Jenny Mollen Says the Key to Her and Jason Biggs' Marriage Is 'a Lot of Therapy' (Exclusive)
The pair has been married since 2008.
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Jenny Mollen knows exactly how her marriage is going strong, 14 years in. ET's Rachel Smith spoke to the 43-year-old writer ahead of the release of her debut cookbook, Dictator Lunches, and Mollen revealed the secret to her long-lasting marriage with Jason Biggs.
"We eloped after only knowing each other for nine months," Mollen said of her and Biggs' 2008 nuptials. "We really didn't know each other. Let's be honest, it was just kind of luck."
It's lasted, Mollen shared, thanks to "a lot of therapy."
"I think my next book is gonna be [about] how to be married. We've spent thousands of dollars in therapy, so you don't have to," she quipped.
Since tying the knot, Mollen and Biggs have welcomed two children -- Lazlo, 4, and Sid, 8. It's her sons who inspired her latest project, which is hilariously titled Dictator Lunches in their honor.
"It's an authoritarian regime here... It started with just having two dictators. My husband and I both work for them," she joked of her boys. "They're out of control. They really are... It's all about psychological warfare here. I gotta stay on my toes."
The City of Likes author does just that by making school lunches for her boys that are both fun and healthy, something she wished for as a child.
"This is just me trying to reparent myself and give myself the childhood that I always wanted," she said. "I grew up [with] two divorced parents, [as a] latchkey kid. I was in public school waiting in the lunch line, watching other kids around me have the PB&J with the crust cut off and the handwritten notes, [while] mine were looking like whatever the lunch lady like slopped on my tray. It wasn't good."
Given that, Mollen explained, "I wanted to make sure that my kids had these moveable feasts when I sent them off."
On the first day of school this year, for example, Mollen packed avocado toast cut into Jenga pieces and cucumbers in "a straight A line across the top." It's a far cry from what Biggs were pack for the kids if he was assigned the task.
"Sometimes I’ll catch him making a weird American cheese and some sort of weird meat that I don't know what it is sandwich in the middle of the night. He steals food in the night... and he will devour whatever sweets are left out," Mollen said of her husband. "... I have watched him on occasion take a box of Oreos, put them in a bowl, fill that bowl with milk and eat it. But you know what? He has high cholesterol now, so he's learning the hard way."
The book isn't just for kids, as Mollen told ET that "it's fully for adults too."
"My mom said to me, 'Jenny, I don't even have kids and I would use this book,'" Mollen recalled. "I looked at her I said, 'Mom, you do have kids. That’s why I wrote this book.'"
Dictator Lunches: Inspired Meals That Will Compel Even the Toughest of (Tyrants) Children will hit shelves Sept. 13.
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