Keith Gessen’s Battle Hymn of the Bear Dad

On this week’s episode of Tell Me About Your Father, we speak with author Keith Gessen about his new memoir “Raising Raffi,” a collection of essays on the first five years of fatherhood to his first-born son, Raffi, now 7. Gessen, the author of the novels “All The Sad Young Literary Men,” and “A Terrible Country,” is a founding editor of n+1 magazine and regular contributor to The New Yorker, and the husband of the writer Emily Gould. Listen as he tells us about being raised by a Russian father who isn’t a hugger, learning to reckon with being a dad who sometimes yells, and defining what it means to be a second-generation “Bear Dad.”  Get full access to Tell Me About Your Father at tellmeaboutyourfather.substack.com/subscribe