Our Best Books coverage continues with nonfiction, featuring Jen Hatmaker.

On this episode of Fully Booked, Jen Hatmaker joins us to discuss Awake: A Memoir (Avid Reader Press, Sept. 23), one of Kirkus’ Best Books of 2025. “A marital crisis causes a road-away-from-Damascus transformation,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of Hatmaker’s “honest, engaging, and enjoyable” chronicle of reclaiming her power and rebuilding her life.

Hatmaker is the author of 14 books, including four New York Times bestsellers, and the host of the award-winning podcast For the Love. She is a speaker, advocate, educator, mother, and a self-described “textbook Enneagram 3.”

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of Awake: “Hatmaker opens with the impetus for her life change: a dead-of-night call her husband is making, aloud and in bed, to his girlfriend. ‘So this is what it looks like when a life unravels in real time,’ she writes, adding, ‘It is quieter than I expected.’ To compound the matter, her marriage of 26 years was to a minister, and she herself was a well-known faith leader of conservative bent. That moment of betrayal opens the author to an examination of her beliefs.…No sooner is the word out that she and her husband have split up than do pious tongues start wagging.…Hatmaker steps over to the progressive side of the faith, allowing that her previous brand had been made toxic by white supremacy, racism, sexism, greed, and ugly secrets.…The author goes on to write of middle-age dating, ‘purity culture,’ body shaming, and a careful kind of forgiveness while proclaiming a hard-won feminism: ‘Women are the eighth wonders of the world. May we love this little life with exposed beating hearts, tender regardless, despite it all.’”

Hatmaker and I discuss the joys of a book tour, why she chose to tell the story in vignettes, a chapter dedicated to a life-changing English teacher, the role reading aloud plays in her writing process, recording your own audiobook, the maximum size for a dining table, tips for welcoming guests to your home (or your podcast), the editing process, and much more.

Then nonfiction editor John McMurtrie joins us to discuss the making of this year’s best nonfiction books list.

JOHN’S PICKS:

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead)

America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton (Pantheon)

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell (Dey Street/HarperCollins)

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge by Ian Kumekawa (Knopf)

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press)

Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

The New Cadets by Marjorie Burns, illus. by Carolyn Wilhelm

Daemon Protocol by JL Spears

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.