According to Shonda Rhimes, the woman behind some of television’s most popular and longest-running shows of all time, her real job is creating empathy.
“All of our stories should be a window and a mirror,” Rhimes said to a packed audience at the Athenaeum Center in Lake View Sunday night. “A window into a world you’ve never known, and a mirror that holds up your own life to use to reflect back at you.”
Rhimes, 55, returned to her hometown to celebrate 10 years of her bestselling memoir “Year of Yes” in a conversation with Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama and CEO of the Obama Foundation. More than 800 people watched as the Chicago HBCU Alumni Choir opened the event, hosted by WBEZ and City Lit Books, with a flash mob performance. The group sang a cover of the 1991 gospel song “Optimistic” by Sounds of Blackness.
The woman behind the wildly popular shows “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Scandal,” Rhimes said she hopes her characters can bring fans some level of comfort in “making sure that you’re not alone.”
“The creation of empathy is actually how story works. If you’re not crying with Christina when she’s ripping off her wedding gown or devastated when Olivia Pope gets kidnapped, we’ve not done our job correctly,” she said, referring to Sandra Oh’s character in “Grey’s Anatomy” and a major plot point in Season 4 of “Scandal.”
From ‘absolutely not’ to yes to everything
Rhimes admitted that even a decade into her Shondaland empire, she still struggled with accepting new opportunities and invitations. During a conversation on Thanksgiving in 2013, Rhimes’ older sister Delorse asked: “Shonda, are you going to do any of these things?”
“Absolutely not, no,” Rhimes responded.
Delorse was afraid that her sister wasn’t enjoying her life, “and she was absolutely right,” Rhimes said. It was then that Rhimes decided to dedicate 2014 to saying “yes” to everything.
Shortly after her big decision, Rhimes received a call from Philip J. Hanlon, the then-president of her alma mater, Dartmouth College. He asked her to deliver a speech to the graduating class of 2014.
“I gamely said, ‘Yes. Let’s do this,” Rhimes told the crowd. Later that year, she said yes to doing an episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and appearing on Mindy Kaling’s “The Mindy Project.”
“I didn’t want to do any of these things at all. They were all horrible, but doing the thing that you’re afraid of undoes the fear,” Rhimes said.
And throughout that year, Rhimes learned several important lessons: the most important, perhaps, being the difference between saying “yes for yourself” versus the yeses to please other people.
Publishing company Simon & Schuster approached Rhimes to revisit her book 10 years later. When she sat down to reread the book, Rhimes said she was “really surprised by the person who was in it.”
“[It] made me realize all the things that I had accomplished in that year,” she said. “Some of it I had let slide. Some of it I had let go. Some of it I had forgotten to keep doing, and some of it I had done to the extreme. I wanted to write about that.”
The memoir has been rereleased, and the 10th anniversary edition includes seven new chapters of personal writing full of soul-bearing, tear-jerking and humorous moments.
Ten years later, Rhimes continues to say yes to as much as possible. Sometimes that means saying yes to spending time with her daughters or doing something for herself.
She’s taken up golf, for example.
“I’m a crazy golf lady now,” Rhimes said.
Rhimes wants to dedicate the next year to learning even more new skills, especially as a self-proclaimed “band geek.” She played the oboe at Marian Catholic High School in suburban Chicago Heights and took up the cello when she moved from Los Angeles to Connecticut.
One of her biggest musical regrets was not marching in the band her senior year.
To Rhimes’ surprise, former Marian Catholic High School band director Greg Bimm and his wife, Connie, were peeking from behind the curtain as she went on about her band experience. Rhimes screamed as the pair approached her with open arms.
“You taught me so much about self-discipline and about believing in yourself,” Rhimes told her former band director on stage. The evening’s kicker? Naturally, a selfie.