emily 💜

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Building a social media presence focused on history, preservation, and storytelling seems pretty cool, right? But it's not all sunshine and roses! Katie DeRaddo of @agraveattraction shares some of the downsides of content creation. We explore this topic even more in the full podcast episode--check it out on It's a Lot, out now wherever you get your podcasts! Just look for the pink logo with a skeleton hand holding a phone 💀🩷📱🫠 #podcastrecommendation #cemeteriesoftiktok #socialmediastruggles #contentcreatorsoftiktok #preservation

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Plus it has a flawed protagonist who grows and changes in ways that feel authentic, which I always appreciate 🙌 #megachurch #newbooks #bookreview #wildride #fiction

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I've long admired Shirley Jackson's work and have read more and more of it over the years. I asked my friend @Sarah McGrath to join me for a deep dive It's a Lot episode on Shirley Jackson, and I was delighted when she said yes! The episode is out today 😁 For this book chat episode, we read We Have Always Lived in the Castle (my third time reading it!) and Life Among the Savages (second time for me) as the focus of our discussion. We wanted to examine the two different sides of Shirley: her gothic horror writing and her domestic memoir. Many people are only familiar with her novels or her famous short story "The Lottery," but her writing about motherhood and her four chaotic, imaginative kids was well known and loved during her lifetime. The constraints of only writing while her kids were napping or at school seemed to work well for her, and their wild imaginations and innate weirdness inspired her deeply. That's not to romanticize the absurd amount of labor required of her to run her household and raise her kids on top of her writing career while her useless husband did nothing to help. As dissimilar as her fiction and memoir might seem, we found a lot of commonalities too. Her voice and sense of humor come through strongly in both, she's excellent at characterization and painting a vivid portrait of someone with a few key details, and there are common themes about human nature, what scares us, what loneliness does to a person, and more. I spent far too much time on this episode--reading 3 books for it, countless articles, pouring over old photos of Shirley and her kids, looking at different book covers for Castle and Savages over the past 60 years, recording, editing, creating graphics, and more. I hope at least one person develops a deep fascination with Shirley Jackson after listening to this episode 😅🖤🐈‍⬛ #shirleyjackson #psychologicalhorror #podcastrecommendation #bookrecommendation #motherhood