The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story

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Night, Lovecraft, Commonplace, Radio, Science Fiction, Nightvaleradio, Welcome, Cecil, Fiction, Nightvale, Cranor, Vale, Neofuturists, Fink

4.8 • 28.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joseph and Meg are here to tell you about their new memoir that they co-wrote called The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story. It’s a memoir about being two kids in love, and then suddenly having a touring live show based on a weird fiction podcast and traveling around the world together.

You can pre-order it now! Just go to tinyurl.com/firsttenyears or wherever you get your books.

Here’s the official synopsis if you want more info:

A sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining joint memoir by Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale, and his wife, writer and performer Meg Bashwiner, chronicling the first ten years of their relationship from both sides.

In 2009, 22-year-old Joseph Fink, newly arrived to New York City from the West Coast, was juggling odd jobs to pay the rent and volunteering with a theater company in the East Village so he could snag free tickets to their shows.

Meg Bashwiner, a 22-year-old aspiring performer and playwright, was living with her parents in New Jersey, working a desk job and commuting to her internship with that same East Village theater company.

Joseph and Meg's stories meet when they both find themselves selling tickets in a cramped box office. They quickly became friends. Within a year, they were a couple. Within five years they were touring the world, performing on some of the world's greatest and not so great stages.

In this candid, soul-baring memoir, Joseph and Meg recount their first ten years together, each telling their story as they remember it, without having consulted the other. We hear both sides of their first kiss, first breakup, first getting back together, the death of a father, marriage, international fame, world tours, mental illness, and discussions about having children. Sometimes, they recall things differently—neither agrees on who paid for the morning after pill on their first date. Sometimes they remember the exact same details in the same way—but still have their own narrative on just what those details mean.

Poignant, funny, and real, alternately told in Joseph and Meg’s remarkably different, yet equally compelling voices, The First Ten Years is the story of two individuals finding their way in the world and becoming "adults" as they learn to become a couple.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Joseph Finch here. We are on our usual January break and we will be back with a new episode in just a few days on February 1st.
0:11.0	But today I have a special guest here to help make a really exciting announcement. We have been waiting to make for a long time and we are so excited to bring it to you.
0:21.0	The special guest, it is Meg Bashwinner.
0:24.0	Hi Joseph, it's nice to see you. Hello. In our home. Yes, it's me, Meg Bashwinner. I play the role of your favorite sentient patch of haze.
0:33.0	On welcome to Night Vale Deb, I also am the MC of the live shows. So if you've ever been to one of our live shows and you saw a very attractive person in a very tight dress telling you not to smoke or vape inside our theater, that was me.
0:46.0	Also, I talked to you at the end of this podcast to tell you about the credits and the proverbs. So Meg, why are we standing in the basement of our house talking in front of a mic today?
0:56.0	Because we love it and our basement is super weird. Also, it's where your microphone is and we're using your microphone to tell you that we wrote a book.
1:03.0	It's called the first 10 years and it is a memoir that the two of us co-wrote that comes out May 11th of this year. And it's available for pre-sale right now.
1:15.0	That's right. The first 10 years, the same love story from both sides. So it's about the first 10 years of Megan Eys relationship for each of those years.
1:24.0	We wrote down how we remembered it entirely separately without consulting the other person. So it's the same events, but we remember them very differently.
1:33.0	It's also covering a very weird time in our lives in which I started this podcast called Welcome Tonight Fill and then we ended up touring the world together and standing on stages in all these countries we never thought we'd go, make what are you most excited about with this book?
1:50.0	What am I most excited about with this book? The fact that it exists for one thing. But it's really exciting to get to share with all of you out there, all of you readers out there, what the past 10 years of our life has been like.
2:04.0	For those of you who don't know, Joseph and I are married, not to spoil the chapter about 2015. But Joseph and I are married and started dating in 2009 when we met as young theater making upstarts in New York City's East Village.
2:17.0	And so the book starts there and it ends today in our basement in upstate New York, where together the two of us as a romantic gift just bought each other 31 feet of new sewer line for our house.
2:30.0	So it's a really interesting journey to get from there to here. There's lots of great stuff about the making of Night Vale, how it went from being just a weird idea into Joseph's head to now a weird idea in all of your heads.
2:43.0	So there's other things that go on in our lives, there's loss, there's gains, I have a mental breakdown and a budget rental car, the Burbank airport, you know, life.
2:53.0	Life. So again, that comes out on May 11th, but you can pre-order it now. And just to give you a behind the scenes peek here, pre-ordering makes a huge difference for authors.
3:05.0	I really actually cannot emphasize that enough. So if you think you're going to buy it, please consider pre-ordering. It really helps.
3:13.0	You can pre-order it by going to tinyurl.com slash first 10 years. That's all spelled out no numbers. And you can see the cover, which I promise is super weird and has pictures of taxidermy. And you can pre-order your copy there.
3:27.0	See you soon with our next episode of Night Vale, Meg. We have a book.
3:32.0	And for those of you that are looking at the cover, I'm the squirrel in the back of the canoe.
3:37.0	Again, Meg, where can we get it and also see that cover?
	...

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