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In a special episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast, Dr. Christopher Lewis sits down for a heartfelt conversation with Michele Filgate, editor of the new anthology What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, and two of the book’s contributors, Susan Muaddi Darraj and Joanna Rakoff. Their discussion dives deep into the intricate, emotional, and sometimes complicated relationships between fathers and daughters—and why these connections matter.

The episode opens with all three guests sharing luminous memories of their fathers: trips to bookstores and theaters, bonding over poetry, or learning life skills under a car’s hood. These small moments, they reveal, helped shape their identities and instilled confidence, independence, and a profound sense of being seen. Whether it’s Michelle’s story of her dad sightseeing at news stations to support her journalism dreams, Susan’s father teaching her to be self-sufficient, or Joanna recollecting her father’s irrepressible optimism despite family tragedy, the stories resonate with authenticity and vulnerability.

A powerful theme throughout the conversation is the diversity—the “spectrum”—of fatherhood. The guests discuss how no two parent-child relationships are the same, and how the book’s essays echo this truth. The episode also delves into how culture, memory, and generational dynamics play pivotal roles in shaping both closeness and distance within families. For immigrant daughters like Susan, a father’s traditions and sacrifices root identity and values; for Joanna, storytelling was both a magic veil and a way to process hidden family pain.

The conversation is not just about nostalgia; it’s about growth, honesty, and the hope that openness leads to better understanding. The guests reflect candidly on how writing about their childhoods and their fathers challenged them as both daughters and parents, inspiring them to be more transparent with their own children. Essential advice emerges: listen deeply, let your daughters into your world, and foster mutual trust.

The episode’s warmth and wisdom are a reminder that strengthening father-daughter relationships isn’t about being perfect—it’s about showing up, being present, and truly listening.

Whether you’re a dad, a daughter, or simply curious about family relationships, this episode promises thoughtful stories, practical advice, and a boost of inspiration. Listen now and discover new ways to connect and grow alongside those you love.

Ready to deepen your connection? Tune in to this moving conversation on the Dad and Daughter Connection podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the dad and Daughter Connection, the podcast for dads who want to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
If you’re looking to build a stronger bond with your daughter and help her grow into a confident, independent woman, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Christopher Lewis, and the dad and Daughter Connection is the podcast where we dive into real stories, expert advice, and practical tips to help you navigate the incredible journey of fatherhood. In every episode, we’ll bring you conversations that inspire, challenge, and equip you to show up as the dad your daughter needs. So let’s get started, because being a great dad isn’t just about being there. It’s about truly connecting. Welcome back to the dad and Daughter Connection. I am so excited that you’re back with us again this week.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:57]:
As always, every week, we have a great opportunity to be able to learn and to grow and to find new ways to build stronger connections with our daughters. And that’s why I come back every week, and I know you come back every week, is to find those new ways and to identify new thoughts and perspectives. Because every week I love being able to bring you different people with different perspectives that can provide you with some new tools for your toolbox that will allow you to think about things in different ways and to allow for you to be able to bring those new learnings to the interactions that you’re having with your own daughters. And today, we’ve got three great guests. We don’t always have three people here, but we have three great guests today, and I’m really excited to have them here. We’re gonna be talking about a brand new book that is out there called what My Father and I Don’t Talk About. And this is a book that brings together 16 different writers, and in each of these chapters, they are speaking to the journey that they had with their own father and really how it allowed for them to become who they were. So it is an anthology.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:09]:
It follows the success of another book called what My Mother and I Don’t Talk about, which was very popular when that came out. And it is definitely a nonfiction book that allows for you to get a better understanding of of that fatherhood journey and how that fatherhood journey impacts daughters in different ways. So we’re gonna be talking about that book, but our guests today are the editor of the book, Michele Filgate, and then two of the authors, Susan Moady Dhiraj and Joanna Rakoff. I’m really excited to have all three of them here today to talk about their own journeys. And to help you in your journeys with your own daughters. Thank you so much for being here today.

Michele Filgate [00:02:56]:
Thank you for having us.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:02:58]:
Thank you.

Joanna Rakoff [00:02:58]:
Thanks so much.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:59]:
I’m really excited to have you here today. And whenever I have daughters on the show, I always love to start the conversation with an opportunity to get to not only know your father a little bit better, but also get a better understanding of your own relationship and how that impacted you in different ways. So one of the questions that I would ask all three of you is, as you think back to the relationship with your own father, what’s one thing that your father did that made you truly feel seen, heard, and valued as a daughter?

Michele Filgate [00:03:34]:
I would say that my dad used to take me to my local Barnes and Noble growing up and let me buy books. And that was always just. I loved that experience. He would go and he would go to the magazine stand because my dad would like to. He’s a musician, and he would buy, like, Billboard Magazine, but he’d let me go browse the book section and buy a few books for me. And that was always a special experience to go to the bookstore with him and feel like he was supporting my bookworm habit and also creating the writer that I would become years later.

Joanna Rakoff [00:04:09]:
Similarly, my dad was a former actor and comedian, and he had grown up in the theater. His father was a theater critic. The Yiddish theater, I should explain, but also the mainstream theater. And from my earliest childhood, I grew up around. Around New York. Took me to the theater with him. We went to the movies together, usually once or twice a week. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of actors, directors, screenwriters, playwrights.

Joanna Rakoff [00:04:34]:
And after those jaunts, after going to a Broadway show, we would go to Chock Full of Nuts, which something only New Yorkers probably remember, and have a sandwich or Danish and talk through everything. We would sort of talk through what we liked, what we didn’t like. And I think sharing his enthusiasms and his loves with me and bringing me into them, making me a part of them, was so integral to my becoming a person who was okay with being myself, if that makes sense.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:05:10]:
That’s so beautiful. My story is not that different, but my father never was able to go to college. He was an immigrant. He came to the United States in 1967. And I’m his eldest child and his only daughter, so I’m like the eldest daughter. We are a specific tribe of people, eldest daughters. And my father, even though he loves poetry and he writes poetry, was never really able to pursue that. He had to sort of work as soon as he arrived in the country.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:05:37]:
And he became a car mechanic for many years. And so I grew up kind of like just around him at his garage, and I would help hand him tools and things like that. And one thing I remember specifically, we would talk a lot while he was working on cars. And I remember specifically when I started to drive. I have three younger brothers. And so I was the lucky one that I was the first to do everything right. Like, I was the first one that he taught to drive. When he was teaching me how to drive, I was a very good driver.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:06:04]:
And then when I got my license, I thought, that’s it. I have my license. I can do whatever I want. And he made me. He would open the hood of the car and he said, you’re not driving until you can do these things. And he would make me learn how to change the oil, how to change a tire, how to jack up the car by myself. And I was like, why do I have to do this? I have a license. Can’t I just get behind the wheel and drive? And what he was teaching me was he told me, I want you to always know that you’re capable and that you have to be independent and that you are able to do these things, like, nothing should ever make you afraid.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:06:41]:
And I don’t remember any of my other friends in school having their father do that, which at the time I thought was not a great thing. But now I. And I realize I always grew up thinking I was capable. I never once in my life imagined I was incapable of anything. And I think it’s because of the way that he treated me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:06:59]:
All three amazing stories and definitely so important to build that confidence in our daughters in that way. I guess looking back, as you think about, again, your father, was there a moment where your dad’s support or guidance had a significant impact on your growth or your confidence. And it may be similar, Susan, to what you just said, or maybe something different.

Michele Filgate [00:07:24]:
I have a really vivid memory of my father, really encouraged my love of journalism. So in college, I was a journalism major. And when I was a kid, we were at Subway sandwich shop, and he saw Carol Jenkins there, who at the time was one of the anchors on NBC in New York City. And I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, an hour outside of the city. So he brought me over to. To meet her, and she invited me to come to NBC and shadow her for the day with my father. When I was probably 10 years old or 11. I can’t remember the exact age, but that became a really important relationship for me.

Michele Filgate [00:08:02]:
And it was so special that I got to do that with my dad. My dad always loved watching the news, and he wanted to support whatever I was interested in doing. So he came with me. And I still remember, you know, us getting a picture together with Carol Jenkins and Chuck Scarborough and Al Roker and it was. And Sue Simmons, who was there at the time, too. And it was such a pivotal experience for me. And then I ended up going on to be an intern at 60 Minutes when I was in college for Ed Bradley and two of his producers. And after college, I worked for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric for my first job out of college.

Michele Filgate [00:08:41]:
So I just vividly remember, like, once I was there, how much my father’s influence and voice was in my head. I was so nervous the first day as an intern, and then again the first day, this job right out of college where I’m the production secretary helping organize Katie Couric scripts. And I kind of felt like I was in Broadcast News the movie. I was so excited. And my father wore a CBS News hat and was bragging about me to all of his friends. He was just really proud of me. And so whenever I feel. Felt really scared or nervous, I just remembered that I just heard my dad’s voice in my head.

Michele Filgate [00:09:20]:
I felt like he was there with me, just like he was there with me when I was a little girl going to visit Carol, who became such an important mentor to me as well. So I feel like my dad helped connect me, helped set me on the path for building my confidence in myself, and that was invaluable.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:09:36]:
I remember when I was in high school again, I grew up in a very working class family, and there was. We just did not have a lot of money to go around. And so the question of college was always. There was always a big question mark on that situation. I had three siblings younger than myself, and there was a lot of talk in immigrant families when people are sort of struggling to make it. There’s always this question of to whom should we throw our resources? Should we. We have four children. Can we give a lot of money to one to go to college? How can we work that and be fair? And I graduated at the top of my class, and I was excelling in English and literature studies.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:10:13]:
And my father had bought me a typewriter at one point, which was a big deal to have a typewriter when I was younger. And then later he bought me a word processor. I remember it was like this thing with a little Tiny screen. It was like a big deal for me to have one. And he said, this is for you to type your stories and your essays and because you’re going to be a writer. But when it was time, when I was graduating from high school, there was a lot of talk in the wider family about. People would tell my father, maybe you shouldn’t send her to. You should save the money for the younger children.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:10:44]:
And he asked me, do you want to go to college? And I said, yes. And he said, okay, well, we’re going to make it work. And we did, and he did. And he took on extra shifts, and my mother worked as well. And so I’m very grateful that they believed in me. It’s a very surprising thing. I’m the first girl in my entire family to go to university. It was a really big deal for us as a family, as a wider community.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:11:06]:
So I’m very grateful for his support in me and his belief in me.

Joanna Rakoff [00:11:10]:
Oh, my God, Susan, I’m, like, about to cry. What I have to say about my father is so much less cataclysmic than either unmomentous than either of the things you two discussed, but I’ll just say so. I was born in 1972, and my parents were, for the time they were, you know, kind of geriatric. They were in their 40s. And a year before I was born, my parents had lost two children, my older brother and sister, who were 12 and 14. And I had one. Their oldest, my oldest sister was still around, so she was 18 when I was born. And so I was born into this family that had just suffered this horrible, horrible loss.

Joanna Rakoff [00:11:51]:
And I grew up not knowing about this loss. But, and this is the important part, my mother was, of course, incapacitated by the loss of these two children. And she was a person who I found out as a grownup had suffered a lot of loss prior to this and had had a pretty. This is what my essay is about. Had had a pretty difficult upbringing, but my father was, you know, he had been a comedian. He is a very, by nature, cheerful, buoyant, incredibly resilient person. And he was able to bring that cheerfulness, that good humor that what my mom would later call, after he died, the shining light of his love into every aspect of my day. And I don’t know what I am by nature.

Joanna Rakoff [00:12:42]:
Like, I don’t know if I’m resilient by nature. I don’t know if I’m cheerful by nature at all, because I think being raised by him led me to Be a person who felt that I could face anything, that I could overcome anything. A friend of mine once described me as someone who could always spin straw into gold. And. And I was shocked when she said that. But while writing the essay from Michelle, I thought about the ways in my father’s approach to life and the ways in which he was always there for me and the ways in which he was never afraid of strong or negative emotions in a way that my mother would just shut down. Like if I started to cry, she would say, stop crying. Stop crying this instant.

Joanna Rakoff [00:13:28]:
Stop crying right now. Stop crying. And my father would just hold me in his arms and listen to what was wrong. So more subtle, but something.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:13:37]:
Now I’m crying.

Joanna Rakoff [00:13:39]:
Me too.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:41]:
I really appreciate all three of you sharing those stories. Now I think I’d love for you to reflect back and think about that perfect day. If you could spend an entire day still with your dad doing anything, what would that look like?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:13:55]:
So my father, as I said, he loves poetry. And I’m so lucky to have my father. He just turned 80 in December, so he loves poetry. And he has committed to memory entire poems and Arabic poems. His first language is Arabic. Just like massive quantities of poetry that he can just call up. And he told me once I do that because when I was working in my shop, I would just recite poetry to pass the time as I was working, I couldn’t stop and consult the book. So I just committed it to memory.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:14:26]:
So his memory is incredible. And I remember when I was growing up and I was still living in my parents home, he would walk around the house just kind of reciting poems and he would stop me, I would be walking from like my bedroom to the bathroom and he would say, susan, stop, listen to this stanza. And he would like recite the stanza. And at the time when I was a teenager, I was like, I really need to do my hair and get to school. Like, I have things to do. But now I think if I could spend the whole day with him, I would just sit and listen to him. I wouldn’t even say anything. I would just listen and let him recite poetry to me.

Joanna Rakoff [00:14:59]:
My dad passed away a long time ago, and in his final years, he had a neurological ailment that is not that well known, but it manifests as Parkinson’s. Like if you met him, you would think he had Parkinson’s, essentially. And so he was radically incapacitated in his last year. And so when I think about, like, if I could spend a day with him, I. I think if I Could spend a day with the him before this disease wrecked him. He was a person who was so adventurous and active, and he loved to travel. He traveled all over the world. He joined the Air Force right after he finished dental school.

Joanna Rakoff [00:15:37]:
And when he enlisted, he wrote on his application, he got drunk when he filled it out, and even though he wasn’t a big drinker and wrote, I am only joining if you will send me somewhere in Western Europe in all caps. And so they sent him to Germany, and he used the two years that he was stationed there to travel to every single country in Europe except Spain and Portugal. I don’t know why. Maybe he just didn’t get there. And so if I could spend just one day with him, I think that I would spend it doing as many of the things that he loved to do. Like, he loved to play golf and tennis. He loved to take long walks in the woods. He loved to hit a handball against a court.

Joanna Rakoff [00:16:15]:
Like, he was really. He was a huge athlete. He played college basketball for City College. I would spend some time doing something like that with him, despite having not inherited his athletic ability. I would go to the driving range. He loved food. I would take him to eat a pastrami sandwich and a pickle, and then maybe I would take him to the movies and then get ice cream and talk about that movie and what was terrible in it and which actors were miscast and which were not and what scenes he would rewrite. And I would then take him to spend the rest of the day with as much of our family as I could.

Joanna Rakoff [00:16:52]:
He was really, really close, even with my mom’s side of the family, with her cousins, and he loved nothing more than a massive family gathering.

Michele Filgate [00:16:59]:
I’m gl. I’m not wearing mascara right now during this podcast recording because didn’t expect it to get so emotional listening to Joanna and you, Susan. Oh, my gosh.

Joanna Rakoff [00:17:10]:
Same.

Michele Filgate [00:17:11]:
Yeah. My father is still around, too, but I think that a perfect day would be going to a place that is no longer a place we can go to for us. So it would be. My grandmother and I wrote about this in my essay for the book. My grandmother, my dad’s mom, passed away in 2019, and her home, she was the matriarch of the family, and her home was the gathering place for our family. And the house no longer belongs to our family. But when my parents were still married, when I was really young, we lived with my grandmother there. So that is my childhood home, and it was on a lake, and it now belongs to a new family.

Michele Filgate [00:17:53]:
And that’s still so hard to wrap my head around. And I think, and I know that it’s hard for my dad, too. Like, he’s talked to me about driving past it and seeing, like, the house and the feelings, how emotional he gets seeing the house and knowing it no longer is in our family. And I think about our family home videos, how my dad was so obsessed with On Golden Pond, the movie that he somehow. I don’t even know how he did this, except he had a recording studio, so he must have figured out how to do this. But he put on our home videos from, like, this was back in the 90s. He put, like, this soundtrack from On Golden Pond, like, over images of, like, me and my dad and I have siblings as well, and, like, of us walking down the road toward that lake. Windwing is what it’s called.

Michele Filgate [00:18:40]:
And so I think that a perfect day with my dad would be watching that movie again On Golden Pond, because it just makes me think of my childhood and the beauty of that lake. And it would be going for a walk around the lake with him and also driving to a place that no longer exists. A lot of my core memories from my childhood are my dad driving me to the. This little market that was called Peach Lake Market in nearby. In North Salem, New York, like, just over the border of Connecticut. And it was this little country market store where I would get a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and I’d buy an Archie comic or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m really showing my age here. And I feel like there was something about the containment of the car.

Michele Filgate [00:19:24]:
Like, that was where we could just be ourselves with each other. It was easier than, like, sitting down and having a conversation, you know? And so I would. I would do that. I would spend a day doing that, of going to a place that no longer exists except in my mind, and a home that still exists, but is no longer in my family.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:45]:
I want to transition into talking about the book. And each of you have talked a little bit about the stories with your own dad. And in the book, you bring those stories to the forefront. And, you know, as an author, myself, as someone that has gone through that process, I’ve been an editor as well. So I truly appreciate the work, Michelle, that you put into bringing all of those different writing styles, different stories together. And I guess, Michelle, first, before I even talk about your essay that you submitted, you know, this book follows the success of the book that I mentioned earlier. What my mother and I don’t talk about. Why was it important for you to create a companion volume that focused on fathers.

Michele Filgate [00:20:29]:
It felt like a natural fit. And also while I was touring around the country for the first book back in 2019, and then when the book went viral twice on TikTok, in those viral social media posts and when I was on tour, I kept hearing from people again and again saying, I want a book about fathers. I need a book about fathers. So. And I also feel like we’re now in a time where there is a focus on fatherhood and looking at it in a more nuanced way, we’re starting to see, even in pop culture, we’re seeing new portrayals of what fatherhood can look like and allowing men to be more vulnerable and to kind of break the mold of what fatherhood like has traditionally always looked like. So I wanted to have a book that looked at the wide spectrum of different experiences with fathers. And I felt like that was really.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:21]:
Important in reading the book and in looking at all of the different essays you had to curate all of those. As an editor, what themes or contradictions about fatherhood surprised you the most across that contributions?

Michele Filgate [00:21:37]:
A lot of people have asked me about what has surprised me. I feel like as a writer and a reader, as a. And as a human, nothing has really surprised me just because I expect fatherhood to not look just one way. Right. I expect to see a lot of different versions of fatherhood and what fatherhood can look like. But I think it’s more just that the individual essays that all the authors and this book really moved me with how open they were and how vulnerable they were on the page about portraying their own experiences. And I felt like everyone was really generous with writing about their father, and it allows the reader to really get to know their father. And I think it’s so hard to turn a parent into a character on the page that then a stranger is going to read.

Michele Filgate [00:22:27]:
And I think that’s a very difficult and challenging thing to do about someone who. Especially if it’s someone who you knew really well. And so I think, for me, again, I don’t know that I was surprised, but I was just moved by all of the different essays in here, whether the person had a good relationship with their dad or a terrible relationship. And there are a variety of pieces here, so there’s something that will speak to everyone, I think.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:54]:
Now, your essay, called Thumbs up, captures the fragmented but affectionate way that you and your father communicate, almost like as you kind of talk about two frogs on a lily pads. How did that image help you understand the rhythm of your relationship with him.

