Approval
This is a story about becoming. Many little boys want to grow up to be their fathers. When my son, Sean, was four, he went through a period of saying, "I want to be you, Daddy!" This was charming, moving, and affirming, all things that were important to me because I was in the midst of reforming my own identity: recovering from a failed marriage; embarking on a second, also unsuccessful, marriage; and coming to realize that the career I had chosen for myself, the career that was my own last attempt at being just like Daddy, was the wrong place for me to be. There was almost nothing in my world that made me feel good about myself, except for this little boy's admiration. The second marriage and the career ended within six months of each other, but the love of the child goes on. A couple of years ago, I began listening to a podcast by Marc Maron, a comedian two years younger than me who posts semiweekly long-from interviews with other performers that almost always d...