I'm Nora Mcnerney and this is a special reading club edition of Terrible Thanks for

Asking.

In these episodes, we have conversations with authors whose work fits into a category

I call good work about terrible things, which is frankly a genre I'd like to see more

booksellers embracing.

When I walk into a bookstore, I'm not looking for mystery or history, those rhyme.

I'm looking for sad.

I'm looking for, we'll destroy you emotionally.

So just a little feedback from a reader here.

The good and the terrible exist hand in hand, side by side, all mixed up together.

We don't know this, usually until we live it.

Until that thin line between what was and what is disappears entirely.

There's Suleika Juaad that happened when she was 22 years old, when she was living a

version of the life she had dreamed of.

Not exactly the life she had dreamed of, which was to be a war correspondent, but a version

of adulthood that didn't involve living in her child bedroom or making drinks at a coffee

shop.

There's nothing wrong with either of those things.

I did the former two or three times after graduating.

I never made it to the latter because I never made the cut to be a barista.

Suleika was deeply in love, living in Paris with a job and her own apartment.

She also had an unbearable itch, and I mean a real physical one, a burning under her skin

...