The Legacy Years with Esme Benjamin

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

Connect with Esme on ⁠Instagram⁠ or ⁠LinkedIn⁠. And for more conversations like these, subscribe to ⁠The Legacy Years newsletter⁠.

The Legacy Years podcast was edited by audio producer Seren Hughes. You can find more of her work ⁠here⁠.