In today’s episode, we meet Mary Laura Philpott, author of the best-selling memoir-in-essays, “I Miss You When I Blink,” named one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2019, a Best Book of the Year by Esquire and Real Simple, and #1 on the Indie Next List by booksellers nationwide.

Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right,” but she felt all wrong. What’s worse, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options?

In this collection of humorous and poignant and observations about home, work, and creative life, Mary Laura Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart. She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and affirms that multiple things can be true about any of us at once. Most of all, she learns that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong.

Mary Laura starts the show with a reading from the first chapter of the book, where her young son reveals to her the perfect sentence – “I Miss You When I Blink” – so perfect, in fact, that she wrote a book about it.
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