Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma

Summary

Fresh Air: Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
Release Date: May 3, 2025
Hosts: Tonya Moseley and Terry Gross

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of NPR's Fresh Air, hosts Tonya Moseley and Terry Gross delve into two significant and thought-provoking topics: the resurgence of the pronatalist movement in the United States and the intricate journey of overcoming childhood trauma, as narrated by author Daria Burke. Additionally, the episode features a review of David Cronenberg's latest thriller, The Shrouds, by film critic Justin Chang. This summary captures the essence of these discussions, weaving together expert insights, personal narratives, and critical analyses.

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The Resurgence of the Pronatalist Movement

Overview

The pronatalist movement, once considered fringe, has gained momentum in recent years, advocating for policies that encourage higher birth rates. This movement posits that increasing the number of births is essential to stave off economic decline and societal collapse.

Key Discussions

1. Conferences and Demographics

NPR reporter Lisa Hagan attended the second annual NatalCon conference in Austin, where about 200 attendees predominantly comprised white men (95%) advocating for pronatalist ideologies. Dr. Karen Guzzo, a sociologist and fertility expert, highlighted the homogeneous nature of the conference, noting the lack of diversity and the male-dominated discourse.

"There were about 200 attendees... 95% men. Absolutely." [05:50]

2. Core Policies and Incentives

The movement discusses a variety of policies, from child tax credit enhancements to more extreme measures like parental voting and genetic engineering. However, experts argue that these incentives, such as the proposed $5,000 baby bonus, have historically shown minimal impact on overall birth rates.

"By and large, they do not have any appreciable impact on birth rates overall or the number of births people have over their own lifetimes." – Lisa Hagan [16:31]

3. Segments Within the Movement

Dr. Guzzo outlines three primary segments within the pronatalist movement:

• Techno-Puritans: Like the Collins family, who use technology extensively in parenting.
• Religious Traditionalists: Focused on marital births and opposing technologies like IVF.
• Racist Groups: Concerned with maintaining a "true American" population against perceived immigrant replacement.

4. Criticisms and Concerns

Critics argue that the pronatalist movement overlooks critical factors such as the high cost of childcare, inadequate parental leave systems, and women’s autonomy over their reproductive choices. There are also concerns about the movement's underlying eugenic undertones, reminiscent of historical injustices like forced sterilizations.

5. Elon Musk's Influence

Elon Musk, with his reported 14 biological children, is a prominent figure within the movement. However, his views, such as advocating for C-sections to enhance infants' brain development, have been met with skepticism and criticism.

"He has this whole thing about C sections that women should have C sections because then it allows their baby's brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers." – Lisa Hagan [20:05]

6. Policy Effectiveness Internationally

Comparisons with other countries like Hungary, Russia, and Singapore reveal that while some incentives have marginal effects, the most impactful measures involve robust childcare support and parental leave systems. Israel stands out for its effective fertility policies due to widespread availability of IVF and integration of work-family balance initiatives.

"Investing in a robust childcare infrastructure is really important." – Lisa Hagan [19:56]

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Making Sense Of Trauma: Interview with Daria Burke

Author Profile

Daria Burke, an accomplished marketing professional, shares her deeply personal memoir, Of My Own Making, which chronicles her tumultuous upbringing in 1980s Detroit amidst addiction and instability. Her journey from neglect to corporate success underscores the profound impact of early trauma on the brain and body.

Key Discussions

1. Discovering Her Grandmother’s Death

Daria recounts the pivotal moment when she uncovered the details of her grandmother’s fatal car accident, which was the catalyst for confronting buried traumas:

"She represented a safety and a stability and a level of care and attention and intention that was markedly absent after she passed away." – Daria Burke [36:05]

2. Childhood Amidst Addiction and Poverty

Growing up in a household strained by her mother's addiction, Daria describes the scarcity and neglect she endured. The absence of basic necessities and the fear of societal exposure shaped her early years.

