Daria Burke, OF MY OWN MAKING: A Memoir

[1:31]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Daria Burke is the author of of my own making a memoir. Daria is an award winning business leader, board director, investor, speaker, and adviser. Her creativity and impact have been recognized by Women's Wear Daily, Adweek, Forbes, Vogue, Teen Vogue, the CFDA, Town and Country, The Cut, and Nylon Magazine. She has written for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Black Enterprise, and has appeared on the Melissa Harris Perry Show on MSNBC, Philly Speaks, numerous podcasts. She holds a bachelor of arts from the University of Michigan and a master of business administration from the New York University Stern School of Business. She lives in Los Angeles and East Hampton. Welcome, Daria. Thanks for coming on to talk about Of My Own Making a Memoir. Thank you. Thank you. The pleasure is mine. You have such an incredible story. Can you tell listeners a little bit about growing up, what the grief that lived in your house? You said at one point, my mother was at war with grief, which is such a beautiful sort of you can just picture what that might look like for a child. Tell listeners a little bit about what it was like growing up, and then we'll go from there.

[3:24]Daria Burke: -Yeah, of course. Thank you. As I share in the book, my mother was the youngest and only daughter in her family, and she was really close to my grandmother, who was frankly a second mother to me. And she was killed in a tragic car accident when I was seven years old. So my mom was young. We were very young, my sister and I. And, you know, I could only describe it as war because I think, you know, first of all, grief is not linear, and it is not a process. And I think for anyone to suggest that it is, is a bit misguided. And so we all have to sort of reckon with the waves of loss and of fear and whatever comes up when we lose someone. And I just She was so ill equipped to do that. And so it was chaotic, to say the least. Her grief, as I understood it initially, manifested in her desire to escape and do so through drug use. And that really metastasized into a crippling addiction that I had a front row seat to for my entire life, up until, you know, my early 20s when we decided to when I decided that I couldn't have a relationship with her in that condition. And so it was very much like a storm was just sort of raging in her. And I feel like she could never find the line between sort of numbing herself enough to function and then just completely tapping out. And, you know, when you're that young, I think it's just really disorienting, I think, is the best word for a child because that's your North Star. You know, mom and dad, in my case, my mom, my parents were separated and later divorced, but she was meant to be the lighthouse or meant to be the North Star. So when that when the lights are shut off, you know, you're sort of rudderless, to beat that metaphor. And it was disorienting. And it really, I think, was just demanding that I sort of put my own feelings aside to some extent in order to function and to survive.

[5:36]Zibby Owens: Yeah. You say in the book, like, I just had to step up. Like, you didn't have a choice. You had to get food and, like, do your thing. Like, you had to I mean, essentially, you lost both your mom and your grandmother in one fell swoop, which is so devastating. You were so young. And then in the book, you go through a deep dive where you learn more about the accident as you didn't know at the time exactly what had happened to your grandmother, and this becomes so triggering for you. And I could just you write so vividly. I could just see the whole scene, how you're like, oh, and then I was my computer and I just wanna see. And, like, what made me do that? And I don't know. And and learning about her, your grandmother, who you have such a clear vision of and how she's depicted and, you know, maybe she just ran out of gas or maybe it was her you know, tell me a little bit about that and that moment and how triggering it was for you to learn some of those details. Yeah. You know, I opened the book with that story because prior to

[6:28]Daria Burke: finding the article that showed the accident that my grandmother had been in, I had just heard the story of the accident. And I knew sort of the particulars of that day because we went to church with her every Sunday. She always picked us up. And so just like any other Sunday, we were there, you know, waiting, dressed, and, you know, the wait just continued until a phone call came and sort of interrupted our wait for her. And it was, you know, from the hospital asking my mom if she knew my grandmother, Effie Mae Bogard, and if she, you know, was her in fact, her daughter, and that there had been an accident. And so I knew that version of the story. I knew that the story had been that her car stalled on the center lane of the freeway and that where the car had stalled was already past our house. So you know how sometimes when you're driving, you kind of you're on autopilot when it's a route you've taken hundreds of times before, and so I could eventually even rationalize that she was probably in that kind of an autopilot mode. She missed the turnoff to come to our house, kept going. Her car stalls, and it's hit by a driver who was, you know, unable to swerve, essentially, to miss her and that she was dead on impact. And so I had that story very clearly, had heard it so many times. Obviously, I had never had any visuals of it. And one night, thirty years later, I was just inspired to see what the Internet held about my grandmother, frankly. It was really just this curiosity. She had sort of just came to me and I said, I wonder what I could find, you know? I don't have a lot of stories about her. And so I found myself sort of looking for her obituary, then eventually, I didn't find that, but I did find the article in the Detroit Free Press that actually posted a photograph of the accident. And it was the most horrific and shocking thing I had ever seen. And it was right there for me to look at in extreme detail. And it was just it was stunning how I was just taken back to the time when she passed away. But it was like 37 year old me going back and witnessing it happen at that time. And it was just this weird sort of collapse, this time collapse, that it made really clear to me that I hadn't fully processed that death and that grief. I had really stuffed it down and kind of tucked it away and that something was asking to be reexamined at a time in my life where I thought that I was everything was great. I had you know, by then, I had been in therapy for over a decade. And, you know, I could talk about modalities and all of the things, you know, I had sort of, like, cognitively processed, but not necessarily physically, fully processed.

