You Probably Think This Story Is About You might not, in fact, be about you. It’s actually about betrayal in love, and the consequences of one man’s deceit, according to its makers. But dip your toe in beyond the first few episodes and it’s a podcast about why Brittani Ard, the host and executive producer of this wildly successful audio debut, fell so hard and so blindly for a master manipulator. This is her story, she tells us, though she also allows that part of it at least belongs to more than a dozen other women.
I’m getting ahead of myself. You Probably Think This Story Is About You, from Larj Media, begins with “Kanon”, the ex-marine with the dimple whom the Seattleite met on a dating app, and two days later for their first IRL date. He could charm the paint off a wall. He was a single dad, he had a tragically deceased ex-wife, he smelled amazing, and he fed her all the lines: how he had never been close to anyone before her, how there was nobody like her. Ard went all in. Five months or so into their relationship Kanon presented her with a book containing images of all the dates they’d been on so far. “I can’t wait to spend my life discovering more and more reasons to love you,” he wrote on the last page. Dear Lord.
You already know how this goes, but there’s something gripping about waiting to see where the cracks will appear. In this case Kanon, faces a grilling from one of Ard’s family members, and his stories start to fall apart. Ard wises up, starts to ask questions, and ultimately finds 14 other women who’ve been down the same road with this dimpled Lothario, who was not only a monumental cheater but was also telling tales so wild and invented that it becomes comical to hear them all come spilling out on top of each other. But before it all unravels, the podcast departs from the catfish narrative into Ard’s biography, where we begin to understand why elements of Kanon’s story – addiction, violent loss – found such purchase with the host.
From a narrative standpoint, it’s quite a segue: Ard, presumably, is trying to figure out why she fell for this malarkey, and looks for answers in her own past. She grew up with an alcoholic mother; she lost a very close family member at a young age. It’s a particularly selective dive into her personal history – there’s only so much you can fit into a half-hour episode, I get it, but there were notable ellipses around her past relationships and her children that left me with more questions than answers.
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The best comes when she circles back to Kanon and we hear from all the other women who found themselves in his thrall, their conflicting accounts burying him in layers of his own fabrication.
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Still, this is Ard’s story, as she reminds us in the final episode, in a voice that’s rich and intimate. Though her own ego gets eye-rollingly in the way at times – she’ll be the one to tell you how making people feel loved is her superpower, or how she’s an autodidact who likes to solve things – she’s a skilled storyteller willing to bring to light some of her own darkest moments.
“I don’t know that my story is going to have the fairy-tale ending,” Ard says towards the end, as if in acknowledgment of the narrative disconnectedness in a tale that starts out as a bad romance but ends with family dinners. Which might be the point: that life is messy and unresolved, that we live through terrible grief and joy, that it all makes us vulnerable and that, sometimes, you just have to put it all out there to get through it.
