Friendship and Heartbreak with Jennifer Senior

We are returning to our June 2022 conversation with reporter Jennifer Senior about friendship, heartbreak, and her ongoing reporting projects. This discussion is a delight and we hope you enjoy hearing it again.

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EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. Welcome to another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are currently on our summer schedule, which includes revisiting some of our favorite conversations on the show. Today, we're sharing our conversation on friendship with Jennifer Senior. Jennifer Senior is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic and she is also the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She's the author of one of my favorite books, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. And we were thrilled to have her on to talk about friendship.

Beth Before we share our conversation with Jennifer, we would love to invite you to leave a review of our show on the Apple Podcast Player. It helps more people find Pantsuit Politics. I loved this recent review that said, "If I could give Infinity Stars, I would. I think I have withheld from writing a review for so long due to knowing that no words I write could possibly sum up just how much this podcast means to me."

Sarah Oh my goodness.

Beth Thank you so much. You don't even have to have great words about it; it just means a lot to us that you take some of your valuable time to support the work that we do. Your reviews encourage our team members and they help more people find Pantsuit Politics. And the more people who are listening, the more we think our discussions here are enhanced by your feedback and participation. So thank you so much for spending a minute or two today leaving a five star review of Pantsuit Politics.

Sarah And now enjoy this conversation we are so proud of that we had what Jennifer Senior. First of all, huge congratulations are in order. You were awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for what Bobby McIlvaine left behind, which was the most beautiful reflection of a family's loss in the 20 years since 9/11, so congratulations.

Jennifer Senior Thank you, ma'am. The ideal time to learn that you've won a Pulitzer is not while you were in the midst of finishing and then editing and then closing a piece about Steve Bannon. Jennifer Senior Thank you, ma'am. The ideal time to learn that you've won a Pulitzer is not while you were in the midst of finishing and then editing and then closing a piece about Steve Bannon.

Sarah I know that. I was going to ask, what's your next thesis?

Jennifer Senior I was like on the homestretch of that. The cognitive dissonance, like, the kind of elation I felt was so utterly canceled out by the material that I was working on and like the stress of having to close in on time. We had this group Zoom, and my editor-- all these shiny, happy faces. I have the nicest colleagues ever. And then my editor in chief closed it by saying, "Jen, go back to work and finish your story and everyone else, go and celebrate on Jen's behalf.".

Sarah Oh, no.

Jennifer Senior No. I was like, what is wrong with this picture? Oh, my God. I mean, it could have been about, like, the copper mines of Nevada. It could have been anything. But it was about Steve Bannon, I mean, of all things.

Beth I have to ask, what compelled you to write about Steve Bannon and how did you make that choice?

Jennifer Senior Well, I've always had politics in my portfolio and the 2022 elections are coming up. So there was only so long I could go without-- I couldn't really get away with not writing about politics. At some point I was going to have to capitulate and just do it. And my editor basically said, "You got to choose somebody, anybody. One of the figures who's out there." And I knew Steve Bannon would say yes because he's a media guy. And I knew that his podcast played some role. And I thought anyway. And helping to organize some of the energy behind the fury on January 6th. I mean, he's got this very activist listenership and he's like a preacher or a televangelist really. It would be a better way of describing him. And he was game because he's always game. And I think he's like Trump. He pines for mainstream coverage. In hindsight, it was a horrendously bad idea. I mean, of all the figures. He wanted me to go for somebody who was Trumpist and part of the conversation. And I knew that he would endure, he wouldn't get knocked out in the middle of a primary. I mean, there were all sorts of considerations, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Sarah This piece is different. [Crosstalk].

Jennifer Senior Yes, just a little.

Sarah And I have to tell you, in our book, Now What, we talk about staying present with loved ones even as they engage with the reality you might not completely understand. And I really can't think of a more clear and beautiful example of that than Helen and Bob and the way you write about them in the piece. I really cannot.

