Mary Marantz | Broken & Beautiful, 158

Mary Marantz Interview

Mary Marantz | Broken & Beautiful

Author, speaker, and podcast host, Mary Marantz, grew up in a single-wide trailer in rural West Virginia. The first of her immediate family to go to college, she went on to earn a law degree from the nation’s top-ranked law school, Yale.

After ditching six-figure-salary law firm offers in London and New York, she started a business with her husband, Justin. Together they have built a successful online education platform for creative entrepreneurs.

She is the author of the book “Dirt” about growing up in West Virginia, and the host of The Mary Marantz Show- which debuted in the iTunes top 200 podcast list. 

Her writing has been featured by Business Insider, Thrive Global, MSN, Bustle, Southern Living, and Brit+Co.

She lives in an 1880s fixer-upper by the sea in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, Justin and their two very fluffy golden retrievers, Goodspeed and Atticus. 

Mary Marantz and Amber discuss embracing the broken places of stories, how they can be made beautiful, and her personal journey written in the bestselling memoir, Dirt.

Beautiful & Broken Questions Mary and Amber Discuss:

  1. (5:04) Take us back to your childhood and share a little about where you grew up and what family life was like.
  2. (13:09) At what point did Jesus become intertwined in your story?
  3. (17:13) You get to a point in Dirt where you’re clearly wrestling through completely discarding your roots and embracing their beauty.  You write, “I think about the boots and the bones, and how I didn’t want to be so lowly as to stoop down and help another human being shake off their layers of mud.  To wind up with their dirt on my hands.  I think that’s because for a long time I believed freedom looked like getting to a place where none of the people were muddy.”  Flesh that out for us a bit.
  4. (24:00) As a young girl, your mom left to take a traveling job and over time she returned less and less.  What are some of the impacts her absence had on you and how have you worked through those as an adult?
  5. (37:18) I found myself laughing and choking back tears as I read about Goldie and her influence in your life. What legacy would you say your grandmother left in your life?
  6. (45:15) You eventually move away from WV and attend Yale Law.  Did you have to wrestle with your identity while attending Yale and then when visiting home?
  7. (51:55) Dirt is very much a story of healing and as the subtitle states, “growing strong roots in what makes the broken beautiful.” As we close, what are a few areas of personal brokenness that you have experienced God’s faithfulness to make beautiful?

Quotes From Beautiful & Broken:

“The repeating theme we’re going to hear as we dig into this conversation is that we all have some version of a trailer, we all have something in our story that we have convinced ourselves, disqualifies us before we even begin.” “I feel like I spent a lot of my life just trying to get back to this place where I didn’t have to be better. I didn’t have to do more. I didn’t have to achieve to be worthy of spending time with God.” “There are a lot of studies that say, regardless of the circumstances a child is in at home, if there’s just one adult…who will take an active interest in that child’s life, they can change their entire trajectory.” “If the number one law school could not convince me, you have achieved enough now to be worthy, then what was going to be enough?” “I want a life that feels better on the inside than it looks on the outside.”

Resources Mentioned:

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I feel like I spent a lot of my life just trying to get back to this place where I didn't have to be better. I didn't have to do more. I didn't have to achieve to be worthy of spending time with God.
We all have some version of a trailer. We all have something in our story that we have convinced ourselves, disqualifies us before we even begin.
I want a life that feels better on the inside than it looks on the outside

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