84. Jennifer Senior Turns Pain Into Beauty

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Our guest today is the remarkable Jennifer Senior, who won the 2022 Pulitzer for Feature Writing for her Atlantic essay “What Bobby McIlvane Left Behind,” written on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. She’s been a book critic and columnist for the NYT, a staff writer for New York magazine, and her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. She talks with Sarah and Nancy about her past work and her moving recent Atlantic essay about an aunt who was institutionalized, “The Ones We Sent Away.”

* What does a Pulitzer look like, anyway?

* When NYT wanted Jennifer to be “the Terry Gross of the op-ed section”

* The importance of writing without judging your subjects

* The “yearning and searching” part of grief

* “We are always inventing and reinventing the dead”

* The aunt Jennifer didn’t know she had

* When children were sent away “for their own good”

* The hell hole that was Willowbrook

* Arthur Miller and psychologist Erik Erikson both had children in institutions?

* The sinister tale of Rosemary Kennedy

* How much power do we actually have over our children’s development?

“You guys have the best podcast name,” Jen said just after taping. And the best guests! Become a paid subscriber and miss not a one