Parenting & Families

In an interview recorded onstage, Amir Questlove Thompson the cofounder and drummer of the Roots, the houseband for The Tonight Show talks with Terry Gross about music, his father doo wop singer Lee Andrews who died last month, and about Prince.

Actor Tom Hanks talks about his new film A Hologram for the King, his production company Playtone, playing courageous, tested men in Captain Phillips, Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, and growing up in a fractuous family.

The co-star of the X-Files discusses his novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, about a son reuniting with his absentee father. Duchovny earned a master's degree in literature before starting his TV career.

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Jacob Bernstein named his documentary about his mother after an Ephron family saying — "everything is copy," meaning that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write about.

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.

When his mother was turning 90, music critic Lloyd Schwartz wrote poems that put her memories into verse. Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three of the poems to music on the new recording, No Orpheus.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Joe R. Lansdale grew up poor in east Texas and worked as a janitor and in a potato field before finding success as a writer. Honky Tonk Samurai is the latest book in his mystery series.

Known for her recent work in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, the Oscar-winning actress now stars in The Lady in the Van, a film about an elderly woman who lived in a van for 15 years.

Ethan Canin traces the complicated lives of two generations of mathematical geniuses in his new novel A Doubter's Almanac. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it an "elegant and devastating novel."

Sue Klebold says she wishes she'd asked her son Dylan "the kinds of questions that would've encouraged him to open up." Published 17 years after the massacre, her new memoir is A Mother's Reckoning.

Growing up in the 1980s, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass weren't into typical family movies. Their friends were enthralled by Star Wars, but Jay tells Fresh Air's Ann Marie Baldonado that he and his brother were more interested in "whatever showed up on HBO," including Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie's Choice and Hannah and Her Sisters.

Journalist, novelist and playwright Thulani Davis traces her roots in My Confederate Kinfolk: a Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. Among the revelations Davis uncovered was that her ancestors include a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters as well as Africans from Sierra Leone.

A performance with singer Iris Dement. Her song 'Let the Mystery Be' was used as a theme for the HBO series of 'The Leftovers.' She was born in Arkansas and her music is inspired by the sound of the delta, and the Pentecostal church.

Mike Cummings and Jorja Leap are working with men in Los Angeles — many of whom are former gang members — to help them find something that was missing from their lives as they grew up: fatherhood.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's film Me and Earl and the Dying Girl won the audience award and the grand jury prize at Sundance. He talks about how losing his dad shaped his approach to the film.

In her memoir Whatever ... Love is Love, Bello describes the evolution of her "modern family," which includes her romantic partner (a woman), her adolescent son and her son's father.