"We lived on public assistance... she usually would do that first big trip and then sell the food stamps for money that she could then use to buy drugs." – Daria Burke [42:00]

3. Escaping Through Literature and Imagination

Daria found solace and escape in reading, which fueled her aspiration to leave Detroit and build a better life.

"I think it was just this act of faith... and I was such a reader that I think it fed my escapism as well." – Daria Burke [43:19]

4. Post-Traumatic Growth

Exploring the concept of post-traumatic growth, Daria explains how overcoming adversity can lead to personal strength, deeper relationships, and a heightened sense of possibility. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent among individuals from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds.

"It's people from impoverished backgrounds... and when I look at all three of those populations... how they create the kind of life that I've made." – Daria Burke [50:05]

5. Motivation to Share Her Story

Daria emphasizes the importance of sharing her experiences to help others recognize that their difficult circumstances do not have to define their futures.

"I wanted to understand more and that I could be a witness for someone else." – Daria Burke [47:00]

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Film Review: The Shrouds by Justin Chang

Overview

Justin Chang provides an insightful review of David Cronenberg's latest film, The Shrouds. The movie intertwines themes of grief, technology, and the macabre, presenting a narrative that is both morbid and oddly humorous.

Key Points

1. Plot and Themes

The film follows Karsh, a wealthy tech entrepreneur grappling with the loss of his wife. He invents "Gravetech," a technology that allows continuous monitoring of deceased loved ones through MRI-style scans integrated into their graves. This obsession reflects on modern society's relationship with technology and mortality.

2. Character Analysis

Vincent Cassel's portrayal of Karsh, coupled with Diane Kruger's role as Terry, his sister-in-law, brings depth to the characters' exploration of loss and obsession.

3. Technological Paranoia

Chang highlights Cronenberg's critique of how technology can both connect and isolate individuals, referencing Videodrome as a parallel in Cronenberg’s filmography. The pervasive influence of smartphones and surveillance is a central concern.

4. Artistic Merit

While acknowledging that The Shrouds may not fully cohere as a mystery, Chang appreciates Cronenberg's refusal to provide easy answers, instead presenting a narrative that mirrors the complexities of contemporary life.

5. Final Thoughts

Cronenberg's The Shrouds is lauded for its cerebral approach to body horror and techno-paranoia, making it a reflective piece on modern existence and the intertwining of life and technology.

"The Shrouds isn't nearly as graphic, but it doesn't have to be. It's set in a world where most of us have all but fused with our phones already." – Justin Chang [28:13]

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Conclusion

This Fresh Air episode masterfully intertwines discussions on the pronatalist movement’s implications for society and the transformative journey of overcoming deep-seated trauma. Through expert analysis and personal storytelling, alongside a critical film review, listeners are offered a multifaceted exploration of contemporary issues surrounding population dynamics, personal resilience, and the pervasive role of technology in our lives. Whether you are intrigued by sociopolitical movements, personal memoirs, or film critique, this episode provides valuable insights and thoughtful reflections.

Transcript

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[Tonya Moseley]

In Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR WEEKEND. I'm Tonya Moseley. Today we're diving into the resurgence of the pronatalism movement, the belief that having more babies will save a failing civilization from new Trump backed policies that promise baby bonuses and even a national medal of motherhood. Pronatalists are warning that falling US Birth rates could mean economic collapse or even extinction. Sociologist Dr. Karen Guzzo and NPR reporter Lisa Hagan join us to unpack the motivations behind this growing movement. Also, we'll talk with author Daria Burke. She spent several years digging into the science of how our brains and bodies carry the imprint of early experiences. She wanted to understand the trauma she lived through growing up in 1980s Detroit with a mother who battled addiction. She suffered years of neglect before finding stability through school and rising in the corporate world. Plus, Justin Chang reviews the new Cronenberg thriller the Shrouds. That's coming up on FRESH AIR weekend.