Jennifer Senior Thank you. I really, really, appreciate that. And I'm very glad that that came through. And I'll tell you, if I hadn't been able to get the diary, that is what the whole story would have been about. It would have been about their marriage. Because here is a man who descended into 9/11 conspiracies and trutherism as a way to cope with losing his son. Just waking up every morning and it's September 12th and there's a murder to be solved. Who actually truly was behind September 11th and who killed his kid? And there's a wife who had absolutely no interest at all in going down these rabbit holes and thinking about this and just had a very different way of coping with their grief. And that was going to be the story if I didn't get the diary. Then suddenly when it did, it had many, many, many parts. But thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Sarah But I think that theme is still even with the diary, like, how people deal with it and how to stay present or sometimes not staying present with someone through that grief process. Well-deserved. It's an incredible piece.

Jennifer Senior Thank you. Thanks.

Beth You have another incredible piece that we've not been able to stop thinking about since it published. And that is, It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart. And you wrote about the great pandemic, friendship reckoning in your own life and how in middle age we're past the collection phase with friends and should be enjoying hard won friendships. And it just doesn't turn out that way for many of us. And I have to tell you, every couple of weeks I solicit questions from our audience, just what do you want to hear us talking about? And every time I get a question that sounds like, how do I find friends in this stage of my life? So I would love to hear about what made you decide to did this piece and now having some distance from it, what parts of it are you still thinking about?

Jennifer Senior Oh, that's a great question. I'm going to answer the second question first. Like, what am I thinking about now? I am thinking about one of my smartest friends critiques of the piece. Or not a critique. It was something that he thought was missing, that he would have loved to have read 1,500 or 2,000 words about. And he said, "In addition to envy," he said, "You know what you don't talk about in that piece, is anger," With many friends, not with all of them, but with many friends, there are these large stories of anger that you sit on and it goes unprocessed or it doesn't get processed healthily with a spouse or with children or with family members. There's a better developed vocabulary for discussing anger, and with friends there often isn't. And it can really corrode. And he said, "I really wish you'd discussed that." And, god, have I ever been thinking about that ever since, because he's totally right. And I think, to be honest, I was too afraid of even going there in my head. Like, I could go to envy because I'm lucky enough to have only very badly envied, like, a couple of times in the last 10, 15, 20 years. And I talked about it, it was in the context of Bob going on Oprah and how great, how gracious and funny he was about it. And real he was. But anger is different. And you know what? Honestly, I have more of that. And I think I just couldn't cope with it. So that's like a coda and you guys could talk about and you could get somebody else to talk about who actually has access to it. Because my mind wanders into blank space. I get so freaked out thinking about it.

Sarah Well, I think it's just about what you talk about in the piece which is, to me, envy, anger, all of it is this undercurrent of conflict and we do not have language experiences like guidance, wisdom, writing. We just don't have a lot about how to deal with conflict inside friendship. I'll never forget I had a really bad falling out with-- who I'm still friends with, but we had to go through sort of this period. And she said, "Well, I don't fight with my friends." And then I said, "Well, how are you even friends? How are you friends if you never have a conflict or a fight?" But I just don't think we have language or, like I said, any sort of cultural wisdom about how to deal with any sort of conflict in a friendship. And I think we tell ourselves these lies. We write about this in our book. Like, in college you're sort of in the same grade, you're the same age, and there's this sameness. But even at that period of life, when it's easy to make friends and you're falling into lockstep, you're not the same. And there's still conflict and there's still anger and there's still envy, even in those time periods where friendship feels easier. And so if we don't have any language during those easier times to deal with anger or envy and any sort of conflict, well, dang, what are we going to do later in life?

Jennifer Senior Well, yeah, like 30 years into a friendship, what are you going to do? And I think your response was really a good one, which is how do you have friends if you don't ever walk through conflict? But, of course, there are people who believe, look, friends are supposed to be the frictionless part of my life. Which is a misunderstanding, I think. I can't imagine all friendships being frictionless. The ones that are frictionless are well, first of all, they're the rarest of elements on the periodic table. You really look out when that happens. And sometimes it's because-- like, I can think my friend Sarah, there's no friction with her. But why is there no friction with her? Because she doesn't have friction with anybody. Sarah is born just with this, like, extremely even-keeled temperament. Nothing ever fazes her. There isn't a particle of anger in her.

Sarah This is a hypothetical. It does not describe me. I can tell you that much.

Jennifer Senior Yeah, right. This doesn't describe anybody I know except my friend Sarah Murray [Sp], who is just always like that. Okay, so there's Sarah and then there's everyone else in my life. And so I think that if we want our friendships to be serious and we want them to deepen, that we want them to kind of rival the deepest of relationships we have, I think you're going to have to work through that shit. But it's hard. It's really hard.

Beth My husband and I saw an early screening of Top Gun last night, and I told him I felt like the summary of it is that by middle age, everything is at least 33 percent heartbreaking.

Jennifer Senior That's so-- oh, my God.

Beth It was kind of beautiful to just have a movie like Top Gun say that out loud, because I can't imagine frictionless friendships at this stage in my life where we're all just made of too much.

Jennifer Senior Right. We are made of too much. That's beautiful and 33 percent heartbreaking. God, it's that Maggie Smith poem that I have to find. All the things she can't tell her daughter because, really, life is just so hard, you know? It just is hard. But, yes, I think that that is true. We are made of too much at this point. And it's beautiful as long as your friends can put up with it. Hey, you want to hear a cool story about what came out of that piece?

Sarah Absolutely.

Jennifer Senior One of the people who I wrote about. I talked about how I had a falling out with a male friend.

Sarah Yes. That you became apparent.

Jennifer Senior Yes. That guy. Yeah. He figured out it was him. He's Steve Metcalf. He's like one of the three guys on Slate Gabfest. Culture Gabfest. And he said on the air, "I think this is me. And either I'm like really narcissistic, in which case I'm about to have egg on my face or it was me and I have egg on my face because I think I said something like that to Jen and I was just young and overwhelmed and a dad. And I was a f*** sh*** friend." I got both of them in there. Really impressive. And he said, "And I totally loved her. And I'm just really sorry." And then he reached out to me. He said on the air many years later what he and I could not like kind of work through, and I couldn't do it either. I couldn't say, god, that really hurt my feelings. You have no idea how much that hurt my feelings. So maybe being older also just like helps you. You've been married maybe and you've had enough fights and learned what works and what doesn't and what you should and shouldn't say. Or maybe you're still sucky at fighting, you know? But, I mean, it's possible that you have a better sense of how to navigate some of that.

Can I go to your first question, which was how do you find new friends? I've spoken to ladies who are older and in retirement or their kids are fully launched and they say, you revisit everybody who you sort of didn't have time for that they do kind of resurface, their back and that you can deepen those friendships again. You'll be surprised at the number of friends who will really enter your life and you can deepen things with. But in terms of making new friends, if you're in a brand new place, it is a bear. I mean, do you get a dog? You know, I mean, that you've got something to talk about. All the clichés. You can go to bar bars and restaurants alone. But it's hard. I don't have great answers for all of that. I mean, I'm very afraid of the narrowing, the funnel that comes when when you move or when people start to get sick. I mean, it becomes really difficult.

Sarah Well, I think some of that hardness is found in something you name in the piece that I want to scratch out a little bit with, which is the embrace of individuality in modern life, right? That we have this sense of we're all completely unique individuals and we all have these completely unique identities and completely unique needs. And if you don't embrace a single part of that, then we're done. I love this line. You say one could argue that modern life conspires against friendships, even as it requires the bonds of friendships all the more. Like, I think that there's this tension between individuality and the collective that bubbles up in modern friendships. And I think you definitely see that in when you're looking to make new friends in a space, right? One, because we don't have a lot of the civic institutions that fostered that that said, well, we share this thing. We share this membership. I mean, when I move back to my hometown, even though it was my hometown and I had friends here, I joined basically our version of Junior League, which is still very popular here where I live in Kentucky. And I had like the full experience of friendship, lots of conflict, full on betrayal inside that organization, and also made some of my strongest friends. But I don't think that that sense of we have to join in something together that doesn't honor every single piece of our individuality, but will give us some things to share and maybe build friendships off. I think that those things have weakened. And I think that tension we always feel between being our unique selves, being like honored for our individualities, but also finding a place of belonging is really hard right now.

