Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2023 memoir Sink and a new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Set over the course of a single, chaotic day in a North Philadelphia hospital, Thomas’ novel unfolds across a multiplicity of geographies and timelines, and weaves together a dense network of human attachments in all their pleasures and pains. The conversation ranges widely as Abby, Patrick, and Joseph discuss what “trauma” means in popular discourse, literary criticism, and real-world trauma centers; the pleasures of food, video games, and genre expectations; Freud, the family, and authentic human connections sustained online; liberal narratives of universality and the dignity of work; the rhetoric of “boundaries”; and living and working through familial relationships that defy neat categorization and challenge us at every turn.

Key texts cited in the episode:

Elaine Castillo, How To Read Now

Omari Akil, “Warning: Playing Pokémon GO is a Death Sentence if You are a Black Man, “ available at https://medium.com/dayone-a-new-perspective/warning-pokemon-go-is-a-death-sentence-if-you-are-a-black-man-acacb4bdae7f

Parul Sehgal, “The Tyranny of the Tale,” available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review

Sehgal, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot

 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-century America

 Mat Johnson, Pym

 Gayl Jones, Mosquito 

 Patrick Jagoda, “On Difficulty in Video Games,” available at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/699585

 
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