Maria Bello is a mother, actor, activist and author.  Her essay in the The New York Times, Modern Love column, “Coming Out as a Modern Family” is one of the ten most popular articles in a decade. Visit her website.

In the summer of 2013, lying in a hospital bed with her body riddled with parasites, Maria Bello realized that waiting to do something isn’t always an option. In a moment, everything could end, and all of her stories would be lost—stories of love, family, miracles and madness that filled the hundreds of journals she had been keeping since she was a child. She read through each one of those journals during her months of recovery, in the in process began to uncover who she was and who she had become. And instead of coming to any definitive answers, she found herself asking more and more questions. Part of her questioning was about how to tell her son, then 12 years old that she had fallen in love with a woman. Jack’s response—simple and wise beyond his years was “Whatever, Mom…love is love.” Seeing that Jack didn’t see traditional labels of partnership, Maria began to contemplate the labels she herself had worn during her life.  

Her essay “Coming Out as a Modern Family” was featured in the New York Times Modern Love column and started a worldwide conversation about how many of the labels we all know and use are simply outdated today. Partnership, career, love, sexuality, all of these aspects of life are fluid now. We no longer fit into the tidy little boxes, and neither do our lives.  Questioning those labels is at the heart of Whatever…Love is Love. 

Written as a series of provocative questions and thoughtful answers, and filled with deeply personal, often funny and even passionate stories, in this book Maria bares her soul and shares what she’s learned—about romantic love, but also about her relationship with her parents, her feelings about spirituality, her sexual identity, the highs and lows of her career, her humanitarian work, and her worth as a mother. Using her experience as a gateway to a larger conversation, Maria encourages you to think about the life you lead, who you love, what you do, what you believe in and what you call yourself…and helps you to realize that the only labels that matter are the ones we place on and accept for ourselves, even if they don’t fit the mold of “typical.”

Camryn Manheim is best known for her portrayal of the feisty defense attorney Ellenor Frutt on the Emmy Award winning drama, The Practice, which garnered her an Emmy and Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. She also played Delia Banks, the resident skeptic on the CBS drama, Ghost Whisperer.” She currently plays the all mighty Control on Person of Interest. 

Her other film and television credits include: The Hot Flashes, The Makeover, Jewtopia, Hotline, Without Men, Fort McCoy, Camilla Dickinson, Twisted, Scary Movie 3, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Happiness, The Laramie Project, The Road to Wellville, Eraser, Jessie Stone, Two and a Half Men, Will and Grace, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal, How I Met Your Mother, Slipstream, which was written and directed by Anthony Hopkins, and An Unfinished Life, where she shared the screen with Robert Redford.

Raised in the Mid-West and Southern California, Manheim is the daughter of outspoken, politically aware parents who passed their activism on to all of their children. She is a passionate advocate for the rights of the disabled, particularly the deaf.  Manheim is a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an active supporter of The Feminist Majority, Planned Parenthood, Waterkeeper Alliance, and a handful of other organizations.    She has received honors from the Death Penalty Focus of California, The Western Law Center for Disability Rights, Hadassah, The Jewish Federation, and an honorary member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and was honored by the National Lawyers Guild of Southern California. Visit her website for more information.  Her book Wake Up, I’m Fat! (1999) was a New York Times bestseller.

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