Jennifer Senior It's really hard. And not everyone here has Junior Leagues. You can join a church and just look. But church attendance, all these things are in decline. You can join a synagogue, these attendances are in decline. Robert Putnam wrote about this at length in 2000 in Bowling Alone and hasn't done work on it since. You can join a book group. Is your book club going to be there for you if you lose your spouse in the way that your church would have been in the days of old? Probably not. Or the Rotary Club or the Elks or all these things that are found. It's harder. It's harder. This age of radical individualism has come at a very steep price. I'm back in touch with an old friend. We were friends and college, friends in our twenties. We had kids and sort of that was like 10 or 12 years where we kind of lost track of each other. And we just started hanging out again. And his father died this year. There's a big memorial coming up for him. And he said, "You are welcome to attend," because I knew his dad. You know people's dads when you're in college and you know them in your twenties before you were married or whatever. And I'd have to reshuffle a lot to get to the memorial that's this Thursday. And it's a huge memorial. A gazillion people will be going. It will be recorded. It is not necessarily for me to be. There will be thousands of people there probably because this guy, his father is somebody a lot of people knew. But there's some part of me that thinks this wouldn't have even been a question 40 years ago. I would have dropped everything and I wouldn't have lost touch with them. Like, then again, I don't think I would have had a really close male friend 40 years ago. It's because of the same developments, you know? I mean, they're all of a piece. It's because life is what it is that one of my dearest friends is a guy, you know? I mean, that just wouldn't have even been-- Look at my mother. That's not true, right?

Beth I think that relates to the limitations of our vocabulary. And part of the reason that I have been so obsessed with this piece of yours is I love the language of the thickness or the thinness of friendships. I love the moment when you talk about these two writers who are in conversation with one another and how their feelings became too hot to handle. Like, just this comes up for me and friendships with men too. What is the range of acceptable obsession with a friend when there is the possibility that it becomes uncomfortable for a spouse or something like that? We just don't have a lot of words to talk about those things and put them in any kind of context for ourselves or the other people in our lives who are affected by those really intense, thick friendships.

Jennifer Senior That is so true. The cross-gender friendships and spousal things can be incredibly intense. We take vacations together. My office spouse and I and his spouse and my spouse we're all friends. We all know each other very, very, well. And we all know each other's kids. So thank God for that. My husband was his editor, too, for a while. So I think they had an independent relationship. But it would have been bonkers otherwise because I find that my office spouse often says things that are more comforting to me than my husband does, in part because he's been spared hearing the exact same soundtrack every day for 18 years. Like, my office spouse though he's heard me whine a lot, it's less than my husband has. It's like it's still a little bit fresher. He's a little bit less worn down. But I do agree. I mean, that's its own. I would read, I'm just telling you right now, if someone wrote a book about the complexities of office spouseship, I would get up in the middle of dinner and go buy that book.

Sarah I think it just speaks to that sort of multifaceted. Like, we're multifaceted. And so we have to have relationships that speak to all those multifaceted parts of ourselves. Like, to think that one spouse or one sibling or one best friend can hold all the different-- It's almost like this paradox of that individuality. Well, yeah, a collective is the only thing up for that challenge. A collective is is the only thing up for that uniqueness.

Jennifer Senior Well, you need many blankets. That's just it. And they are filling the place where your church or the Elks Club or your bowling league or whatever it once was, right? And I think this was kind of the devastating problem with the 1950s companionate kind of model of marriage, where husbands and wives couldn't do that for each other and the wives really got the bum end of the stick. I mean, you saw this in Mad Men played out pretty well where the fellows all had their camaraderie at work and the women were just screwed. They were screwed. They were alone in their big empty houses. And Betty Draper just with her thousand yard stare and her cigarette, like, sitting there, maybe finding some companionship with the women who were similarly screwed, who were trapped in their houses next door. I mean, Betty Friedan was on to something very real. You need more. You need a lot more to make you whole and to capture you. I mean, you also need more fulfillment. I think that was her point, which doesn't necessarily mean work, but it does mean that you can't just be consigned to sitting at home all day and looking pretty and running a vacuum.

Sarah Well, speaking of paradox, I do have to say now that it's been eight years since you wrote my favorite parenting book of all time, All Joy and No Fun, The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Still pass it out. Still pass it out to people.

Jennifer Senior Oh, you're the one. Thanks.

Sarah That's me.

Jennifer Senior Oh, I was wondering where those three sales a month came from. Thank you.

Sarah When do we get a sequel? That's the first thing I want to know.

Jennifer Senior Never. Never. I hated writing a book. It's so lonely.

