Unabridged Interview: Marisa Renee Lee

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Hello, friends, Lee C. Camp. You're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our Unabridged Interview with Marisa Renee Lee. Marisa is an award-winning author of Grief is Love, and the newly released Waiting for Dawn, subtitled Living with Uncertainty. Marisa has a remarkably diverse resume. She graduated from Harvard as an undergrad, then she went on to work on Wall Street in banking, then served as a senior appointee in the Obama White House. She's then become something like an advocate for grief, work that's arisen out of her own navigation of multiple personal losses.
So I think of her work as something like sitting at the intersection of a Venn diagram of personal pain, social trends, and public policy. She keeps pushing us to convert private sorrow into community care, institutional action, and I especially appreciated her rejection of toxic positivity and this sort of cultural pressure simply just to move on when difficult things occur. Instead points us towards hope as a demanding and disciplined practice. Lots of highly practical takeaways.
Lovely interview. Here's Marisa Renee Lee.
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**SPEAKER_2** (3:01)
Hi friends, it's Annie F. Downs here and I am so beyond excited to share with you that I have a brand new TV show called I Gotta Ask that begins airing Thursday, May 28th on the Wonder Project, which you can find through your Amazon Prime Video app. You may have heard of the Wonder Project because they're the ones who brought you The House of David and I am so honored and honestly have zero chill that I get to partner with them to make this dream come true. I love how Wonder Project is not only creating great original TV and movies that audiences can experience together, but also curating content via their subscription on Prime Video filled with meaningful stories.
The first two episodes of my talk show, I Gotta Ask premier on May 28th, followed by two episodes each on June 4th and June 11th. And every episode, I sit down with a group of friends, some experts in their fields and some thought leaders, some just my real life people. And we talk about things like why is dating so hard in 2026 or how do I build a business? What do I do with fear and anxiety and so many more questions that I just had to ask. I cannot wait to hear what you think.
You can subscribe today at igottaask.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:20)
Welcome to No Small Endeavor, Marisa.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:23)
Thank you so much for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:24)
Yeah, pleased to have you.
And pleased to hear you're talking to you in your home in Poughkeepsie, help the Southerner, Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:33)
Poughkeepsie, yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:35)
Poughkeepsie, Poughkeepsie, New York.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:37)
It is a mouthful.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:38)
Yeah, yeah. Well, great to get to talk to you today. It seems to me that to even begin to get at the great riches of your work, one might have to think in terms of a Venn diagram with a lot of, maybe a lot of different overlapping circles of disciplines and work that you've done. But if I were to ask you to describe your current work in terms of a Venn diagram, what would be the circles that are overlapping?