Episode #12: "Booed At My Own Wedding"
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Kerri Maher and Annie Hartnett
Kerri Maher is the USA Today, ABA, and international bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller, All You Have To Do Is Call, The Girl In White Gloves, and The Kennedy Debutante. Under the name Kerri Majors, she is also the author of a memoir, This Is Not A Writing Manual: Notes For the Young Writer in the Real World. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and founded YARN, an award-winning literary journal of short-form YA writing. A writing professor for many years, she now writes full-time and lives with her daughter and dog in a leafy suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.
Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction and was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living. Annie has been awarded several fellowships and residencies. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, she co-runs Accountability Workshops for writers, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. She lives in Massachusetts with her pretty good husband, perfect daughter, and two flawless rescue dogs, Willie Nelson and Minnie Mouse.
Read Along!
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"A love letter to California…. Through the deftly rendered lives of sisters, mothers and daughters, and longtime friends, Maher reveals how telling the truth can guide us back to ourselves and carry us forward with hope.”—Marjan Kamali, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion Women of Tehran
In this moving novel about the transformative power of storytelling, three women make life-changing decisions set in motion by the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, from the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller.
It’s the summer of 1967 and the counterculture revolution is in full swing in San Francisco. Every street is alive with the music of Jim Morrison and Dionne Warwick, and in view of the Golden Gate bridge young people come together, waving anti-war signs and shouting for equal rights. No one is more into the messages of love and peace than Winnie Hartley who has just graduated from UC Berkeley determined to use poetry to capture the ever-shifting world around her. When she reconnects with her high school boyfriend, an aspiring musician, their creative bond further fuels her work, and it feels like her life is finally taking off.
Meanwhile, miles up the winding coast, her sister Miranda stays close to home, throwing herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard. She’s determined to make California wine that rivals French. But change is in the air this wild and heady summer, and each sister will make choices that set their lives hurdling down paths neither would have imagined.
Fifty years later, Dawn Hartley stays as far as possible from her family’s famous vineyard, until a work assignment requires her to research the bestselling Vineland novels penned by a famously anonymous author. Determined to discover the identity of this mysterious writer—who seems to know things no one should about her family—Dawn embarks on a soul-searching journey along the windswept coast of California to uncover her family’s secrets even as she’s keeping a big one of her own.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER A darkly comic and warm-hearted novel about an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush—bringing together his adult daughter, two orphaned kids, and a cat who can predict death—by the beloved author of Rabbit Cake and Unlikely Animals
“A miraculous novel—an actual and spiritual road trip you won’t forget.”—John Irving
AN NPR AND LIT HUB BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.
But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.
Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also thinks he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter who’s adrift in her twenties, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.
This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a fresh shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.
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