Sarah Well, you did such a good job, and I'd love to hear how you think about that book now, now that you're farther along in your parenting journey, especially after the impact of pandemic parenting. Because I think it speaks so well to that paradox of parenting. And I think it speaks to some, to parenting littles, but to me it still feels relevant. But I wonder how you think about that book now.

Jennifer Senior You're sweet. Well, a few things. First of all, it's very dated in there. If you read it, I talk about black boards. There were no such thing as iPads, let alone multiplayer, online video games. I mean, the idea that the Internet was going to insinuate its porn tentacles into our young boys, and that there was going to be Tick Tock and that everybody was going to have this outward facing. I mean, the perils that what our adolescent children were going to come across, none of that was apparent to me. And so it would have been a different book in that sense, right? There would have been so much in there raising the adolescence chapter. And it would have been a different kind of book because it's also happening to the grown ups. We are susceptible to some of the same things that our adolescents are. So it would have been that we'd have been very hard to maybe even contain. It would have gotten unwielden early because the Internet is just not bringing out our finest selves. It's bringing out our interactive lessons.

Sarah That's an understatement.

Jennifer Senior Right. So I look at it and I think that stated number one. And then on the other hand, I think that some of it was like swept into the culture so quickly, the idea that parenting was kind of a drag and sort of feel the same compulsion to be excellent at parenting in the same way that women in the 1950s felt obliged to be excellent housewives and to keep fine homes. I think all that stuff got subsumed very, very, quickly. So it's lessons were sort of absorbed. So now people don't even know where some of those ideas came from. A few years ago on Christmas Day, Clare Kane Miller had this front page story in the New York Times about how women were spending more time with their children now than they had in the 1960s. That's like on page 11 of my book and minute four of my Ted Talk, but it was new to her. It was new to her. So she basically recapitulated the entire thesis of my book and I got a lot of tweets that day saying, "Why are you mentioned in this?" And I was like, I don't know. But it was all news to her and it flew at high altitude. Like, in The New York Times most emailed and most read for like a week. Because it's news to a certain time. Like, five or six years later--

Sarah Everybody has to rediscover it.

Jennifer Senior No one remembers who said it. Everybody has to rediscover it. Everybody is rediscovering the same thing. And so, like I just said, they're kind of laughing. You know what I mean, they'll do this again. People forget. It just kind of gets reabsorbed in the culture and then people go off and read it. So I feel like it is at once dated and a perennial.

Sarah Yeah. Well, I think that parts for me that the reason I still recommend it, reading that history and realizing that the economically useless and emotionally priceless.

Jennifer Senior Yeah, that's good.

Sarah I quote that all the time. And I think you can't tell the future, but illuminating the past and the way we've changed and our thinking around parenting is always going to be helpful and I think make people feel less alone. And I think what you did in the book about particularly gendered perceptions of parenting, that holds up so well.

Jennifer Senior Yes. That's amazingly okay.

Sarah It's so helpful in the sense of, like, well the way that men parent there's benefits to that. Like, the idea that the only right way to parent is the way women parent, and that the pressure that is on women and the fact that children benefit from different styles and approaches. And I just remember reading and feeling an enormous sense of pressure release. Like, oh, okay. I see what's happening here that's bigger than me. And I don't have to feel like I have to fix it or solve it. I still love that book. I still love that book.

Jennifer Senior I adore you for saying that. And I will say that that is the one part that I feel proudest of and like it can still stand on its own two legs and will for really some time, I think. The end of the second chapter where Clint says, "I'm the standard. I am the standard," and his wife Angie can't bring herself to just think I am the standard, meaning I'm good enough. Oh, I know how it came up. He didn't have a father who was very involved, so he felt like whatever he did was good and good enough. Whereas, Angie had all these insane notions about what she had to do to be a perfect mom rather than just going...

Sarah Good enough.

Jennifer Senior I hugged my kids today. Yeah. The good enough parent idea that she just couldn't let herself off the hook. Whereas, her husband was like, what? They're they're protected. They're taken care of.

Sarah They're alive. They can still watch a game.

Jennifer Senior I know. Ballgame one. You know, they're watching TV. They're cheerful and they're giggling, like, how have I failed? How have I failed.

Sarah That's a thread in the friendship piece too. We need a little bit of good enough with friends. Like, you don't have to reach out in a tough moment and say the perfect thing. Reaching out is good enough. You don't have to get together every Friday night for dinner. Reaching out and getting to dinner once every six months is good enough. Like, I think there's a little bit of that even in all our relationships that we do to each other in ourselves.

