Dear Prudence,
I’m bisexual and genderqueer, and I live with my long-term partner, also genderqueer. I have a very uncomfortable relationship with my mother due to her alcoholism and drug abuse and the fact that she stole my identity to open credit cards before I turned 18. She also waged a hate-mail campaign against me when I came out and brought a lot of abusive men into my life growing up. I now live in another country and limit our contact to phone calls on birthdays and holidays. She recently moved and, during one of our holiday calls, mentioned that she’d found a box full of letters, poems, and pictures from my first high school boyfriend.
Episode Notes
Prudence is joined this week by Bijan Stephen, a reporter at the Verge, music critic at the Nation, and video game columnist at the Believer. He plays T.K. on the actual play podcast
Fun City and hosts a couple shows on Twitch; his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, and elsewhere.
Prudie and Stephen dig into letters about how to come to terms with a long-ago relationship you now realize was inappropriate, what to do when your always-negative sister-in-law decides to move to your town, how to decide when or if you’ll tell your parents that you’re legally changing your name, and what to consider when you feel like you’re competing for your boyfriend’s attention with his female bestie.