Thank you for joining us for episode 456 of Live Happy Now.

As we continue our month-long look at love, this week we're talking about an inevitable but painful aspect of it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm sitting down with best-selling novelist Claire McIntosh, who has

written her first nonfiction book, and it's very personal. I promise it won't always hurt like this,

is part memoir and part roadmap through the tricky and heart-wrenching journey of grief.

As you're about to hear, Claire wrote these 18 assurances on grief years after the death of her son,

and she has encouraging words for everyone who is mourning the loss of love. Let's have a listen.

Claire, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thank you for having me.

I am really, really excited to talk to you. Most people know you as a New York Times bestselling author.

You write thrillers. And what we're talking about today could not be farther removed from that.

So what we're talking about today is your new book that's coming out in March. It's called, I

promise it won't always hurt like this. And it is about grief and loss. All this month, we are talking about love,

unlive happy now. So for many, it might seem odd to include loss as part of that conversation,

but it really is. Well, they're two sides of the same coin, aren't they? You don't grieve for someone

unless you loved them. Right, right. And their loss is inevitable in some way

we are going to lose the ones we love. We are. And I think that the more conversations we have

about death, about grief, about how we are likely to prepare for that and to feel when it happens, the better. And as a writer

and a prolific reader, the best way I know to start conversations is books. Yes. Yes. And you do it so

well. And what's interesting is even prior to this book, with your fiction, grief has really informed your work. Can you talk a

little bit about that, how it has appeared in your fiction work? It keeps cropping up in my fiction,

even when I don't set out. The right about grief. My first book is very obviously about grief

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