Episode 548: Susan Burton

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Susan Burton is an editor at This American Life, the author of the memoir Empty, and the host of the podcast The Retrievals. “I know I have much more anger than I reveal, and I don’t think that’s uncommon. Especially for women. There’s been a lot of attention to that in recent years—the anger of women, how it’s expressed and not expressed. But I think that among the things I’ve stifled for years are just my true feelings, and I’ve always wanted to be close to people and to be intimate with people, and have often felt that I have trouble making myself known or being known or being understood. And so...it felt good to be known.” Show notes: @burtonsusan susanburton.net Burton on Longform Burton’s This American Life archive 01:00 “In The Event of an Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position” (Ira Glass • This American Life • Jan 2001) 05:00 Empty (Random House • 2020) 06:00 “Secrets” (This American Life • Feb 2021) 39:00 “Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up” (New York Times • Oct 2015) 42:00 “From 'Empty' To Satisfied: Author Traces A Hunger That Food Can't Fix” (Terry Gross • NPR • June 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:19.8	You can sign up for your trial today at num.com, that's n-o-o-m, dot com, to sign up for
0:25.6	your trial today.
0:30.0	Hello, welcome to the Longform Podcast.
0:40.1	I'm Maxence Gimm, here with my co-hosts, Aaron Lammer, Evan Ratliff, gentleman, hello.
0:44.9	Hello, guys.
0:45.9	Hey, Max, I find myself in the position that Aaron sometimes in.
0:50.4	I genuinely don't know who the guest is this week.
0:53.0	Well, you will be pleased to know that my guest this week is Susan Burton.
0:57.2	All right.
0:58.2	This is a longtime editor at This American Life.
1:01.2	She is responsible for many of your favorite This American Life stories.
1:06.6	One of them is an all-time favorite of mine, unaccompanied minors, which actually got turned
1:11.5	in to a movie.
1:13.2	Susan's also a writer, a couple years ago, she wrote a memoir called Empty that is about
1:18.8	her decades long suffering from an eating disorder, a needing disorder that she kept secret
1:26.2	from virtually everyone in her life until the book was published.
1:31.8	And we talked about the process of revealing that secret so publicly.
	...

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