Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby is joined by award-winning artist, designer, and host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, to discuss LOVE LETTER TO A GARDEN, her beautifully illustrated gem of a book with recipes by her wife, Roxane Gay. Together, they explore Debbie’s unlikely journey into gardening and how it became a powerful metaphor for healing, growth, peace, and transformation. She also shares the personal stories that shaped her creative life, touching on moments of love, loss, resilience, and joy.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Debbie. Thank you so much for coming to the first ever Live podcast for Totally Booked with Zibby. So glad you're here. 

Debbie: Thank you, Zibby. It's an honor. Thank you. 

Zibby: Yay. I'm gonna read your bio really quickly. 

Debbie: Okay. 

Zibby: For people who are in the audience and listening or watching wherever they may be, so this is Debbie's amazing new book.

How cute is this? It's so beautiful. It's called Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman with recipes by Roxanne Gay, who's her wife. If you didn't know that. Okay. Ready? Debbie Millman named one of the most creative people in the business by Fast Company, one of the most influential designers working today by graphic Design, USA and a Woman of Influence by Success Magazine.

Debbie Millman is also the founder of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts partner and editorial director of print mag.com and host of the award-winning podcast, design Matters, one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world. No Pressure. She is the author of seven books, and her writing and artwork have appeared in publications including The New York Times, New York magazine, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Enquirer, and many more.

And it is illustrated by Roxanne Gay, and this is the book. Congratulations.

Debbie: Thank you. Thank you. 

Zibby: Tell everybody all about this little gem. How did this come to be? What is it about? Why are we talking about it? 

Debbie: It's about my quest to become a gardener, and I wrote and illustrated the entire book. It came to be, I got completely out of the blue an email from an editor at Hachette publications Hachette Press one of the big four. And it was from a woman who is, who runs Timber Press and it's their gardening imprint. And apparently she had seen two things that I had done before, during COVID, I had created some interstitials for the TED Conference back when it went completely online so that they'd have some content in between the talks.

And so I made three visual stories that I narrated, so it brought them to life with narration one on storytelling. So it's called Love Letter to storytelling. One to traveling because none of us were traveling. So Love Letter to travel. And then I made one on gardening Love Letter to gardening. Because I had so much free time, I decided to try my hand at making a real vegetable garden.

And I had attempted over a good part of my life to have a little garden space of my own in various places that I'd lived in Manhattan. Manhattan isn't particularly conducive to a garden, especially if, like me, you lived in a shady apartment with very little sunlight. And so all of my previous attempts had pretty much failed.

But at this point during C-O-V-I-D-I went to stay with Roxanne, who I was engaged to at that point, but not married to. We had never lived together, and at that point in our relationship, we had just started to think about actually going back and forth from LA to New York where she lived more collectively together as opposed to, I go there for a weekend, she comes to New York for a weekend and so forth.

At the time, we didn't think Covid was going to go on for as long as it did. I don't know if anybody remembers, but the president at that time was saying, oh, we'll be back outside by Easter. And this was first in March. 

Zibby: I love in the book that you said you packed underwear for two weeks and then you're like, yeah, I needed a lot more underwear.

Debbie: Roxanne was like, pack for two weeks. That's what we thought. And. I did. And then of course I, I needed to go to Target and buy a lot, masks. And remember we were wearing gloves and go and get the underwear, leave it in the garage for two days to, decontaminate and then wash it all and whatever.

So I, I had a lot of time and we had a lot of sun and because I had been attempting over the years. I tried again, but this time it was, I had a lot better results and started drawing it, drawing about it. I made these visual stories about what I was doing on Instagram, and so the editor at Timber had seen my interstitials for the TED Conference, the Instagram stories that I was making about my efforts and a piece that I had done in a far magazine. I had illustrated a piece about an expedition that I had gone on with Roxanne for my 60th birthday to try and see an eclipse on Antarctica. That was my gift to myself.

And unfortunately we didn't get to see the eclipse because of cloud cover. My mother-in-law was like, do you get your money back? 

Zibby: That's best laid plans. 

Debbie: She was really insistent that we try to get our money back because we didn't get to see the eclipse. I'm like, mom, it doesn't work that way. But in any case, I wrote about it was.

Still a glorious experience. Going to Antarctica is one of the most extraordinary places on the planet. It's pure. And so she had seen these two, or really these three different avenues of my work and reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in writing a book about gardening. And I actually thought it was a prank.

