Bonus Book Club edition. Guest: Annie Hartnett, The Road to Tender Hearts.

2026-08-07

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Description:In this Book Club edition of For the Love, Jen sits down with novelist Annie Hartnett to talk about The Road to Tender Hearts — a book Jen calls heart-wrenching, heartwarming, weird, hilarious, and deeply satisfying all at once.They open with a very funny catch-up from Me Camp, the solo month Jen takes every July. This year she’s in a tiny lake town in Canada, cooking, meeting neighbors, reading on the deck at sunset — and buying blueberries for scones instead of checking her calendar.From there, Annie...

Description:

In this Book Club edition of For the Love, Jen sits down with novelist Annie Hartnett to talk about The Road to Tender Hearts — a book Jen calls heart-wrenching, heartwarming, weird, hilarious, and deeply satisfying all at once.

They open with a very funny catch-up from Me Camp, the solo month Jen takes every July. This year she’s in a tiny lake town in Canada, cooking, meeting neighbors, reading on the deck at sunset — and buying blueberries for scones instead of checking her calendar.

From there, Annie traces her path from high-school art major to novelist, and the two teachers whose offhand comments redirected both of their lives. She unpacks the real backstory behind the novel: a Providence rental house that delivered basement floods, gas leaks, black mold, vicious rats, a falling tree, and a neighborhood tragedy — all in 2020 — and the anxiety that followed her to a new town anyway. Her answer was to write down every bad thing she feared could happen to her family, then make it as funny as she possibly could.

Jen and Annie also get into:

PJ Halliday, built from Annie’s dad and grandfather — lottery dreams, storytelling, lollipop trees and all
Pancakes the death-predicting cat, inspired by Oscar, a real Rhode Island nursing-home cat
Why Ivy and Fred keep loving PJ, and what that tells us about him
How a talking cat in chapter one bought Annie the freedom to go very dark
Writing grief, addiction, and fear without losing the comedy
The “year of floundering” that starts every new book
Why readers mourn whichever character they want, no matter what the author intended

Jen closes by asking what Annie’s reading, and Annie makes a hard case for Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

“Life is suffering and joy.” — Pancakes, The Road to Tender Hearts
“I realized in that class that I could be exactly who I am. I could be weird and I could be really accepted.” — Annie
“Your words are not wasted. The stuff that you say into our little ears when we are formative and searching can absolutely set me on a path.” — Jen
“She took my face in her hands and said, Jennifer, you have a gift for words and you should use it.” — Jen
“I will put every bad thing that I think could happen to my family in a book, but I will make it as funny as possible.” — Annie
“That’s how I feel like that’s the only way you get through bad things — to talk about them. But also to make them funny.” — Annie
“I love people despite their flaws, sometimes because of their flaws.” — Annie
“He has to be loved before he can really… he wants to be in the family.” — Annie, on PJ
“The year of floundering, when you spend a year just flopping around like a fish out of water.” — Annie

Resources Mentioned in This Episode: