When she was 21, Joanna Gaines wrote down her life story.
Joanna Gaines at her book launch in New York City in November, 2022.Craig Barritt/Getty Images
She was trying to make sense of a strange time in her life: On one hand, an unfulfilling internship at CBS News was slowly killing her long-held dream of being a news anchor. On the other, the diversity of New York all around her was a revelation to someone who’d grown up half-Korean in otherwise homogeneously white small towns.
As she was losing one part of herself, it felt like she was gaining another – and so every night, she came home and wrote, putting to paper everything she felt had led her to this place: the cruel, racist playground teasing about how she looked, the endless moving around of her family that made her desperate to fit in, the pressure she felt to be the “perfect” daughter, motivated in part by the protectiveness she felt for her mother, who’d moved from South Korea as the young bride of a U.S. soldier, and whose “difference” was an easy target for schoolyard bullies.
All those words, scribbled down in a youthful fumble toward healing, are not what you’ll read when you pick up The Stories We Tell, Gaines’ best-selling new book. Nor will you find the fruit of the second time she did that same exercise as a 44 year old whose life couldn’t be farther than the one she’d imagined for herself when she went back to Texas after that summer in New York.
Rather than running her dad’s tire store (Plan B after it was clear she was not meant to be the next Barbara Walters), she was now Joanna Gaines, star of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, the popular home renovation show that spawned a thousand more like it, and made “shiplap,” those feature walls made out of rustic wooden boards, the most ubiquitous design trend of the 2010s. (Got a Pinterest board full of “modern farmhouse” inspo? You can thank her for that Shaker-cabineted, subway-tiled backsplash movement, too.)
The show, which she made with her husband, Chip, had spawned a universe of its own: a magazine, a bunch of businesses in their hometown of Waco, Tex., and even their own television network, which featured Gaines’ own cooking show (which, of course, spawned its own series of recipe books, too.) She was also now a mother of five, whose brood spanned a senior about to go off to college and a toddler who’d come along as a surprise when she was 40.
“I was ready to catch my breath and look closely at my life,” Gaines writes in the book’s introduction. And so she went through her journals, made some voice memos, and, sitting in her laundry room, began to trace out her story once more, in search of clarity as she enters what she calls “the second half” of her life.
But again: This book is not that text, written up as the ubiquitous celebrity tell-all memoir for our titillation. (Spoiler: The beats I’ve outlined above are about as juicy as the biographical reveals get.) Instead, this is Gaines’ invitation to her readers to “write their own story,” a sort of guide toward doing this exercise for yourself, helped along by her own reflections as she’s done the same.
This can be a little eye-glazing at times, in the same way that hearing someone talk about their journey – which detour they had to take when the highway was jammed, how many hours their plane was delayed – can be fascinating to the storyteller and devastatingly boring to the listener.
Gaines also isn’t breaking any new self-help ground here: The usual roll call of buzzwords – presence, intentionality, purpose – are all present and accounted for. The character flaws Gaines reveals – perfectionism, striving for success, not being fully “there” in her own life – are ubiquitous in our present moment. Her themes are broad – parenthood, work – and it’s as intellectually accessible as the visual “trick” of the book’s cover, where a belly band with present-day Gaines’ face can be removed to reveal a picture of her as the bullied, shy little girl we meet in the narrative. It’s not hard to get, it’s relatable and, unlike many other things you might come across in a day’s cultural consumption, it’s not likely to send you into an existential spiral.
You see, this is a book that rewards you if you approach it on its own terms. “Open-hearted” is a word that comes up often in Gaines’ writing, and as much as the idea of her other favourite phrase “soul work” might break me out in hives, embracing that posture (and suspending your own cynical disbelief) might mean that even the most snark-prone could get something out of this beguilingly sincere volume. In a world where it feels like everything is a hot take and even the most profound events are memed three seconds later, Gaines invites you to take yourself seriously, and get into your own feelings in the most unironic way.
It’s writing like nobody’s watching – and it only took the stars of one of television’s biggest shows to lead the way.
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