Grieving our mothers online, with author Rachel Vorona Cote

Freelance Pod

Author Rachel Vorona Cote joins Suchandrika Chakrabarti on Freelance Pod's first birthday episode, to talk about grieving in a digital age.

We first spoke after I read Rachel's Longreads piece, The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning (https://longreads.com/2019/05/21/the-fraught-culture-of-online-mourning/), earlier this year. Rachel had lost her mother 18 months before writing the essay.

She took to the internet during her mother's last illness, tweeting updates. Soon after her death, Rachel wrote Dead Mom Soundtrack, or the Top 5 Songs About Losing Your Mother (https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/dead-mom-soundtrack-or-the-top-5-songs-about-losing-your-mother/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video), for Pitchfork.

As someone who lost their parents in an analogue age, I'm fascinated by how the internet has enabled greater visibility for the bereaved. It's possible to find people in a similarly painful and isolating state anywhere in the world, and to have meaningful, cathartic conversations without ever meeting - as Rachel and I have.

I've left in Rachel's side of the conversation, where she talks about my early experiences of grief. Perhaps I'm not ready to get into them on this podcast yet; it's too intimate. She mentions a couple of personal essays I've written, so here are links:

Grief doesn’t have five stages (https://theoutline.com/post/6135/unconventional-wisdom-no-stages-of-grief?zd=2&zi=nn56rjpu)

The storage unit that became a portal to my childhood home (https://www.curbed.com/2019/10/10/20905310/story-deceased-parents-grief-storage-units)

Check out Rachel's book Too Much (https://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Victorian-Constraints-Still/dp/1538729709/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EA01G90E9E34&keywords=too+much+rachel+vorona+cote&qid=1559599468&s=gateway&sprefix=too+much+rac%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-1), which is available to pre-order now, and is published in February 2020.

Don't forget that there are still tickets available for Freelance Pod's third live recording of the year, at the Boulevard Theatre in Soho. They're only £12, and what else are you doing this Sunday evening? (https://boulevardtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/sunday-service-podcasts-2/)

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How has your industry moved from analogue to digital? Each episode, creative guests tell host Suchandrika Chakrabarti how the internet has revolutionised work.

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