BRAT Summer: Estrangement Edition

Estrangement is having a bit of a moment.

Estrangement had a bit of a moment this spring and summer, when several high-profile national outlets published articles on the topic. Next week, I’ll take an in-depth look at a couple of these articles, and share some of the similarities I found in them. Frankly, although many of them were “longreads,” they lacked depth in some pretty striking ways! But I will save that meta-analysis for Monday. 

As you chomp at the bit in anticipation for that, I’m sending you a link roundup of the articles I’ll be examining in that essay. Just a little light weekend reading. Get pumped! 👏👏

Below is the link to each article (a free link when I can so you don’t hit a paywall), a short summary, and a 🤔emoji for the quote that stuck with me. It wasn’t necessarily a quote I agreed with! Just the thing that made me go… 🤔. Here we go: 

1. Vogue.com, May 4, 2024: “Why So Many People (Myself Included) Are Experiencing Family Estrangement” by Kui Mwai. This was a first person essay that then zoomed out to consider the pain of estrangement from an adult-child’s point of view. 🤔: “I think our generation is more aware that they don’t need to keep their family’s secrets anymore.”

2. New Yorker, August 30: “Why So Many People are Going ‘No Contact’ With Their Parents” by Anna Russell. This is the article I spent the most time dissecting in next week’s essay. My big beef with it is the assumption that estrangement is more common now than in some vague, unspecified “beforetimes.” But I’ll save that for Monday. 🤔 [via Karl Pillemer, a family estrangement researcher whose work I’ll be referencing a lot in this newsletter]: 

   “If you ask older parents and their adult children, ‘How important is this relationship to you? How central is it to your life? How upset are you if you can’t see the other person? How much is your identity bound up in the relationship?,’ older parents are much stronger in those views than their adult children are,” [Pillemer] said. “You’ve invested for years in your children.” Meanwhile, adult children have “many competing roles, many competing responsibilities. It’s structurally easier for them to exit the relationship than it is for parents.”

3. New York Times, July 14 “Is Cutting Off Your Family Good Therapy?” (gift link) by Ellen Barry. This article focused on the ways therapists address issues in their clients’ families of origin, and it wondered aloud whether therapists are more likely to recommend estrangement or cutting off family members now than they used to be. It featured a rather extended look at a psychologist/YouTube influencer named Patrick Teahan. 🤔(remember, doesn’t mean I agree with it, just that it stuck with me): 

   “Early this year, Dr. Murphy began reporting individual therapists to licensing boards. ‘My personal opinion is that TikTok therapists are destroying the trust and professionalism that took forever to build up in this field,’ she said. ‘What they want is to generate revenue,” she added. ‘They all have podcasts. They all have books.’”

   BONUS link: POP SONG! “What’s Fair” by Blondshell (released August 20) I love the sound of this song, which is very Liz Phair. I heard it on KEXP (any KEXP fans here?) while I was riding my bike and when I heard the line 

But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mom

I had to pull the bike over and look up the song name immediately.  Later, I googled Blondshell’s Wikipedia page and deduced the song must be, at least in part, autobiographical.

This is the first pop song I can remember hearing a daughter singing to her mother about their f***ed up relationship. (A kind of female mirror image of Cat’s in the Cradle.) Am I wrong about that? Are there more songs like this? If you can think of more pop songs about parents and their kids, please comment and let me know. 

Have a great weekend. (RIP Maggie Smith)

XO,

Maggie