Tell Me About Your Father Erin Hosier, Matthew Phillp and Elizabeth Thompson

Elizabeth and Erin chat with indie rock icon Miki Berenyi of the '90s band Lush about her critically acclaimed memoir, "Fingers Crossed," hailed by Rolling Stone and Rough Trade as one of the best autobiographies ever. Miki opens up about her unique upbringing by her eccentric Hungarian sports journalist father and her Nazi-sympathizer grandmother, the turbulent London post-punk scene, and the highs and lows of being in a band that influenced so many musicians, including Kurt Cobain. In this interview, Miki tells us about the agonies and ecstasies of life with a boundary-less, hard-partying, single dad at the helm, and the perils of being treated like an adult when you're six. She also shares the shocking family secrets uncovered in her memoir, which Miki didn't know about until the end of her father's life.


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It's our annual Oscars episode with Tell Me About Your Father pal Richard Lawson, chief critic of Vanity Fair, discussing all the dad themes in this year's Academy Award-nominated films. We've got J. Robert Oppenheimer as the father of the atomic bomb in "Oppenheimer", a perma-wounded mad professor dad named "God" in "Poor Things," a philandering dead father whose shadow is cast across "American Fiction," and another dead dad who provides solid proof that writers should almost never be married to each other in "Anatomy of a Fall." Plus "Killers of the Flower Moon," snubs galore (Zac Efron in Iron Claw, you deserved more) and some quick Barbie discourse - we know when to say Kenough! Roll out the red carpet and smash play.


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Who was this year’s Best-Worst-Late Father-of-the-Year? Who was the best animal dad? Which saviors of culture are in line to clinch the Patrick Swayze Memorial Award for Excellence in the lifelong practice of Holistic Hotness? From Elon and King Charles to the best of this year’s celebrity memoir tell-alls, the celebrity dads of Tik Tok, and the finest incomprehensibly verbose headlines of the Daily Mail - we sum up the dad-moments that made this year special with the 787th Daddy Awards. It's the father-centric podcast industry biggest awards ceremony of the year!


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Matt Phillp talks with culture writer Marcie Bianco, author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom about her childhood growing up working class in South New Jersey with a father who, as she puts it “erased himself” and how that foundation informs her perspective on society and politics today.  They talk about how her family dynamic shifted when she got a sports scholarship to Harvard, a moment that changed her life forever, how she learned to defend herself at an early age against her father’s violent outbursts, and what it means to throw off the shackles of systemic oppression and create a life of your own making.  Given how bleak it is to truly look at systemic, white patriarchal oppression - another manifestation of father-centric culture if ever there was one - and how it continues to play out in myriad ways for anyone who isn’t a straight white man, Marcie’s take on culture and her book are both fundamentally hopeful, even if she initially struggled to find that sense of hope.




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This is our third episode, since the launch of TMAYF, dedicated to the life story of Britney Spears. Erin and Elizabeth discuss her long-awaited memoir The Woman in Me, and look back at the cultural mood that led to the pop princess tragically being held prisoner by a legal conservatorship that gave her father Jamie the right to control her person and her fortune for 13 years after she had a nervous breakdown in 2008. We unearth a Daily Mail article from 2008 entitled "The Day I Saw Britney Spears' father pull a knife,' by a journalist named Sharon Churcher that highlights - 15 years ago - just how unfit Jamie Spears was to take care of anyone. We discuss the legacy of alcoholism, mental illness, and misogynistic abuse across the Spears family tree, and the sadly enduring trope of abusive patriarchs-as-managers in Hollywood. Later, we also hear from Matt and writer Marcie Bianco - whose new book Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom is the perfect chaser for this story.


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In this episode, we are joined by Leta McCollough Seletzky, author of the recent book, “The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr." Seletzky's father, Marrell "Mac" McCullough, appears in the famous photo of Dr. King seconds after he was shot at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. In the photo, King lies in a pool of blood, surrounded by aides urgently pointing in the direction of the gunshot, while Leta's father kneels at his side, applying pressure to his wound. Upon discovering in her teens that Mac was undercover for Memphis Police that day, Leta's book unpacks his complex life—from spying on Black activists and the racism he endured from white colleagues to the 1998 polygraph test he was subjected to as part of a DOJ investigation. Her conversation with Elizabeth details her work to help piece together her father's legacy and tell his story, long shrouded in secrecy, seeking a complete understanding of the man whose life was forever marked by that pivotal moment in history.


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