The Firestarter Five with Eve Rodsky

Five quick questions to dig a little deeper

Eve Rodsky, age 47, Los Angeles
Website // Instagram

Eve Rodsky transformed a “blueberries breakdown” into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard-trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question: What would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? Her New York Times bestselling book and Reese’s Book Club Pick, Fair Play, a gamified life-management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship, has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care.

In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Rodsky explores the cross-section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Described as the ‘antidote to physical, mental, and emotional burnout,’ Rodsky aims to inspire a new narrative around the equality of time and the individual right to personal time choice that influences sustainable and lasting change on a policy level.

Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Seth and their three children.

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Is your life what you thought it would be? Why or why not?

I am an expert on the “gendered division of labor,” and that was not what was on my Third Grade “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Board :) In fact, I thought I would be smashing so many glass ceilings as a Harvard Law School graduate but if you cut to my life 10 years after graduation, the only thing I can honestly tell you that I was “smashing“ was peas for my toddler, Zach, while breastfeeding a newborn Ben while trying to negotiate returning to work with a hostile boss and living a statistic that I didn’t even know at the time — that women shoulder 2/3 or more of what it takes to run a home and family. That reality led me down a path to a realization that the last and most difficult frontier of feminism was ironically going to be the place closest to us — our homes. 

What are you most proud of so far in your life?

I grew up with a single mother in a rent-stabilized apartment on Ave C and 14th Street in New York City. I watched my mom reject an orthodox Jewish lifestyle, and I took care of my disabled brother Josh as my mother was teaching at night. At 15, my boyfriend was shot in the stomach (he survived), and we ended up in Bellevue Hospital at midnight. I live a very different life now than I did growing up. I’ve been in rooms with people who tell me they try to forget and lose empathy for where they come from. This makes me sad. I try to continue to use those early experiences to move forward with optimism, fairness, and justice at the center of my work. I’m proud of never forgetting where I come from.

What worry do you carry around that doesn't serve you?

As my friend Dr. Becky says, it’s important to differentiate between true guilt (a misalignment of your values and actions) and other people’s discomfort. When my worries come from a place of false guilt—I worry that I am not meeting other people’s expectations—I try to let that go.

What is one thing you want to achieve before your life is over?

I would like to see unpaid labor reflected in US Gross Domestic Product. It has never made sense to me that if you hire a house cleaner, that transaction is reflected in GDP, but if you go on to marry that house cleaner, the value of that work disappears.

What do you want your legacy to be?

That I helped the world understand that an hour holding a child’s hand in the pediatrician’s office is just as valuable as an hour in the board room.