Walsh Jennifer Rudolph - Hungry Hearts: Essays on Courage, Desire, and Belonging

IF I TOLD YOU THAT my parents got divorced when I was nine years old, it would communicate a factbut it wouldnt help you know me better. What if, instead, I told you this: One morning when I was nine years old, my dad told us we were having a family meeting after school. I was so excited, I could barely breathe. I had never been to a meeting before and it sounded important. Between classes, I asked some friends if theyd ever been to one, and my friend Pamela explained to me that a family meeting is when you decide where you are going on vacation. Wow! I thought. My first vacation! She told me about an amazing ride at Disney World called Its a Small World and sang me the song about a small world with a shared sun, where a smile meant friendship to everyone. It sounded like heaven.

When I got home from school, I found a yellow legal pad and wrote a detailed list of the reasons Disney World was an educational place. I arrived at our family meeting ready to advocate for my choice with all my might. When, instead of calling the meeting to order and asking where wed like to go on vacation, my parents calmly sat down and told my siblings and me that they were getting divorced, my mind went blank. All I can remember now is how desperately I hugged the legal pad to my chest, wishing I could make it disappear. I had never been so wrong about something so big. That moment was a tectonic shift not only in my understanding of my family, but in the way I trusted myself and the world. What else did I think was permanent that might change in an instant? How else was my innocence leaving me exposed to pain and confusion? I can still feel the legal pads solid edges pressing into my handsthe physical, almost shameful evidence of a world I no longer inhabited and never would again.

I expose my vulnerability by telling you about my Disney World list instead of just saying When I was nine my parents got divorced because I want to share more of myselfmy history, my soul, my heart. And I believe that sharing my full humanity honors you, in your full humanity. After a lifetime of listening and thirty years working as a literary agent, professionally midwifing thousands of peoples stories, Ive learned firsthand that bravely sharing our truth and encouraging others to share theirs creates a type of magic that has the power to heal and connect us more deeply to one another.

Sharing our authentic stories can be transformational. Someone may look very different from us on the outside, but what our true stories reveal is that, on the inside, we have all experienced similar feelings of heartbreak, failure, betrayal, longing, triumph, and joy. We all want the same thingsto be loved, to be seen, and to belong. We all have dreams that our lives will make a difference. Our stories illustrate that.

Its all too easy to compare our insides to other peoples outsides, imagining some version of a perfect life others are living, while we are left with our imperfect ones. In that disconnect between our perception and reality is a void where loneliness, anxiety, and depression often grow. But there is an antidoteone we all have access to. Sharing the real stories of our hearts, our vulnerable and hungry hearts, allows us to connect to othersinsides to insides. When someone hears our story, we feel seen, we know we matter, and we instantly realize were not alone. Thats why I call it magic. Because it is.

My purpose has always been to amplify peoples voices, to build a giant megaphone for people to be heard far and wide. This book will change everything is something I have said and meant too many times to count. Great books are like thattotally transformational. I cannot imagine where I would be had I not been foundlike a search and rescue team locating me on a snowy mountainby books. Growing up, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maxine Hong Kingston were my most impactful teachers. Finding me in my lonely teenage bedroom, they shined a light, gave me words for my own experience, and made me feel I belonged. It made perfect sense that I would want to spend my adult life as close to books and their authors as possible.

After two decades as the leader of the literary division of a major global talent agency, representing and advocating for the most amazing, courageous, trailblazing, and luminous authors on the planet, selling their books to publishers and filmmakers and bringing their words into the world, living my dream come true every day, something unexpected happened: my dream evolved.

Authors write in solitude and we read in solitude. Ive always loved thatbut I found myself starting to long for community in a more intimate and immediate way. I wanted to bring people together as stories were shared, craving the magnified power of a collective experience. The universe provided the most perfect opportunity, and I was beyond blessed to collaborate on Oprah Winfreys The Life You Want tour. I spent twelve weeks on the road with hundreds of thousands of people, forming a collective heartbeat of hope and change. I joked it should have been called the life I want tour because I never wanted it to end. But when it did, I knew there was no going back for me. Something too big had shifted inside me.

I yearned to turn up the volume on the voices our mainstream media culture wasnt often giving the microphone to: people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, and people of all religious faiths. Out of that yearning, Together Live was born.

A speaking tour featuring the storytelling of writers, poets, musicians, and performers of all sorts, Together Live aimed to share stories from a stage that featured a diverse group of people, mostly womxn and the occasional man, who shared a desire for a more compassionate, equal, and just world. We made sure that ticket prices were affordable so that everyone with a hungry heart would be welcome. We set sail in the fall of 2016, and for four years our traveling love rally, including the contributors in this anthology, communed with fifty thousand kindred spirits. The word most often used to describe our event was life-changing. Life-changing. Yet all we did was sit on a couch onstage, share our wholehearted truths, and ask the audience to do the same. We entered every night as strangers in a new city and ended every night as a familydancing, laughing, and crying together.