The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story
You can pre-order it now! Just go to tinyurl.com/firsttenyears or wherever you get your books.
Here’s the official synopsis if you want more info:
A sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining joint memoir by Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale, and his wife, writer and performer Meg Bashwiner, chronicling the first ten years of their relationship from both sides.
In 2009, 22-year-old Joseph Fink, newly arrived to New York City from the West Coast, was juggling odd jobs to pay the rent and volunteering with a theater company in the East Village so he could snag free tickets to their shows.
Meg Bashwiner, a 22-year-old aspiring performer and playwright, was living with her parents in New Jersey, working a desk job and commuting to her internship with that same East Village theater company.
Joseph and Meg's stories meet when they both find themselves selling tickets in a cramped box office. They quickly became friends. Within a year, they were a couple. Within five years they were touring the world, performing on some of the world's greatest and not so great stages.
In this candid, soul-baring memoir, Joseph and Meg recount their first ten years together, each telling their story as they remember it, without having consulted the other. We hear both sides of their first kiss, first breakup, first getting back together, the death of a father, marriage, international fame, world tours, mental illness, and discussions about having children. Sometimes, they recall things differently—neither agrees on who paid for the morning after pill on their first date. Sometimes they remember the exact same details in the same way—but still have their own narrative on just what those details mean.
Poignant, funny, and real, alternately told in Joseph and Meg’s remarkably different, yet equally compelling voices, The First Ten Years is the story of two individuals finding their way in the world and becoming "adults" as they learn to become a couple.
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Transcript
and I don't just write Welcome to Nightville, we also write books that are not about Nightville, and here are some of them.
Alice Isn't Dead, a lesbian road trip horror love story for fans of Stephen King.
The Halloween Moon, my book for kids of any age about a Halloween where things really start to get weird for everyone.
The First 10 Years, a memoir from me and my wife about our relationship told year by year without consulting each other about our differences in memory.
And from Jeffrey, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, an apocalyptic novel that takes place in the same universe as the Within the Wires podcast.
No matter what you're looking for, we've written a book just for you.
Find them where you find books.
Okay, bye.
If you're dying for the next batch of Wednesday Season 2 to drop on Netflix, then I'll let you in on a secret.
The Wednesday Season 2 official wocast is already here.
Dive deeper into the mysteries of Wednesday with the Ultimate Companion Video Podcast.
Join the frightfully funny Caitlin Riley, along with her producer, Thing, as she sits down with the cast and crew.
Together, they'll unravel each shocking twist, dissect the dynamics lurking beneath, unearth Adam's family lore, and answer all of your lingering questions.
Guests include Emma Myers, Joy Sunday, Hunter Doohan, Steve Buscemi, Fred Armison, Catherine Zeta Jones, the Joanna Lumley, also show creators Al Goh and Miles Miller, and of course, Wednesday herself, Jenna Ortega, plus many, many more.
With eight delightfully dark episodes to devour, you'll be drawn into the haunting halls of Nevermore Academy deeper than ever before.
But beware, you know where curiosity often leads.
The Wednesday season two official wocast is available in audio and video on todoom.com or wherever it is you get your podcasts.
Hi, it's Joseph Fink here.
We are on our usual January break, and we will be back with a new episode in just a few days on February 1st.
But today I have a special guest here to help make a really exciting announcement we have been waiting to make for a long time and we are so excited to bring it to you.
The special guest, it is Meg Bashwiner.
Hi, Joseph.
It's nice to see you.
Hello.
In our home.
Yes, it's me, Meg Bashwiner.
I play the role of your favorite sentient patch of haze.
And welcome to Night Veil Deb.
I also am the MC of the live shows.
So if you've ever been to one of our live shows and you saw a very attractive person in a very tight dress telling you not to smoke or vape inside our theater, that was me.
Also, I talk to you at the end of this podcast to tell you about the credits and the proverbs.
So Meg, why are we standing in the basement of our house talking in front of a bike today?
Because we love it and our basement's super weird.
Also, it's where your microphone is and we're using your microphone to tell you that we wrote a book.
It's called The First 10 Years and it is a memoir that the two of us co-wrote that comes out May 11th of this year and it's available for pre-sale right
now.