Jennifer Senior That's a great, great, point. In fact, it reminds me of a hack that I'm now going to share with everybody that my friend Rachel did early on. She's a professor in upstate New York, and she wrote to me and she said, "I'm writing you a long email and long emails are really intimidating. So I'm telling you that I would love a reply to this long email and it can be like within the next couple of months and it doesn't have to be as long. Like, just whenever you feel like you can reply, I'd just love to hear from you." But think about somebody saying, answer me in two months. I get an email and I'm like, "Ah!". And also her saying, like, I just wrote you a very long email. It does not have to be as long as mine. It's so generous and it's a much more realistic sort of parameter..

Sarah If at any point in your relationships you can ease the pressure on people, lean into that instinct.

Jennifer Senior Oh, god, totally.

Beth Well, I have to ask you, we are a politics podcast. And our theory of being a politics podcast is that all these stuff is the basis of the way that we express ourselves politically. Do you feel good enough in your relationships? Do you have enough relationships? How lonely are you? So I have to ask you, I'm really curious, as you have been studying Steve Bannon, what connections you would draw between everything we've been talking about and the way that he has become, as you said, kind of a minister for people.

Jennifer Senior Oh, god, that is so fascinating. That is very, very, perceptive. So Steve Bannon said something. This is going to speak directly whiz-bang to your point. Steve Bannon told Errol Morris in a documentary about him. Errol made a documentary about Steve Bannon in 2018 with a not so great name called American Dharma. It was great if you understood Steve Bannon. It's not anything that's box office sexy. And he kind of got canceled for doing it, which was a shame because I think people ought to know what Steve Bannon is about. I'm mildly afraid at this point of getting canceled, too, although I think we are slightly more enlightened about what happens when you don't know what's going on sub Rosa. I think people ought to know. Not even the subterranean currents. These are just currents in American life that are happening that we're not paying attention to. Anyway, Steve Bannon said something to Errol Morris that was so chilling and so perceptive. He said when he was working for Internet gaming entertainment, he was in Hong Kong. He was astonished to discover how many men, grown men, men in their thirties played all these multiplayer online games and how intensely they played them and how many hours they spent doing them. And he said, but then he sort of understood it because let's say that you were Dave in accounting and you drop dead one day.

You're 250 lbs and you drop dead. You find some preacher who doesn't know you very well, who does a 10 minute eulogy based on a couple of things that a few people have said about you, and you get dropped into an urn and put into one of these perpetual cemeteries, and that's Dave. If Dave online dies, online Dave is Ajax and thousands of people show up at Dave's funeral, and Dave is carried in a caisson to a giant, raging funeral pyre. And the warring tribe that hated Dave comes out to fight and everybody stays home for Dave's funeral. They miss a day of work. That's Dave online. Dave online is Ajax. Who is more real? Ajax are Dave? And then people relate better to their online avatars, their idealized selves, or who they want to be. And he said, "When I took over Brite Art, I had that top of mind when I built out the comment section, because people, their online comments selves are their realer selves. They're who they want to be. They are their aspirational selves." So the people who are trolls, the people who are the big online figures, who are mobilizing the-- and he said those selves properly directed and weaponized can be used in politics. Your online selves. Those angry people, that energy properly directed can be put to political use.

Sarah And that's why it feels so disjointed to the all of us living among the real world Daves.

Jennifer Senior Right. Correct. And I think those of us who don't live online, who live in the real world, can't quite understand what that energy is, what those alter ego energies are about, and how they can become some so inflamed and how they can privately go into a voting booth and vote for someone reprehensible who understands their rage. Think about what happened on like January 6th. I mean, people came out as their real life avatars. They were cosplaying. They were Ajax. They missed a day of work. They showed up at the Capitol with their own version of caissons and they were fighting and they were in face paint and fur. Think about that.

Sarah Well, and I think the mass shootings are another reflection of that. Where it crosses over.

Jennifer Senior Yeah. That's right. Think about they all have these online manifestos. They've got this online selves. Or they livestream it, right? That's right. It's their online personas. I mean, it's fascinating. And Bannon is fundamentally a media guy. He's an immediate impresario. He did write bad news. He made all these propaganda films, the most famous of which was about Sarah Palin. He understands this. And it's frightening. It's dangerous.

Beth And it just seems to me that the threat here is who might Dave have been if he had been invited in real life into some full expression of himself? And would it be so dark?

Jennifer Senior Bingo. What if he had a real church? Although, of course, my colleague Tim Alberta just wrote the best thing that I think I've read this year about how the churches are turned out [Crosstalk]. That piece was so good right? That they're privileging politics over spiritual identity and scripture. So this is a brand new question. You asked the exact right question. It's a Robert Putnam question. But what if that's getting lost now? Where does one go just for fellowship, just for love, just for support? I mean, I want my church to bring me casseroles when someone dies, I don't need them to tell me how to vote.

Sarah Well, that's definitely our theory here, is that at the end of the day, it's us together with each other, right? Like, we are the institution. We are the committee. Like, the friendships, the Helen and Bob marriages. The moments where I say, "I see you. I see you, you don't have to go online to be seen. I see you." I think about all the time. Like, it was just like a short roundup in the times of people talking about interactions with their conservative relatives. And somebody said, I had this cousin. He was getting in with the alt right and his sister-- I think it was his sister or another female cousin just wouldn't stop with him, just wouldn't give up on him. Just went at him and went at him and eventually sort of extracted him from it. But she just wouldn't stop. She just wouldn't stop showing up in the face of conflict, in the face of hard conversations, just saying, "I see you. You don't have to go there. I see you. I see you."

Jennifer Senior Two things to say to that. Oh, my god. So, number one, I was-- totally unrelated. The chairwoman of the selection committee for the Pulitzer on nonfiction, because I'd been a book critic at the Times, one of the daily book critics for two and a half years and all I basically reviewed was nonfiction. So when I abandoned that gig, they asked me whether or not I wanted to go through all the entries in the committee to winnow it down to a group of three. And one of the books that we chose is called Homeland Security, and it's all about how banal radicals actually are. And particularly it's mainly Muslim fundamentalists that they're mainly just lost boys. They're like normal adolescent teenagers. And when they are successful at de-radicalizing, it's always the sister, the mom, the people who know them. Oh, come on, you like chocolate ice cream and watching that mindless film and you're you. You're not them. You're you, you're us, right? And I loved that book and you should read that book and everyone should read that book. It's such a great book. It got totally overlooked. It was barely reviewed. It broke my heart. It's fabulous. So A, that, yes. Exactly what you just said about Thanksgiving. But to the like 100th power.

The second thing is, yes, let's go back to the [inaudible]. We've got a conspiracy theorist husband and a mom who is indifferent or might privately think that most of this stuff is just kind of loopy. What's their bond? They are the only two people who knew what it was to lose that boy. They loved this boy so much. It's their love. And that they went through that grief side by side and they knew him for 26, almost 27 years. And who else can relate to that? Can relate to losing that? Only those two. And as long as they understood that each one's expression of grief was an expression of love and love by another means. Like, Helen saying about her husband, "How can I stop him from doing what he's doing?" He is fighting for his son in the way that he knows how. People might see it as a sign of crazy. I see it as an expression of love. It was so beautiful. And when you reinterpret someone you love that way, it's different. But grieving is lonely. So clearly he found fellowship with all these 9/11 truthers, right? But Helen is still steadfastly by his side. And I'm hoping he can just at some point replace all that weird fellowship that he's getting with truthers with his grandkids and Helen alone, and that that can really do the trick.

Sarah Well, thank you for sharing their stories. Thank you for all your writing and this thread that we've been pulling on together. And thank you for coming on our show. We adore you. Thank you.

Jennifer Senior Thank you. Oh, my God. I've adored this conversation. Oh, I will remember this conversation.

Beth Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you.

Jennifer Senior Middled age [Crosstalk].

Sarah You're welcome back, anytime.

Jennifer Senior Thank you. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'd love to come back.

Beth Thank you so much.

Jennifer Senior Okay. Thank you, guys.

Sarah Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in years on Friday, where I'm sharing my conversation with Richard Reeves, which I cannot wait for all of you to hear. And until then, keep it nuanced, y'all. Beth Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.

Beth Our show is listener-supported special thanks to our executive producers.

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