Nora McInerny

Nora McInerny is the best-selling author of the memoirs It’s Okay To Laugh, (Crying Is Cool Too) and No Happy Endings, as well as The Hot Young Widows Club, Bad Moms and the best-selling essay collection Bad Vibes Only. She created and hosts the award-winning podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking.

She has contributed to publications like Time, Slate and Vox, where she’s often tapped for her essays highlighting the emotional landscape and humor in complex topics, like the financial impacts of healthcare and grief in a digital age. Her TED talk, “We don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it,” was the #4 TED talk of 2019.

Nora is a master storyteller known for her dedication to bringing heart and levity to the difficult and uncomfortable conversations most of us try to avoid, and also for being very tall. She was voted Most Humorous by the Annunciation Catholic School Class of 1997. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Founded by writer and illustrator Emily McDowell, Em & Friends makes products that speak to the human condition with honesty, humor, and heart. As Em & Friends (previously Emily McDowell & Friends), they partner with different authors and artists to create gifts and cards for the relationships we really have. Their mission is to help people connect when they’re not sure what to say.

Em & Friends is perhaps best-known for their Empathy Cards, designed for people going through life’s hardest times: major illness, loss, and grief; and inspired by Emily’s experience with cancer in her 20s. In our culture, most of us don’t learn how to talk about illness and death. Emily was struck by how lonely and isolated she felt when people disappeared because they didn’t know what to say when she was sick—and traditional “get well” card messages weren’t terribly helpful. With Empathy Cards, they created unique sympathy cards to help people going through a hard time, and to help friends and family find supportive alternate sympathy messages to write in a card to offer encouragement when they don’t know what to say.

In 2018, they joined forces with the kindred spirits at Knock Knock—another female-founded company—uniting as two sister brands under one kickass umbrella. In 2019, they added “Friends” to their product collections—outside creative collaborators, including amazing artists and writers like Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Congdon, and Nora McInerny. And in 2022, along with Knock Knock, Em & Friends joined the Union Square & Co. family. No matter how they evolve, their goal will always be the same: to help people feel more connected and less alone.