Slayers, Every One of Us: How One Girl in All the World Showed Us How to Hold on

In this sparkling joint memoir, ex-wives Russo and Youngs cover miscarriage, divorce, eviction, and their enduring love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which they recapped together on their popular podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer. With conversational prose and cheeky chapter titles like “If the Apocalypse Comes, Start a Podcast,” the duo parallels Buffy Summers’s seven-season arc with their own, discussing how her perseverance informed their determination to stay in each other’s lives after they broke up, and how developing an episode around the Buffy musical “Once More with Feeling” took their creative partnership to new heights. With hand-drawn graphics and sometimes-goofy, sometimes-moving Buffy-themed song lyrics written by Youngs, the book has the feel of a shared diary. Surprisingly candid accounts of the authors’ relationship trials and triumphs sit alongside shop-talk nuggets for the podcast’s fans. The result is a tender ode to the pleasures of TV fandom that doubles as a moving account of what happens after a romance ends. Illus. Agent: Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Apr.)