Tell Me About Your Father

On this special Father's Day-themed episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Erin talks to her old friend and real-life dad of two, Brad Listi, the author and host of the much-loved literary podcast Otherppl with Brad Listi, where he has epic conversations with legendary writers. In his new autobiographical novel, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything , Brad has written a love letter of a book to his chi...

Joel Kim Booster, comedian, actor and writer of the just-released Pride and Prejudice -inspired gay romantic comedy Fire Island , joins Matt and Elizabeth this week for Daddy Issues ! Joel, who also stars in the film alongside Saturday Night Live ’s Bowen Yang, tells us about what Jane Austen and Regency-era England has in common with the impenetrable wealth and whiteness of Fire Island, portrayin...

This week, Matt is joined by writer Michele Dawson Haber, to discuss their shared experiences of losing their fathers as young children. Both Matt, who was three when his father died, and Michelle, who was three months old, have few or no memories of their dads but were left with audio recordings of their voices.  Last year, Michele wrote a Modern Love column in the New York Times about discoverin...

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father’ s pop culture and news review show Daddy Issues! , Erin and Elizabeth are joined by comedian Youngmi Mayer, host of must-listen podcasts "Feeling Asian" and "Hairy Butthole." We talk to Youngmi about comedy being the best way to talk about the worst things, her young adulthood in Korea and why she left to move to the US at age 20, as well as her white...

In this episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk to actor Ray Abruzzo, who played the deceptively wise mobster-dummy Little Carmine Lupertazzi on The Sopranos (see Tell Me About Your Father episodes 34-39 for our exegesis on the daddy issues inherent to that show). You may also know him from Night Court, LA Law, Dynasty, The Practice, Mad Men and Transparent . We came for Ray's insights on the family dyna...

Molly Shannon, beloved performer, Saturday Night Live alumna, and now New York Times bestselling author of the memoir  Hello Molly ! recently stopped by her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio on her book tour to speak with Erin in front of a sold-out auditorium. This special episode of Tell Me About Your Father is a live recording of their conversation from April 15th at the Cuyahoga County Public Librar...

Joining Erin and Matt on today’s episode of Tell Me About Your Father’s pop culture and current affairs show, Daddy Issues, is the charming, and thoughtful cultural critic, Naveen Kumar - who contributes regularly to the New York Times, Them, Variety , and Broadway News . And we do manage to cover it all: President Zelensky ’s heroism, Will Smith ’s tantrums, Sean Penn ’s irrelevance, Broadways (o...

For our latest episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk to the two-time-Emmy-nominated film director Erin Lee Carr , whose work features several acclaimed true crime titles for HBO, including Mommy Dead & Dearest, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal , I Love You Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter, and Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall. For Netflix, Carr directed...

Richard Lawson , Vanity Fair ’s chief critic and co-host of the podcast Little Gold Men , joins 'Daddy Issues' for a second year and counting to discuss fatherly presence in this year’s Oscars nominations and to make his winner predictions. Fathers were a source of tender support in several of this year’s nominated films’— as opposed to last year when they were tragically slipping away to Alzheime...

On our latest episode, Elizabeth talks with choreographer, writer and performance artist @jackferver about their work, which puts words and movement to the shattering of the self that comes with the near-constant existential and cultural threats the world poses to queer people and essentially anyone without power. Jack’s piercing dance-theater pieces have been called “so extreme that they sometime...

Welcome to this Valentine's Day edition of Tell Me About Your Father, where Erin and Elizabeth are applying the same razor-sharp critical analysis they've given to television shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos to an extraordinarily horny 30-year-old movie called Damage. It's the story of a family torn apart by a father's affair with his son's girlfriend and is based on the sensational 1991 novel...

Artist Salman Toor, 38, had his first solo museum show in late 2020 at the Whitney, an acclaimed exhibition of 15 paintings titled How Will I Know, which the New York Times called “a brilliant debut.” Since then, Toor, who has shown work at the Frick Collection, has rocketed to stardom in the art world with a stunning body of work in lush green evocative of 16th and 17th century-style old masters...

We’re back with the latest episode of our monthly Patreon bonus series, The Daily Monthly Dad , in which we parse through all of the dad-centric stories featured in the breathlessly inane and incomprehensible headlines of the Daily Mail . We’re making this edition free, and available on all platforms, and, boy, does it cover the gamut of the Mail ’s favorite topics: Royal scandal (particularly Pri...

