This Book Made Me

It's the 25th anniversary of a combination literary hoax and totem of the "Just Say No" campaign, with a bit of "satanic panic" tossed in for color. Welcome to Go Ask Alice, the supposedly anonymous, supposed journal of a good girl whose life is ruined by drugs (that somehow makes drugs sound great). Join my guests and I as we try to take this book seriously for our final installment of Gen X Summer School. 
My "guest lecturers" for Gen X Summer School:
Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at JenCapra.com, as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok. 
Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and others. His new novella, "The Tristans, by Isobel Chase Montgomery" is now available from Amazon, and his series of weird microfictions, "The Sunday Scaries" appears weekly at GhoulishDelights.com . 
Michael McDunnah is a long-time communications professional who writes about film and television at unaffiliatedcritic.com, and co-hosts The Unenthusiastic Critic podcast. He lives in Chicago. 
And as always, you can find more about the podcast on Instagram, or contact us directly at ThisBookMadeMe@gmail.com

Who let us read this stuff?! It's the Gen X classic Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews's introduction to puberty with a side of incest, wrapped in a faux-gothic nightmare. Join my guests for a rip-roaring ride through this book that got passed from girl clique to girl clique, and influenced a generation.
My "guest lecturers" for Summer School:
Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at , as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok. 
Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and others. His new novella, "The Tristans, by Isobel Chase Montgomery" is now available from Amazon, and his series of weird microfictions, "The Sunday Scaries" appears weekly at GhoulishDelights.com. 
And as always, you can find more about the podcast on Instagram, or contact us directly at ThisBookMadeMe@gmail.com

Stephen King, the father of Generation X's nightmares--and an obvious first class for Gen X Summer School! Join my guests and I as we dig into Night Shift, an early compilation of King's short stories. It includes the material for so many of his later masterpieces (Salem's Lot, Children of the Corn, The Stand), along with many of his misfires (Maximum Overdrive, The Lawnmower Man). Who let us read this stuff? And how did it shape a generation of young readers?
My "guest lecturers" for Summer School:
Jen Capra is an Emmy nominated Sesame Street writer, aspiring author, and content creator-slash-professional starving artist. You can find her at JenCapra.com, as well as @genxistentialcrisis on TikTok. 
Patrick Harrigan is the author of the novel Lost Clusters and the short story collections Thin Times and Thin Places, The Lecture Tour and On Tour Forever, and has had other work published by The MIT Press, Camden House, Fantasy Flight Games, Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and others. His new novella, "The Tristans, by Isobel Chase Montgomery" is now available from Amazon, and his series of weird microfictions, "The Sunday Scaries" appears weekly at Ghoulishdelights.com.
Michael McDunnah is a long-time communications professional who writes about film and television at www.unaffiliatedcritic.com, and co-hosts The Unenthusiastic Critic podcast. He lives in Chicago. 
And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at ThisBookMadeMe@gmail.com

Class is in session! Join us for Gen X Summer School: the books that made feral latchkey children into feral adults with no f's to give. Launching this week!

Has there ever been a more urgent moment to ask ourselves what it means to be human? And how can a novel help us ask that question better? (Hint: there may be clones...) Thankfully, my guest has all of the right questions and interpretations for the book that made him: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. 
Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer and literary translator based in Montreal. Born in Seoul, he has lived across North America and the UK since age 11. He earned his master's in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford in 2015. He won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers' Award in 2021 and the Emerging Translator Award from LTI Korea in 2023. His debut novel, Oxford Soju Club, was longlisted for Canada Reads 2026.
You can find his insightful social media posts—about books, writing, Korean and American culture, and more—at the link below, as well as his official, authorial website. 
https://www.instagram.com/jinwoopark0721/
jinwoo-park.com
And as always, you can find more about the podcast at our Instagram, or contact us directly at ThisBookMadeMe@gmail.com