Sara Hirsh Bordo | Author & Filmmaker

Award-winning filmmaker, activist, and founder of Women Rising, Sara Hirsh Bordo joins the Dream Job Podcast to discuss her debut book Autoimmunity and the Good Girls — a groundbreaking exploration of how women raised to self-silence and caretake are disproportionately likely to develop autoimmune disease, and how reclaiming your own voice may be the most powerful medicine of all.

EPISODE NOTES

Sara Hirsh Bordo has spent her career building stages for other people's stories — directing award-winning documentaries, founding the women's empowerment production company Women Rising, and being named an Architect of Change by Maria Shriver. But while she was busy lifting up everyone else, her own body was sending a message she couldn't ignore.

In this conversation, Marc and Sara — friends since their days as undergrads at TCU — go deep on her debut book, Autoimmunity and the Good Girls: How Permission to Put Ourselves First Has the Power to Keep Us Well, published by HarperOne/HarperCollins.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How Sara's career journey — from Estée Lauder and MGM Studios to Paramount Pictures to documentary filmmaker — was always driven by curiosity and storytelling
• What it means to be a "good girl," and why that conditioning starts in girlhood
• The connection between the caretaker archetype, birth order, and autoimmune disease
• How Sara funded the first quantitative research study at the intersection of female empowerment and autoimmunity — and what the data revealed
• Why 80% of autoimmune disease patients are women, and why so many go undiagnosed or unheard
• The role of self-suppression in chronic illness — and the science behind it
• Sara's personal health journey: Hashimoto's, cancer, tumors — and full remission
• How faith intersects with the struggle for self-sovereignty
• The butterfly as a symbol for transformation — and why the journey to flight matters more than the flight itself
• What Sara hopes the book ultimately does for the women who read it

Timestamps:

• 00:02:28 — Sara on what she actually does for a living
• 00:05:33 — The hero's journey vs. the heroine's journey
• 00:10:12 — On catalysts: cozy ones and crushing ones
• 00:15:47 — The lightbulb moment that led to the book
• 00:16:19 — What autoimmune disease actually is, explained plainly
• 00:19:18 — How Sara funded the first research study on this topic
• 00:22:24 — Beyond birth order: the caretaker archetype
• 00:27:43 — Sara's full list of diagnoses — and how they all went into remission
• 00:29:57 — Why women silence themselves in the doctor's office
• 00:32:01 — The whisper, the tap, the shove
• 00:33:32 — Why the word "feminist" doesn't appear in the book
• 00:39:30 — The battered butterfly in a German museum
• 00:44:58 — What Sara hopes the book's legacy will be

About Sara Hirsh Bordo: Sara is a 20-time award-winning filmmaker and Founder/CEO of Women Rising. Her documentary debut, A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story, won the Audience Award at SXSW and qualified for the Academy Award. She has directed campaigns for Toyota and ESPN, consulted on the Wonder Woman franchise for Warner Bros., and produced the first TEDxAustinWomen — the most-viewed TEDxWomen event in the world that year. A percentage of her author proceeds are being donated to the Society for Women's Health Research.

Autoimmunity and the Good Girls is available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, and the audiobook — read by Sara herself — is available on Audible.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.