A Fresh Story

Fresh Starts
  • 4.9 (95)
  • PERSONAL JOURNALS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

A Fresh Story Podcast is a top 2% personal journals podcast, hosted by sisters Olivia Dreizen Howell and Jenny Dreizen, that delves into courageous life choices, creative concepts, and fresh start stories through candid conversations. The podcast explores cultural subjects often overlooked, offering listeners a fresh perspective on various life experiences. Join the sisters and guests on a journey discussing bravery, significant decisions, and fresh starts, navigating the complexities of the human experience.

  1. Fresh Reads: Sexual Pleasure For Dummies by Myisha Battle

    APR 29

    Fresh Reads: Sexual Pleasure For Dummies by Myisha Battle

    There are questions most of us carry in silence—questions we've never felt safe enough to ask out loud, things we didn't learn in any classroom, and experiences we've quietly wondered about in the dark. Myisha Battle has spent her career in those silences, helping people finally say the words they've swallowed for years. As a clinical sexologist and dating coach, she's the person her clients call when they won't even Google what they're thinking. Now, with her new book Sexual Pleasure for Dummies (part of the iconic For Dummies series), Myisha has written the guide she always wished existed—a warm, smart, judgment-free companion for anyone who ever felt like they missed the class everyone else seemed to have taken. Sexual Pleasure for Dummies isn't about shock or spectacle. It's about wholeness. Myisha walks readers through the landscape of their own bodies and desires—from pleasure anatomy (a chapter she considers essential and revolutionary) to navigating pain, hormonal shifts, toys, communication, and the orgasm gap that quietly shapes so many women's experiences. The book is especially resonant for anyone in the middle of a life transition: the woman emerging from a long marriage and realizing she never truly explored her own desires; the person reclaiming themselves after a relationship that slowly dimmed their sense of self; or anyone stepping into a new chapter and thinking—maybe for the first time—what do I actually want? Myisha coined it perfectly in conversation: this season of life is not reverse puberty. It's cougar puberty. And it is full of possibility. What makes this episode—and this book—so powerful is the way Myisha dismantles shame by naming it clearly and then setting it aside. She reminds us that most of us are dummies when it comes to sexual pleasure, and that's not a personal failure. It's a systemic one. Sex ed gave us baby-making and fear. It didn't give us ourselves. Sexual Pleasure for Dummies finally does. Whether you're newly single, newly curious, or simply ready to stop putting yourself last, Myisha's voice is the one you've been waiting for—clear-eyed, compassionate, and completely unafraid to go there.

    15 min
  2. Fresh Reads: Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid by Mary Van Geffen

    APR 22

    Fresh Reads: Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid by Mary Van Geffen

    There is a moment—one most parents have had but few will ever admit out loud—where you look at your child and feel something uncomfortably close to dislike. Not a fleeting frustration, but a deep, bewildering wall between you and the small person you love more than life. If you have ever stood there, in that shame-soaked silence, wondering what is wrong with you—or them—then Mary Van Geffen wrote this book for you. Mary is an international parenting coach who works with what she lovingly calls "the spicy ones"—the intense, strong-willed, deep-feeling children who seem engineered to challenge every expectation you had about who you would be as a parent. She knows this child intimately because she was one herself, raised without the tools or understanding she desperately needed. And then, in one of life's most poetic ironies, she gave birth to one. Her journey from bewildered, burned-out mother to coach and author is at the heart of her book, Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid—a memoir-meets-manual that weaves her own raw, unguarded story together with the voices of over 1,700 women who have moved through her program and come out the other side transformed. What makes this book unlike any other parenting book on the shelf is its radical insistence that the child is not the problem—and neither, ultimately, are you. Mary guides parents through the work of examining their own unhealed wounds, their need for control, their inherited smallness, and their people-pleasing patterns, because this kid—your spicy one—will not let you bypass any of it. The book moves through the pillars of being calm, kind, and firm, and it ends in the places other books are afraid to go: what to do when your child gets violent, how to navigate co-parenting after divorce, how to survive the judgment of everyone who has an opinion about your family. It is, as Olivia put it in this conversation, a Bible. A lifesaver. And an invitation to finally stop parenting out of fear and start leading from a place of self-knowledge, humor, and radical self-compassion.

    30 min
  3. Fresh Reads: Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions by Zahra Tangorra

    APR 18

    Fresh Reads: Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions by Zahra Tangorra

    Some connections defy explanation. They arrive on a random Tuesday afternoon through a phone scroll, a face you haven't seen in decades, a name that pulls you back to childhood hallways — and suddenly, the universe has done the thing it sometimes does, folding time neatly in half. That is exactly how host Olivia Howell found herself reconnecting with Zahra Tangorra, an old schoolmate from the North Shore of Long Island who had gone on to become one of New York City's most celebrated culinary voices. But this episode isn't just a reunion story. It's the story of a woman who survived a 40-foot cliff, rebuilt herself from the wreckage, fed a city through a pandemic, and then sat down to write the memoir she was always meant to write. Zahra's debut culinary memoir, Extra Sauce: The Good, The Bad, and The Onions, is the kind of book that reads like a conversation with someone who has seen the full spectrum of life and decided, against all odds, to lean into it. Part love letter to food, part reckoning with family, grief, identity, and starting over, Extra Sauce traces Zahra's unlikely path from a directionless 22-year-old on a cross-country tour bus to a restaurateur, chef, and writer who has spent her career asking one essential question: what happens when we stop accepting less? The memoir is as much about the restaurant she opened with her accident settlement money as it is about the father she lost, the long-lost brother she discovered, and the community she spent a lifetime trying to create — because growing up as an only child of divorced parents had left her hungry for something far more nourishing than food alone. What makes this conversation so deeply resonant for anyone navigating a life transition is the philosophy at the heart of Zahra's book: that in a world constantly asking us to shrink — fewer rights, fewer people, less room in our hearts — the most radical act is to ask for more. More joy. More messiness. More extra sauce. Zahra wrote this book for the people who feel the longing for connection, who are carrying grief they don't know how to name, who are rebuilding their lives one small act of courage at a time. Her warmth, wit, and honesty make this episode feel less like an interview and more like the very thing Zahra herself has always been building: a table big enough for everyone.

    20 min
  4. Fresh Reads: Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi

    APR 14

    Fresh Reads: Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi

    There is something quietly radical about a journalist who turns her most pressing obsession—the thing that keeps her up at night, filling spreadsheets and firing off emails at 2 a.m.—into a book that asks the rest of us to pay closer attention. Fortesa Latifi is that journalist, and her debut book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online is one of those rare works that manages to be both impeccably researched and deeply, uncomfortably human. It asks a question most of us have scrolled past without stopping: what does it actually cost a child to grow up as content? Fortesa wrote this book during one of the most disorienting seasons a person can move through—early motherhood. She had survived a brutal pregnancy, marked by hyperemesis gravidarum that left her physically depleted and emotionally unmoored, followed by a traumatic birth and the strange dissociation that can come postpartum, that feeling of existing purely as a body serving another body. And yet, a few weeks after her C-section, laptop balanced on the couch beside her newborn, she started writing again. Not because she was ignoring her recovery, but because work was how she found herself. It was how she remembered she was a person with a mind and a voice and a story worth telling. That kind of radical self-recovery—the kind that looks a little impractical from the outside—is woven into every page of this book. Like, Follow, Subscribe dives deep into the world of mom influencers, family vloggers, and child content creators, interviewing the parents who run these accounts, the experts who study them, and the children who grew up inside them. What Fortesa found—that the content performing best often features kids at their saddest, sickest, or most vulnerable—is the kind of discovery that lands differently once you're a mother yourself. This book is for anyone who has ever paused on a family vlog and felt something they couldn't name—a little uncomfortable, a little complicit, a little curious. It is for the woman who has wondered whether the internet's hunger for authenticity is actually just hunger, full stop. And it is for anyone standing at a crossroads in their own life, looking for proof that the most important work sometimes begins in the middle of the hardest season.

