Nerdette Book Club: Molly McGhee on ‘Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind’
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nerdette Book Club is kicking off a new year of reading with Molly McGhee’s debut novel Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. Our protagonist, Jonathan Abernathy, is completely subsumed by debt. So, he takes a job editing the bad dreams of middle class workers. It’s a searing critique of late-stage capitalism that also manages to be funny and tender.
Read along with us! The book club will be back on the last Tuesday of the month with a spoilery discussion of the book and two fun guest readers. You can get in on the conversation by recording your thoughts on the book in a voice memo and sending the file to NerdettePodcast@gmail.com by Friday, January 26. Happy reading!
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Transcript
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| 0:38.9 | From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat Book Club. |
| 0:42.5 | It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. |
| 0:50.3 | It is the month of January, and our book this month is Molly McGee's strange and surreal debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy. |
| 0:51.5 | You Are Kind. |
| 0:57.0 | Our protagonist is Jonathan Abernathy, whose life is completely subsumed by debt. |
| 1:02.5 | He inherited debt from his parents. He has student loans. It's all very precarious. Rent is tricky. |
| 1:08.8 | Food is scarce. So when a very bizarre and mysterious job opportunity arises, he can't exactly say no. The job is dream auditor and the gig opens up a whole new |
| 1:13.5 | world of both literal and symbolic misery. Dream auditors go into other people's dreams and remove the |
| 1:21.4 | things that are making them anxious or depressed so that they can work more effectively the next day. This is one of those books |
| 1:30.8 | where the absurd ends up perfectly illuminating reality. And that is all I am going to say for now |
| 1:35.9 | because I want this conversation with Molly to be spoiler-free. Molly, welcome to NERDAP. |
| 1:41.3 | Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. |
| 1:45.9 | Oh, it's an honor to have you. |
| 1:51.2 | So I would love to talk about how you wrote the dreams themselves because they're so surreal. |
| 1:53.7 | I listened to the audiobook version of this. I love the audio book. |
| 1:55.0 | It was just like, like you're just on such a wild ride, you know? |
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