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Let's Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale

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Let's Talk About Hard Things

A Guide for Difficult Conversations

by Anna Sale

Narrator Anna Sale

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Length 8 hours 3 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Death, sex, money, family, identity: the hardest things to talk about in life, especially with those closest to you. Anna gives some guidance on how to approach each of these topics graciously, openly, and with a meaningful and purposeful discussion in mind. In sharing experiences from her own life and interviewing people about each topic and how they talk about them, she does exactly this. These conversations are some of the most important in life, but there's no easy way to start them. She gets right into it with death as the first chapter, and had me in tears first thing in the morning -I had just lost my grandmother, so it really hit home. I was able to talk about it with my mother and it helped us both through the grief. I think I listened to the whole thing in one sitting.”
— Brandy • Page 1 Books

Bookseller recommendation

“Let’s Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale, host of the Death, Sex and Money Podcast, is an in depth look at how to talk about difficult topics with those closest to young and also complete strangers. Sale takes an empathetic and thoughtful approach to some of life’s most personal, difficult, yet universal conversations. The conversations involving grief, relationships, sex, money, family, and identity. Using interviews with everyday people infused into a deeply personal memoir, Sale shows you step by step how to talk about the hardest topics, and how to do it in a productive and meaningful way.”
— Will • Newtown Bookshop

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

From the host of the popular WNYC podcast Death, Sex, & Money, Let’s Talk About Hard Things is “like a good conversation with a friend” (The New Yorker) where “no topic is off-limits when it comes to creating meaningful connection” (Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone).

Anna Sale wants you to have that conversation. You know the one. The one that you’ve been avoiding or putting off, maybe for years. The one that you’ve thought “they’ll never understand” or “do I really want to bring that up?” or “it’s not going to go well, so why even try?”

Sale is the founder and host of WNYC’s popular, award-winning podcast Death, Sex, & Money or as the New York Times dubbed her “a therapist at happy hour.” She and her guests have direct and thought-provoking conversations, discussing topics that most of us are too squeamish, polite, or nervous to bring up. But Sale argues that we all experience these hard things, and by not talking to one another, we cut ourselves off, leading us to feel isolated and disconnected from people who can help us most.

In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale uses the best of what she’s learned from her podcast to reveal that when we dare to talk about hard things, we learn about ourselves, others, and the world that we make together. Diving into five of the most fraught conversation topics—death, sex, money, family, and identity—she moves between memoir, fascinating snapshots of a variety of Americans opening up about their lives, and expert opinions to show why having tough conversations is important and how to do them in a thoughtful and generous way. She uncovers that listening may be the most important part of a tough conversation, that the end goal should be understanding without the pressure of reconciliation, and that there are some things that words can’t fix (and why that’s actually okay).

Biography & Memoir Science & Technology Self-Improvement Nonfiction Psychology

Anna Sale is the creator and host of Death, Sex, & Money, the award-winning podcast from WNYC Studios, where she’s been doing interviews about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more” since 2014. Before that, she covered politics for public radio for years. She grew up in West Virginia and lives in the East Bay in California with her husband and two daughters.