The Ex Talk(101)
I’m so grateful to have found the perfect home for The Ex Talk at Berkley and with Kristine Swartz. Kristine, your enthusiasm and expert editorial guidance have made this process so much fun! Thank you for loving my messy cohosts as much as I do. Thank you to art director Vi-An Nguyen for this stunning cover—I’m obsessed! Thank you, too, to the rest of the fantastic Berkley team: Jessica Brock, Jessica Plummer, and Megha Jain.
Erin Hennessey and Joanne Silberner—this book would not exist if you hadn’t taken a chance on me ten years ago and encouraged me with your knowledge of public radio. Erin, you had coffee with me and told me all about KPLU when you knew next to nothing about me. Joanne, you were the highlight of my senior year at the University of Washington. I am wildly lucky to have learned from you both. Many thanks to the other journalists I had the pleasure of working with at KUOW, KPLU (now KNKX), and the Seattle Times.
Tara Tsai, you are my favorite person to talk to about romance novels and podcasts. Rachel Griffin, thank you for your compassion and for somehow always knowing the right thing to say. Kelsey Rodkey, thank you for the perfect title and for telling me to stop apologizing. Much love to everyone who read this book in part or in whole at various stages of its life: Carlyn Greenwald, Marisa Kanter, Haley Neil, Monica Gomez-Hira, Claire Ahn, Sonia Hartl, Annette Christie, Auriane Desombre, Susan Lee, and Andrea Contos. I never truly felt like I belonged until I met other writers, and in that vein I am also so grateful to Joy McCullough, Kit Frick, Gloria Chao, and Rosie Danan.
The readers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers, and bookstagrammers who’ve shouted about my books for the past few years—“thank you” will never be enough. Your creativity and generosity floor me on a daily basis. Every post, every photo means the world to me. To my family and especially to Ivan, thank you for being so excited about this one. Journalism and radio have been part of our story almost since the beginning, which makes it kind of perfect that my radio book is a romance.
Finally, thank you to all the podcasts that I refresh-refresh-refresh until the latest episode appears, the shows I can’t imagine my life without, the hosts who feel like friends and make me laugh even on my worst days. I hope I did you justice and captured some of that magic.