Tell Me About Your Father

Gretchen Cherington, author of the 2020 memoir "Poetic License," discusses her complicated relationship with her late father, Richard Eberhart, a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate. Growing up surrounded by literary titans, Gretchen idolized her father but experienced a disturbing shift in their dynamic during her teenage years. She eventually revealed the truth ab...

In part 2, Erin and Elizabeth, look at the Roy family’s connections to the Murdochs and Kennedys, before diving deeper into the show's final season. We look more at Siobhan, and Tom as her masochistic dog to kick, the legacy of NRPIs in a family where love goes to die, and the ceaseless game of “stop hitting yourself” that is getting a narcissist parent to grant you the memory of “the slant of...

In part one of our two-part exegesis on Succession, Erin and Elizabeth parse the incredible storytelling at play on this show, including the emotional and psychological underpinnings of the motivations and machinations of each slime puppy in the Roy pack, and the daddy issues at the root of this razor-sharp comedic satire about an American family by a sensitive British creator, Jesse Armstrong. Ge...

Actor, director, and bestselling author Andrew McCarthy talks to Erin about Walking with Sam , his new memoir about making the 500-mile-long trek across Spain on the Camino de Santiago with his 19-year-old son. This episode is excerpted from their live conversation at the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Cleveland on May 15th. Andrew opens up about reconnecting with his father after a 30-year-est...

A day after Britain crowned its third Charles as King in 1200 years, Matt and Erin spoke with author Komail Aijazuddin about what it was like growing up gay in Lahore, Pakistan with a father who was the honorary consul to the UK, what it was like being taught how to be a British gentleman at a British-style school in Pakistan, and how he once curtsied for the Queen. Komail talks about how the brut...

Rockstar Melissa Auf der Maur (Hole, The Smashing Pumpkins) joins Erin and Elizabeth to talk about her professionally provocative father, Nick, a legendary journalist, leftist politician and “unofficial mayor” of Montreal for three decades, where he pinched butts and influenced culture until his death at age 54. Twenty-five years later, Melissa regales us with stories about her unconventional comi...

Noted radio DJ Nic Harcourt joins Elizabeth to talk about his difficult relationship with his late TV news anchor father, his own struggles with fatherhood, and putting in the work to rebuild his relationships with his kids. Listen as Nic talks about “blowing up” his life and marriage and the subsequent work he has done to be closer to his children, the acceptance and empathy he now has for his fa...

What do you say when someone close to you has lost everything? Colin Campbell, author of FINDING THE WORDS: Working Through Profound Loss With Hope And Purpose talks with Erin about losing his two teenage children, Ruby and Hart, who were killed by a drunk driver in a car crash in 2019, leaving him and his wife Gail grappling with their own identities as parents. Colin shares how we can show up fo...

This week, we're highlighting Elizabeth's May 2021 interview with the writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, whose memoir "Surviving the White Gaze" details a childhood with white adoptive parents that left her feeling disconnected from her identity as a Black woman. This episode features a new intro, in which Elizabeth reads from some of Carroll's February 2023 essay on...

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair's chief critic and co-host of its awards podcast Little Gold Men,  joins us for our annual Oscars episode to discuss father themes in this year's nominated films. From the chest-beating patriarchs of Avatar 2 to the unhappily married backdrop dads of Everything Everywhere All At Once to the leering father-daughter Lifetime body horror of The Whale , we're cheering and j...

Presidential historian Alexis Coe, author of the New York Times bestseller “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington,” joins Elizabeth for a special Presidents’ Day edition of Tell Me About Your Father to discuss what we get right and wrong about the legacy of America’s first dad. Alexis is the first female historian to write a biography of Washington in over a century, and he...

How do you connect with a father who is so emotionally stoic that the only thing you can really talk to him about is the weather? On this episode, Matt talks with George Azar, author of the forthcoming My Gay Church Days: Memoir of a Closeted Evangelical Pastor Who Eventually Had Enough, about how diving head first into political and religious conservatism was one way to connect with his dad. He e...

Matt talks fathers with two queer Asian food professionals: cookbook author and graphic designer Frankie Gaw (author of "First Generation") and Yuhe Su, the talented chef behind the professional home kitchen Daddy's Got Chopsticks, about the ways in which they maintain a connection with their fathers through recipes from their respective childhoods. They talk about the importance of scallion panca...

We’re using this sleepy week between Christmas and New Year’s to honor and shun a cavalcade of celebrity fathers and men,  from dicks to dictators and zeroes to heroes. Listen as the glamor unfolds with appearances by Meghan Markle, King Charles III, and Don Draper, as we recognize and alienate Daddy Awards veteran offenders including Alec Baldwin, Woody Allen, Ted Cruz, and the Supreme Court, as...

AJ Daulerio, writer, and creator of the excellent recovery newsletter The Small Bow , returns to Tell Me About Your Father for a second time to discuss our recent episode on Shia LaBeouf . That episode, which also focused on Shia's fellow recently canceled peer Armie Hammer, examined Hollywood's need to quickly forgive famous men who have done bad things. (Shia was sued by ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs...

Effervescent, thoughtful king and GayVN award-nominated porn star Cody Seiya joins us on the latest edition of our current events talk show, DADDY ISSUES. In the first half of the episode, Cody describes how art and anime offered solace from his difficult relationship with his late father and his upbringing as a Chinese American Jew in the Reagan-esque hell of Orange Country, California. He also d...

In this episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Kathryn Schulz, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the new bestselling memoir  Lost & Found - in paperback 11/22 - which has been longlisted for The National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and has been called a best book of the year by NPR and the New York Times . Lost & Found grew out of “Losi...

On today’s special Halloween episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt sits down for a real psychic reading with medium Victoria Laurie who reaches into the primordial ether to get in touch with his deceased father, Ross. Featuring unedited excerpts from the session, the episode is a moving, funny, and unexpectedly pragmatic conversation between Victoria, Matt, and what purport to be the spirits...

On this special double episode of Tell Me About Your Father, hosts Erin and Elizabeth take a graphic look at familial curses, generational trauma and the rules of inheritance as they relate to addiction, abuse, and American men in power. We're looking at two actors in the news right now—satiric “actual cannibal,” Shia LaBeouf, and actual alleged cannibal, Armie Hammer—both facing multiple credible...

In a gold-plated return to the airwaves, our current events show “Daddy Issues” is back from its summer hiatus with a special super-sized catch-up edition of all the celebrity dadly dysfunction we must discuss as we enter into pumpkin season. Matt explains the British monarchy in the wake of mummy HM Queen Elizabeth’s death, and the saga of Britain’s new divorced dad, now known to his sons, Willia...

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, writer Brandi Larsen tells Erin about her late father Eric Kleinert, an appliance repairman and volunteer firefighter whose unsolicited life lessons transcended the textbook they published together in the early 90s when she was just 15 (turning them both into authors, and not for the last time). Eric was a walking, talking #1 Girl Dad and Wife Guy t-sh...

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Jenna Perry tells Erin and Matt the story of how she spent her entire childhood unwittingly on the run as her con-man father moved his fundamentalist family from state to state (and church to church). But long before her father’s lies had expanded to the point of fracture, even as a small child, Jenna had him pegged as an evil man who only masqueraded...

When the comedian and actress Alyssa Limperis was 25 years old in 2015, her dad was diagnosed with a stage four glioblastoma tumor in his brain. It’s an aggressive form of cancer that is almost always lethal and her father, Jim, a vivacious sheet metal salesman who was athletic, strong, and almost supernaturally optimistic, would be dead in a year. When he died, she immediately got to work to help...

To celebrate 4th of July, Matt speaks with Jason Kander, veteran, author, former Secretary of State for Missouri, and the first millennial elected to statewide office, about his new memoir, Invisible Storm: a Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, co-written with his wife, Diana. Jason discusses how he approaches fatherhood post-therapy, and what he learned from his own father, grandfather, and gr...

On this week’s episode of Tell Me About Your Father, we speak with author Keith Gessen about his new memoir “Raising Raffi,” a collection of essays on the first five years of fatherhood to his first-born son, Raffi, now 7. Gessen, the author of the novels “All The Sad Young Literary Men,” and “A Terrible Country,” is a founding editor of n+1 magazine and regular contributor to The New Yorker , and...