Death, sex, money … and podcasting? (via Bookends) - Episode Artwork
Culture

Death, sex, money … and podcasting? (via Bookends)

In this episode of Bookends, host Mateo Roach sits down with Anna Sale, the creator of the acclaimed podcast Death, Sex, and Money. They delve into the themes of her podcast and her new book, Let'...

Death, sex, money … and podcasting? (via Bookends)
Death, sex, money … and podcasting? (via Bookends)
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Interactive Transcript

spk_0 What happens when an identity is stolen?
spk_0 And then what happens when there isn't anyone or any document to help you get it back?
spk_0 She's saying, I'm innocent, I am William Woods.
spk_0 One William Woods ended up in prison.
spk_0 The other went on to live a normal life for decades.
spk_0 I'm Kathleen Goldtar and this week on Crime Story, the two lives of William Woods.
spk_0 Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
spk_0 This is a CBC Podcast.
spk_0 Hey OPP listeners, this is Mateo Roach.
spk_0 I host another CBC Podcast called Bookends.
spk_0 It's a show where I sit down for honest conversations with some of today's best authors.
spk_0 We talk about their writing, their inspirations, and their lives,
spk_0 and we don't shy away from the tough conversations.
spk_0 That was especially true for my conversation with the writer and interviewer Anna Sale.
spk_0 You may know Anna from her beloved podcast, Death, Sex, and Money.
spk_0 And she also wrote a book called Let's Talk About Hard Things,
spk_0 which is essentially an extension of that podcast.
spk_0 Anna joined me on Bookends recently to dive into her show and her book.
spk_0 We talked about everything from pondering mortality to my obsessive avoidance of paying ATM fees.
spk_0 And we talked a bit about our problems too, which from the fact that you listened to this show,
spk_0 I gather you might enjoy.
spk_0 I hope you enjoy this special bonus episode,
spk_0 and that this conversation resonates with you as much as it did with me.
spk_0 And now without further ado, here's my conversation with Anna Sale on Bookends.
spk_0 Hey there, welcome to Bookends. I'm Mateo Roach.
spk_0 The producers of Bookends and I often joke that it can be hard for us to get through recording an episode
spk_0 without either hearing about grief or sexuality.
spk_0 Sometimes we manage to actually cover both at the same time.
spk_0 If a book can spark a provocative and challenging conversation, usually we're all in.
spk_0 My guest today, Anna Sale, is all about having conversations that others might shy away from.
spk_0 Her long-running podcast, Death, Sex, and Money, grapples with all kinds of hot button and sometimes taboo topics.
spk_0 And Anna wrote a book drawing from that experience called Let's Talk About Hard Things.
spk_0 It discusses what she's learned from years of hosting her show and from her own life.
spk_0 Anna joined me from her home in Berkeley for this conversation.
spk_0 Hi Anna, welcome to Bookends.
spk_0 Thank you for having me.
spk_0 So we were actually quite surprised and excited when your producers reached out to us and said that you'd listen to our show.
spk_0 And I'm curious what interested you in bookends, why you wanted to come on and chat with us.
spk_0 I don't know. Actually, honestly, let's see. I think it's probably been about the last 18 months.
spk_0 I've just decided that I, as far as what I let into my brain, I want it to be a lot more long form writing and books,
spk_0 unless short takes that are like arrows that pierce my amygdala and get me into fighter flight mode.
spk_0 So I've just been taking in more book podcasts and book interview podcasts.
spk_0 And I like the pace and the thoughtfulness of just spending time in those waters instead of in waters where I've spent maybe the 10 years before that,
spk_0 which is just like Twitter, X, Internet, commentary.
spk_0 Was there a specific thing that happened or a specific moment that you can point to where you realize this short form stuff is just not doing it for me anymore?
spk_0 And I need to pivot away from consuming so much of that.
spk_0 I don't think it was one moment, but I think I noticed, I don't know if you've experienced this as an interviewer,
spk_0 but there was like a period probably like 2019 till 2022 before Twitter and X kind of began to recede from its dominant position in the culture,
spk_0 where I could hear the response of the public in my ears before I even asked a question.
spk_0 And I think it made me a less sophisticated interviewer, a less brave thinker.
spk_0 I think I became more intolerant of ambiguity.
spk_0 I was constantly thinking like where do I stand and how am I positioning myself alongside or within this chorus that had become this sort of Internet commentary.
spk_0 And so it just got really loud and books are just more...
spk_0 Books allow for a lot more complexity, you know?
spk_0 I don't agree with every book author I read.
spk_0 I probably don't agree with everything I wrote in my book now that it's been a few years.
spk_0 But I just like, I think it's better for my nervous system to spend time with longer paragraphs.
spk_0 I want to talk about your journey as an interviewer and your journey working on Death, Sex, and Money before we circle back around to your book,
spk_0 just because it's such a... you know, it's big words, it's big concepts.
spk_0 And these are things that as you say people often avoid discussing.
spk_0 I know before Death, Sex, and Money, you were kind of a more conventional like Newsy political reporter for a period of time.
spk_0 What inspired you to start a podcast that had those three subjects as your focus and move away from that political, Newsy type of journalism?
spk_0 I covered politics pretty exclusively from about 2010 till 2013 when I conceived of Death, Sex, and Money and Pitched it.
spk_0 And I was mostly covering kind of the Permacampains.
spk_0 So you had this contrast of candidates who said the most kind of focus grouped talking points ever that were not really saying anything.
spk_0 And then I would talk to... another thing I really love to do was just talk to people who were in different consequential districts and ask them like, what's going on in your life?
spk_0 Do you feel like things are on the right track or the wrong track?
spk_0 And you would hear these really beautiful detailed stories and you could see the way people kind of opened up and flowered when somebody took three minutes to say like, what's going on with you?
spk_0 And they were complicated tough stories that people shared when I started with like, I'm a public radio reporter covering the campaign and just want to know what's going on in your life.
spk_0 And so I think that the origins of Death, Sex, and Money were responding to that contrast.
spk_0 It was both a response to the artifice of what the politicians were saying, you know, what they were leaving out, the complexity that they refused to acknowledge.
spk_0 And I also wanted to give more time to the stories of people who I would have these incredible conversations, shopping mall with them.
spk_0 And I would use two or three, twenty second clips from them to illustrate why polls were a certain way.
spk_0 And I was like, what is the point of what I'm making is to spend time with someone's story as opposed to extracting an anecdote to then tell a story that's...
spk_0 just about what political polls are doing that week.
spk_0 I want to ask now about the book, let's talk about hard things.
spk_0 Your book is divided into five sections, discussing how to have hard conversations about death, sex, and money as per the title of the podcast, but also family and identity.
spk_0 How did those come to be as the other two hard things that were going to be included as big chunks of the book?
spk_0 In my book proposal, I think there were like nine or ten chapters, like friendship, work, you know, all these different things.
spk_0 And then it was like, okay, what if I, what if I pair it back a little bit because it starts to get a little, you know, you don't want to...
spk_0 They sort of, the overlap is, it starts to get more overlap.
spk_0 I mean, work and money, I think, for instance, like a lot of concerns about work are really concerns about money.
spk_0 Yes, and status.
spk_0 But family and identity felt particular in that family I sort of define as both, you know, the choices we make about the own families that we cultivate.
spk_0 But the families that were born into these relationships that we had no choice in the matter.
spk_0 And then we have to figure out how we want to work at, how we want to try to evolve these relationships, what we want to accept about them.
spk_0 And how that can change over the course of a relationship.
spk_0 And identity just felt very like, you know, the way that you approach hard conversations is so, like, so dependent on how you feel oriented to the person you're talking with.
spk_0 And so much of that is how you think about who you are in relation to them and how you think you are perceived by them and how you are in fact perceived by them, which is all about identity.
spk_0 So that's how I came to those five.
spk_0 It's interesting you mentioned that there are memory pieces in this book and you do share quite openly about some tough conversations you've had to have over the course of your life.
spk_0 I'm curious though you acknowledge that you've not always been the best at openly discussing some of these subjects in your own life with your loved ones.
spk_0 Out of those five topics that you discuss and let's talk about hard things, is there one that you still find a bit thorny or that you find more of a struggle perhaps than some of the others?
spk_0 Oh, sure.
spk_0 I mean, let me say first part of making this book, which I think when I look back at the process, what was probably the most incredible, incredible part relationally for me was I just made a commitment to myself that anybody who in my life who I wrote about I've shared the pages with them.
spk_0 And so that meant sharing pages with my parents sharing pages with my sister sharing pages with my ex husband sharing pages with my current husband.
spk_0 And so that, you know, when you're doing that in the process of writing a memoir, like it keeps you honest and it also makes you face the fact that you're not writing in a little hole that nobody's ever going to discover, you know, this is not a journal.
spk_0 This is a book that's going to be published and it's going to have consequences for my life and the lives of people I love.
spk_0 And so taking care with that process was really one of the scariest parts of it because, you know, I'm figuring out what I want to say about these relationships and these memories.
spk_0 And then I have to say, hey, what do you think about this? Do you think that I'm accurate and also do you how do you feel about me writing about this publicly?
spk_0 I guess when I was writing the book, I think for me writing about money was very tricky.
spk_0 I just have a lot of that's my that's my particular suitcase of baggage that I carry around is how I feel about scarcity.
spk_0 And that's where I hook to feel safe is like, am I doing enough to make sure that my savings account is tended to and there's parts of that part of my personality that I just find odious and gross.
spk_0 But I've kind of loosened up around that now and I think if I were writing the book now, as I've gotten older and we're in a more deep into middle age, just the reality of death and it's not an abstract concept, but it's like people you love disappear off the face of the earth.
spk_0 I think that would feel more difficult now.
spk_0 That's interesting because it's not like in the book, you don't have direct experience with death like you talk about actually being at this family.
spk_0 I think it was in was it an anniversary celebration, I think for some of your family members and then grandparents, yeah, your grandparents anniversary and then having, you know, a relative not one of your grandparents actually die at that celebration and everyone being around like that is a pretty intense experience to see death up close like that.
spk_0 Why do you think in middle age now it's become harder to talk about death?
spk_0 I think so and I was a, you know, I was a mid teenager when that happened and when I think back on that experience, it was my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary and my great uncle had been having heart trouble and he collapsed at the party and the EMTs came at the party and CPR was performed at the party in front of his kids, you know, his entire family.
spk_0 We were all in the room watching and then we all gathered together days later for his funeral.
spk_0 It was certainly a shock of, you know, this is an example of someone is here one moment and then not here.
spk_0 But more than that part of the memory, it is such a beautiful memory that this was a community in a family where the rituals around death and memorializing someone you love and how you gather and who brings the food.
spk_0 And who cleans up the community hall and the church after all of that was really, they knew how to do it.
spk_0 And I think actually, you know, that's not how my life is organized now. That was in a affirming community in North Carolina.
spk_0 If I were to drop dead today in Berkeley, California, I don't know where if there would be a memorial service for me, right?
spk_0 Like I don't live in my community that I grew up in.
spk_0 I, you know, have plenty of friends here, but I have plenty of friends and loved ones elsewhere.
spk_0 You know, those kinds of things, like it actually likes thinking about that memory makes me feel more anxious about being sort of cut off from pretty clear rituals around death.
spk_0 And I think that, you know, feeling yourself age and watching people you love age, I've watched people I love since writing the book.
spk_0 You know, I've watched people who've lost some cognitive acuity and there's a certain, there's a grief to that.
spk_0 And then I've watched people who are very sharp right until their last breath and you can't believe the injustice that it's just their body is going to take them away from us when they are still so there.
spk_0 So I don't know. I think there's plenty of new things to me to feel find hard about death.
spk_0 Yeah.
spk_0 I'm Meredith Goldstein, host of the Boston Globes Love Letters Podcast, which features real people from all over the world telling stories about their relationship lives.
spk_0 This season we're talking about how to change for the better.
spk_0 I just remember thinking like wow, this is what a healthy relationship looks and feels like.
spk_0 The reason why I'm getting emotional is I didn't want to leave you.
spk_0 I never thought I would be this way again.
spk_0 Join us at Love Letters, wherever you get your podcasts.
spk_0 You talk a lot and let's talk about hard things in the sort of family identity portion of things about being from West Virginia and moving away first to go to school and then later, you know, living in New York, now living in Berkeley.
spk_0 I've had kind of a similar experience of being from Halifax in Nova Scotia, but I've lived in Toronto my whole adult life.
spk_0 I feel very rooted in Nova Scotia still, even though all of my stuff, most of my friends are all here in Toronto.
spk_0 West Virginia seems to loom similarly large for you, I feel.
spk_0 What is it about that place that makes it such a core part of your identity even after so many years away?
spk_0 I grew up in West Virginia and my whole growing up, my family has all left.
