This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Noel King.

If you're a regular Life Kit listener, you probably know that an essential step in many of our

episodes is to talk about things. Call your friend who's having a hard time. Sit down with your

family for that conversation you've been avoiding. Find a way to tell your kids about the one thing

you never wanted them to learn about. Anna Sale has made having these tough conversations

her mission in life. These hard things are happening in our lives. We are in grief. We are experiencing

loss. We are having tensions in our relationships. We are noticing change that we don't know how to

put words to. And really my argument is instead of kind of waiting until you have a conclusion

that you can present to someone in your life when you have figured all that out, it can feel a lot

better when you open up and invite someone into that process. Have a conversation about what

you're noticing, describing what you feel uncertainty about. She's the host of WNYC's podcast,

Death Sex and Money. And she has a new book out called Let's Talk about Hard Things.

In this episode of Life Kit, why and how we should all be talking about the toughest subjects in our

lives. Death and sex are hard enough to talk about, but I feel like money is its own

universe of difficulty. I want to read a line from your book. You write quote, I host a podcast

and make more money than my husband who spent seven years getting graduate degrees and usually

puts in more hours a week teaching, advising, fundraising, and writing. Was that a difficult thing

for either you or your husband to be public about? You know, no. I think it's something we're

pretty comfortable with because it's just so like part of our life. And maybe that's because

we've just sort of noticed it. It's been the fact throughout our relationship that even though

I'm a reporter and he's been a grad student and then a postdoc and now a tenure track faculty

member, he on the open marketplace is valued at a lower value than I am for my work. And so I think

...