Bedtime Stories for Tired Parents

"Children Are Bored on Sunday" didn't exactly sweep us off our feet. But the more we talked, the more we found ourselves grudgingly nodding along.  Stafford's protagonist is a woman adrift in New York, paralyzed by the particular shame of feeling intellectually and socially outclassed—and somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we both had to admit: we've been her. That specific cocktail of self-consciousness and fraudulence, the exhausting performance of belonging somewhere you're not sure you do. Stafford renders it so precisely it starts to feel a little exposing. We didn't fall in love, but we left with a lot more respect than we arrived with, and maybe a little more self-knowledge than we bargained for. Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link  

Luise is back for part two of Separate Beds. The Living is Easy is Dorothy West at her most vivid and alive, and a mother-daughter read was exactly the right way to come at it. We spent a good chunk of time reveling in how powerfully West conjures her world, Boston's Black middle class in the early twentieth century feels so fully realized you can practically smell the parlor. And then there's Cleo. An absolute force of chaos, and we loved every second of it. West gives us someone genuinely difficult to love and makes you love her anyway, which is its own kind of magic. We also got into something we've been circling for a while: what does it mean to actively make space for writers outside the traditional canon? West was writing at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and somehow still ends up on fewer syllabi than she deserves. We didn't have all the answers, but we agreed the conversation is worth having, loudly and often. Luise, you're basically a co-host at this point. Please come back.   Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Links from the Episode:  Dorothy West on Harvard's Black Women Oral History Project: link The Zora Canon: link

Sam tapped out this week—so Alan called in reinforcements: Sam's mom, Luise, who turned out to be exactly the reading companion this story deserved. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is Salinger at his most hypnotic and unsettling, and having a fresh voice in the mix made for one of our most incisive episodes yet. We went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Salinger himself—the recluse, the mythos, the deeply complicated man behind the prose—and inevitably ended up asking the question the story almost demands: can you separate the author from the narrator? We didn't exactly land on a tidy answer, but we had a great time not landing on one. The story itself is so deceptively gentle on the surface—Seymour on the beach, the little girl, the bananafish—and then it just pulls the rug out completely. We talked about the darker themes it raises with as much honesty as we could manage while still keeping things fun, because that's kind of what the story forces you to do: sit with something genuinely disturbing and somehow keep going. Luise was a wonderful guest, and we'll be hearing from her again soon—she and Sam are teaming up in our next episode to spotlight Dorothy West's The Living is Easy, published the same year as Bananafish. Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link  

This one got complicated fast. We were supposed to dive into J.D. Salinger this week, but we couldn't even get to the actual reading without talking about the man—specifically, the deeply unsettling pattern of him grooming teenage girls. So we went there: can you separate the art from the artist? Should you? And here's the thing—we didn't have all the answers, but we wanted to actually talk it through with each other instead of just landing on some neat position. Truth is usually messy. We got into whether engaging with art is a moral choice, what we owe ourselves as readers, how to sit with discomfort without needing to resolve it—and honestly, it mattered to us what each other thought about all of it. This is the kind of conversation where you learn something new about your partner, where their reasoning reveals something you hadn't considered, and that's part of why we wanted to have it out loud. It's uncomfortable territory, but that's kind of the point. Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Links from the Episode: CBS Sunday morning story: link Photographers: Carrie Mae Weems' Kitchen Table Series - link Gordon Parks - link Gregory Crewdson - link Bill Cunningham - link David LaChapelle - link Additional Links: Joyce Maynard on her relationship with Salinger: link

We're back with Mary McCarthy—our second woman writer, and honestly, where has she been all our lives? "The Weeds" is hands down our favorite story so far, and we couldn't stop quoting it to each other. McCarthy has this incredible gift for turns of phrase that are both elegant and devastating, the kind of sentences you want to read out loud just to feel them in your mouth. We got a bit sidetracked gushing about her smoking on the Dick Cavett show (iconic), but mostly we talked about how deceptively dark this story gets beneath its polished surface. The wit here is surgical—McCarthy slices into her characters with such precision that you're laughing even as you're watching something genuinely disturbing unfold. There's a bleakness lurking underneath all that brilliant style, and the story doesn't flinch from it.  Our main takeaway? We need to read more Mary McCarthy, immediately.  Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Links from the Episode:  Mary McCarthy on the Dick Cavett show: link Brené Brown on Empathy: link  

We're back from the holidays with Dawn Powell—finally, our first woman writer in the book! And honestly, it's criminal how overlooked she's been. While F. Scott Fitzgerald was busy romanticizing Jazz Age dreamers, Powell was serving up razor-sharp satire about New York society, equal parts humor and barely concealed fury. We dive into some of her most caustic quotes and wrestle with the big question: why didn't her brilliant, acidic wit earn her a spot in the canon when lesser male writers got immortalized? "Such a Pretty Day" peels back polite social surfaces to expose all the judgment and simmering frustration underneath. It's wickedly funny but also surprisingly tender, and brutally honest about human nature in a way that makes you squirm a little. We couldn't help but compare her approach to Fitzgerald's: where he gave us tragic glamour, she gave us people who saw through the performance and laughed bitterly at it. Is Powell's obscurity just bad luck, or does her anger make her harder to canonize than the melancholy men who came before her? Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Links from the Episode:  LA Review of Books Article - Minding Other People's Business: On Dawn Powell link The Unmarked Graveyard podcast - Dawn Powell link  

We finally broke free from short stories and dove into film, actually, two versions of the same film. The central question: how do you transform a 5-page story into a two-hour movie? We dug into what has to fundamentally change when you adapt a short story for screen, what a visual medium can do that prose simply can't, and whether these adaptations justified their existence beyond just "we liked the story." The film was beautiful—we said it repeatedly, because it actually was—and surprising in ways that took the story to another level entirely. We also spiraled into anxieties about AI and whether we're all just becoming Walter Mittys—fantasizing about doing things instead of actually getting out there and doing them. Worth staying up after bedtime? Absolutely! Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Next episode: "Such a Pretty Day" by Dawn Powell (1939)  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review—it really helps other exhausted parents find us!**

We're officially in a rut—three middle-aged white men in a row, all deeply unsatisfied with their lives. James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) gave us a protagonist who escapes into elaborate fantasies (complete with Sam's failed attempts at "pocketa pocketa pocketa" sound effects), but we couldn't help asking: why should we actually care about Walter Mitty? Here's a guy with every advantage and agency to actually do something with his life, but instead he just... daydreams about it. We wrestled with whether his fantasies are poignant or just kind of frustrating, debated the story's surprising staying power in pop culture, and somehow ended up talking about Star Trek—because of course we did. Thurber's prose is deceptively simple, but underneath it all, we're left wondering is this a story about the universal human need for escape, or a very specific kind of privilege?   Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Next episode: "Such a Pretty Day" by Dawn Powell (1939)  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review—it really helps other exhausted parents find us!**

We doubled our runtime for this one, and honestly? Worth it. John O’Hara’s “Over the River and Through the Wood” (1934) immediately had us both leaning forward on the bed, which is saying something at 11 PM. We started by digging in to the actual Thanksgiving poem that clearly inspired O’Hara’s  story, then spiraled into everything from Jane Austen to *The History of Love* to—yes—Shiv and Tom Wambsgans. But here’s the thing: this 90-year-old story feels shockingly modern, with a surprisingly mature take on masculinity. Also, we talked about O’Hara’s epitaph, which may or may not count as gossip corner. Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Next episode: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber (1939)  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review—it really helps other exhausted parents find us!**

We're kicking things off with E.B. White's 1926 "Life Cycle of a Literary Genius"—and honestly, we almost didn't make it past the title. After forgetting to read the introduction (parenting brain strikes again), stumbling into some juicy gossip about White's complicated relationship with his New Yorker editor, and one of us starting out pretty skeptical about the whole thing, something unexpected happened: we actually came around to it. By the end, we were already looking forward to the second story.  Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link Next episode: "Over the River and Through the Wood" by John O'Hara (1934)   If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review—it really helps other exhausted parents find us!