Tell Me About Your Father

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...

We’re using this sleepy week between Christmas and New Year’s to honor and shun a cavalcade of celebrity fathers and men,  from dicks to dictators and zeroes to heroes. Listen as the glamor unfolds with appearances by Meghan Markle, King Charles III, and Don Draper, as we recognize and alienate Daddy Awards veteran offenders including Alec Baldwin, Woody Allen, Ted Cruz, and the Supreme Court, as well as new low achievers, inc...

AJ Daulerio, writer, and creator of the excellent recovery newsletter The Small Bow, returns to Tell Me About Your Father for a second time to discuss our recent episode on Shia LaBeouf. That episode, which also focused on Shia's fellow recently canceled peer Armie Hammer, examined Hollywood's need to quickly forgive famous men who have done bad things. (Shia was sued by ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs in 2020 for sexual battery, assault a...

Effervescent, thoughtful king and GayVN award-nominated porn star Cody Seiya joins us on the latest edition of our current events talk show, DADDY ISSUES. In the first half of the episode, Cody describes how art and anime offered solace from his difficult relationship with his late father and his upbringing as a Chinese American Jew in the Reagan-esque hell of Orange Country, California. He also discusses his plans to become a fath...

In this episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Kathryn Schulz, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the new bestselling memoir Lost & Found - in paperback 11/22 - which has been longlisted for The National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and has been called a best book of the year by NPR and the New York Times. Lost & Found grew out of “Losing Streak,” a New Yorker piece t...

On today’s special Halloween episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt sits down for a real psychic reading with medium Victoria Laurie who reaches into the primordial ether to get in touch with his deceased father, Ross. Featuring unedited excerpts from the session, the episode is a moving, funny, and unexpectedly pragmatic conversation between Victoria, Matt, and what purport to be the spirits of his father and late mater...

On this special double episode of Tell Me About Your Father, hosts Erin and Elizabeth take a graphic look at familial curses, generational trauma and the rules of inheritance as they relate to addiction, abuse, and American men in power. We're looking at two actors in the news right now—satiric “actual cannibal,” Shia LaBeouf, and actual alleged cannibal, Armie Hammer—both facing multiple credible accusations of sexual assault and ...

In a gold-plated return to the airwaves, our current events show “Daddy Issues” is back from its summer hiatus with a special super-sized catch-up edition of all the celebrity dadly dysfunction we must discuss as we enter into pumpkin season. Matt explains the British monarchy in the wake of mummy HM Queen Elizabeth’s death, and the saga of Britain’s new divorced dad, now known to his sons, William and Harry, as King Charles III. E...

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, writer Brandi Larsen tells Erin about her late father Eric Kleinert, an appliance repairman and volunteer firefighter whose unsolicited life lessons transcended the textbook they published together in the early 90s when she was just 15 (turning them both into authors, and not for the last time). Eric was a walking, talking #1 Girl Dad and Wife Guy t-shirt who saved lives like it was no ...

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Jenna Perry tells Erin and Matt the story of how she spent her entire childhood unwittingly on the run as her con-man father moved his fundamentalist family from state to state (and church to church). But long before her father’s lies had expanded to the point of fracture, even as a small child, Jenna had him pegged as an evil man who only masqueraded as a man of God to get what he want...

When the comedian and actress Alyssa Limperis was 25 years old in 2015, her dad was diagnosed with a stage four glioblastoma tumor in his brain. It’s an aggressive form of cancer that is almost always lethal and her father, Jim, a vivacious sheet metal salesman who was athletic, strong, and almost supernaturally optimistic, would be dead in a year. When he died, she immediately got to work to help herself process the grief, writing...