Estranged

This Substack is changing: here's how it will work.

I’m reconceiving and rebranding this newsletter with a focus on family estrangement. If you know me as a writer and editor and this rebrand sounds random to you, read on while I explain! 

Why Family Estrangement? 

Estrangement is a painful and particularly personal subject for me. Although the idea of family estrangement is regularly covered in mainstream media, and online support groups exist across social media, I haven’t seen the kind of nuance that I’ve needed in order to move through estrangement in my life. 

So, rather than waiting for someone else to “get it right,” I thought, “What if I use the lens of my experience, my skills as a writer, and also dust off my reporting skills to make something new?” 

Karl Pillemer, a sociologist who spent five years researching family estrangement and reconciliation, asked a random sample of American adults: “Do you have any family members from whom you are currently estranged, meaning you have no contact with them at the present time?”  

27 percent of people surveyed answered yes. Twenty-seven percent! About 10 percent were estranged from a parent or child, 8 percent from a sibling, and the remaining 9 percent from another family member. In his question, he defined “estranged” not just as a distant or disconnected relationship, but “a situation in which you are cut off.” 

Yet, you don’t hear 27 percent of people in everyday conversation talking about how they never speak to their brother, mother, or son. In my case, I know my default in adulthood when I meet new people has been not to tell anyone. In fact, there are people in my life who have known me for years, even a decade or more, who have no idea. 

I used to think I never mentioned it because it just “never came up” in everyday conversation. But that’s not entirely honest. Because I know that whenever I have told people about my estrangement, at best, it creates awkwardness, and at worst, an opening for people to project on to me. Meaning that when people find out that I was estranged from my father until his death, they often knee-jerk react with some variation of 

“How could you?” or 

“You poor thing.” 

Or: “What’s wrong with you?” 

Estrangement brings with it a veil of shame, and shame isolates. If you can’t talk openly (even if selectively) about this painful thing, you can’t come to find out that friends of yours, coworkers, teachers, and other people in your life have also gone through this experience. (Like maybe up to 27% of the people you know!) You can’t connect. You feel like you’re the only one. 

I’ve had that feeling of shame and isolation before. When I became a mother 10 years ago, I found out about the Things No One Talked About: the fact that the first postpartum poo is as painful as labor, or that for the duration of your breastfeeding “journey,” your boobs leak when you hear a baby cry—any baby. Plus, the scarier things, too: the rage, the compulsive checking to make sure the baby is still breathing. The desperation. 

So much of motherhood was hidden under a veil of shame. But I decided to talk about it anyway, and to follow a lot of other mothers who were talking about it, too. I’ve written about motherhood for the past 10 years, all over the internet, and I’ve seen what a dramatic and positive effect my writing has had in conjunction with thousands (at least) of other mom content creators: women doing everything from writing well researched, moving books to sharing  raunchy mom reels. 

The aggregate of all that content has created more transparency around mothering and parenting in general, which has led me to feel less alone, and I believe it’s done that for a lot of mothers, too. In fact, it’s altered the experience of motherhood for me. 

Now, with increasing attention paid to estrangement, I think it is possible that people who write about estrangement can overcome the shame and isolation, and help others do that, too. 

I’ll get more in detail in an upcoming post about the nature of my familial estrangement (in my case, from my father). For now, I’ll say that while, yes, I have personal experience with estrangement, this newsletter won’t be just about me. With “Estranged,” I’m building a foundation for a community of people who’ve experienced the pain, shame, isolation, stigma, anger, and also (often) the relief that comes with the decision. 

Here’s more about how “Estranged” will work for you as a subscriber. 

1. Frequency

You’re getting an email from me today and another in a couple of days, but after that, you’ll get new content from me 2-4 times a month.  

2. Format

In the past, the newsletter content I’ve published has been exclusively long form essays. In Estranged, I will write personal essays, but I also have a few other features: 

• Interviews with experts. I have a wish list of people I’d like to interview: researchers, therapists, journalists, and authors, yes. But also people who are just good at talking about elements of estrangement: grief counselors, death doulas, and people who, through personal or professional experience, have special insight into conflict and conflict resolution.  

• Links to resources: I will be sharing the best of the Internet when it comes to estrangement. Estrangement, like divorce, is a topic that seems to make the rounds on social media and through mainstream media as well. I will round them up here, sometimes with and sometimes without my spicy takes. 

• Guest Posts TBD: it is possible that I will create a community space where guests can post their estrangement stories. If I do that, it will not be right away, and those posts will live behind a paywall. Which reminds me… 

Free vs. Paid 

For the moment, there’s no difference in the free vs. paid membership, but I will be adding bonuses for the paid option soon. If you want to become a paid subscriber now to support my work, you can use the blue button to upgrade. That is welcome but optional, since or now, free and paid subscribers receive the same content.

Here’s a little background on me:

I’ve worked with words my entire career: I’ve written a weekly newsletter (with some breaks) for the past seven years. My poetry has been published in Quarter(ly), Pidgeonholes, and Whale Road Review, among other publications. I am also a writing teacher and editor, and a formerly worked as a staffer on magazines including Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, and ESPN the Magazine. I self-published my first book, Be About Something, in 2020 and I’m at work on my second book. I also have a masters in journalism from Columbia.

If you’re a subscriber and you’re sticking with me through this transition, welcome to this experiment! If not, no hard feelings and if you’d like to keep in touch another way, I’m on Instagram @maggiefrankhsu. 

XOXO,

Maggie

PS: I’m not archiving my “Momsplaining” posts just yet, so those are available at maggiefrankhsu.substack.com as well.