Chris Duffy

speaker

7,610 appearances 65 recordings 9 series first heard Jul 2023 last heard 3d ago

Chris Duffy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 58 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.

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Now, on to the episode.

This is how to be a better human.

I'm your host, Chris Duffy.

Today's guest is Emerson Whitney, the author of the new book, O Mother.

And before we dive in, I want to just give you a quick heads up that today's episode is going to discuss suicide.

So if that is not a topic for you right now, totally understand.

We will see you back here next week.

Now, O Mother is a very personal book.

It is a book about Emerson's complicated relationship with his mother, about moving back home to an

Island in Maine to be closer to her, and how that decision does not go at all how Emerson had planned, ultimately ending in tragedy.

But as specific as Emerson's story is, the themes in this book are incredibly universal.

This is a book that asks questions like, what do we owe our family members?

What about if our relationships are really, really, really hard?

How do we handle the difficult things that we inherit from our families, both biologically and emotionally?

It also asks questions like what makes a life livable?

And can we accept it if someone decides that their life is not livable?

To me, these are the kinds of questions that get at the heart of what it means to be human.

These are questions that everyone ends up wrestling with at some point in their lives, but we often wrestle with them all on our own.

And maybe that's because we're ashamed or scared, or maybe we just think that you're not supposed to talk about these things publicly.

Well, today's guest, Emerson Whitney, talks about them publicly and writes about them and thinks about them really deeply.

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