Gabfest Reads: Kirsten Powers, Saving Grace

Political Gabfest

Slate Podcasts

Politics, Government, News

4.5 • 8.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Dickerson talks with Kirsten Powers about her new book Saving Grace: speak your truth, stay centered and learn to coexist with people who drive you nuts. Powers offers advice about on how to navigate the toxic divisions within our culture without compromising personal convictions and emotional well-being. Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author, USA Today columnist, and senior political analyst for CNN, where she appears regularly on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, and The Lead with Jake Tapper. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Elle, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Observer, Salon, the New York Post, and The American Prospect online. Raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, Powers lives in Washington, D.C, with her fiancé, Robert Draper, and their two fur children, Lucy and Bill. Gabfest Reads is an occasional author interview series with the hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest. Join John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon and David Plotz in one on one conversations with thought-provoking authors discussing books that range from the overtly political to the politically adjacent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.5	Kirsten, let's just start at the very beginning.
0:34.0	Give me the origin story of saving grace.
0:38.0	Well, the origin story is something that might sound familiar to a lot of people.
0:44.0	Post 2016, I started to be filled with, I guess you would call it rage, maybe,
0:52.0	filled with contempt for people that I had never even met a lot of the time.
0:57.5	It dawned on me eventually that this was just unsustainable.
1:00.5	And I basically just hit a wall where I realized that my...
1:06.0	Some of it was my behavior, but a lot of it was that internal dialogue,
1:10.5	where I was just thinking and ruminating and then coming home and having the same conversations
1:17.0	and talking to my friends, and I started to realize that my behavior and my thoughts
1:22.5	weren't really aligned with what I said I believed.
1:26.5	And as a person who's pretty open about the fact that I'm a Christian,
1:31.5	I felt like, well, I say I love my neighbors and I say I love...
1:36.0	You know, I'm supposed to love my enemies and I'm so far away from loving anybody
	...

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