In Jenny Owen Youngs and Kristin Russo’s new memoir, Slayers, Every One Of Us, the podcasting duo behind Buffering the Vampire Slayer reflect on their relationship with the iconic queer television show — and their relationship with each other. In this exclusive excerpt, Kristin writes about approaching one of the most challenging moments in her collaborative career with Jenny: how to tell their thriving community of listeners that the inspirational gay marriage they’d built the podcast around had dissolved. Jenny and Kristin were getting divorced.

Read a snippet of how this turned out, below, followed by the excerpt in audiobook format, including the beginning of one of the songs featured in the audiobook, which features bonus songs, jingles, and clips from the podcast and live shows. Slayers, Every One Of Us is out now from St. Martin’s Press.

Excerpted from SLAYERS, EVERY ONE OF US: How One Girl In All The World Showed Us How To Hold On by Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs © 2025 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.

So now our closest friends knew. Our families knew. Our listenership, though, did not. Our fourth season was set to begin at the end of May, and we were terrified of breaking their hearts with the news. How do you tell thousands of people who have looked to your partnership as a beacon of hope that it is ending? How do you tell them everything is going to be okay when you’re miles away from a place where you can believe that yourself?

We decided to take a three-pronged (and some might say unhinged) approach:

1. On May 23, return to Buffering with the Season 4 premiere, “The Freshman.”
2. On May 24, announce an upcoming event—a live recording of “Beer Bad”—scheduled for July at Brooklyn’s Littlefield.
3. On May 25, publish a statement announcing our separation.

We reasoned that, if our listeners saw that we would be together in NYC in July, then maybe they would be able to believe us when we told them it was going to be okay. I am pretty sure that we also reasoned: if we planned a show in July, then maybe . . . we would be okay.

We decided we should be together when the statement went live and so, sitting side by side—having read and reread the words, rewritten them, rearranged them, copyedited them—we hit Publish.

As some of you already know, we have been moving through a difficult time over the past few months. We live a complicated life where a lot of our personal experiences are public, and we feel very thankful for that in many ways because of how it connects us to all of you. We have spent the past nine years in each other’s lives, and the past five years married. We have been through so much together, including creating a podcast which has grown a community that astounds us every day.

Over the past several months we have uncovered a difficult truth which we know will be surprising to many of you, as it was surprising to both of us. We’ve come to realize that we will be better—both to ourselves and to each other— within the context of a friendship, rather than a marriage.

One of our top priorities as we move through our separation is continuing to cultivate the beautiful community that has been created by Buffering the Vampire Slayer. While we know that there have been and will be bumps along the way, we have every intention of continuing to produce Buffering together. We have been privately moving through this for several months, and your collective love has been much of what has supported us. There will undoubtedly be some temporary structural changes as we work to heal the parts that hurt the most, but we are still here, and we are still with you all.

We also know that queer love is a very powerful thing to witness. With that in mind, we want you all to under- stand that our love was and is still powerful, that we still care very deeply for one another, and that our split will not change that fundamental truth.

We know that you will respect our privacy during this difficult time, and appreciate you all the more for it.

All our love,
Kristin & Jenny

We turned the comments off. We turned our phones off. We, incredibly, decided that we would go out and get our nails done. We left the nail salon and went out to dinner together at one of our favorite local spots. Absolutely nothing made sense.

We received an outpouring of emails—folks were kind, they were gentle, and they let us have more space than we’d dared to hope for, even from these, the most compassionately wonderful listeners a podcast could ever dream of having.

Cruelly, the last episode Jenny and I were set to record together before we moved out of our home was “Wild at Heart,” in which Willow and Oz break up. Oz, who has been in a relationship with Willow for the past two seasons, finds connection with another—a fellow werewolf named Veruca. In the conflict that results after this revelation, Oz realizes that he needs to figure some things out about himself, and he needs to do that alone. He packs and leaves town at the end of the episode, telling Willow she is the only person he ever loved.

Now, we are incredible compartmentalizers . . . but this was too much life imitating art, even for us.

So I picked up the phone. And Joanna Robinson—friend, podcaster, savior—answered.

I asked if she’d sub in for Jenny as my cohost on this heart-breaking episode.¹

An emphatic yes.

A podcast-saving yes

.

After I’d hung up with Joanna, I couldn’t stop thinking about Willow. Looking out the window, through the dark, to the tree that bordered the driveway of a house that no longer felt like home, my brain began to whirl. What if this episode’s song was from Willow’s perspective? What if I wrote down what I was feeling as my world came apart, and we put those words into Willow’s voice as she watched Oz drive his van out of Sunnydale?

I picked up my phone again, opened a blank email, and began to write. The words came out in a rush. We’d decided before the start of the season that Jenny should take over songwriting entirely—affording us a small measure of space from one another—but I couldn’t help myself. This was Willow’s song, but it was also mine. I sent the email to Jenny, asking her if she could use some of my words for Willow’s lyrics, before I fell asleep.

Much of what I’d written made its way into the final lyrics of the song, and Jenny wrote a melody that was as beautiful as it was gutting. I am not a musician, and while I love unlocking lyrics with Jenny, she is the only one of us who can manifest a song. I have always envied those who can take their hurt and shape it into music, and hearing my words inside the melody she’d crafted felt closer than I’d ever imagined I would get to having that experience myself. Our good friend Bess Rogers entered the Buffering universe as the voice of Willow.

The final version of the song begins:

How can you leave me?
How can you go?
What were we, even?
I used to know

¹  Months before, I’d prepared Joanna for this moment, taking her out for dinner in New York to one of my favorite spots in the city. Tucked in an actual alley off Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, Freemans Alley has some magical, time-portal aesthetic going on—flickering candles, worn wooden tables, a quiet warmth. Joanna often describes that dinner as “the night one of my parents told me that they were divorcing,” a nod to the shared nature of our friendship with Joanna and the way I opened the conversation once we’d been seated: “There is something I have to tell you.”

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