Episode 2477: How Daniel Oppenheimer Learned That the Problem in his Marriage Was Himself

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, everyone. This is Andrew. Welcome to Keen On America.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
On July 4th, 2026, America will be 250 years old, an anniversary that will, no doubt, be greeted with a mixture of celebration, contemplation and resignation. In Keen On America, Andrew talks not just about the American past and present, but also speculates on its future. What, Andrew asks, will be the 21st century fate of this now venerable American Republic?

**Andrew Keen** (0:46)
Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show on something called Manhood, the Coming Revival of Democracy with a Danish writer, Morten Høy Jensen, who was writing about the great German novelist, Thomas Mann. He's an expert on him, and he described all Mann's work. It was actually a conversation about Mann's defense of democracy in America in the late 1930s. But he described all of Mann's books, all his novels in particular, as confessionals, that they're hard to summarize because they reflect Mann himself. But when it comes to Mann confessionals, nothing much compares with something I read last month in The New York Times. How I learned that the problem in my marriage was me by my guest today, Daniel Oppenheimer. It's a highly confessional long essay, and Daniel is joining us from his home in Austin, Texas. Daniel, is this the first time you've been compared to Thomas Mann?

**Daniel Oppenheimer** (1:57)
Yeah, but hopefully not the last, Andrew.

**Andrew Keen** (1:59)
Yeah. Well, you deserve it. In terms of this confessional, I have to admit, I read it and I actually listened to it online as well on The New York Times podcast. I was struck, shall we say, by the fact that you actually wrote it, and acknowledged all the problems and challenges and perhaps solutions in your marriage. Did you have any qualms about it? Did you talk to your wife, Jess, about it before you actually wrote this thing?

**Daniel Oppenheimer** (2:30)
Yeah. Any qualms is an understatement. Massive amounts of qualms.
Yeah. I talked to Jess, my wife, about it, not just before I wrote it, but while I was writing it. And I would say, I don't think I'm giving me anything away by saying that there was a fair amount of negotiation going on during the process, on all ends, on the ends in terms of the New York Times magazine editors, wanting certain things from me, and then talking to Jess about what I wouldn't, you know, would and wouldn't reveal about our marriage, about myself, about her, and then other figures in the picture, I guess, are my parents, who I was also, I wasn't in conversation with, I wasn't kind of giving them the option of vetoing anything, but I was sort of in my mind thinking about how much I wanted to give. In the article about them and about my childhood, I don't think you can talk about how screwed up you are as much as I do in that article without at a minimum being there's some, you know, there being some implication that some of that screwed up-ness came from my childhood. And so there's that just at a baseline. And then also, you know, if I want to say explicitly about what kind of context I grew up in and how that led to the complicated adult figure that I am. So yeah, there were a lot of qualms, a lot of negotiations and then just trying to sort of deal with all of that and be, be a decent person at the same time that I wanted to be a good writer and be true to the subject and have a kind of authentic voice. So yeah, it was complicated. In that sense, it was by far the most complicated thing that I've ever written because I don't usually write confessional stuff.

**Andrew Keen** (4:08)
Yeah. And your parents, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but my interpretation is that your parents didn't come out of this particularly well. How do they feel about the article?
I mean, I assume they're both still alive.

**Daniel Oppenheimer** (4:20)
They're both, my parents are both still alive. They were a little bit upset with me. I mean, I don't think that I make them look terrible. They were, they were.

**Andrew Keen** (4:27)
You don't make them look particularly great parents.

**Daniel Oppenheimer** (4:31)
I would say that I'm trying to, that's interesting. They felt that way. They felt, I think that I was a little bit unfair to them or that one of the difficult things and I'm not sure that I solved this entirely was, I didn't want to go into immense detail about my childhood because I didn't want to throw them under the bus. But I think that also left things vague that may have implied in certain ways that it was worse than it was. I mean, they were not physically abusive. They were not neglectful. They were very loving. They were also kind of dysfunctional in their own ways and kind of bearing their own load of trauma. So there was a lot of complexity and a certain amount of emotional dysfunction in our home.