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Talks by Date (newest at top, Talks by Author below)

• April 12, 2011 – Chapter 91 – Larry Brooks
• March 29, 2011 - Chapter 90 – Alice Hoffman
• March 22, 2011 – Chapter 89 – Gary Vaynerchuk
• March 8, 2011 – Chapter 88 – Elizabeth Gilbert
• March 1, 2011 – Chapter 87 – Susan Miller
• February 22, 2011 – Chapter 86 – Harry Beckwith
• February 15, 2011 – Chapter 85 – Amy Spencer
• February 8, 2011 – Chapter 84 – Amy Zerner and Monte Farber
• February 1, 2011 – Chapter 83 – Ann Rule
• January 25, 2011 - Chapter 82 – Linda Gray Sexton
• January 18, 2011 – Chapter 81 – Brad Meltzer
• January 11, 2011 – Chapter 80 – John Kralik
• January 4, 2011 – Chapter 79 – Marianne Williamson
• December 28, 2010 – Chapter 78 – Rameshwar Das
• December 21, 2010 – Chapter 77 – Gary Quinn
• December 14, 2010 – Chapter 76 – Kate Somerville
• December 7, 2010 – Chapter 75 – Sue Storm
• November 30, 2010 – Chapter 74 – Brian Tracy and Mark Thompson
• November 23, 2010 - Chapter 73 – Nicole Krauss
• November 15, 2010 – Chapter 72 – Dr John Demartini
• November 8, 2010 – Chapter 71 – Katherine Schwarzenegger
• November 1, 2010 – Chapter 70 – Mick Rock
• October 25, 2010 – Chapter 69 – Kim Dower
• October 18, 2010 – Chapter 68 – Robert Dugoni
• October 11, 2010 – Chapter 67 – Emma Donoghue
• October 4, 2010 – Chapter 66 – Inna Segal
• September 27, 2010 – Chapter 65 – Susan Casey
• September 20, 2010 – Chapter 64 – Meg Cabot
• September 13, 2010 – Chapter 63 – Nick Bunick
• August 30, 2010 – Chapter 62 – Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
• August 23, 2010 – Chapter 61 – Sue Frederick
• August 16, 2010 - Chapter 25 – Mary Karr (replay)
• August 9, 2010 – Chapter 60 – Justin Cronin
• August 2, 2010 – Chapter 59 – Neil Landau
• July 26, 2010 – Chapter 58 – Charla Krupp
• July 19, 2010 – Chapter 57 – Scott Turow
• July 12, 2010 - Chapter 56 – Kris Carlson
• June 28, 2010 – Chapter 55 – Henry Winkler
• June 21, 2010 – Chapter 54 – Kevin Alan Milne
• June 14, 2010 – Chapter 53 – Brad Meltzer
• June 7, 2010 – Chapter 52 – Chuck Palahniuk
• May 31, 2010 – Chapter 41 – William Peter Blatty (replay)
• May 24, 2010 – Chapter 51: Phillip Margolin
• May 17, 2010 – Chapter 50: Andrew Bridge
• May 10, 2010 – Chapter 49: Diana’s First BookReview Show
• May 3, 2010 – Chapter 48: MJ Rose
• April 26, 2010 – Chapter 47: David Baldacci
• April 19, 2010 – Chapter 46: Alafair Burke
• April 12, 2010 – Chapter 45: Lisa Jackson
• April 5, 2010 – Chapter 44: Kathy Kinney & Cindy Ratzlaff
• Mar 29, 2010 – Chapter 43: Anne Coyle
• Mar 22, 2010 – Chapter 42: Bridgett Walther
• Mar 15, 2010 – Chapter 41: William Peter Blatty
• Mar 8, 2010 – Chapter 40: Jennie Shortridge
• Mar 1, 2010 - Chapter 39: Kristin Hannah
• Feb 22, 2010 - Chapter 38: Chris Bohjalian
• Feb 15, 2010 – Chapter 37: Glynis McCants
• Feb 8, 2010 – Chapter 36: Mike Dooley
• Feb 1, 2010 – Chapter 35: Richard Wiseman
• Jan 25, 2010 – Chapter 34: William Gladstone
• Jan 18, 2010 – Chapter 33: Ann Louise Gittleman
• Jan 11, 2010 – Chapter 32: Laura Day
• Jan 4, 2010 – Chapter 31: Psychic Sylvia Browne
• Dec 28, 2009 – Chapter 30: Richard Paul Evans
• Dec 21, 2009 – Chapter 29: Wally Lamb
• Dec 14, 2009 – Chapter 28: Ruth Reichl
• Dec 7, 2009 – Chapter 27: Chelsea Cain
• Nov 30, 2009 – Chapter 26: Deepak Chopra
• Nov 23, 2009 – Chapter 25: Mary Karr
• Nov 16, 2009 – Chapter 24: Suzanne Jauchius
• Nov 9, 2009 - Chapter 23: Jennie Shortridge
• Nov 2, 2009 – Chapter 22: Nena Baker
• Oct 26, 2009 – Chapter 21: Richard Bach
• Oct 19, 2009 – Chapter 20: Jeff Kinney
• Oct 12, 2009 – Chapter 19: Jacquelyn Mitchard
• Oct 5, 2009 – Chapter 17: Heather Lauer
• Sep 28, 2009 – Chapter 18: Tim Gallwey
• Sep 21, 2009 – Chapter 16: Debbie Ford
• Sep 14, 2009 – Chapter 15: Maryanne Comaroto
• Sep 7, 2009 – Chapter 14: David Kord Murray
• Aug 31, 2009 – Chapter 13: Christine Arylo
• Aug 24, 2009 – Chapter 12: Sarah Schmelling
• Aug 17, 2009 – Chapter 11: Chuck Palahniuk
• Aug 10, 2009 – Chapter 10: Jeff Abbott
• Aug 3, 2009 – Chapter 9: Whitney Ferre
• Jul 27, 2009 – Chapter 8: Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz
• Jul 20, 2009 – Chapter 7: Jennifer Hoffman
• Jul 13, 2009 – Chapter 6: Brad Meltzer
• Jul 6, 2009 – Chapter 5: Kami Gray
• Jun 29, 2009 – Chapter 4: James VanPraagh
• Jun 22, 2009 – Chapter 3: Tatiana Boncompagni
• Jun 15, 2009 - Chapter 2: Phillip Margolin
• Jun 8, 2009 – Chapter 1: Chelsea Cain

Talks by Author

By Servet Hasan

Published December 1, 2009 (Paperback) Llewellyn Worldwide

My son said yesterday, “Mom, you’re a witch.” Calmly.  With love in his voice, so I knew he didn’t mean the Margaret Hamilton kind.  I protested.  “You are,” he said, “You’re the most pure person I know, and when you’re really yourself, amazing things happen.”

So why do I need a book to remind me to use what’s God-given?  Tune Him In, Turn Him On arrived today, on time, as do most of the books I need and want most.  Servet Hasan says in her book that she comes from a long line of psychics, and that we all have this intuitive ability.  We just have to respect it — and listen to it!  Yeah. But.  I’ve spent a lifetime ignoring the magic I hear and see and feel — when it comes to the men who enter my romantic life.

Servet Hasan tells how to go out of body, into the body of the man we’re interested in — and sense him out.  Ask questions, and receive answers.  Respectfully.  She says he won’t know, but I have done this kind of thing before, and the guy nearly always calls me at that moment.  A bit spooky. If you have questions about a relationship, get quiet, and ask in your head — staying open to perceive the answers.  Trust your intuition. Another variation – reach out through your third eye and enter his heart chakra to sense his spirit.

Burn that past baggage, and monitor your thoughts.  If you’re hearing “nobody is going to want me,” you are to replace that thought immediately with something like “I naturally attract loving relationships into my life.”  Yay!  Doesn’t that feel awesome already.  Relationships, she says, have to be on all three levels – physical, spiritual and psychological.  She also says, like my friend Marianne Comaroto, to love yourself enough to marry yourself.

Servet is  happy to kick your butt if you’re hanging onto the wrong guy or nagging a guy.  She emphatically tells you to use your intuition to sense what is truly going on.  What a liberating stance.

As I read the book, my older son stopped by, saying he was headed out.  I noticed the Red Bull.  I stopped, and “read” him, and picked up that his ego was in command, and that his body didn’t really want that high level of caffeine.  So I told him.  He brushed it off, took off with his Red Bull, and I just got a text that said, “You were right.”

He’ll be okay.  So will I – now that I know I can use my intuition on men.

This week Diana Page Jordan will talks with author Maryanne Comaroto about her book, “Hindsight – What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers.”

• View a list of all chapters
• Listen to Open Book with Diana Page Jordan on iTunes

Hindsight: What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers!

By Maryanne Comaroto

Published March 24, 2009 (Paperback) Bridge the Gap Publishing

More Info: Maryanne Comaroto

Enjoy the sassy subtitle on her book, Hindsight: What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers. But it goes a lot deeper than that.

Maryanne Comaroto — like all great girlfriends — sets you in the right direction.  And, sometimes you don’t know how true her aim is until much later.  Maryanne was on my show today — Open Book with Diana Page Jordan.  Btw, it’s airing now at pdx.fm. And, every time I read Maryanne or listen to her, I get her wisdom at a deeper level.  And, it cooks there for awhile, until I notice this amazing change in behavior, and can trace it back.

Top of mind lately has been Maryanne’s work to truly love your own self, to the point where you want to marry yourself.  She even has a chapter in her book that gives her vows which she spoke to a group of her friends.  That’s serious.

I began thinking, “How could I get to that place inside myself where I feel so balanced that I could perform a ceremony in front of my friends, and not feel like a total goofball?”  I’ve just recently gotten to the place where I can actually throw a party at my home — and not a little kid’s birthday party.

I asked myself, “When did I last feel truly like myself?”

I was three-and-a-half.  Which was more than half-a-century ago.

When you’re three-and-a-half, memories are put away as visuals with feelings.  I didn’t think myself back.  I felt myself back.  This was maybe a year before my real dad was shut out of my life except for a cameo when I was age six — forever.  No photos.  No stories. His name was Jimmy Jordan, but my brother thinks his middle name was Frances, and I think  it was Frederick.  We don’t know if he had siblings, never met our paternal grandparents.  Our last names were changed from Jordan, and my brother tells me when I reclaimed my last name — that’s what made my mother and stepfather disown me.  Not that I told them one day — long-distance — that what they had done had hurt me.  No, it’s not that I brought it out in the open that my stepfather raped me from the time I was four-and-a-half and that he was, in general, very violent, nor was it that my mother was alcoholic, schizophrenic, and suicidal, oh, yeah, and she didn’t protect me from him.  Nope, it wasn’t that.  It was that I was disloyal by changing my last name back to Jordan.  The name I last had around age four-and-a-half.

So you get the picture.  For me to want to marry myself, I must first find my purest self.  A lot of people get derailed during these tender years, and they lose the real Who of them.

I fell into that friendly old space.  Three-and-a-half.  I was spirited.  Maybe rebellious.  The kind of rebellion that’s challenging in a cute way.  Not the way I turned — which was secretly rebellious against authority.  I’ve healed that, btw.  And I found Joyful!  Playful.  Chasing Smudgie, the Siamese cat, down the dark-wooded halls of my mother’s parent’s apartment.  Laughing.  I felt — then– completely adored by at least four adults.  Daily.  There was music, always.  A piano playing.  A violin playing.  The sound of New York City traffic outside the windows.  I expected nothing.  I had everything.  There was no cruelty.  Yet.  I was in love with everyone and everything in my life.

Can you find who you truly are, by going back to that last precious age when you felt completely loved? What do you then take away?  Who are you?  That reminds me of the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland asked, smoke pouring out of its mouth, “Whooooo are youuuuu?”  And she doesn’t know anymore.

The point is not to know who you are by how your friends, colleagues, and family treat you.  They are actually just a reflection of how you feel about yourself.  But if you gently fall back to that last time you unconditionally loved yourself — which did happen at some point — you will know who you truly are.  And then, you can read Maryanne’s chapter about that, and marry yourself. Okay, I’m being a bit naughty there.  Good!  It’s coming back!

My being — before it was traumatized — was spirited, rebellious, kindhearted, joyful, playful, loved engaging everyone in the room, curious, and yes, a little bit naughty.  I loved to laugh and dance and sing.  To throw myself into peoples’ arms and hug the stuffing out of them. Fearless.

After reading thousands of books, interviewing thousands of authors, spending thousands of dollars on EMDR and other therapy, now I’m seeing that girl in me.  The hugging part, I’m just recently getting again.  Fearless is close.

I’ll let you know when I buy that wedding gown.  First I’m toning up my triceps.  The gown will be strapless.  And, Maryanne — you’re invited!

Buy on Amazon

More Info:  Maryanne Comaroto

When I packed up my gear this afternoon, and left The Nines — the elegant new Portland hotel where Maryanne Comaroto was staying — I was revitalized.  Lit with love.  For Maryanne, my friend.  Also, for myself.  That, actually, is the point of her book, Hindsight.  To connect with that divinity within, and know that love.

When I arrived, she introduced me right away to her husband David — new, since the last time Maryanne and I met for an interview.  She said she still remembered that experience fondly.  The interview was one of her first — it was about her memoir, Skinny, Tan and Rich, and she cut her teeth on it.  We connected deeply, which led us to get together again for an interview about Hindsight.

As soon as we sank into the long velvet love seat in the window — with room enough for four — we began our half-hour interview for my Monday (Live at Noon Pacific) Open Book with Diana Page Jordan on Small Plate Radio Network.  It is so easy to talk with Maryanne — the ultra-smart girlfriend with the brilliant opinions.  She’s on the right in the photo, by the way.

We open, talking about Skinny, Tan and Rich — about all the hard work she’s done since, to figure out how she got herself out of the loop of alcoholic, no-good boyfriends.  That, she says, is where the title Hindsight comes from.

Same guy, different face. Maryanne says we’re either drawn to a man because with him we’re going to make awesome children — it’s a biological DNA-sniffing going on.  Or, she says, we find this relationship with this guy comfortable because it’s a familiar feeling — we grew up with this energy.  The alcoholic, the abuser, the commitment-phobe.  Same guy, different face.

We discuss her exercises on patterns — and this works for guys as well as it does for gals.  You list your partners, why you were initially attracted, and why you broke up.  A few of mine:  Why attracted?  Sex.  Why broke up? They were commitment-phobes.  But, another way of looking at this, Maryanne says, is what is the common denominator?  Aha!  Moi.  Perhaps it is I who is having a tough time committing.  Back to therapy.

Not joking.  This book is a lot of hard work.  She gives the heartbreaking stories of six women — one ended up dead because of choosing the wrong guy, the others ended up broke, or cheated upon, or abandoned.  All bright women, but unaware of the same guy, different face issue they had.  Maryanne has six tools, including mirrors and flashlights, to see what is truly going on in a relationship, to ask the guy the right questions casually over time, and then make good choices.

I ask Maryanne about this totally hot guy I dated a few times — tons of chemistry, just kissing — but he broke it off after helping his ex (of two months) move, saying it was too soon for him to be in a relationship.  And, about this other hot guy who lets me know I’m great — in between his girlfriends.  She scolded me.  And, this message is for all women who find themselves psychologically hanging around for him to figure out how great you are — men, too.    You want to be with someone who totally wants to be with you, finds you irresistible, and gets how wonderful you are.

You can’t get that, Maryanne says, unless you feel that way about yourself.

Buy on Amazon

More Info: Maryanne Comaroto

Maryanne and I met when she was on her book tour for  Skinny, Tan, & Rich .  Connected — at a deep level — instantly.  We share the same kind of hyper-sexual, violent background.  Sisters.  After the interview, when we parted, she gave me a red, alligator-skin belt bracelet with letters that said SHOMI — show me. I kept the bracelet on till its little belt wore out, and it fell off my wrist.  I figured that was a sign I had graduated.  Maryanne grew up, got married again, to a really great guy, while I got divorced, and began healing parts of me I didn’t even know needed healing.

I opened her new book, Hindsight: What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers! and began taking her true/false quiz.  “Happily Ever After is real and possible…I can change a man if I’m the right woman…I have to say yes even when I want to say no.”   True, true, true, I answer true to most of the statements, and I’m getting really horny.  Oh crap — that girl is still inside of me, the one that was damaged when she was five, and her stepfather indoctrinated her as his little sex-toy.

Maryanne writes to tune into my body – listen — what is it saying to me?  Beyond the obvious.  I love that her “most favorite question” is the same as mine — “What do I need to know right now?”  That is a deep question, one that I release as if it’s a prayer.  The answer is always divine.

She sets out tools and exercises to break open your awareness, break you of old behaviors, and break new ground in relationships with guys.  Hindsight is brutal and true — the stories of women she knows, smart, beautiful women who made bad choices about men — will raise the tiny hairs on the back of your neck.  Chilling stories.  And, she articulates another way.  Save yourself, she counsels.  She even offers a list of questions to ask your dreamy guy before you drop your drawers.  Ask him these questions — they could save your life!

And, Hindsight is your girlfriend telling you what’s up.

I pull my copy of Skinny Tan & Rich off my bookshelf and open Maryanne’s 2003 memoir.  She has written in beautiful cursive:  Diana, You are beautiful inside out and I am honored to be able to stay awake on our paths together. Many Blessings, Maryanne Comaroto.

She reminds me of the greater journey — the one beyond healing, the one that reveals all the secrets so other little girls who are now women know that they can break free of old bonds and bad new boyfriends, the one that says have faith.