When Nora lost her dad, her second pregnancy, and her husband in the fall of 2015, people gifted her a lot of books. Why? Because people want to say and do the right thing when times are hard … want to make everything better as fast as possible. Many of those books ended up in the donation pile immediately, but one of the books Nora actually read was by Anne Lamott.

Since then, she’s read all of Anne’s books — including her latest, Dusk Night Dawn. So it only made sense to kick off this new show with Nora’s conversation with Anne.

John Green is one of Nora’s favorite observers of humanity, in part because of how gentle he is with even the most maddening parts of human existence: illness (both mental and physical), human foibles and failures. And maybe most impressively, he’s a creator who has existed on the Internet without letting it completely destroy him and his opinions of humanity.

In today’s episode, Nora talks with John about his book The Anthropocene Reviewed.

When sickness has become the center of your life, when the goal posts move from “get better” to “live,” you do not simply wake up better and get on with it.

In today’s episode, Nora talks with Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms. Suleika was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia when she was 22. A major spoiler for her book (and for this episode) is that Suleika lives. She survives cancer, the stated goal for every patient, but… then what?

Our brains and our minds fragile, and they’re housed in our fragile little human bodies that just break unexpectedly. 

That’s where Drew Magary found himself: the owner of a broken skull and a badly damaged brain. But you’d really never know it — because on the outside, he looked mostly fine!

In this episode, Nora talks with Drew about his memoir, The Night The Lights Went Out, and the insidiousness that is recovering from a traumatic brain injury.

There are people in the world who were once kids who grew up without the kind of parents you see on ‘90s sitcoms, kids whose parents abdicated all responsibility, who walked off the job, who just didn’t do the one thing they were supposed to have done.

Danielle Henderson was one of those kids. She’s a grown-up now, and author of The Ugly Cry, a book that traces Danielle’s childhood as a Black girl in a very white town in upstate New York with a mother who was struggling with her own life’s disappointments. She and Nora talk about using humor to address trauma and the importance of foundational relationships.

Self-help books sell mostly because they are selling you a way to solve a problem, and the problem is you. It’s never something that’s out of your control, or bigger than you, it’s just… you. But today’s book, even if it’s shelved in the self-help section, is different.

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis is the most compassionate, most practical, most understanding book about how to do the kind of tasks that can confound and, like it says, drown you. In this episode, Nora talks with KC about the problems that arise when having a clean home becomes a moral issue.

Adolescence is generally a pretty terrible part of a person’s life. Being a teenager is hard! It (often) sucks!

But reading about teenagers doesn’t suck, and one of Nora’s favorite YA authors is Kathleen Glasgow.

In this episode, Nora talks with Kathleen about her book You’d Be Home Now, which tackles addiction and mental health and a lot of other tough subjects that impact young people. They also talk about being Twihards, because obviously.