Tag Archives: Tracey Jackson

Writing the Book on Gratitude & Trust

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Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson collaborate on new book that uses the principles of the recovery movement to help just about anybody

Longtime friends—the pair first met in Robert Mitchum‘s bedroom in 1982—Paul Williams (yes, that Paul Williams, the Oscar-, Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning Hall of Fame songwriter) and Tracey Jackson (who write the films Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Guru, among others) had talked about doing a project together for years before inspiration finally struck.

Authors Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson will appear at Tecolote Book Shop in Montecito on Sept. 25. Photo courtesy Gratitude and Trust Facebook page.

Authors Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson will appear at Tecolote Book Shop in Montecito on Sept. 25. Photo courtesy Gratitude and Trust Facebook page.

 

“I always had a fascination with the recovery movement. I always felt that it was a great foundation for all people and that all people should probably be required to go through it just on general principal,” says Jackson, who grew up in Santa Barbara. “I had kind of always been envious of … Paul and various other friends in my life who had been in recovery and I had seen the difference it made in their lives.”

Meanwhile, Williams starred in the 2012 documentary Paul Williams, Still Alive, and during a Q & A after a screening of the film, “he mentioned his choo choo ran on the twin rails of gratitude and trust.” Jackson says, “the light bulb went off in my head and afterwards I said you know, that’s it. That’s a book, gratitude and trust.”

With a basic underlying theme of “recovery is not just for addicts,” the pair set out to make the project a reality, quickly developing a book proposal that sparked a bidding war and ultimately publishing under Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Group. They also launched a website, gratitudeandtrust.com, and immediately began connecting with readers.

Williams, who will celebrate 25 years of sobriety on March 15, says, “For 24 years people had been saying to me, ‘I wish we had something like you have to turn our lives around and to clean up our lives, I wish we had some process like you have in recovery. ‘ And I never really knew how to share that until …Tracey became a catalyst to finding a way to do it.”

He continues, “It’s been an amazing journey to write this book.”

Gratitude & Trust offers “Six Affirmations of Personal Freedom,” along with anecdotes and advice from both authors individually, as well as their collective voices. The six affirmations are:

  • -Something needs to change, and it's probably me.
  • -I don't know how to do this but something inside me does.
  • -I will learn from my mistakes and defend them.
  • -I will make right the wrongs I've done wherever possible.
  • -I will continue to examine my behavior on a daily basis.
  • -I will live my life in love and service, gratitude and trust.

The beauty of these ideas is that they can work for a variety of problems.

“Everyone starts life in a different place, everyone has different levels of dysfunction, everyone has different levels of needs. … I think that people will take what they need in the order and the intensity of which they need it, so that’s not up to us,” says Jackson. “Neither Paul nor I are obviously going to be able to clone ourselves and sit in thousands of living rooms and say okay, do the first step. But I’m such a bossy person I probably would love to do that! …I could just Skype into people’s houses. Would you please go and apologize to your mom,” she laughs.

Because the pair have been blogging from the beginning, they have lots of reader contact. “Food addiction is the biggest thing that comes up after people who are getting sober, are sober or are staying sober. … Some things require more spirituality, some things require more discipline, some requires they walk hand in hand. … It’s sort of a buffet,” says Jackson.

Adds Williams, “The thing that I think that the six affirmations have in common with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is essentially it’s a toolbox … a good carpenter has a Phillips screwdriver, he’s got a hammer, he’s got a box of tools that are appropriate to the needs.”

“I don’t think you really are as aware that you need it, … but the truth is until you really try it, you don’t realize how valuable it is,” says Jackson.

“There a couple chapters dealing with people who are kind of broken in your life. One is called Navigating the Nasties, which is about dealing with people that you’re not going to change but you’re going to be stuck with them, whether it’s a bad boss or a member of your family that is almost impossible to deal with,” says Williams. “The other one is there’s a chapter called The Ones We Love, about dealing with someone who is an alcoholic… It’s just a reminder that even though somebody may not feel they need the book, they don’t have anything broken to fix, I bet you they know somebody that does.”

While the advice in the book is helpful, the tone is still humorous.

“Tracy has an edge to her,” laughs Williams. “She can be wonderfully quick and quick witted and defend herself, take care of herself, but I have seen a spiritual growth I think for both of us, and I have seen it in Tracey”

“But I like when I go back to being funny and edgy. I do I like that,” says Jackson.

