I have a really exciting guest for us today. Andrew Solomon is here. And this is profoundly

exciting for me because I don't think I've quoted someone so often in a long time, so much so

that someone of my team said, you quote Andrew Solomon a lot. We should probably have him on the

pod to talk about what you quote so often. So this is going to be a really

important conversation about what it's like to parent, what it's like to have kids who are

different from our unconscious, often fantasies of who our kids will be and how we tolerate raising kids who might have different

values, might have different interests, might have even different identities than what we imagined.

We'll be back right after this.

Andrew, I am so excited to have you here because now in your presence I can read aloud

something. I have read to countless parents starting way before I had an Instagram.

This is something I would give so many parents my private practice, and it's something I refer to often.

And then I was just thinking, wait, I should have the man, the myth, the legend here.

And so I'm just going to read some of this, and then we'll jump in.

There is no such thing as reproduction.

When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity with its implication that two people are but berating themselves together is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads. In the subconscious fantasies

that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever,

not someone with a personality of his own. Oh.

So, so good.

So I'm just going to pass it to you.

I'm curious, tell me a little bit.

Like when you wrote that, when you were thinking about this, in some ways it's the encapsulation of so much that's in this book, but in some ways it's the encapsulation

of what makes parenting

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