Episode 545: Jennifer Senior

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her article ”What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Her most recent article is ”The Ones We Sent Away.” “I'm at the point where I'm only thinking about the big questions and the difficulty of being a human as what matter most. That's what I want to keep focusing on. Our common frailties, our common bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right? … But we can bond over our kids with disabilities. About the fact that we grieve, that we love, that we lose people. That we have friends that we love, friends that we hate. We have friendships that we miss, we have friendships that we can't live without.” Show notes: jennifersenior.net Jennifer Senior on Longform Jennifer Senior on Longform Podcast 00:00 "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind" (Atlantic • Aug 2021) 01:00 On Grief (Atlantic Editions • 2023) 01:00 "The Ones We Sent Away" (Atlantic • Aug 2023) 02:00 All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (Ecco • 2014) 03:00 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Bessel Van Der Kolk • Penguin • 2015) 03:00 Senior's New York Magazine archive 04:00 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande • Picador • 2017) 05:00 Senior's New York Times archive 12:00 Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Annette Lareau • University of California Press • 2011) 17:00 Heavyweight (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet) 18:00 "#25 Becky and Jo" (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet • Oct 2019) 18:00 "#2 Gregor" (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet • Sep 2016) 28:00 "It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart" (Atlantic • Feb 2022) 42:00 Patient H.M. (Luke Dittrich • Random House • 2017) 47:00 "What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID" (Atlantic • Feb 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the long-for-podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe. Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer are the
0:15.6	other two hosts of the show. They're with me now. Hello. Hi. Welcome to the program. Who is on this
0:22.1	program as a guest this week? What is this show? Guys, I've done a few podcasts. Which one are we
0:29.3	doing right now? I kid Evan. What's going on this week? Aaron, this week on the long-for-podcast,
0:36.8	I talked to Jennifer Senior. She was on the show many years and hundreds of episodes ago,
0:42.7	and I've wanted to have her back for a while, particularly since she wrote this story for the
0:47.5	Atlantic in 2021 called What Bobby McElvain Left Behind, which is a story that won the Pulitzer
0:56.3	Prize National Magazine Award. It got turned into a standalone book called On Grief. So there
1:03.0	was that, and she has another big story out in the Atlantic, a very personal one about her aunt,
1:09.1	called The One's We Sent Away. The subtitle is, I thought my mother was an only child. I was wrong,
1:15.9	and that was a good excuse to get her back on to talk about both and everything in between,
1:21.6	and what goes into these stories, what she's tried to accomplish with them, and it was a great
1:26.4	conversation. We are brought to you in partnership with Vox Media. They help us make the show. Thanks
1:32.4	to everyone over at Vox. And now here's Evan with Jennifer Senior.
1:43.7	Jennifer, welcome back to the long-for-podcast. Evan, it's awesome to be here. It's been some years,
1:50.8	many things have happened in between. Trump, a pandemic. Yeah, our kids have gotten older,
1:59.1	lots of things. Yeah, I didn't actually, I didn't even have any kids. I listened back to the
2:03.6	original one, and one of the things I say is, this is the first parenting book that I've read.
2:08.8	I don't have any kids, but like I'm talking to other people who are parents about this book,
2:13.2	and now I have two kids. So I still treasure that book actually, even more so now that I have kids.
2:19.0	It's not your angel. Oh my god. Wow. So I'm delighted to hear that because there was always
2:25.1	that dreaded other response, which was, I read your book and decided, I'm never having kids.
	...

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