“Buy the book,” she says, with a laugh.

You can do just that on Thursday, September 25, when the authors will be signing books—and surely laughing along the way—from 5-7 p.m. at Tecolote Book Store, 1470 E. Valley Rd., Montecito.

—Leslie Dinaberg

Originally published in Santa Barbara Seasons on September 24, 2014.

 

Heating up to Fifty

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Between a Rock and Hot Place, by Tracey Jackson

Between a Rock and Hot Place, by Tracey Jackson

Let me start out this column by saying that I am not 50 yet.

I am nowhere near 50 years old.

OK, the sum total of my journeys around the sun is not quite 50–yet–but I’m a heck of a lot closer to being 50 than I am to being 30.

The fact that I have difficulty wrapping my head around this oh-so-obvious reality was part of the inspiration for Tracey Jackson‘s humorous new book, Between a Rock and a Hot Place: Why Fifty is Not the New Thirty, a part memoir, part self-help, part rant and always entertaining look at what happens to women when they hit the big Five-O.

“The idea that just because we want to we can turn back the clock and pretend to be thirty is both amusing and insane,” laughed Jackson, speaking to me from the back room of a hair salon. This busy lady fit in our interview during a quick trip home to New York before flying off to D.C. to continue a book tour that includes visits with Kathie Lee and Hoda, Meredith Vierra on “The Today Show” and the Writing Mamas of Corte Madera County.

“Being on a book tour is tiring, but it’s a good kind of whirlwind,” said Jackson, who has had a lot of whirlwinds since her childhood in Santa Barbara, where her extended family still resides. A comedy screenwriter for 17 years–Confessions of a Shopholic and The Guru are some of her better known titles–Jackson writes frankly about being shocked when she got older and the writing jobs started drying up. Ironically, her last screenwriting job was adapting a book called “The Ivy Chronicles,” about a woman who loses her job and reinvents herself.

Jackson also reinvented herself, producing and starring with her daughter in a documentary film called Lucky Ducks, (about the complex relationship boomer parents have with their over-indulged teens), daily blogging and most recently, writing “Between a Rock and a Hot Place.”

All of the hot button middle age stuff is there, with her amusing takes on what could be depressing topics like menopause (“it’s not all in your head, it’s in your vagina”), money (“I didn’t mean to spend it all”), death (“ready or not, here death comes”) and my favorite, “Sex, Estrogen and Not So Much Rock and Roll.”

Of course I immediately turned to the chapter about sex, where Jackson describes in hilarious detail her attempt to spice up her marriage with a trip to a very posh sex store. The resulting misadventures involving Jackson, her husband, a shiny black bag of toys, and Lola Falana (their Chihuahua) made me laugh so hard that I woke up my husband.

With sex, face lifts, finances and sandwich generation challenges of aging parents and exhausting teenagers sitting side-by-side, the book casts a pretty wide net over the issues of “second adulthood.” Jackson said that was her plan from the start.

“When you’re writing a comedic book, which a lot of this is, and then you have to throw in things that aren’t funny, it’s hard. … When you’re writing about death, you’re writing about death so it’s trickier to make that buoyant and make that something that people don’t go ‘OK now I’ve read this really funny chapter about sex and now I’m reading about dying.’ How do you keep that light? … At the end of the day you kind of give in and say OK I’m writing about death, this is not a funny topic any way you cut it, so we just have to kind of go for it. ”

She still manages to get the comedy in– when she talks about death she includes the story of her husband’s spinning teacher dropping dead at the gym. In fact, no matter what the topic, the laughs and hard truths resonate throughout both the book and my conversation with Jackson.

“We aren’t old and we aren’t young; we are in kind of in-between states, passing through the transit lounge of life,” she writes. “No matter how much Botox you get, things will start falling apart: some marriages end, some kids are job, some jobs are terminated, most faces fall and all boobs do. No one bothered to fill us in on this.”

Luckily that’s where Jackson and “Between a Rock and Hot Place” come in.

Tracey Jackson blogs daily at www.traceyjacksononline.com. Maybe Leslie will do that when she’s 50, but for now she writes weekly. Read her columns every Friday in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound or at www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on March 4, 2011.