spk_0 I feel deeply rooted there and I also feel so grateful for the sense of values that I was born with and raised in there.
spk_0 A lot around community, a lot around, I don't know about what your community was like, but in West Virginia, there was a lot of little words that you lose, used that I find that don't come up in my life in fancy cities.
spk_0 Like an insult in junior high was you would call somebody stuck up if they seemed like they weren't, you know, if they thought they were too good.
spk_0 No, but that's not such an insult, I don't think in major urban centers.
spk_0 Right, and I really love that that was part of the judgment of people.
spk_0 It's like this person doesn't know how to talk to everybody and doesn't try and we think that that's bad.
spk_0 Because I agree with that.
spk_0 And so I feel very connected to that place and I root for it.
spk_0 And I think when I was writing this book, I just had my second kid, it was becoming more and more clear that the rest of my adult life was being built elsewhere.
spk_0 I wasn't going to go home and live in West Virginia.
spk_0 And so there's kind of like that hanging, it's kind of like picture like a potted plant and you just have these, you pull it out of the pot and you just have these roots kind of hanging in the air.
spk_0 And I felt for a long time really like, what does it mean that I care about this place so much and I'm not there and I'm not putting my shoulder to the wheel there along with other people.
spk_0 And I've sort of softened on that a little bit.
spk_0 But I actually think it's quite important to have people in media organizations and in cities who understand smaller communities and who understand agricultural heritage who understand the building blocks of a small community and why something like divestment is as traumatic as it is.
spk_0 So I've come to appreciate that both living in fancy cities and spending time in rural places is part of my life and not feeling like I have to choose so much.
spk_0 But it took a while.
spk_0 I know you grew up in Charleston, which is the capital of West Virginia.
spk_0 How big of a city center actually is that because a lot of what you're describing is sort of rural life agricultural life.
spk_0 In Nova Scotia, there's a big difference.
spk_0 I would say culturally between Halifax, which is where I grew up and then rural communities or like my dad grew up in a mining town, my mom grew up in in like a fishing village.
spk_0 So their experiences were totally different than mine and I feel like I kind of have stolen dollar a little bit if I talk about those communities.
spk_0 Yes.
spk_0 Oh, 100%. I have so much Appalachian stolen valor.
spk_0 I'm from like, like if you were to see what my life looked like when I was growing up in Charleston, it was all the trappings of generic American suburbia.
spk_0 But I think that there is something about West Virginia and I spend a lot of time now in rural Wyoming.
spk_0 My town growing up was about 50,000 people and the town in Wyoming where I spend time now is about 10,000 people.
spk_0 So they're not teeny tiny.
spk_0 You know, they have big grocery stores.
spk_0 But I do think even in those communities, there's a sense of like, just perspective.
spk_0 Like you get it.
spk_0 You know, just I can't to grow up in West Virginia how often leaving the state you would have to remind people that you weren't from Virginia.
spk_0 Like West Virginia was its own place.
spk_0 It's not the biggest deal in the world that people don't talk about your state all the time.
spk_0 But when you are when it's you know, it creates a chip on your shoulder.
spk_0 And so when I had this very like traditionally suburban life, but I have the same chip as a lot of other West Virginians, there's a lot that we kind of come together around and feel like we celebrate together.
spk_0 You know, when we sing country roads together, like you know, we are all West Virginia.
spk_0 It's a classic song.
spk_0 You talk about having this kind of almost chip on your shoulder, leaving West Virginia and coming into contact with people who were, let's say maybe more stereotypically coastal elite.
spk_0 And specifically, I know you went to college at Stanford, which is like one of the most
spk_0 coastal places you can go.
spk_0 I would say from West Virginia, right?
spk_0 What was that experience like? Was that complete culture shock? Did you find yourself having to shed pieces of yourself at all to navigate that environment?
spk_0 I just think I was 19, 18, 19 when I showed up there and I did not understand the technology economy at all.
spk_0 I landed there right before the first comm crash. So there was no sense that there was ever going to be any kind of ceiling unpossibility.
spk_0 And I didn't really understand why some of my classmates were talking about dropping out to start startups.
spk_0 And I remember being like, but wait, but what is your startup going to do?
spk_0 Like I just couldn't understand it. And I still don't really get it.
spk_0 But it was this mix of both feeling totally apart from this culture and trying to understand it.
spk_0 And also feeling just a thing about Stanford, like most fancy colleges, like the physical space is designed to create a sense of awe.