[9:22]Zibby Owens: Oh, my gosh. Well, I'm I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sorry for everything. Although, I'm glad that sort of reliving it and all of that led in part to this book. Right? When did when did this book come to be in your mind? Like, when and why?

[9:40]Daria Burke: It sort of came in waves, if I'm honest. You know, I when I was 30, I it was the first time that I thought maybe I might tell the story. I had just started telling, you know, my life had been such a secret. My childhood had been such a secret for most of my life. And by that time, a few friends knew, you know, a guy that I was dating at the time, he knew, and I had a therapist who I had talked to about everything. And in therapy, things started to come up and it's one of those things where it's like the more you remember, the more you remember. And so I found myself just capturing the remembrances as they occurred and they were garbled and, you know, not in any real coherent story, but it was just for me to acknowledge that this had happened and that this was real. And I read The Glass Castle around that time, and that was the first, I think, little whisper that maybe one day I'd wanna tell my story, but I knew I wasn't ready. I knew that I didn't know how I would wanna tell it. And I didn't even really know my why yet. I think, you know, it was clear in The Glass Castle that there was value in that and that there was something bigger than myself about the way in which we suffer as humans. You know, Maya Angelou popularized the quote, but it's from Tyrone from, like, 600 BC that says that nothing that is human is alien to me. And I remember reading that book, and I think that was the first time that that quote kind of my antenna went up in the sense that our stories are so different, Jeanette Walls and I, and yet quite similar in some ways. But I saw myself in it. And if there's anything that I could do by sharing my own story and acknowledging the suffering that I went through and acknowledging how I processed it and the stories that I told myself and the ways in which I was able to kind of reclaim my truth and my story and integrate it in a way that felt healing, I wanted to do that for other people. And so a decade went by from that first notion, and I was just having a conversation with somebody, and they had asked me, Well, how how did you get to this this place in your life? You know, you'd gone on to the University of Michigan. You graduated college when you were 20. Then you went to NYU for your MBA, and you, you know, had this career in beauty and fashion. I was a CMO at the time in Los Angeles. And I'd gotten that question for years, as I would tell people, know, little by little, tell people about my background. It was the first time that I thought I could answer the question or really say, Okay, I think this is how. And the book really became a bit of me pressure testing my thesis that I could answer the question by talking about neuroplasticity and epigenetics and exploring what I had learned over those years about early childhood development and ACEs and also post traumatic growth. But it was also, I think, still me looking for the answer in that. And so it was a mix of those two things. But I think by the time I could start to cobble together something more than I knew that version of this life was always waiting for me. It felt like the time that I would wanna write the book and and really tell my story as an offering to other people to make sense maybe of their own lives.

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[15:52]Zibby Owens: Tell everybody a little bit more about your career and what

[15:56]Daria Burke: that meant. So you got the MBA, and then what happened? Yeah, I got the MBA, and I started what was a, you know, twenty year career in beauty and in fashion, sort of shoelacing throughout companies and different organizations. But, you know, a lot of the blue chip firms like L'Oreal and Estee Lauder, where, you know, by the time I was 30, I was running the 300,000,000 makeup marketing business in North America as the director of makeup marketing there. I was I did a stint at Rent the Runway. I was the number 10 employee there. And then kind of that work evolved as an operator to become more strategic in nature at places like CVS and at Facebook, now Meta, where I worked with a lot of C Sweeteners on their storytelling, mobile storytelling, customer acquisition strategies. And then as I mentioned, you know, by the time I felt, we're around the time where the book starts to take place and where my, really my idea for it, took place was in LA, where I was a chief marketing officer at JustVap, which was part of the textile fashion group. And now I am really lucky to have taken a lot of that experience. And I sit on the board of several venture backed companies. I am an angel investor in a female founded ventures. I advise startups, and now I'm writing. And so it's been a really wonderful journey and arc. And, yeah, I'm excited to see how it unfolds, I think, now that I've allowed myself to speak, so to speak, on behalf of myself, you know, it's really exciting to think about all the other things now that I want to talk about and write about. Yeah. Watch out. Floodgates are open. Get out of the way, everybody.

[17:43]Zibby Owens: How, as a marketing expert, now approaching the book industry, how are you feeling about that? What have you learned already? And what are you are you gonna do anything differently? Like, are you thinking? Putting your -Thank big brain on

[17:56]Daria Burke: you. Well, the book is coming out in a few weeks. -Mm -And as you know better than I do, the publishing industry is definitely ripe for disruption. It's also difficult to disrupt. And so I think it's it'd been difficult but interesting to try to imagine how you could apply some of the same principles as you would in consumer marketing to something like this. Because ultimately, a book is still a consumer product, you know, but it's also, in some ways, arguably, it's art. It's certainly, it's my life and work that's very personal. So I think that also makes it really hard, you know, to externalize it in the same way that I would a tube of mascara or, you know, a collection for a season. I would say some of the things though that I'm excited about that we've tried to bring to it was just integration with partners, brand partners, where there's a very obvious tie in connection to the themes in the book. And so, you know, there will be, you'll see that play out in some of the gifting that goes out and maybe a giveaway to some folks who are followers or listeners and readers. And then, you know, I really had to think hard about kind of the brand of and I'm using air quotes for your listeners of the book as it pertains to me or portrays me. And so that, I think, it was really important for me to think about who I'm in conversation with. And, you know, so much of what's similar is that for any brand, as a marketer, your job is to to make meaning or give meaning to something and to use other people's understanding of how they see the world to reinforce that meaning. And so being really thoughtful about that dynamic in particular. And I have to say, you know, being a Black woman, it was important for me to think about telling a story that has trauma in it without that being the story. And that's difficult to do. If I'm honest, it's not easy to do, but it was important for me also to make sure that joy and possibility and promise and inspiration ultimately are where, you know, you find yourself as you're going through the book, that it continues to feel like you're taking in air, that you can deep you know, take a deeper breath and and breathe out more into the world as a stronger version of yourself. Wow.

[20:25]Zibby Owens: So many people in similar situations, similar childhoods or whatever, don't escape, if you will. Don't go on to overcome odds, whether it's this type of upbringing or something else that really gets in your way, essentially, and you don't have the support that it would be better for a child to have at a young age. Right? The the parenting and all of that. Why how did you how do you think when you look back, like, why you? And is it just something you're born with, that inner drive and intelligence and whatever? Or, like, what do you take from that and, like, your own resilience?

[21:04]Daria Burke: I think it's a mix of both. You know, I There are no shortage of memoirs and other kinds of books that explore nature versus nurture. This is this one is not unique in that regard. But I do think it's both. I think that there are absolutely elements of who I am and how I move through the world, how I see the world that are uniquely mine. And some of that, that instinct to look for possibility, to see, to be future forward, to be optimistic or positive, definitely are innate. And I think that a lot of us have our own baseline for what that looks like. They're not the same, but I think we all hold that capacity. The hard work and where I really try to, I think with the book, explore this, but also offer, you know, a way of thinking about this for people no matter where they are in their situation is that it's not predetermined how it ends. And so, you know, we don't earn our beginnings. We don't get to take credit for where we started. If you started with a wonderful family and background and you were given everything that a kid could need, you didn't earn that either, you know? And if you started on the third rail, you know, I'll call it like as Melody Hobson would say, as growing up poor black and female and being told that because you were poor black and female that you shouldn't expect anything. But you get to choose who you become. And the choices that we make along the way, starting with the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, you know, the stories that we tell about our lives become the stories about our lives. They really, our lives reflect a version of that. And so yes, then getting to choose to see school as a way out and to decide to create the distance that I needed for growth and for healing away from my family, my parents, you know, when it was obvious that it was going to be really difficult to construct a life that was healthy, I think whole positive, you know, that didn't feel like I was constantly being pulled back into some trapdoor, you know? Those were all choices. They weren't easy, but I think the choice that we start to make and we make them little by little, sometimes it feels like it's one we're one big decision away from something, but it's generally a series of really small choices that we make, and sometimes it's just as insignificant as I feel really sad and I feel, you know, really isolated in this sadness, And rather than allowing myself to stay with that alone, I call a friend, right? That's a small choice that we might make. And then, of course, sometimes they're big choices like moving away and things like that. But usually we, I think we get the courage and the confidence to make those really big choices because we've allowed ourselves to make a lot of small ones. And so, yeah, it's tough, Zoebe, because I never want to be dismissive of how difficult it is for someone to see their way through something. But I think that when we do that, that's the most creative act that we can show, can demonstrate as human beings, is to see possibility or, you know, to see how to live another day despite crippling grief that might threaten to, you know, leave us in bed all day. So yeah, I don't know. That's how I try to think about it, but I think it's both. And I try to be really conscious of what's mine, so to speak, and then what I've cultivated. Eventually, it becomes really hard to know the difference, you know, but to be aware of that, especially with a question like this. I love this question. Thank you. Well,

[24:58]Zibby Owens: thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for getting it on the page, allowing other people to feel inspired because that's really what your story does. It's like this act of creation and self determination and drive and that each day we can change. We can do whatever. We can create and overcome and learn more about ourselves. Right? You would do a lot of work on that. Like, hats off. Chuck Floss on the self analysis So, yeah, congratulations. And I'm really excited for you. And I will be watching very closely to see how you market the book and everything else. Thank you. No pressure. I know. I think there'll be some fun stuff that you end up doing, and I hope that it involves some beautiful flower bouquets and that's, you know It just might. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much, Zibby. Was wonderful to talk to you. Thank you. You too. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.