The Ex Talk

What's inside (10 sections)

1. A girl in a repair shop, pretending to be on air
2. Dominic Yun, who is twenty four and correct
3. The show becomes a thing
4. Truffles, a thunderstorm, and a dog in a T-shirt
5. Casual, until it isn't
6. A grief episode, and a national broadcast
7. Austin, and a stage with nobody on it
8. What works, and what doesn't
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I picked up The Ex Talk because the pitch sounded like a sketch: two public radio producers who cannot stand each other are ordered to host a dating show as former lovers. Rachel Lynn Solomon published it with Berkley in 2021, 352 pages, and it was her adult debut after a run of young adult novels. The cover promises banter and a microphone. What I did not expect was a book about a dead father, and about how a person can build a whole career as a shelter from grief.

That is the thing worth saying first, because the marketing does not say it. The fake relationship is the engine, but the fuel is loss.

A girl in a repair shop, pretending to be on air

Shay Goldstein is twenty nine and has been at Pacific Public Radio in Seattle for a decade. Before that she was a kid in her father's electronics repair shop, sitting on a stool while Dan Goldstein fixed radios and toasters, the two of them doing bits for an audience of nobody. She was the host. He was the guest, or the call in, or the weather. It is the kind of memory that seems cute until you notice what it is doing to her adult life.

Dan died of cardiac arrest during her senior year of high school, suddenly, without a goodbye scene. Shay's internship at PPR became the thing she held onto. Ten years later she is a senior producer, good at the work, underpaid in the way that public radio is underpaid, and still living in a house in Wallingford that is too quiet for one person. She owns it. She rattles around in it. Her dating life is on pause after she told a man she loved him too early and watched him retreat.

Her mother, Leanna, is a violinist in the Seattle Symphony, and she is proposing to her boyfriend Phil, also a violinist, which gives the book one of its warmest running threads. Her best friend Ameena Chaudhry is interviewing for a job in Virginia. Everyone in Shay's life is moving, pairing off, leaving. Shay is staying, because staying is what she does.

Dominic Yun, who is twenty four and correct

Then there is Dominic Yun, reporter, twenty four, master's from Northwestern, insufferable in the specific way of a young man who has been told he is promising. Shay finds him arrogant and also genuinely talented, which is the worst combination. He breaks a story about the mayor misusing campaign funds, and his segment starts beating Puget Sounds, the show Shay produces with host Paloma Powers. He is not even subtle about enjoying that.

The program director is Kent O'Grady, and Kent is the book's quiet villain long before he is a loud one. He calls a meeting about falling listenership. Layoffs are coming. Shay, nervous and trying to be useful, pitches a dating show hosted by exes: people who used to love each other, talking about it on air, no couples therapy, just honesty. It is a decent idea. Dominic says so in the least helpful way possible, which is to say he dismisses it, and they argue in front of the whole staff.

Kent watches them snipe and sees a product. He proposes that Shay and Dominic cohost the show themselves, pretending to be former lovers, using the friction that is already there. Puget Sounds will be cancelled. This new show is the only way to save their jobs, and also Ruthie Liao's, their producer colleague, who is the kind of competent, under-credited person that institutions discard first.

Dominic refuses. Then he has dinner with Shay, hears the parts of her situation that are not funny, and agrees. Their invented history gets built like a set: a first date, a Halloween anniversary, a breakup caused by working together. Ruthie suggests the name The Ex Talk. Shay adopts an anxious Chihuahua mix and names him Steve Rogers, which tells you exactly how she feels about bravery.

She also lies to her mother about having dated Dominic. That is a small moment and a large one. Leanna is delighted. Shay feels the floor tilt.

The show becomes a thing

The premiere goes well. Listeners immediately start calling them Shayminic, which is the kind of portmanteau that should be unbearable and instead becomes a small engine of affection. A tweet from the actress Saffron Shaw pushes the show into the Apple Podcasts Top 100. Sponsors appear. Kent is pleased in the way that makes everyone else nervous.

