Palisadian Kimberly Wolf Writes First Book, Inspired by Her Dad
By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor
There are numerous books published about the bond between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters, but for her first tome, Kimberly Wolf chose to write about another important—and often undervalued—relationship: that between father and daughter.
The youngest daughter of longtime Palisades Charter High School Life Experience Coach Joe Spector, Wolf combined personal experiences with years and years of study to offer critical insights in her forthcoming “Talk with Her: A Dad’s Essential Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident, and Capable Daughters,” which hits bookstore shelves May 31.
“It’s about the roles fathers play in their girls’ lives, the communication strategies that build father-daughter bonds and how fathers can prepare for key conversations on 19 topics, including body image, love and sexual health, social media, mental health, and career,” she explained. “The briefs I include highlight cutting-edge research and perspectives from leading scholars, experts and organizations serving young people. They’re designed to help readers get a handle on issues like social media and mental health that can be overwhelming and hard to master. The briefs also guide parents on what they need to know concerning key topics, where they can go for additional information, who to talk to and what questions to ask so they can best help their daughters.”
An educator, public speaker and educational consultant with an undergraduate degree in gender studies from Brown University and a master’s degree in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Wolf has championed the health and wellbeing of teenagers since she was 18, talking with her friends and classmates in the quad at Marymount High School. She is proud to have been raised in the Palisades (first on El Hito Circle, then in The Highlands), where she went to St. Matthew’s from Mommy & Me through eighth grade.
“Compared to the body of research that exists about mothers and their daughters, there’s only a fraction of that amount about father-daughter relationships, but the findings are unequivocal—that fathers can have broad-ranging positive effects on their daughters’ wellbeing and achievement, and it’s not just about being a ‘good man,’” Wolf elaborated. “Having a positive influence isn’t about being the ‘perfect father.’ What’s been so striking to me writing the book is that so many men I encounter have no idea how much they’re already doing right (though there’s nothing like a teenager to make you feel like you’re doing and saying everything wrong). I hope men recognize the strengths in their parenting prior to reading my book. Fathers are great at telling their girls to believe in themselves and when it comes to raising teenage girls, I’d say the same to dads.”
There were many motivations for her writing the book, not the least of which was making her own dad proud. Spector, now 78, is a beloved and respected figure in the community, and in 1987 he started the Pali High football program’s tradition of pre-game meals at Gladstones. Every year he presents the “Joe Spector Award” to the varsity’s Most Valuable Player. His favorite saying is: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.”
“Growing up in the Palisades and coming from a family of doctors, I’ve always been interested in health and wellness,” Wolf shared. “In high school, my friends and I were riding the waves of the adolescent years. It was clear to me that we needed guidance and resources. We certainly had some, but not enough. I remember sitting at a Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica with my family one night for dinner. Sitting all by herself at a table while waiting for the rest of her party was Tyra Banks. She was eating chips and I remember thinking ‘Wait, super models eat chips?’ For young women, especially at that time, there was just a major disconnect between media representations and reality. The media I was consuming was focused on diet culture and not on balanced, healthy living, so the fact that this awesome, glowing super model was eating chips came as a surprise to me. That was one of those experiences, among many, that made me think we could do more. I knew then that I wanted to educate and produce media for girls, to help them learn the secrets of health and wellness and the true building blocks of happiness and achievement. So, that’s what I started working on, and spent nearly two decades learning about and doing before my career took an unexpected turn. At Brown I wrote my honors thesis on sexual health content in SEVENTEEN Magazine. I never expected men to be at the center of my work, but I was launching a digital health platform for young women and after a fundraising meeting I was standing outside the Coffee Bean on Sunset in the Palisades with one of the angel investors who’d gotten divorced and he asked if could he start dating again without it damaging his teenage daughter. As I fielded more questions about this, it became clear to me that there was a widespread need for the type of information in my book.”
Not surprisingly, Wolf initially contacted Spector for some perspective: “My own dad was my first ‘research’ call. I asked him if it was really that much harder for him to raise me and my sister than it was to parent my brother and he replied without hesitation ‘absolutely!’ It hadn’t occurred to me that he was struggling, but even though he was a great ‘girl dad,’ he found those pre-teen and teenage years to be very challenging. Eventually, once I’d done the research review for the book, I called him back and apologized for taking so much of what he did for granted all those years. I think he appreciated that.”
A mother of two boys, Wolf met her husband Alex in the library at Harvard during grad school. They moved to Texas almost a decade ago so he could do a one-year law clerkship with a federal judge and they have been there ever since.
“I joke with him that if someone had told me I was going to marry a lawyer, I would’ve thought he’d do something ‘normal’ like entertainment law in LA, but instead he became a Texas trial attorney with a national practice in litigation and white collar criminal defense,” she said. “We get back to the Palisades about four times a year.”
She and her family were LA Lakers season ticket holders throughout her childhood, so Wolf spent a lot of school nights at the Forum and Staples Center watching her favorite team (something she talked about in the book). One hard thing, she said, was deciding what to leave in and what to take out.
“Of course I wanted to include some of my favorite stories about my dad,” Wolf said. “He was ahead of his time in the ways he intuitively knew how to parent girls and a lot of what he did is reflected in the scholarly research I reviewed for the book. He was mindful about the ways he engaged in my emotional development and has always been deliberate about many of the memories he’s created for us together. These are two of the core themes of the book. Beyond that, it was difficult to narrow down which stories to include. I hit the maximum page count for my manuscript trying to pack everything in. There are ways in which he’s never stopped being the dad he was when I was little and that’s something I talk about a lot in the book because it’s one of the secrets to lasting father-daughter bonds. Our relationship hasn’t always been perfect. We’ve weathered some tough moments, but he’s never run out of energy to tell me and everyone he meets how proud he is of me. If ‘Talk with Her’ hits the bestseller list it’ll be in great part because my father has personally had thousands of conversations, many of them with people he meets for the first time while walking on the beach or at the pharmacy, about how amazing this book is.”
“Talk with Her” has been a nearly five-year process from proposal to publishing.
“I was at times working time and a half, went through multiple rounds of fertility, and gave birth to two baby boys (yes, two boys just in time to release my groundbreaking book on raising girls) … during the pandemic,” she said. “My advice for anyone who has a book project they’re working on would be to engage a book coach or join a writing group so you have support and a system of accountability.”
As for a sequel, a lot of people have told Wolf her next book should be about mothers and sons, given that she has two little boys. To that she replies: “It took me a few decades to gather the wisdom for this one about fathers and daughters, so I have a few other books in me before I get to that one.”
Wolf will be at DIESEL, A Bookstore (225 26th Street, Suite 33) in the Brentwood Country Mart Tuesday, May 31, at 6:30 p.m. to sign copies of “Talk with Her”—a heartfelt gift for Father’s Day.
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