Preface and Introduction to the Hearthbroken Book
A Winter Return
Dear friends,
Last winter, I wrote the book.
This winter, I am finally sharing it.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been, it’s where I almost always am most of the year: at the hearth. Not metaphorically. Literally.
The past year has been consumed by a build on our property, one I have largely managed myself. It has meant designing a new space, organizing trades, solving problems, keeping animals and people fed and cared for, and holding the center of a complicated household and property. In other words, I’ve been doing the very work Hearthbroken argues still matters. As many of you know, care is relentless. In my case, it has left little room for promoting a new book.
Hearthbroken: Reviving Care and Connection in the Age of AI has been out in the world since September, but I’ve barely had a moment to share it beyond family and close friends. Seasonality helps me make sense of this. Winter is my thinking season. It’s when the property slows, the days shorten, and there is time to sit at a desk and speak plainly. Last winter was for writing. This one, it seems, is for sharing.
So here I am.
I’ve been debating whether to produce an Audible version, since so many of us now prefer to listen. Last week, a simpler approach became obvious: I’ll publish the book here on Substack, one chapter at a time, with audio enabled. You can read on any device, and if you’re in the mood to listen, you can use your mobile device. If you choose to subscribe, I’m grateful. If not, that’s perfectly fine. I’m not doing this to build a business. I’m semi-retired. I’m doing this because I believe elders are meant to pass things on.
This book carries what I sometimes call belly wisdom. It’s drawn from decades of work in food, hospitality, building, caregiving, and entrepreneurship, and from watching how quickly care has been abstracted, outsourced, and optimized away. I’m especially speaking to younger people, who are inheriting astonishing technologies alongside profound cultural fragility. My hope is to offer something steady. Something warm. Something true enough to be useful.
Below, I’m sharing the preface and introduction. If you’d like to read along this winter, I’d love the company.
Tend your hearth. However that looks.
With warmth,
Kathryn
Preface
The voice in my head was persistent. It was time to hunker down and birth this book. For ten years, perhaps longer, this tale has been bubbling and brewing, spilling into countless conversations and overflowing the edges of notebooks. Late last year, I finally committed to spending the winter in front of my computer until every last bit of this story had been poured into these pages. [1]
What finally compelled me to begin was a subtle inner shift, an awakening, really, into what I now recognize as ‘grandmother energy.’ Our culture offers no playbook for this metamorphosis, no rites for the moment you realize you’ve become less of a player and more of a keeper of stories and hard-won clarity. What pulses in me now is an inner conviction that what I’ve experienced and witnessed might be worth sharing, might actually matter to someone. Truths that maybe I needed to hear when I was twenty.
Young people are inheriting a world that will demand everything of them. They’ll need tools, real tools, not quick fixes or the illusion of connection sold to them online. They deserve perspectives forged in lived experience and gentle support, the kind that used to pass naturally from one generation to the next within households and villages. They need elders now more than ever, allies who remember how to build fires in the dark.
In 2023, I met a 29-year-old woman, Erin, who gave shape to this urgency for me. She’d explored different career paths, but none of them felt quite right. Although she had decided to marry her partner of ten years, the prospect of motherhood felt daunting, not because she didn’t want children, but because like so many young women, she feared losing her identity and income. We started talking, then we kept talking. Those early vulnerable conversations grew into Hearth Matters, a podcast and Substack where we met with thinkers wrestling with the same questions. Her perspective helped me see more clearly the tangle of pressures young women (and men) are trying to sort through and just how deeply her generation longs for support from those of us who’ve already lived through the tradeoffs.
In many ways, this book is for you Erin, and for others questioning the cultural scripts we’ve been handed about care, ambition and what makes a life worth living. And it’s equally for you builders, entrepreneurs and kitchen-table elders who know we need better blueprints. Consider this an invitation to question louder, to dig deeper and to build better.
I never meant to write a book championing the hearth. I’m showing up here not as a scholar or a trained writer but as someone just bossy enough to say what our culture seems to have forgotten: that the art of becoming whole humans starts at the hearth. I learned this lesson late, but you won’t find regret in these pages. You also won’t find nostalgia for the way things were because let’s face it, those days weren’t exactly golden. I’m certain we can and will do better. Much better.
Think of this book as feral wisdom from a lifelong rebel who’s equal parts idealist and pragmatist. A ravenous reader, cultural spelunker, and a hyper-systemizer. I’ve been a mother for 41 years (still not a grandmother) and an OG Girl Boss for even longer (my sister, Julianne, likes to tell my friends that she was my first employee.)
My heart lives among bubbling pots and sunlit counters and stepping away for the long season of writing asked more of me than I could have imagined, but now that the book is complete, that insistent voice has gone quiet. And that, I suppose, means I’ve kept my promise to the girl I was, to those of you who needed to read these words and to those who’ll walk this path long after I’ve become stardust.
Kathryn
Introduction
The fermented foods company I started in 2008 was thriving. Sales were climbing, distribution was expanding and investors were mostly happy. On the surface, I was succeeding. But as I sat alone in my office, staring at spreadsheets, the irony of my endeavor to share traditional foods with a wider audience became hauntingly apparent. While my company industrialized the production of foods that people had crafted in their home kitchens for thousands of years, my own hearth sat dark and quiet.
In that moment of clarity, I saw the arc of my life with new eyes. I traced the path from a creative child most at home in the garden or the kitchen, tending animals, baking or filling pantry shelves with the season’s abundance, to the business woman I’d become, a woman who had expertly packaged her creativity and homemaking skills and sold them to the market.
Somewhere along the way, I had redirected my passion for nourishing others away from an intimate circle of loved ones toward an ever-expanding network of strangers. At forty-eight, single and somewhat bewildered by the corporate game I found myself playing, I couldn’t help but wonder: what cultural forces had shaped these choices? What invisible hands had guided me away from the hearth?
A creeping sense that something was deeply off track not only with me, but also in the culture at large, pushed me towards books, podcasts and new thinkers in search of answers. Why had I not made better choices? And why were so many people around me struggling?
But there was one question I found myself circling around, on repeat: Why, in an era of so much abundance and choice, are we failing to thrive as a species? I asked it over dinners with colleagues, during long walks with friends and in conversations with random strangers. Many of us seemed to carry a similar unease, but no one had answers, or at least, none that satisfied. Some shrugged and blamed technology; others pointed to politics or the economy. But their explanations missed the mark, skimming the surface of something I could feel in my bones but couldn’t yet name.
We live in an age of miracles. Over the past 150 years, humanity, particularly in the developed West, has rewritten the rules of our existence. Poverty rates have plummeted, infant and maternal mortality have sharply declined and education rates have soared. Women now lead nations and corporations, shattering glass ceilings that once seemed unbreakable. By any measurable standard, we are freer, safer and more empowered than at any time in history.
And yet. Here we are, witnessing an epidemic of unhappiness and disconnection, drowning in loneliness, burnout, and shrinking health spans. One in five children is obese and more than one third of teens report persistent feelings of hopelessness. Sixty-one percent of young adults describe their loneliness as crushing and pervasive. And the list goes on. It’s no secret that we are faltering in ways that defy logic.
***
Long before I understood the politics of care or the economics of the hearth, I was drawn to the one place where connection still lived and breathed with ease: the kitchen table. My fascination with all things culinary began in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1994, when my then-husband and I bought a restaurant in Germany, that I first donned a chef’s coat. When we weren’t building our business, we were traveling and immersing ourselves in Europe’s rich culinary landscapes. We made regular pilgrimages to the nearby Alsace region in France, ventured often through Northern Italy’s gastronomic landscape and spent a good deal of time exploring Austria’s culinary scene. European cuisine was a revelation for me. Back then, American food culture was still pretty much “white bread and Velveeta” and lacked the diversity we take for granted today. It took time to adjust to meals that stretched into hours-long ceremonies but eventually, I got it. Food wasn’t just fuel here, it was a celebration of life, of connection, of each other. It was communion.
I’ll never forget one dining experience we had in a small Catalonian village outside of Barcelona, Spain, where a mother-daughter pair cooked and served exquisite haute cuisine right from their home kitchen. For those willing to wait six months and pay a premium for a place at their table, the meal was like none other. Mama, in her 90’s, cooked while her daughter (who must have been in her late 70’s) served and pampered us with the love and kindness of a grandmother. Seconds were offered straight from copper pots tableside and the porrons filled with local wine never ran dry.
These women were unique in the mostly male-dominated upper echelons of the restaurant business then. As a female outlier in the same business, I was captivated by this duo who had achieved culinary excellence without leaving their home. That Catalonian kitchen became a compass for me, one that sent me chasing similar experiences across continents.
Over the last thirty years, I’ve enjoyed meals in micro and home-based restaurants around the world, from the highland kitchens of Peru to the neon-lit food stalls of Bangkok, from Oaxacan courtyards to tucked-away Shanghai alleyways. Spaces, that without exception, were stewarded by grandmothers, mothers and daughters. I went not just out of culinary curiosity, but to see if I could capture something of their ‘magic sauce’ — their ability to turn the humblest ingredients into the most nourishing food I’d ever eaten.
Not every dish was stellar, but each bore the imprint of something deeper, of hands that had cradled babies between chopping onions, of kitchens that doubled as nurseries and gossip hubs. The gap between restaurant fare and these intimate meals was undeniable. It would take me years to realize I was tasting the microbial signature of care, the invisible alchemy of food prepared where love and labor shared the same hearth.
***
In 2004, I took a year-long culinary pilgrimage to study fermentation. First stop: Peru. For nearly a month I traversed the Sacred Valley living with Quechua families along the way and learning about their ancestral food traditions. One particular group of women who welcomed me into their homes were especially spirited and quick to laugh, and they loved to tease me. They poked at my ribs, insisting I eat more, while teaching me to ferment chicha, an ancient, fizzy drink that danced on the tongue. But beneath their playfulness, I sensed a fierce pride in their craft and a deep reverence for their roles as keepers of traditions and rituals.
When I returned to Cusco, a city transformed by its proximity to Machu Picchu, I met young women who had traded their hearth crafts for work in hotels as maids. I remember noticing how they moved through the corridors with a heaviness, a weariness. Energetically they seemed so different than the women I’d spent time with in the mountains.
While reading my notes about these women in preparation for a TEDx talk fourteen years later, I had an epiphany: As cultures modernize and women shift from home-based work to market jobs, the very skills that once earned them reverence, like homemaking, caregiving and cultural stewardship, are stripped of their status. Suddenly, phrases like “I’m just a mom” made tragic sense to me. These roles, the bedrock of human thriving, now sit at the bottom of our status hierarchies.
As I sat at my desk reflecting on this, another thought occurred to me: in order to manage jobs in both the public and domestic spheres, women have steadily replaced what they once provided in the hearth with market-made substitutes. Transactional convenience has taken the place of relational nourishment. A larger pattern began to emerge, slowly at first, then all at once, it clicked into place. The more we outsource care and the everyday acts that ground us in connection and meaning, the more we seem to sever ourselves from the relationships and rhythms that make life meaningful.
I thought about my own life, the years spent feeding strangers while rarely home, and the cost of that choice, etched into my son’s childhood. We were both living out a new cultural narrative: mine, a story of market-driven empowerment; his, a lesson in absence. The irony wasn’t lost on me: that in turning “care” into my profession, I had denied its most vital form to the person who mattered most to me.
***
I began to wonder if some of our modern ills are rooted in cultural narratives and market metrics that fail to recognize the true value of care. Have we traded homemade care and connection for market-made alternatives at the expense of our well-being? These questions wouldn’t let go of me. Over the past seven years, they gathered weight and urgency until this past winter, when they finally became the kindling for this book.
Hearthbroken is an exploration of how we arrived here and where we might go next. Our journey will trace the path from the first hearths of our ancient ancestors to the complex challenges of modern domestic life, examining how we’ve gradually outsourced the work of home to the market. We’ll unpack how technological advances have reshaped not just our domestic routines but our very understanding of what makes a home.
Through this lens, we’ll look at how feminist movements complicated our relationship with domestic life and why the market economy, despite its endless innovations, cannot fully replicate the essential care work that happens within our homes. Our investigation will reveal what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost and offer a fresh lens through which to imagine our path forward.
Drawing on this history, I’ll do my best to make the case that we stand at a unique moment, one where full-time homemaking can be reimagined as a powerful choice, whether as a lifelong pursuit or as a chapter during the intensive years of raising young children. Or not at all.
In fact, for those who are fully engaged in careers within the market economy, I’ll explore how a growing network of dedicated homemakers can become trusted partners by offering homemade alternatives to goods and services typically purchased from the market. Operating within a revitalized domestic economy, these homemakers earn a meaningful living while supporting those who work full time in the public sphere.
We’ll learn about the ethics and moral theories of care, along with the unexpected gift AI provides to humanity by revealing what it will never replicate. I hope to show that the tools and connectivity of our digital world offer an unprecedented opportunity to bridge the divide between home and work and how these innovations can help us create new domestic arrangements that strengthen, rather than strain, our relationships. In doing so, we might finally create the conditions for the thriving and well-being of our human family.
When our mothers and grandmothers ventured beyond their homes to fight for equality and economic independence, they didn’t do it for themselves, they did it for us. They were investing in a future they could barely imagine. Their courage and sacrifice opened doors to education, professional achievement and public influence that they themselves couldn’t access.
We are now armed with resources our ancestors could only dream of, facing challenges they couldn’t have foreseen. Our inheritance, one that has brought so much opportunity, also carries with it a responsibility: to figure out the next part of the plan. We are now tasked with creatively solving our problems, including those we inadvertently made for ourselves. The women who came before us fought, not only for the right to choose how we live our lives, but for our power to shape a better future for all of us.
We’re not in this alone. Men are not only our partners, they are true allies. For perhaps the first time ever, we have the opportunity to build something side-by-side, each of us bringing our own unique gifts to the table. When we share the work, across boardrooms and backyards, kitchens and court rooms, we multiply our impact exponentially. When we work together toward the goal of human flourishing, we unlock a generative force the world has scarcely seen — one born of mutual respect, shared power, and the full chorus of human voices, at last in harmony.
That harmony isn’t abstract to me — it’s lived. I’ve stood at the stove and the strategy table, raised both a child and a company. And if there’s one truth I’ve come to hold above all else, it’s this: the future will be built together at the hearth, or not at all.
Note to readers: Looking for sources and deeper listening? See Footnotes by the Fire: Sources + Podcast Companion