E27: Girl in the Spotlight Is Now an Audiobook—And Why This Story Still Matters

E27: Girl in the Spotlight Is Now an Audiobook — And Why This Story Still Matters

Two years after publication, my memoir Girl in the Spotlight is now an audiobook. In this episode I'm sharing the full story behind the book, why the timing of this audiobook is exactly right, and why I believe this coming-of-age story is still so important for the woman who is standing at a crossroads right now.

If you're new here, start with this one. It's everything you need to know about why I do this work — and why it might matter to you.

What We Talk About In This Episode

• Why Girl in the Spotlight is my origin story — and the anchor for everything I create
• The woman this book was written for: she's built a life that looks fine on the outside but feels off on the inside
• The season of grief and loss that delayed the audiobook — and made the timing exactly right
• My mother: her influence on my ambition, our complicated relationship, and the moment she told me you have more power than you realize
• The ticking clock — how fear of time keeps us trapped in lives we don't want, and how to reframe it
• How success became my remedy for loss — and why that made leaving so hard
• Breaking family cycles: the unhealed things we carry from childhood into adulthood
• What the book is really asking: What would you do if you weren't afraid?
• Why creating a life that feels like home is mostly an inside job

Mentioned in This Episode

• Girl in the Spotlight — available now in print and audio
• Hello Friday — Angie's weekly letter, delivered every Friday morning

Transcript

Angie Mizzell (00:00)
Hey, it's Angie Mizzell and welcome to More Like You. This is a podcast where we talk about the pivotal moments and the perspective shifts that point us towards a life that feels true. Today, I am sharing the very exciting news that my memoir, Girl in the Spotlight, is now an audiobook. Girl in the Spotlight is my origin story. It's a coming of age story. It is about leaving my career in television news.

And this story is for a woman who is standing at a crossroads, who knows that something about her life that may very well look just fine and lovely on the outside, but still feels like something is off, something is missing, something is wrong, something needs to change. And she's wondering, what am I gonna do about that?

So that's why I wrote this book. When I left my career in television news, I knew that it had changed me in a pivotal way. I am here two decades later telling you that that single story has changed everything about my life moving forward.

That experience changed how I make decisions, how I parent, how I show up for my relationships, my relationship with work.

it guided me in the direction of ongoing work of achieving more peace and healing in my life as I worked to resolve the issues that led me to what at the time felt like a huge crisis.

So Girl in the Spotlight came out two years ago. So the release of this audio book breathes new life into not just the story, but the message inside the story that I still feel so strongly about.

wrote this book for the younger version of me. I also wrote this book for every version of me.

that has come after.

So why is the audio book coming out now, two years after the book's publication? Well, many of you know that about a month after my book came out, my mom's health took a serious turn. She got very sick and she died eight months later. And in that span of eight months,

I spent many days at the hospital or at her house caregiving. It was a lot of back and forth from the hospital. And that was a traumatic event. And the thing that's also very significant and poignant about that is that my mom and our mother daughter story is a very significant theme throughout the book. It is not a mother daughter story per se.

but I do look back at our relationship and all of the different turning points within our relationship dynamic that did shape and influence my belief about success and self-worth.

I had to reconcile these big dreams that she had for my life and what I actually wanted. So there is this whole thread of untangling from that very attached relationship to find the woman that I was and truly become the woman that she always wanted me to be, a woman who truly understood her own power.

My mom and I had a very close and complicated dynamic. She had me when she was 18 years old and she always had these big dreams for my life. And probably one of her biggest fears is that I might turn out like her. And the thing I always had to reconcile is this feeling of what is wrong with turning out just like you.

So in the memoir, I do flashback in time and highlight some scenes from my childhood and how her influence on me did shape me and in many ways. But in the present day timeline of the story, I'm moving to Portland, Oregon to follow my husband who has taken a job there and my mom decides she's gonna move with me. So.

there's this whole scene of driving across the country with her and how that comes to a head and just the evolution of our relationship in this pivotal time in my young adult life and marriage and career. And I wrote the book and she always knew I was writing the book and

supported me throughout the way. And I let her read some early pages years and years and years ago, but I actually didn't let her read the whole thing until about six months before the book was published, when I felt pretty solid that this was getting close to the final draft. And I let her read it and I was so surprised

how she unconditionally supported me telling the story.

and I know that it was tough for her to read, but she did stand by my need to share the story and why it felt important to share.

