Hello and welcome to the long-for-podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe. My co-hosts are Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer. Hey Max Aaron. Hey. Hey you guys we got that good internet right now. We just did bad internet before. Let's talk real fast. Let's get through it. Let's do it. Let's do it. We got that good internet. I might never have internet ever again. If this is our last transmission, who's on the show this week?

On the show this week, my guest is Peggy Orinstein. A lot of people know Peggy Orinstein, but if you don't, she's a long-time magazine writer, multiple best-selling author. She's reported on pretty much everything onto the Sun, but particularly she's written best-selling books about teenagers, including one called Girls and Sex, one called Boys and Sex, one called Cinderella 8 My Daughter, but she's also written two memoirs, an earlier one called Waiting for Daisy, which was about her journey to becoming a mother.

And the other, which is just out literally, just came out called Unraveling, which is about how in the early days of the pandemic, she decided to go through the entire process from scratch of knitting a single sweater, and she started with shearing the sheep, and then she dies the wool, she spins the wool, she does the actual knitting, and in the process, a lot of things come up personal and global about how our clothes are made.

And it's a great book, and I wanted to talk to you about that, and we haven't had her on before, so all the other things we haven't talked about, really enjoyed it.

Sounds fascinating. I'm just going to blast straight to the ending here, because I don't know if Max and Evan can actually hear me.

I'm not going to lie, I couldn't hear anything that Evan said until he said, it's a really good book, and it was great to talk to her. And I believe that to be true.

I heard the sheep part also, we're not going to retap this. We don't have any more time. The show has brought you in partnership with Vox Media to help us make the show. Thanks to them.

And now here's Evan with Peggy Weinstein.

Peggy, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited.

Me too. I know your work. We have friends in common, and having read this most recent book that's coming out, or it will be out.

I think by the time this airs, when you sit down to write a book like this, do you think about the reader, like me, who will suddenly know a lot about you, not just facts about your life, but your thoughts and feelings about aging, about sex, about whatever the topic is.

Yes.

There's a couple of different layers to that. And of course, I mean, unraveling in many ways is a less less intense on some of those scores than waiting for Daisy, which really was about like my sex life and my relationship with my husband.

And I'm kind of more direct way, and I can talk about that in a minute, but there's sort of two levels. I mean, I think the first level is people you know.

And with this book, I write about my relationship with my mom, and I write some of a few things that were, you know, part of the more fraught or damaging parts of our relationship.

I love my mom, my mom, you know, I say, I say in the beginning of the book that when the pandemic hit that I talked about it all day, every day with my mom, which was kind of funny because she was dead and have been for several years at that point.

So my mom's in the book, I learned from my mom, like so many other people, other women I spoke with did.

But I also talk about things like the impact of my mom and my body image, for instance, and how she used to really push me to lose weight when I was a teenager.

And she would try on my jeans to show how they fit her, even though I was 13 and then they were too big on her, even though it's for, you know, and those things were really, you know, she didn't mean to cause harm, but they caused harm.

And when I write those things, it is on one hand a little easier because she is dead. And when I was writing waiting for Daisy, there's some parts about my mom that I read and I think I wasn't being honest there because I didn't want to hurt my mom.

And I feel like the parts about my mom and waiting for Daisy are the weakest parts of the book because of that.

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