Michele Filgate [00:23:10]:
Yeah, I mentioned that the, you know, we’re. Because we both have adhd, that it is like we’re two frogs on lily pads when we’re talking and we’re always skipping from topic to topic. That helped me understand the. The ways in which we communicate and we don’t communicate and that these texts my dad sends, these messages he sends me on Facebook or the texts he sends me on my ph, or these phone calls, because that’s a lot of what my piece is about, and it’s called Thumbs up after his favorite emoji. He loves to use the thumbs up emoji. I’ve learned that these are his ways of showing his love. And I often don’t have deep conversations with my father, and I’m okay with that because I know that this is how we communicate and this is how we show our love for each other is through these quick phone calls, these quick messages where he. He’s telling me to watch out for sharks when I’m not anywhere near the ocean.

Michele Filgate [00:24:02]:
I’ve really come to appreciate just his sense of humor and his quirkiness and the ways in which he shows his love. And ever since my Uncle Jim took his own life in 2019, he was my dad’s best friend, and he’s really tried to fill that hole in his life by calling his three adult daughters all the time. And so a lot of times at very inconvenient times, like when I’m in a zoom meeting, I’m surprised he hasn’t called right now recording this podcast, but I think that that image of the frogs really helped me also with just structuring my essay, because it does kind of leap from section to section.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:38]:
You know, the loss of your uncle definitely reshaped your father’s behavior based on what you wrote. And your piece becomes quite a quiet elegy to sibling connection. How did witnessing that relationship affect how you view your father now as a man, a brother, and a dad?

Michele Filgate [00:24:58]:
My uncle was younger than him. My dad was the oldest of four boys. But I feel like my uncle kind of took on the older brother role with my dad a lot. And so with Uncle Jim gone, I think my dad has really had to take on that older brother role for the first time. In some ways, it was everything to me because I saw that deep, unconditional love he had for my Uncle Jim is similar to the deep, unconditional love he has for his daughters and his son. And so it was an important thing for me to witness. And going through that grief together was heartbreaking with the loss of Uncle Jim. And then Mimo a few months.

Michele Filgate [00:25:41]:
She died three months after. Meemo was my grandmother, as she died three months after Uncle Jim. So our family went through this really terrible year, personally. But it also made me realize how important our memories are. They’re everything, right? Thinking about what we’re talking about today, even with Susan talking about your dad memorizing these poems, I think our memories are so crucial. They are part of our legacy, which is why it’s so devastating when people lose their memories, because memories are such a core part of us and also the objects that we have. I write about that a lot in my essay, too, that my father kind of has his shrine in his office. And I think a lot of dads are like this, like these objects that remind them of their unique.

Michele Filgate [00:26:26]:
And I have kind of inherited that as well, because it’s these things that become sort of totems that remind me of that unconditional love from my father, from my grandmother, from my uncle.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:38]:
Now, toward the end of your essay, you reflect, like you said, on memory, on keepsakes and preserving scent or feeling through physical objects. What role do these rituals of memory play in how you understand your father’s and your own emotional legacy?

Michele Filgate [00:26:54]:
I think memories, they help us reflect on what we’ve been through, right? And also, as we’re holding on to memories, they’re kind of shifting, too. I talk about this as a teacher when I teach writing. When we’re writing about our own lived experience, we kind of change that memory a little bit when we write it, because then our memories become the story that we told rather than just that lived experience, rather than just that memory. And so I think that our memories are transformed when we tell them, whether we write them down or when we’re sharing them with others, they’re like living memories. They’re reshaped somehow. So I think about that a lot, too. And that kind of goes with this idea, too, that I feel like everyone in this book and in the first anthology, if you ask them to write about their same parent five years from now, that what they write might be very different based on where they are in their lives and how their relationship has changed.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:27:50]:
Now, Susan, you wrote a piece called Baba Peels Apples for Me. And your piece delves into, as you mentioned earlier, the eldest daughter syndrome in a Palestinian American household. How did your father’s cultural expectations shape your early sense of responsibility and identity?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:28:09]:
So I think it took me a long time to understand that my father is actually. He’s essentially a refugee, and he’s been through a lot of trauma, and he’s experienced a tremendous loss, which is having to leave his homeland. And that in that loss, like, you know, there’s a lot committed to memory, as you said, Michelle. Like, I mean, I grew up hearing stories about my father and his childhood. In fact, when I’ve gone to his village, you know, I can actually look at an older building and I can say, oh, that’s where Ibn Musa and my father played together. You know, I know these stories so well. It’s almost like he’s used his memory as, like, a way of documenting these things to us. But also he felt that, like, our culture, even though we were Americans now and he was raising American children, essentially, he felt that our culture was a way to ground us in something.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:28:59]:
And some people do that with different things. Like, some people feel that their religion grounds them in something. My father is not really religious. We’re a Christian family. But he’s not like, really, as he would say, he hasn’t really completely bought the whole organized religion thing. He’s not really into it, so. But he’s a spiritual person. But he felt that culture is a way of grounding you in something that’s real, so that you know who you are and who you are might change.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:29:22]:
But he felt that America was a wonderful country, but it was just such a big country with so many different people and different ideas. And so if you don’t have something to ground yourself in, you might get lost, and who you are might change. Like, you might learn about another type of identity or another value system that you prefer more. But at least you’re starting with something that’s solid. And so he raised us with what are essentially the cultural values that he was raised with. And I’m grateful that he did. I have. I’ve kept many of them, and I’ve raised my children with many of them.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:29:55]:
And many of them I have just turned away from and decided they’re not for me. And I think I’m grateful for that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:30:01]:
Now, you describe both distance and tenderness with your father like the scene of him peeling apples. How did writing this piece help you reconcile those emotional contradictions?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:30:12]:
Well, I think the distance came from a lot of his fears. You know, my father, I think his greatest fear was that he would not be able to provide us with a life that was fulfilling. And he’d already lost so much that it was very important to him to provide us with a home and something that was lasting. So I grew up as the Eldest child, I think, being sort of the testing ground for those fears. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve grown up with immigrant parents, that there’s so much that they want to give you, and it’s because they’re afraid of losing it forever. Like, if they don’t pass it on to you, like the language, the food, the values they feel if they don’t pass these things on to you, these things are lost forever. And so the distance, what I learned as I became older, I just turned 50 this month. So as I became older, I learned.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:31:03]:
Didn’t take me till I was 50. I think I was about 30 when I realized that all that distance, that those tense moments were because he was afraid. And I think I said in my essay that we were kind of learning about living in America. At the same time. He didn’t know American culture. I mean, he came here in 67. I was born in 75. And I’m very sure he and my mother planned to go back.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:31:25]:
Like, they were waiting to be able to go back, but they were told they could never go back. And so to their shock, they realized they were going to be raising a family in this country that they were still not familiar with. And that’s very scary. And that’s where the tension and distance comes from. But my father is a very loving and openly loving person. I mean, I never. And my children never see my father without getting big hugs and kisses on the cheeks. And he’s very, very emotional, and he shows his love in lots of different ways.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:31:53]:
But he also is very direct and says, I love you. Sometimes he’ll just text me and say, I love you. I hope you’re having a good day. I mean, I’m very lucky to have grown up like that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:32:02]:
Speaking about those words, you mentioned the importance of language. How your father used Arabic endearments but also demanded silence or obedience. How has language, or lack of it, defined your relationship with him?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:32:18]:
You said he demanded obedience. Even if it’s interpreted like that. I would say even those things were because of his fears. Right. So, for example, he never wanted me in high school to date because he thought that dating was going to distract me from my studies and I would not have time for my studies. And then what would happen if I. I. And he didn’t want me to go out late because he knew that his co workers, that their children would be out late.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:32:45]:
And he would hear stories about how they came home drunk or they had car accidents. And this was like a major fear. Like, this was something that when I have teenagers myself and I worry about these things. But I think for him, this was such a shocking thing that he was afraid that I would be harmed or I would. So and so he clamped down. Right. The language issue comes into play, I think, because he always spoke to me in Arabic, and sometimes when I was angry, I would answer him in English. Every immigrant, every child of immigrants knows that trick.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:33:16]:
It’s the most passive aggressive thing you can do if your parents are immigrants. But I think that his real true self came out when he was speaking in Arabic. Like he could find the exact words he wanted to use when he was using his own language. And he speaks fluent English, of course. He speaks it with a very heavy, very charming accent, which everybody loves when they talk to him. They’re very charmed by it. But Arabic is definitely the language in which he best expresses himself and where all the nuanced things he wants to say are made clear when he speaks in Arabic.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:33:49]:
How do you see your role as a parent now, especially when reflecting on the inherited patterns from your father’s parenting style?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:33:57]:
Well, I’m raising an eldest daughter, and there are maybe some responsibilities I’m very careful not to. To not to put on her, although I do find myself really liking her. And she’s like my. I call her my vice president because an eldest daughter. And maybe this is true for eldest sons too, I don’t know. But there really is a sort of like second in command kind of energy that we bring to the table, I think, like my daughter, really. A lot of times if I need something, I don’t even have to express what I need. She kind of looks at me, she says, oh, let me go to the car for you, or, or, hey, I can go pick up my brother.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:34:33]:
Let me do that for you. So there’s like this energy that she brings that I think my mother has said I had the same vibe when she was raising me. So that’s kind of like a remarkable thing. But I try not to lean on that too much. It’s easy to do it, but I try not to. I try to share with my children the values that I’ve kept from my upbringing, especially the value of, or the belief in themselves as capable people, no matter what they need to do, that they are capable people, that even if they. They fail, they can learn something from the failure. That’s something my father taught me for sure, that even if you fail, there’s a lesson you take from that and the next attempt will be a smarter attempt, a more strategic Attempt, whatever it might be.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:35:16]:
So I think I’ve passed that on to my children. I hope I have. We’ll see what they write about me in 25 years.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:35:22]:
Now, Joanna, you wrote a piece called the Storybook Childhood, and your essay paints your father as a storyteller, both enchanting and elusive. How did his constant reinvention of truth affect your ability to trust narratives, both personal and professional?

Joanna Rakoff [00:35:40]:
Growing up, I was not aware that there was an elusive. That he had an elusive relationship to truth. I just believed everything he told me and did really feel that I myself had kind of a storybook childhood. That title refers to my mother’s childhood, but I sort of bought the Kool Aid. I think, below the surface, I knew that there was something awry, that I wasn’t being told the whole story, and also that there were things within me and things happening in my life that didn’t fit the narrative of the Storybook Childhood. But I myself sort of squelched them down to kind of fit my father’s defining narrative for our family. As an adult, as I’ve slowly come to understand that the kind of predominant story of my childhood and of our family was not what it seemed, I think that it’s not made me in any way less trusting of other people, but it has made me a critic, which is to say I mentioned my father, and I would go to movies and critique them after. My father was also, perhaps ironically, perhaps not a huge, huge reader who loved criticism.

Joanna Rakoff [00:36:52]:
So he introduced me to Pauline Kael, the legendary film critic who he adored. He was a person who. He read the New Yorker every week, and he would read the Critic at Large section first. And so I then started doing that when I was maybe like 8 or 9 years old. I was very young, and my eldest child, who’s 20, my son, who’s not relevant to this podcast, he started doing the same thing in third grade. He started reading the New Yorker, the critics section first. And so I guess this is perhaps not a satisfactory answer, but I think that there’s a way in which the kind of silent message of my childhood and my kind of coming of age and realizing that there was a lot below the surface was to regard everything in life with a critic’s eye. And I think it’s not a coincidence that I started life as a literary critic.

Joanna Rakoff [00:37:40]:
I thought that was what I wanted to be. I wanted to be like Lionel Trilling or T.S. eliot, except not racist and a Nazi, whatever. But I wanted to be a kind of high literary critic. And then when it Became clear that I wasn’t cut out, out for academia, that I didn’t want to continue on and get my doctorate, that I couldn’t write in academic language. I became a book critic, basically, and also did theater criticism, food criticism, stuff like that. I think that I view the world through this critical lens, always thinking about what’s the counter narrative, what’s the story below the story, and also, what’s going on behind the scenes, how was this made, what happened? And also, and here I am giving you, like, five levels of one little thing also. What are the sociocultural ideas that were in the back of the writer, the showrunner, the cinematographer’s mind that shaped every aspect of this piece of culture? I can’t watch anything, read anything, be privy to any piece of art without thinking about all of these things at once.

Joanna Rakoff [00:38:40]:
And I think that’s really what happened to me from growing up in this family, where there’s this one truth and then there were several of them, other truths lurking beneath it that were never spoken of.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:38:51]:
Now you recount the storybook world your father created, often masking deeper wounds or realities. How did writing this piece help you uncover those layers of illusion?

Joanna Rakoff [00:39:03]:
This is a really unsatisfactory answer. That seems to be my theme for this round of questions. But the actual sitting down and writing of the essay and having to face these truths about my father is actually what allowed me to uncover those truths. As in, so I’m writing a whole book. My new book, which I’m under contract for, which is overdue, which is called the Fifth Passenger, is about essentially uncovering family secrets. And it’s much more focused on the secret about my late brother and sister who. Whose lives and death were kept from me, which meant that many, many other things were kept from me, which meant that I didn’t understand anything about my family. I didn’t understand why my mother would burst into tears when I walked into the room.