Looking back when I can sort of see my mom's health was really declining for a long time. It's almost as if she held out for the book release, that she held on as long as she could and saw this dream of mine come to life.

So in the memoir, I take our relationship through its own story arc. And there's a moment near the end of the book where she tells me, you have more power than you realize. And that's when I realized that that was really what she was trying to explain to me all along. It wasn't that I needed to become...

some version of me that she wanted me to be.

So my book came out in October of 2023. In November, a month later, my mom's health takes a rapid decline. And my son, my oldest son is also a senior in high school during that time.

My son graduated from high school in June. My mom died 10 or 11 days later. and then in late summer, we're packing my son up to go off to college. So that year of the book coming out was a whirlwind.

It was a mix of realizing a dream come true and also such profound transition change loss.

One of the things that I truly understand now after living the story that I tell in my memoir, Girl in the Spotlight, is the importance of giving yourself time and space to grieve.

I would say maybe three months after mom passed away and Dillon was then off at school, as it shifted into that fall, like a year after the book launch, I started to feel myself coming out of that.

and a slow return to life.

So that brought me into 2025 and I spent the majority of last year recalibrating and I was still showing up for work. I was still writing my newsletter. I was still showing up on social media. I was still promoting the book and

And I kept looking at this list of projects and things I wanted to do after the book came out. Launching this podcast was one of those things.

And so when I look back, I'm amazed at the timeline of things that I launched this podcast in October of 2024, a month after I sent my son off to school.

and just a few months after my mom had passed.

But the truth of that, how I was even able to do that is this podcast, the idea of this podcast really started forming a few years before the book even came out.

Of course, I still miss my mom. I still grieve her, but the loss is more integrated into my daily life now

So producing an audio book is always something I wanted to do. I would file it in the category of launching a book bucket list. And as I was coming out of a hard season, I was looking at my list again late last summer and there's,

produce an audio book sitting on my list. And I finally felt a nudge of I'm ready to move this forward.

So I reached out to a studio in Minneapolis that my publisher recommended. And next week, I'm gonna talk about more about the behind the scenes of making an audio book and how I actually did that and what it was like to narrate the book myself.

But today I wanna talk a little bit more about the audio book itself. And as I said in the beginning, why this coming of age story is still so important and how it will continue to serve as an anchor for all of my work and everything I do moving forward from here. It was always about this book.

this story is the beginning of everything. And it's also the reason for everything.

So again, I wrote this story for a woman at a crossroads. It was inspired by my decision to leave my career in television news. But the story was never really about leaving

or the burnout I experienced because I stayed in a situation too long, longer than I should have. It was about looking back in time and starting to notice when I stopped listening to my inner voice, when I stopped trusting myself.

I really had to go back in time and dissect whether I went into that business because it was something that I wanted or if it was something that my mom wanted for me.

In high school, I started to realize that I wasn't that bad at public speaking. And my mom and my teachers, they really encouraged this path. when I was a senior in high school, we would do the morning announcements, but we would do it over the classroom televisions. And the top stories would be, lunch for today is Salisbury steak.

And then a local television station came to our school and did a story about us doing stories as classroom announcements. when that story aired on the news, my teachers started stopping me in the hall

they were like, you should consider a career in television. You could be the next name, whatever popular news anchor at the time, you could be the next. And a lot of those influences did shape what I ultimately pursued as a profession.

But when I really look back on those moments where I was deciding, this is where I'm gonna go to college, this is what I wanna major in, and then really the work I had to do to get my foot in the door working at Local News, I cannot deny that that was all me I wanted this career too.

And I had these big dreams and I was on a trajectory. I met my husband in college. He was also a journalism major.

We ended up working at the same television stations together. We made these plans about moving up and moving on in this highly competitive career of television news together.

We had the plans, we had the dreams, and we were doing it.

But then as I was approaching 30, a couple of seemingly small circumstances made me begin to question everything.

And to be in such a highly competitive business and to be approaching 30, I really did feel a ticking clock. And even now, two decades later from that, where I can go, ⁓ I was in my late 20s, I was such a baby. I know that that feeling of the ticking clock was very real

And it's still real. We still feel some societal pressure to be doing certain things by a certain time.

