Kristin Birdwell's Sex, Drugs, & Soul Hit Amazon Bestseller and Set Off a Podcast, a South by Southwest Mentorship, and a TV Pilot
“Listening to our longings is one of the biggest acts of self-love.”
Kristin Birdwell
Kristin Birdwell published a memoir about grief, abuse, and the long climb back to herself, and she came to Scribe with one unusual requirement: she wanted to own every creative decision, because a television show was already on her vision board. Four years later the pilot is written and in front of industry advisors, a forwarded application made her a South by Southwest storytelling mentor, and the podcast she started just to make herself use her voice is roughly 120 episodes deep.
The book she did not plan to write
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on the common denominator · 19s
Kristin had always assumed a book was coming. She had been a reader and a liver-in-her-own-imagination for as long as she could remember, and the first attempt was fiction. What moved her off fiction was not really a decision. It was a nagging.
“I just got to the point, I think I was coaching some people in creativity, and it was just gnawing at me that I hadn’t put out the thing in the world that I was feeling called to the most at that time. And it switched, it switched to memoir, and I started writing it.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Threads of it went back ten years. What made 2019 different is that she hired a writing coach and an editor, and she was honest with herself about why.
“I know I’ll show up, I’ll have the accountability to keep me in check.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Then COVID arrived and handed her the one thing she had been asking for, in the least welcome way possible.
“I had always said, I wish I just had the time, energy, space, resources to dedicate just to writing. And I got that wish in a way.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She wrote the book through COVID, ran a first round of edits in June 2020 and another in 2021, and published Sex, Drugs, & Soul: Finding Grace in the Shadow in 2022. Along the way she found the chapter she had planned to leave out. It was the one where she is sitting in a detective’s office, because a man she had been dating intended to hire a hitman, and she was in another country when it surfaced.
“Whenever I got to that point in the chapter, I was like, Oh my god, I have to include this.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Writing it forced the question the rest of the book answers.
“But what’s the common denominator here? It’s me.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She calls that the pivot.
“It was definitely like a hold up the mirror to myself moment and shifted my trajectory completely.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Why she chose Scribe over a query letter
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on owning the creative rights · 22s
Kristin did query for a while. Two things pulled her off that road, and neither was about the writing. The first was ownership, at a point when there was nothing yet to own it for.
“I wanted to own the creative control, or have the creative rights. And I knew one day, okay, I might be working on a TV show or book or something. And I wanted to own all of the decisions too, that went into it.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The second was that she did not want the book to look like it had been uploaded. She is a book coach and a ghostwriter by trade, and she can spot the difference from across a room.
“I’ve still wanted it to look like a professionally published book. I’ve seen a ton of Kindle direct publishing uploads. I’m like, I can tell.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
There was also the clock. By her own estimate, landing an agent would have put publication another 18 to 24 months out, on top of everything already behind her.
“I want this thing out yesterday.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
How she kept writing when it got heavy
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on writing through the fear · 19s
Travis asked her the question every memoirist gets asked and few answer usefully: the material is grief and abuse and self-medication, so how do you keep putting it on the page instead of stopping? Her answer had three parts, and the first one came from her mother.
“I’ve always deeply held and believe, and this was probably attributed to my mom, that all things work out for good, even if I can’t see it in that moment.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The second was to get the book out of her own hands and think about the person on the other end of it.
“If I took it outside of me, okay, this can help someone someday.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The third was permission to be unimpressive about it.
“I just kind of was gentle on myself, gave myself space, ate a lot of dark chocolate and had that vision in mind of, okay, this will help others.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
How she handled the real people in her memoir
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on asking permission first · 34s
This is the part of Kristin’s process most worth copying, and it is the part most aspiring memoirists never think to do. Rather than treat the people in her book as a legal problem to be managed after the fact, she went to them first.
“With fears, you can acknowledge them and you can tell your story in such a kind way. You can change names. If it’s a memoir, you can have conversations with people.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She did exactly that, and she went further than she had to.
“I went to them, Hey, I’m going to write this story. Would you want me to change your name? And then some people said, yes, some people said no. And then I shared pages with people. You don’t have to do that. But also I felt like it was the respectful thing to do.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
One identifying detail came back from those conversations and needed to change. What she could not predict was who would take the book badly and who would take it well, and she is blunt that predicting it is not worth the effort.
“You can’t predict who’s going to love [or] hate your book and it’s wasted energy to even try.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The family member she assumed would be a thousand percent behind her had the hardest time with it. The person she was most frightened to send it to went the other way.
“It took me six months to send it to this person. They came back with a glowing review.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
That reader’s verdict, in Kristin’s recounting: “don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the fact that I’m one of the main people, but so proud of you. This needs to be out there.”
What four years set in motion
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on the podcast the book started · 20s
The launch made the book an Amazon bestseller. Almost everything after that arrived sideways. She started a podcast and gave it the same title as the book, with no particular strategy behind it.
“It just started as an exercise to use my voice really.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She is a writer by temperament, more comfortable alone with a document than behind a microphone, and the podcast was deliberately an exercise in the other thing. It is now the longest-running project the book produced.
“Now I have like 120 episodes under my belt, which is kind of cool that you can go along on a journey.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She moved to recording in person around episode 75, and the guest list became a set of relationships she does not think she would otherwise have.
“I don’t know if that meeting or encounter would happen had I not started this and had this platform to offer people and connect with them.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The South by Southwest mentorship came from a friend hitting forward.
“The South by Southwest thing, that wasn’t even on my radar. A friend sent me an application or something to become a mentor for them.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
She has done it a couple of years running, platinum badge included, running storytelling sessions for people who want to do what she did. At one of them a stranger recognized her as the writer who writes about sexuality and spirituality.
“In the wild someone came up to me? How cool. I’m like, yeah, that’s me.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
And the television show that justified holding onto her creative rights in the first place is no longer hypothetical. She and a writing partner have finished a pilot carrying threads of her story and are taking it through industry advisement. An advisor who has worked on Emmy award-winning shows gave them a read that Kristin repeated almost word for word.
“And she’s like, I don’t say this often, but this one has a lot of potential because of the world you created and the people and a couple other elements.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
The messages that made it worth it
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on holding the book for the first time · 40s
Kristin found out her cover was locked while standing at the Barrett-Jackson car auction in Arizona, which is the kind of detail she remembers precisely. But the cover was not the moment that got her.
“What I had the most emotional response to was holding it for the first time, because I was like, oh my God, here’s this thing that I’ve been baking on for 10 plus years or that I lived to tell the tale of. And it was just an idea in my mind. And now it’s this physical, tangible thing in my arms.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Her words for what that did: “that was like what spouted the most waterworks from me.” Four years on, the thing she keeps returning to is smaller than the bestseller or the pilot. It is her inbox. Readers write to her about their own grief. One of them told her, “I feel like you wrote this for me and my journey with grief with my dad.”
“All those nights were worth it. All those days were worth it. The moments of doubt, just continuing to go.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
What she tells anyone still sitting on their story
Clip · Kristin Birdwell on advice for anyone still stuck · 40s
Travis asked what she would say to someone standing exactly where she stood in 2019, with the glimmer there and the fear bigger than the glimmer. She reframed the glimmer first.
“I’d say follow it, lean into it. I truly believe that if you have that inkling or desire, it’s kind of like our future self whispering to us in the present moment being like, Hey, this thing, I need you, I need you to follow this route.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
Then she made the case that it is not really optional.
“If you have this beautiful story and there’s someone on the other side that could benefit from it, even if it’s just being seen or not alone on their journey, you owe it to the world, no pressure.”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
And then she turned the whole thing into a question, which is the version worth writing down.
“Who are you to not share your gifts or story in the world?”
— Kristin Birdwell, author of Sex, Drugs, & Soul
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