Somewhere along the way, most women learn to smile through it. Through the pain no one warned you about in the doctor's office. Through the joke that wasn't funny. Through the stranger on the street who says you'd look prettier if you did.
Hillary Frank, creator of the beloved parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time, has spent years telling surprising, honest stories about parenthood and reproductive health. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, she tells Olivia what happened when she took that familiar, crazy-making feeling and asked a different question: what if it were a thriller?
The answer is Wedlocked, an original audiobook from Macmillan Audio. It follows Zara, the top instructor on a fitness app called Uplift, which her husband owns. Her job is to be the happiest person in the room. She is about to turn 40, she wants a baby, and her husband keeps saying he'll be ready when he's ready. Over the course of the story, Zara starts to realize she feels trapped in her marriage, and then that she might literally be trapped in it. Hillary wrote and directed the production herself, with a full cast led by narrator Helen Laser, so listeners hear Zara teach her classes and livestream with her husband as if they were members of the app.
Olivia names why the premise lands so hard for anyone who has lived inside a marriage that looked fine from the outside: "there is a level of horror movie that goes into ordinary marriage stuff that we don't like to talk about because it's so ordinary."
Hillary explains about writing suspense for the ear, why she hopes men listen too, and what it costs a person to keep swallowing the hard feelings so everyone else stays comfortable. If you are navigating marriage, motherhood, the mental load, divorce, or any life transition where you have been told to look on the bright side, this audiobook thriller, and this episode, may feel uncomfortably and usefully familiar.
Listen to Wedlocked here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250372208/wedlocked/
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