Hello and welcome to the long form podcast. I'm Eric co-host Evan Ratliffe. I'm here with Max Linsky. My other co-host Aaron is off today.

Hello, sir. How are you? I'm glad that Aaron is getting a well-deserved break. Who did you have on the program this week?

A special guest I would say on the show this week is Jess Zimmerman. Jess is the editor-in-chief of the online literary outlet and publisher electric lit.

She is also a prolific and brilliant essayist with a new collection out called Women and Other Monsters. She writes about feminism. She writes about literature and culture.

She writes about things that happen online. And she writes about reimagining ancient Greek monsters. And we talked about all of that.

Evan, you're burying the leaves. She is also, Max, you may not know this, but she is also my sister-in-law.

I think it's a brave thing that you've done having so many members of your family on this podcast. I could tell you that if I had members in my family who wanted to come on this podcast, I would not have them on the show.

But you're a bigger person than I am. You're a better person than I am. And I'm so glad that you had your sister-in-law to talk about these very sensitive and personal things that she writes about so very well.

Well, dedicated listeners to the show will know that some years after the show started, I married into a family of successful writers, all of whom would be on the show in some sort of alternate universe anyway.

So I don't let these familiar connections stand in the way of having them on the show. And I should say one disclaimer for this episode, which is I think partly because Jess and I do know each other so well, and I know her works so well, we may have skimmed over some of the details of some of the essays that we talk about.

So if you're not familiar with Jess's work, you should jump in the show notes. You should read something like hunger makes me or a mid-life crisis by any other name. Those are both Haslet essays or just buy the book. Why not just buy the book and familiarize yourself a little bit and that might help with the conversation.

If you want to skip some of the details and just get right to the heart of the gory difficult family dynamics, you should do some of the email newsletter.

Because you can do it by yourself and you can reach so many people and MailChimp is the absolute best way to send an email newsletter thanks to them for their support and here is Evan with Jess Zimmerman.

Jess, welcome to the long form podcast. Thank you for having me.

You are a unique guest for the podcast in that you're probably the first one that the previous day I was standing with you on a playground watching my children run around too cold today to stand around in the playground.

But we'll just put that up front that we are in fact related by marriage.

I did a terrible job of looking after your children by the way, Zaley absolutely bamboozled me into letting her climb on way more fences than I was.

And then I told her we were that if she didn't hurry up, we were going to take her to a mush restaurant where all of the food was mush.

And she ended up deciding that as long as she could get French fry mush, that was actually fine. So she's much smarter than I am.

Well, this is what I answer for exactly to provide this kind of guidance.

But I also feel like if he's a viewer writing, although I am related to you, I'm not like a character in your writing like I don't appear in your writing so far.

But I will say that being close to you kind of enhances the curiosity that I would naturally have about how a lot of this works particularly when it comes to essay writing personal essay writing and how you go about it.

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