This week’s ‘Daddy Issues’ guest marks two Tell Me About Your Father milestones: Our first non-human guest and our first guest over the age of 90. Claywoman , an ancient interstellar being from the Mirillion Galaxy, is, in fact, 500 million years old. Claywoman is the creation of actor and performance artist Michael Cavadias, whose credits include Girls , Difficult People , and Wonder Boys . Cavad...

On today's episode, Erin talks to sisters Denise and Andrea, whose dad Michael See blew up their lives when he suddenly disappeared from the family home in Singapore in 2003, having secretly fleeced millions over the years from their mother, grandfather, and other family members, and mysteriously fled to China, never to be seen again. But to say that Michael See was a con artist diminishes the wor...

It’s the end of the year and Tell Me About Your Father is honoring the best and worst of the patriarchy in 2021 with our 785th Annual Daddy Awards. For those of you who haven’t remembered to tune in the past 784th years, The Daddy Awards honors the heroes who have helped undo the doing of toxic masculinity by displaying big boss energy tempered by compassion, vulnerability, or intelligence, and th...

On this week’s episode, Elizabeth and Erin talk to the anonymous creator of the viral Instagram and Twitter accounts, Christian Nightmares. (We’ll call him “Christian.”) Christian is using the account, an archive of American evangelical messaging, videos, photos, and music going back decades, to examine pop culture dedicated to a vengeful Heavenly Father, one which loomed over his upbringing in an...

When journalist Maggie Serota isn’t asking Glenn Danzig the tough questions and making Hollywood flacks squirm, she’s sharing screenshots of text conversations with her father about his several dogs on her must-follow Twitter account. Maggie’s dad, as she tells Matt and Elizabeth in this episode of “Daddy Issues,” uses his flip phone to send her blurry images of his Rottweilers and to check in on...

Erin & Elizabeth solve the mystery of the final episode of the show, "Made in America," widely considered to be the greatest tv finale of all time. We talk to the critics and authors of The Sopranos Sessions, Matt Zoller Seitz (New York Magazine) and Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone), about the meaning of the ending, the evils of parallel parking, the importance of ambiguity in art, what makes David...

Erin and Elizabeth dissect the final stretch of episodes of the series (aka season 6b or season 7, depending on whether or not you’re an executive at HBO) and we explore the numbness inherent to Chrissy's failure to thrive, Vito's son's shit sandwich of an adolescence, AJ's nervous breakdown, Tony's inner and outer monster, the Soprano curse, and Dr. Jennifer Melfi's doorknob-comment moment for th...

In which Erin and Elizabeth recap season 6a (aka the first 12 episodes of “season 6”) wherein friction between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, and brothers from another mother all come to a head. First in the form of a near-death experience that bores him for Tony; a heroic effort at vengeance gone wrong for AJ; a futile attempt at sobriety in the midst of new fatherhood for Christopher; and...

On this episode, Erin and Elizabeth looking at The Sopranos’ acclaimed season 5, “Two Tonys,” and the show’s handling of race, sex, and the characters’ performance of gender. Once again, we’re joined by The Sopranos Sessions authors and TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz (New York Magazine) and Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone), and we’re also hearing from a new voice: Mel Magazine contributor Chingy Nea,...

Tell Me About Your Father’s Sopranos series continues with the second episode of our four-part deep dive into the heart of darkness of our favorite TV dad Tony Soprano, with our guests Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, authors of The Sopranos Sessions. We discuss Season 3 and 4’s’ portrayal of violence against women, the breakdown of Tony and Carmella’s marriage, Tony’s connection to his daugh...

Tell Me About Your Father is relocating to New Jersey for the next few episodes and immersing ourselves in the fathers, mothers, children, generational trauma and crystalline dysfunction of the Soprano family. We’ve also got two very special guests joining us across the entirety of these episodes: The Sopranos Sessions authors and critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, the foremost experts...

Alex Scordelis joins Elizabeth and Erin for "Daddy Issues" this week, and this early-fall episode is the equivalent of a therapeutic apple-picking trip. Scordelis, a writer for Billy Eichner’s deeply hilarious Billy on the Street, and Eichner and Julie Klausner’s Hulu triumph Difficult People, is also a rock journalist and regular contributor to the L.A. Review of Books. Listen as Scordelis tells...