KYD Podcast: Coming of Age

It’s the 21st episode of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast – and while we’ve been fully formed for a while now, any excuse to speak to artists examining the highs and lows of coming of age is just fine in our books. So listen in to hear Megan Tan on recording her life for Radiotopia’s Millennial Podcast, Brodie Lancaster on writing No Way! Okay, Fine (Hachette Australia), and Emily Brewin on Hello, Goodbye (Allen & Unwin), our First Book Club pick for July.

Read Emily Brewin on the inspiration behind Hello, Goodbye here.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello, and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. 21 doesn’t come with anything practical in Australia – you can’t do anything then that you couldn’t do at 18. And while you might graduate from university, you might just as easily still be studying, or have been working for years. But we still have a big party; still see it as one step among many in our coming of age. So it seems fitting that we celebrate our 21st podcast by speaking to people whose work grapples with growing up, moments of change, and navigating your twenties. I’m done with my twenties – and you might feel they’re behind you as well. But coming of age is about making choices, and about living with the repercussions. We’ll be doing that our whole lives, and we’ll always be interested in how others choose to do the same.

First off we speak to Megan Tan, creator and host of Millennial – a podcast about coming of age.

All right, so I have to admit I’m a little embarrassed coming in here today, I’m just getting over a cold so my radio voice is radio-y than usual, and my headphones broke, so I was using my boyfriend’s gaming headphones, which look less profesh than I’d like. And then I thought someone who started off doing the podcast mainly in her closet would probably understand those issues. Is it weird to meet people who have listened to so much of your life up until this point?

Megan Tan: To be honest I totally forget that people have listened to my life up until this point. So I think maybe it’s more strange for other people than it is for me.

KYD: So Millennial, while it’s carefully crafted it does chronicle some of the messier elements of your twenties – so the indecision, the doubts, and these aren’t the sort of things that you tend to put in a resume, for example. When we’re increasingly expected to treat Facebook like LinkedIn, and Twitter as a professional platform, did you ever worry that what you’re putting out there might come back to bite you?

MT: No – I never thought about it like that. Millennial was supposed to be something that I used in order to practice making audio stories, and so it was just, it’s like a portfolio piece. There was this one time, though, where I was interviewing for a job and the people who I was going to be interviewing with had listened to the podcast, and they told me, and I was just like, ‘what episode are you on?!’, because I felt like, man, they they know more about my lif