When Your Parents Are Hoarders and More
Catch up on So Your Parents Are Old, Campside co-founder Vanessa Grigoriadis's show full of gallows humor and catharsis
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts and business.
If you’re currently the parent to your parents, this is your group chat in podcast form. The Campside original series, So Your Parents Are Old, is a brutally honest, often hilarious look at one of life’s most disorienting stages.
Here’s your chance to catch up on the latest episodes:
When Your Parents Are Hoarders with Amanda Uhle
Amanda Uhle, writer and publisher of McSweeney’s, joins Vanessa to talk about her new book Destroy This House. She reflects on her parents’ lifelong struggles with hoarding and the lessons she carried forward after clearing the home they left behind.
Amanda Uhle grew up in a house overflowing with her parents’ hoarded things (truly overflowing), and yet she now cultivates clarity and elegance in the way she lives and works.
Watch now or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
My Mom Celebrated Life with Erika Christensen
Actress Erika Christensen joins Vanessa to talk about her new film After All, where she plays a daughter caring for her ill mother. Together, they explore the unexpected intimacy of birth, death, and everything in between.
Erika talks in a genuine way about how her mom handled death with matter-of-fact flair: declaring she was “done,” refusing a funeral, and insisting everyone go have a blast at her son’s wedding instead of hovering around her. This interview is so real that Erika even posted a clip of it on Instagram with the caption, “we got real!”
Watch now or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Singing To My Mom with Amara Walker
Journalist and former CNN anchor Amara Walker opens up about her mother’s Alzheimer’s - how she found support in community, how she talks to her children about their grandmother’s illness, and how she arrived at the difficult decision to move her mother to a nursing home.
I love how Amara, in our interview, goes from polished CNN anchor to a daughter singing half-forgotten Korean hymns into her mom’s face, praying the pronunciation holds while her mom just beams at her anyway.
Watch now or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Laughing Through Medicare Appeals with Kathleen Madigan
Comedian Kathleen Madigan has turned the trials of caring for her parents into some of her sharpest material. She joins Vanessa to commiserate about Medicare and creepy porcelain basement dolls—and to show how humor can help you through the hardest moments.
It’s hilarious how Kathleen treats elder care like a battlefield - her mom as a “Civil War nurse” ready to hand out whiskey and a stick, her dad on his “world tour” to the hospital - and somehow it all becomes a family comedy instead of a tragedy.
Watch now or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
WTF Is Hospice with Ann Neumann
Most of us fear the word “hospice,” but author and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann wants to change that. From morphine spoons to lottery tickets, she shares stories from the bedside that show how hospice can help us reclaim an ancient, almost forgotten skill: caring for each other at the end.
Vanessa says, “What I love about this conversation with Ann Neumann is that she somehow takes the word “hospice” — which usually makes everyone stare at the floor — and turns it into something comforting and even a little hilarious.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Catch up now on all of Vanessa’s So Your Parents Are Old interviews. Email us with questions or comments: questions@campsidemedia.com.
We hope to see you inside the tent again soon. Subscribe now for updates on So Your Parents Are Old and all of Campside’s hit shows.