Jim Spellman/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Actress Hilarie Burton Morgan and her husband, Walking Dead star Jeffrey Dean Morgan, traded in the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles for a working farm in Rhinebeck, New York years ago.
The Morgan homestead is not only the shooting location for one of their many quarantine projects, the AMC show Friday Night In With the Morgans, but it’s also the focal point for Burton’s new book, The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm.
The book, which came out last month, debuted at Number 5 on the New York Times Best Seller list. Hilarie explains, “Now it’s a love letter to our town in the midst of being shutdown. And so I can’t wait for our neighbors and our fellow community members to…know how much I appreciate them in this moment where a lot of shops are shuttered and our kids aren’t at school.”
The book tells of lessons they learned on the farm, and about each other.
Morgan says, “You know, everybody has this kind of idea that our relationship is this picture perfect relationship and this book will shut that down immediately.”
Hilarie laughs a denial, but allows, “We don’t do bullsh** well. Let’s just rip off the Band-Aid.”
“Yeah,” Morgan says with a laugh, “There’s no rainbows shooting out of anyone’s a**ses here. She tells the truth and it’s brutally honest.”
Hilarie found honesty was the best policy. “I think I set out to write like a sweet, cute book, and it felt really inauthentic and it felt phony. And when you set up false precedent for other people, it makes them not feel good about their lives. And so the more honest you can be, the better.”
“Oh, good,” Morgan says sarcastically.
By Stephen Iervolino
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