First of all. I didn't know the press. Second of all, I was like. Somebody wants me to write a book about gardening. I have the opposite of a green thumb. I'm a plant killer. Although I did have some success with the latest effort, I couldn't imagine that, she foresaw me having a sort of gardening platform, a la Martha.

And so I said I, any gardener would laugh and roll their eyes at my, giving them any kind of advice. And I said instead, how about my quest? A quest to try and becomes something that you're not. And she said Yes. And that's how the book happened. 

Zibby: Your book is really not about gardening only, right?

Your book is about life. Your book is about finding meaning, overcoming challenges, learning something new, making the most of the time here, our police in the universe. You pack a lot into a few beautiful pages, but it's enough to make a reader, laugh, cry. You have a scene where you took care of your neighbor is one of the many teachers that you have in the book who taught you how to garden.

And it was just on her tiny little balcony. She had some rhododendron. And then when your neighbor passes away, you inherit the rhododendron and then plant them in your own yard. And then you said, but they're still blooming. Yeah. It's just so poignant. 

Debbie: Thank you. That means a lot to me. I have a very complicated relationship with my biological family and the immediate one.

And Maria became my sort of chosen family. She lived two doors down and I'd seen her for years on my block. She was one of those women that she was elderly, but was very confident and would walk down the street and like little short. And a tube top and a cigarette. And I just found her to be the most fascinating person.

She seemed to just ooze self-confidence and I would always sort of wave or say hi. 'cause I saw her a lot on the street, but she never ever paid any attention to me until I got a dog. And then when I got Scruffy, she suddenly recognized me and was like, oh, look at this little dog. She's Greek, really wonderful woman.

And then she started helping me take care of Scruffy 'cause she'd walked dogs for a living and we became very close for almost two decades. And she taught me a lot about container gardening in New York City, which is really challenging. And unfortunately, she developed cancer and lost her battle to this terrible disease.

And I was very lucky to know her and to have her in my life. And when she passed, I was one of the people that helped organize her things and I ended up bringing her ashes to Greece for her daughter. But I did get the rhododendron and yeah, this is the time of year when it starts to bloom and it's blooming.

Zibby: Aw. 

Debbie: And the interesting thing about it is that I. I've taken pictures of it over the years because one of the other women that was also very close to her was somebody that Maria actually nannied over the years. Now she's married and in her probably close to 30 at this point, and every year I sent her pictures of the Rhododendron.

So I have this sort of record of how it's grown, which is remarkable, and nothing that I ever anticipated. That would end up in a book because I wasn't taking the photos for that reason. And in fact, most of the photos in the book, which I then drew and I used them as reference and made paintings, watercolors, collages, was all because I was documenting things.

Mostly for evidence that I had either been someplace or asking my cousin Eileen, who's a really avid gardener, what's this mold? What's this fungus? What's this bug? Why is this getting this spot on it? And so I would take, send those pictures to her, and she would give me advice. And all of that ended up in the book, even the Dead Corn.

I tried to plant corn. It worked for a while until it didn't, and then it all died. But I took pictures of the dying corn to try to get some help and trying to keep it alive, which was unsuccessful. 

Zibby: By the way. I read and showed this to my son last night, who's 10, and I was showing him all the pictures. He found the corn part, the funniest.

Debbie: Oh yeah. 

Zibby: But at the end we put it down and he was like, I really liked that book. It was really sweet. So has,.. 

Debbie: Thank you. 

Zibby: This has a very wide audience because.. 

Debbie: Thank you. 

Zibby: All of it is quite universal. You talked about your. Somewhat difficult childhood, which anyone who has done a deep dive into you or followed you for a long time knows you've spoken very openly about it.

Would you mind sharing a little more about that? 

Debbie: Yeah, absolutely. I'm a native New Yorker. I was born. 

Zibby: That is not the bad part. 

Debbie: No. No, it's not. It's not. I was born in Brooklyn and then moved to Howard Beach, Queens, so I've lived in all the boroughs except the Bronx at this point. And then we moved to Staten Island and my parents at that point divorced and that was difficult and I think it's difficult for any, 8-year-old to go through, especially in the seventies when divorce was much more stigmatized. And then my mother very quickly got remarried to somebody who ended up being really abusive to me and to my brother and to his own biological daughters.

But I was the oldest, so I got it first. And he was sexually abusive, physically abusive, beat us and really tortured us a lot. And so that was four years. I call those the dark years. And that was from like nine to 13. And then, trying to overcome that. Initially I think a lot of people that go through that kind of situation try very quickly to rise above it.

