PoS Book Club
Exploring the worst and weirdest books the world has to offer. Who appointed these guys critics? No one.
PoS Book Club
S2E9: It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
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The book club takes a look at "It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover, a bestselling blend of romantic tropes and flawed portrayals of domestic assault.
Intro
SPEAKER_00To all members president worldwide, I hereby call this meeting of the Peace of Shit Book Club to order. I'm Dominic Wilde, and we're back with another thrilling and romantic meeting. So nice of you to attend. Alright, without further ado, let us introduce the Peace of Shit members assembled here in person. Jane Lynch. Welcome. Always a pleasure. Chip Wilson, lovely to see your smiling face back again.
SPEAKER_07Thank you for having me, Dominic.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for being here. And of course, our resident romance studies expert, Dr. Bo Dashnan PhD. Thank you so much for taking time, Doctor.
SPEAKER_01Hi there. Thanks for uh bringing me in.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well, we've got quite a meeting in store for our members today. We heard you loud and clear. So it turns out that really nobody is that interested in hearing about Saddam Hussein or obscure UFO cults. Our listenership is sinking like a stone. It's uh never been lower after those last two episodes. And, you know, I so I've been um myself kindled a new romance with this lovely lady who has since been listening to the podcast. She's a uh new book club member. And I'm paraphrasing, but she said, you know, like she'll listen. She loved the model land, loved Boy in the Stripe of Jammer. She's like, what when are you going to get back to doing like actual books that people have heard of and that people have, you know, actually read? And so for all of you women and men out in the audience, uh members who are thinking the same thing, well, this one is for you. So let me let me tease our feature book today. So a gorgeous florist opens a shop, meets a brooding neurosurgeon, and thinks she's landed the ultimate romantic fantasy. Enter her childhood first love to turn a sing a standard triangle into an escalating emotional mess. This glossy, trauma-heavy melodrama somehow became a global juggernaut. Powered by TikTok, it came to define viral publishing. Critics slammed the book for packaging domestic violence as a spicy romance trope and sanitizing abusive behavior, but fans were enraptured with the work spawning sequels, knockoffs, and even a companion coloring book. If you want an agonizingly controversial exercise in relationship whiplash that fundamentally altered 2020s pop culture, stick around for our discussion of It Ends With Us by Romance Queen Colleen Hoover. And especially stick around to the end of today's meeting where we'll announce next meeting's book so you can read along. We're really pushing for more member engagement. We'd love for you to read with us, send us your thoughts, and allow us to share them on future meetings. But before all that, as ever, we first dive into the book report. Okay, the book report is our grab bag segment of news, doings, happenings, and new releases. Uh, before I open it up to the floor today, I'll I'll put it out to a vote. Shall we reach into the mailbag?
Mailbag
SPEAKER_00Always.
SPEAKER_02Let's touch the mail bag.
SPEAKER_00Okay, let's reach into that mailbag. And again, you can always reach us at POSbookclub at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. So this member writes, Thanks for keeping up the good work, PSBC. After a month or so away, I'm now catching up on episodes. When I saw the title Model Land by Tyler Banks, I was pretty sure it'd be some dumbass autobiographical vanity project about the modeling industry with a general lack of personal reflection or critique. The fact that it was actually a fantasy shit sandwich with a general lack of personal reflection or critique made it so much better. This guy or woman wishes that there was a two-hour Tommy Wazoe style film. Could have been brilliant. Regarding plug gate, I would have believed it was likely an accident if Bo hadn't given such a long-winded story about the earplug got into his asshole in the first place. Nice try, Doctor. That refers to, of course, an anecdote that the doctor shared about finding an earplug in his underwear in the morning in bed. Also, great work to Jane for having a relevant thought than asking other people to look into it. For the record, I didn't bother looking into it either. Uh there's no name given, but um, yeah, some great feedback. And as I said, people loved model. Thank you. Thanks for the feedback.
The Book Report: News & Doings, Erotica Hits
SPEAKER_00Uh thanks for writing in.
SPEAKER_03Actually, if I could uh follow up with that, last week I was mentioning that there was the worst book I could find on Goodreads called Handbook for Mortals, being a 1.3 something. And someone on our Reddit, Mark L. Dark, had written that doesn't really count as traditionally published. It was published by a company that has only ever published that one book and was a friend of the author. And by their own uh list that they keep, the worst book on Goodreads is Trigger Warning by William Johnstone at 1.95, which still seems really high for the worst book on all of Goodreads. So there you go. Thank you, Mark L.
SPEAKER_00Dark, for writing that correction. And thank you, Jane Lynch, for a fantastic contribution to the book reports.
SPEAKER_07Can I also thank Mark again for compiling that list of books that we will be mining and probably stealing from to uh find books to cover?
SPEAKER_03I did want to add one other thing for the grab bag. I was reading it's a good book, though. And I was uh we've established that it is okay to bring up good books, right? I'll allow it. All right. There is a uh my favorite uh kind of modern fantasy author, Scott Lynch, who does the Gentleman Bastard series. He hasn't really written the fourth book. I think it's been like 10 or 12 years or something like that since he started on it. Um, but he has written a very short uh little fantasy novel uh called this in this magic and mystery series, where a bunch of fantasy authors all wrote uh little true crime art uh crime novels uh in like fantasy settings. Um so there's seven of them, they're like a dollar each, um, and they're available. So if anybody's a fan of Scott Lynch, you can look that up. It's the wizard who kept himself suspicious. Um and then there's a bunch, there's six other kind of fantasy authors that uh gonna check out.
SPEAKER_00There you go. We'll definitely run to pick that up. And Jane just overflowing with contributions to the book report today. So thank you for that. Uh Bo, Chip, anything you guys wanted to add to this segment?
SPEAKER_07Do you have something bad, Bo? Because I have something good.
SPEAKER_02And back-to-back good is I've got I've got I got nothing. I got absolutely nothing this week.
SPEAKER_00Pull on a Jane.
SPEAKER_07So reading It Ends With Us, I've been kind of thinking a lot about prose and like the prose standard in popular fiction right now. So and I like to do a bit of writing myself for fun. But I picked up this book called Steering the Craft, a 21st century guide to sailing the sea of story by Ursula Kayla Gwynn. It's like a bunch of little um little exercises that you can do for like personal writing. It's only like a hundred pages, it's really fun to work through. So I've been playing with this and and doing some writing exercises. So I thought it'd be like.
SPEAKER_00Do they keep up the nautical theme throughout the book?
SPEAKER_07No, that's just sort of a bit of flourish. It's just a title. Have you read her sci-fi books? I haven't, but like I know she's she's pretty well regarded, right? I I'm honestly I haven't read anything from her, but I saw it and uh I looked and I was like, oh, she's written a lot, she's got a good reputation, so I thought I'd pick it up, and yeah, it's fun.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for that chip. Um, okay, let us then dive into some new releases that we're keeping an eye on here. And uh, in keeping with our romance theme, this meeting, I thought we would focus in on some new romance books that are trending on Amazon. First one, uh Stepdaughter Shared at the Cabin. Taboo Forbidden Lust, Shared with Friends, and Deep Claiming by Isla Storm. Reading from the back cover here. When my wife asked me to bring my 23-year-old stepdaughter on the annual guys' trip to the lake cabin, I knew it was a bad idea. What I didn't expect was how quickly things would spiral into pure filthy indulgence. This is straight up explicit smut with zero slow burn. Uh, number one bestseller in BDSM erotica, 47 pages, $1.99 on Amazon Kindle, and came out June 15th, 2026.
SPEAKER_02Wait, did you say like Isla Storm?
SPEAKER_00Is that the author's name? Yeah. Uh Isla Storm.
SPEAKER_02Uh Isla Isla, yeah, whichever one it is. Yeah, I was curious. I just quickly Googled that. And apparently, yeah, whoever that author is, it's nothing but weird, like weird, inappropriate family erotica with pretty straightforward book titles. One is Draining Her Dry, Milking My Son's Pregnant Fiancé. Next one, Betting My Stepanies on the Train, A Forbidden Taboo Tale of Virginity and Cream Pies. Wow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we don't have time to dive into the whole cultural phenomenon of uh incest porn and erotica here, but it's unsettling at the least. It really is.
SPEAKER_02I just say one more.
SPEAKER_00Please.
SPEAKER_02Milked by Daddy on July the 4th, breeding his best friend's daughter.
SPEAKER_00Well, if you like that, you might enjoy uh stretching her out. Dominant Boutique Owner breeds the Petite Virgin by Felicity Blaze. Reading from the back cover, a violent storm traps petite untouched Sophie with her massive dominant boutique owner boss Marcus, turning one night of forced proximity into raw, unrelenting indulgence. Big dominant alpha meets tiny innocent virgin. Expect heavy emphasis on extreme size difference as he slowly stretches and claims every inch of her untouched body, turning her into his eager, well-bred little plaything. And that's also $1.99. 42 pages. And uh lucky for you boys, it's already out. Came out July 6th. Nokia Doke. Uh and the last book that we're keeping an eye on here, again, keeping with the romance theme. Drained by the Doctor by Lucas Blaze. And I don't know if that's any relation to Felicity Blaze, but uh I'll read from the back cover here. Um me, 6'4, 220, the golden boy, star quarterback, the guy every girl on campus wants to take home. And I can't get hard for a single one of them. Coach knows something's off. My stats are slipping, my timing's shot, and that's why he sends me to this discreet doctor, an older, broad-shouldered guy with intense eyes that seem to see right through me. Now I'm on his exam table in nothing but a thin gown, and those big hands are all over me, pressing, prodding, squeezing, and the thing that hasn't worked for months? It's waking up. Uh, this is number one bestseller and LGBTQ plus short stories, 58 pages, $2.99, and um came out last week, July 23rd, 2026.
SPEAKER_02Wow. It's a popular title. There's at least three different books called that. There's Drained by the Doctor, The Cream Chronicles by Virginia Thick. There's also Drained by My Doctor, gay first time authority figures by Dylan Thorne. Crazy.
SPEAKER_03I'm not very well versed in the romance genre, and I'm kind of curious if these are like these are obviously like more smut, right? But there's erotica, I think, more than erotica more than romance, right?
SPEAKER_00But I take a big tent view when it comes to romance.
SPEAKER_02You pop you mean you pop a big tent. Pop a big tent. When you read romance, yeah. Sorry, sorry, Chase.
SPEAKER_03All are like romance novels more like getting more and more towards erotica. I don't think like the old ones with like Fabio on the cover were like quite so smuddy, I'm sure. But like is it more normalized nowadays where there is more like erotica and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_00All of these are from uh these are all Kindle, you know, self-published Kindle Unlimited books. And um there is like they they just bang them out like a factory. So I guess because there's no barrier to entry, um, it's really easy. And and you notice all of these are like around 50 pages or so. So I don't know that necessarily we're seeing less the actual conventional romance books, but but it does seem like the sort of erotica vein of romance has exploded with uh the self-publishing industry. Okay, so goes the book report. Uh I'll now hand it over to my esteemed colleague, Dr. Bo Dash in the PhD, to lead us through a discussion of It Ends
It Ends with Us: Booktok, CoHo & Context
SPEAKER_00With Us.
SPEAKER_02Thanks very much. Before we kind of dive right into the book, it's worth having a quick like discussion or quick comment on what types of books we actually cover and why this book fits into that. This is a book, of course, that's extraordinarily popular. Uh as you said in the intro, uh, Dominic, it it's kind of redefined the publishing industry. It's extremely popular, especially, of course, with young women. Um, and as as the readers are or sorry, the listeners are members. As the members are probably aware, none of us are young women. Um, young nor women. Neither young nor women. Um and this is a book about domestic uh domestic assault and abuse. So it's kind of like we don't want to kind of want to clarify why this is a legitimate target for us, I think. Um, rather than it's just kind of poking fun. But I don't know if you remember the f the very first conversation we had on on the on the podcast was about what books we cover and why. Has your guys' thinking changed on that sort of subject?
SPEAKER_00The the main thrust of that conversation was that yeah, don't punch down and nothing that's intentionally unserious.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I know.
SPEAKER_00Do you have that list in front of you? What I I should remember our own ethos, but uh to be honest with you, you know, I I can't remember what I said, you know, 20 meetings ago.
SPEAKER_02No, I think that that's basically it. We don't punch down. We usually it's it's people who have some sort of grift or angle, people who are doing something that's kind of shitty. We don't kind of pick on people just for being bad authors, especially not like self-published or startup people. That's basically it. And so why is this then a very clear target for us? The reason this book is a massive piece of shit is because of how flippantly it it deals with really, really challenging and difficult topics, specifically domestic abuse. Um the way it portrays it, the way it portrays victims, and the way it portrays perpetrators. We're kind of gonna we're gonna dive into all that when we get to the plot. We thought maybe the best way to do this was to talk through the plot and then we de we deal with the problems when they pop up. But just to really quickly introduce the book, Colleen Hoover, um, the author, sort of part of her her mythos is that she, you know, she lived in a trailer park in Texas. She she wrote in her spare time, somehow became one of the best-selling authors of the 2020s. Um, referred to as Coho by her fans who refer to themselves as the cohort. She's got, you know, almost five million, I think four and a half million followers on social media, sold 35 million books in just a few years. Uh, and as you said in the intro, she is one of the drivers behind book talk, which is of course the the the TikTok trend for discussing books. Many people talk about book talk as being revolutionary, saying that it's uh it's encouraging young people to read, it's making publishers' taste more democratic, it's more driven by audiences on social media.
SPEAKER_03Um Are we a part of the book talk?
SPEAKER_02We are not, because we are not on TikTok. It's book T-O-K, not book T-A-L-T-A-L-K. Gotcha. Unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00I think we were on TikTok for a bit, but I don't think that any of us maintain the account.
SPEAKER_02So Well, we should we should get on there and we should put a hashtag book talk and start fucking raking in the money, is what we should be doing.
SPEAKER_00Maybe that's the problem. Yeah, maybe that's why nobody's attending these meetings.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but book talk has driven up sales of books, and some people would say it's it's driven up like engagement by younger people, especially young women. Um, critics will say it's led to more sales of fewer books. Um, there's less diversity in the marketplace, and the market is now just trying to replicate the same thing over and over again. People also say that, you know, that the trend has driven more away from literature and towards aesthetics, right? Because it's about people getting wearing woolly sweaters and autumn scenes and dark academia and stuff like that rather than the actual content of the book. Um, I actually went and watched a bunch of book talk stuff for It Ends With Us. Have you guys ever, I don't even know if you use TikTok or if you're familiar with this trend. Have you ever actually seen it online?
SPEAKER_00I'm a do-yun guy. I like the Chinese version of TikTok. It's mostly military parades and like farmers dancing.
SPEAKER_07Um I'm I'm on Doyun too. I'm I I completely agree. I'm scared of book talk.
SPEAKER_03I've watched uh YouTube uh book reviewers um before. I can't remember any of their names right now, but my wife and I have watched a few of them, but not TikTok, so I don't really know. It's probably very different.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, there's a few like video essayists I like.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, that's that's basically it. Um the videos I watched, especially for this book, are almost entirely people videoing themselves while reading the book and like either crying or screaming or laughing. Um with the book kind of in the shop. Literally holding them reading the book and saying like my reaction at this moment. And it's like it don't want to be like sound like some old piece of shit uh making fun of the kids or something. But yeah, it's hard to be optimistic about the future when you when you see that. It's obviously like all social media, it's extremely performative. Um, and that's the main major criticism of of book talk.
SPEAKER_00But that's half of LinkedIn as well, too. It's not just the kids, like you go on LinkedIn and it's just like jerk off the streets. Those people are fucking on hand talking about. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But it's one of my favorite tropes on LinkedIn, it's like, you know, this guy reading like Rich Dad Poor Dad, and it's like this book saved my life.
SPEAKER_02And it's like Should we should should we do Rich Dad Poor Dad one day? Maybe we should add that to our list.
SPEAKER_07Is is it really more performative than like a guy reading a book at a cafe and like really holding it up? He's reading infinite jest and he like really wants everyone to see.
SPEAKER_00Don't you do that, Jane?
SPEAKER_07I do. Yeah, and you're there to be seen.
SPEAKER_02Of course.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you used to go to the bar and like read your book at happy hour, didn't you? That's what I that's usually how I read. Hit up the pub and read there.
SPEAKER_02And prop up infinite jest on the counter for the ladies to show up. Works every time. Yeah. So so yeah, good point. Let's not blame the kids. It's not the kids' fault, it's social media's fault. But what is this book? What's the basic plot? Let's dive in. Let's dive into the world of let us end with us. Before we do.
SPEAKER_03I I have a question. If it's not too much of a spoiler, what is it and who is us? Now that gives it all away.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that gives it all away. It is like a it's like an interdimensional being, I think, that takes the form of a clown.
SPEAKER_02That's infinite jest, you idiot. Um so
It Ends with Us: Meeting Lily Blossum Bloom & Ryle Kincaid
SPEAKER_02this is the story of Lily Blossom Bloom. A horrendously named character. She's 23.
SPEAKER_00Okay, go ahead. Is it fun? It's not fun. The author makes a point of the stuff. Get through the plot summary and we can talk about if it's fun or not fun later.
SPEAKER_07But I'll defend Lily Blossom Bloom as well. I gotta make it.
SPEAKER_02It's but it's uh it's such such horrible naming of a character, but it's also written in that way of like provided you point it out that you're aware that it's silly, that it doesn't matter. Um the book takes place, come on, Lily Blossom Bloom who loves flowers. Just let's just get through the plot summary. There's a lot of plot to get through, so I don't know anybody let's get through it.
SPEAKER_00Let's let's just do this.
SPEAKER_02Takes place in in Boston. It's a it's a romance story fundamentally.
SPEAKER_03Wait, wait, wait. This Texas lady wrote a book about a lady from Boston.
SPEAKER_02Well, she's from Maine. This book will will mention Boston on every other page, but will never mention anything specific or identifying about Boston. It just reminds you that we're in Boston. It doesn't reference any specific place or anything specific happening.
SPEAKER_00They go to a Bruins game or watch one on TV at the bar. I mean, there's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_02You don't have to be in Boston to do that. No, the Bruins are mentioned a few times.
SPEAKER_07And there's a serious lesson about dating Bruins fans.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we're gonna come to that too. But the, you know, the book the the one thing I thought I'd do read it, reading a couple quotes. I thought I'd read a quote from the, I think it's like actually the first page that shows how flippantly this book deals with like serious topics. Right from the start, it just shows you right away that it can't deal with serious topics. Lily Blossom Bloom is for some reason standing on the edge of a building. Um and she says she's just standing there, it's night, and she's looking out at it from the top of this apartment building, looking down over the city of Boston. In case we didn't mention that already.
SPEAKER_00The day of her father's funeral.
SPEAKER_02It's the day of her father's funeral. We don't even Know that yet because this is like the opening. I'm not sure if it's the opening lines or some of the opening lines. As I sit here with one foot on either side of the ledge, looking down from 12 stories above the streets of Boston, I can't help but think about suicide. Not my own. I like my life enough uh to want to see it through. I'm more focused on other people and how they ultimately come to the decision to just end their lives. Do they ever regret it? Do they look at the ground as it rushes towards them and think, well, crap, this was a bad idea? Um, yeah, that's the intro about suicide. Um that's how seriously this book is able to take extremely challenging topics.
SPEAKER_01It's pretty juvenile.
SPEAKER_02But that's Lily Blossom Bloom, our our fair uh our fair heroine. Um but enter the Romeo to her Juliet, whose name is Ryle Kincaid. Doctor. Ryle Kinkade. Doctor of Neurosurgery. Um what a dreamy hunky guy. He Lily Blossom Bloom is sitting on the edge, thinking about jumping off, not actually jumping off, just wondering if other people go, oh crap, when they jump off. And suddenly Raoul Kinkade appears and starts kicking the fuck out of a chair and smashing it. And Lily Blossom Bloom looks at him and says, He's beautiful. He's just a big hunky piece of beef. And for some reason, she starts speaking to him. Uh, and he says, he's a neurosurgeon. And this, you know, stepping out of the story for a second, at first you might think this is unbelievable that you could just be hanging out and a beautiful doctor man just magically appears. That sounds like a romance stroke. I will actually defend this book at this point, um, because this has happened to me. And I might even remember having told you guys about this.
SPEAKER_00Are you the dreamy doctor in this one?
SPEAKER_02You're just showing up and thinking about killing yourself, you're so hot doctor. No, that that I've definitely done, but but I'm not not the dreamy doctor. Um I was on holiday in a in a tropical climate, and I twisted my ankle really badly, and I I sprained my ankle and I plummeted to the ground on the on the hard, rocky surface. And as I was kind of crying in pain, and my wife was comforting me, this beautiful German doctor with bright blue eyes came up to me to like help me. And he was literally like, like, I saw that you've a hurting, and I came to help you. And I was like, he's the most beautiful man I'd ever seen in my entire life. And I was just swimming in his eyes. And and and my wife was like, was like, yeah, I think he's a little bit hurt. And I was like, fuck off, bitch, he's mine.
SPEAKER_00Um in the book though, in the book though, the doctor also says, uh, I want to fuck you. And I don't know if this German doctor propositioned you as uh politely in the I said that.
SPEAKER_02He he didn't. Um shame. Yeah, so that's so that they're they're the conversation is so badly written. I'm not even sure what the right word is. The mechanism between these two characters is that they agree to always tell each other naked truths. So throughout the rest of the book, every time they're speaking, they say naked truths, which is just them stating their internal monologue, their motivations, their their desires, their feelings in any given moment. And anytime I read a book or see a movie where people do that, I always think of Futurama because it has one of my favorite lines in anything. And I don't know if you guys know Futurama, but there's an episode where Fry interacts with the robot devil, and Fry's writing an opera to impress his love, Leela, and he writes really bad characters. And the robot devil says, you can't just have your characters say what they feel. That makes me angry. Um and I always think of that during things like this with their naked truths. So Lily's Lily Blossom Bloom's naked truth is that her father was abusive. Riley shares a naked truth that he saw a child die that day. She gives the naked truth that at the father's funeral that day, she didn't say anything when she was supposed to give a eulogy because she couldn't think of one nice thing to say. And then his naked truth was, I want to fuck you.
SPEAKER_01Right after she talks about her dead father.
SPEAKER_07She she has a great follow-up to that, another naked truth. Where she says, Okay, since we're on the subject, the first guy I ever had sex with was homeless. And at that point, I she Miss Hoover almost had me with this book. I was like, okay, this is fun.
SPEAKER_00I I was hooked at that point.
SPEAKER_07Bagging homeless dudes? We're gonna set up a soup kitchen here. Yeah, I was like, but it's that um, it's just right from the beginning, like you're saying, it's that tell tell tell. Like nothing is shown, there's there's no subtlety. Um uh it really reminds me of like um late 19th century kind of literature where you read that and they're just these elaborate explanations of the way the characters look physically, and then telling you within that same line, like he looked like this because he was tired, and he was tired because he was thinking about this, and just telling you every single component of what the character's thinking, what their motivations are, their interests, and so on. It's interesting because like I think that's really common now uh in in what most people are reading, and like Hoover is kind of like just a maybe just like a reflection of it, but there's this uh I don't know, there's some some kind of shift in in like narrative structure and prose where everything is like tell tell tell. And it's like a totally different way to interact with a story. I don't know, like that the the relationship between the narrator and the and the audience, I think is much different. And so it's I I have a tough time with it because you also kind of want to step back and be like, well, like if this is just like a trend, like there are all kinds of trends over time in in terms of how you tell stories, and like if this is how people engage with it now, like, yeah, sure, go ahead, right?
SPEAKER_03But it does like you know what I think it is, I think it's that all these people, these authors are kind of thinking about how when they had to go to school and they had to like read books for English class and they had to have discussions in class about what the author meant and what the symbolism is and all this bullshit. And they're like, you know what? No, I'm just gonna give the kids the answers so these teachers can stop get it get off their high fucking horse.
SPEAKER_02But and theoretically, there's nothing wrong with that, right? Like this this this writing may not be to my taste, uh, and it certainly is not. But that doesn't make it that doesn't that's not what makes this book a piece of shit. The characters are lame and Lily I Lily Blossom Bloom, for fuck's sake, um, and constantly saying what they feel um is, in my opinion, not good writing. That's not to my taste, that's fine. That's not what makes it a piece of shit. It's the other stuff that really makes it genuinely awful. But this stuff is like, just for the for you, Jane, since I'm assuming you didn't read the book, just how tired and like awful the dialogue is. During this conversation on the on the on the rooftop, you know, Ryle Kincaid just randomly says, Do you ever wish people were more transparent? I feel like everyone fakes who they really are. When deep down we're all equal amounts of screwed up, some of us are just better at hiding it than others. Like, that's this is two people who just met.
SPEAKER_03And there's also just like a childish fantasy that I don't know how old like was this was this lady like young when she wrote this? Or she was 12 years old.
SPEAKER_00Phenomenally popular romance book written by a 12-year-old that like we just had to take him down, had enough of these uppity 12-year-olds.
SPEAKER_02She was in her 30s when she wrote it. She was not 12 years old.
SPEAKER_00But the character's
It Ends with Us: Ellen DeGeneres Diaries & Love Triangle
SPEAKER_00like 22, 23, Lily Blossom Bloom.
SPEAKER_02Lily Blossom Bloom is 23, yeah. So that they kind of they have their moment on the rooftop. His pager goes off. It's probably not his pager, reminding him that he works at the Boston Hospital and he's gotta go. And they're separated. Um, we then get our first of many flashback scenes, which is told through the medium of Lily Blossom Bloom's diary, which she has inexplicably decided to write all her diary entries to Ellen de Generis. So every diary entry starts, dear Ellen. And every diary entry also starts with a few comments about the show, like loved your show last night, loved your interview with Brad Pitt, or whatever. Um, and then she dives into the details of her life.
SPEAKER_00Um I didn't care for that mechanism so much. I enjoyed other pieces of the book, but it was pretty funny.
SPEAKER_07Like some of the entries are like, Wow, you were dancing with Barack Obama last night. That's so cool, Ellen. Just very funny.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, these very sort of on-the-nos references in order to date it in a certain period.
SPEAKER_02Of course, the the diary entries are written in the exact same tone and style as the rest of the book. So we're supposed to assume that when she's 13 and when she's in her mid-twenties, she's exactly the same, right? There's no no change in character. But the core part that she's reflecting back on is there's a homeless boy. There's a homeless boy lurking around.
SPEAKER_00A hobo is her called.
SPEAKER_02Hobo. Oh boy. I never never thought of that. Yeah, I guess that's what it is. Oh boy. But let me tell you, this is one hot hoboy. Um, he might be dirty, but he's got blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes, and she admires him from afar before eventually kind of chatting to him and letting her come into her house to uh to shower and eat a sandwich. Uh, and they watch Ellen together. And she also kind of drops in, oh, by the way, her dad repeatedly and horrifically beats her mother. Uh, and that's bad. Um, but her life motto, which she takes from Ellen DeGeneres, and the hit Pixar film Finding Nemo, as the fish dory would say, just keep swimming. So she ends her diary entry with Just Keep Swimming.
SPEAKER_07Which great movie.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I've never seen it. Yeah, it's a good never seen.
SPEAKER_07You've never seen Finding Nemo?
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, I re I recommend. I think you should watch it and give us uh give us a rating next uh next meeting.
SPEAKER_07Dominic's like a freak though, he won't watch anything that's animated.
SPEAKER_00I don't care for animation. I I I like give me some reality.
SPEAKER_02Also doesn't like wearing shorts.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's just makes sense. Does it? Yeah, shorts are for little boys. If you go on our male fashion and you see like comments about shorts aren't for men, those that's my account. I'm always on there telling guys not to wear shorts.
SPEAKER_02Um but back to the back to the plug. It's six months later. Six months later. Lily Blossom Bloom is living her dream, and she has opened a flower shop. In a mere matter of months, she's acquired the facilities and opened a business. I haven't ever opened a business. That sounds pretty impressive. Went pretty fast. And as she's getting ready, Alyssa, one of our more annoying and useless characters, walks in. Alyssa wants to work there and wants to work for free. Because as the character constantly reminds you, she is filthy rich. Filthy, filthy, stinking rich. While they're hanging out talking, Alyssa's husband comes with her brother, having just left a bar to watch a Bruins game. Uh and they show up drunk, and that brother of Alyssa just happens to be none other than Ryle Kinkade. And I know this isn't the point of this, but it's just it's mentioned so repeatedly. Ryle Kincaid and his buddy are both stinking rich. They constantly say it. But for some reason, they they love to go to this bar to watch hockey games because the bar gives everyone free beer if they show up in a onesie. Um can we just talk about like the business model of giving out free beers at a hockey game to people dressed like slobs?
SPEAKER_03Free beer for the whole night or just like one free beer? No, no, free beer for the whole night. So that's that's a terrible business strategy.
SPEAKER_07You have to pay for wine, though, I think, if I remember correctly. You do text.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_07Well, it's important to it's important to mention that the rich, because being rich is hot. That's true. That's true. But also going uh going for going to the game and drinking free beer is down to earth, which I think is also hot.
SPEAKER_02True. Being a doctor is hot too. That's hot too. He's tall. You know what else is be is is hot? Being fucking sexy. That's hot.
SPEAKER_07Being sexy's hot. Being sexy is so hot. This uh encounter where she opens the flower shop and is not even open yet. She's in it, and the there's like an old help-wanted sign from the previous owners before she's even like rented the place in the window, and then this rich lady just walks in and says, Oh, you need help? I'm rich and I have free time. I also happen to be connected to the uh male love interest, is just like one of many of these just like incredible coincidences that that that move the plot forward. Yeah, and like this kind of stuff just when it happens when you're reading it, it just like we'll we'll get to the more serious later stuff later, but it's the the way that this stuff pulls you out of there being anything, uh sort of any depth or seriousness to the story that's being told is like I don't know.
SPEAKER_02And though those see, those things are fine. They're not, I don't necessarily have a problem with that, right? If it's a romance novel, but if it's a romance novel, then why the fuck is it about domestic assault? And we haven't even got to that part yet. So the because these little silly, little magical little coincidences just like make any possible message or or any genuine thought about domestic violence, it just it just completely undermines it. Because how can you take any of that stuff seriously?
SPEAKER_07I I mean, I wonder, like, I think she was a few books in, and you wonder if it was like a bit of she's trying to like subvert the genre she was writing in a little bit, but because it's so basic and following these really, really cheap, superficial, uh, you know, key aspects of romance the whole time. As soon as you try to tell uh a deeper story within that or a very like about a very serious issue, something like domestic violence, you're just like, what the hell is going on here?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_07You know, the genre doesn't like justify the discussion of that sort of subject matter, basically.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, that's a that's a great way to say it.
SPEAKER_00I've read some criticism of the author suggesting that she should position herself more as women's lit than romance, because then it allows her to take on some of these more serious topics without facing this kind of criticism.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, maybe. But but again, like changing the label on the tin doesn't change what's in the tin, right? This is still going to be a formulaic romance.
SPEAKER_07Right. And I think I do I do kind of feel a little bad for her because I think that like sh her her mother, like she had like grew up with like domestic amuse about her mother, and that's like what she was trying to write around. Yeah, the author was. That's like what she was trying to write about to some degree, but it's just like done in such a a basically she just did a bad job. Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, so it's like it's tough. Like I can I on some level though I can kind of understand what she was trying to do, but it's just like this uh it's like a square peg and a round hole kind of thing trying to do that in this genre and and with her uh sort of ability as a writer.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, as the as the plot progresses, um one day, you know, they go their separate ways.
SPEAKER_02Lily Blossom Bloom is at home one day when suddenly there's a banging on the door, it's Ryle Kincaid who somehow tracks down where she lived. Red flag. Um, and he knocked on every apartment in the building. Twenty nine doors. Twenty-nine doors and he professes his love for her immediately. Um he's just he's just smitten with her right away. And my question for for you two who've read the book is why? Why is he in love with her? What has the author given us at all that makes Lily Blossom Bloom extremely attractive to the extent that you know even Lotharios and even like you know not Lotharios, what is the term Casanovas and Don Juans are gonna you know fall at her feet.
SPEAKER_00She is written as being exceptionally physically beautiful.
SPEAKER_07She has a hot mouth. That's what the guy compliments her on.
SPEAKER_02Because she seems she seems anytime someone compliments her on her beauty, she's stunned. Like when he says she's hot. She's like, What? Really? Which is not genuinely how how attractive women respond when they're told for the milli umpteenth time that they're attractive.
SPEAKER_03It's just like a she's all that situation. She just gotta remove her glasses, put her hair down.
SPEAKER_07Well, I think it's because this guy, this doctor, can get anything he wants, right? Even though he's still just in residency. But he's hot, he's he's tall, he's handsome, and then in the beginning of the book, he hits her with his classic pickup line, I wanna fuck you. She says, No. Time is he's driven mad by it, right? He's never heard this before.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I was almost wondering if like it was because for me, the Lily Blossom Bloom character is so bland and so empty of any actual character. I was wondering if that's almost intentional, so that you can have a Mary Sue character that any reader can insert themselves into. Because she's got no real defining qualities. Um she likes to garden. She likes to garden? Is that a reason to love someone? She was she was nice to a homeless boy once, a really hot homeless boy. Is it you know, but that's kind of it?
SPEAKER_00But they did share a moment on the roof. Like it was a genuine connection where they were transparent and bared their souls. If you met if you if you had that experience with a woman, yeah, naked truth. If you meet if you met a stranger, you'd probably in your head form some sort of attachment to that person. You would want to see them again. You would that in your head you'd think that there was some kind of connection.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, you could be like infatuated, right?
SPEAKER_03I just realized, I didn't ask, but I was really curious, why was he smashing that chair when he first entered the scene?
SPEAKER_02Well, he he said at the time, we we kind of find out more about it later, but at the time he said it was basically because he lost a patient. There was a a little boy who was shot in the face by his uh by his friend or his brother when they were playing with a gun. And he was outraged. How could someone it's a great question, thanks for for reminding us of that. But yeah, he had a patient, was a little boy who got shot in the face by another little boy with a gun they found.
SPEAKER_07Just to go back to what you're saying, what you were asking about like why he was doing this, um, he's the character, like he's extremely rash and spontaneous. Uh, and one thing that was one thing that really undermined that is that all the characters are extremely rash and spontaneous. Like anyone is just like anybody suggests anything in this universe, and everybody in the room is on board with it. Like, yeah, let's go, right? And so, like him doing this kind of stuff, on one level you could read it as like, oh, there's a red flags of this guy that's gonna end up being like a terrible relationship to get in with. But you don't pick up on it in particular because it it just seems to flow with like this silly romance.
SPEAKER_03True. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07It's a it's a really odd thing because like everyone just acts like that. Everyone, any any character would be willing to go bang on 29 doors to try and speak with someone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's he's rash and spontaneous and makes decisions on a whim, just like all the other surgeons that you know. Uh guy is not famous for their planning or th or critical thinking.
SPEAKER_00It's also a guy doing sort of a say anything uh scenario where you know these these totally inappropriate, outlandish, stalker-ish kind of uh behaviors.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but it was cute in the 80s, and like because you know, there was no cell phones or internet to like research people and figure out where they live and then go knock on their door. Like you you usually had to have you usually had to like it was some sort of fate that you saw them again, or like, you know, you knew somebody who knew somebody. You do some romantic gesture.
SPEAKER_07He should be just stalking her on uh her TikTok and stuff, right?
SPEAKER_02Just stalk her on stalk on book talk. But in this moment where Raul Kinkade has knocked on every single door, he's just finished work for a 48-hour shift in surgery. That's not legal anywhere. 48 hours? Obviously. I think the author's confusing like a surgeon working and a surgeon being on call for 48 hours. But anyway, and he rushed from the hospital straight to find her, still wearing his scrubs, having run out of like the OR when he finished work. And this again is supposed to be sexy. This surgeon covered in like bloody scrub, banging on your door, tracking you down at your home. That's supposed to be that's supposed to be attractive.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like my wife works at the hospital. The scrubs are stinky and disgusting anytime she comes home. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't want no scrubs. Thank you. Okay. Um, but he when he comes, when he let me rephrase that. When when he when he arrives, he's not only arrived all dirty, unexpected, he's arrived to beg her for sex. Literally. He's literally gets on his knees and begs her to have sex with him. And this is supposed to be charming.
SPEAKER_01Not a red flag, it's supposed to be charming. They don't have sex.
SPEAKER_02Um, but they fall asleep nicely together.
SPEAKER_07She actually decides that she's gonna do it, and she spends too long um shaving her genitals in the shower, and when she comes out, he's already asleep, passed out in the bed, is why it doesn't happen. So they sleep next to each other uh with no sex.
SPEAKER_02Which is kind of it's it's kind of a funny way because it's it's a way, I'm not sure if it's again, this is one of those moments which might be smart writing. It's a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too, because you get that sort of like hot, kind of lusty moment, but you also get the oh yeah, she doesn't throw herself cheaply right away because he begged for sex, and and instead they you know it builds towards a relationship. But yeah, he he also reveals that at that moment that when they first met, he was taking pictures of her, and he got the pictures printed and put on his wall, which is very romantic and not a red flag. Has anybody seen the movie Obsession yet? I feel like this is great on that. I can't wait to see it. I'm I'm really stoked to see it. But no, but in the book it's not, right? Because it because as Chip said, it's written in this airy fairy world where this is how everyone behaves, so it's all completely normal and behavior and it's very romanticized. And the narrative does not say like unbeknownst to Lily, Ral Kincaid is acting a little fucking weird. It's saying, look how hot this guy is. He's amazing. When you think about all the red flags up to this point, he's attacking furniture, he's taking creepy photos of women and putting on this wall, he's begging women for sex or just telling them he wants to fuck them. We didn't mention the part where he physically carries Lily out of a party because he wants wants to take her somewhere to fuck her, even though she's asking her to stop. He supports the Bruins. You know, there's a lot of bad stuff here. It's a sick mind.
SPEAKER_07It's a sick sick man. When he that that photo of her, too, it's on the wall of his sister's apartment. Because his sister has this enormous, nice apartment that Lily goes and parties at because you know, his sister works for her for fun, basically. And it's like obscured so that it doesn't actually show her exactly. Like he's he's done some photo editing and things, which just kind of actually makes him like much scarier if you really think about it. But it is presented in this romantic way. But yeah, he has this like you know, this distorted photo that's all warped of her on the wall.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the wall of her sister of his sister's apartment, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Why go through all that and then put it up in somebody else's house, though?
SPEAKER_07That's really weird. Well, he's kind of a bum. He like lives with them for the first while, even though he's rich. Okay, so another record. He has a room in his sister's apartment. Yeah, because they're super rich.
SPEAKER_02And they've all got multiple apartments. Like everybody's got more than one apartment. He's got an extra apartment somewhere too. But you know who doesn't have an apartment? Atlas Corrigan, the homeless boy. No apartments for him. But he is beautiful, don't forget. In in our in our our what's the right word? The flashbacks, the in the diary entries from the past. In in the in the context of the story, Lily is reading through her old diaries. That's how we get these flashbacks. But anyway, she she mentions in her diary that her and Atlas have started hanging out, uh, they're smooching, uh, he's really hot, um, and they like to watch Ellen together. But then, and talk about Tona Whiplash. These diary entries jump between moments of which are supposed to be like teenage romance to instances of spousal assault by Lily Blossom Bloom's father to her mother. And his her father is like, he's genuinely an ex a horrible abuser. Like, not just a uh not I don't want to ever minimize domestic assault, but we're talking about like choke, choking, and choking and like attempted rape and stuff. But the problem for me with the tonal whiplash is the way the assault is described to Ellen. But it's like a 14-year-old girl writing this. You so I wouldn't laugh, I would never laugh at a 14-year-old describing describing domestic assault. That's never that's never funny. But the way the author chooses, who is a grown-up woman, um, the way she just chooses to describe it, for me, undermines any potential emotional connection with the child character, and that's why it's absurd. Um, let me read you one part about this, and you tell me if this sounds absurd. I mean, some of you have already read it, but So Ellen, I don't want to describe what happened. It's it was shocking. I opened the garage door and I didn't see my mom. I just saw my dad behind the car doing something. I took a step closer and realized why I couldn't see my mom. He had pushed her down on the hood with his hands around her throat. He was joking her, Ellen. Like, does that not is it just me?
SPEAKER_07Like Ellen's reading that and she's like, Yeah, that's like how you should treat people. Yeah, yeah. She's like, Well, he must have been her assistant. She must have like been five minutes late with her latte. Was it called the coffee cold, or yeah? And you know what made it hard for me too is that I found that those letters to Ellen were the same as um in Model Land, the T-Mail jail that Dukey de la Creme kept, her like letters to all these people. And then it would just cut to them, and you know, it's in italics, and you're reading. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00As is my habit, I I listened to this book um text-to-speech read by AI Burt Reynolds. So I mean, it was extra odd when you get these Ellen uh snippets and she's describing the domestic abuse. Now I'm not willing to go on audio recording and say that I thought it was funny because I don't think that sort of stuff is funny. But I mean listen to AI Burt Reynolds narrate the uh the Ellen abuse passages and tell me that it's not, you know, it's not odd.
SPEAKER_02You also you stumbled on, by the way, on a weird trope there, Chip of like it was a trend in the 90s and early 2000s to name your diary. Um so girls over that stage often would wouldn't have. I named mine. Did you? Do you want to share with us what what its name was? Bo Dashington. It's about a hot doctor that I ran into on a rooftop one time. While he was kicking a couch and smoking a joint, yeah. Uh and saying he wants to fuck you. Stark rain nuts. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um I have to ask for another spoiler, but you don't have to answer it if you don't want. Does Atlas come back and then it's like a happily ever after at the end? So that would be great. Perfect segue. Very perfect segue. He dies, doesn't he?
unknownHe's dead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's dead. Uh he died in the war. He died in the war. Um.
SPEAKER_01The war. The war.
SPEAKER_02Um he was fighting for the Confederates, obviously.
It Ends with Us: Rising Action & Abuse
SPEAKER_02Um, Lily Blossom Bloom's mother's coming to town, and she wants to meet hot Dr. Ral Kincaid. They go out to a restaurant. The waiter comes up, says, What would you like to order? Lily Blossom Bloom looks up, and who is the waiter? None other than Atlas, Oregon. The hot homeless boy. The hot hoe boy.
SPEAKER_07It's one of those key coincidences.
SPEAKER_03Well, I like that.
SPEAKER_02I like this one. I'm enthralled now. I'm into it. They pretend not to know each other in front of the family, but they have a quick chat afterwards. She says she's happily in this beautiful relationship with Dr. Rock and Cade. He says she's got a girlfriend. They go their separate ways. Maybe they'll see each other again. Maybe not. We don't know. Uh, but the gang goes to the the Bruins bar because it's it's it's a hockey game again. Um and the everyone in the bar is wearing onesies, including all of them, because everybody gets free beer. So the bar is basically just instead of using its its largest event to draw in paying customers, it uses its largest event to just give away all of its produce. But the funniest thing about this is look, I don't want to criticize a romance book for not knowing a lot about sports, but you think if you're gonna make sports a plot element, you should get someone to like help you with just the basics of it. There's a really I don't know why I find this line so funny, just describing the bar, and they say every time the Bruins make a good play, the crowd cheers. And it's like if you're gonna use that as a sport, get anything. Like, you don't have to be a hockey expert. Every time they score, every time they go on the fore check, every time there's a you know, every time they make a good play.
SPEAKER_00Should have brought Sean Avery in as a consultant.
SPEAKER_02There we go. Um but during this conversation at the bar, Alyssa let slip that her and Raoul Kincaid had a secret brother that they never mentioned before called Emerson. And Emerson is no longer with us, and we don't know why. But the big news is that Ryle Kinkade has got a big surgery coming up. This is like the sir, the mother of all surgeries. He's gonna do a uh cranial page separation, which is separating.
SPEAKER_00Never seen a surgery that's important.
SPEAKER_02This is oh, people, this is gonna be huge. This is like everybody's been saying this is gonna be a really big surgery. It's got numbers like you've never seen. Uh yeah, she's gonna separate he's gonna separate conjoined twins. And I was curious how rare that is. I looked it up. It's about a cranial page separation is necessary in about one in every two and a half million births, which means it happens in the US, in the United States, maybe every other year.
SPEAKER_01It'll happen once, which is obviously pretty rare.
SPEAKER_04More than I would have thought.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But things are getting complicated because while he's getting ready for the surgery, Lily has been glug glugging, drinking an entire bottle of wine to herself for some reason, and she's making a plate of hot lasagna. Um, but there's a kerfuffle in the kitchen, lasagna's burning. So Ral Kincaid rushes to the rescue and grabs lasagna out of the oven with his bare hands. And he burns his precious, precious hands.
SPEAKER_01And Lily laughs. So Raoul Kincaid pushes her.
SPEAKER_02She gets mad at him and she pushes him, and he falls into the glass on the hand and cuts up his hand that he just burned. Which actually sounds pretty horrible. And that's the first red flag. That he got angry, then he pushed her. But it's okay. He apologizes and they bang. And he he he bangs her in a very apologetic way. And this is I thought I'd read this part to you. This is a quote. Slow, apologetic thrusts inside of me. Every time he enters me, he whispers another apology. And by some miracle, every time he pulls out of me, my anger leaves with him. And in this moment, I think I realize, like, fellas, I've been doing it wrong all these years. Are you supposed to pull all the way out every time? Every time. That's not what I've been doing.
SPEAKER_00You've been doing the apologies, but you haven't been coming all the way out. Look, just just to back it up a minute or two, it's not necessarily the first time that she notices a red flag because she was turned off in fairness by the massive photo of her on Raya's sister's wall. So she she has noticed the little sort of and and the kicking of the marine grade plastic, furniture on the roof, the knocking on the 29 doors. Like it's not as if she was totally blind to these uh troubling elements before the physical assault.
SPEAKER_07Well, this is yeah, this is like the first incident of like the actual abuse, and then the the sort of apology cycle and the normalizing it and luring the person back in, or they call it love love bombing after that sort of thing. Which is like the you know, the thing that she was who was trying to write about, I guess.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. She's trying to she I think she said in some quotes, she didn't want to write about why uh a partner might abuse, but why a partner would stay. Yeah. And so that's what she's claims to be focusing on. And you know, as the character Lily says, you know, all humans make mistakes. What determines a person's value is not the mistakes, it's how they turn those mistakes into lessons rather than excuses.
SPEAKER_01So they make up and they say I love you for the first time. And that's nice.
SPEAKER_07But what isn't nice is there's every other part of that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. What isn't nice apart from the domestic assault is the next day they go back to the restaurant. Um Lily Blossom Bloom's trying to avoid it, but Alyssa drags her there because she really wants to go. Uh, and the waiter comes to the table. And who is the waiter? It's none other than Atlas Corgan, the hot hoy. Um he's the chef. They compliment, they say compliments to the chef, and he goes, Thanks, I'm the chef. And also the owner. Also, I own the place and I run it, and I'm awesome.
SPEAKER_00Record scratch.
SPEAKER_03I'm I'm really liking Atlas here. This guy's awesome.
SPEAKER_07It's the hottest restaurant in Boston.
SPEAKER_02And he he it is the hottest restaurant in Boston, which is where this is set, just to make sure that's clear.
SPEAKER_00Um Hobo, hottest restaurant in Boston.
SPEAKER_07Going over to Hobo's for a bite.
SPEAKER_02He takes one look at Lily Blossom Bloom's face and sees the mark from where she was when she was pushed and she hit her face. And he, because he knows about domestic assault, he recognizes it right away. So he fights Raoul Kinkade, fights him right there in the restaurant, which he owns, which is in Boston. Does he win? I think nobody wins. I think Ryle Kinkade wins.
SPEAKER_07He's kind of a scuffle, they're kind of going back and forth. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I think Raoul Kinkade wins because he drops the the bomb at the end, which he says, like uh, you know, you're just some homeless boy that Lily Blossom Bloom pity fucked, you know, I think it's not even that long ago, eight years ago, something like that. Um that makes everybody sad. It's a bit rude. Um it's not very nice. It's a I'm starting to think this Ral King Kate is a bad egg.
SPEAKER_07This this scene's like really important for you know establishing that Atlas, it's not just that he hasn't forgotten about Lily, she's still number one for him for all in eternity. So he sees he sees the cut. Um, and then when she goes to the bathroom, he sneaks into the bathroom with her. And he's like, hey, like what's going on? Like, I I know I can I can tell something's going on. And then then when they're coming into the bathroom, that's when Ryal, Ryle says, I called him Brial. Um Brial. Um that's when Ryle sees sees them coming out, he gets jealous, and they get they get in the big fight kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02He's also like, to be fair to Atlas, he's very clear when he follows Lily Blossom Bloom into the bathroom. He's like, Don't worry, I'm allowed to follow him into the bathroom because I own this restaurant. And and they let you do they let you do it. That's the law in Boston. That's the law. That's Boston. The next day, Atlas comes to Lily Blossom Bloom's flower shop and says, I know what's all what's up. I know he's abusing you. Um, I also know that uh I've always been in love with you. I also want you to know that, you know, when I was a hot hoe boy, um, and you let me have a shower and a sandwich, I was actually planning to kill myself, but but I didn't because of you, and I'll always love you. And so he writes down his phone number on a piece of paper, and he slips it into the case of her phone. Instead of just getting her to save it in her phone, even save it under a fake name, for some reason it's got to be on a piece of paper. Well, we know why it's gotta be on a piece of paper for plot reasons later, obviously. But um, but he puts it there in the phone and then also is revealed the history of what happened and why they broke up uh one day when back it back in the day when Atlas was a hot hoy, um, him and Lily Blossom Bloom were getting hot and heavy under the sheets, and her abusive dad burst into the room with a baseball bat and beat the shit out of Atlas Corgan and sent him packing.
SPEAKER_07At this point, I kind of at this point I started thinking like it's really clear that Atlas is the forest gump to Lily Blossom Bloom's Jenny. Where he's like in love with her from a very young age. He goes on and like lives this, he even joins the Marines and goes like Forrest Gump going to Vietnam. But he never forgets her, and he's like pure he has this pure loyalty to her, right? And now he's now he has uh runs the best restaurant in town, and boom, your your girl walks in, you know, from when you're uh back in grade school or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you think you're completely right, but Forrest Gump has way more depth as a character. Atlas Corgan has no depth at all. He's just a hot hoe boy who loves Lily Blossom Bloom, and that's it. That was the end of part one of the book, by the way. We're now in part two, two of two. Um, and things are going so well uh in Boston, where this book is set. Um Alyssa, Ralkincaid's sister, has a baby, and that makes everybody happy. And Ral Kincaid says, you know, I would have Lily Blossom's baby, or the other way around, Lily Blossom Bloom would have my baby, and we should get married, and we should do it right away. So they rush off to Vegas and they get married, and then they come back from Vegas in the in a space of like two or three pages. Um they're sitting down to celebrate their marriage and how great it was, and Ralkingade picks up Lily Blossom Bloom's phone and he drops it, uh-oh, and the case comes off, double uh-oh, and Atlas Corgan's number falls out.
SPEAKER_01And then bad things happen.
SPEAKER_02I've actually gotten my wait, wait, which I deleted for my notes here. Which moment of abuse is this? Do you remember? That's when he throws her down the stairs, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um at the ho wait. What stairs? At the apartment. They're at the apartment, yeah. Sorry.
SPEAKER_02This is at the apartment. They she Lily Blossom Bloom gets upset, they kind of are apart for a little bit, and Alyssa comes uh and tells Ryle that he needs to tell Lily the truth about why he's got all this anger inside of him. So Ryle Kincaid comes back and tells Lily Blossom Bloom that when he was six, he shot his brother Emerson in the face by accident because they were playing with a gun.
SPEAKER_03I blame the parents.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Blame the parents. You can also blame society. It's also weird that, I mean, obviously, this is an American book, and the author's from Texas, but that this could be dropped in just as a perfectly plausible plot point that Eddie Malton.
SPEAKER_03Anywhere in the world, they'd be like, excuse me? No.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. At multiple points in this book, one child shoots another child in the face with a gun they found in their in their parents, you know.
SPEAKER_07I actually blame Ryle for the shooting. I think it was first degree.
SPEAKER_04The six-year-old?
SPEAKER_07Six-year-old murderer. Throw the book at him.
SPEAKER_02When Ryle is describing the scene after shooting his brother in the face, he describes that he thought that he could put his brother back together, so he was trying to put the pieces back in his brother's head.
SPEAKER_00Yikes. I must have glossed over that part. It's very uh Jackie O JFK Zapruder film-esque.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I was trying to put everything back in his head. I thought it could fix him, Lily. And that's what I'm saying. So that's why it became a brain surgeon.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there we go. Um also why he's angry, because he shot a boy in the face. And they named him Ryle.
SPEAKER_03Obviously, he's gonna be riled up.
SPEAKER_07That's what you do. I need a character that gets kind of riled up too much. About Ryle.
SPEAKER_02Is Ryle actually a name?
SPEAKER_07I've never heard of it. I know I know the name Kyle.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yes, that's a name. Um, but Lily decides to forgive him because she's like, This, this, this fucking hot doctor here in Boston is, you know, and she says there's no such thing as bad people. We're just just good people who do bad things, which is the central moral of the book, by the way. That comes up again and again, it will come up. So they decide to work through the domestic assault until the doctor gets all riled up again when he reads the Ellen Diary.
SPEAKER_07Um This is after they moved in together.
SPEAKER_02By an apartment. Thank you. This is after they've moved in together. Um, he reads the Ellen Diary and learns, he realizes uh the past between Atlas and Ellen. Uh not Ellen, Billy Blossom Bloom. Um and he in a moment that is not like up until now, he's been presented as this guy whose passions get overflamed. But this is a moment of like very much premeditated cruelty and torture, right? He's planned this out. She comes home, she makes him she comes home, he makes her sit down and read an article where Atlas is talking about his restaurant, and he says, I named this restaurant after this most beautiful woman uh that I ever moved, who I was always in love with. And of course we know that that's Lily Blossom Bloom. And while doing this, he she keeps saying, Stop, no, I don't want to do this, stop, no, and he pushes her through, forces her to. She has to do it because she's terrified. Um, he forces her to strip down while humiliating her. Um and then he starts to rape her to show her as he says, I haven't shown you how much I loved you, now I'm gonna show you. In what is obviously the worst moment of abuse in the book. He holds her down um until she bites him and he headbutts her and she blacks out. But when he wakes up in the narrative, he's snapped out of it and realized realized, Oh, what's going on? Oh god, what have I done? Um you don't snap out of things that you've premeditated and planned. Um which makes that moment completely completely unrealistic.
SPEAKER_07He also bites her. She has a Heart-shaped tattoo on her collarbone, which is where Atlas kissed her when she was a teenager. And then like
It Ends with Us: Issues & Verdict
SPEAKER_07at some point in college, she got this tattoo as a memory. So he tries to like bite the tattoo off of her, basically.
SPEAKER_03Damn. I don't like this guy anymore.
SPEAKER_07No, it's like it's it's really quite horrible. And when I I it's kind of interesting, like just to go back to reactions to the book, I I saw I what I did watch some reviews, um, not like on TikTok, but like some YouTube reviews that came out like around the time, and a lot of people talking about like the that liked it, you know, like positive reviews, people talking about like, oh, this book like just destroyed me and stuck with me and stuff. Because I think like a lot of people went in reading it thinking it was a romance and then got hit with this like really hard. It's a very very vivid, uh like awful description of of of uh of like uh rape and and assault and domestic violence and stuff, right? Just just point point being it's awful.
SPEAKER_02Like to read. Yeah, the abuse is awful, but it's also this is the I think the part of the book w why the book gets as much flack as it does, and why the book is condemned by organizations that work with with survivors of of uh of domestic abuse. Who I I mean there's many, many, many, you can find them yourself online who've who've uh who've sort of condemned this book for this reason. Because this book presents the situation as a tired trope where the abuser is a good man who wants to do good, and you know what? Everybody makes mistakes and everybody deserves second chances. And that's not what happens, and of course, I'm I'm not speaking from personal experience, but we all know that's not what happens with domestic assault and domestic abuse. It's most certainly not what happened in this situation, where he premeditated and planned out a really especially cruel uh and violent attack. Um, and this message of we all need to learn from our mistakes and we need to grow as people, is in a philosophical sense, maybe correct, but that's not an appropriate expectation to place on a survivor of sexual assault and domestic assault, especially not in the moment of the assault or immediately afterwards. And that's one of the main reasons why this book is a piece of shit.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like this weird thing where it's like, oh, he can't control himself and he like blacks out, essentially, you know, when when he's being violent, it's like it's it's not really like that. There's there's more of a um deliberate chain of actions and small, small actions that contribute to that. Yeah, to those big events.
SPEAKER_00Is it possible though that we're seeing these events through the eyes of Lily, and the book is not justifying or trying to advance those views as as being correct or right, but rather it's it's dealing with the dilemma inside of her where she's trying to rationalize her love for this man with the horrible actions that that he's capable of and frequently carries out.
SPEAKER_02So that that would be a great point. Um, and it would be giving the author a lot of credit if the narrative ended with that as a reflection, but it most certainly does not. The narrative ends with this man needs to be forgiven and supported. Uh and we haven't gotten to that yet. But the ending of the book directly contradicts like your your suggestion of how things could be going. The narrative doesn't build towards here's where things went wrong, it builds towards this is a good man who needs support.
SPEAKER_07I think I think like what you're what you're saying, Dominic, is being generous to her, but I think it actually is probably what she was trying to do, but like she just did did not succeed uh uh in doing so. Because it is like more I I think it is ultimately more a story about like why why is the the victim how do they rationalize things or or work work through things uh as they move out of it. And and and also like like for example, like if this is something that uh her mother faced or something, her perspective is gonna be like probably colored by personal experience. And when when that's the case, like you I I feel like oftentimes you can't necessarily speak to something or write to something in like a uh an impartial practical way. Your approach is maybe like a little bit colored by uh by your own experiences and things, and and that can be a shortcoming, right?
SPEAKER_00So I I but I do think it is what the author had intended because we see Lily try to rationalize the assault, saying, Well, I shouldn't have kept the magnet, I should have told him about the tattoo. Um and clearly the author isn't trying to say that that's the correct view, and that's how uh we as readers should see the situation. But rather it's it's a character struggling with this cognitive dissonance where this this character is sort of a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde type.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that part is yet I don't know if it's well done, but it's done, I suppose, correctly as Don Like as you both you and Chip observed. That she she kept the magnet that Atlas gave her as a teenager. She's got the tattoo of a heart here where Atlas used to kiss her, and she lies about it to Ryle Kincaid, and that gets him all riled up. Um and she should not have lied about that. Of course, that does not then justify what happened to her. Um, but once we reach that, and so like the the slow buildup of he did something wrong, but I love him, so I'll accept it, and he says it won't happen again. He did something worse, but you know, I'll accept him. And it's that the metaphor of the frog and the boiling pot of water where the situation gets worse and worse and worse, and you accept worse and worse things. That's technically portrayed in some ways, I think, accurately. But that's not what people take issue with about this book. What people take issue with is, and maybe it like it helps just to draw the for Jane's sake to draw the plot to a conclusion since we're basically at the end of the book. Um she waits until Ryle is asleep. She phones Atlas Corgan, who picks her up, takes her to the hospital. Um, they reveal to her that she's pregnant, so she's gonna have Ryle's baby. Ryle goes to I think Cambridge for three months for some doctor course and then comes back and he says, Please let me in the baby be in a baby's life. They get closer during the pregnancy, and he plays the role of supportive husband. They have the baby and they decide to name it after the boy who was shot in the face. Um Emerson. Says Emerson, yeah, good memory. And the middle name? Middle name is yeah, Dory. Dory. Dory, good memory. Just keeps swimming. And basically there's a scene where you know Lily Blossombloom says, we have to leave each other. Ralph and Cade says, No, don't do this to me. And she says, What would you do if this beautiful daughter of yours came home one day and said, My husband threw me down a flight of stairs, what would you tell her to do? And he said, I would tell her to leave him, so we have to divorce, you're right. And they agree to co-parent amicably, and they have a mutual not going to work out in part two. Positive relationship. And it even ends like with scenes where she gives the child over to him for him for his childcare sessions. And why are you letting the violent sexual offender take your baby? Don't let the violent sexual offender take your baby. That's not only stupid, it's illegal. And the end of the book, which made me hate the book more than the rest of it, and it made me so fucking annoyed I could barely put my thoughts coherently, it ends with Lily Blossom Bloom holding the baby and says, This situation. She's got and she stares directly into the camera. This ends with us. And then in the epilogue, uh, she goes and meets Atlas Corrigan in the street, and they decide to give it a shot. And he says, Lily, you've always told yourself, just like Dory, just keep swimming. Well, you can stop swimming now, Lily. We have finally reached the shore. And the book ends: never mind the fact that when fish end up on the shore, they fucking die.
SPEAKER_07Bo, to that final quote from Atlas, to be fair, he is a United States Marine.
SPEAKER_00But you don't think that that that line about ending intergenerational trauma and intergenerational domestic abuse with us is is kind of like sweet or poignant?
SPEAKER_02Not when it's set up in such a ham-fisted way and not when it's crammed into the title and it's one of the last lines of the main part of the book.
SPEAKER_07Anytime a character says the title.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm I see, I'm a sucker for that. I I I love when they say the title of the movies in the film.
SPEAKER_02But what what's a time when someone's actually done it? I mean, there was that part in Schindler's List where Oscar Schindler just looks into the camera and says Schindler's List. What other examples are there?
SPEAKER_03The one that I really love, which doesn't actually count, but in Oceans 12, they say Ocean's 11, referencing the job that they did, and it's so fucking funny.
SPEAKER_00They talk about Judgment Day a lot in T2, uh, Roadhouse. They talk about road houses.
SPEAKER_07I love it. Anytime Forrest Gump says forest gump. He says it a lot in that movie.
SPEAKER_02He does say his name is Forest Gump. Does say Forest Forest Gump. Yeah. There's one, I just popped into my mind. There's one moment of that where I actually really like. There's yeah, Titanic, where Leo looks into the camera and says, What is this? Some kind of Titanic? Um it's so it's so cheesy that they had it written on the boat.
SPEAKER_07Come on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very for morons. It's for morons. No, there's there's the movie Hot Tub Time Machine, and I think it's Craig. Did you ever see that on the news about a hot tub time machine? It makes it a fun movie, it makes no sense, and there's a moment, I think Craig Robinson actually looks into the camera and says, What is this? Some kind of hot tub time machine.
SPEAKER_04So, so I did anyone else enjoy this book? I enjoyed hearing about it.
SPEAKER_07I I I tried to be as like forgiving and generous as possible with the book. Um, but I did not like it for uh you know reasons I've said. Like it's just uh the I find the pros frustrating, this the tell telltale style of of of storytelling. Um the way that I I just don't think the gravity of the subject matter fits this like super really superficial, cheesy, melodramatic genre. And it's I think it's gonna be confined by that, no matter how good of a job she did at the end of the day. Like, I just don't think it's a fit. And as an example, um when he at after the horrible assault, he headbutts her and she's in the hospital being checked for the headbutt. The doctor comes in and goes, like, she's like, Aren't you gonna do a CT scan? He's like, Well, I don't normally do a CT scan of pregnant people, and that's like how it's revealed that she's pregnant, because this is so fucking bad. Yeah right. Um, and and then and then the next one was uh he goes away to England. He's he's out of the story for three months as she's pregnant, and then he comes back when she's like uh uh nearing term, and and they kind of reconcile a little bit, and it's clear she's gonna leave him, but she hasn't officially left him yet. And then he's there for the birth of the child, and when he's holding the child, Emerson, that's when she says, I want a divorce at that moment.
SPEAKER_02So this this guy who's on a hair trigger holding the baby.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. This guy is a raving lunatic, and he's holding your newborn child, and you're like, You're out of here, bud. It doesn't mean it's so hit the skin. You're done, bud. Yeah, like it it's just like the it makes her character like so uh dumb and and and and spontaneous and and things like that, that it's it just makes it hard.
SPEAKER_00But are are we holding this to an unfair standard? Because you're kind of you seem to be working from the position that because the book is super popular, you're equating that with you know being a high-quality read. No, I'm not. As as just okay, on for me, based on all the books we've read recently, this is like the best book that the Peace of Shit Book Club has done in ages, since Attack of the Crabs or Night of the Crabs. Uh, way better than the Raelian book, way better than the Saddam Hussein romance book.
SPEAKER_02And then High praise, high praise.
SPEAKER_00Even even uh based against compared to just like a standard paperback beach read. It's fun, it's breezy, it it it blows by, it doesn't really like tax you. Not I don't think it's gonna be fucking Chaucer.
SPEAKER_02Breezy.
SPEAKER_07The part where he throws her down the stairs, easy breezy. So okay, I'm sorry, Dominic. I'll agree. It is better than Mind Conf. If that's like the point you're trying to make. It's it's it's better than like the kind of stuff that we talk about normally, but I don't think it's like breezy or light at all. It's like an intentionally and emotionally heavy book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I also think that like so I I was struggling with this at the beginning because I was worried, like, I don't want to pick just as we talked about at the opening of the episode. The goal is not to just make fun of shit that people like, right? That's that's not the goal here. And so I was trying to give the book as much credit as possible. And I was actually worried until the the you know, we dove into the actual there was a narrative of the book. I was worried that we'd picked a book that was not a piece of shit. But it's fair to judge this book by the standards it sets for itself. If this book is going to try to deal with an extremely difficult and nuanced topic like domestic assault, why uh victims stay in relationships, but also the moral responsibilities that people have towards perpetrators, because a core argument of this book is that the perpetrators are humans too, and they need support and they need rehabilitation, which is technically true, right? That's true, but that's an extremely challenging and nuanced topic to actually deal with. That's not a light topic, and that's not a small topic. And it's not a topic that fits, that type of nuance does not fit well into a light-hearted, rompy, easy breezy romance novel. It's like writing a little action adventure uh book about a little Nazi boy who was a good boy and caught up in the genocide. And you know what? He's a little boy too, and he and he deserves love and support, and he's a brave little boy. And technically, that would be a complex argument. Yeah, there were kids conscripted into the into the you know the Wehrmacht, into the German military, but treating such a morally complex and nuanced topic with no nuance at all, with just ham-fisted bluntness and easy breezy approach, it's it's inappropriate. That's why this book's a piece of shit.
SPEAKER_00Right. Okay. I'll accept that argument. I just found myself looking forward to listening to it this past week. I enjoyed having it is because of Burt Reynolds partially, but I I I found myself interested to hear like where the narrative was gonna go, where the romance was gonna go. I I think this this piece of shit book club podcast project has awakened a love of romance books within me. It turns out I'm actually a very romantic man because two of the favorite books that we've done have been the Sean Avery romance book and this one. I really like them.
SPEAKER_02You also love that romance book about the man fucking the dolphin. You were a big fan of that one.
SPEAKER_00We all like that in fairness. Everybody enjoys that book.
SPEAKER_07Like, I don't I don't think that because a genre is popular, it has to be uh high art. It's just certain genres can can you can tell certain stories within them better than others, right? And so I think that the book, the limitations are more on like a technical level. And and I'm speaking to the wide criticism of it, right? Like, why does that prism exist? What are the failings of the book? I think that's probably where it is. In terms of like the moral question of whether it's her obligation to tell the correct story of domestic abuse, that on that I'm kind of I I I'm not sure what the answer is because I kind of agree with the idea that she might just be telling this character's story, and this character has like a flawed story, though though I take Bo's point that you know ultimately the narrative resolves in a way that is like perhaps more kind and forgiving to the abuser than it should be.
SPEAKER_00In past meetings, we've used the benchmark. Does the book succeed in achieving what it sets out to achieve?
SPEAKER_02So in terms of like, in terms of moving copies and making a lot of money, then yeah, it's it's it's obviously succeeded immensely, right? She's one of the most influential authors there are out there in terms of her influence, not on literature, but on but on publishing. Um, but but in terms of like having like, as a point I was trying to make before, an exploration of the challenges of like domestic assault within the family unit and resolving trauma, absolutely not. We didn't even talk about how horribly misrepresentative this book is of trauma. Like because this guy experienced trauma as a kid, he's therefore explosive and violent. It says lots of there's articles about this as well, lots of really bad things about people who've experienced post-traumatic stress, right? They don't you don't you don't turn into a uh an abuser who who you know who who chokes people and things like that just because you've had had stress in your past. By the those standards of exploring those topics, um, then I absolutely don't think it passes. I don't think it succeeds.
SPEAKER_07I mentioned it before, but I took it more like the goal of it being her trying to expand what she was doing as a writer. Because as I understand it, prior to this, she was purely just writing more straightforward romances, and so she's trying to write something that's a little bit more serious. Um and then yeah, I don't think it really accomplished it just because the uh it's just not quite there on like a technical level.
SPEAKER_00Do they reconcile in the sequel?
SPEAKER_02They I I I was I didn't read it, but I read it briefly. It's the the sequel, it starts with us, is um it's basically the story of Atlas and what's her name again? Lily Blossom Bloom coming together and like their their relationship and facing their challenges. Um and it turns out that Ral Kinkade is actually a bad egg um because he's still around. Um and he has to he he snaps a few times again because of Atlas, and then they realize I have to keep him away from the baby. Um and so they keep him away from the kid, which obviously they should have done from the beginning. And very clearly there was a correction, I think she realized from the first book. Because it was one of the biggest pieces of criticism, so she makes a point of correcting that in the in the in the sequel.
SPEAKER_07It ends with us two, this time it's over. What's it called?
SPEAKER_02It ends it ends with us two, Colonel this time it starts. New beginnings. Did yeah, comment new beginnings.
Outro: Film Adaptation & Next Episode's Book
SPEAKER_02Did any of you watch the movie? I watched the movie as a research for this book. It is a wholly faithful adapt adaptation of the book and gave me nothing, no material. What a fucking waste of time that was. Two hours of my life. I'll never get it.
SPEAKER_00I'd never heard of this phenomenon before we did this and was shocked to see that there was a movie made and it grossed over $300 million. Like I'm just so out of the loop when it comes to things that are going on.
SPEAKER_07And there's like immense controversy around it.
SPEAKER_03I was just looking up that uh the actor that plays Atlas uh also played Burt Reynolds in the 2022 film or miniseries The Offer. Uh so there you go.
SPEAKER_02We gotta check that out, eager readers. Yeah, the movie had, I'm not gonna bother trying to summarize it, but the movie had loads of like um controversy between like the director and star Justin Baldoni, who played Ryle and Blake Lively, who played Lily Blossom Bloom.
SPEAKER_00Um, that's what all I don't even know the controversy, but that's what it was all about. It was that movie.
SPEAKER_02They see each other, nothing happened. They there was all sorts of horrible uh allegations uh about like inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Um, and um I think Baldoni accused Lively of like libel and slander and things like this.
SPEAKER_03I actually did see that. My conclusion is they hate each other. The PR firm or whatever. There's like all these emails going back about how the PR firms are gonna like destroy the other person or something like that.
SPEAKER_07Someone told me that it's the reason that Blake Lively wasn't invited to Taylor Swift's wedding. So just as a demonstration of like the you know, the ripples, the cultural ripples of that this book has caused.
SPEAKER_02It didn't end with us, Chip. It was supposed to end and it didn't.
SPEAKER_00Um So, Dr. Bodaj and PhD, you've done it all, you said it all, you've done a wonderful job at walking us through this book. Is there any last thoughts that people wanted to share, put a pin in this before we uh wrap this meeting up today?
SPEAKER_02No, I don't. I I I suppose like maybe the last thing I'd say is just that I think that on the face of it, like a group of guys like us kind of picking apart uh a book. It's mainly written for women about domestic abuse. At first, you know, we're not the the right type of people to be doing this. But you know, on deeper reflection, I think it actually sort of behooves uh men um to be thinking about these things a lot more and not just to be trying to pick apart the female characters, but especially picking apart the representation of men and abusers, that even in this literature by women for women, you still have lots of those like really bad stereotypes about abusers, about how they behave, about how they get away with what they do. So in a weird roundabout way, I think I think talking about these types of things is is not to sound too cheesy, but is weirdly important by guys like us uh to be thinking and talking about these things.
SPEAKER_01So sorry to be concluding with a with a with a serious thought rather than a bad joke.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you. That that's a great way to sum it up. It it really is just about men as much as it is women. So I hope that people enjoyed this lively discussion. Stick around for next meeting. Uh, we're changing things up a little bit. We've got a scintillating work by a fellow named Clement Wood called The Life of a Man, a biography of John R. Brinkley. Those not familiar with Dr. John Brinkley, he's most famous for 1930s impotence surgeries, where he would graft goat testicles uh onto men and uh help them revive their, yeah, help them revive their uh sexual stamina. Um major, major influencer or influential figure in the Manosphere movement that would come to light decades later. So this guy was a real innovator. He had a radio show, and this book that we're reading is a uh sort of a fake biography of himself that he commissioned. Uh is it is it hagiography? Hot geography? How do you pronounce that, Dr. Dashnan? Hagiography. There you go. All right. So, you know, uh uh read it up, uh, and we would love to have your contributions next meeting. Um, but I think until then, let's uh perhaps wrap things up here. So again, thanks for everyone who attended today. Lovely to have all of your participation and uh presence at these Pieceship Book Club meetings. You can visit our website, we've got dozens and dozens of reviews there, POSBookclub.com, uh, the subreddit, uh, leave us a voicemail again, our email, POSBook club at gmail.com. But until next time, take care of yourself and each other. Meeting adjourned. Love y'all. Good night. Bye-bye.