How Author Nora McInerny Learned to Live with Her Grief When a World of 'Toxic Positivity' Tried to Erase It

When author Nora McInerny lost her 35-year-old husband to brain cancer eight years ago, she realized just how uncomfortable most people are with the emotion of grief.

Even at the funeral, she was approached by friends and acquaintances desperately trying to find a silver lining and a create a happy ending for her. "They'd say things like, 'Well, he died, but he also lived' or 'You're young; you'll find someone else,'" McInerny tells PEOPLE in this week's issue.

"Nobody says these things to be unkind. Nobody says these things to wound you. It's part of our cultural script. We love a person who can overcome adversity. But the things that don't kill us do not always make us stronger. There are a lot of people walking around, especially after the past few years, really hurting, and really suffering, and not feeling any better for it."

For a time after her husband, Aaron, died, McInerny, now 39, tried to play the part, despite the deep pain of his loss, which left her as the single mother of a toddler. Her stock answer to "How are you?" was always "I'm good." But that, she says, was far from the truth. "That made life lonelier for me. When you lie to the people who want to be there, you make it impossible for them to show up. You build a brick wall between you. I should have told them the truth"

The honest answer, says McInerny, who, just weeks before her husband's death, had a miscarriage and lost her father to cancer, "would have been, 'Terrible, thanks for asking.' " That eventually became the title for her popular podcast, where she's explored the nature of grief through her own, and other people's stories. She's also delved deeply into the topic in a series of memoirs (Mandy Moore and Lena Dunham are both fans of her 2016 book It's Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too) — Moore called it "a perfect blend of nostalgia-drenched humor, wit, and heartbreak") and in a TED Talk that has more than 6 million views.

In her latest book, Bad Vibes Only (and Other Things I Bring to the Table), which is a series of personal essays, she dismantles the cultural compulsion to accentuate the positive — the impulse that led her, in the year after Aaron's death, to post photos of herself running a half marathon or beaming as she had dinners with her son: "I wasn't taking pictures of me having a panic attack and pulling the car over to puke."

"Toxic positivity attempts to erase our very real-life experiences, the pain of it, and it was poisoning me from the inside," she says. "That need for people to want you to be okay is kind of a selfish one. What toxic positivity and self-improvement culture does to us is, it makes it a 'you' problem. Why are you like this? How can you fix this? But what's wrong isn't you. There's nothing wrong with the way that you are experiencing pain. To live fully in the face of your loss is to allow yourself to feel fully your loss and to feel also every bit of happiness and joy that you can squeeze out of this life."

When McInerny fell in love with someone new a year after Aaron died, she struggled with her conflicting emotions. "I was defensive of both my grief for Aaron and my love for Matthew, as though they were at odds with each other," she says. "Grief is complicated. It also does not exist in this vacuum. It exists mixed in with all these other life experiences. The world moves forward. The world keeps spinning."

Married to Matthew Hart, 44, since 2017, she and her "current husband," as she calls him ("I want him on his toes!" she jokes) now live in Phoenix with his two children from a previous marriage, her son Ralph, now 9, and their 5-year-old son, whom they call Q. But her second marriage and their blended family are not her happy ending. "I love a happy ending but what we're in now is a very happy middle," she says.

"If you're living to get to an end point where it's happiness, period, you are set up for a life of disappointment. What I know now is the guarantee in life is that there will be more. There will be more joy. There will be more pain, and there will be more struggle. And I can only cross that bridge when I come to it."

For more on Nora McInerny, pick up a copy of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday