Classic City Vibes

Author Tara Heaton

• Athens Regional Library System • Episode 88

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Our guest today is Tara Heaton — a published author, keynote speaker, and master storyteller whose unforgettable memoir invites readers into a world few can imagine. In Life Minutes: Igniting Joy from the Fire of Heartache, Tara shares her journey as a mother navigating trauma, weaving together raw emotion, surprising humor, and heartfelt insight. Her ability to turn deeply personal experiences into universal truths leaves a lasting imprint on the
hearts and minds of readers.
Long before publishing this captivating story, Tara was on a mission-driven quest to help her daughter survive a rare seizure disorder. That journey ignited a lifelong obsession with the brain— particularly how it processes memory, emotion, behavior, and change. Drawing from years of study in neuroscience and her background as a business owner and corporate vice president, Tara founded En Pointe Communication and developed her signature platform, Talk to the Brain™.
Through workshops, keynotes, coaching, and writing, Talk to the Brain™ helps teams and individuals communicate for connection and influence. Tara teaches neuroscience-based strategies that elevate storytelling, deepen trust, and inspire action — all rooted in how the overstimulated brain best receives information in today’s noisy world. She believes that our greatest success and deepest fulfillment come from our ability to build strong, trusted relationships.
You can find Life Minutes wherever books are sold. Learn more at enpointeglobal.com, connect on Instagram @taraheatonauthor, watch her TEDx Talk Is Our Pleasure Killing Our Joy?, and subscribe to her YouTube channel.

Speaker 1:

All right. Welcome everyone today to Classic City Vibes. We have with us Tara Heaton, author of Life Minutes Igniting Joy from the Fire of Heartache A True Story. Thanks for coming in today.

Speaker 2:

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you, James.

Speaker 1:

All right, so let's jump Well first of all? Was this your first attempt at writing, or have you always been a writer?

Speaker 2:

So I have a degree in journalism. Ironically I saw you on that so I have a degree in journalism ironically. So I wanted to write early on in my career but I, early on in my career, went from writing to selling ads in newspapers. So most of my career was in sales. But as a salesperson one of the most powerful and effective and authentic skills is to know how to tell stories, and I really got into that. So that's how I've kind of shifted from getting back to writing. It all really started with the power of story.

Speaker 1:

So when you were going to school and for journalism, was the writing aspect what you were most interested in, or was it the kind of like did you want to be a reporter? Or like, what was the thing that drew you to journalism?

Speaker 2:

If I had known more about the opportunities in journalism versus probably like creative writing, I probably would have gone more in the true writing A little bit. I loved reporting, but the reporting that I loved was much more around feature stories and like pulling stories out of people and putting them to paper. So I have to say I think it's always been in me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, all right, so tell us a little bit about the book.

Speaker 2:

Yes, so Life Minutes is actually a memoir, but the reason why I didn't put the classic word memoir on the book and I just wrote a true story is because it is a collection of chronological true stories and it took me about three years to write that. It took about two years to write it and another year through a lot of editing, and so you want a little bit of a summary. Is that what you're asking?

Speaker 1:

Sure, just kind of give a general overview of it.

Speaker 2:

So the main character is a mother who starts out with truly living the American dream a rewarding career, a loving husband, three healthy children. And overnight all that changed when her daughter, my daughter Caroline, she was 12. She got a virus that the pediatrician said was just a little virus, but that little virus traveled to her brain and caused encephalitis which left her with a seizure disorder and she left. After a lot of rehab she was almost back to herself with just a very slight learning disability, but it left her with seizures that to this day, here we are, over 20 years later. We've never stopped those seizures. And so I lived truly as her warrior, determined to stop these seizures. I mean, nothing would stop me. And I'm still on that journey. And our family has endured a lot of heartache and disappointment and I've realized how much we've learned. And that's really what brought me to write, to put these stories on paper, is because I've learned where joy comes from, and it is from those depths of heartache.

Speaker 1:

Was that a gradual process of you just thinking, oh, I need to write this book? Or was it one day you're just like you know? Did it just kind of click I need to write this story? I mean, was it something you mulled over a long time, or did it come pretty quickly?

Speaker 2:

Well, for a long time people would learn a little bit about our story and they would say, oh, you should write a book. And I never really felt called to write the book until I realized that I had learned some things and I was starting to write and starting to work on it, but I really hadn't solidified what it is that I had learned that I wanted to share, until I had an interesting conversation and I don't want this to be a spoiler alert, but anyone can Google and find this out. This took place on the Friday before the Monday that my son was getting out of prison and I was sitting on a Zoom call with a very important client, his whole sales team, and toward the end of the call I said hey guys, I won't be here Monday, my calendar will be blocked. And we get off the Zoom call and my phone rings and it was the president, one of the members of this team. You know my client, and I thought, well, that's odd, he doesn't call me very often and we had just gotten off the call. So he called and he just said you know, I want to thank you for a couple things. And then he said you know, tara, I've got to ask you. When you talked about Monday, you had the biggest smile on your face. I got to ask you if you don't mind sharing what are you doing on Monday. And at that moment I shared with him what my son had been through and that he will be walking out of prison and into my arms after seven years and 41 days.

Speaker 2:

And this gentleman's response was what made me realize that I had to write this book. I had to finish it. He said this. He said, tara, I knew about your daughter, I knew a little bit about what you've been through with your daughter, he said, but I had no idea about your son been through with your daughter. He said, but I had no idea about your son. He said, and yet you seem to show up with more like authentic joy than anyone I know. Where does that come from? And, james, without even thinking, I'll tell you what came out of my mouth. I said, brent, it's not despite what I've been through, it's because of it. And it was in that moment that I knew that I had to finish this book and, hopefully, let it be a gift to readers.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's wonderful. That's a great story and we should know that the book is. This is the Watkinsville kind of Athens area. Everything is set in this.

Speaker 2:

In Watkinsville and Athens? It sure is. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, how would you describe you know before the events in this book? How would you describe yourself then versus now?

Speaker 2:

That's such a great question. A lot of people that have read this book think it has like a Buddhist and a Stoicism kind of mindset to it, and that's not intentional. But that is true and I'll tell you what I mean by that. I used to see Caroline's seizure disorder as something for me to beat. I used to see grief and heartache as something for me to beat off, and I have learned that heartache is undefeated and if we don't allow it to be part of us, I think it will beat us. And quite honestly, that's what happened to my son. He used alcohol and adrenaline to beat off grief, watching what was happening to his sister and to his family. So I have accepted that I will never, ever stop hurting for what my daughter has lost in this life. I've accepted that as part of me and because of that it fuels me. So I am a much more patient, joyful and mindful present person when I'm at my best, Not every day.

Speaker 2:

I don't nail that every day, but I have the skills to be that person.

Speaker 1:

I would think one of the challenges of writing a book like this is how does your family and friends, how do they, how do you juggle the boundaries of like what you can and can't say and sharing your story without you know going outside? How did you navigate that and how did you, you know, kind of navigate it with your family and people you talk about in the book? So I would think that's very tricky.

Speaker 2:

Yes, Well, at first, and then I'll tell you how it became. Not tricky. A couple things. This is I heard this said by Cheryl Strayed, who wrote Wild, one of the probably most well-read memoirs but when she said it, something clicked with me and I realized that this is actually what I was doing, and so the story is not just a collection of trauma and traumatic events. It is me being very, very honest about what I was feeling through these events. So I never felt like I owed the reader every single piece of privacy from our lives. It's not about that. It is about what was going on, my response to it, quite honestly, as a mother and as a wife, and how I took those events and those emotions and made them relatable to any reader. And that's what people continue to tell me. They're like I can't imagine what you've been through, but your emotions around it, I totally get those and that's what I really wanted.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've started reading the book and I would say that, like, your writing has this great like raw quality to it, that like really I think you really nailed that kind of conveying like the emotions and you definitely feel like you're getting 100% of like what's your story and not, you know, holding back. I know there's details and stuff, but the, the kind of the message and the emotion is like a hundred percent there.

Speaker 2:

So oh, I'm glad that you, I'm glad it struck you that way. I, um was very careful to make sure that all of the stories were either something that happened over and over again and I put it into one story, Um, or maybe I left something out that I felt was private to my family, but never, ever I changed names, of course, but never, ever did I change anything to sensationalize it. If anything, it's quite the opposite. Like there's a couple of chapters in there where my editor was like you know what, you need to take your foot off the gas here and just maybe leave some of this to the imagination. And she was right.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Was that, I would think, because you're getting so into writing it. You're kind of in that flow, as we were talking about a little beforehand, and then your editor has a perspective from the outside. Is that kind of? Was it hard for you to tell that line?

Speaker 2:

In a few instances, yes, but when I am able to write and then walk away and really come back after, you know, several days or even a week or more, I can see it pretty clearly pretty often. Like there's a time when we took Caroline to Hawaii to put her on a special diet and a lot of the details of what she went through in Hawaii are not in this book. It's just the editor was like this is too harrowing, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Did anything surprise your family at all reading it? You know, even though I know they lived through it. But even when you live through something with someone like you, you don't know their emotions and things of that Was, was there some surprises? There were people like well, I didn't realize that or I didn't know that or Well, a couple things.

Speaker 2:

I've read some excerpts of it to my son and my ex-husband, who's my very, very dear friend, and but the truth of the matter is he nor my son have read this book, and some people have said does that hurt your feelings? And it doesn't. They're not in a place where they want to relive it. So they trusted me. We have just unbelievably beautiful relationship with my adult children and my ex-husband and his husband and my husband, which I, you know, get into in the book. But so they trusted me and they haven't read a lot of it. Now there is. I'll give you a funny piece of it, though. I read one excerpt to Wilson about this dog that I reference as Sandy the seizure dog, who could not detect seizures, and he's like Mom, that was a different dog. He's like I mean, there were just so many dogs in our life that I was like oh, I said, well, I'm going to leave it.

Speaker 2:

He's like Sandy was this dog and the seizure dog was. I think her name was Rose and I was like well. I'm just going to have to leave that one.

Speaker 2:

But my youngest daughter, holly, she read the book and she works interestingly in in publishing, in marketing, and she, she loved it and she was worried that because she, she is our youngest, she was worried that she sounded like a brat. That was her concern and I said not one single person would ever think that you were a little girl whose role as the little sister got ripped away from her overnight almost yeah yeah yeah, I would think anyone.

Speaker 1:

If someone was going to tell a story about, about yourself, that from your it's kind of like when you hear yourself on the radio or you see you're always more self-critical of yourself or your own portraits of yourself, oh you know then. Then she probably didn't even think anything else of anyone else portrayed in the books. You know you're harder on yourself than on anybody else's in general.

Speaker 1:

So what do you want you know people reading this book to take away? What's the main hope you would have that someone reading this book would get from it?

Speaker 2:

There are a couple things. The primary, I think, is if someone can put this book down and realize that we cannot wait for joy until we have the absence of pain in our life, I think that will be a powerful gift to the readers, and that's what I was hoping that this would feel like a powerful gift to anyone who reads it that they may realize that they have been telling themselves that they are not even allowed to truly experience joy because someone that they love is hurting and that is not serving the people that we love. I think that we owe it to ourselves and the people that we love to grasp joy from every ordinary moment in life. Don't wait for the big vacation. Don't wait for the piece of cake once a year at a birthday cake. Connect with the people that you love and relish in moments. You may or may not know this, but I talk about this.

Speaker 2:

In my TED Talk I coined a phrase called pleasure stacking and through much of that book, what I was doing to fight off grief was using little hits of dopamine. I call it pleasure stacking. For me it was caffeine, nicotine and cardio, and I was using those to cope with stress and grief. But what I was not doing because of those is truly deeply connecting with nature and art and people most importantly, relationships and if we can realize that life is now and we can't wait for the absence of pain to truly enjoy life, I think it could affect people. And, if I may, the other sidebar message is that no one has power over our spirit more than we do, and I just want to encourage people to never give away their power.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful, yeah. What was the writing process itself like? Did you start with kind of an outline, did you have a pretty good idea of what stories you wanted to tell, or did you just kind of sit down and start plowing away at it?

Speaker 2:

idea of what stories you wanted to tell, or did you just kind of sit down and start plowing away at it? Well, I got a book coach and she showed me that you need an. You need an outline and I had several outlines and didn't follow any of them, and that is very Tara-esque but, um, I wrote more than what is in that book.

Speaker 2:

So I pulled stories out that didn't seem to align with my messaging. Or maybe they were interesting, they meant something to me, but maybe I couldn't make them mean something to the reader. And so through the whole process I continued to ask myself would this mean something to a reader, particularly a mother, but really anyone who's dealt with heartache and feels like that capacity to love is like a bonfire. That's my reader, and if I couldn't make a story mean something to someone else, then it would feel like it was just for me, and I didn't want that. I didn't write the book to heal. I didn't write it to be therapeutic. I wrote it so that others would feel it was a gift to them and how they show up in life, and in so doing, that gives meaning to the suffering of my children, and that's what matters to me, did you enjoy the writing process Most of it?

Speaker 2:

A lot of it was. It was kind of like grueling, Like have you ever done something that's really grueling and you love it at the same time? That's what it was my editor. Her name is Trish Lockard, and had I not found her, the book would have just, I think, been more of like a collection of chronological stories, without that clear message and pushed to make sure that it's a gift to the reader. She pushed me to not let go of that goal and I'm forever grateful for her.

Speaker 1:

Now are you thinking of doing more writing? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2:

I do write a blog and I'm trying to be better about publishing it on Substack and Medium, which I do, but I'm going to have a second book, for sure. I mean, that's been the really the only criticism I've gotten is we want now what, like, we want to know more about what the next chapter of the family.

Speaker 2:

So it'll take me several years because it needs to mean something to the reader more than oh, that's interesting. It's not a novel. You know, I clearly write memoir and that means that it has a message that someone else can internalize and use to apply to their life.

Speaker 1:

So you're not actively working on one yet, but you, oh, I am, oh, you are, oh, okay, I'm working on it but it's a slow process. So it should be right. Yes, yes, yes um, did you have any writers or books that were kind of inspirational for this that you know you, you read or saw that like you know you wanted in that vein kind of thing?

Speaker 2:

you mentioned wild earlier, but yes, you know was there I've read a lot of memoir and I honestly can't say that one of them inspired me as much as someone that you'd be very surprised to hear. You may not even know this name, but he's a copywriter and he's also just a very creative writer. He's written some poetry. It's a man named Cole Schaefer, do you?

Speaker 1:

know that name. I do not know that name, no.

Speaker 2:

Well, I get his emails and they're so creative and so real and they just make me think on another level and he's inspired me more than any other writer.

Speaker 1:

Oh, very interesting, yeah, so people go online and sign up for his newsletter.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, you can find him. He um he. He wrote a book of poetry and he used the name January Black, but he has a company called Honey Copy and he's a young man who's wildly successful as an ad copy person. But I just find his writing to be really just rich and raw and kind of dark and sometimes funny.

Speaker 1:

Right up your alley. Yeah, yeah. How did the TED Talk come about?

Speaker 2:

Hard work, continuing to try to find a place where I would be accepted it was. I've been a speaker much longer than I've been a writer and I teach a lot of workshops, especially around storytelling. This was very different, because you have to memorize every word of the message and then, in my particular setting, I couldn't see the screen. So even if I advanced the slide not that I was using it for notes, but I wouldn't even be assured that it had advanced, had advanced and the audience was pitch black, and so it was a different experience for me.

Speaker 1:

Stressful.

Speaker 2:

At first I think I started out a little stiff and then I really got into it Because of the message?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2:

And again it was grueling and I loved it.

Speaker 1:

So the idea was pleasure stacking to avoid dealing with issues. Is that kind of what the quote was.

Speaker 2:

I'll tell you a little bit about the message of the TED Talk. The name of it is is our pleasure killing our joy? And the message was yes, we are using pleasure stacking because it's so much more accessible to us today in replace for what real joy is. And real joy comes from oxytocin, which is connection with humans and also even animals and art. But what I did was there's a through line story and there even animals and art. But what I did was there's a through-line story and there's little mini stories, and the through-line story is about Caroline and her bucket list, and I start off explaining about Caroline and in the end I kind of put a big bow on it by sharing her bucket list, which is all about the simplicities of life that we don't stop to appreciate. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful. What was anything surprising about the process itself that really surprised you?

Speaker 2:

The process. No, I'll tell you what surprised me since I wrote that book how hard it is to get independent bookstores to let you come and do a reading. I'm just mind blown by it.

Speaker 1:

Is that? Because, why do you think that is Just because there's so many people want to do readings?

Speaker 2:

That's part of it. I did not realize how inundated bookstores are with writers. So, and I understand it, they're running a business, so you have to be able to show that you can bring a crowd, or I don't think they're going to listen.

Speaker 1:

Right yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that's been an uphill battle, but I'm always one to take on the challenge with all of my might, Do you.

Speaker 1:

how many book events have you done so far? Have you done many?

Speaker 2:

No no.

Speaker 1:

About five done many, no, no, about five, yeah, do you enjoy them? I love it. Yeah, I love it. I think it's a speaker like it, talking about your book, like all your, your synergies kind of like coming together there.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, you know it's been, um, those that I've done, it has been for lack of a better word thrilling because, um, it's just like the most authentic thing that I can talk about is this journey and how it's affected me and how I hope it will affect other people. So I don't want to just ever just do a monologue. It's always been a lot more conversational. I'll share some readings, share some inspiration, and people will ask questions and then at the end it just always amazes me Like every person in the room is like I want the book.

Speaker 1:

And that is just like, yeah, it's me like every person in the room is like I want the book and that is just like, oh, that's great, yes, yeah, it's just so good for the soul. How much feedback. I often wonder about authors how much feedback do you actually get from your readers? Do you get a lot of emails? Do people come up at events and tell you, or do you just kind of not? How much do you actually get?

Speaker 2:

I've gotten some from people that I don't know at all. But the people that kind of I've heard from people I haven't talked to in 20 and 30 years reach out to me and say I read your book and I you know, and just, I don't want to toot my own horn, but yeah, just. I've just gotten the most beautiful messages from people that I haven't even, like I said, talked to or heard from in decades and that has just made me feel really proud of the work I did?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I am. I am proud of it, and do you share that with your family? Does that make them proud as well, not just of you?

Speaker 2:

know I used to, but I kind of stopped doing it because I'm wondering They've probably heard enough about this. But they, you know, yeah, we had a huge book launch event and I called each one of my children on the stage and you know, it was just a beautiful, beautiful, rather emotional celebration. And, yeah, my kids are—my relationship with them and how proud I am of them for all, for such different, unique reasons.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what we share. And, yeah, they're definitely proud of their mom for this one, that's wonderful.

Speaker 1:

Thank you yeah.

Speaker 2:

And there we share.

Speaker 1:

And, yeah, they're definitely proud of their mom for this one. That's wonderful, thank you. Yeah, and there's definitely, you know, like I said, I haven't read the whole thing, but there's definitely, you know, a lot of moments in here that are, you know, they're not the. It's not all tragedy and dealing with tragedy. There's a lot of stories about I think there was one about going to the rodeo and you know and things like that that are wonderful to hear.

Speaker 2:

I'll tell you what I really wanted to do was to tell stories that made people forget they were reading a book for a moment, just take them away into the story. But as the story unfolds and they come out of it, a light bulb goes off. They're touched in some way, and that's what I really tried to do with all those stories in that book.

Speaker 1:

What's a book that you've read recently, or just a book that's had an impact on you in your life?

Speaker 2:

I'm going to tell you one that's been recent because I still am thinking about it and I read it probably six weeks ago and it's a book by a man named David Ambrose and it is a memoir, and it's called book by a man named David Ambrose and it is a memoir and it's called A Place Called Home and it tells the story of his growing up homeless, being raised by a mentally ill woman, and then he goes into the foster care system and he's gay and he knows that too, which made the foster care system even more difficult, and today he's extremely successful, is making huge change for the foster care system. I mean, it is a story of absolute resilience and transformation like I've never read. Highly recommend it. After you read Life Minutes.

Speaker 1:

Yes, in that order, please yes, yes. That's great and where can people follow? You find more information about. You get the book.

Speaker 2:

Well, I am trying to grow a brand new Instagram account that's connected to the book, so, at Tara Heaton, author on Instagram, would be a great place to find me. I have a website On Point Global, but On Point is French, so it's E-N-P-O-I-N-T-E globalcom. Those are the best two places you can buy the book anywhere books are sold. Yeah, those are the best two places you can buy the book anywhere books are sold. Yeah, amazon, barnes, noble the publisher, two Sisters Writing that's really the best place to go to buy the book.

Speaker 1:

Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming in and sharing your book today, and I hope everybody will check it out.

Speaker 2:

Thank you no-transcript.