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 “Losing Streak,” a New Yorker piece that was anthologized in The Best American Essays about the paradox of loss—from keys, to memories, to dads; and the joy of finding something—from language, to love. Between love and loss, we find that the "and" of life matters too. Kathryn tells us about her larger-than-life father Isaac, an attorney and Renaissance man who came to the US as a child and Jewish refugee, spoke at least 5 languages fluently, taught, philosophized, mentored, and generally spread the love to his family and all who knew him, and died in 2016. In a wide-ranging conversation, Kathryn talks about the boredom of grief and the beauty of sorrow, her future wife's first meeting with her dad so soon after their own accidental love story, and what surprises her about the intersection of the scientific and the spiritual.

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 of his father and late maternal grandmother. Matt and Victoria touch on the survival of consciousness after death, what the other side might be like, and, in particular, what insights his father - who died suddenly in 1982, at 35, while running in a marathon - has to impart to his eldest son.  Then, in the second half of the episode, following the session, Erin and Matt talk with Victoria, who is also the co-host of the Psychic Eye Mysteries True Crime Podcast and New York Times Bestselling author of the Psychic Eye Mysteries novel series, about what it’s like to be a psychic who can commune with the dead, how anyone can learn to connect with deceased relatives, and how being a medium impacts her understanding of life and death.

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 accusations of sexual assault and battery, abuse, and violent behavior. Neither has been charged with crimes (this year), though a civil suit bought by Shia's ex-girlfriend, musician FKA Twigs, is upcoming. LaBeouf recently discussed the allegations at length, and much more, on an episode of actor Jon Bernthal's Real Ones podcast. Meanwhile, a new documentary series on Discovery+ called House of Hammer exposes the dark and disturbing side of Armie's family going back four generations. Both Shia and Armie are currently attempting to rehabilitate their lives and careers, which include well-placed comeback ascension narratives since their alleged crimes were revealed just 1.5 years ago. Both men are fathers themselves at age 36. Shia grew up on food stamps; Armie comes from incredible wealth. Erin and Elizabeth look at how the nature vs, nurture debate plays out when it comes to grown men who abused their power and followed similar paths of chaos as the fathers they hold in conflicting esteem. Why is it different for Hollywood men behaving badly in public than it is for women, whose careers tend to fall apart over their addictions, even as they fall victim to the crimes perpetrated by men who so often get pass after pass?  Why do we as a society have a tendency to race to forgive men/fathers their trespasses, even as they continue to trespass against us?

Note: This episode is long. And upsetting. Trigger warnings for discussion and descriptions of sexual assault are included throughout to allow listeners to skip ahead. Additional time codes are below:

PART 1 / Shia LaBeouf 

PART 2 / Armie Hammmer 

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, William and Harry, as King Charles III. Erin unpacks the British cultural obsession with the body language cues of the senior royals as they try to keep their emotions inside like so many tampons, and Elizabeth presents new and myriad ways in which the Musk Men still stink. She also takes a sobering look at Jonathan’s Depp-ression, Alec Baldwin’s Instagram Live with Woody Allen that failed worse than Hilaria’s birth control, and the whole gang discusses Armie Hammer’s sojourn into the Caymen Islands hospitality industry and Robert Downey Jr.-guided recovery, as well as new dad Shia LaBoeuf’s too-soon appearance on Jon Bernthal’s podcast “Real Ones.” 

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-shirt who saved lives like it was no big deal and preferred to give his daughter the spotlight (unless he was pushing his toy poodle, Rudy, in a stroller at the mall with the love of his life, Eileen, Brandi’s late mom). Brandi opens up about the day her parents told her she was adopted, what she found out about her biological father when she went looking, and reflects on the quiet heroism of everyday superdads.

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 as a man of God to get what he wanted. Eventually, her hypervigilance, growing disappointment, and anger toward him led to a memorable escape with a violent if poetic confrontation. Listen as the daughter of a psychopath grapples with her own belief in a God whose name will always default to Our Father, and learns to find faith in herself.

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 herself process the grief, writing a one-woman stage show called No Bad Days—now its own hour-long comedy special streaming on Peacock—about watching him slip away and how deeply his death changed the course of her life and who she would become. Listen as Tell Me About Your Father co-host Elizabeth talks to Alyssa about No Bad Days, the uniquely terrifying destabilization that comes with losing a parent in your twenties (a time when you’re technically an adult, but come on), waiting for the “movie goodbye” from him that never came, and how she tries to carry on her dad’s love of life in everything she does.

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 great uncle, the iconic Broadway composer John Kander. He also talks about who, in politics, is probably most desperate for their father's approval, and how President Obama helped him name his son, True.

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 the husband of the writer Emily Gould. Listen as he tells us about being raised by a Russian father who isn’t a hugger, learning to reckon with being a dad who sometimes yells, and defining what it means to be a second-generation “Bear Dad.” 

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 children, in which he writes candidly about fatherhood and all of its moods - elation, fear, hope, excitement, ambivalence, guilt, and grief; all the terror and all the love. Brad shares how Buddhism and a spiritual practice which includes a midlife psilocybin mushroom trip with a playlist curated by Johns Hopkins, influence his approach to parenthood. It's a moving conversation that reflects the specific challenges of raising a child with disabilities, negotiating middle age, and defining what it means to be a good man, a good parent, and a good writer (we think the answer for all is telling the truth). Be Brief and Tell Them Everything is the book title, Otherppl is the podcast, and Brad Listi is the man.