Coming Out Of Hiding: A Story Of Recovery And Resilience With Laura Cathcart Robbins

[00:00:00] Eric Brotman: Welcome to Don’t Retire, Graduate, the podcast that asks you what you want to be when you grow up so you can graduate into retirement with purpose and passion. I’m your host and valedictorian, Eric Brotman, and today I have a podcasting celebrity- an author- on our show Laura Cathcart Robbins is the host of an incredibly popular podcast, “The Only One in the Room”, and the author of the forthcoming Simon & Schuster memoir called “Stash”, which will be out this March.
[00:00:32] Eric Brotman: She’s been active for many years as a speaker and school trustee, and is credited for creating the Buckley School’s nationally recognized committee on Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Her recent articles in HuffPo and the Temper on the subjects of race, recovery and divorce have garnered her worldwide acclaim that she’s a 2022 Ted X Speaker, an LA Moth story slam winner, and currently she sits on the advisory boards of the San Diego Writers Festival, the Outliers HQ Podcast Festival.
[00:00:59] Eric Brotman: You can [00:01:00] find out more about her on her website, and you guys are gonna love Laura. She’s an incredible guest. Welcome to Don’t Retire, Graduate.
[00:01:07] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Oh, thank you so much for having me, and thank you for that introduction. That was great. I haven’t heard all of that. Read it once in a long time.
[00:01:15] Eric Brotman: Well, you know, I, I don’t normally do a full introduction, but I, I felt like it would not do you justice not to because there’s, you, you’ve been involved in so many extraordinary things.
[00:01:25] Eric Brotman: I was fortunate enough to guest on your show, “The Only One in the Room”, which was, and I, I’ve been doing podcasts now for, for better than half a decade. I’ve been on hundreds of shows and I can honestly say that was one of the most enjoyable experiences as a guest I’ve ever had. And I love your show and I hope people after they, after they listen to ours every Thursday, I hope they’ll check yours out too.
[00:01:47] Eric Brotman: So I’m so glad to have you. This is gonna be fun and it’s great that you’re in the hot seat instead of me. And I know we’re gonna talk about the new book. The new book, which I, I, I did not get an advanced copy of, so maybe I have to wait until March, like everybody else. But I’m [00:02:00] excited to read it.
[00:02:01] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Okay.
[00:02:01] Eric Brotman: I’m excited to read it. So, so why don’t we start with, with your background, because your, your, your story is inspirational in and of itself. So why don’t we begin at the beginning and, and hear about your your journey.
[00:02:13] Laura Cathcart Robbins: We will. I mean, thank you for that. And I just wanted to say first about your appearance on our show “The Only One in the Room”. My my personal financial guy has listened to it and shared it with everyone that he knows in his company and all of his colleagues. He just thought it was extraordinary that you were calling out something that they all live with. And, you know, every once in a while maybe someone acknowledges, which was how, you know male heavy your industry is, and your being the only man in that room really enlightened you and, and created this activism in you, which, you know,
[00:02:54] Eric Brotman: yeah.
[00:02:54] Laura Cathcart Robbins: He just, he just thought it was phenomenal. So I just wanted to give you that prop. I [00:03:00] don’t know if I ever got back to you and told you that.
[00:03:02] Eric Brotman: Oh, well that’s, that’s, that’s high praise, especially coming from another financial advisor. So that’s always
[00:03:07] Laura Cathcart Robbins: yes.
[00:03:07] Eric Brotman: That’s always nice. So thank you for, thank you for sharing with that. Yes. This, our business is about 88% male.
[00:03:13] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:03:14] Eric Brotman: Which is in today’s day and age, kind of a shocking thing. And I, I believe that it starts with girls in school being taught that they’re not good at math before they’re even old enough to know what they’re good at.
[00:03:25] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Right.
[00:03:25] Eric Brotman: But we talked about that on your show. I wanna talk about you.
