But what impacted all of us who worked on TMCM the most – and what we heard about often from listeners in their emails and reviews – was the vulnerability and wisdom of the guests that we featured on the show, guests like writer Naomi Alderman, talking about Groundhog Day. 

I interviewed writer Naomi Alderman years ago when I was a producer at NPR. I had pitched a short segment on a new running app called “Zombies, Run!” — I loved the idea that the only way to get some folks to run would be to make zombies chase them — and set up a pre-interview with Naomi, who wrote the story for the game. I became a huge fan of Naomi during that call. Her passion, sense of humor, and singular way of looking at the world were infectious, and after our call, I went out and bought a copy of her beautiful novel Disobedience.

When we started brainstorming guests for season 2 of This Movie Changed Me, Naomi immediately came to my mind. I had no idea if she was a movie fan, but I hoped for it. And when Tony Liu, one of TMCM’s producers, reached out to her, we discovered that Groundhog Day had profoundly changed her life and inspired her to create a new spiritual practice. As she explains in our conversation, “Every now and then, when I feel like I have either been through some hard times or that I’ve somehow become a little bit too blasé about my life, I spend a month, every single day, going to a place that I have not been before.” When Naomi shared this with me, it blew my mind. Her suggestion was something so simple, so practical that I could do in my own city, that would have the wondrous effect of illuminating, as Naomi says, “how amazing it is to just be allowed to be alive right now.”