I'm Nora Mcnerney and this is the first episode of the future of Terrible Thanks for

Asking.

Nothing is happening to the previous 200 or so episodes, but something is happening to

me, for me, with me, for us, for all of us together. And I have notes, so I don't

forget to say anything important. But today, for the first time, this show is my own independent

production. It's not a part of American public media or APM studios. It's not a part of

another giant network. My heart is thumping, saying that today, like Taylor Swift before

me, I own the rights to my work. I got the masters. I got my words. I got these stories. I got

the feed where you listen to all of this.

I started working on this show almost exactly six years ago. My first book had just come

out, which funny enough, the publisher had told me that Terrible Thanks for Asking was too

negative of a book title for a book where my husband dies. So I'd file that title away

for something in the future. I didn't know what. And if you've heard this story before,

I am so sorry, but there are some people who haven't heard it. And the story, the driving

force behind this podcast was this that my husband, Aaron and I had written his obituary

together and the obituary had gone viral. This was 2014 viral. It was literally a simpler

time. We did not each have personalized algorithms. There was like one Facebook and we were all

on it, baby. But his obituary went viral. And I started getting literally thousands of

messages from complete strangers around the world. Emails, DMs, comments, stories from

people who had been through something hard or who were going through something hard.

And we're just spilling their guts to me to a total stranger, not because the people

around them didn't care. But because the people around them were asking, how are you?

...