Author Hollis dishes on her busy lifestyle
Bestselling author and blogger Hollis relishes in packing in a busy lifestyle
NEW YORK There’s no shortage of books, podcasts, blogs and social streams of people dispensing advice, motivation, home tips and the idea that personal growth, happiness and health can be achieved if one just follows and believes. So what’s a life guru to do? Well, write a book that lands at the top of just about every bestseller list, for starters. Love her or trash her, Rachel Hollis has done just that with Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be, a collection of lies she once told herself and how she turned them around.
Hollis, 35, is the little engine that could as she reaches for more every day of her life, mostly from the rural spread on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, that she shares with her newly minted business partner and husband of 14 years, Dave Hollis, their four kids and a mini schnauzer named Jeffrey.
The Hollises do more than sit home. They run. They blast out livestreams. They record podcasts in their closet and organize lifeaffirming conferences for mostly female audiences who cheer and scribble their dreams on paper as Rachel waves her arms and jumps around on a stage, urging them on.
The Hollises drink a lot water (half their body weight in water a day) and want you to do the same, perhaps while you’re following Rachel’s lead on prepping healthy meals and snacks for yourself and your kids, training for a halfmarathon and writing a new book while simultaneously promoting the last one.
These two are Made for More, one of their slogans, and they’re just about the cutest duo working in the space today.
Rachel’s Girl, Wash Your Face, from the Christian imprint Thomas Nelson, was released in February. It just passed the million-sold mark after a slow start, climbing its way up the lists through word of mouth. She doesn’t hold back, describing the suicide of her brother when they were teens, her tense childhood as the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher in the sticks of Southern California and the sometimes debilitating anxiety that has plagued her through the years.
Hollis later moved to Los Angeles to make her dreams come true at age 17. Last year, she, 43-yearold Dave and their kids decamped to Austin to get more bang for their business buck, buying an old church they’re converting into office space.
So how does one go from food blogger to event planner to running a lifestyles site to bestselling writer?
“What sets this book apart is — this sounds so lame to say — is my voice. I’m not an expert. I’m not a guru. Anything I’ve ever done, the work I’ve done, has always been like your girlfriend telling you what worked for her,” Hollis said.
“Even as a food blogger, which is how I got started, I was just telling what worked for me. ‘Hey, this is the casserole I made that got my kids to eat dinner the other night.’ ”
Over the years, her content changed as she “evolved as a woman,” as her boys — now 11, 10 and six — grew out of toddlerhood (the couple also has an adopted 18-month-old daughter) and as she realized she needed to fix the things wrong in her life.
“I was having massive anxiety attacks. I was abusing alcohol. I was making really poor choices,” she said. “I wanted to get control, so I started to do therapy and I started to read books and I started to listen to podcasts. I was like a sponge for this information.”
Rachel’s lifestyle blog, The Chic Site, is where she truly began building a following. Her Girl, Wash Your Face is her seventh book, if you count a novella of long ago. She has crossed genres, from a novel about three young women making their way in Los Angeles, with two follow-ups, to a cookbook and soon, Girl, Stop Apologizing, out in March.
As podcasts have taken hold again, the Hollises have scored there, too. Rachel started alone with Rise, but as the two have become a self-help power couple, they’ve added Rise Together to focus on marriage. Both podcasts have made it into the Top 10 on iTunes.
They’ve also made a featurelength documentary, Made for More, about last year’s Rise conference. The film was a Fathom event shown for two nights in theatres earlier this year that sold 100,000-plus tickets around the U.S.
This new life, Dave said, “feels like a calling,” and if that sounds like God talk, it is. These are people of faith who are unashamed but not terribly Bible-thumpy as they dispense the self-help that has worked for them, both as individuals and as a couple.
I started to do therapy and I started to read books and I started to listen to podcasts. I was like a sponge for this information.