The Terrible Reading Club

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.

Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Apple Books or Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

For book discussion guides and a community of Terrible bookworms just like you, join The Terrible Reading Club on Substack! It's free!

The Terrible Reading Club team is Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Megan Palmer, Marcel Malekebu, Kara Nesvig, Jordan Turgeon, and Michelle Plantan.

Got a book you want to recommend? Send us a note at [email protected].

Our upcoming reading list can be found here.

Find all our shows and our store at feelingsand.co.

The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Originally published on “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” on October 12th, 2021

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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.

Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Apple Books or Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

For book discussion guides and a community of Terrible bookworms just like you, join The Terrible Reading Club on Substack! It's free!

Got a book you want to recommend? Send us a note at [email protected].

The Terrible Reading Club team is Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Megan Palmer, Marcel Malekebu, Kara Nesvig, Jordan Turgeon, and Michelle Plantan.

Our upcoming reading list can be found here.

Find all our shows and our store at feelingsand.co.

The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Originally published on “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” on September 23, 2021

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone knows who Britney Spears is ... or do we? For many people, Britney is frozen in time circa 2002. For others, she faded away after 2008 until her gut-wrenching testimony about her 13-year conservatorship in 2021. Much of Britney’s life story has been told to us by others: Us Weekly, Perez Hilton, her father, the speculating crowds of the internet. But for the first time in a very, very long time, Britney is telling her own story in her new memoir, The Woman in Me.

Today on Terrible Reading Club’s first-ever EMERGENCY EPISODE, Nora and fellow Britney superfan Kara Nesvig (who also created The Britney Spears Oracle Deck) do a deep dive on The Woman in Me, Britney’s legacy and the many, MANY people who owe Britney a public apology.

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Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

Got a book recommendation? Send it our way by emailing us at [email protected].

—

Find all our shows and our store at feelingsand.co.

The episode transcript can be found here.

Find The Terrible Reading Club on Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Harrison Scott Key discovered his wife was cheating on him, he wasn’t about to break his wedding vows. He was going to save his marriage, and that quest involved taking a good hard look at how he’d failed his wife too. The result? A happily ever after — well, sort of — and the memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.

Harrison joins Nora to talk about the extremely wild ride called marriage and why he decided to let his wife write the (second to) last chapter in their not-quite divorce story.

Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Apple Books or Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

Got a book recommendation? Send it our way by emailing us at [email protected].

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Nora’s new Happyish journal and affirmation deck based on her own journaling practices launches today! We have a special deal for you on these new items:

25% discount for the Em & Friends website. Coupon code: HAPPYISH25. This will only work on the Em & Friends website, not on Amazon.

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Find all our shows and our store at feelingsand.co.

The episode transcript can be found here.

Find The Terrible Reading Club on Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2014, 12-year-old Payton "Bella" Leutner was stabbed 19 times by two other tween girls. The crime was well publicized as the Slenderman stabbings because the two girls who committed the stabbing said a fictional character named Slenderman told them to do it. The girls were tried as adults for attempted murder (Payton lived) and went to jail.

In her book Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, journalist Kathleen Hale looks at this true crime story through a new lens: that the girls who stabbed Payton were dealing with severe mental illness that the justice system in Wisconsin ignored.

Nora and Kathleen discuss the legal realities of this case, how the media portrayed the story and how we can all think about true crime consumption differently.

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Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

Got a book recommendation? Send it our way by emailing us at [email protected].

—

Find all our shows and our store at feelingsand.co.

The episode transcript can be found here.

Find The Terrible Reading Club on Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices