How to navigate complicated family dynamics (w/ Emerson Whitney)
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What is the purpose of the episode and who is the guest?
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and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that makes this show. Thanks for listening and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. 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. And I'm so glad that we are going to get a Chance to hear from Emerson today on the episode. To get us started, here is Emerson reading a passage from O Mother. And um the book is all written in second person, so it's all directed towards his mother. Here's Emerson reading that passage now.
Since you're dying, I am completely changed. I used to want success or something, but now all I want is calm, a pervading calm. Roland Barthes writes about this in his morning diary, a book of notes compiled after the death of his mom. He writes about how he notices a totally different feeling after she's died. He no longer cares about posterity and writes of a complete acceptance of vanishing utterly, no desire for a monument. He goes on to write that he can no longer bear traveling. Why is it that I keep trying like a lost child to get back home, though Mama is no longer there? I relate to this so much. Before this, I was working toward being interesting and cool. At least in my mind, I was. I thought so much more about what people thought of me.
The approval I was seeking in others was maybe your approval, which I guess is a standard thing. You'd warn me forever about. Not staying in the house like Grammy, the value of trying to have friends and being out. I'd been letting go of this performance for a while in little ways, leaving the city, being more honest with myself about what this body needs, but your death gave it that final push out the door. Everything was leading to this. I've put up a cattle gate a few yards from my house, and I want to stay inside it with the dogs and your ashes.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the purpose of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–10:34
2
How does Emerson Whitney introduce his book “O Mother” with a reading?
10:34–24:24
3
What are the central themes of “O Mother” – family, grief, and suicide?
24:24–38:52
4
How does the conversation explore neurodivergence, ADHD, and autism in the family?
38:52–52:53
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from How to Be a Better Human
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