Joanna Rakoff [00:39:52]:
I thought I was doing something wrong, that kind of thing. So it’s focused on that. And in writing this essay, which is focused on another secret that plays into the book, in this particular book, I talk about my family, kind of of both my parents coming from a culture of secrecy for different reasons. My mom, you know, for the reasons that I discuss in the essay, that she grew up feeling ashamed of herself for existing. For listeners out there who, of course, haven’t read the essay, my mother was born in 1930, and her father abandoned her mother in the hospital. And she was from a very small town. Her mother had moved to New York City, married, had her at a very young age, and was left with this infant and no one nowhere, no money, nothing. She had a big diamond ring, but that was it.

Joanna Rakoff [00:40:41]:
And so she went back home to her small town. And it was almost as if my mother’s father, her biological father, had vanished. My mother was given her family as her maternal family’s last name. And I understand now was kind of regarded as kind of a social pariah in this conservative small town. You know, the child of a single mother. No one knew anything and no one had ever, ever seen her father. And there’s much more to it. But.

Joanna Rakoff [00:41:07]:
So she sort of grew up in this culture of secrecy, never talking about her father, never talking about her mother being a single mother, none of these things. And my father, on the other hand, was a red diaper baby. So his parents were communist. They were really socialists, but they were leaders in the Socialist party, they were labor activists. And during the McCarthy era, they didn’t literally go underground, but they buried this part of their past. And my father has a 500 page FBI file, and he was an actual child when his, you know, he was either unborn or a child when his parents were engaged in these activities, but he still has that file. And everyone in my father’s family, actually on both sides, has a huge FBI file. So no one ever spoke of this.

Joanna Rakoff [00:41:51]:
I actually only found out the real truth about this when my grandmother died and I inherited her apartment and I found all these papers and I was like, what is this? And my mother was like, don’t talk about it. So they both come from these kind of cultures of secrecy, which I’m trying to investigate in the book. But the real point of my mentioning all this is just that I think there is something in my personality, maybe there’s something in everyone’s personality in which I really maybe just didn’t want to know all of this, even though I’m writing a whole book about it. And I wrote a gazillion page proposal that I want worked on for years. And I’ve been working on this book for years. Part of me just doesn’t want to know. Part of me just wants to think of my family as this happy family and wants to continue to drink the Kool Aid. And so writing this essay for Michelle was really difficult.

Joanna Rakoff [00:42:37]:
I really didn’t want to write it. I really, really avoided telling the truth about my mom’s childhood, about my father manufacturing these layers and layers, layers of lies about it. And I guess this is one of the things that Happens when you write memoir. I’m not. I’m really a novelist. I’m not a natural memoirist. Maybe I don’t like to tell the truth. I don’t like to uncover hard truths.

Joanna Rakoff [00:42:59]:
But having to sit down and actually work on it, which I really did under duress, one of my closest friends basically, like, kidnapped me and brought me to her country house and like, locked me away until I wrote a draft of it. Forced me to kind of figure out my own feelings about this, and also helped me figure out out who I am as a mother and a wife. And what do I do? My husband read the essay. One of the. There were many drafts of it, but one of the earlier drafts, and he said, the thing that you’re leaving out here is how you’re culpable in this kind of family tradition of aggrandizing the past and aggrandizing your family and glamorizing your family members, including your father. And he was sort of saying, you’re doing the same thing that your dad did for our kids. You’re making your father and your mother into these larger than life glamorous figures. And I thought, oh, my God, he’s.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:43:54]:
Completely right, you know, in speaking about that and being a parent today. How has your father’s fondness for storytelling influenced the way that you do communicate truth or fiction with your own children? And in writing this, has it affected or impacted or changed the way in which you now reflect and talk with your kids?

Joanna Rakoff [00:44:18]:
Writing this really did change the way I talk with my kids, definitely. I think I made a conscious effort to be more transparent with them in every way, to not sugarcoat things, to not talk about my family and the past in sort of sepia toned images, to kind of go behind those. My parents were both very attractive people, and we have all these, like, glamorous photos of them and glamorous clothing, and my son loves to pull them out and look at them. And I feel like there’s a sort of really powerful metaphor in that. In that those images only tell one part, one very small part of a huge emotional, socio, cultural, historical, economic history. And I think I really have become aware of the need to be as honest and to put things in context for my kids and to not exaggerate things in either direction. You know, to not sort of lapse into the kind of stories my dad told about his gritty childhood on the Lower east side, being chased by gangs and all of that. Like, to sort of try to tell them the truth as I know it, rather than Perpetuating these almost cinematic myths that of course have a lot of truth to them.

Joanna Rakoff [00:45:39]:
My father wasn’t lying to me about his childhood, about his family’s life. He just was kind of leaving things out and making things more the way he wanted them to be or the more exciting, as exciting as they could be. So I try very hard not to do this. I think prior to writing this essay I was much less conscious of this tendency and bought into a little bit more of the stories I had been told and also felt, I think my parents really felt like they needed to protect me. In fact, I know that they did. The reason they kept this secret about my late siblings was a feeling that they needed to protect me. I eventually found out that my mother wanted me never to be known as coming from this tragic family. What had happened to my family was not just tragic, it was very publicly tragic.

Joanna Rakoff [00:46:24]:
I now know. And we lived in a town, you know, everyone knew our family, we lived in the center of town. Parents were very active in all elements of the town, professionally and politically and. And my mother just didn’t want me to have this specter chasing me. And that’s part of the reason that she never told me about these things. And I think there’s a layer of that to every aspect of what my parents told me about who I am and who our family was. And so I realized that part of that was generational, but that I had inherited that and that there were so many ways in which I tried to protect my kids, who I just want to mention, span in age between 9 and 20 with a 16 year old in between. So the 9 year old is really little.

Joanna Rakoff [00:47:04]:
And it is okay to protect her from. From things. Certainly it’s okay to protect all of them from things, but I think that I in general started giving them all a lot more credit for being able to understand things than I had before. So thank you, Michelle, for making me a better parent.

Michele Filgate [00:47:21]:
It’s really moving to hear, A little embarrassing for me.

Joanna Rakoff [00:47:26]:
I used to be one of those people who was like, writing is not therapy. And now I’m like, maybe it’s a.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:47:32]:
Little bit, but it’s kind of the thing about parenting I’m thinking about, like, we don’t know what we’re doing when we’re parents. Like, we really don’t. Like, that’s what I think I learned about my dad is he didn’t know how to raise children, especially in a different country. We’re all still learning, we’re all still getting better and fine tuning our Parenting skills. And I love hearing that. It’s so interesting.

