Both women already had decades of success under their belts. Walsh had been a literary agent and global head of literature, lectures, and events at WME, where she championed women’s stories. Her clients included Alice Munro, Arianna Huffington, Sheryl Sandberg, and memoirist Dani Shapiro. As a board member, she was often the only woman in the decision-making room. Jackson, meanwhile, is a beauty mogul — the first woman to generate more than a billion dollars in revenue from selling cosmetics on television — as well as a medical philanthropist and author. Both had long relationships with books: reading them, promoting them, writing them. But a bookstore of their own had never been part of the plan.

“It wasn’t something I’d wanted to do my whole life,” says Jackson. “It really was just a left turn, but it turned out to be the right turn.” At the same moment the idea was floated, a location sprang to mind: a restored three-story 1920s barn in the neighbouring town of Summerland. “The building wasn’t even for sale,” Jackson says. But everything moved quickly, and in September 2024, Godmothers opened its doors. “It was all very organic,” says Walsh, who sees the business as her second act — and by far the most peaceful. “I have found the balance between letting things happen and making things happen.”

Walsh curates the guest roster and conducts many of the interviews herself. She favours authentic straight-talkers — Belle Burton and Emma Grede were recent highlights. Her own relationship with reading has been anything but linear. At school, she was not the child at the back of the class with her nose in a book. “I was a troublemaker, and I didn’t discover reading until college, when I took a contemporary voices in fiction and non-fiction class,” she says. “Until that point, I had thought that only dead white men wrote books — then I discovered Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.”

At WME, she read ten to twelve books a week and took suitcases of manuscripts on family holidays. When she left in 2019 and moved to Montecito, she abandoned reading almost entirely for several years. By the time she came back to it, something had shifted. “Now I read more joyfully and slowly. I savour every word.”