Tell Me About Your Father

It's our annual Oscars episode with Tell Me About Your Father pal Richard Lawson, chief critic of Vanity Fair, discussing all the dad themes in this year's Academy Award-nominated films. We've got J. Robert Oppenheimer as the father of the atomic bomb in "Oppenheimer", a perma-wounded mad professor dad named "God" in "Poor Things," a philandering dead father whose shadow is cast across &quo...

Who was this year’s Best-Worst-Late Father-of-the-Year? Who was the best animal dad? Which saviors of culture are in line to clinch the Patrick Swayze Memorial Award for Excellence in the lifelong practice of Holistic Hotness? From Elon and King Charles to the best of this year’s celebrity memoir tell-alls, the celebrity dads of Tik Tok, and the finest incomprehensibly verbose headlines of the Daily Mail - we sum up the dad-moments...

Matt Phillp talks with culture writer Marcie Bianco, author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom about her childhood growing up working class in South New Jersey with a father who, as she puts it “erased himself” and how that foundation informs her perspective on society and politics today.  They talk about how her family dynamic shifted when she got a sports scholarship to Harvard, a moment that...

This is our third episode, since the launch of TMAYF, dedicated to the life story of Britney Spears. Erin and Elizabeth discuss her long-awaited memoir The Woman in Me, and look back at the cultural mood that led to the pop princess tragically being held prisoner by a legal conservatorship that gave her father Jamie the right to control her person and her fortune for 13 years after she had a nervous breakdown in 2008. We unearth a ...

In this episode, we are joined by Leta McCollough Seletzky, author of the recent book, “The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr." Seletzky's father, Marrell "Mac" McCullough, appears in the famous photo of Dr. King seconds after he was shot at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. In the photo, King lies in a pool of blood, surrounded by aides ...

For the season 4 finale and 2023 Pride episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt spoke with comedian, TV and film actor, and Emmy award-winning writer Bryan Safi. As the co-host of three weekly podcasts, "No Autographs Please," "Ask Ronna," and "Attitudes!" formerly known as "Throwing Shade," Bryan is as much a master of comedic improv as he is a shrewd cultural critic, and political comment...

Gretchen Cherington, author of the 2020 memoir "Poetic License," discusses her complicated relationship with her late father, Richard Eberhart, a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate. Growing up surrounded by literary titans, Gretchen idolized her father but experienced a disturbing shift in their dynamic during her teenage years. She eventually revealed the truth about her father's inappropriate ...

In part 2, Erin and Elizabeth, look at the Roy family’s connections to the Murdochs and Kennedys, before diving deeper into the show's final season. We look more at Siobhan, and Tom as her masochistic dog to kick, the legacy of NRPIs in a family where love goes to die, and the ceaseless game of “stop hitting yourself” that is getting a narcissist parent to grant you the memory of “the slant of the light.” We also hear from New ...

In part one of our two-part exegesis on Succession, Erin and Elizabeth parse the incredible storytelling at play on this show, including the emotional and psychological underpinnings of the motivations and machinations of each slime puppy in the Roy pack, and the daddy issues at the root of this razor-sharp comedic satire about an American family by a sensitive British creator, Jesse Armstrong.

Actor, director, and bestselling author Andrew McCarthy talks to Erin about Walking with Sam, his new memoir about making the 500-mile-long trek across Spain on the Camino de Santiago with his 19-year-old son. This episode is excerpted from their live conversation at the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Cleveland on May 15th. Andrew opens up about reconnecting with his father after a 30-year-estrangement, the ongoing art of talkin...

A day after Britain crowned its third Charles as King in 1200 years, Matt and Erin spoke with author Komail Aijazuddin about what it was like growing up gay in Lahore, Pakistan with a father who was the honorary consul to the UK, what it was like being taught how to be a British gentleman at a British-style school in Pakistan, and how he once curtsied for the Queen. Komail talks about how the brutal fallout of British imperialism s...

Rockstar Melissa Auf der Maur (Hole, The Smashing Pumpkins) joins Erin and Elizabeth to talk about her professionally provocative father, Nick, a legendary journalist, leftist politician and “unofficial mayor” of Montreal for three decades, where he pinched butts and influenced culture until his death at age 54. Twenty-five years later, Melissa regales us with stories about her unconventional coming of age, which saw her joining Ho...

Noted radio DJ Nic Harcourt joins Elizabeth to talk about his difficult relationship with his late TV news anchor father, his own struggles with fatherhood, and putting in the work to rebuild his relationships with his kids. Listen as Nic talks about “blowing up” his life and marriage and the subsequent work he has done to be closer to his children, the acceptance and empathy he now has for his father – who came with his own wounds...

What do you say when someone close to you has lost everything? Colin Campbell, author of FINDING THE WORDS: Working Through Profound Loss With Hope And Purpose talks with Erin about losing his two teenage children, Ruby and Hart, who were killed by a drunk driver in a car crash in 2019, leaving him and his wife Gail grappling with their own identities as parents. Colin shares how we can show up for each other in times of acute trag...

This week, we're highlighting Elizabeth's May 2021 interview with the writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, whose memoir "Surviving the White Gaze" details a childhood with white adoptive parents that left her feeling disconnected from her identity as a Black woman. This episode features a new intro, in which Elizabeth reads from some of Carroll's February 2023 essay on her life since the book came out. ...

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair's chief critic and co-host of its awards podcast Little Gold Men,  joins us for our annual Oscars episode to discuss father themes in this year's nominated films. From the chest-beating patriarchs of Avatar 2 to the unhappily married backdrop dads of Everything Everywhere All At Once to the leering father-daughter Lifetime body horror of The Whale, we're cheering and jeering Hollywood's best attempt...

Presidential historian Alexis Coe, author of the New York Times bestseller “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington,” joins Elizabeth for a special Presidents’ Day edition of Tell Me About Your Father to discuss what we get right and wrong about the legacy of America’s first dad. Alexis is the first female historian to write a biography of Washington in over a century, and her work dares to roll its eyes at th...

How do you connect with a father who is so emotionally stoic that the only thing you can really talk to him about is the weather? On this episode, Matt talks with George Azar, author of the forthcoming My Gay Church Days: Memoir of a Closeted Evangelical Pastor Who Eventually Had Enough, about how diving head first into political and religious conservatism was one way to connect with his dad. He even became a pastor in the process....

Matt talks fathers with two queer Asian food professionals: cookbook author and graphic designer Frankie Gaw (author of "First Generation") and Yuhe Su, the talented chef behind the professional home kitchen Daddy's Got Chopsticks, about the ways in which they maintain a connection with their fathers through recipes from their respective childhoods. They talk about the importance of scallion pancakes, Olive Garden,  pig’s bloo...