Joanna Rakoff [00:47:51]:
Well, there’s like, that Russian idea, the first pancake. I think the first person who mentioned it to me was M. Gessen, who used to be known as Masha Gessen, the writer and I introduced interviewed her so long ago, and she mentioned this concept of the first pancake, which is that the first child is the one where you’re like, you have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know if the griddle is too hot or too cool. So it could be burned, it could be undercooked and too pale. And then after that, all the pancakes turn out, like, perfectly browned and the right texture and that kind of thing. And you feel like, well, there is some truth to that. And hopefully the oldest one turns out.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:48:27]:
Note, this is my eldest daughter thing. I’m telling you, it’s real, it’s true. Or eldest child syndrome. Yeah, that’s so fascinating.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:48:35]:
Well, I really appreciate all of you sharing your stories today. And we always finish our interviews with what I like to call the dad connection 6. And I usually ask dads these questions, but I’m going to ask you these questions as well. First and foremost, what’s one word that describes your relationship with your own father?

Joanna Rakoff [00:48:52]:
I feel like if I had to choose one word for my dad, the first thing that comes to mind is magical.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:48:58]:
I would have to say it’s an Arabic word, the word habibi, which a lot of people are familiar with. It just means my love. And it can refer to your significant other, to your child, to your parent. But it’s a word I heard just growing up. Every single day I call my kids habibi. It’s something we heard a lot. It captures so much, like, softness and tenderness. And that’s the word that came to mind when you asked that question.

Michele Filgate [00:49:22]:
I think I would say creative, because my father, like I said, he has a background as a musician and he had a recording studio, and he’s also a very talented artist, just as a hobby, not something he’s pursued. So the word creative, what’s the best.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:49:37]:
Piece of dad advice you’ve ever received?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:49:40]:
It’s kind of a question that my dad would say, he would ask us all the time if I would say, I can’t do this. He would say, who said you can’t? And then that would lead to, like, a larger discussion of you’re telling yourself you can’t, but you don’t even know that you can’t. So he would always say, who says you Can’t. So it’s advice in the form of a question. I think.

Michele Filgate [00:49:58]:
I think for me, my father, I wouldn’t say it’s one specific thing he said, but he could always tell when I was with the wrong person. And it frustrated me because I didn’t want my dad to weigh in on my love life. But he knew. He just knew. And so I wish I had listened to him over my many years of dating instead of just being scoffing and being like, it’s my dad, he’s not gonna be happy with anyone. I dare date. Because as soon as I met my husband, I just got married last year, he was immediately part of the family. And my dad loves my husband so much and Andy is like a son to him.

Michele Filgate [00:50:34]:
So I think that I wish I had listened to my dad sooner.

Joanna Rakoff [00:50:38]:
These are two kind of quotidian, pedestrian things. My family is not one for, like big proclamations or life changing pieces of advice or guidance. But we ate out a lot when I was a kid. I now know, I think, because my mom, mom was really not in the best state. And my mom somehow had this tendency, it was like she was a contrarian or something. So we would go to like a seafood restaurant in Maine and my mom would order a hamburger and it would be terrible. And my father would say, you gotta eat steak in a steakhouse. And there’s a way in which, like, obviously this is just like very silly advice, but as the older I’ve gotten, I think about that all the time the way my mom always did that.

Joanna Rakoff [00:51:18]:
This. We would go to a steakhouse and she would order fish and be like, this isn’t good and this restaurant is terrible. And my father would say, you gotta eat steak in a steakhouse. And it applies to so many things and it, you know, almost like any situation that you get yourself into, there’s a way in which it boils down to, you should eat steak in a steakhouse. Even with romantic partners, Michelle, it’s like you can’t expect someone to be someone they’re not. But conversation. Conversely, my dad was a very mischievous person and a very adventurous person who. He was the person who you’d be on the beach in Hawaii or wherever, staying at.

Joanna Rakoff [00:51:55]:
Not like the Four Seasons. And you’d take a walk along the beach and you’d see the pool at the Four Seasons and be like, let’s just go in there and swim. And I’d be like, but dad, you know, we’re not staying there. And he’d be like, they’re not Gonna know. And you would. And it was almost always fine. Like, and he loved to go, shh, don’t tell anyone. Like, don’t tell anyone.

Joanna Rakoff [00:52:13]:
And I definitely. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve taken that, shh, don’t tell anyone in that there are so many rules you can break that will make your life better, but that won’t harm anyone and maybe will help people. And it just lends your life a little bit of a spark, in a way. But it also. As a writer, I have this whole talk that I give that started as a commencement speech for college, and I now give it different MFA programs and whatever that is called, Break every rule. And I realized that it came out of my dad saying this to me. And as a writer, you really do have to throw out all rules when you sit down and that sort of blank screen or blank, blank legal pad is in front of you. So I feel like that, shh, don’t tell anyone.

Joanna Rakoff [00:53:08]:
Because no one’s gonna know. No reader is gonna read your book and be like, oh, you’re not supposed to have a lot of backstory at the front of the book. Like, no. You know, these rules that you learn, no one is ever going to know if you break them. They’re just. If you write a great book or a great essay, they’re just gonna be absorbed in it. Follow some rules, break all the others.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:53:26]:
I love that so much.

Michele Filgate [00:53:28]:
Me too.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:53:29]:
Now I know. Susan and Joanna, you both have daughters. If you could give your daughter one life lesson in. In a single sentence, what would it be?

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:53:37]:
I would tell her, you don’t have to fix everybody. You don’t have to fix people. It’s not your job to fix people. I think, and I say this because growing up in my family, I was always helping, and I was always the second in command, so to speak. And whenever there was something wrong, I would feel very responsible for it. And I’m still like that. I have students who will come to me. They may have disappeared midway through the semester, and then they come to me a month later, the semester’s over, and they want to me to help them magically pass the class.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:54:07]:
And I get really invested. I try. I think the older I get, the more I’m like, it’s not my job to fix the world. Maybe all women need to hear this advice. It’s not our job to do that. It doesn’t mean you can’t be nice and you can’t be helpful, but you should not take it on as your responsibility. So that would be my advice.

Joanna Rakoff [00:54:24]:
I think I’m torn here because there’s so much I want to tell my daughters. But I think maybe the biggest thing that encompasses some of the others would be be don’t let anyone’s ideas about who you are or what you can do shape the choices you make with your life. I think I, as a kid, college student, a young person, really did. I think that I, in a sponge like way, absorbed what people were telling me about myself, like about the way that I looked, about who I was in the world, about what was possible for me. And I really did let those things affect me and affect, affect even some of my biggest choices in life. And in some ways they kind of contradicted the things that my father told me. But I let those outside voices affect me in such a deep and profound way. And it bothers me to this day.

