Ryan Holiday and Mel Robbins browse books and swap recommendations

Executive overview

Ryan Holiday visits Mel Robbins at her bookstore, and they browse shelves together. The conversation weaves between book picks, Mel's account of co-writing Let Them with her daughter, and Ryan's in-progress biography of Admiral James Stockdale.

Writing a book with your adult child can heal a fractured relationship — if you survive it.

Book recommendations exchanged

• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong — story of dignity on society's margins, centred on a Boston Market crew
• Phosphorescence by Julia Baird — Australian writer, recommended for its resonance with nature and wonder
• A Gift from the Sea — recommended for reflective reading
• The Book with No Pictures by BJ Novak — forces parents to say absurd things aloud; kids love the role reversal
• Court of Thorns and Roses series — Mel recommends the graphic audio version as "a movie in your mind"
• I Need a New Butt — crowd favourite in the kids' section

Co-writing Let Them with her daughter

• Mel's daughter identified a gap: "Let Them" made people feel superior but left them lonely
• The fix was a second part — "Let Me" — which her daughter conceived and insisted on
• They worked together for 11 months, her daughter living at home in Vermont
• The love chapter was written while her daughter was going through a major breakup and applying the advice in real time
• The process forced them to work through long-standing emotional mismatches and reach genuine acceptance

Ryan's next book: a Stockdale biography

• Subject is Admiral James Stockdale — spent seven years in a North Vietnamese prison camp
• Known to many readers via the Stockdale Paradox in Jim Collins' Good to Great
• Ryan describes him as an "interesting, unsung" figure deserving a full biography
• Research is organised on index cards, one per idea, sorted across multiple concurrent projects