Shay and Dominic are good on air because they are essentially doing a heightened version of their real dynamic: she overexplains, he deadpans, both of them are a little too pleased when the other laughs. The show is a hit partly because it sounds like a real relationship, which is a horrible compliment for two people who are manufacturing one.

Then a hostile caller points out the gaps in their social media history. No tagged photos. No shared vacations. No friends in common from the supposed years together. Dominic defends Shay smoothly and gets them out of it, but the call leaves a mark. They both know the lie is thin in exactly the places a stranger would poke.

Kent's solution is a weekend. He sends them to an Airbnb on Orcas Island to learn more about each other, which is his way of saying the show needs material and also, though he would never frame it this way, that the two of them need to be in a small house together with no escape.

Truffles, a thunderstorm, and a dog in a T-shirt

The middle of the book is where Solomon is best. At a taping in a dark restaurant, they feed each other chocolate truffles, and the scene is funny, then drawn out, then genuinely intimate in a way neither of them planned. After a drinking night celebrating the show, Dominic kisses Shay outside his apartment. They agree to forget it. They do not forget it.

Orcas Island does the work that plot cannot. A thunderstorm hits. Steve Rogers is terrified, shaking, inconsolable, and Dominic calms him by taking off his T-shirt and wrapping the dog in it, then holding him until the shaking stops. It is the kind of detail that tells you more about a man than a page of description.

They talk. Dominic's ex Mia left after he spent a year caring for her through a skiing injury, a year of being needed that ended with her gone and him unsure whether he had been a partner or a nurse. Shay talks about her father, and about the loneliness of being the person who stays in a house full of other people's memories. They sleep together. It is not a plot twist, it is a consequence.

Afterward he says something that lands harder than a declaration would have: if he kissed her again, it would be because he wanted to, not because the show needed it. That line does a lot of work. It is also, on re-reading, a warning about how much of their relationship is being performed for an audience.

Casual, until it isn't

Back in Seattle they agree to keep it casual. No feelings, no labels, no sleepovers. Shay agrees to this with her whole body and none of her judgment. Her feelings grow anyway, in the ordinary way feelings do: she wants to tell him things first, she checks her phone, she is disappointed by the shape of a Tuesday.

Dominic mentions on air that he is interested in someone, without naming her. The studio audience loves it. Shay sits there with a microphone and a face she has to control. Later she texts him, he shows up with Thai food, and he stays the night, a small violation of their rule that both of them pretend is not a change.

Ameena takes the Virginia job and, on her way out, tells Shay the truth: that Shay clings to her father's memory, that she has made work her whole identity, that she uses being needed at the station as a reason not to risk anything else. It is the accusation that hurts because it is half right. Shay then meets Dominic's parents, who are warm and welcoming and clearly a little delighted by her, and something in her tightens. She ends the casual arrangement because she is too invested. Dominic does not fight it the way she needs him to.

A grief episode, and a national broadcast

Shay pitches an episode about grief, with her mother and Phil, about her father. Kent dismisses it. This is the sexism in the book made concrete rather than slogan: Kent takes Dominic's ideas more seriously, gives Dominic the credit, sidelines Shay on the show she built, and when Shay brings him something raw and specific he cannot see the value in it. Dominic advocates for the episode, which is both decent of him and a reminder that he has the standing she does not.

The episode is simulcast nationally on NPR, and it is the best thing they have made. Leanna and Phil talk about Dan with humor and specificity. Shay talks about the repair shop, the pretend broadcasts, the way grief can calcify into a job. The show climbs. PodCon invites them to Austin for a live taping.

At Green Lake, Dominic confesses that the unnamed person was Shay. They become a real couple. They plan to announce it at PodCon, which is the moment where I, as a reader, started bracing.

Austin, and a stage with nobody on it

Before the live show, tweets from the show's official account expose the fake relationship. Not hints. Receipts. The audience turns before Shay and Dominic even get to the microphones. Shay does the brave thing: she admits the lie, and then she says they really fell for each other. It is messy and true and exactly what a person who has been hiding for a year would say.

Dominic freezes. He whispers "I'm sorry" and walks offstage, leaving her alone in front of a crowd that has just been told it was the joke. It is the cruellest moment in the book, and the one that made me put it down for a minute.

Kent, it turns out, posted the tweets. The board wanted to cut the show and he was afraid a distributor would poach them, so he blew it up himself and called it strategy. He offers Dominic a researcher job. He tells Shay and Ruthie there is one part-time slot between them. Shay quits. She confronts Dominic, furious that he left her on that stage, and says she was falling in love with him. He does not have an answer that is good enough.

The retreat section is the part I expected to skim and did not. Shay disables social media. She listens to old recordings with her father, the pretend shows, his voice, and the sound of being a child who was loved. She feels relief at not carrying the lie anymore, which is a more honest emotion than triumph. She reconciles with Ameena at Leanna and Phil's wedding. Ameena gives her a bracelet engraved WWAMWMD: What Would a Mediocre White Man Do, their old joke about self-advocacy. Lunch with Paloma helps Shay see her skills as portable, not tied to one building.

Then, at a cafe with Ruthie, she learns that Dominic has been doing a live on-air apology for over two hours during the pledge drive, describing, to anyone still listening, how he fell in love with her on air. She drives to the station. He explains his stage fright and apologizes. He unplugs the headphones so he can tell her privately, not as content, that he loves her. She says it back.

Back on air, Dominic quits. Shay adds a farewell to Kent that is profane and satisfying and probably a liability. In the epilogue they live together in her Wallingford house and launch an independent podcast called Relationship Goals, with Ruthie producing.

What works, and what doesn't

The banter is the obvious pleasure. Solomon writes argument as flirtation without making either character stupid, and the Jewish family texture is specific and lived in: Leanna's violin, the wedding, the food, the way Shay's mother can be loving and evasive in the same sentence. Steve Rogers is not a gimmick. He is a small anxious creature who needs someone, which is the whole book in a dog.

The Orcas weekend is the strongest stretch, because it stops performing. Two people in a rented house, a storm, a dog, a conversation about the worst year of each of their lives. The book is honest about wanting a career and a love life at the same time, and about how the workplace can make a woman choose the wrong one out of exhaustion.

The criticisms are real. The third act leak is contrived: Kent's motive is announced rather than built, and the tweets arrive exactly when the plot needs a grenade. Dominic's stage fright is introduced late enough that it feels like a key produced after the lock. The ending is very neat: the apology, the quitting, the new podcast, the house, the dog, all in a row, with the institutional problems of PPR resolved by leaving them behind. And the radio details sometimes feel researched rather than lived, the correct vocabulary of a station without the smell of one.

Who should skip it: readers who need the conflict to come from character rather than authorial convenience, and anyone allergic to a third act separation. Who should read it: anyone who has used work as a hiding place, and anyone who has ever been the person who stays.

The image I keep is not the kiss or the confession. It is Shay in a studio, headphones on, listening to a recording of her father pretending to be a caller on a show that never existed, and realizing she has been making that show her whole adult life. The novel's real question is whether you can love someone without turning them into an audience. Shay's answer, finally, is to say it to one person with the microphones still on.

FAQ

Is The Ex Talk Rachel Lynn Solomon's first adult novel?

Yes. It was her adult debut after several young adult novels, and it was published by Berkley in 2021.

Does The Ex Talk have a happy ending?

Yes. Shay and Dominic end up together and launch an independent podcast, though the novel first puts them through a public humiliation.

What is The Ex Talk about beyond the fake relationship?

It is also about grief, workplace sexism, and Shay's habit of using her job as a shelter from loss.