Babes in Bookland: Your Favorite Women's Bookclub Podcast

Babes in Bookland is the book club podcast for women who love women's stories. We read the memoirs, dissect the narratives, and celebrate the writers brave enough to put it all on the page. Great books, honest conversation, and a whole lot of love for women's voices in literature. Think of us as your most well-read friend who always knows exactly which book you need next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Babes in Bookland: Your Favorite Women's Bookclub Podcast is a arts podcast hosted by Alex Frnka - Bookclub Host, with 90 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Alex Frnka - Bookclub Host hosts Babes in Bookland: Your Favorite Women's Bookclub Podcast, a arts show with 90 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #37

  Author Chat: Ariel Lawhon's "The Pirate Queen"

  Sep 8, 20261h 21mS3

  What does it take to reclaim a woman's story when history itself was written by people who had every reason to erase her? That's the question at the center of our conversation with Ariel Lawhon, bestselling author of The Frozen River and her newest novel, The Pirate Queen, about the real life Irish chieftain Grace O'Malley. We talk about why Grace doesn't appear anywhere in official Irish history, and how the only record of her survives in the snide, grudging English state papers written by the empire that feared her. Ariel explains that she's drawn again and again to subversive women because women have always had to be subversive, and because for most of history, only the literate got remembered, which meant most women simply didn't. From Nancy Wake to Martha Ballard to Grace herself, she talks about borrowing personality and instinct from the women in her own life to fill in the gaps history left behind, sometimes literally turning a character into her own mother. We get into her process too, how she became a devoted plotter out of necessity after having four sons in five years and learning to write in stolen thirty minute increments, and how she still treats a deadline with the gravity of its original meaning, a line you did not want to cross on a battlefield. There's a genuinely magical detour into the children's book she read in an abandoned two room schoolhouse in New Mexico decades later and found sitting in a pile on the floor, the exact copy, waiting for her. And we spend real time on the moment in The Frozen River that readers talk about most, when Martha Ballard delivers her own kind of justice, and what it means that women are so often expected to pull their punches in fiction the way men never are. Ariel and I talk about intuition, the knowing, and trusting it, sometimes because it's the thing that keeps you alive. Share this conversation with the woman in your life who needs a reminder that the world has always underestimated women like Grace O'Malley, but Grace still soared. “Because men will never respect you if you try to be like them.” Gráinne lifts her head and meets her mother’s gaze. “Then how will they respect me?” “They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.” -excerpt from THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon Connect with Ariel Lawhon: @Ariel.lawhon Books Referenced: THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon CODE NAME HÉLÈNE by Ariel Lawhon FLIGHT OF DREAMS by Ariel Lawhon WAIT FOR ME, WATCH FOR ME, EULA BEE by Patricia Beatty CHRONICLES OF NARNIA by C.S. Lewis THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolken LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolken WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams BARRIERS TO ENTRY by Ariel Lawhon (short story) Support the show: Buy us a book Buy cute merch on Patreon Subscribe on Apple Subscribe on Substack This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.  Xx, Alex Connect with us and suggest a great memoir! Follow us on instagram!  @babesinbooklandpod   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #36

  Author Chat: Emilee Hackney's Memoir "All That's Unseen"

  Sep 1, 20261h 1mS3

  What does it cost to love a place and a faith that shaped you, even after they've hurt you? This week I sit down with Emilee Hackney, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir  All That's Unseen , to talk about growing up in Tazewell, Virginia, and the long, winding path that took her from a Pentecostal church pew to Harvard Yard to a bestseller list. We talk about the church she grew up in from age five, the engagement she entered as a teenager, and the slow, painful process of questioning beliefs she'd never been taught to question until she left home for Harvard. Emilee is remarkably generous about her younger self throughout our conversation, and that same compassion runs through every page of her book. We get into the isolation she felt as an Appalachian student surrounded by people who saw her as, in her words, an exotic creature from a shameful corner of the country, and how spite became an unlikely motivator for her education. Of course... politics come up too. Emilee doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable truths in her research, from Trump's proposed defunding of the Appalachian Regional Commission to his rollback of coal dust health protections, even as she pushed back against easy judgments of the people who voted for him anyway. We talk about fear as a political currency, about algorithms that feed conservatism to anyone who engages with Appalachian content, and about the quiet apathy Emilee believes both parties have shown her home region for generations. We end with hope, opossums, and the strange, permanent tension of loving a place you can never quite be happy in or without. This is a memoir about reckoning with faith, class, and identity, and Emilee brought every bit of that nuance into our conversation. Share this conversation with anyone who grew up somewhere they had complicated feelings about leaving. "A personal essay, as it turned out, was about more than the people and places I knew. It was about how those people and places affected me: how I saw them, how I interpreted them, how I understood them in my greater understanding of the world." - Emilee Hackney's memoir ALL THAT'S UNSEEN Connect with Emilee Hackney: @emileehackney Books Referenced: ALL THAT'S UNSEEN by Emilee Hackney STOLEN PRIDE by Arlie Russell Hochschild Support the show: Buy us a book Buy cute merch on Patreon Subscribe on Apple Subscribe on Substack This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.  Xx, Alex Connect with us and suggest a great memoir! Follow us on instagram!  @babesinbooklandpod   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #35

  Friday Fiction: Rachel Hochhauser's "Lady Tremaine"

