Hey friends, it's me, Kate, and I have news.

It's the kind where I want to send you like 47 all caps texts,

but simultaneously crawl under a weighted blanket because it feels too real.

But, okay, here it is.

I've got a new book coming out.

And it's called Joyful Anyway.

Or actually kind of more of a voice that's like, Joyful, Anyway,

because that's really, oh man, that's the moment we're in. And yeah, I like that the title is

kind of a dare. Because if you've lived through anything, which we all have, illness, grief,

heartbreak, or just like a very long PTA meeting, you know that sometimes joy feels

impossible, offensive even. Like how could we possibly be joyful when there is so much suffering

in the world and every headline feels similarly apocalyptic. But then there's this weird

thing that happens, this uninvited, surprising joy that just keeps popping up. This book grew out of

the last decade of my life, cancer and marriage and parenting and

faculty meetings that possibly could have been an email and somewhere just between Ivy

polls and Costco runs, I just kept noticing that there was a persistent ache.

And I pause before I say it because it already makes me feel ungrateful to say.

But there was just some kind of persistent, hummy grief.

And yet, there was also joy. Like not the the Instagram kind, not the live, laugh, love, throw pillow kind. Just mean, like, absurd joy. The kind that, like, comes in the side door.

Like the time my son woke me up by crawling into bed wrapped in a tortilla blanket and he whispered,

Mom, is there a place that children can go to practice using grenades? Very concerning. Also,

it's obvious that pacifism is just hanging by a thread in my house. Or like the time I dragged my friends on a three-hour detour to visit the world's largest turtle made of spare tires.

...