[00:03:28] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Okay. So, so my background is a really long story. But I’ll just start with, I, I grew up between the cities of Cambridge, Mass. I was born in Chicago, so I was in Cambridge, Mass from like 5 through 13, and then Berkeley, California from 13 to 20.
[00:03:49] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I live in Los Angeles. I’ve been here since 1988 and I did not finish high school. I dropped out in the 10th grade [00:04:00] and I never went to college. So that happened during those Berkeley years and when I moved to Los Angeles, I, I thought I would be a commercial director. That’s, I love commercials which is very rare now cuz no one even sees commercials anymore.
[00:04:16] Laura Cathcart Robbins: But I moved here to direct commercials. I ended up… I’ve always written– like I’ve always… I’ve always had a journal, I’ve always written stories, and I ended up writing press releases for a friend of mine who had a very famous brother that she was doing publicity for. Got hired at a PR firm, later opened my own.
[00:04:35] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I had the only black owned entertainment publicity firm in Los Angeles at the time, and I had, it was a boutique firm. I had about six people working for me, and I, I, I grew that company until I got married and pregnant and then I shuttered the company and I was an at-home mom for about 15, 16 years.
[00:04:59] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And so [00:05:00] now I’m in my fifties and do you want me to keep going?
[00:05:04] Eric Brotman: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you, you’re, you’re not, you, you’re not that much older than that. We’re almost at the end here, so we’re all right.
[00:05:11] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Right.
[00:05:12] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Okay. Well, I was gonna say in, in my forties, I actually went to treatment for a really intense pill addiction, and I had- I was the parent association president. I’m actually wearing the necklace that is bestowed upon the Outgoing Parent Association Association president at my kids’ former school. I had just been asked to join the board that she read about at the be the top of the show, the board where I still sit as ex- officio.
[00:05:41] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And I was, I was dying with a drug and alcohol addiction and I had solved everything else. You know, like I had all these hacks. I hadn’t graduated from high school, didn’t go to college, but I had hacks around that. Still opened my own company, still was really successful. I, I, I was [00:06:00] in a very high profile marriage and kind of ran the marriage successfully.
[00:06:05] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And then there was this thing that I couldn’t, I couldn’t figure out. I couldn’t hack it. So I went to treatment and, and then what happened was I got divorced at the same time, so a and, and they, those were not two mutually exclusive things. There was, there was some overlap there, but we, we really made a decision, my ex-husband and I, to continue to raise our children together.
[00:06:29] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So that’s what I devoted my time to.
[00:06:32] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And I couldn’t write or read after a, after that. I just, when I got sober, it just took that ability away from me for pleasure.
[00:06:43] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I obviously read emails and wrote thank you notes and like that kind of thing, but I …
[00:06:48] Eric Brotman: Right.
[00:06:48] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I didn’t, I was a voracious reader before, and so in, in my fifties I started taking writing classes again with the hopes of kind of regenerating that love that I had, that passion and [00:07:00] I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I was effectively retired because I didn’t have to go to a day job at that point, but I wanted something in my life. And so I started taking those classes. And do you want me to keep going? Or do you want me to stop there?
[00:07:14] Eric Brotman: Well, I, I, I, well, let’s, let’s unpack it a little bit because-
[00:07:16] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Okay.
[00:07:16] Eric Brotman: Because first, first of all, thank you for, for sharing so openly and transparently with us because I, I think that it’s important. A lot of times people see others’ success…
[00:07:28] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:07:28] Eric Brotman: And assume, assume lots of things about them. So successful people are sometimes assumed to, oh, they must have had it easy growing up, or they must have been born into money, or they must have gone to the Ivy League, or they must have had X, Y, and Z. And you know, you had a couple of interesting, for lack of a more graceful term, strikes against you…
[00:07:49] Laura Cathcart Robbins: yeah.
[00:07:49] Eric Brotman: To, to break into that. And you know, you’re not the first person who said, “oh, I think I’ll go to LA and get involved in, in some kind of production work”. Like no one’s ever thought to do that. It’s kinda like no one goes to New York [00:08:00] thinking they’re gonna be a Broadway star.
