The Waves: Fleishman Is In Trouble

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3.8 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate Money host Emily Peck is joined by journalist and author Taffy Brodesser-Akner to talk about Taffy’s new show, Fleishman is in Trouble, based on her bestselling novel. They dig into why men’s magazines are more freeing to write for, how ambition can mess up a marriage, and how midlife crises and divorce are different experiences for women.

In Slate Plus, Emily and Taffy talk about Toby’s eating disorder, how empathy can make people mad, and more.

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Wave, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and life after 40.
0:18.6	Every episode, you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off
0:23.0	our minds.
0:23.6	And today you've got me, Emily Peck, a business reporter at Axios, and co-host of Slate Money,
0:28.4	and I'm joined by the one, the only to Abby Brodus or Ackner, a writer for New York Times
0:33.7	magazine known for celebrity profiles of everyone from Gwyneth, Paltrow to Tom Hanks to Bradley Cooper, and the author of the 2019 bestselling novel, Fleishman is in trouble, which just debuted as a TV series on FX. You can watch it on Hulu. Taffy, I'm so happy to talk to you today on the
0:55.8	Waves. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. So I had a whole long thing written out
1:00.8	describing the show and why I want to talk about it. But then I was like, let me just ask Taffy to do
1:06.4	that. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So maybe you could just sort of like give us the premise for the show and then why you think it's a good thing to talk about it on a podcast about feminism.
1:18.5	Okay. Lachman is in Trouble is a TV show from a book about a man who is luxuriating in his first post-divorce summer of app-assisted sexual freedom when his ex-wife drops the kids off a day ahead of his custodial weekend and then doesn't pick them up.
1:41.8	He looks for her, finds out where she is, makes peace with the fact that she doesn't seem to be coming home,
1:48.5	and tries to figure out how he could have done things differently,
1:54.9	how his marriage could have gone differently, or any permeation of the above.
2:00.6	All right. And, I mean, for my point of
2:03.6	view, it's about divorce. It's about like life doesn't end after 40 kind of a thing. It's about
2:11.5	midlife crisis. It's like about, it's like, yeah, like midlife crises and middle age and lifelong friendship
2:19.5	and nostalgia. Like, you hear about midlife crises a lot. I know from being on a lot of podcasts,
2:26.2	that's how you say it. Thank you. You, you hear about midlife crises a lot, but you don't really,
2:31.7	I did not feel that I had ever read much about
2:38.4	what are the ingredients of the crisis, right? Like what exactly happens? I was always told that
2:46.4	it was about a man who feels the hot breath of relevance on his neck and gets a sports car and marries a cocktail waitress.
2:58.9	Like that was the story we were given when we were in the 80s and 90s and you got a Porsche and you start wearing aviator sunglasses.
	...

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