You're listening to the Beautiful Mess podcast, your cozy comfort listen.

I'm your host, Emma Chapman.

And I'm your host, Alty Larson.

And this week, we're talking about the books that genuinely shifted how we see the world.

Not just five-star reads, not just books we love, but the ones that rewired our thinking and books that we still find ourselves talking about years later.

I love this episode so much.

So before we jump in, I have this, like, fun parisocial relationship story from this past week.

What is parasycial?

I don't even know what that means.

So parasycial relationship is the relationship that you have with someone you feel like you know, but they don't know you.

So like for me, my example, like I feel like Alice Hoffman is my best friend, but she, in fact, would not recognize me at the grocery store.

Okay. So kind of celebrities. So kind of being a fan girl. Right. And it mostly happens online. Uh-huh. Okay. So this is my funny story. It's so weird, but I kind of love it. So a couple weeks ago, I did this Instagram Q&A. You know, I love the Instagram Q&A. Emma's not on

Instagram anymore. So she didn't see any of this. I didn't. Okay. So I did the Q&A and I got like multiple

questions that were like, are you and Jeremy still married? Are you divorced? And I had gotten one the

time before. So I was like, oh my God. Like, because when you get one, it's like, who cares?

But when you start getting like, it's over and over, you're like, people are seeing something that I'm not putting out.

What's happening? So I was like, did I say something? Is it because I never remembered to wear my rings?

Is it because I literally never show a photo of him? But I feel like a lot of people

don't show a photo of their husband. Anyway, so I just put it out there like, why? Why? Why do people

think this? And I got like a thousand DMs. I've never gotten this many DMs. It was so, like,

I got where I couldn't read them all. And it, uh, people had all kinds of theories. What's the verdict? Yeah. There was a lot of theories. Many people, okay, so people who listened to the podcast were like, I would never think that because I listen to the podcast and you mention him. Right. So it's like obvious.

And then a lot of people were like, I was wondering the same thing.

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