That's right, the first 10 years, the same love story from both sides.
So it's about the first 10 years of Meghan and I's relationship.
For each of those years, we wrote down how we remembered it entirely separately without consulting the other person.
So it's the same events, but we remember them very differently.
It's also covering a very weird time in our lives in which I started this podcast called Welcome to Nightvale and then we ended up touring the world together and standing on stages in all these countries we never thought we'd go.
Meg, what are you most excited about with this book?
What am I most excited about with this book?
The fact that it exists for
one thing, but it's really exciting to get to share with all of you out there, all of you readers out there, what the past 10 years of our life has been like.
For those of you who don't know, Joseph and I are married.
Not to spoil the chapter about 2015, but Joseph and I are married and started dating in 2009 when we met as young theater-making upstarts in New York City's East Village.
And so the book starts there and it ends today in our basement in upstate New York, where together the two of us, as a romantic gift, just bought each other 31 feet of new sewer line for our house.
So it's a
really interesting journey to get from there to here.
There's lots of great stuff about the making of Night Vale, how it went from being just a weird idea into Joseph's head to now a weird idea in all of your heads.
Also, there's other things that go on in our lives.
There's loss, there's gains.
I have a mental breakdown at a budget rental car in the Burbank airport.
You know, life.
Life.
So again, that comes out on May 11th, but you can pre-order it now.
And just to give you a behind-the-scenes peek here, Pre-ordering makes a huge difference for authors.
I really actually cannot emphasize that enough.
So if you think you're going to buy it, please consider pre-ordering.
It really helps.
You can pre-order it by going to tinyurl.com slash first10 years.
That's all spelled out, no numbers.
And you can see the cover, which I promise is super weird and has pictures of taxidermy.
And you can pre-order your copy there.
See you soon with our next episode of Night Vale.
Meg, we have a book.
We have a book.
And for those of you that are looking at the cover, I'm the squirrel in the back of the canoe.
Again, Meg, where can we get it?
And also see that cover.
Tinyurl.com/slash first10 years.
All spelled out, no numbers, all squirrels, all day.
So, of course, that link is also in the show notes if you'd like that.
The first 10 years, the same love story from Two Sides, a new memoir by me and Meg.
Okay, talk to you all again in a couple days.
Bye.
Goodbye.
You don't want to do your squirrel joke?
I guess I'll do my squirrel joke.
My squirrel joke is that I'm the squirrel in the back of the boat
on the cover.
I'll do it.
I was going to do it later.
Okay.
We'll go to the later then.
Trip Planner by Expedia.
You were made to outdo your holiday,
your hammocking,
and your pooling.
We were made to help organize the competition.
Expedia, made to travel.
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.
You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.
Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.
He's too old.
Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dude 2 is overrated.
It is.
Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unschooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them.
We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, from Greece to the Dark Knight.
We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look, and we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.
So, if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.
Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget to hit the follow button.
Hey, y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.
And did you know that Welcome to Night Vale is back out on tour?
We are.
We're going to be up in the northeast, in the Boston, New York City area, going all the way over to the upper Midwest in Minnesota.
That's in July.
You kind of draw a line through there, and you'll kind of see the towns we'll be hitting.
We'll also be doing Philly down to Florida in September.
And we'll be going from Austin all the way up through the middle of the country into Toronto, Canada Canada in October.
And then we'll be doing the West Coast plus the Southwest plus Colorado in January of 2026.
You can find all of the show dates at welcome to nightvale.com slash live.
Listen, this brand new live show is so much fun.
It is called Murder Night in Blood Forest, and it stars Cecil Baldwin, of course, Symphony Sanders, me, and live original music by Disparition, and who knows what other special guests may come along for the ride.
These tours are always so much fun, and they are for you, the Die Hard fan, and you, the Night veil new kid alike.
So feel comfortable bringing your family, your partner, your co-workers, your cat, whatever.
They don't got to know what a night veil is to like the show.
Tickets to all of these live shows are on sale now at welcometonightvell.com/slash live.
Don't let time slip away and miss us when we are in your town because otherwise we will all be sad.
Get your tickets to our live U.S.
plus Toronto tours right now at welcometonightveld.com/slash live.
And hey,
see you soon.
