One of my favorite things about being in podcasting is that, as part of my work, I need to cover lots of different angles to stay current on creative trends, great artists, good work, scouting for the next big thing, all the things that made me fall in love with podcasts in the first place.

Way back in the day, I was invited to an event in Canada tied to Content Canada, the Toronto gathering that ran alongside TIFF and pulled the Canadian content industry into one building to compare notes. I was invited to speak on a panel, and at the dinner the night before, I spent time with the people at the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, their national public broadcaster. We talked about their philosophy on podcasting and storytelling, which came down to a commitment to fearless and unusual storytelling across a lot of different genres, and that is not an easy greenlight to get in most places. It was one of those magical nights when you look up, and everyone else has left the room, and it is just your table, chatting, realizing it is way later than you thought and you’ve inadvertently become the bad guests who just won’t leave.

(apologies to the wait staff on that one)

And so, filled with those positive vibes, I resolved to start working my way through the CBC titles at the time, which included something called Alone: A Love Story. I went in cold, no idea what it was, and oh my god, what it was was…devastating and beautiful and human and funny and deeply, deeply relatable in a way I never expected. Probably the most riveting podcast I have listened to in a genre I would never select for myself.

The storytelling, the personal narrative, it all came together in a way I had not heard before, and I completely fell for it. Fearless and unusual, exactly as advertised. Which is why I am thrilled to be bringing this one back to everyone, because even though it took Gold at the New York Festivals Radio Awards and landed on The Atlantic's 50 best podcasts list, I feel like it never fully got its due, so…that ends now. Alone: A Love Story, welcome to basking in the collective admiration that is the Worth the Listen newsletter. You are welcome.

So, what is it? Alone: A Love Story is a definite shift from the last two weeks of cold cases and courtrooms (always good to mix it up in podcastland). It’s a memoir, read by the woman who lived it, in ten chapters that run about three hours and forty minutes all in, which means you can finish the whole thing in a week of commutes or binge over a longish weekend.

Michelle Parise is a producer at CBC Radio in Toronto, and about a decade ago her marriage ended. By her account, it ended badly and with someone else involved, and she says so in the opening minutes, so I am not giving anything away. What she did with that trauma, how she processes it and what she creates, is what makes the pod so special.

It opens on the eve of her 39th birthday, drunk on fancy cocktails, being talked into a tarot reading in what sounds like a closet, by a reader who is about 25 and working through a very large glass of red wine. The cards come up as loss and fear. She wakes up hungover and looks at the man asleep next to her, who is not her husband, and asks herself how she got here. And then we do a time jump back to 1999, to a bar on a Wednesday night, and start digging in.

That is the structure for all ten chapters. Two timelines, running toward each other. The 24-year-old in public radio who falls hard for a brooding physics grad student, and the 39-year-old across the street from that same man, sharing custody of a daughter and trying to remember who she was before any of it. Every person in it has a label instead of a name. The Scientist, who becomes The Husband. The Musician, who came before him. The Man With the White Shirt, who I had a lot of questions about. It can read like a gimmick, but in execution it’s done incredibly well, allowing her to speak more openly and candidly about people in her life without putting their names on it.

Before I go further, a note. This series includes strong language, drinking and substance use, and frank but non-graphic talk about sex. Apple lists a couple of chapters as clean; perhaps they didn’t focus intently on Chapter 1. Probably not a pod for the kids’ carpool unless it is a really precocious set of tweens.

What you are actually listening to is a radio producer using every tool she has on the story closest to her. There is a line about a smirk the two of them still share, long after the divorce, that says more about a marriage in a sentence than most memoirs manage in three hundred pages.

It is, again, really well done.

And she says the thing the rest of the season is built to explain: it is complicated to love someone who betrayed you.

Two things make this more than just a well-produced breakup pod.

Pix Plus subscribers get Steve's pick for this week, plus three podcasts you'd never find on your own.