Episode 663 - Jennifer Hayden

Who knew that olive oil makes head lice sleepy? Jennifer Hayden rejoins the show to celebrate her new graphic memoir/anti-cookbook, WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S DINNER: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (Top Shelf), share comedic tales of domestic mess, and rebel against the expectations of wife/motherhood. We talk about the lifetime of bad cooking that led to this new book, the revenge of turning her bad experiences into comedy, how she found a unique form to tell her story, and how a youthful reading of Babar left her with a lifelong phobia of mushrooms. We get into how she was reverse-inspired by Lucy Knisley's Relish , how watercolors gave her a color toolbox for her comics, what this book taught her about storytelling, and how her daughter diagnosed her as "expectation-allergic." We also discuss how she's been cheating on comics with spoken word storytelling , what life after memoir is like, how her breast-cancer memoir doubled as a last will & testament for her family, the process of finding a new creative process and narrative voice, her shamanic experience attending The Moth , the significance of the tarot card she repeatedly draws when she's hard at work on a book, why the folk names of herbs are like edible emotion, and more. Follow Jennifer on Instagram and Facebook , and

You can listen to Episode 663 - Jennifer Hayden online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 663 - Jennifer Hayden is an episode from The Virtual Memories Show by Gil Roth.

This episode is 01:27:42 long.

This episode was published on Nov 11, 2025.

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