Life Matters - Separate stories podcast ABC listen

You catch up with an old school friend and her husband for lunch. When you ask the husband questions the pair talk over the top of each other and your friend's voice gets louder and louder.

It's a distressing experience that is making you reconsider moving back to your home town, because you'll need to see more of them.

What can you do?

The way we are as parents can be heavily influenced by our own experiences in childhood, both good and bad.

When it came to parenting your own children, how much you have stuck to or strayed from how you were parented?

When it comes to presentation and manner, Australians are pretty casual, and more of the world is following suit. Employees are pushing back against formal dress codes in workplaces, and formal dress is necessary in fewer social settings. So are we losing anything by dropping the formalities? How does our presentation change the way we relate to each other, and ourselves? 

Geraldine Turner is a legend of the Australian stage, and has earned a lot of wisdom through her long career.

She shares her mantra for getting through stage fright, and what she's learned about figuring out a person's true character.

Angie Chong’s grandfather, Chen Wing Young, is known as the man who, in the early 1940's, popularised the dim sim in Australia. Angie’s mum, Elizabeth Chong, Australia’s 'queen of Chinese Chinese cuisine', was one of the country’s first celebrity chefs. Angie has a rich cooking legacy of her own. But now, as a grandmother, how does she bring her family together over food? And, how has she evolved traditions to keep her grandkids happy whilst maintaining a strong connection to her family’s past? A conversation with three generations - Angie Chong, her mum Elizabeth Chong and her daughter Tess Duddy-Chong

Our closest relationships can feel all consuming sometimes. particularly our children, but also our partners, or close friends, or parents.

It can be hard to imagine ourselves apart from them; to define ourselves, outside of those relationships.

And even when a relationship ends those connections still resonate, we are shaped by the people in our lives, as we shape their lives in turn.

In her new memoir Splinters, Leslie Jamison is sharing her story: of being a mother, a wife, a teacher, an artist, and of being herself.