This Book Made Me

It's the 25th anniversary of a combination literary hoax and totem of the "Just Say No" campaign, with a bit of "satanic panic" tossed in for color. Welcome to Go Ask Alice, the supposedly anonymous, supposed journal of a good girl whose life is ruined by drugs (that somehow makes drugs sound great). Join my guests and I as we try to take this book seriously for our final installment of Gen X Summer School.

My "guest lecturers" for Gen X Summer School:

Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at JenCapra.com, as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok.

Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and others. His new novella, "The Tristans, by Isobel Chase Montgomery" is now available from Amazon, and his series of weird microfictions, "The Sunday Scaries" appears weekly at GhoulishDelights.com .

Michael McDunnah is a long-time communications professional who writes about film and television at unaffiliatedcritic.com, and co-hosts The Unenthusiastic Critic podcast. He lives in Chicago.

And as always, you can find more about the podcast on Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

Who let us read this stuff?! It's the Gen X classic Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews's introduction to puberty with a side of incest, wrapped in a faux-gothic nightmare. Join my guests for a rip-roaring ride through this book that got passed from girl clique to girl clique, and influenced a generation.

My "guest lecturers" for Summer School:

Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at , as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok.

Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and others. His new novella, "The Tristans, by Isobel Chase Montgomery" is now available from Amazon, and his series of weird microfictions, "The Sunday Scaries" appears weekly at GhoulishDelights.com.

And as always, you can find more about the podcast on Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

Stephen King, the father of Generation X's nightmares--and an obvious first class for Gen X Summer School! Join my guests and I as we dig into Night Shift, an early compilation of King's short stories. It includes the material for so many of his later masterpieces (Salem's Lot, Children of the Corn, The Stand), along with many of his misfires (Maximum Overdrive, The Lawnmower Man). Who let us read this stuff? And how did it shape a generation of young readers?

My "guest lecturers" for Summer School:

Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at JenCapra.com, as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok.

Michael McDunnah is a long-time communications professional who writes about film and television at www.unaffiliatedcritic.com, and co-hosts The Unenthusiastic Critic podcast. He lives in Chicago.

And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

Class is in session! Join us for Gen X Summer School: the books that made feral latchkey children into feral adults with no f's to give. Launching this week!

Has there ever been a more urgent moment to ask ourselves what it means to be human? And how can a novel help us ask that question better? (Hint: there may be clones...) Thankfully, my guest has all of the right questions and interpretations for the book that made him: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer and literary translator based in Montreal. Born in Seoul, he has lived across North America and the UK since age 11. He earned his master's in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford in 2015. He won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers' Award in 2021 and the Emerging Translator Award from LTI Korea in 2023. His debut novel, Oxford Soju Club, was longlisted for Canada Reads 2026.

You can find his insightful social media posts—about books, writing, Korean and American culture, and more—at the link below, as well as his official, authorial website.

https://www.instagram.com/jinwoopark0721/

jinwoo-park.com

And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

Black mermaids?! Say what?! That's just the hook! Join my guest for a deep dive (get it?) into Rivers Solomon's The Deep—a novel that makes a new myth from an American atrocity.

Everything is terrible! How do we wake up every morning and keep going? My guest makes the very compelling case for an answer in Albert Camus's existential absurdist classic The Plague (La Peste).

Kevin Gannon is the director of faculty development and a professor of history at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. He's spent almost 30 years in higher education, yet still maintains hope for the future through both rage and love, as Paulo Freire put it. When he's not reading existential literature, you can most likely find him at a baseball game. He's the co-editor of the book The Campus Crisis Toolkit, and you can find him on social media as The Tattooed Prof.

To get you in the mood, check out DJ/curator Diego Dela Rosa mixtape Trust. And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

If you've ever dreamed of doing the extraordinary, but thought it was too late, this episode is for you. Meet Dorothy Gilman's The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, who decides, in her 60s, to pursue a life-long dream of becoming a spy. In addition to digging into the life lessons of the novel, my guests tell us what it's like to have a book shared across a family, and with the person you love.

Sara Scrimshaw has proudly used her liberal arts degrees in history and dance, working in historic house museums/gardens and as a dancer. Sara currently oversees programs at Greystone Mansion & Gardens and performs with Deborah Rosen & Dancers, and she recently co-executive produced the independent film DEAD MEDIA. Despite doing a report on Albania in 5th grade after reading The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, she has yet to visit the country in person. You can find her as @scrimstreet at Bluesky and Instagram.

Joseph Scrimshaw is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has many years of experience as a writer, director, actor, comedian, and producer in multiple mediums. He's written for Adult Swim's fantasy comedy TV show, Tigtone, the movie-riffing group, RiffTrax, the scripted podcast, Getting On With James Urbaniak, and more. Joseph's plays Adventures in Mating, An Inconvenient Squirrel, and My Monster (written with Bill Corbett) have been performed worldwide. He's also the co-host of the popular Star Wars podcast, ForceCenter. His first feature film, the horror movie Dead Media, is currently playing in film festivals and planning future screenings. Learn more about Joseph at josephscrimshaw.com

The Scrimshaws are Angelenos, but Minnesotans at heart. Don't forget to check out standwithminnesota.com to support the ongoing work in Minneapolis and environs.

And finally: DJ Diego Dela Rosa has their patented Mixtape, inspired by Mrs. Pollifax over at Spotify. Give This Mixtape Made Me: Fortify a listen! As always, you can send feedback and ideas via our Instagram or via email at [email protected].

Wuthering Heights is coming! The movie, anyway. What do you need to know about the book, and why has it become such a cultural touchstone? Lucky for us, my friend Dr. Julie Townsend joins me for a re-read of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel. We dig into the book itself, and puzzle over the continued popularity of Wuthering Heights as a romance, in anticipation of Emerald Fennell's upcoming movie.

Julie Townsend is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands. She is author of The Choreography of Modernism in France and currently experiments with performance art practices in the humanities classroom. She is also the co-founder of Best College Path, which offers students personalized guidance through the college admissions process.

Meanwhile, to get you in the mood, DJ/curator Diego Dela Rosa has put together a very special, Wuthering Heights-inspired playlist, for your tempestuous, romantical listening needs. And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at [email protected]

Do you think you know Los Angeles? Beyond the fantasy images that television and movies have fed us for decades, there is an even more magical city that lives with the people and places outside the media view. In this episode, my marvelous guest shares the book that showed her THIS Los Angeles: Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat.