Second Self

This week's episode features author and literary agent Catherine Cho on her experience with postpartum psychosis and the incredibly beautiful book that she wrote about it - Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness. We discuss mental health and illness, the sometimes thin difference between sanity and insanity, the brittleness of our relationship with reality, and the way we consider people with mental health issues. Catherine is refreshingly honest in discussing being institutionalised after the birth of her son and the very deliberate work she undertook to develop her relationship with him, as well as her choice to expand her family again and face the fifty/fifty risk of experiencing psychosis once more in order to bring her daughter into the world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a week's break from Second Self, we are back for episode four with writer and public intellectual Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is the author of Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, and Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. He is also a columnist at Harper's and a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Magazine. We discuss Thomas' re-evaluation of his own racial identity and race as a form of collective identity, defying incentives to conform in order to live authentically as an individual, the truly strange cultural moment in which we find ourselves, and the influence of philosophy on his work and ideas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Second Self episode two features author, broadcaster and academic Emma Dabiri. We discuss race, identity, taking a radical approach to a world that is anything but, and her book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition. We also discuss change, Irishness, and we settle the question of the best butter ever made. As if it were really a question. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Second Self, the podcast about the self we inherit, and the one we create. In this series, I’ll be having conversations with interesting people about the important ideas they’ve adopted and the ones they’ve moved away from through their lives. Though we live in an increasingly polarised landscape where ‘picking a side’ and digging your heels in is incentivised, Second Self is about intellectual curiosity, constructing your own individual identity, and when you need to, changing your mind.In this introductory minisode, I introduce the logic behind Second Self. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.