Public radio listeners know Amy Dickinson as a regular panelist on “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” The popular advice columnist joins us to talk about how experiences in her own life have helped her to guide readers through relationships, parenting and even death. Her new book is called “Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home” (Hachette).

Amy Dickinson on … 

… why she thinks advice columns still work: 

“When somebody writes to me about a challenging relationship I direct my answer directly to them, but I know based on the responses I get that it resonates with hundreds of people. … There is this sort of, I don’t know, sort of this uncomfortable fascination with other people’s problems. That’s one reason a lot of us read advice columns. But in the course of sorting laughing at somebody else’s petty problem, you may see something that has more direct relationship to you. And I genuinely believe that it helps a lot of people.”