Juggling a demanding career and a young family is already overwhelming. But what happens when you add caring for an estranged parent to the equation? That’s exactly what happened to podcaster Jonathan Hirsch, author of The Mind is Burning, when his father Thomas was diagnosed with dementia. Jonathan’s parents raised him in a cult, and were largely absent from his life growing up. Now, he’s had to navigate the logistics, guilt, and grief that comes with caring for someone who never truly cared for you.

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Charlie Sheen is an actor perhaps known just as well for his off-screen antics as his on-screen performances. In his new memoir, The Book of Sheen, Charlie is finally coming clean on what was going on during his years of hard drugs, public divorces, and on-set disputes that came to define his later career and reputation. These days, humility, gratitude, and sobriety have come to replace his meme-able bravado. Sitting on stage with him at the 92nd Street Y in NYC, he and David Duchovny shared jokes and jabs as David sought to discover why he chose to tell his story now — and why he took such a unique literary approach. Plus, they discuss the turning point that sent him on the road to recovery, and Charlie tells us what his one “do-over” in life would be — the answer might surprise you.

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Recently, the Podcrushed crew was joined by author and actor Tembi Locke. She takes them from her whirlwind childhood to her life today as a bestselling writer and performer. They talk about the heart behind her memoir From Scratch and her new audiobook Someday, Now, the rituals and traditions that keep us grounded, and why midlife can feel a lot like adolescence (in the best way). It’s a rich conversation on grief, creativity, and finding light through it all.

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“Sometimes I feel that I’m not going to write again,” says Arundhati Roy, “but then it becomes harder to keep quiet than to write it.” Few writers have bridged the personal and political as powerfully as Arundhati Roy. With her first memoir, fittingly titled Mother Mary Comes to Me, she turns to her turbulent relationship with her late mother, Mary Roy, a pioneering feminist who reshaped Indian law. This incredible conversation with Sam Fragoso on Talk Easy covers the book, and so much more.

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The hilarious Jen Hatmaker (New York Times–bestselling author and host of the podcast For the Love) joins Elise Loehnen on Pulling The Thread to chat, in part, about her new memoir Awake. They talk about the moment in Jen’s life when everything seemingly dissolved (including her marriage of 26 years and her relationship to the church) and the much deeper awakening that she entered from there, when she truly started to rely on herself. 

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Right after turning forty, Steve Grove packed up his life in Silicon Valley and moved back to his home state of Minnesota. He is now the publisher and CEO of the Star Tribune newspaper, embarking on a reinvention for that longstanding publication that parallels his own. As he navigates all of it, Grove’s journey becomes not just about changing careers or moving home—it’s about rediscovering purpose.

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Great Black Hope opens on Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons, when police officers descend and arrest a young Black man named Smith for cocaine possession. In the blink of an eye, his life transforms from charmed to a nightmare. As he struggles to adjust to his changed reality, while also mourning the loss of his best friend from an overdose, he confronts issues of race, class, addiction, and much more, in this propulsive, beautifully written debut novel.

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Kostya has a truly unique gourmet talent – he experiences vivid aftertastes, which he identifies (with some help from a ghost and a psychic) as tastes that are coming from the dead. Aftertaste, the buzzy debut novel by author Daria Lavelle, is like a mashup of the food-centric magical realism in Like Water For Chocolate and a restaurant memoir like Sweetbitter.

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My Friends, the highly anticipated new book from beloved Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman, delivers on all you’d expect from a Backman novel – richly drawn characters, poignant emotions, and clever turns of phrase. The book consists of two parallel narratives, united by a painting, and features a vivid set of teenage characters that bring to life the power of transformative friendships.

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 In 2019, podcast executive Jonathan Hirsch was suddenly thrust into what’s known as the “sandwich generation” – that group of adults simultaneously caring for their children and their parents. And in this compelling new memoir, we learn that in caring for his father, Hirsch not only had the usual set of responsibilities associated with an aging person who is struggling with dementia – he also was forced to confront, for the first time in 20 years, his family’s history and his father’s responsibility for entrenching them with a spiritual cult.

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