Episode cover
Smashing Life (ft. Peter C. Baker)
May 25, 2022 · 140 min

***TICKETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR OUR 6/2 LIVE SHOW! EVENTBRITE LINK HERE***

-KGB is a very small venue and we've already sold 60% of the tickets so if you want to see our first and likely last ever live show, do buy your ticket ASAP!

-Friends of the show Christian Lorentzen and Dean Kissick are confirmed as guests. And there will probably be 1 to 2 additional mystery guests ;)

------------------------------------

WE'RE BACK! And this time joined by Peter C. Baker, another novelist dad who supplicated to us. Petey C. made an agenda for his OS appearance, to which we dutifully adhered, although we skipped the item about fatherhood, because -- BORING! Instead we spent probably an hour talking about his tenure at Wendy's, an American fast food franchise. Also can't remember if we let him mention this but Petey has a novel coming out 5/31 and it's called PLANES. The blurbs on the back of my galley copy are too long to read but I feel like they probably say the book is good, so you should buy it.

cheat sheet:

0:00 - Drew, clean-shaven and clear-headed, recounts in Knausgaardian fashion his weekend at home in Boston with mom.

11:29 - Petey tells us of his three summers as a Wendy's employee in central Pennsylvania, which led to his first byline - call it a "coming of flippable age story"

44:23 - Lauren, Petey and Drew have a real Gen-x style nerd-out session about indie bands - namely Destroyer and Belle and Sebastian, the latter of which Petey recently wrote about in the New Yorker magazine. We hear about an epic B&S concert Petey saw in Battery Park City in the summer of 2007, a time in which Petey was incidentally subletting Christian Lorentzen's room on the LES, dipping into Christian's Pynchons and "smashing life." 

1:26:20 - We finally get to Petey's beef with us (agenda item #4): our oft-repeated claim that Knausgaard is "unmediated." We seriously explore this question for about 3 minutes before getting into Pete's back pain and Phillip Rawdog's Halcion psychosis.

Thanks to Petey! See you on the squash court soon homie. And see the rest of you - AT THE LIVE SHOW!!!!

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message