15: Mary Trump

Booked Up with Jen Taub

You may think that Mary Trump needs no introduction, because you believe you know who she is in relation to a certain distasteful someone who shares her surname. Or you have read her first bestselling book: Too much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Or her equally stellar second, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.
But what an author produces or shares with the public, as well as the degrees they collect (in Mary’s case a BA and MA in English literature as well as a doctorate PhD in clinical psychology) is only a part of who they are. And, it should go without saying that our family of origin is a piece, but not all of us.
In today’s episode, Mary and Jen get lost in a conversation about books. They start with Mary’s childhood favorite, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a children's picture book written and illustrated by William Steig that won a Caldecott Medal in 1970. And the conversation continued into weightier tomes like the more than 1,534 page epistolary novel Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. The 1748 work’s rather lengthly alternative title reveals a bit about the story, but hardly as much as Mary does: The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage
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Get More from Mary Trump
Twitter | The Good in Us Substack | Author of TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH and THE RECKONING
Get More from Jen Taub:
Twitter | Follow the Money Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY