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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Double X book club for Thursday, October 7th.

This is Hannah Rosen, the co-editor of Double X.

I'm here with my fellow co-editor, Emily Bazelon, who's in D.C. with us.

Hi.

And Margaret Talbot of The New Yorker,'s here with us too. Hi there. Hello.

Today we are going to talk about Jonathan Franzen's freedom, which is, I would say, the closest we'd have to a literary event in a very long time. It's stirred up all sorts of controversy and, you know, praise and anti-praise and lots and lots of debates. And we won't talk entirely about the debates, although we'll get into them a little bit.

But let's just start by talking about the book itself.

The book itself opens with a couple Patty and Walter Bergland.

And it's essentially a story of their family and their intimate connections

and what happens to them over a number of years, told by herself in her own voice and then the voice of the narrator.

It opens with them having her moving into a neighborhood and gentrifying this neighborhood essentially.

And there's basically a portrait of a certain kind of mother in that opening chapter.

And I was very curious from the two of you whether you found

that portrait of her believable. She's essentially plays this kind of hapless neighborhood.

She's like the neighborhood connector kind of. Okay, can I read a passage? Yes, you can

read a passage. Because I think it will give a flavor. It's a long paragraph, but bear with me, because I think it's worth it. Okay. For all queries, Patty Bergland was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. Yes, that's a good one. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said she expected to be beheaded

someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were probably

dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her addiction to paint-strip

perfumes might be related to her never reading books anymore. She confided that she'd been

forbidden to fertilize Walter's flowers after what had happened last time.

...