That's not gonna kill me. And if you don't deal with it, it will. And so I very quickly had to figure out how to make a life for myself that wasn't only about keeping myself safe and how do I live more openly? How do I live able to still love and trust? And that took a very long time. 

Zibby: And how did you do that. 

Debbie: Therapy.

Lot of the lot of therapy and then just continuing to make mistakes, continuing to be destructive, self-destructive, and then trying to repair that. And then just trying to figure, it didn't come out until I was 50. Mostly because I was afraid of, I had a lot of my own inner homophobia. I was afraid of being judged. I was, I had actually created some success in my life in branding and had ran, was running a big agency and at the time was really worried that like my clients would reject me. Some of my conservative clients I was worried would be just really dismissive of this choice that I'd made in my life and that didn't happen.

And it never happened actually, but I, I always, I, for a long time, I came to, and I write in the book that I had and really struggled with a sense of the scarcity of my life. That I was always afraid that I didn't have enough, that if I didn't say yes to this thing. It would, I would never have another chance again, this is my last chance for love, my last chance for a book, my last chance for success, my last chance for a friendship, and would always get really rigid about being open to sharing or trusting.

And over the years and in some ways through gardening, realized that if I had this stance of there being so much scarcity in the world for myself, there would be, I took a class with Milton Glaser several years ago, many years ago, and he talked about this of in his own, in own his own life, that if you see the world with eyes through of seeing the world with scarcity through eyes of scarcity, it will be.

Yeah. But if you see your life as one that has the potential for abundance, then you can be more open to sharing. And if you're more open to sharing, you'll get that back. And so that mindset has helped quite a lot. I still struggle with feeling like my last chance for anything, especially since most of my successes come later in life.

But I, I now feel that, and maybe it's rationalization, but I do feel like the longer it takes, the longer it lasts. 

Zibby: This is not the last chance that you have for this show. You can come on as much as you want. I'll just put that out there. Easy. 

Debbie: Thank you. 

Zibby: No, I'm joking, but I'm so sorry for everything that you've had to go through, but also just so inspired by your ability to plow through.

In effect, this book is so similar to your emotional journey, so to speak. 

Debbie: Yeah no. What it getting through, what is, I would agree with that. One other thing that. I think has really helped and if this helps anybody else I will feel very grateful, but I have been working for the last 10 years with a woman named Marishka Hargitay.

She's the star of Law and Order, SVU longtime star. The show is the longest running drama on television, and I got an opportunity more than 10 years ago to work with one of my clients who had joined a consortium of organizations and corporations. She worked at Kimberly Clark, a woman named Christine Mao.

She worked at Kimberly Clark, and she had joined forces with Verizon and Avon and a number of other Viacom to create an organization called No More, and that was about eradicating sexual violence in our culture. And she asked me if I wanted to work on the identity and the positioning. She knew my history, and I jumped at the chance, volunteered our agency.

We did all the strategy, all the positioning, all the creative work, the identity and advertising and so forth. And through that experience, because Mariska's Foundation, the Joyful Heart Foundation, was also part of this. I got involved with Joyful Heart after I finished my work with no more.  Marishka asked me if I'd be interested in joining the board at Joyful Heart, and that happened about 10 years ago.

And so we've been working ever since to eradicate child abuse sexual assault, domestic violence, and to eradicate the rape kit backlog, which has been really an epidemic in our country for decades. And now we're also working on combating image-based abuse because of how much unsolicited, unwanted photographs and also a lot of deep fakes that are going up without a consent from whoever's being abused in this way.

And so the work that we're doing is ongoing. And I had before I had disclosed, that's what we call it when you share your history. I had been interviewed on the website and when I became a board member and it was like, why did you, why are you doing this work? And because I was doing so much of the branding work with my history and branding, I wrote that it made me feel like my life made sense, having this sort of symmetry to what I had been through and now what I was doing and trying to combat for others.

I was interviewed on the Tim Ferris show, and in his research he came upon that interview and I had never really been public with my history. And Tim on the air asked me what that meant. What does it mean that it's making you feel like your life makes sense? And so there I was like a deer in the headlights.

Do I say something silly and push it away, or do I share. Really why, and in that moment I, I jumped in and said it and it was really like, scary for me. But that experience showed me. Again, holding it all tight was not helping me, and no one was going to judge me for this except me.

And so letting go of that judgment, I'm damaged. I am not as good as I am. Nothing helped me overcome that in a really profound way. And. This book is a journey. This experience of my life has been a journey and it's all been about growth and recovery. And I think that is a lot of what I've shared in this book through the lens of what it means to be reborn through gardening and how sort of nature is constantly being reborn.

And even when it. Doesn't get reborn. It creates other opportunities for other self sewing and propagating and continuing on. 

Zibby: The one image that repeats through the book is this sense of time. You have a clock that is ticking our way through the book and till the end, the sense of our time here.

And then you say but we are here, like we are here right now. 

Debbie: Yeah. 

Zibby: What do you want people to know about that? Like how do you, are you trying to wake people up and just say, enjoy it?

Debbie: I don't know. If I'm trying to wake people up maybe I'm trying to wake myself up. I'm endlessly fascinated by astrophysics.

In another life, I would've been a scientist, but you can't really be a scientist unless you have just a modicum of understanding of mathematics and science in which I have zero. Zero. And so I think about it a lot and I read about it a lot. But I just don't have the capacity to really understand any of it.

I'm, but I think about it all the time, and we are here for such a short time, and as I'm getting older, I'm much, much more conscious of time. When I was younger, I didn't even think about it. I think I just assumed that we were all infinite and we would all be immortal in some ways. I never really thought about.

Not being here, but once you get into your sixties, you start to think if not now, when? When do I start to do the things that I really wanna do? But maybe I'm afraid to do, when do I learn that second language? Because I've been saying for my whole life, how could I only know one language? When do I start playing the piano?

Because I've wanted my whole life to be able to play. When do I start? When do I start? And so the idea of this running clock is about how we are part of time, we move with time, and that we can do. We can try whatever we really want to try, if we want to try it, and maybe we don't want to if we don't do it, or maybe we're too afraid to do it if we don't do it.

And so my life has been this sort of, I, I don't wanna say battle, but this sort of endless struggle between wanting to do things and being afraid of doing them and then doing them. And then wanting to do something and being afraid of it, and then tentatively doing it. So it's been this sort of circuitous journey through time, which I try to express with the illustrations.

Zibby: And speaking of time, you've been doing your show design matters for 20 years. Yes. You have this giant celebration with all the people. It's so exciting. Tell me what you've learned from that show. You've talked to so many people. 

Debbie: The show started as a sort of inside baseball show about design. I was talking designers talking about design, graphic design.

Big audience. 

Zibby: Turns out, yes. 

Debbie: Who knew? It has evolved over the years to. A show about how the most creative people in the world design the arc of their lives. How do they make their lives? Again, fascinated by how does one construct their own narrative arc? How do you create a life of meaning?

And I've gotten very lucky because it's been 20 years and momentum builds and you get to interview this person who then introduced you to this person and becomes this wonderful connective tissue. I have gotten to interview now over 700 of the most creative people in the world, and it's expanded from design to performers, musicians, writers, playwrights, directors, MacArthur winners, Oscar winners, Emmy winners, Grammy winners.

And what I've learned is that really the most creative people in the world are always striving to make more things and also have some of the same struggles, worrying that their best work might be behind them, or worrying that this work might not be as good as that work. Or wondering if they can make something again with meaning.

And actually the only two people of all the 700 people I've interviewed that ever were like. I'm good as is. You know why worry were two white cis het men in their eighties. That's it. Two Masa Movin and Milton Glaser, and they were like, they had no more Fs to give and were really happy with who they'd been and become.

Zibby: Do you feel like you're happy with who you've become or are you ready to build more things? 

Debbie: I'm always ready to build more things. I am grateful and I am. I feel very lucky, but I don't feel like I've peaked yet and I don't want to peak yet. I still have, hopefully a couple more decades to do what I do and try to get bHachetter at it and try to make more things.

One thing I have noticed, another thing I don't know that people are searching for more success as much as they're seeking for more opportunities to make things. And yes, I'm thrilled that this book is out, but I had the time of my life making it, and it made me realize that I am happiest when I'm in the process of making and that's, I think, something that I wanna hold onto.

Zibby: That's amazing. Debbie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Love Letters to a Garden. You think it's just a little book about gardening? It is so much more and it is so beautiful and we are so honored to have had you here. Thank you so much. 

Debbie: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you. 

Zibby: Yay. Thank you. 

Debbie: Thank you. Thank you everyone.