Description:

In this Book Club edition of For the Love, Jen sits down with novelist Annie Hartnett to talk about The Road to Tender Hearts — a book Jen calls heart-wrenching, heartwarming, weird, hilarious, and deeply satisfying all at once.

They open with a very funny catch-up from Me Camp, the solo month Jen takes every July. This year she’s in a tiny lake town in Canada, cooking, meeting neighbors, reading on the deck at sunset — and buying blueberries for scones instead of checking her calendar.

From there, Annie traces her path from high-school art major to novelist, and the two teachers whose offhand comments redirected both of their lives. She unpacks the real backstory behind the novel: a Providence rental house that delivered basement floods, gas leaks, black mold, vicious rats, a falling tree, and a neighborhood tragedy — all in 2020 — and the anxiety that followed her to a new town anyway. Her answer was to write down every bad thing she feared could happen to her family, then make it as funny as she possibly could.

Jen and Annie also get into:

• PJ Halliday, built from Annie’s dad and grandfather — lottery dreams, storytelling, lollipop trees and all
• Pancakes the death-predicting cat, inspired by Oscar, a real Rhode Island nursing-home cat
• Why Ivy and Fred keep loving PJ, and what that tells us about him
• How a talking cat in chapter one bought Annie the freedom to go very dark
• Writing grief, addiction, and fear without losing the comedy
• The “year of floundering” that starts every new book
• Why readers mourn whichever character they want, no matter what the author intended

Jen closes by asking what Annie’s reading, and Annie makes a hard case for Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “Life is suffering and joy.” — Pancakes, The Road to Tender Hearts
• “I realized in that class that I could be exactly who I am. I could be weird and I could be really accepted.” — Annie
• “Your words are not wasted. The stuff that you say into our little ears when we are formative and searching can absolutely set me on a path.” — Jen
• “She took my face in her hands and said, Jennifer, you have a gift for words and you should use it.” — Jen
• “I will put every bad thing that I think could happen to my family in a book, but I will make it as funny as possible.” — Annie
• “That’s how I feel like that’s the only way you get through bad things — to talk about them. But also to make them funny.” — Annie
• “I love people despite their flaws, sometimes because of their flaws.” — Annie
• “He has to be loved before he can really… he wants to be in the family.” — Annie, on PJ
• “The year of floundering, when you spend a year just flopping around like a fish out of water.” — Annie

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
• Unlikely Animals and Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
• Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.anniehartnett.com/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/annie_hartnett

Newsletter - https://www.anniehartnett.com/newletter

Connect with Jen!

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Description:

Jen is coming to you from the last two days of Me Camp in Canada, eyeballs on the lake, four weeks into having the volume turned down on every channel. And when the static quiets, the truer things rise up. In this me-to-you episode, Jen kicks off August's theme of honesty with the idea at the spine of the whole month: there is the thing we say, and then there is a truer sentence sitting an inch underneath it. And usually one inch under that.

Jen shares what her own silence cost in the last years of her marriage, names the difference between truth-telling and truth-throwing, and offers the gentlest possible place to begin: one true sentence, one page, just between you and you.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “Staying quiet only masquerades as keeping the peace. We are genuinely just deferring the bill.”
• “It doesn't disappear just because we're not willing to look it in the eye. It just goes underground, but it charges interest.”
• “So here I am thinking I'm protecting this marriage, protecting the kids — and I was actually helping to sink the ship.”
• “My body was absolutely telling the truth. Maybe my mouth wasn't, but my body was.”
• “There is a difference between truth telling and truth throwing.”
• “Honest is not the same thing as "unfiltered." Honest and kind are not opposites.”
• “You are not too much, and your real self is not an inconvenience.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The AWAKE Collective, the monthly live gathering where this conversation started, included with a paid subscription to Jen’s Substack: jenhatmaker.substack.com
• Letters from the Middle, Jen’s Substack, where the honesty conversation continues all month: jenhatmaker.substack.com
• Tell us your story — head to jenhatmaker.com/podcast, look for the Send Voicemail button, and tell Jen the quiet thing you finally said out loud (or the one you’re working up to).

Connect with Jen!

Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Substack - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Description:

Some yeses cost us something. Some of them save us.

Jen sits down with her partner, actor, author, and speaker Tyler Merritt, hours after his chemotherapy infusion. Tyler is midway through treatment for colorectal cancer, his second diagnosis in six years, and the two get honest about making thoughtful decisions when your body is calling every shot.

They talk about the yes Tyler gave in the middle of radiation: booking a brand-new theater tour that opens seventeen days after his last chemo, a yes he says he "arguably shouldn't have" given, made so he'd have something beautiful to walk toward. Jen turns the lens on her own year and the yes she almost took back: getting on the plane to Me Camp after a hysterectomy, a brutal spring, and a boyfriend in chemo two thousand miles away.

Tyler also flips the mic and asks Jen whether she regrets writing AWAKE. Her answer is about closure, discretion, and the two longest weeks of her life waiting to hear what her daughter thought of the book.

Plus: how to tell your intuition from everybody else's fear, Jen's top three Me Camp TV experiences, one Enneagram argument, and the one yes Tyler is still too scared to say out loud.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• "There is something absolutely sacred in choosing your body in a time period where it may not be convenient." — Tyler

• "Rest is the thing that I choose. Rest is my sacred yes." — Tyler

• "It's not a yes that feels obligated. It's not coerced. It isn't even careless. It's thoughtful. It is baked in with wisdom." — Jen

• "In the midst of the fire, I made the decision to do something that would be difficult if I was just healthy." — Tyler

• "When someone else puts their caution on your yes, that can be a real governor on forward progress." — Jen

• "The sacred yes I'm afraid to say out loud is that I'm going to be okay." — Tyler

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• AWAKE by Jen Hatmaker
• I Take My Coffee Black by Tyler Merritt
• Tyler's new theater tour, opening August 28
• Me Camp, the Enneagram, and Jeremy Pope
• John Candy: I Like Me, Widows Bay, The Bear, The Five-Star Weekend

Guest's Links:

Website - thetylermerrittproject.com

Instagram - @thetylermerrittproject

Twitter - @TTMProject

Facebook - The Tyler Merritt Project

Youtube - The Tyler Merritt Project

Connect with Jen! Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker Jen's Twitter -