Fireside with Blair Hodges

Holly Brown loves TV sitcoms. Growing up, her own family looked like the prototype for must-see TV: a charismatic dad who worked on a top sitcom in Hollywood, siblings and a mother filling the other familiar family roles.Until it all started to fall apart. As though the writers were playing some kind of sadistic joke. And as her father was dying of cancer, he revealed a secret no one had told her—Holly and her siblings had five-year-old twin half brothers.Holly joins Blair to talk about her genre-bending new podcast, Everybody Knows But Me, which blends memoir, investigative storytelling, with fake sitcom scenes of her life complete with wisecracks and laugh tracks.Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org.  Fellow Traveler EpisodesDead Dads Club, with Maddie Norris About the GuestHolly Brown is an LA-based stand-up comedian, a podcast person at Tink Media, and also the host and creator of a new darkly comedic narrative podcast called Everybody Knows But Me.

“Relationscapes” is the current podcast by Fireside host Blair Hodges. Enjoy this sample episode! Be sure to subscribe directly to Relationscapes now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!

Tara Boyce joins us to reconsider Tom Whyman’s episode about “hope.” Is Tom too hopeful? Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/boyce.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Ross Gay is a New York Times bestselling author of essays and poetry. His latest book is ‘Inciting Joy,’ which argues that “joy is something like what we feel like when we help each other carry our sorrows, what we feel like when we sort of realize we're practicing our entanglement, our belonging to one another.”Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/gay.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Meghan O'Rourke is a citizen of what she calls the invisible kingdom. Anyone can become a citizen. Even you. All you need is a debilitating chronic illness that doctors can't easily understand or treat—autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, and a bunch of other conditions at the blurry edges of medical knowledge. As doctors tried to pinpoint Meghan’s diagnoses, she decided to create a record of what she was learning about chronic illness from doctors, scientists, and patients along the way.Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/orourke.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.