    13 min
  5. Fresh Reads: Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust - A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood by Dr. Gertrude Lyons

    MAR 24

    Fresh Reads: Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust - A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood by Dr. Gertrude Lyons

    What if the very word "mother" has been quietly shrinking you your whole life — not because you didn't love being one, but because no one ever told you that you were allowed to be more than one? That's the question at the heart of this week's conversation on A Fresh Story: Book Talk, and it's the kind of question that lingers long after you've set down the book that asked it. Dr. Gertrude Lyons is an author, coach, retreat leader, and TEDx speaker whose talk has now reached nearly 250,000 views — and when you spend even twenty minutes in her presence, it is immediately clear why. She has the rare gift of making a room feel like a circle of trusted women who've finally decided to tell the truth. Her book, Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust, A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood, grew out of a long and deeply personal reckoning. A mother of two grown daughters, Dr. Lyons pursued her doctorate specifically to study the transformational potential buried inside the experience of motherhood — only to look back and realize that even she, a coach surrounded by frameworks for growth, had quietly lost herself along the way. "I lost that thread," she says with the kind of honesty that makes you exhale. "I let it go." That vulnerability is what makes this book so necessary. It is not a manual for doing motherhood better. It is an invitation to ask who you have been while doing it — and who you might still become. Rewrite the Mother Code argues that mothering is not a role confined to those who have given birth. It is an energy — one that flows through aunts, mentors, artists, founders, and coaches; through anyone pouring their nurturing, creative, cyclical power into something they love. And the most overlooked recipient of that energy? You. The book maps the inherited "codes" — the patriarchal myths and silent scripts — that have kept women disconnected from their own desires, intuition, and aliveness. It then charts a path back: through emotional awareness, self-compassion, and what Dr. Lyons calls "cosmic motherhood," the realization that universal wisdom becomes available to us the moment we stop outsourcing our sense of self to the world's expectations. For anyone in the middle of a life transition — redefining themselves after loss, reinvention, or the quiet erosion that comes from years of putting everyone else first — this book is not just a read. It is a reclamation.

    19 min
  6. Fresh Reads: Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light by Cassidy Gard

    MAR 23

    Fresh Reads: Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light by Cassidy Gard

    Some of us learned very early that love could be unpredictable. That the sound of a car pulling into the driveway meant something different in our house. That being the last kid picked up from school wasn't just inconvenient—it was a whole education in holding your breath. Cassidy Gard, debut memoirist and former television producer, grew up being that kid: hyperaware, fiercely observant, and already whispering to herself, I'm going to write about this one day. From age seven—when she first understood that her father's illness was reshaping everything around her—Cassidy was quietly building an inner world fortified by prayer, imagination, and an unwavering belief that something bigger was watching over her. She didn't have the language for it yet. But she was already living inside what would one day become her book. Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light spans nearly three decades—from that seven-year-old girl navigating a home filled with chaos and secrets, to a mother of two, finally grounded in the life she once only dared to imagine. The memoir explores the long shadow of growing up with an alcoholic, emotionally abusive father and the particular perfectionism and people-pleasing that survival demands. It moves through a young woman's brave solo relocation to New York City at seventeen, a decade-long career in television production, a solo pandemic road trip to Montana, and the discovery of a word—Cosmic Goodness—to name the force that had been quietly guiding her all along. It is a book about learning to stop masking and start trusting. About choosing a sober partner because you finally understand what safety actually feels like. About writing yourself—slowly, deliberately—into the future you deserve. What makes Cosmic Goodness something you'll want to press into the hands of anyone navigating a life transition is this: Cassidy doesn't arrive at healing by accident. She earns it—through Al-Anon, through therapy, through the radical act of telling her story honestly. This conversation is a reminder that you don't have to come from a peaceful home to build one. That the anxious child waiting by the window can grow into a woman who finally, deeply feels at home in herself. That cosmic goodness—whatever you call it in your own life—is not something that happens to you. It is something you learn, slowly and beautifully, to recognize.

    17 min
  7. Fresh Reads: UNBREAKABLE DIVORCE: The Winning Divorce Guide Every Woman Needs to Reclaim Her Life with Heather Quick, ESQ.

    MAR 23

    Fresh Reads: UNBREAKABLE DIVORCE: The Winning Divorce Guide Every Woman Needs to Reclaim Her Life with Heather Quick, ESQ.

    There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes when your life is being dismantled — not by accident, but by necessity. When Heather Quick walks into a courtroom, she carries with her more than case files and legal strategy. She carries two-plus decades of watching women rebuild from the inside out — women who walked in terrified and walked out, eventually, transformed. A 26-year family law attorney whose Florida-based firm represents women exclusively, Heather has sat across the table from thousands of clients mid-crisis. And what she kept witnessing, again and again, was a specific kind of pain that wasn't just emotional — it was the pain of not knowing. Not knowing what came next, not knowing the language, not knowing how to hold their ground. That's why she wrote Unbreakable Divorce: A Winning Guide Every Woman Needs to Reclaim Her Life. Not because divorce is a win, but because you can be. Unbreakable Divorce is many things at once: a legal primer, an emotional road map, and an act of advocacy. In under 200 pages — with full-size type, because Heather's not here for suffering of any kind — she walks readers through the full arc of the divorce process. What is family law? How do you prepare? What questions do you ask an attorney? What happens at mediation, at trial, in front of a judge who is, as Heather says with candid humor, "just another human being with their own preconceptions"? The book is clear that it isn't a substitute for a lawyer — but it is the kind of document that gives women language, strategy, and a framework for reclaiming their footing. Whether a woman is just beginning to ask hard questions or is already in the middle of proceedings, this book meets her where she is and refuses to leave her there. What comes through in this conversation — and in the book — is Heather's deeply competitive, deeply compassionate belief that winning is available to you. Not winning as in beating someone else, but winning as in arriving at peace, freedom, and a future that is yours. "It's a marathon, not a sprint," she tells Olivia, and she means it in every sense: it's long, it's grueling, and it requires training you never asked for. But women, she says without hesitation, are extraordinary at pivoting. At enduring. At finding their footing again. Unbreakable Divorce is the training guide Heather wishes every woman had before she ever needed it — and the lifeline she knows so many need right now. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    15 min
  8. Fresh Reads: Our Home: The Love, Work, and Heart of Family by Lori Sugarman-Li

    MAR 9

    Fresh Reads: Our Home: The Love, Work, and Heart of Family by Lori Sugarman-Li

    There are moments that crack something open in you — moments you can't unhear, can't unsee, can't unfeel. For Lori Sugarman Lee, that moment came across a desk from an insurance agent who looked at her years of raising children, moving her family across continents, building communities from scratch, and sustaining a household with fierce devotion — and said, simply, "You're just a housewife. There's no loss." No loss. As if the thousands of hours she had poured into her family, her husband's career, her children's schools, her community organizations, amounted to nothing more than a footnote. That sentence didn't break Lori. It lit her on fire. A former marketing director for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts who had deliberately stepped away from a high-powered career to invest in her family, Lori had never once doubted the value of that choice — until society handed her its verdict. What followed was a journey of profound reinvention: she found Eve Rodsky's Fair Play system, took a Stanford course on Motherhood and Work, wrote a viral LinkedIn article called "I Don't Get Paid, So What Am I Worth?" — and then asked herself the most important question of all: What can I do that no one else is doing? The answer was a children's book. Not because her sons needed a bedtime story, but because she believed, deeply, that if we want to change how the next generation values care — how our daughters are treated, how our sons show up — we have to start before the patterns calcify. Our Home: The Love, Work and Heart of Family is that book. It's tender and illustrated and deceptively simple, and it is, at its core, a revolution wrapped in a picture book. In this conversation, Lori and Olivia explore what it truly means to value the invisible — the labor that keeps families alive and thriving but so rarely gets named, let alone celebrated. They talk about representation and why seeing your own family reflected in the pages of a book can quietly change a child's entire worldview. They talk about raising boys who understand that care is not a burden to be avoided but a gift to be given. And they talk about the cycle — the one that places the full weight of domestic life on daughters, generation after generation — and why a book, of all things, might be exactly the right tool to break it. If you've ever felt unseen in your own home, if you've ever wondered whether the work you do matters, or if you're raising children you hope will build a more equitable world — this episode is for you.

    17 min
See All (279)

Trailers

4.9
out of 5
95 Ratings

About

A Fresh Story Podcast is a top 2% personal journals podcast, hosted by sisters Olivia Dreizen Howell and Jenny Dreizen, that delves into courageous life choices, creative concepts, and fresh start stories through candid conversations. The podcast explores cultural subjects often overlooked, offering listeners a fresh perspective on various life experiences. Join the sisters and guests on a journey discussing bravery, significant decisions, and fresh starts, navigating the complexities of the human experience.

Information

  • Channel
    Fresh Starts
  • Creator
    Fresh Starts
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    279
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Fresh Starts Registry
  • Show Website
    A Fresh Story

More From Fresh Starts

You Might Also Like