“ Am I just becoming my father and there’s really nothing I can do about that?”

What does it actually feel like to change? Not the story you tell about it afterward. Not the version you post. The actual, messy, doubt-filled experience of becoming someone different — or realizing you already have.

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt Phillp is joined by New York Times Bestselling author, journalist, and professor Benoit Denizet-Lewis to talk about his new book You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self Transformation. They talk about how transformation can sometimes happen slowly and it can hit you like a revelation about your sexuality on a street corner or at a Christian youth convention telling you to give you life to God. They also discuss kind of change you can’t fully take credit for because other people made it possible…like your parents whom you’ll inevitably resemble.

Some of what we get into:

Why do we often insist that real change has to come from within — when almost none of it actually does?

What does doubt during a major life shift actually signal? And why can’t we talk about it publicly?

What does it mean when the person you’ve become turns out to look a lot like your father?

Benoit has spent his career writing about identity — sexuality, addiction, the stories we tell about who we are and who we’re becoming. This book is his most personal yet, which comes across quite clearly in this episode.

Listen by clicking play above, or find this episode on Apple podcasts and wherever else you may attend to your podcast listening.

By the time Dan Pelzer died last year at the age of 92, he'd accomplished many admirable things. Over the decades, he'd worked as a Marine, a Peace Corp volunteer in Nepal, a seminary student, a passionate campaigner for Jesse Jackson's presidential run in the 80s, a security guard, and as a beloved social worker for incarcerated juvenile delinquents in Columbus, Ohio. Dan was a loving husband to his wife of 52 years, Mary Lou, a hands-on father to their kids Marci and John and his grandchildren, and an engaged member of the community, where he regularly volunteered to feed the hungry. A life well lived by all accounts.

But there was something else notable about Dan's life: between the years pf 1962 and 2023, he kept a handwritten record of every book he read, stopping at the very end of that year, a list totaling 3,599 titles of every possible genre, from the pop science classic Rats, Lice and History (1935), to contemporary memoirs by Sinead O'Connor and Jennette McCurdy, and every novel by his beloved John Grisham since A Time to Kill.

On this episode, Dan's daughter Marci reminisces with Erin about reading Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow with her father, finding the full list after his death, the surprises therein, and what she's learned from strangers about her dad's life since sharing the list with the world. You can see a digital copy here at Dan's exclusive literary destination, the Columbus Metropolitan Library. And the original handwritten list via What-Dan-Read.com.

It’s that time of year again. Every year, we put the 10 Best Picture nominees under the same deceptively simple microscope: How are fathers portrayed?

Joining this conversation, as always, is: member of the New York Film Critics Circle, author of the Premier Party newsletter, host of the Critical Darlings podcast, culture writer Richard Lawson.