Annie Hartnett, author of THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS

Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction and was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living. It’s now out and available in paperback, published by Ballentine. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, Annie co-runs Accountability Workshops for writers, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. The Road to Tender Hearts gives us writers a lot to talk about. Structuring a novel around a road trip and how to weave in backstory while maintaining forward momentum. Writing heavy topics like death, addiction, grief, and abandonment with humor. Annie’s approach to third-person multiple points of view, tackling a range of viewpoints, and so much more. We also talked about her ambivalent relationship with Scrivener, how she uses spreadsheets, working with mind maps, and the importance of accountability for writers. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded June 2, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)