[00:08:01] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Right.
[00:08:01] Eric Brotman: No one thought of that. So, so you’re entering a, a wildly hyper-competitive environment in a, in a city that, that I know New York doesn’t sleep, but LA, LA really doesn’t sleep as far as I’m concerned. And…
[00:08:15] Laura Cathcart Robbins: yeah.
[00:08:16] Eric Brotman: And, and so you, you, you were doing a lot of reading, you were doing a lot of writing, and your creative juices were at least partly, or you believed they were partly created by some substances I would think. You know, there, there are there, there are stories about some of the, the great poets or artists or musicians or other folks who claim that, that that was part of the key to their success. I, I, I don’t, I can’t fathom that’s true, but, but I think people believe it. So how did that start? Like how did you, how did you go from seemingly having it all together to allowing that to, to eat at you from the inside? Because I think that’s really what happened, right?
[00:08:57] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes. I know there’s, there’s a really great [00:09:00] expression for this and I can’t think of what it is, but it’s something like, it happened slowly then all at once. So it wasn’t like I was, well, well, okay. What happened was, I, I wasn’t, my kids were born back to back– boys.
[00:09:15] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Amazing boys. They’re amazing adults now. They were what I know that we call now spirited children, which may, they were just really energetic and into everything even as babies, and I was having a really hard time sleeping. So I was prescribed Ambien for sleep. And I’m not villainizing Ambien at all.
[00:09:37] Laura Cathcart Robbins: It’s, it’s a really good drug when it’s used as prescribed. And I enjoyed the sleep that I got while taking it so much that I took it longer than it was originally suggested. It was prescribed to me, but he had said, take it for 10 days. Those 10 days were the best sleep I’d ever had, so I wanted to take it every night basically.
[00:09:58] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And that’s, it didn’t, it [00:10:00] wasn’t that the first year, but by the second year I was taking it every night and then by probably the third year I needed to take more of it in order to get to sleep. And maybe by the fourth or fifth year, I was doctor shopping, meaning getting a prescription from more than one doctor because I didn’t want them to, I didn’t want to alert them to the fact that not only was I not able to get to sleep without this medication, the dosage that I had prescribed myself at this point, but I could not sleep at all without it.
[00:10:34] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I had what they call rebound insomnia, which is a terrible, terrible thing. It’s an effect of overusing benzodiazepines or whatever they’re called. Benzos. And so when you stop taking the thing that was sedating you, it makes you wired. And it is impossible, physically, to get to, to get back to a, what I felt was like a normal state without the pill [00:11:00] that got me there in the first.
[00:11:01] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So that’s, that’s really how it happened. It happened over a number of years. I was you know, I, I described you my life a little bit. I had two young kids. I was showing up at school. I was giving speeches. I was joining this board. I was giving dinner parties. I was taking tennis lessons. I had a personal shopper at Barney’s.
[00:11:19] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I went with the girls to tea and to jewelry parties. But the work for me was, keeping up with and then hiding this addiction, which is why the book is called “Stash: My Life in Hiding”. And it details the 10 months that I’m describing for you now where I file for divorce and the addiction gets really bad and I end up going to treatment where I meet my hon, Scott. I met him the hour I checked into treatment at the Meadows in Wickenburg, Arizona, and then coming back here and to LA from there. And being a sober mom, being a mom, like all of that stuff was [00:12:00] so scary. And humiliating, honestly, I was, I felt like I had taken this huge fall from grace. And I no longer had the husband that I had been known to have and I was single, and I felt like I had failed and that, you know, I just didn’t know how I’d be received.
[00:12:23] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And so I tried not to see anybody for a while, but that didn’t work because I was still PA president and still on this board. So, I still had to see people and and that’s, that was August 14th, 2008 when I left treatment. So that was the last time I had a drink or a drug was, well, I mean, it wasn’t the last time I had been sober since I had been in treatment for a month at that point. So,
[00:12:48] Eric Brotman: okay.
