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.