I'm Nora McEnerney and this is Terrible Thanks for Asking.

This show started because after my husband Aaron died and his obituary went viral, I got

a lot of messages, a lot of emails and DMs and tweets and sometimes a little scarily

physical letters from people who are going through or who had been through something

hard and needed someone to know that they too had crawled through the darkness or maybe

were still pawing their way around in the abyss.

They were reaching out to say this thing happened and I need someone to know about it.

Someone who doesn't know me, who isn't burned in by the full context of my existence and

some of those messages ended up being the first season of this podcast and I've seen

many more of them as a sort of confession, not of wrongdoing necessarily but of the truth.

Truth is sometimes hard to give to the people closest to us.

We may not want their judgment but just as often we don't want to burden them with having

to feel bad for us or to worry about us.

So stories, these little pieces of a person's life end up in my inbox as a kind of offering

and if you subscribe to my emails, I often put in the end of them that you can reply

and I will read and I will hold your secret or your pain and I will release it and offer

up my own little non-denominational prayer for you or a punch of pillow for you or whatever

feels right.

We made an episode called The Grudge Book full of your grudges and the feedback was so

strong, people felt validated, they laughed, they connected and I thought do we need one

of these that also gives you a place to share the other things that are hard to say, your

regrets, you're almost, do we need a space for people to tell a truth they haven't told

...