WBUr podcasts, Boston.
The universe has good news for the lost, lonely and heartsick.
The sugars are here speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Alman.
I'm Cheryl straight.
This is dear sugars.
Oh dear song, won't you please, please share some little sweetness with me?
I check my bell vibes every day.
Oh, in the sugar you see, in my way.
So, Cheryl, I was reading two things in conjunction, reading letters from our inbox, and also just happened to read this story that was in the New Yorker recently, some months ago, called FAQ, like, frequently asked questions by the writer Allegra Goodman, whose work I love.
And it was really such a brilliant story.
And I sort of just could see in my little brain this connection to all these letters we've started to receive at dear sugars.
The story deals with this young woman who returns home from college, and she's sort of seemingly adrift.
The way the story is presented, and it's brilliant in this sense, is that the parents are very concerned.
They have all these anxieties about whether their child is depressed.
She doesn't seem to be taking action.
When's she going to get back to school, get back on track, and so forth.
And as the story progresses, in a way that good fiction has of sort of defamiliarizing us, making us see the world in a new way, what we actually come to see is that the parents vigilance is a form of neediness, that it's a kind of dependence that they have on their child.
And what she realizes at the end is that she has to liberate herself.
And what's so interesting, the connection I made to the letters that we're getting in our inbox, is that a lot of people, from both directions, parents and kids, are struggling with this question of when do I stop paying for my kin?