Parenting & Families

The singer-songwriter earned a name for himself while playing with Drive-By Truckers and The 400 Unit, but on his new album — written after he got sober — Isbell finds a new level of emotional honesty. Here, he talks with Terry Gross about his life and plays songs from Southeastern.

Novelist Kate Christensen makes a plot line of her own life in a memoir that describes her struggles to come to terms with her family, her relationships and her sometimes violent father. A passionate lover of food, Christensen weaves recipes into a story of survival.

Karen Joy Fowler's haunting novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, draws on arguments she used to have with her father, a psychology professor, over how closely connected humans and animals are. Fowler is also the author of the 2004 best-seller The Jane Austen Book Club.

Show creator Mitch Hurwitz advises against binge-watching the new season, but TV critic David Bianculli begs to differ. He says hidden identities and perplexing mysteries unfold slowly, and watching everything in one sitting helps make those connections ever clearer.

After years trying to conceive, novelist Jennifer Gilmore and her husband decided to adopt. What they thought would be a relatively simple process was instead a long and painful one. In her latest novel, Gilmore channels these autobiographical experiences into fiction.

In a striking documentary, Sarah Polley turns the camera on her own family. The director and actor, known for films such as Away from Her and The Sweet Hereafter, was teased growing up about not looking like her actor father. At 27, she discovered that it wasn't a joke.

In her new novel, Emperor's Children author Claire Messud explores the complicated relationship between two women: Nora, who longed to be an artist and have a family but failed, and the woman Nora befriends, who puts her art first and built a family as well.

Even as a child, Patricia Volk knew she would never measure up to her strikingly beautiful mother. But after reading the memoir of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, Volk found a new understanding of beauty that had more to do with personality than a pretty face.

The comedian turned his life around when he started "WTF with Marc Maron" out of his garage in 2009. He has parlayed the popularity of the podcast into a new television show called Maron, based on his life, as well as a new memoir.

The creator of the acclaimed AMC series talks about his protagonist -- Don Draper -- as an aging existentialist looking for meaning in a chaotic world. He says the show's sixth season, set in 1968, is situated in that historical meaning for a reason: to reflect a traumatic passage in Don's life.

In a cover story for The New Republic, journalist Jonathan Cohn examines the conundrum of day care in the United States. "On the one hand," he says, "improving the quality of child care ... is going to take more money. On the other hand, it already costs more than many families can pay."

P.J. Hogan's new movie is madder than madcap, a zany, nonconformist boundary-pusher whose offbeat manner makes for a rich and grounded film. Toni Collete plays the part of a modern-day Maria von Trapp as if she has nothing to lose -- and Anthony LaPaglia shows his true Aussie accent.

Lexicographers know they're in the hot seat as they confront the changing use of the word "marriage." Linguist Geoff Nunberg says the key to getting the new definition right is to crisply describe everything that's in the category and nothing that isn't.

Elizabeth Strout is best known for her short story collection Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. Her new book is a novel, and critic Maureen Corrigan says it's a different kind of winner.

"The view that drug use is a moral choice is pervasive, pernicious and wrong," writes David Sheff in Clean, a critical look at the nation's approach to drug treatment. Shelf argues that we should not wait for "rock bottom" -- that addiction should be treated promptly, just like any other disease.

The writer's family was living in Egypt, in exile from Libya, when Matar's father, a prominent opponent of the Qaddafi regime, was kidnapped, taken back to Libya, and imprisoned. That was in March 1990, and it was the last time Matar saw his father. After the revolution in March 2012, Matar returned to look for his father or at least try to find out what became of him.

In a new memoir, the Major League Baseball catcher opens up about getting drafted in the 62nd round, his feud with Roger Clemens and what it's like to go into retirement. Leaving the game, he says, was "like a small death."

To some, Detroit may be a symbol of urban decay; but to journalist Charlie LeDuff, it's home. In Detroit: An American Autopsy, he says the city's heart beats on. "We're still here trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

The actor, nominated for an Academy Award for his role in David O. Russell's film, talks about watching movies with this father as a kid in Philadelphia, his childhood fascination with soldiers and being up against Daniel Day Lewis for an Oscar.