#583. Jennifer Senior On: Grief, Happiness, Friendship Breakups, and Why We Feel Younger Than Our Actual Age
It’s likely uncontroversial to assert that Jennifer Senior is one of our finest living journalists. She’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and before that she spent many years at the New York Times and New York magazine. Jennifer’s written on a vast array of topics, but she has a special knack for writing articles about the human condition that go massively, massively, viral. One such hit was a lengthy and extremely moving piece for The Atlantic that won a Pulitzer Prize. It was about a young man who died on 9/11, and the wildly varying ways in which his loved ones experienced grief. That article, called “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” has now been turned into a book called, On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory.
In this interview, we spend a lot of time talking about this truly fascinating yarn, but we also talk about her other articles: one about an eminent happiness researcher who died by suicide, another about why friendships often break up, and a truly delightful recent piece about the puzzling gap between how old we are and how old we think we are. Jennifer has also written a book about parenting, called All Joy and No Fun which we also reference a few times throughout.
In this episode we talk about:
- Jennifer’s perspective on the Bobby McIlvaine story
- Lesser known theories of grieving from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- The work involved in finding meaning in loss
- Why – from an evolutionary standpoint – we hurt so badly when we lose someone we love
- Commitment and sacrifice
- The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are
- The power and perils of friendship
- Why Jennifer has chosen to focus so much of her writing on relationships
Where to find Jennifer Senior online:
Website: jennifersenior.net
Social Media:
- Twitter: @JenSeniorNY
Book and Articles Mentioned:
- On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
- What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind
- All Joy and No Fun: The Modern Paradox of Parenthood
- The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are And How Old You Think You Are
- Opinion: Happiness Won’t Save You
- It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
Other Resources Mentioned:
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- Robert Wright
- Dr. George Vaillant
- Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison
- Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam
