After You Blow Up Your Life

plus, my dreams of forming a Supergroup!

At Death, Sex & Money, we get many of our stories from our listener inbox. Sometimes, you respond to big open questions about infidelity, paid caregiving, and inheritance. Our hope is that we’ll inspire you to reach out with a very particular story about something many of us have gone through. We also get notes about how the show has affected your decisions. 

One memorable example is in 2019, when we received an email in our inbox with the subject line, “Sugar babies cost me $8000 and my marriage.”

A listener to our show said a previous episode we did about sex work inspired him to check out the website Seeking Arrangements and start paying for sex. We called him “Ethan.” He was married, and his wife found out, and they were in the process of divorcing. He wanted to talk to us about the experience. So we called him and made an episode about it.

That was five years ago. The interview stuck with me because it was an intense experience that I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, he wanted to confess and honestly unpack what had happened. But as we talked, it became clear that he hadn’t really faced the consequences of his decisions of lying to his ex-wife and then blaming her — and also kind of our podcast? — for making him do it.

I wanted to know what had happened since.

When I sent him an email recently, he wrote back quickly. “Honestly, I've been both hoping for and fearing an email like this for some time now,” he wrote. “Talking to you catapulted me into another level of grief, sorrow, pain and, eventually, healing, growth and understanding.”

This week in your podcast feed, we are sharing parts of our original conversation and our new follow-up interview from a couple of weeks ago. I really liked talking with Ethan again. For any of us carrying around shame about past decisions, it’s an interesting listen.

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Your reactions to ‘Ethan’

We’ve already gotten some notes about this episode in the few days since it’s come out. Some of you have been on the other side of Ethan’s sort of lying in a relationship, and it was painful to hear him self-reflect. You’re not sure you buy it.

This guy sounds just like my ex, spending years trying to undermine his wife, planning how to humiliate her, then turning it around and justifying his actions and playing up the ‘poor me, I’m such an asshole, and I’m shocked at myself’ attitude, when in fact everything he did was pre-meditated.

Notice how he builds both sides, so that he can appear to be ‘working’ at the marriage, but gleefully simultaneously and meticulously planning his meetups, and saving that info to emotionally destroy his wife.

Just my opinion of course, but he seems to love having the spotlight on your podcast. And frankly it makes me sick that he has that platform while his ex is probably still trying to grapple with what the hell happened, how she could have missed the red flags, how will she ever trust a man again, questioning why a person who claims to love you be so cruel, etc.,etc.

—Name withheld

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Creative pairings

I got to see Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar speak and read from each other’s books in Point Reyes last weekend. They talked about emailing each other pages over a series years while they wrote their latest books: Akbar’s Martyr and Orange’s Wondering Stars.

It’s lovely to see people who are different artists and personalities come together to celebrate each other and have fun, and it made me reflect on the particular kind of love that can grow between creative collaborators.

And…now I’m dreaming of my own fantasy Supergroup, like The Highwaymen.

A printed photo of The Highwaymen, so they can look down over me in my office.

Who could I team up with??? The trouble is, I’ve never been the kind of person with one posse. I moved between lunch tables in high school. So…who could be in my Supergroup? I’m taking recommendations in the comments!

This is a pure fantasy exercise, so let’s assume everyone would say yes if they were invited. There are no other rules: they don't have to make podcasts. And if you want to share your own Supergroup fantasies, that’s allowed, too.

Another pairing you might like: I just finished watching the first season of the Taylor Sheridan TV show Landman, about fictional characters in the Texas oilfields, while listening to the audiobook for John McPhee’s 1971 nonfiction book Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies. In Encounters, McPhee and environmental activist David Brower go on a series of outdoor adventures with industrialists and developers who want to exploit natural resources in the name of human progress. The differences in worldview are stark, and the conversation is direct. It’s a great read.

These stories got my head out of my social and professional bubbles, and they also made me laugh. I recommend both. (And if you want to go even deeper, Newsweek fact-checked some of the claims about energy use and production from Landman’s oil industry characters.)

Finally, I noticed this obituary for K.W. Lee in the NY Times yesterday.

screenshot from NYTimes

I first came across Lee’s byline when I was home in West Virginia over summer break during college and looking in the public library archives to learn what had happened to a Black neighborhood in my hometown that had been cleared for interstate construction and “urban renewal.” Lee had written extensively about the neighborhood known as the Triangle District and my city’s Black community. After reporting for years in West Virginia, Lee returned to California, where he continued to rigorously report for a city newspaper in Sacramento before leaving to focus on newspapers specifically serving Korean Americans. Read about Lee’s incredible life and reporting career here.

It’s a reminder that sometimes, for reporters and storytellers, you can be creatively paired with someone from the future who’s lucky enough to stumble on your work in a library file cabinet.

Until next week,

Anna

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