Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week as it down for gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Gabrielle Union, where I ask her, do you know how much I love you?

Since this is only like our second time really sending time together, Gayath Ron's being the first.

I just really excited to see you at its been a long time. Welcome to the show. Literally Gabrielle Union, how are you?

I'm so good. I'm so, I don't know, I'm relieved. I'm, I'm happy. I'm excited about this book and the reaction and as people are getting, you know, breeding it and we're listening to the audible and getting the feedback.

I'm, I'm kind of like energized. So this is good. It's a good time right now.

Oh my god, it was so good. Like congratulations. This book is literally everything. So this is an essay book which we're obsessed with.

It's called You Got Anything Stronger and I love that title. I find myself saying that to my husband about alcoholic beverages.

A lot, you know, in the pandemic, everything, you know, shut down. You were there. How did you go about deciding what you wanted to write about?

Did the title just like come to you? Tell us everything.

Anything liquor related just sort of comes to me. Sort of my wheelhouse. So when I, when I was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to focus on.

I kind of went back to the first book. We're going to need more wine. See the theme. Do you see there's an overarching thing here.

And what I left out of that book and why and there were a lot of chapters that I didn't include in that first book because I just wasn't ready to talk about them in any sort of real or impactful way.

I was like, I was fine to put them in the book, but I didn't want to face anyone. I didn't want to, you know, do press about certain chapters or face the public, you know, talking about certain things. So that to me was a sign perhaps, but you're not ready.

So I left those out four years ago by my, my daughter is born via justational carrier. I get a lot more therapy. And I realize I have a lot more to say.

And I'm ready to say it. I'm healed enough to say it. I have enough perspective to be able to speak impactfully about some of the, you know, the tougher, you know, things issues that we all face.

It's beautiful. And I also think that a lot of times when we think about those like things that we define as like tougher issues to face, it's like for us and our lives and in our families, it's like, this is what our life is.

Brunei Brown, I was talking to her this one time. God, I'm so full of knee drops. Who am I?

I'm here for. But what I was, I was working on some stuff and she was like, well, can you talk about your trauma without becoming your trauma?

And I realized that I was explaining to her about something that was already in my book and very similarly, I kind of wrote my book and then I was like after I wrote out, I thought writing was going to be the hardest part.

Hello, new to being a public figure part. And then when it came out, I was like, oh, God, this is really hard. I'm like talking about it so much. And maybe I published it before I was ready to fully talk about certain aspects of it.

Who do I think that's so grown so smart of you to know that that's kind of where you were. And so because you had taken some essays from your previous book, did you find that like your writing style had changed or your writing process had changed or do you think you found your voice more in this book?

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