Episode 16: Tembi Locke

I’ve Written an Essay. How “From Scratch” Came to Netflix.

With these four words, Tembi Locke changed her life. As she describes it herself, the writing of this essay about her husband’s death was “The key that open[ed] the door to those things we want, desire, need that we may fear.” What started as an essay that she shared with her sister, would become her memoir From Scratch. The book honestly and poignantly chronicles how she met and fell in love with her husband Saro, married and started a family with him, cared for him when cancer abruptly showed up in their lives, and how she ultimately remained by his side as he slipped into eternity. The essential questions of the book are complex and quite relevant for the epoch shift we are living through today: Can this love work? Can I go on? Can love stay with me? How do we analyze and embrace those things that cause us grief? 

The importance of From Scratch goes beyond accolades from editors, or Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine producing the screenplay (as a Netflix Limited Series that Tembi wrote and produced with her sister Attica Locke), or even the thousands of people who have been impacted by the story. The writing of this book allowed Tembi to claim the power of naming what it is that she is. All of it. All of her. With one essay she catalyzed full artistic expression within herself and claimed all parts of herself, not for ego, or for public acclaim, but for herself.

What essay is it that we all need to write? What are the words we all need to say? What is it that we all need to name and claim that will give us the freedom, even the courage to be accountable to all parts of our identity? To embrace that we are not singular, fixed creatures. Oh no. We are called to live full creative lives. Artistic lives that remind us as Tembi humbly says, “I am more than one thing. I am multitudes.”