883: Call Your Parents
This American Life
This American Life
4.5 • 91.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the early days of the radio show, Ira did a series of interviews with his parents that completely changed his relationship with them. This week, he returns to those interviews.
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- Prologue: Ira talks about why four conversations reveal how his relationship with his parents changed. (4 minutes)
- Act One: Ira’s mom, Shirley, is invited to lead a discussion about how to get along with your adult children. Her adult children question her expertise. (9 minutes)
- Act Two: Ira asks his parents for advice on how he should build the radio show. His parents don’t hold back. (9 minutes)
- Act Three: Ira talks with his dad, Barry, about Barry’s own brief and doomed career in radio. (21 minutes)
- Act Four: An interview with Ira’s mom that, to this day, makes Ira’s skin crawl. (13 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | WBC Chicago, This American Life, I'm out of glass. |
| 0:05.1 | So when I was 36 years old, the year started this American life. |
| 0:09.0 | My relationship with my parents was not the greatest. |
| 0:12.4 | I've been working in NPR since I was 19, and they were not into it at all. |
| 0:18.2 | Like, they were not into public radio. |
| 0:20.0 | They were not into me working in public radio. |
| 0:22.1 | They saw public radio is this, like, sad little backwater when they would listen to all things |
| 0:26.7 | considered morning edition, which were shows I was working at. I remember they would complain, |
| 0:31.1 | like, why are the stories so long? They especially did not like that I wasn't making much money. |
| 0:37.2 | I did not make much money. |
| 0:39.8 | They were both people raised in families where there was never any money and they really |
| 0:43.8 | organized their lives to get themselves firmly into the middle class and they really did not |
| 0:50.7 | understand why I didn't want to make money. And then also there have been a period in my early 20s when I was kind of judgey about certain choices that they were making, and I hurt their feelings. And by my 30s, I tried to make amends and fix that, but it still wasn't quite right between this. And really, I felt pretty distant from them. They did not hide the fact that they disapproved to pretty much all my life choices, |
| 1:12.9 | and I didn't feel a lot of patience for that disapproval, |
| 1:15.6 | and I didn't have, like, a combative relationship with them, |
| 1:19.8 | but it was just distant. |
| 1:21.8 | I would go a month or two all the time without talking to them. |
| 1:25.7 | And, you know, they were busy people, but I am sure this hurt |
| 1:29.4 | their feelings. We talked about it later in our lives. And then I started the radio show. |
| 1:37.6 | I have to say the single most surprising thing that happened in my life because of the radio show |
| 1:41.3 | is that it fundamentally changed things between me and my parents. |
| 1:48.7 | It healed things in a way I had not suspected could ever happen. |
... |
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