spk_0 So I also felt this sense of, oh my god, this opportunity to be among all of these smart kids with the libraries.
spk_0 You could look up anything and there were like six copies.
spk_0 So I just, I felt this mix of, gosh, I feel so disoriented and don't really understand who I am in relation to this place and what I'm doing here.
spk_0 And also I better figure out how to make the most of it.
spk_0 Yeah, you mentioned that money conversations in particular can be harder because people have a desire to relate to one another, but it becomes clear so quickly sometimes that there's just no relating across certain class differences.
spk_0 Is that something you've experienced at all in your life?
spk_0 If I know you also talk about like being very comfortable, perhaps talking about specific numbers in close conversation with friends or with people that work in the same industries you, but not wanting to invite kind of weird comparisons in public.
spk_0 Yeah, it's not necessarily even cross class conversations that can get difficult, but there's so it's very difficult to track whether you share the same definitions as somebody else when you're starting a conversation.
spk_0 I think about showing up at Stanford and I remember there was like one of those ice breakers and it was you're supposed to walk across the line if you were one of the people.
spk_0 And it was something like you come from a rich family was the thing.
spk_0 And in my memory, my dad was a doctor at Surgeon in West Virginia.
spk_0 So in my whole growing up, the whole thing that my parent like I knew I was a rich kid in West Virginia.
spk_0 So I like march across the room. And then I look around and I'm like one of like I can't remember if there was like one or two other people and I turned and I looked at all these people from my dorm who I knew had very fancy families in very fancy places and had gone to private schools in Southern California.
spk_0 But because they grew up in proximity to Beverly Hills, they didn't self identify as rich because there was always a richer family.
spk_0 And so I was just like, wow, this is weird.
spk_0 And so when I was thinking about the money chapter, yeah, it's so tricky when you, I can remember being an early parent like my kid, my first time parent.
spk_0 And when you have become a first time parent and you don't live near family, you are inundated with the harsh reality of whatever your housing costs are at plus childcare costs.
spk_0 And when I was becoming a first time parent, I was also moving to the Bay Area, going back to work in four months and had to figure out who was going to take care of this infant when I went back to work.
spk_0 And so you start kind of like kind of talking to other sort of older moms around you like, how did you do it? How did you pay for it?
spk_0 And you just talked to like moms at the playground. How do you pay for childcare? That kind of thing. And there's, you know, coded, oh, well we did a nanny.
spk_0 So then you're like, okay, that person has money for nanny. We did, we did daycare in this way that we did on campus, you know, childcare.
spk_0 So there's all these ways you're sort of figuring out the puzzle of like, are they like me and can we compare notes? And if I tell them what I'm able to afford at this point, is it going to be going to make our relationship feel less close because one of us will feel embarrassed.
spk_0 So there's all these like landmines while you're trying to make very concrete decisions about how much is it going to cost for me to have childcare, right?
spk_0 So it just, you have the puzzle, the problem solving piece, and then you have all the emotional piece and the relational stuff that you're trying to like, wade through.
spk_0 So I think that one thing that when I was writing that chapter that I really kind of kept coming back to is like, when you talk about money, you have to start so far back in the like definition of terms.
spk_0 It's like, what do I think money is for? Is money for creating more ease in my life as I like go back to work as a first time parent or is money for creating this sense of stability.
spk_0 So I want to get the best value I possibly can't like, there's really different answers to those questions depending on how you define what money is for.
spk_0 And so you got to figure out for yourself, then you've got to figure it out if you've got a partner you're making money decisions with and then you sort of go about that awkward, you know, dance of figuring out who in your life, who's a friend or a colleague that you can talk openly about it.
spk_0 Has that answer as to what money is for changed for you at all over the course of your life. I feel like you talk about money vigilance as an orientation to money in your book.
spk_0 And that was something that when I read it, I was like, oh, that's me. I have been described as having scrooge like tendencies around money, which is crazy because I am in a position where everyone kind of knows how much money I have because I want it on a game show.
spk_0 So there's no pretending like I can't afford stuff. Like I'll have friends making fun of me because I won't go to an ATM where I have to pay a fee all like walk an extra kilometer to go to my banks ATM.
spk_0 And they're like, now I know the dollar 75 is not going to bankrupt you. Why are you doing this? So I know you talk about having been very vigilant towards money.
