Our first guest on The Legacy Years podcast is the screenwriter and producer Kristin Newman (Only Murders In The Building, How I Met Your Mother, That 70s Show). Kristin is also the author of the popular travel memoir What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, which chronicles her adventures as a 30-something professional woman, traveling the world and enjoying vacation romances with hot foreign men while all her friends are getting married and having babies. Spoiler alert: Kristin did eventually settle down. After six failed rounds of IVF she and her husband went on to conceive their daughter using a donor egg – an experience she's generous enough to share in this episode.
We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including:
- Why, as a memoir writer, Kristin thinks it’s better to publish your life story just before you die
- The tactics Kristin used as a young woman to survive working in a Hollywood writers’ room in the pre-Me Too era
- The scientific reason travel is good for the brain and can boost creativity
- Kristin’s compulsion to live a dramatic, story-worthy life
- Motherhood as a hero’s journey
- Why Kristen wants to buy her daughter egg-freezing as a graduation gift
- Kristen’s experience of using an egg donor to conceive her daughter
- The truth about “miracle babies” born to older Hollywood actresses
- Accepting “the full catastrophe” of life, regardless of which path you pick
S1 E1 Related links and references:
Kristin’s book “What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding”
The Retrievals podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times
HBO Girls episode “One Man's Trash”
Jessie Klein’s book “I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife & Motherhood”
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Deborah Copaken Kogan’s book Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War
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The Legacy Years podcast was edited by audio producer Seren Hughes. You can find more of her work here.