Joanna Rakoff [00:55:19]:
And I really hope that I can free my daughters from that and free them from allowing those outside ideas and voices to have them take the safer route, especially professionally, rather than kind of going for what they want.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:55:37]:
As you think about your own relationship with your own father and you think about other fathers that are out there trying to build those connections with their daughters, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

Michele Filgate [00:55:54]:
I would say that I think it’s easy for dads to get kind of embarrassed talking about quote unquote traditional girl things with girls. And I would encourage fathers to be more open minded about listening to their daughters and not just changing the subject or walking away or dismissing them. I would say I would love to see dads take their daughters seriously with, Whether they’re talking about a crush they have or a movie star that they like or whatever, Even if it’s something that they seem that they’re not as interested in. Listen and take your daughter’s interests seriously.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:56:35]:
If I could piggyback on that, I would say, ask your daughters for advice yourself. Like, tell your daughters I had a bad day at work and this coworker said this thing to me. What do you think I should do? I think I should talk to him tomorrow. But what do you think? Ask her advice. Tell her about, don’t make yourself the person who knows everything. Show her that you also have bad days and you would like to listen to her input. I remember my dad would talk to me all the time. I had a customer today who said this.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:57:02]:
It really put me in a bad mood or I’m not sure what to do about your brother’s. Wrestling schedule. He would talk to me and ask for my input. And I think it would make your daughter feel that her input matters. And she would never allow anyone in her future to dismiss her input or, or dismiss her opinion or point of view because she’s used to having her voice be heard by the most important man in her life until that point.

Joanna Rakoff [00:57:26]:
And really similarly, I of course have two things that I’ll say very quick, but similarly I would say let them in, which is kind of saying the same thing as both of you. Like I’m just thinking about last night. My husband, who is my two older kids stepfather but is very close with them, he has all sorts of quirky interests and loves and like finds tremendous, tremendous excitement and humor and like the Eurovision Song Awards and that kind of thing. And loves to laugh and have fun and enjoy whatever he enjoys. And last night he was watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee and I was putting my younger daughter to sleep and he grabbed my 16 year old who you would not think would necessarily, if you knew her, you wouldn’t think it would be her interest. But he was like, you have to watch this, it’s amazing. And I came out of my younger daughter’s room and heard that hysterically laughing and cheering and I don’t know if you guys watched it, but they were just going crazy. They were like sarp and, and it was the most fun and just I think bringing your daughter in rather than that kind of conventional thing of like, I’m interested in basketball and I’m going to this game with my friends and we will drink beer.

Joanna Rakoff [00:58:33]:
Realizing that your daughter can share your interests if you let her in and give her the chance and think about them in a kind of non conventional way and think about yourself in a non conventional way. But the other related thing I just would say is find every opportunity to laugh. You know, like listen to her stories from school when she comes home. Listen to all of her stories. You know, she might talk for two hours about things that happened at lunch that her friends did. And maybe you’re kind of like zoning out and thinking about work, but don’t really listen and find the moment when you can laugh about things and, and so she can laugh about them too.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:59:13]:
And I just want to add one thing which is that these are all the things that we’re mentioning are things that any father can do. Especially like fathers who are like working class fathers who don’t like have a lot. Like fathers are always into this idea of being the provider and if they are not able to, like, financially or materially provide a lot for their children. And, you know, we live in this materialistic society. You can feel bad about yourself, I think, as a father, because you’re not giving your kids the same things that other children are getting from their parents. And your kids will let you know that their friend has an apple watch, and they don’t. But all the things that we’re talking about are more lasting than those things. And they’re things any father can do.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [00:59:53]:
You don’t have to be. You don’t have to be making a quarter million dollars a year to sit and talk to your child or watch the spelling bee with them or chat with them and build those. Build that sense of trust and love with your daughter.

Joanna Rakoff [01:00:06]:
And, Susan, just listening to you, I’m realizing that there’s one thing that we’re all saying which is just listen. Like, listen more than you talk. You know, if your daughter is talking to you about anything that’s on her mind, like a problem with a grade, you know, not being the starter for the rugby team, like, whatever it is a dilemma that she has, you know, with, do I do this night or that night, or I didn’t get this part in the school play. She doesn’t need you to solve the problem for her. I think this is a thing that dads do. My own dad did not do this, but I see this in my life, this need to kind of solve a problem. Be like, why don’t you just do this? Or, let’s just do this, or, I’ll just call the school. But that’s not what they need.

Joanna Rakoff [01:00:45]:
They just need you to listen. That’s all they want, is for you to listen, to really listen. Not while looking at your phone, not while doing paperwork, not while, like, raking leaves. Like, to really, really listen. Which is, I suppose, why driving can be such a wonderful time. Dads and daughters.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [01:01:06]:
And actually, if I can quote my mother here, one of my mother’s favorite sayings is, God gave you two ears and one mouth because you’re supposed to listen twice as much as you talk. She. She said that all the time. I don’t know where she heard it, but she said it all the time. And I. She would say that to us when we were gabbing a lot, I think, but she said it in other, more appropriate moments. So listening. I think you’re right, Joanna.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [01:01:29]:
This is about just building a relationship through listening. And when you listen, you’re really hearing and seeing your child as the beautiful individual that they are.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [01:01:40]:
Well, I just want to say thank you to all three of you for being here today. Your words are so important and the relationship that you had with your own fathers and that you have with your own fathers is so powerful. I appreciate you sharing not only this journey with us today, but in the book. And Michelle, if people want to find out more about the authors in the book or the book itself, where should they go?

Michele Filgate [01:02:04]:
Yes, I encourage them to buy the book from their local independent bookstore, but they can also go to my website and I have information about the book on my website. Michellephilgate.com.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [01:02:16]:
Well, again, thank you so much for your time today for sharing your own journey with your fathers. And I wish you all the best.

Michele Filgate [01:02:24]:
Thank you.

Susan Muaddi Darraj [01:02:25]:
Thank you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [01:02:25]:
Thank you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [01:02:26]:
That’s a wrap for this episode of the Dad and Daughter Connection. Thanks for joining us on this journey to build stronger bonds and raise confident, independent daughters. Remember, being an engaged dad isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a fellow dad. And don’t forget, you can find all our episodes at dadanddaughterconnection.com until next time, keep showing up, keep connecting, and keep being the dad she needs.

Musical Outro Performer [01:02:57]:
We’re all in the same boat and it’s full of tiny screaming passengers we spend the time, we give the lessons, we make the meals, we buy them presents and bring your A game cause those kids are growing fast the time goes by just like a dynamite blast Calling astronauts and firemen carpenters and muscle men get out and be the world you down Be the best dad you can be Be the best that you can.