I’ve Tried Being Nice – A chat with Ann Leary, wife of Denis Leary

Jen Hardy [00:00:10]:
Today, I am so happy to have Anne Leary with me.

Ann Leary [00:00:12]:
Well, thank you, Jen, for having me on your amazing podcast. And I am the author of, I think, 4 novels, a memoir, and now a new essay collection. I’ve tried being nice. It comes out in is it backwards? No.

Jen Hardy [00:00:27]:
No. It is the right way. Yeah.

Ann Leary [00:00:28]:
Okay. It comes out June 4, 2024. That’s in just a month from now. It’s so soon. And so I’m thrilled to talk about it with you on your podcast.

Jen Hardy [00:00:41]:
I think that’s amazing. And, you know, I think we’re just going to start right away talking about the book because I think there are a lot of women that can relate with the title. We’ve tried so hard being nice. You know? And, so how did you get to the title and how did you get it started?

Ann Leary [00:00:59]:
Well, the title of the book comes from the title essay, of the this is a collection of personal essays. And in the book, I there’s essays that talk touch on, you know, parts of my childhood, my marriage, my, you know, different places I’ve lived, my passions. But the first chapter is called I’ve Tried Being Nice, and it’s about this kind of passive aggressive showdown I had with a neighbor who involving dogs. I’m a dog freak. We have at the time, we had 4 dogs. And now we just lost one last week, unfortunately. So, but we have a couple of rescues who are a little unhinged, and we don’t like when strange dogs come on our property. And and so there was a woman who would walk off leash, and her dogs would come on.

Ann Leary [00:01:39]:
We had this back and forth where we were both trying to be nice. Oh, it’d be so nice if you didn’t let your dogs come on my property. Oh, my dogs love other that kind of thing. Until finally, one day, I had had it, and I actually the dogs came up my driveway on a snowy day. As I always am midday in my pajamas, though I’d been up since 5 working. I ride in the mornings. I jumped in my car in my pajamas, drove after them because these women are speed walkers. I cannot catch them.

Ann Leary [00:02:09]:
Not that fit. And when I finally caught up to them, I didn’t know what to say. But as they the woman came over to my window like, oh, hi. I said, look. I’ve tried being nice. And I she she literally reeled, but she kind of and, like, reached for her dog’s collar, and it was really satisfying. I never knew, the, you know, the power of a of a it was almost like cocking a pistol. Like, you know, it was it’s like when when my kids used to say all the time to me, no offense, but and you knew what’s happened.

Ann Leary [00:02:42]:
Khaled was gonna literally slay you. So anyway, but the but the book you know, I do have many other essays in the book, but they all do kind of, share this theme of, you know, what made me the way I am, why I, so want to have people like me, and then reaching a certain age, which is over 5th would, you know, happen to be in my fifties, where I gradually and it’s still, you know, I still have to work on it, but I gradually realized I can I don’t have to have everybody love me more than anything on this planet? They I’m okay if they are just slightly fond of me or, actually, maybe if they don’t like me at all. You know? I I I used to feel very unsafe, but I moved a lot, and I do write about this in in my book. I moved a lot growing up. I changed schools a lot. My siblings and I, you know, were kind of, you know, bullied. Not I don’t hate that you that term is used so much, but all kids bully one another. And we had to we had to really ingratiate ourselves with the other people, and we learned how to.

Ann Leary [00:03:42]:
And it’s kind of what I’ve carried through into adult life. Short answer long answer to a very short question.

Jen Hardy [00:03:49]:
Oh, no. That’s okay. That’s okay. And you talk about so many things in your book that I think people can really relate to. Do you still have thoughts of that from before that kind of creep in or

Ann Leary [00:04:00]:
People pleasing kind of thing? Definitely. I mean, right now, I’m gearing up. This book comes out in a month. This is a really fraught time for most authors, I think. But I really do, mute well, the truth is when I I usually write fiction. When I have a novel coming out, I’m actually looking forward to sharing it and talking about it at book events and on podcasts like this, other interviews, because there’s a story and characters that that are fit you know, that I’ve made up and that I’ve I’ve come to really understand and love and wanna share. This is about me. And so I feel, again, really it feels very exposing, and and and I feel a little fragile, you know, it coming out.

Ann Leary [00:04:40]:
You know, I don’t these essays, I I write about my family and friends. I show these essays. Some of these essays were previously published in magazines or other places. And, I always show my family if I write about them anything I’m gonna publish. And then people who aren’t in my family, I changed the identifying, names and characteristics per, order of my publishers. So, the woman we were just talking about with the dog, I called her Doodle Lady, and I say that she has Doodle, but maybe Doodle isn’t the breed. But if I said the actual breed of her dog, my whole town would know I’m talking.

Jen Hardy [00:05:21]:
Right. Then that makes sense. You absolutely can’t. Yeah. So, and yeah, you do really expose a lot of deep and personal things in this book. And I’d imagine that was both cathartic and terrifying.

Ann Leary [00:05:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of the most kind of, personal essays or a couple of them had had been previously published. Probably the most revealing was the one about, it’s it was in a modern love piece in the New York Times originally. It’s about it’s it’s about how tennis kind of saved my marriage, and it was hard. So that that was published, you know, at least a decade ago. But then it became it was part of the Amazon did a television series based on the modern love column, and, Tina Fey and John Slattery played the characters based on my husband and myself. So that was really fun.

Ann Leary [00:06:15]:
But, it’s about, you know, my husband and I are happily married today. We’ve been married. We’ve been living together. And I don’t even like to say this. It makes me sound so old. But I was 20 and my husband was 25 when we started living together. And now I’m a lot we’ve been living together for over 40 years. So, it makes me sound really old, but we are still together.

Ann Leary [00:06:39]:
And we’re different people than we were when we met, and I think we’re better people, hopefully, in many ways. And our marriage is certainly probably the strongest it’s ever been. And when I say that, I know that when people say this publicly, they immediately get divorced. It’s kind of a jinxy thing to do. But when I wrote that Modern Love piece that is in this book, Dan Jones, who’s the editor, said, you know, what he loved about the piece is many people write about, you know, falling in love or, falling out of love and, you know, relationships ending. And not many people write about relationships almost ending and then recovering because and I got why when I was writing it. It’s so painful to go back. I wrote it at a time when that time was behind us a little bit, but it was painful.

Ann Leary [00:07:25]:
And when I showed it to my husband, he too found it. He loved it, but he found it really hard to read because it reminded us of this really, really hard time in our marriage. And, but but when the piece was first published in the times, the the feedback I got from so many people was that they too were, in I called it my piece of penguin marriage. It was based on this movie, March of the Penguins. Penguins marry to raise one egg. And then when that egg for a year, they take care of it. When it grows up, then they part and they meet other people. We felt like that was you know, our kids were getting to be college age, and we felt like we’re just kinda holding on until they went to college, and it probably wasn’t gonna work out.

Ann Leary [00:08:05]:
So it was really, really hard, time, as I said. But they’ve been long out of college, and we’re still happily married because we worked through it. So I, but the piece, you know, I kind of really expanded on it for the book. I wrote much more. I’m it’s it’s still a lot about tennis. So I I learned tennis in my forties and I’m obsessed with tennis. So I write a couple, essays. I think I include tennis, but I also write a lot about my dogs and, my, you know, love for, you know, the place you know, homes that I my my children, the homes that we’ve lived in and had to leave or stay in and decisions regarding, you know, homemaking and raising children.

Jen Hardy [00:08:55]:
So now your kids are grown and, out of college, I’m guessing. And, you know, what do you think are some of the good things about being a woman of a certain age?

Ann Leary [00:09:07]:
Well, I do think that one of the biggest thing is is this thing. I I do think it’s kind of had to do with our hormones and, you know, when we’re younger and during our childbearing age, we it’s important to have the other people, especially the other women, and it’s been like this probably since tribal times. We we really needed the other people to like us and for the safety of our children. And then when you’re no longer of childbearing age, maybe those hormones that make you regulate your behavior to endear yourself with others kind of go away. They do, and and they affect our behavior. And so I think that has part of it where there’s no need for it anymore. And that is why, I think there’s a kind of a trope of the older woman as being, like, get off my property or, but also of kind of being wise. And actually, you know, in many cultures being the kind of person that people go to for advice.

Ann Leary [00:10:04]:
And I love giving advice. No one ever asks for my advice because no one really wants to be like me. I’m kind of a mess, but I give it anyway for free.

Jen Hardy [00:10:13]:
In chapter 4, we I just I’m transitioning here. Yeah. There’s some talk about some knitters. Some what? Knit knitters.

Ann Leary [00:10:21]:
Oh, really?

Jen Hardy [00:10:22]:
And some tude with the knitting. Some attitude. I I Knitting attitude.

Ann Leary [00:10:30]:
Oh, yeah. So yeah. So this was a piece actually was originally published, Ann Hood has published a couple of knitting anthologies. And she asked me to write a piece for hers and I said, well, I don’t really knit. I’ve I’ve tried many times. I’m not good at it. And she said, well, people sometimes write them that they haven’t. And I remembered the time when I tried the hardest to knit was when I was in London.

Ann Leary [00:10:50]:
I went for a weekend in 1990 with my husband who was a struggling, like, aspiring stand up comic, and we were supposed to go for a weekend. I was pregnant and went into preterm labor. And though we packed for 2 nights, we stayed for 6 months. This woman, this sweet Irish nurse taught me to knit, but it was so soothing, the her teaching me and and her, you know, her hands and everything. So I I really I decided to write about that. And I, the funny thing about that is when that anthology came out, Anne was, you know, promoting it. So I said I’d do a couple book events with her, and I I did. But the first one I did, I went and there was another author who had a piece in the anthology.

Ann Leary [00:11:32]:
And the piece originally I don’t think it starts that way in this, but it started with the sentence, I hate knitters. And I sat and I had to read from it, and it was in this big group in front of a big group at a bookstore, and they all had their knitting. They were knitters. I didn’t think about the fact that everyone who reads this, of course, they love to knit. So it’s talked about this, like, kind of prejudice I have against knitters. Like, if I’m in an airport well, I guess they don’t allow knitting needles. But, you know, sometimes you’ll well, you know, it’d be in a meeting or something. Somebody’s knitting.

Ann Leary [00:12:03]:
It it to me, you know, like, I I kind of explored that. But the but the truth was, you know, in my essay, I said it probably has to do with the fact that a knitter sort of saved me, with, taking the time to teach me this skill that has always been associated a little bit with maternity. Right? Knitting. Isn’t that like another I think knitting little booties, and that’s what I wanted to do. I think I I was ultimately able to knit something that looked like a premature baby’s belt. One strand of wool. But, yeah. So that yeah.

Ann Leary [00:12:41]:
That that’s a kind of a different tone, that piece, but I I I like to I usually write fiction, and so the audiobooks are always recorded and narrated by an actress. But this is this book, I was the narrator. I went to a recording studio and read them, which was fun. I never knew how long it takes to record an audio book. It doesn’t take that long. But, I got really choked up reading this one and another one where that talks about the death of one of our dogs. I was reading a lot of them and I’m like, And the poor guy who produced it, he was kind of like dry eyed and looking at his watch. Like, okay, can you not do that noise? And just can we please? And I didn’t laugh out loud at any of my things, but I have done that at readings and no one else laughed.

Ann Leary [00:13:28]:
That’s embarrassing to me. I’ve cried and laughed out loud at my own things and nobody joined me in that.

Jen Hardy [00:13:35]:
But you have the feelings behind it, though. I mean, it’s not just a book to you. This is this is you.

Ann Leary [00:13:40]:
Yeah. So that’s why it did it does feel vulnerable, but I I did get choked up because it’s not yeah. Right. If it was a novel about a person whose dog died or, you know, who had a difficult time with a baby, you know, it yeah. I probably wouldn’t cry in front of people about it when I’m trying to retell it, and it was a long time ago. So, yeah, it’s real. These are true stories. There’s nothing in these stories that have changed except for people’s identifying characteristics.

Jen Hardy [00:14:04]:
Yeah. So is what is what is another part that I haven’t covered in the book that you that you can tell people a little backstory on?

Ann Leary [00:14:13]:
Well, I I have to say there I really like there there’s one essay about when my husband and I decided to take ballroom dancing lessons, and, I really enjoyed writing that essay. It’s it’s about a more recent thing. We just this has just happened a couple years ago, and it was hilarious. We were just, what sometimes, you know, because I do write, you know, sometimes for magazines and stuff. But sometimes when I’m writing or sometimes when I’m just actually living, I things happen that I think, oh, this is I have to write about this. When we were in this lesson that my husband was kind of just kind of, you know, being nice and indulging me by taking I know I wanted to go I’m an I you’re I don’t know how old you are, but I’m in an age where we I didn’t grow up learning how to really dance in a traditional way with another person. We were just, like, dancing to the Ramones, like, with our head. Yeah.

Ann Leary [00:15:06]:
But what I was always hated when I’d be at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, and somebody some old man would come up and ask me to dance. And he’d think you know, he could, like, foxtrot me around in front of his friends. And and then he’d find out I can’t he’d be, like, I’d be skipping in place and didn’t know what I was doing. And I just wanted I said to Dennis, I just wanna go out at a wedding and, like, blow people’s minds. That’s all. I just wanna, like and he was into it, so we went. And then during the first lesson, at one point, this this, Russian dance instructor, you know, who’s won all these trophies and, was very humorous. He, Dennis didn’t know how to lead.

Ann Leary [00:15:49]:
And so the guy took Dennis in his arms and waltzed him around the room, and it was adorable. And then Dennis was like, oh, okay. I get it. So when it when that oh, and then he waltzed him back to me, and I I was like, okay. Great. You’ve got it. And I went to to, like, embrace my husband, and then they waltzed off again without me. I was like, okay.

Ann Leary [00:16:08]:
I’m worried about this. Very And so, yeah, that was fun. And then I the the kind of the the fun the ones I’d love to revisit also, I wrote about where we used to live up in Connecticut, and we had this bat situation. And I’m not talking about baseball bats. I’m talking about the flying rodents that have a face that looks like a like a pig crossed with a human, and I once found one on my pajamas. So, you know, I wrote about, like, kind of that that horror, but also how it involved maybe the decline of our house and our family growing up and stuff. So everything I write about kind of is about something else as as most people, I think, who write do. Yeah.

Jen Hardy [00:16:56]:
But I think this is it’s great. I I kudos to you for having the gumption to get up and do that and just really expose all of these things. I think it’s wonderful, and it really does. I feel like after reading it, I know you, you know, and we’re friends. And that’s just, you know I mean, you I mean, you don’t know me either. But it just you know, you really open yourself up, and I think that that’s a beautiful thing and something that, you know, not a lot of people are willing to do.

Ann Leary [00:17:22]:
Well, that’s very flattering. Every I think anyone who writes personal essays or memoirs, I mean, it’s really important to feel that people can relate. And I when I, you know, when I I meet a lot with book groups or writers, and so, you know, I was just on a panel this weekend at a library event for, you know, writers and aspiring writers. And advice I always give is, always when you’re writing, write as if you’re writing a letter to your your best friend who really gets you. Trust that your audience is smart and has a sense of humor. You don’t have to explain. They get you. And then write it like that.

Ann Leary [00:17:58]:
I think it gives a sense of more personal, it gives it more a tone that’s easier and fun. And and I I got that my first book was a memoir, and I, I was inspired by these letters I had written to a friend that I had forgotten about who when she heard I was writing the book, she sent them all to me. They were funny, and I forgot there were funny things that happened. But the tone of those letters I used in my memoir, and then I tried to remember that in these essays too. Just to you know what? People I think writers sometimes try too hard to sound writerly or, you know, be very prosy and very literary. That’s fine. But I wanna be I want people to relate and like what they’re reading and wanna read on.

Jen Hardy [00:18:43]:
And we do. And that’s why you’re here. Right? We’re not telling everyone yet. It’s so amazing. I’m gonna hold up this envelope. For people who are watching the video, if you’re not watching the video, there’s a yellow envelope, and it says on it in bold Sharpie, requested. I’ve tried being nice. And I don’t talk about the fact that I’ve got a couple of sassy neighbors.

Jen Hardy [00:19:04]:
I love my neighborhood. I love all my neighbors, but there’s a couple. We’ve had some things. And, my husband goes to the mailbox, and he’s like, what did you do? I I don’t know because it says my name. We didn’t think to look for the sender because we just, you know, saw those big letters. And, I love that it says I requested I’m trying be nice.

Ann Leary [00:19:27]:
You know your neighbor was saying, I’ve tried be nice, and inside was gonna be, like, a kind of, you know, pages of what you’ve done wrong and

Jen Hardy [00:19:34]:
Yes. Or some kind of summons. I don’t know what I thought it was. I mean, clearly, it’s not from a court, but, yes, some sort of, I don’t know.

Ann Leary [00:19:42]:
Other than New York. So I mean, around the world, if you say you’re from New York, people are like, oh. Like, people take a step back. But and people misunderstand. You know, when we were walking people in the city, it’s so crowded. You’re just you’re not trying to be rude. You just want to save everyone time. So you just say if someone is in your way, excuse me.

Ann Leary [00:19:58]:
It just means it doesn’t mean anything. But, you know, if you I just need to go faster. And people do take it the wrong way. It’s not personal, but when you leave New York and I found this when we lived in New York City for years, and then we moved up to Northwestern Connecticut, really kind of a rural part of Connecticut. And I had to remember, you know so in New York too, you know, if you tap the horn, it’s just helping. Helping the person to light change. You’re looking, you know if you do that, where we moved to, people would turn around and wave because they thought they it was a friend. You know? They would they would oh, who’s that? You know? And and, you know, if you go in a Dunkin’ Donuts and start saying, I’ll have this, this, this, the person’s like, woah.

Ann Leary [00:20:34]:
It’s like, slow down. So you just have to you know, I think New Yorkers have to remember to check themselves when they leave New York.

Jen Hardy [00:20:41]:
Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s interesting.

Ann Leary [00:20:43]:
You know, not everyone understands. Where do

Jen Hardy [00:20:45]:
you like to vacation when you vacation?

Ann Leary [00:20:47]:
Well, I’m glad you asked because there’s an essay about that in my essay collection. We we actually have not been on vacation in a while because we have we have, you know, too many dogs right now, but also just because of my husband’s work schedule. But we love Italy, and I do write about, different I write a bit about the way we travel. We we have this thing where we actually can’t check luggage. We we find it. For some reason, we feel, you know, it just would be, like, tragic if we had to do that. And somehow we also feel some moral superiority for carrying on luggage even though then we get to a place we have no shoes to wear. I don’t know.

Ann Leary [00:21:27]:
But I write about that and also about, just, yeah, trying to different things about Italy. And I I’m actually not a I I like to say I’m not emotional. I don’t I don’t like to cry because I’m not a person who, like, if I’m watching a movie that’s sad or if I walk into a cathedral in Florence and I’m overwhelmed by the beauty. I’m another person might like touch away a tear, but I go from happy smiling to sobbing. I can’t control. I can’t regulate emotion. So I would often burst into tears, like tears spraying, heaving sobs. And, you know, in cathedrals, in, you know, beautiful towns, I’ll just walk up to a summit and burst into tears.

Ann Leary [00:22:11]:
So, my family tries to be away from me when we go places in in not just in Italy, but in European cities. I just I’m kind of I’m kind of a move by by beauty in ways very I I miss some kind of there’s some point in development in child development where children, like, 3 years old learn to regulate emotions, and I guess I skipped it. I was pretty I was playing with kittens or something. I have to do that. So I have a hard time not crying when I’m not not, you know, crying too much. I also can’t laugh without crying, so I guess I cry a lot. Oh. And being extra remember, like, we’re human.

Ann Leary [00:22:48]:
We’re supposed to have feelings and we yes. We were taught our age. It’s funny you’re the the the what you were saying about different you know, how people perceive people our age. I I spend a lot of time on Reddit. I do a lot of research if I’m working on a novel there. And I found this subreddit, and it’s I forget what it’s called, but it’s about it’s like it’s millennials who hate boomers. It’s like why boomers suck or boomer. And I didn’t know there was such boomer hate from millennials and gen xers and gen z’s, but it it made sense it started to make sense why if I’m in a, like, a grocery store and I’m trying to use, like, Apple Pay or something, I will often say to the young cashier, oh, I’m such a boomer.

Ann Leary [00:23:25]:
And they say, oh, no. No. Like, as if I had said something really horrible. I didn’t know I actually did. It was like a I I didn’t know that. So, yeah. So but they don’t like us. I don’t know.

Ann Leary [00:23:39]:
What what did we like old people when we were young now?

Jen Hardy [00:23:41]:
Well, we were not like this. And, also, I just want you to know that Gen X’s are categorized with boomers in the hate because we are an invisible group, and so they lump everyone over. We’re over millennials. We’re all boomers and they hate us all. So, yeah, it’s a thing. So we, we need to learn to, we need to start educating them on, on the good things.

Ann Leary [00:24:04]:
They hate us for ruining the planet, which I get, but I don’t think we did it by ourselves. We had generations before us. And then but in the subreddit, they they were like, people will post that they’re angry because their parents are, like, traveling and spending all the kids’ inheritance. And I’m ready. I’m reading the comments. Like, well, this kid’s gonna get slammed. No. They’re all on board with hating the parents for not living a thriftier life so that their children will it’s like, are you gonna kill the parents so that you can have their money sooner? Like, what? But it’s fun.

Ann Leary [00:24:34]:
I like to I like I like to visit these communities. I’m a bit of a hermit. I spend a lot of time on Reddit and other forums watching the people from a safe place, my bedroom.

Jen Hardy [00:24:45]:
One thing, but it about you and your husband. And how did you meet? Oh, okay. I was gonna lie.

Ann Leary [00:24:51]:
My last name is Denis Leary, the actor comedian, actor, writer, producer. But when we met, he had just graduated from Emerson College. I was a student there. I took a comedy writing class that he was teaching. It’s like a workshop. And, we kind of, I had a huge crush and he, I guess, did too. And after this class was over, we started going out. And by that, I mean, we went on a date, he stayed over, and he still hasn’t left.

Ann Leary [00:25:16]:
He’s still here. Like, it went really fast. But, yeah. So he then became he was he was, like, an open mic guy. He wasn’t even getting paid to do stand up. He was just developing his career, and then, then he became pretty successful. So it was but it was great because we knew each other before that. We actually made, you know, friends and been adults before he had that.

Ann Leary [00:25:38]:
So we kind of came into the world of red carpets and celebrity kind of with more of a sense of, you know, 2 feet on the ground, maybe. I don’t know. But I I did write about this. There’s some, a chapter called I think it’s called Red Carpet Diaries, but it’s about how we really didn’t know what we were doing when we went to our first movie premieres and went to LA for while he was shooting a movie for a few months. And, you know, even back then in the early 19 nineties, there wasn’t this kind of Kardashian, like, red carpet. I don’t think they even showed the red carpet. Remember, you just watched the Academy Awards. There was nothing before.

Ann Leary [00:26:14]:
And so we didn’t really know how people behave the way now if anyone would know how to walk in front of a bunch of cameras and pose, but we we didn’t know that. So I I remembered some very funny stories where we, and I mean me, really put the wrong foot forward and made a fool of myself many times. If I don’t know if it’s still up, but TMC once had a thing of me. And I’m I’m a sober recovering I used to drink when I was younger. I had a recovering alcoholic. I was dead sober. Stepped out of a limousine after, like, an Emmy party and into a gutter and fell into the pavement face first.

Jen Hardy [00:26:53]:
Oh my goodness.

Ann Leary [00:26:54]:
It looked like I was drunk out of my mouth. You know, of course, I sprang back to my feet as one does and then limped into the thing, but it’s just, like, classic. I don’t know. I often I do write about, you know, struggles I’ve had with, bad depression and substance abuse, alcoholism. But often, you know, I embarrass myself enough to get sober. But when people question that didn’t know me when I drank, and they they they’re like, oh, I just think, why don’t you drink? I’m I’m like, trust me. This is my baseline. This is plenty.

Ann Leary [00:27:25]:
Like, you don’t want more than this. It’s too much. Trust me. Everyone who knew me when I drank just not asked that question.

Jen Hardy [00:27:32]:
Yeah. And, you know, what I found is we don’t drink really either is it’s you can have just as much fun. In fact, sometimes it’s more fun when everyone else is drinking and you’re not because you can see the silly.

Ann Leary [00:27:43]:
I actually you know, when I stopped drinking, I was always I was shocked that people I assume when you drink heavily, when you have a drinking problem, which I did, a blackout drinker, I thought everyone else drank that way too. I didn’t know what I was the big so it was shocking and embarrassing to finally go out and be around my friends I’ve known for years. And see, they’re not that drunk. I was the drunk one. And I often I often don’t recognize drunkenness. Like, I will be at a party, and I’ll say to my husband afterwards, yeah. That guy is so and so’s husband, he’s really not that smart. He’s not he’s kinda dumb.

Ann Leary [00:28:16]:
And Dennis will say, no. He was drunk. And I say, oh, okay. Then he’s not dumb. I didn’t recognize that. But, I my editor told me something, which I didn’t know, which is that people are now sober curious, which I love that phrase. It cracks me up. Like, what’s I didn’t know that was a thing, but, yeah, a lot of people are trying to be sober and not sure if they have a drinking problem.

Ann Leary [00:28:38]:
I I think that’s funny.

Jen Hardy [00:28:39]:
That is very interesting. I’ve never heard the word sober curious.

Ann Leary [00:28:42]:
Over curious. Okay. If you’re sober curious, don’t be curious. It’s just like yeah. I don’t drink. I still have fun, if you’re curious.

Jen Hardy [00:28:54]:
That’s funny. Alright. Well, that seems like a great interesting thing to leave on. And I thank you so much for your time. You are amazing and phenomenal, and I cannot wait to have everyone else be able to read this book because they’re gonna love it and learn all about you. And where can they find the anywhere. Right? Your books just

Ann Leary [00:29:11]:
gonna be The book comes out June 4th, the audiobook and the, hardcover. And I will be doing some events, in the kind of, you know, New England, nor New York area, which you could find on my website when I update it. My it’s annleary.com. It will be updated by the time this airs. And, yeah, I’d love to see you at bookstores or libraries or just I hope you enjoy my book if you decide to read it. Maybe sample it and then buy it. That’s what I do.

Jen Hardy [00:29:39]:
Buy it. Just buy it. Let’s well, thank you again. I appreciate you coming on the show. You’re amazing. Have a wonderful day.

Ann Leary [00:29:47]:
Thank you. You too, Jen. Bye.

Jen Hardy [00:29:48]:
Bye.

And thank you so much for joining us for this episode about Ann’s book,” I’ve tried being nice.”