We’ve picked our next book for the Happier Podcast Book Club, the brilliant new memoir by Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (Amazon, Bookshop). This memoir hits the shelves today, September 28. Even pre-publication, it has generated tremendous buzz. The official description explains:

The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn’t choose? It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely? Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age 35, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.

Elizabeth and I also both loved Kate Bowler’s first memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) (Amazon, Bookshop). (Kate is a history professor at Duke Divinity School, and I’ve also read her academic books: Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Amazon, Bookshop) and The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities (Amazon, Bookshop.)

If you’d like to listen to a short interview with Kate ahead of time, Elizabeth and I talked to her in episode 273. Kate also has a terrific podcast, Everything Happens. If you’d like to listen to an interview of the two of us, it’s here. We’ll talk to Kate in episode 349, on October 27, 2021. So get reading! Or listening, if you love audiobooks. What are your questions or insights about the book? Add them in the comments, or share them on social media using #happierpodcastbookclub, and we’ll incorporate them into the interview. Remember: whenever it is and wherever you are, there’s always a book waiting for you.