No Happy Endings: A Memoir

The author of Its Okay to Laugh and host of the popular podcast Terrible, Thanks for Askinginterviews that are a gift to be able to listen [to] (New York Times)returns with more hilarious meditations on her messy, wonderful, bittersweet, and unconventional life. Life has a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose love, lose jobs, lose our sense of self. For Nora McInerny, it was losing her husband, her father, and her unborn second child in one catastrophic year. But in the wake of loss, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind. Some circles call finding happiness after loss Chapter 2the continuation of something else. Today, Nora is remarried and mothers four children aged 16 months to 16 years. While her new circumstances bring her extraordinary joy, they are also tinged with sadness over the loved ones shes lost. Life has made Nora a reluctant expert in hard conversations. On her wildly popular podcast, she talks about painful experiences we inevitably face, and exposes the absurdity of the question how are you? that people often ask when were coping with the aftermath of emotional catastrophe. She knows intimately that when your life falls apart, theres a mad rush to be okayto find a silver lining, to get to the happy ending. In this, her second memoir, Nora offers a tragicomic exploration of the tension between finding happiness and holding space for the unhappy experiences that have shaped us. No Happy Endings is a book for people living life after life has fallen apart. Its a book for people who know that theyre moving forward, not moving on. Its a book for people who know life isnt always happy, but it isnt the end: there will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy. As Nora reminds us, there will be no happy endingsbut there will be new beginnings.