In this month’s episode, our host and bestselling author Theo Clarke, speaks to author Professor Lucy Easthope about her latest book Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis, published by Hodder Books. They also discuss advice on being a non-fiction author and writing memoir.
We all know that at some point in life, we will experience pain, uncertainty and loss. Widowhood, redundancy, a life-changing diagnosis, pregnancy loss, or a global pandemic. So how can we weather the storms, and cope with whatever comes next?
No one can answer this better than Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner whose job is to support survivors of major disasters. She has been there after countless earthquakes, fires and floods. Time and again she has watched how people rebuild: the work, the pitfalls and the fragile joy. In Come What May, she distils for us what she has learned about how to carry on during and after terrible times.
Through poignant stories and hard-won wisdom, she offers a roadmap for resilience in the face of adversity. She explains what shape the recovery journey might take, how to triage your life in an emergency, how to plan for ‘the slump’ (also known as the lasagne phase), how to take stock of what has happened to you, how to watch out for ‘learned helplessness’, and what good (and bad) help looks like.
This is a book for all of us existing in ‘the after’ who want not just to survive, but to live and unleash strengths we never knew we had.
BIOGRAPHY
Lucy Easthope is the UK’s leading authority on recovering from disaster. She has been advisor on nearly every major disaster of the past two decades, including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury Poisonings, Grenfell. She has most recently has been advising the Prime Minister’s Office on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lucy grew up in Liverpool and has a degree in law, a PhD in medicine and a Masters in risk, crisis and disaster management. She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham and Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath.
Her book When The Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster was released in March 2022 and was a Sunday Times bestseller.
https://whatevernext.info/about/
Follow @whenthedustsettleslucy
ABOUT THE HOST
Theo Clarke hosts A Thread of One’s Own and the hit podcast Breaking the Taboo which is in the Top 5% most listened to podcasts globally. She is the bestselling author of Breaking the Taboo: Why We Need to Talk About Birth Trauma. Theo was formerly the Member of Parliament for Stafford and won ‘Speech of the Year’ at the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. She has twice been listed among the Top 100 Women in Westminster (2024 & 2025).
Follow @theoclarkemp