If I could have had the ability to flash forward and see my future self, like see me now, telling this story, sitting cross-legged and comfortable on my sofa in my house, doing a podcast that I created and produced myself, I would have said, girl, follow your heart. It's going to be okay. But in that moment, I didn't know it was going to be okay.

because I was thinking if I don't do this anymore, then what? If I listen to my heart that's telling me that something is shifting and something needs to change and maybe I don't actually want to be on this path anymore, what would that mean? It was so scary. My whole identity was wrapped up in it. So, Girl in the Spotlight unpacks that process of what I went through

to go through a change like that and get to a place that I actually could leave.

Because here's the thing I want to say about the reality of the ticking clock. Time is finite and there's no doubt about that. But as I've gotten older, I have learned how to take that reality and use it to motivate me to move towards things that bring me joy, that make me feel free,

The ticking clock, if framed correctly, can move you towards the light, not like the light in poltergeist or the light at Heaven's Gates. The light, the things in life that feel like light.

But too many times the fear of that ticking clock can actually keep us trapped, stuck, pushing, striving, staying in situations that maybe we don't want to be in because of the arbitrary timeline that we have to do things by a certain time in our life for our life to be meaningful, for our life to matter.

The ticking clock ideally pulls us towards the things that make our heart beat. But most of the time, the ticking clock really just stresses us out and makes us compare our unique path to someone else's unique path. And Girl in the Spotlight is the story of how I began to step out of that.

that very narrow belief about success and what it means to live a meaningful life.

just through a series of turning points and encountering wise people and mentors and books that were recommended to me and just circumstances in general that started pointing me towards that path that felt true.

the courage to step into an unknown future. And even though stepping into the unknown was scary, it also felt freeing. It woke me up. It made me feel more alive.

Girl in the Spotlight also explores the deeper undercurrent beyond just the external societal pressure that makes us all feel like we're on this treadmill and we have to keep up and it's a race that we're not sure if we're ever gonna win or even finish.

There's that undercurrent of things that happen in our own lives behind the scenes. This book is about how I started to examine and begin to break those family cycles, the things in my own family that were unhealed and dysfunctional and were just passed down.

to me.

I had to look back and recognize the loss and the longings and those things from childhood that were painful that I carried into adulthood. I was turning to my successful life to fill the void.

Somewhere along the way, the success became my remedy for loss. And that is what made it so difficult for me to change. That's why it felt like such a crisis because I hadn't really examined the dark shadow of this path I was pursuing.

There was a lot of good, compelling reasons to be on the path I was on. The mistake I made, or the thing I didn't realize at the time, was it was also masking a lot of inner work that I needed to do.

Girl in the Spotlight pulls back the curtain and examines what I really wanted, the true desires of my heart. And it was to feel valued, like I belonged, I wanted to be part of something. And some of that ambition was driven by loss and longing.

So Girl in the Spotlight takes you on this journey of moving across the country and back and eventually stepping out on faith into an unknown future.

Girl in the Spotlight asked the question that I borrowed from a business book called Who Moved My Cheese, the words on the page leaped out at me, what would you do if you weren't afraid?

The book raises important universal questions. What do you need to let go of? What are you holding on to that you need to release? And if you're walking away from something,

What are you walking towards?

Change is hard and it comes with grief and a lot of work on the other side.

Girl in the Spotlight is about bravely stepping into the not knowing and trusting that.

I am now two decades on the other side of that story, of making that leap. And it's not a dramatic before and after, except the general act of aging and maturing. A lot of the change happened inside.

Creating a life and a life that feels like home is mostly an inside job.

But finding peace and healing and more courage on the inside does influence how you move through the world. And it does affect your life on the outside.

So please go get the audio book. Or if you are not an audio book person, get the book, read Girl in the Spotlight, listen to Girl in the Spotlight, subscribe to this podcast, join my weekly newsletter, Hello Friday.

A lot of asks at one time. but what I'm doing is inviting you into this next chapter. Join me on this journey where we go deeper into what it means to truly create a life that feels like home.

All of those links are in the show notes.

Thank you for listening to More Like You. I'm Angie Mizzell and I'm so glad you're here. I'll see you next week.