Ann Hood & Jessi Hempel: A Conversation

Jenny Brown is the senior editor of Shelf Awareness. She grew up in Athena and John Rollins Bookstores and the Kalamazoo Public Library in Michigan. She has served in editorial roles at Harper and Knopf, edited reviews at Publishers Weekly and has been the librarian at Bank Street College of Education.

Jessi Hempel is the host of the podcast Hello Monday and a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. For nearly two decades, she has been writing and editing features and cover stories about work, life, and meaning in the digital age. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. In The Family Outing: A Memoir (HarperOne), Hempel writes about growing up in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. The reality was far different. Her father was constantly away from home traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Hempel and her siblings struggled to make sense of their family, world, changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. Each, in their way, was hiding their true self from the world. By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender, and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with an alleged serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning. It led them to question their place in the world in new and liberating ways.

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Book That Matters Most, The Obituary Writer, The Knitting Circle, and the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her most recent books are the memoirs Fly Girl: A Memoir and Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food. In Fly Girl (W. W. Norton & Company), Hood explores her years as a flight attendant. In 1978 flight attendants were the epitome of glamor and sophistication. Fresh out of college and hungry to experience the world – and maybe, one day, write about it – Hood joined their ranks. She survived TWA’s rigorous Breech Training Academy and learned to evacuate seven kinds of aircraft, deliver a baby, mix proper cocktails, administer oxygen, and stay calm no matter the situation. In the air, Hood found both the expected adventure and the sometimes unexpected realities of the job. She carved chateaubriand in the first-class cabin and dined in front of the pyramids in Cairo. She fended off passengers’ advances, found romance on layovers in London and Lisbon, and walked more than a million miles in high heels. It was a job that, she notes, despite its roots in sexist standards, empowered her.