  Aug 28, 202650 minS3

  What if the woman we've been taught to hate for six centuries was just doing what it took to survive in a world that gave her almost no options? That's the question Rachel Hochhauser sat with long before she ever sat down to write, and it's the question that turns into her debut novel,  Lady Tremaine , the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick that reimagines Cinderella's stepmother as a woman worth understanding rather than a woman worth fearing. Rachel and I talk about how the idea found her at the hardest possible time, scrolling her phone in a hospital while her husband recovered from emergency brain surgery, suddenly a single parent overnight, when an image of Lady Tremaine stopped her cold. She walks me through the years she spent away from fiction after her first manuscript didn't sell, the puzzle company she built in that gap called Piecework, and what it meant to come back to her desk and have it feel, in her words, like coming home to herself. We get into her research process, including a deep dive into falconry that started with a pandemic hotel workshop and turned into Lucy, the peregrine falcon who becomes one of the book's most vivid characters. And we talk about Ellen, her version of Cinderella, and why Rachel chose to make her one of the more complicated, less immediately likable Cinderellas in the canon, and why that complication is the point. We also get into the line Rachel calls her favorite in the entire book, the one she was writing toward long before she knew how she'd get there, and what it means that the book ends up being a message from a mother to her daughters instead of a fairy tale ending at all. Share this conversation with the friend who still has strong feelings about Ever After. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #34

  AUTHOR CHAT: Mallary Tenore Tarplay's "SLIP"

  Aug 25, 20261 hourS3

  What if recovery was never meant to be a finish line? Mallory Tenore Tarpley spent over twenty years writing and rewriting the story that became  Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery , and what she landed on upends how we're taught to think about healing. She calls it the middle place: the space between acutely sick and fully recovered where most people actually live, and where almost no one gives them permission to stay. Mallory's story starts at eight years old, when her mother died of metastatic breast cancer. In the wreckage of that loss, an idea took root that if she could keep her body the same size it was when her mother was alive, she could stop time and stay close to her. That thought, formed by a grieving child in a health class learning about good foods and bad foods, spiraled into anorexia and five hospitalizations at Boston Children's, followed by seventeen months in residential treatment. It is a reminder that eating disorders are rarely about vanity. They're about control, grief, and a body trying to speak what a person cannot yet say out loud. We talk about why Mallory built her memoir as reported journalism as much as personal narrative, weaving in the voices of 700 survey respondents and 175 interview subjects specifically because she didn't want her story, as a thin, white, middle class woman, to stand in as the only face of this disease. We get into what it was like reading her own childhood journals, calorie counts and self-loathing tucked inside Winnie the Pooh covers, and the moment she caught herself slipping back into old behaviors just from transcribing them. We talk about the staggering gap in medical training, the history of women being excluded from clinical trials, and how diet culture, GLP-1 drugs, and AI beauty filters are reshaping an old danger into something that feels newly urgent. And we talk about what it means to write an ending that refuses a tidy bow, because pretending to be fully healed would have made her, in her words, an unreliable narrator. If you've ever felt like you were failing at recovery because you weren't finished with it, this conversation is for you. Share this conversation with someone who needs permission to be in progress instead of fixed. The National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is  866-662-1235 , open 9:00am–7:00pm EST Monday–Friday. It's not a 24/7 crisis line — for after-hours support, they direct people to 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or text "ALLIANCE" to 741-741 "I'm telling you to be intentional about how you trust to help you walk through this difficult, confusing, frustrating, maddening thing we call life." - Ariel Fitz-Patrick Connect with Mallary Tenore Tarplay: https://www.mallarytenoretarpley.com/ @mallarytenoretarplay Books Referenced: SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating-Disorder Recovery by Mallary Tenore Tarplay Articles Referenced: We Keep Arguing About Ariana Grande's Body. We're Missing the Bigger Story When I Lost My Sense of Taste to Covid, My Anorexia Stepped In (gifted) Support the show: Buy us a book Buy cute merch on Patreon Subscribe on Apple Subscribe on Substack This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.  Xx, Alex Connect with us and suggest a great memoir! Follow us on instagram!  @babesinbooklandpod   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Babes in Bookland: Your Favorite Women's Bookclub Podcast

  TEASER: UnReliable? // Jodie Sweetin's Memoir "UnSweetined"

  Aug 24, 202611 minS3

  Is a sobriety memoir still honest if the author was relapsing while she wrote it?  That's the question Suz and I couldn't shake after reading and listening to Jodi Sweetin's "UnSweetined", and it's why we brought this one back as a bonus episode. We dug into Jodie's story from Full House's beloved Stephanie Tanner to the meth addiction she hid for years, and we couldn't agree on much except this: the book is fascinating, fast paced, and also strangely hard to trust. Jodie wrote most of "UnSweetined" while she was actively using, only getting sober once she became a mother, and we talked about what that means for a memoir that's marketed as a redemption story. We got into the newer audiobook forward Jodie recorded sixteen years after the book's original release, where she updates listeners on two more marriages, another child, and a version of sobriety she never quite defines for us. We also spent time in the good stuff, the Full House trivia we didn't know and the way the cast really did seem to love each other. But we kept circling back to the same tension. Jodie is disarmingly honest about her own manipulation and dishonesty, and yet there's a lack of accountability running underneath all of it, a scapegoating that never quite resolves. We talked about what we expect from addiction memoirs, whether humor can be armor, and whether a book like this would exist at all if she weren't famous. Share this conversation with someone who grew up watching Full House, or with anyone who's ever wondered what a redemption arc actually requires. "I still don't know what it was that I was so unhappy about. To some people it probably looked like I had it all. If I had to sit and list what was bothering me at the time, I don't think I could have done it. All I knew was that I didn't want to be me." - Jodie Sweetin Thank you for supporting the show! xx, Alex Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  ListenShow Notes

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.