Annie Hartnett, ‘The Road to Tender Hearts’ – The Girlfriend Author Interview (May 2026)

In this Girlfriend Book Club author talk, executive editor Shelley Emling sits down with bestselling novelist Annie Hartnett to discuss The Road to Tender Hearts, the May 2026 selection. Hartnett reveals the real-life spark behind the novel’s opening — Pancakes, a cat modeled on a nursing-home cat rumored to sense when residents were near death — and explains how that uncanny premise helped her explore grief, caregiving and the everyday anxiety of loving people in an unpredictable world.

Hartnett traces the book’s road-trip DNA to her own cross-country travels — especially a college drive from Massachusetts to San Francisco, filled with strange roadside stops, including Niagara Falls — and to the darkly comic story of barrel rider Bobby Leach, who survived the falls but later died after slipping on an orange peel. She shares that the novel began as three separate threads (the cat, PJ’s obituary-driven quest and the children’s storyline) until they “clicked” into one ensemble journey that doesn’t hit the road until well into the book. Hartnett also talks about character inspirations (including an exceptionally sensitive man who had upsetting news clipped from the paper), why writing twenty-somethings like PJ’s daughter, Sophie, is hardest, and how a year of real-life chaos in a troubled rental home fed the book’s themes of doom, humor and hope. The conversation wraps with the book’s word-of-mouth success, Hartnett’s hopes for a screen adaptation and her recommendation of Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.