884: The Idiot
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBBC Chicago, it's this American Life from our Glass, and I am joined in the studio by M. Gessen. Hello. Hi, Eric. So nice to have you back here. It's always lovely to be here. And the story that you're about to tell today is one that you've been telling for years. Yeah. First, it was just, you know, there's something weird going on in my family, but also of insane ways that my family talks about these crazy events. And is this story a story that when you would tell it to friends and loved ones, was it a funny story? I hesitate to say it was a funny story, but yes, yes, it was a funny story. And maybe that's also just the only way that we can deal with things that are unbelievable. It wasn't until I started reporting it that I realized how horrible this story actually was. And when you started to report it, this was years ago, originally this was going to be a story for this American Life, and then at some point, it just got too big. It was like, we cannot contain this in one episode of our show, and you turned it into this podcast with cereal. Yes. And it's now a five-part series with cereal that was released this week. And you've been doing read-throughs of drafts of you've been writing drafts that have set in on. And I just want to say like I just, I love this show and feel like this show is so different from other podcasts that I have heard in a bunch of interesting ways. And what we're going to do today on our program is we're going to walk through enough of this story so that listeners here can hear what I'm hearing in it, and then if they want they can go and listen to the whole thing, from W.B.E.'s East Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm out of a glass. That's going to be our show today. And we're going to begin by playing the first episode of this series, which is almost like a prologue and sets the whole thing up. Is there anything else that we should say before we play that? No, I think I think we can jump in. Okay. Let's just jump right in with that. My family. If I have to give it an adjective is elastic, 45 years ago, my parents, my little brother and I, came over to this country from the Soviet Union, extending the family across continents. Over the decades, the family, my father really, stretched to absorb spouses in laws even though they spoke a different language, children both biological and adopted, ex-spouses who chose to stick around, and eventually grandchildren. Over those same decades as in any family, people meet bad decisions, said things they hoped no one would remember, got mad at each other, felt grudges, came around, and the family stretched as needed. And then it snapped.
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