spk_0 It sounds as though there may have been somewhat of a shift over time. I don't know.
spk_0 Yeah, I think it's partially getting more money. That helps. Yeah.
spk_0 Getting more money because then it feels a little less like scary. Also being in relationship with somebody for whom like my husband loves beauty and good food.
spk_0 So he's all about like investing in a nice house plan. He's all about like getting the right kind of tomatoes from the farmer's market, whereas like I would just go to Safeway and get like the not good tomatoes even in Berkeley.
spk_0 And so he's taught me that like there could be real pleasure in spending a little more money than you have to. I was programmed with like if I spend more money than I have to then somehow somebody is taking advantage of me is kind of this like self protection thing.
spk_0 Like I don't want to be had like that. And I've kind of loosened. I'm just like, is it worth the extra effort to walk that extra block? Like sometimes it is. And sometimes it's like, who cares?
spk_0 And I've also really come to cultivate intentionally the joy of generosity.
spk_0 Like I really have gotten into hosting at my house and like serving people good food and having good wine and like past versions of me would be very aware.
spk_0 And like we could just order pizza and it would be a you know, I'd be very aware of like being afraid that I was being indulgent or wasteful.
spk_0 And now I like it's like, oh, this is so nice to get to do this for people, you know, it feels good.
spk_0 So that has made me more relaxed. But I have two kids and I they have very different personalities around money. Some of this is taught of course, but some of it is ingrained around what your relationship is to kind of control.
spk_0 So I am trying to teach my kids like it feels good. It feels good to share.
spk_0 Interesting. And so they have different relationships with that, I guess by the sounds of it. Like what are what are the sort of compare contrast of the two kids relationships with these concepts?
spk_0 Well like I have one child who if she knows that there's like a stack of cookies on the counter and her sister isn't home, she'll be like, I'm going to eat off for cookies and not tell the other one.
spk_0 Whereas the other child will be like, oh, we'll get to save some to give her when she gets home.
spk_0 Right. Right. This is like, I yeah love to live with a sibling.
spk_0 However, I do feel like I live with a cookie eater or beer drinker. Like sometimes I'll come home and I'm like, now where where's my treat that I was looking forward to at the end of the work day.
spk_0 And he's like, whoops.
spk_0 Cookie eater beer drinker.
spk_0
spk_0 Yeah.
spk_0 Yeah.
spk_0 But you know, I mean, I don't know how old your kids are. Like at this point my brother and I were both in our 20s. Right.
spk_0 Like I've had many years to learn that that is something to expect and watch out for. So it's not as upsetting as it might have been, you know, in the cookie eater only years.
spk_0 Yes.
spk_0 You crossed my boundary.
spk_0 Yeah. Yeah.
spk_0 Oh my god. I remember one time actually we were both home for the holidays and I had taken leftover Chinese food out of the fridge and then like walked away to go grab something else.
spk_0 And then while I was away from the kitchen, he was like, well, I figured because you walked away actually weren't going to eat it. So actually I heated it up and ate all of it immediately.
spk_0 Oh, I was mad. I was so mad.
spk_0 You should have been mad.
spk_0 I was so mad. You should hang on to it.
spk_0
spk_0 It was old that grad. No, exactly. So yeah, I'll throw that one out. If I ever take anything of his out of the fridge, I'll be like, remember when in an act of egregious slavery.
spk_0 You took my Chinese leftovers.
spk_0 I want to, you know, you mentioned a couple of times through the course of our conversation with let's talk about hard things.
spk_0 There are some things that maybe now a couple years on from writing the book. You might do differently.
spk_0 How do you feel looking back at this work that contains so many personal pieces of you, so many stories of people that you're close to and care about?
spk_0 How do you feel about it all?
spk_0 When I think about what it felt like to write the book, I remember feeling a lot of heaviness and self-doubt and fear.
spk_0 It was actually hard writing about hard things.
spk_0 It was just like, am I going to get this right?
spk_0 What do I know? That's sex and money, family identity.
spk_0 Every single book ever is about one of those themes.
spk_0 And then some, what do I have to say?
spk_0 So I just remember feeling a real just heaviness.
spk_0 And when I look back at it, I feel really proud and happy that I have this record of at that time in my life when basically I like captured the snapshot of, you know, I had the great fortune of having,
spk_0 landing on something that was working, where my talents and my opportunities were lined up, career-wise.
spk_0 So that was really great. And it gave me a lot of, it gave me some room to run.
spk_0 And also at the time that I was writing this, I was figuring out how to be a wife and a mother.
spk_0 And so I was trying to distill what are my values about how I want to live in relationship and as a partner and as a parent.
spk_0 And certainly those things kind of adjust as I change, as what history demands of us change.
spk_0 But I feel really glad to have this kind of like time capsule of that moment.
spk_0 And I guess when I think about what has changed since then, since I wrote it, I do think, you know, the title is Let's Talk About Hard Things.
spk_0 And I do think like I still endorse that as a concept.
spk_0 And part of the thesis of the book is it's because so much around our rituals and kind of ways of dealing with hard things without having to talk about it.
spk_0 So much of that is sort of collapsing as US and maybe to a lesser extent, but probably also Canadian culture.
spk_0 Like it's all, it's become much more about the individual over the course of my lifetime because of the ways that capitalism has accelerated because of the ways that how communities have changed, how institutions have faltered.
spk_0 And so the argument for the book is like if more of that is on our shoulders to figure out how to lead on our own, like we have to figure out how to participate in those conversations and not flee from them because we need them.
spk_0 And I still believe that I think what has evolved is maybe in my own life, I notice there's probably more instances now where I choose to live in.
spk_0 And I think that if I want to be a bit more contentious and letting go, then like let's figure this out kind of energy, you know.
spk_0 So I think I might talk about hard things slightly less frequently because we're all doing our best.
spk_0 And there's a lot coming at us.
spk_0 And so I want to, I probably just have a little bit more want to lead with grace a little bit more than maybe I thought.
spk_0 There's a lot that you can't just solve with conversations. And there's a lot, there's probably more than I acknowledge of just sometimes we just need to figure out how to hold each other and let each other be where we are.
spk_0 That's beautiful, more difficult, you know, to do than perhaps to say for sure, but something to aspire to.
spk_0 I think the person who wrote this book, the part of my personality that was most at the fore was kind of the one with like, you know, looking really my eyes are squenched.
spk_0 And I'm like, listening really close and I'm taking notes and really trying to understand and document.
spk_0 And I think the part of me that's like, I've tried to let lead a little bit more is maybe like my middle aged Berkeley mom and Lynn and clothing kind of just like, it's all right.
spk_0 You know, maybe it was the moving to Berkeley. I don't know. This is not a very New York energy. I would say neither a very West Virginia.
spk_0 I don't know where she lives, but I think it has to do with turning 45 is just kind of like, we're trying our best.
spk_0 And there's a lot coming at us. Something for me to look forward to, I suppose 20 years in the future.
spk_0 I don't know how I'm going to make it that far before chilling out. And I thank you so much for joining me today.
spk_0 It's been such a pleasure talking with you. And I feel like I've learned a lot from listening to your interview. So this is really cool for me too.
spk_0 Thank you for having me. It's nice.
spk_0 I really enjoyed speaking with Anna, podcaster to podcaster. You can tell she knows ball. And she's so thoughtful about her craft.
spk_0 I feel like I learn a lot from listening to her interviews and learned a lot from chatting with her.
spk_0 Anna's sale is the author of Let's Talk About Hard Things. And you can listen to her show Death, Sex, and Money, Wherever You Get Your Podcasts.
spk_0 This week's episode was produced by Talia Cliaud.
spk_0 Ily M. Emoto is our associate producer. Our senior producer is Jacqueline Kirk and our executive producer is Aaron Balser.
spk_0 Special thanks to Katie Redford, Tony Springer, Kelsey Quava, and Amanda Cox. And of course, shout out to our audio tech, A涂 Day Williams, and the rest of the CBC Books team.
spk_0 I'm Matea Roach, and this is Bookends.
spk_0 Very exciting news in the world of Bookends. We are back for season two this weekend.
spk_0 Don't forget to hit the follow button so you won't miss any of the amazing authors we have coming up on the show.
spk_0 No spoilers, but you really won't want to miss any of these conversations.
spk_0 And in the meantime, while you're already in your podcast app, why not check out our back list from season one?
spk_0 Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time. Because when the book ends, the conversation begins.
spk_0 You just heard an episode of Bookends. It's hosted by me, Matea Roach, and in that episode I spoke with Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex, and Money.
spk_0 You can find and follow Bookends wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
spk_0 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcast.