Linda Marigliano is doing the work

In the summer of 2020, Linda Marigliano found herself pacing around her father’s pool. She had just left her job as a presenter at Triple J and was due to move to Los Angeles to live with her boyfriend, Magnus, a Norwegian music producer she had been in a long-distance relationship with for years. Yet, like most dreams held at the beginning of the pandemic, this did not materialise. The specificity in individual stories often reveals a universal truth the masses can connect with. And the story of Linda Marigliano at this time was that she was stuck, having left her past, unable to step into her future. So she found herself pacing.

Over the following months, as she paced around the pool, the 36-year-old listened to podcasts spanning a range of genres: fiction, chat shows, documentaries, true crime. She connected with a friend and former colleague, Amelia Chappelow, who was in lockdown in New York. She began thinking about what a podcast of her own would sound like. “There was something brewing in me,” Marigliano tells FW. “Plus, there was the tension of what was going on in my real life.” 

Marigliano is currently producing the third season of Tough Love. Image credit: Supplied.

What followed was Tough Love, a genre-bending podcast series that documented Linda’s life at this time. She untangled her career from her identity, navigated uncertainty and froze her eggs. She interviewed experts, family members and close friends. As she tackled existential questions and revealed universal truths about love and the losses of this era, she took listeners on the journey with her. And with that, the interviewer became the subject. 

“It really hits different when you put yourself out there like that because you have so much more to lose,” Marigliano says. “The risk was big, but the reward was so much bigger than I could imagine.” 

The response was wildly different to anything she had ever experienced in her career. During her ten years at Triple J, a great interview would lead to surface-level praise (‘That’s awesome. I love Tame Impala’) whereas listeners were now sending her long emails and messages. Whether it was a partner separated from their lover or a daughter unable to sit in the same room as her ill mother, they would write to Marigliano about their own personal heartache. Her vulnerability had allowed them to feel seen and, in a sense, helped them navigate their own losses. Or at least feel less alone in them.

“People pleasing and perfectionism were so tied to control and wanting to control this narrative that you are this unflappable person, and it’s just not genuine.”

The podcast led to Marigliano’s memoir, Love Language, which explores how we can show up for others without losing ourselves. “I remember writing, ‘Why do I always feel like I need to perform?” she says, describing this behaviour as a “rock in my pocket” that she has carried around for as long as she can remember. “I’ve always thought deep down that it makes me kind of flawed but it’s also what makes me, me.”

This perfectionist performance has fed into every aspect of her life: work, romance, friendships, familial relationships. It has left her compromising herself in relationships and overextending herself at work, choosing to please others instead of being true to her own needs and desires. In the book, there is a particularly shocking scene where she recounts showing up at work with lockjaw because she didn’t want to let her colleagues and bosses down. 

“It was such a therapeutic experience, aggressively going in and trying to pick it apart and analyse [my past] and actually learn – in a very real sense – what is it to perform or show love in the way that we do,” she says. “For me, people pleasing and perfectionism were so tied to control and wanting to control this narrative that you are this unflappable person, and it’s just not genuine.”

The author and podcaster’s memoir, Love Language, was published in May this year. Image credit: Supplied.

“There is a lesson in knowing when it gives me pleasure to show up and be loyal to my friends or my lover or my mum, but where that line is,” she continues. “[The book] gave me the tools to know when I was compromising myself.”

Many lessons have emerged from the book — namely how one establishes and maintains boundaries — and over the course of our conversation, the author shares a few. It’s okay to say no. Adults are capable of being disappointed. You’re not that important (and the job will probably still get done without you). Then she shares a strategy she learned from the mental health expert Jono Nicholas, who she interviewed in the first season of Tough Love. It’s a strategy she now uses every morning.

Instead of writing a single to-do list, she divides herself – and her list – into four quarters: work, wellbeing, social, personal. She writes three major things under each of these headings. This simple act not only helps her balance work and life, but reminds her that work only makes up a quarter of her identity. 

“I’d never really thought about [work-life balance] before because, for me, it was always about people-pleasing, being productive, being perfect, saying yes to everything,” she says. “So I always had a packed calendar, always had a DJ set, always had an extra thing to host, and it was really an unlearning. There’s more things that make up happiness on a daily level than being productive or hitting a deadline.”

“There’s always going to be days that blow out where you’ve got more work on,” she adds. “But when you look back on that [to-do list] at the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t exercise and I didn’t call my mum back.’ You make yourself accountable.”

“I really used to have to hold everything so tightly. But now I can breathe out a bit.”

Today, Marigliano is on the other side of the pandemic and on the other side of the world, finally in Los Angeles with the person that she has waited years to be living with. She is also over there with an acclaimed podcast and memoir to her name. She is over there, perhaps, with more than she ever imagined. I wonder whether that moment in time — where her plans were upended, but led to opportunities she didn’t expect — has taught her anything.

“The best things in my life have come from embracing and accepting the hardest parts,” she says. “Some days are easier than others to say life is uncertain. Some days are more uncomfortable than others. But it is a part of a part of life and there is a real beauty in that and having those two projects and being able to put them out is sort of evidence for me to go, ‘No matter what happens, you’re going to be able to make things and you’re going to be okay.’”

The author and podcaster doesn’t know exactly what the future holds but she does know her work will continue to embrace the personal. (“I think, in a sense, I can’t go back.”) The third season of Tough Love is currently in production and writing is still firmly on her mind. As for her personal life, she is enjoying the simple act of making plans – whether it is booking a holiday with her partner or making a dinner reservation a month in advance. She has been settled in Los Angeles for the last year, but only recently has she noticed a shift in the “foundation of anxiety” the pandemic had created within her. 

“I really used to have to hold everything so tightly,” she says. “But now I can breathe out a bit more, I can sleep better.” And as she speaks to me from the second floor of her West Hollywood home, there is a heatwave in Los Angeles but a sense of ease in Marigliano as she speaks.