Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Does this mean that this is how we must live

our lives, constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Maybe that's what being alive is all about, so we can track down those moments that are dying.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our final episode of our summer book club on The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary.

I don't know if you've read the last chapter.

If you haven't, then pause this and go do so immediately because I have rather big spoilers

to talk about.

And I can honestly kind of hardly contain myself from sharing them because I just finished

rereading the final section today in a little Scottish cafe where back from France and I just

found it so moving obviously the turn of the final pages is completely shocking. And I had read it before,

so I knew what was coming, but I found myself in a little Scottish cafe in those final pages

when Renee is, and here's the spoiler alert, pause the episode if you haven't read it yet, when Renee is

dying and she is remembering her camellias, as she puts it, thinking of the faces that flashed

before her. And I found myself genuinely having to kind of quietly wipe away tears in a cafe.

I never cry at books, but this, the final pages of this book,

I just found so touching and thoughtful and moving that I hardly know what to say about it,

just because I enjoyed it and found it so moving and so touching. So I'm excited to talk about it with you, but I don't know how gathered

my thoughts are simply because I just found it so touching and I look forward to hearing what you all

think of this little book now that you have reached its final pages. As an update, I've already said this, but we are back from Paris. It was

such a gift, such a wonderful time to be able to do work there, but just to kind of enjoy the city.

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