[00:12:49] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I, I haven’t had anything since then.
[00:12:52] Eric Brotman: Well, first of all congratulations because that is,
[00:12:55] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Thank you.
[00:12:55] Eric Brotman: That is a daily struggle and incredibly hard. It’s incredibly hard because it’s so [00:13:00] ingrained in our society and our social culture.
[00:13:02] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:02] Eric Brotman: You can’t watch TV or open a magazine or, or even read a story without
[00:13:07] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Right.
[00:13:08] Eric Brotman: References to the things that, that you’re talking about. So on paper,
[00:13:12] Laura Cathcart Robbins: yes,
[00:13:12] Eric Brotman: on paper you had kind of this dream life. You’re, you’re the mom.
[00:13:17] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Absolutely.
[00:13:17] Eric Brotman: You’re the wife.
[00:13:18] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:13:18] Eric Brotman: You’re the, you’re, you’re well to do. You’re, you’re a wealthy person at this point. And wealth is a, a funny word defined lots of different ways, but for all accounts.
[00:13:26] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:13:26] Eric Brotman: You were a wealthy person living a high profile life. You had it all.
[00:13:30] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:13:31] Eric Brotman: At least people thought you did.
[00:13:32] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes.
[00:13:33] Eric Brotman: And so you were functionally retired then. I mean, you, you know, you, you weren’t, you didn’t have to work. You chose to do some things, but you, you didn’t have to work. So by definition, you were financially independent.
[00:13:45] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes.
[00:13:45] Eric Brotman: How did that change after divorce? Did, did the divorce create a lack of financial independence or were you still sort of financially okay afterwards to where you could move on to the next chapter?
[00:13:58] Laura Cathcart Robbins: you know, that word “okay” is [00:14:00] funny, isn’t it? Because
[00:14:01] Eric Brotman: Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:01] Laura Cathcart Robbins: What’s okay for one person may not be okay for another.
[00:14:05] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And you know, I, I was really fragile and vulnerable when, when my ex-husband and I got divorced and what I was looking for at that point in my life was not wealth. I was just looking to be okay in, in my terms, which meant that I could continue to be an at-home mom, continue to take care of our boys the way I’ve been taking care of them.
[00:14:34] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Well, not the way I’d been taking care of them, but prior to.
[00:14:37] Eric Brotman: Sure.
[00:14:38] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And live in the same home that I didn’t want my boys and I to have to move. And I, you know, I just, I wanted to be comfortable, but I wasn’t interested in, in gaining anything and
[00:14:52] Eric Brotman: Okay.
[00:14:53] Laura Cathcart Robbins: that’s, that’s what happened. That’s what happened when we got divorced.
[00:14:56] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I got those things.
[00:14:58] Eric Brotman: Okay.
[00:14:58] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And I, [00:15:00] I was I’m, you know, I’m, I’m so blessed. I’m so blessed. The hustle to pay my bills just didn’t exist for years afterward.
[00:15:11] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I just didn’t ha- I could focus on my sobriety, I could focus on my boys, I could focus on service work, you know, the… at the school and outside of the school.
[00:15:22] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I, I did a lot of service work. I always did a lot of service work, but I could focus on that, and I felt like those were the right priorities to focus on. So I’m really grateful that I didn’t have to focus on the other thing.
[00:15:37] Eric Brotman: Right. Sure.
[00:15:39] Laura Cathcart Robbins: But where I am now, it would be really nice to make some income and or to have an income.
[00:15:48] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And so this is part of the reason for me starting, you know, at age 55, I guess I started writing the book proposal for [00:16:00] Stash, and cuz I’m 58 now, so yeah, that was about three years ago. With this idea in mind that if I can make a living- I heard in this meditation, you and I were talking about meditation, I heard in this meditation a few months ago that if you make a list of everything that you’re good at, and then you make a list of everything you love to do, and then cross reference that.
[00:16:25] Eric Brotman: Yep.
[00:16:25] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Where they, where they align– that’s your purpose. And writing was right at the top for me with both. I love to write and I’m great at it.
[00:16:33] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So if this is my purpose, maybe I can make money with my purpose and, and if not, I don’t, you know, I find something else, but I wanted to take that shot. And so I did, I, I started the process.
[00:16:48] Eric Brotman: Well, I, I want to talk about the book…
[00:16:50] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:16:50] Eric Brotman: For sure. But, but, but before we dive into the book, I want to talk a little bit about the podcast because
[00:16:56] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Sure.
[00:16:56] Eric Brotman: The podcast to me, in a very crowded space, there are [00:17:00] a million plus podcasts. Not, not only has your show become wildly popular, I, I consider it to be intensely unique and purposeful. And there, there are a lot of podcasts that, that frankly don’t, don’t accomplish that. We certainly are trying to do that here and it, it’s not easy to stand out in a crowd, but you’ve had some extraordinary guests on.
[00:17:23] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:17:23] Eric Brotman: And, and had some really in-depth conversations, and a lot of it has to do with, with privilege and with race and with other heavy topics that today are now being sort of slapped on billboards and, and becoming punchlines- a little bit more than maybe they should. And, and so you you invite me onto the show, I think begrudgingly, at least initially, although I understand our executive producer was, was like, was, was like on you to, to make it happen.
[00:17:54] Laura Cathcart Robbins: She was.
[00:17:55] Eric Brotman: But, but, but I was, I was an outlier. Not only in the story that I [00:18:00] told, but also on your show.
[00:18:01] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:18:02] Eric Brotman: How did, how did the show come to be? How did you come up with “The Only One in the Room”? I love it. But how did you do it?
[00:18:09] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Thank you for that. And yes, and, and, and Sara was relentless. She was amazing. And, and really what she needed, or what I needed from her was just, I needed your “only one” story, which she finally gave to me and was brilliant and we hadn’t had it anything like it before. And we have a, we have over 600 episodes now.
[00:18:29] Laura Cathcart Robbins: We just, I just went through and looked to see how many episodes we have. I’m like, wow! It’s a lot of episodes. So to have a a story that’s unique is, is pretty amazing. Anyway, I, the way that started was back to I’m looking to write this book, the thing that I was advised to do was to create an author’s platform.
[00:18:53] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I knew nothing about this, and I was actually advised by an agent that rejected me . She said [00:19:00] you’re a beautiful writer. I love your writing. I love this idea. This is a pr, a book proposal that I sent her. It was far too long. It, it, it was, it was the wrong proposal anyway, but I didn’t know.
[00:19:11] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I just did what I had, you know, learned to do and everybody sent me a standard rejection. She sent me back a rejection with an emailed paragraph that said, you’re a beautiful writer. Nobody… but nobody knows who you are, and memoir is the hardest thing to sell. And if no one knows who you are, I can’t sell you.
[00:19:28] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So it’s business, right? It doesn’t matter that it’s a beautiful story or I’m a beautiful writer. The business part of this is they need to sell books and
[00:19:38] Eric Brotman: Right.
[00:19:38] Laura Cathcart Robbins: memoir is the hardest thing to sell because people only wanna read about you if they’re interested in you. Why would they wanna read your life story if they don’t know who you are?
[00:19:47] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Fiction is a whole different thing. But anyway, so she said, why don’t you do some things like get some articles published, which I had had none published at that time. Why don’t you try some storytelling [00:20:00] like The Moth? Why don’t you get some paid speaking gigs? Why don’t you do a few talks and get those on, on film, you know, like so that you can get a website, start putting some stuff together, maybe start a podcast.
[00:20:15] Laura Cathcart Robbins: That was the last sentence in that line to me. So, I mean, in her email to me, and I hadn’t even listened to a podcast at that point, and this was, this was 2018. And I hadn’t listened to a podcast, but I decided to take a podcast class and the class was a six week intensive course and you basically created a, your trailer for your podcast at the end.
[00:20:39] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And we went and recorded it at KPRW, which is our local public radio station here. During that class, I had to listen to a lot of podcasts and report back on them, and we discussed them. At the same time, based on this woman’s feedback, I’d gone to a writer’s retreat called Brave Magic that was given by Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed up in the Santa Cruz [00:21:00] Mountains.
[00:21:00] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So excited because Elizabeth Gilbert wrote “Eat Pray Love” and “Big Magic”, which is one of my favorite books. Cheryl Strayed wrote “Wild”, which is like the epitome of the type of story that I wanted to write. And to be sitting with them for three days was just like heaven. And so, and it was, and I, but I got there and there were 600 people there.
[00:21:22] Laura Cathcart Robbins: It was a really well attended event. The 600 includes the people that work at this, this space, 1440 Multiversity, and I was the only black person there for three days. So I’m taking this podcasting class. I’ve gone to this retreat for three days, and so for three days I’m having this amazing experience because it is Elizabeth Gilbert, who they call Liz, and it’s Cheryl Strayed, and I took two blank notebooks and I filled them up.
[00:21:50] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Like it was incredible. But at the same time, I keep looking for affinity and finding none. And I felt very aware [00:22:00] of my blackness there the whole time- which is in smaller spaces it’s almost never the case, you know? I walk into a a classroom and I’m the only black person there- there’s 26 people I barely notice. But 600 people was really stark. So I wrote about it and I ended up pitching it out as an article on a Saturday, and on Monday the Huffington Post published it. It was my first published article. It went viral instantly and I started getting all of these responses- people all races, all colors, all over the world saying, “I get it”. I know what it’s like to feel a alone in a room full of people. And during that week in podcasting class, she’s like, “you need to pick a title for your project”. And a lot of those responses were hashtag the only one in the room. And we were both like, my teacher and I were [00:23:00] like, “that’s such a cool hashtag, we should use that”.
[00:23:03] Laura Cathcart Robbins: So, we called my project “The Only One in the Room” and finished the class. And a friend of mine who saw a picture that I snapped while I was recording the trailer asked if they could be on the podcast. Like two weeks later I’m like, “oh, it’s not really a podcast. I just took a class”. And they’re like, “well, you should start that podcast and I can help you”.
[00:23:25] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And he did. And so we launched, that was December of 2018. We launched in 2019, and that’s how it came to be. And we decided to tell the stories of all those people who had or liked the stories that that had come to me and said, I’m the only guy in a wheelchair in the room. I’m the only divorced person in the room.
[00:23:45] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I’m the only one who has kids with special needs. You know? So all of these different stories were the stories that we decided to tell. The idea being that, [00:24:00] you know, people might become more aware of inclusivity. They hear all these different stories and maybe they walk into a room to see what’s missing.
[00:24:11] Laura Cathcart Robbins: You know, is there access in this room for a wheelchair? How does somebody who’s on crutches get in here? Are, why, what is the dominant culture in this room and why? Where are the other people? You know, can the a person who’s hard of hearing hear this person who’s speaking without a microphone, like all of those inclusive things, all those stories we tell on our show, and the hope is that people become like inclusion ambassadors everywhere they go.
[00:24:43] Eric Brotman: I, I, I hope people will check out your show. I had no idea there were 600 episodes. That’s amazing.
[00:24:48] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:24:48] Eric Brotman: Because that means binge listen, binge listening that will, will take a month. So plan on an interesting month. Pack the snacks and get going.
[00:24:57] Laura Cathcart Robbins: There you go. Yeah.
[00:24:57] Eric Brotman: So let’s talk about the book now, because the book is [00:25:00] new.
[00:25:00] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:25:00] Eric Brotman: I haven’t seen it. It is on my, it is on my immediate will read list but I haven’t seen it yet. So you, you told us a little bit about the, a little bit about the fact that it’s a memoir and you told us the name of it and why. What else can you tell us about the book?
[00:25:15] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Well, I think what’s really important, because I’m a first time author and I’m learning this, and this is just fascinating to me, was how it comes to be like that author’s platform that Anjali Singh, that’s the woman’s name, the agent who rejected me, that I’ve tried to reach back out to, and I get an automatic reply.
[00:25:36] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I just wanted to thank her. Every step of this process…. you know, and I’m, I, well, so I, I, I sent the pages, some of the pages that I wrote to a friend of mine, Holly Whitaker, you just showed her blurb that she did for me. She’s a New York Times bestselling author. She wrote the book, “Quit Like a Woman”, so it’s in the recovery genre.
[00:25:58] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I sent those pages to Holly, [00:26:00] and Holly sent them to her agent in November of 2020, her agent signed me immediately and said, “how quickly can you get this book written?” And I, I just cleared the decks. I wrote from 11 to seven every day for six months. I turned it into her in April. And that’s, that’s actually, I was sending her pages as I went along, but I turned in a completed manuscript to her in April.
[00:26:24] Laura Cathcart Robbins: She shopped it out in September of 2021. I was… My, the book was purchased at auction by one of the big five, with this one happened to be Simon & Schuster. And at auction literally means a, that the big five were bidding against each other for it. So that was incredibly heady and a great experience for a first time author.
[00:26:48] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And then I go through the editing process with the editor that I was working with and and now the book’s coming out in March and it’s…. Everything [00:27:00] that I did to prepare for this re, re vis-a-vis the authors platform, you know, the networking that I did, you know, and the conferences that I went to, the cards that I gave out, the cards I, I, I received and followed up on the, the friendships that I’ve made have all come into play.
[00:27:20] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Down to like my launch events that I’m, I’m booking, like, I’m doing so much of that on my own. So much of this is on the strength of my contacts that I created while I was creating this author’s platform. So my favorite part of, of writing a book is the writing, but there is also that business part, which has to be satisfied if I’m going to sell books, if they’re going to be able to sell me and make money off of me, I have to carry a lot of the weight. That’s why they make authors do a book proposal with a complete marketing component. You know, because it’s, it’s, it’s on you really [00:28:00] to sell these books. And, you know, I, I don’t, I, I don’t know where my sales stand at this point, but the hope is that because of all this groundwork that I’ve done, I’ll be able to come out of the gate with some really decent sales. And, you know, I have a, I have a few production companies interested, which is really amazing. I’ve had a couple of video calls with people that I’ve only seen in film and….
[00:28:28] Eric Brotman: Wow!
[00:28:29] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yeah.
[00:28:30] Eric Brotman: That’s cool.
[00:28:30] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Just try…. It’s very cool. Very cool. I try not to fan girl out the whole time and like be…
[00:28:36] Eric Brotman: no, you can’t. You, you can’t. You have to– they have to be just other people, you know?
[00:28:41] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes. Yes.
[00:28:42] Eric Brotman: Although you should probably play yourself, you know that, right?
[00:28:45] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Oh, come on.
[00:28:47] Eric Brotman: I’m serious! I’m serious.
[00:28:48] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Oh, thank you. But yeah, no, no, it’s… that’s, that’s why I wanted, I wanted to be behind the scenes, you know? I never wanted to be in front of the camera.
[00:28:57] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I never wanted to be an actress. I always wanted [00:29:00] to be directing, like that’s my thing. But writing is like directing.
[00:29:05] Eric Brotman: So basically, basically being the boss, bossing people around is your thing.
[00:29:09] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes. Yes.
[00:29:10] Eric Brotman: Okay. Scott. Scott, I’m sorry man. I, I, I, I get what that must be like. I get it. Well, so we are, we are getting close to out of time. I could talk to you all day. I, I do want to, to ask you the two most important questions that I have today.
[00:29:27] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Please.
[00:29:27] Eric Brotman: The first is, what do you want to be when you grow up?
[00:29:33] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I, I would, gosh, so my, my first answer is I want to continue to write– whatever that looks like, whether I’m publishing or it’s writing for myself or writing for other people, or writing for people in recovery. Like, I just wanna keep writing. The, the second answer is, when I grow up, I don’t wanna have any red in my ledger.
[00:29:57] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I don’t wanna have any unfinished business with [00:30:00] anyone. I want to be able to run into anybody on this earth in the grocery store and engage them in a conversation instead of turning my cart around the other way. And so that’s, that’s what a lot of my earlier sobriety was dedicated to. And now it’s a lot of keeping my, keeping up and keeping my side of the street clean.
[00:30:20] Laura Cathcart Robbins: And I would like to continue that and make sure that when, when I’m a grownup, I’m good. And I, it’s, it’s just all black. I’m, I don’t owe anyone anything, but I can be generous and curious with everyone.
[00:30:37] Eric Brotman: Very cool. And lastly, because we, we, we believe in extra credit here, but not in homework, do you have an extra credit assignment for our, for our listeners and viewers today?
[00:30:50] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I do. I really do. And that goes back to the reason I started the podcast. My extra credit assignment for anyone listening you know, whatever your world looks [00:31:00] like, every room that you walk into- make sure that you are checking around to see who’s missing and to, if there are voices that are missing or access that isn’t available, make sure you go to the powers that be and say something.
[00:31:17] Laura Cathcart Robbins: You don’t have to challenge them. It doesn’t have to be confrontational. It can be just like, “Hey, I was looking around and I noticed that there aren’t ways for these people to have access or hear or be here, or, I just noticed that there’s little visible diversity in the room and I’m wondering if there’s something we can do about that?”
[00:31:37] Eric Brotman: It’s a great assignment and I, I shall check that on off my list of things to do as well. This has been such fun. Where can folks get either an advanced copy or, or if we have to wait until the launch, where can folks get “Stash”?
[00:31:50] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Okay. So the, our website, which is theonlyonepod.com, as soon as you open the website, there’s a, a pre-order page right there.
[00:31:59] Laura Cathcart Robbins: [00:32:00] Yeah. For the book you can just
[00:32:00] Eric Brotman: That’s subtle, that’s very subtle. Very subtle. Make sure they get through that first. Yeah, no, course not.
[00:32:07] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Yes, yes. Buy the book, please. Pre-order it and if you do pre-order it, it will arrive right on March 7th when it releases, so.
[00:32:17] Eric Brotman: Very cool. Well, I, I wish you tremendous success with the book and the podcast and with adulting- though, I encourage you never to actually grow up entirely.
[00:32:27] Laura Cathcart Robbins: I appreciate that.
[00:32:28] Eric Brotman: Yeah, I can’t, I can’t wait to see you at a conference someday, cuz you, you know, you say you go fangirl- as a podcast host I’m fanboy right now, so this has been fun. This has been fun for me. I hope our enjoy our, our audience enjoyed you. I hope they’ll check you out. The show, the book, everything.
[00:32:43] Eric Brotman: And I, I thank you. And don’t ever retire… keep, keep, you’re changing lives, so don’t ever retire. Graduate all you want, but don’t ever retire, okay?
[00:32:51] Laura Cathcart Robbins: Thank you, Eric. Thank you so much.
[00:32:54] Eric Brotman: Thanks for being here, Laura. I’d like to thank all of you for listening and watching today. We’d love to hear from you, so [00:33:00] please send us a message or leave comments at dontretiregraduate.com or on social media.
[00:33:05] Eric Brotman: If you enjoy our show, don’t keep it a secret. Share it with friends and family so they can join you on your journey to financial freedom, and please leave ratings and reviews in your favorite podcast platform. They’re priceless to us. We’ll be back next week with another installment of Office Hours and in two weeks with another engaging guest. For now, this is Eric Brotman reminding you Don’t Retire. Graduate
[00:33:36] Narrator: Securities offered through Kestra Investment Services, L L C. Kestra IS, member Finra, S I P C, investment Advisory Services offered through Kestra Advisory Services L L c. Kestra AS, an affiliate of Kestra IS. Kestra IS, or Kestra AS are not affiliated with Brotman Financial or any other entity discussed.