In the weeks and months after Nora McInerny’s husband, Aaron, died from a brain tumor, people would ask her how she was. Reflexively, she’d answer, “Fine.”
“I certainly spent the year after Aaron died convincing everybody that I was fine, that things were OK,” McInerny said.
“I was not fine at all,” she said, “but it was easier to say that than risk giving somebody an answer they weren’t looking for when we were having brunch together or running into each other at the grocery store.”
This wasn’t healthy behavior, she now admits. “I was creating a space that didn’t serve anybody, didn’t serve my family,” she said. “It made it harder for me to be close to people who really did care about me.”
What she should have replied all along, she realizes, was, “Terrible, Thanks for asking.”
That is the title of a podcast McInerny recently launched in a partnership with St. Paul-based American Public Media, home of “Prairie Home Companion” and “Splendid Table.”
“Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” like so many other such online shows, has an interview-style format. McInerny’s guests, however, collectively fit an unusual profile: All have seen catastrophic hardship in one form or another. In other words, all could enunciate the podcast’s title as an honest summary of their situations, though the details vary widely.
One guest experienced postpartum depression while another suffered from traumatic brain injury leading to memory loss. Yet another guest miscarried and also dealt with infertility, while a fourth described how he’d prepared to confront his grandparents’ murderer.
McInerny said she got the idea for the podcast after the runaway popularity of her blog, “My Husband’s Tumor,” which chronicled how the couple lived with cancer.
That led to a Still Kickin charity that provides financial assistance to “people who find themselves going through something awful,” a best-selling memoir, “It’s OK to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too“), and a burgeoning writing career with articles appearing regularly in the likes of Elle and Cosmopolitan.
McInerny’s rising visibility caused her email inbox to swell with stories from ordinary people whose lives have been devastated in one way or another.
“I had all these stories, and I wanted to give people a platform,” she noted. “These are stories from folks who aren’t famous, or quasi-internet-famous like me. These are stories from people we might otherwise not hear from.”
Such people “have just experienced a loss and want to say it to someone,” she said. “They want someone to be witness. They often say, ‘This doesn’t compare to your situation,’ but I tell them their heavy is plenty heavy. I am not here weighing them.”
Beyond a vague podcast idea, she was unclear on how to proceed.
“I can’t stress enough how very little I knew about making a podcast,” she said. “But podcasts that interest me have to have a story. They’re a mix of narrative writing and interviewing.”
But she said she was in good hands at APM, which went for her show idea with little hesitation.
The first full episode (labeled episode “0”) last November was somewhat of an air-clearing exercise. She opened up about being in a new relationship, and having just had a baby, something she previously had worked to keep largely private.
In the episode, she recalls having given a talk and afterward, during Q&A, being asked if she was pregnant. She was, in fact, but channeled her inner Angelina Jolie by snippily replying, “Next question.”
McInerny now aspires to be more open about her new life, which has included a new love. She recently announced her engagement on Instagram:
2015: meet.
2016: fall in love. Buy a house. Have a baby.
2017: buy a minivan.
The only next logical step after that is to marry the dummy, so what’s what I’m gonna do.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRCuH_CARw6/
She said her life is still a stew of potent feelings: ongoing grief about losing her first love and a happiness she sometimes distrusts.
“Every single widow I know has the same conflict about being in love again, about being happy,” she said. “A lot of us almost feel like it’s not OK.”
An early episode partly focuses on the “Hot Young Widows Club,” a group she co-founded to help her and others like her cope with complicated lives and emotions.
For one episode, she was set to speak with a wife about her husband, who was going through hospice — but then the man died. The woman wanted to go on the show anyway, showing up at the APM studios “not even 24 hours after losing the love of her life,” McInerny said.
An upcoming episode consists of a five-month-later catch-up conversation with that woman, McInerny said.
For another episode, she interviewed a woman who is outspoken about her rape.
“Sexual violence thrives in silence, and it’s hard to talk about, so we don’t,” McInerny writes. “ But rape survivor Sarah Super refuses to be quiet and has dedicated her life to helping other survivors Break the Silence.”
This is one of the episodes that made the biggest impact on listeners, many of whom were prompted to write in, she said.
One of the episodes that made the biggest impact on McInerny involved her father, a Vietnam War veteran who has now passed.
For the episode, she and her producer, Hans Buetow, traveled to Houston, Texas, for a Marine Corps reunion with many of her father’s old comrades in attendance. She didn’t know what to expect as she sat in a hotel room with sound gear set up all around her.
“I just listened to these men I never met but who’d served with my father,” she recalled. “I watched them weep about things that happened decades ago. I will never forget that.”
