Aloni Ford’s literary community delivered an unforgettable afternoon at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey — and this is only the beginning.
There are book club meetings, and then there are experiences that shift something inside you before you even open the first page. What Aloni Ford created aboard the historic Northwind at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey on Sunday afternoon was unquestionably the latter.
Yacht Girls Book Club, the leadership-driven literary community for high-achieving women founded by Ford, hosted one of its most standout gatherings to date, bringing bestselling author Gabrielle Stone aboard for a live Q&A and intimate discussion of her viral memoir, Eat, Pray, #FML. The energy on that vessel was electric from the moment women stepped on deck, and by the time the afternoon wrapped, it was clear that what Ford has been building since 2019 is no longer a well-kept secret. This is a movement.
Who Is Aloni Ford, and Why Is She One of Marina del Rey’s Most Influential Voices
If you’re not already familiar with Aloni Ford, you need to be. The founder and visionary behind Yacht Girls Book Club is one of the most significant figures in the Marina del Rey community, and her reach extends well beyond the water. Ford currently serves as Vice Commodore of the Women’s Sailing Association of Santa Monica Bay and as Ambassador of the California Yacht Club — positions that reflect both her deep ties to the yachting world and her commitment to expanding who belongs in it. She also serves on the board of Jack & Jill of America and actively teaches youth sailing at the California Yacht Club, investing in the next generation of women and girls on the water.
Ford is a trailblazing entertainment executive, filmmaker, and women’s empowerment visionary whose career spans sports management, media, wellness, and community leadership. For over 15 years, she has managed championship professional athletes and award-winning entertainers while serving as an executive producer, shaping narratives that elevate and connect. What she has built with Yacht Girls Book Club sits at the intersection of all of it — luxury, access, healing, and community — and it is entirely her own.
More Than a Book Club
Since its founding in 2019, Yacht Girls Book Club has grown into one of the most distinctive women’s communities in Los Angeles. The club does not simply gather women to discuss books. It creates immersive on-water experiences that blend literature, wellness, and sisterhood in ways that most communities never think to attempt. Ford hosts monthly Yacht Yoga sessions — a yin yoga and sound healing experience held aboard a yacht at Naos Yachts in Marina del Rey. The club also produces vision board parties on the water, author events, and curated social experiences, all built around the same core belief: that luxury and access are not in conflict, and that women deserve both.
Sunday’s event was the fullest expression of that philosophy to date.
The Vibe Was Everything, and That Was Intentional
The Northwind — a 130-foot classic yacht commissioned in 1930, beautifully restored with brass fixtures, historic details, and sweeping coastal views, and docked at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey — set the scene. Champagne flowed as servers in uniform moved through the crowd with food and drinks throughout the afternoon. This was not a self-serve situation. This was a fully produced experience. A live DJ, Bobbie Lee, kept the energy exactly right from arrival to departure. And then there was the smaller vessel that took guests out for an exhilarating 10-minute ride beyond the dock — open water, wind, and a moment that reminded everyone exactly where they were.
Women were dressed, present, and ready to be poured into. This was not a stuffy literary event. This was a full afternoon. And it was priced with accessibility as a core value — because Ford believes that luxury and inclusion are not mutually exclusive, and she proves it every single time she produces one of these experiences.
The energy drew women from across the region. A group made the drive from Santa Clarita specifically for the afternoon and said it was worth every mile. “The world is a crazy place right now,” said Heather Wilson Covarrubias, “so when there is an opportunity to come together and celebrate one another regardless of what we look like or who we vote for, then we should absolutely do it because it’s such a gift. Women supporting women makes all the chaos worth it.”
Gabrielle Stone Walked Into That Room and Made It Hers
Some authors show up to speak at events, and then some storytellers walk into a room and immediately make everyone in it feel seen. From the first moment she opened up to that crowd, Gabrielle Stone made clear she was there to give fully, honestly, and without reservation.
Stone is the daughter of actress Dee Wallace. After years of working as an actress and director in Los Angeles, her world was upended when her husband’s affair came to light. She filed for divorce — then, two weeks later, fell for someone new. It was that man who convinced her to join him on a romantic trip to Italy, then told her 48 hours before departure that he needed to go alone. Rather than stay home and grieve, she got on a plane anyway, a leather-bound journal in hand, moving through Europe — healing in real time and writing every word of it down. That journal became Eat, Pray, #FML, a memoir that found a worldwide tribe of women who recognized themselves in every raw, unfiltered page. The sequel, The Ridiculous Misadventures of a Single Girl, followed, along with the FML Talk podcast and a global reader travel community that has since taken women to destinations across the world. Every word of it is self-published.
Gabby Loved on That Audience, and They Felt Every Bit of It
The Q&A was the heart of the afternoon, and Stone gave everything she had to it. She talked about returning from Europe and finding herself back in her childhood bedroom at her mother’s house — waiting for her divorce to finalize, sitting in one of the deepest depressions she had ever known. She talked about the moment she decided to write a list of things that made her soul happy — meditating, creating, going to the gym, eating well, dancing — and committed to doing just one of those things a day before allowing herself to get back in bed. That list, posted on her mirror, became her lifeline. Week by week, it became two things. Then three. Then she didn’t want to get back in bed at all.
“When I finally realized that loving yourself is as simple as giving your soul the things it loves, and it has nothing to do with any external factors,” she told the crowd, “it completely changed my life.”
She introduced the “Peeled Onion” technique — a layered process of moving through your reactions from the surface emotional response down through deeper triggers rooted in past experiences and early patterns. She credited this ongoing inner work with helping her recognize when she was close to sabotaging the healthy relationship that eventually became her marriage.
“When my current husband arrived in my life, I was like, this can’t be right,” she said. “This is too safe. This is boring.” It was only through the work that she recognized safety as the gift it was — and chose it.
She spoke about Barcelona as the turning point of her European trip — the first moment she felt like she was healing more than she was grieving. She answered questions about spirituality, boundaries, financial trauma, and what it truly means to start over. On manifestation, she offered one of the afternoon’s most resonant observations: that the mistake most people make is locking so tightly into the version of success they have imagined that they close themselves off to the version the universe has actually mapped out for them. Her own breakthrough came not through the celebrity cosign she had envisioned, but through a TikTok video during COVID that went viral and found her audience in a way she never could have scripted.
On solo travel, her advice was unambiguous: every woman should do it at least once. “Learn how to be okay in your skin by yourself,” she said. “Solo travel changed my life.” She now leads destination reader trips multiple times a year, with all 2026 dates already sold out and five 2027 itineraries — spanning Europe and South America — dropping within the next two months.
She and her co-writer, Haley, are actively in meetings around bringing Eat, Pray, #FML to the screen, with the possibility of a feature film now on the table. Her husband, Taymour Ghazi, co-authored their most recent release, Finding You Through Finding Me, out in November.
By the time she wrapped, the women aboard the Northwind were transformed — not in a loud, performative way, but in the quiet, certain way that happens when something true lands exactly where it was meant to.
This Is What the New Normal Looks Like
What Aloni Ford has created with Yacht Girls Book Club is a blueprint. It is proof that you can bring women together in a luxury space, center meaningful content, price it so that access is real, and produce an experience that women drive across the county to be part of — and leave changed by. Sunday was not an outlier. It is the standard Ford has been setting since 2019, and the community she has built around it is only growing.
The question is not whether this kind of event should exist. The question is why you are not already at the next one.
Follow the Yacht Girls Book Club for updates on upcoming events. For more on Gabrielle Stone and her reader travel community, visit eatprayfml.com.