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[Tonya Moseley]

This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Tonya Moseley. Have more babies or civilization dies. That's the rallying cry behind a once fringe ideology that has made its way into the mainstream. Pro natalism has been in the news lately with Trump policies underway to increase birth rates by giving away a $5,000 baby bonus for parents and a National Medal of Motherhood for moms who have six or more children. Pronatalists warn of an apocalyptic future, that if birth rates in the US Keep falling, we might be headed towards economic collapse, even extinction. They're pushing ideas like genetic engineering, limiting access to contraceptives and the great replacement conspiracy theory, which believes that there is a plot to replace white populations with non white immigrants. One of the more well known faces of the movement is Elon Musk, who who reportedly has at least 14 biological children with several different women and has called the world's population decline the greatest threat to humanity. But critics argue that this movement isn't solely about increasing birth rates. It's about who gets to reproduce under what terms and at what cost. They argue that this movement ignores the skyrocketing price of childcare in our country, our broken parental leave systems and a woman's autonomy over her own body. Well, today we're joined by two people whose work explores this movement and the motivations behind it. Dr. Karen Guzzo is a sociologist and fertility expert serving as the director of the Carolina Population center and a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And Lisa Hagan is a reporter for NPR who has been covering the pronatal movement and attended last month's second annual natalcon conference in Austin. Lisa Hagan and Karen Guzzo, welcome to FRESH air.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Thanks for having me.

[Lisa Hagan]

Happy to be here.

[Tonya Moseley]

Well, I want to start with you, Lisa, and I want you to take us inside of this conference that you attended in Austin. First off, kind of set the scene for us. How big was it and how would you describe this overarching message you heard this year?

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Well, There were about 200 attendees. This was the second ever Natal Con. The first one was held two years ago and it was half the s still a pretty small conference. And I think what's interesting about it is that there were a lot of different kinds of messages. The tone had also shifted quite a bit from the first iteration of the conference. So you heard everything from people saying, you know, we should have a child Tax credit increase to, you know, our enemies are the enemies of humanity and that sort of language.

[Tonya Moseley]

I'm just curious, what was the breakdown of men versus women at Natalcon?

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Oh, 95% men. Absolutely. And not even men. Yes. So another interesting thing to note there. Right. Is like some, there were supposed to be some women speakers. They have lots of kids, so some of them, their kids got sick or childcare, like whatever. Right. Things fall through. I think there are some natural ways in which it ends up being a lot of dudes who are talking about it. The other thing is this was a very, very white crowd. And I say that as someone who's been in a lot of sort of right wing spaces. They're not always this white. There weren't no people of color there. But it's just important to sort of say that about who was gathered there.

[Tonya Moseley]

What kinds of policies or incentives were seriously being discussed at Natal Khan?

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

You know, Natal Con is a bit of a, I would say, pie in the sky kind of gathering. It's very open to a lot of ideas that would take a lot of political change to actually bring into being. Like parental voting, for instance. You know, having parents vote on behalf of their minor children. That was suggested. I don't know. I think that would be very hard to bring about. You know, you hear things about like the child tax credit or getting rid of no fault divorce. But what I would say, I think is the through line always is that there's something off about culture and that culture specifically needs to change and that mainstream culture has devalued motherhood, those kinds of arguments. So that's sort of one of the bigger things that you'll hear a lot about how culture needs to change. I mean, you also will hear sort of traditionalist religion arguments like people need to stop having abortions or, you know, pornography should be banned, or we need to rein in technology so that young people are looking less at their phones and more focused on having babies. I mean, I think it's a lot of more generalized stuff about culture needing to change.

[Tonya Moseley]

Okay, we're gonna delve into some of those more granular details in the moment. But before we get to that, I wanna go to you, Dr. G, to talk about the legitimacy of the problem that they're trying to solve. You're a demographer who studies when and why people have children. Remind us of some of the reasons, particularly here in our country, that we are actually seeing a decline in birth rates.

[Lisa Hagan]

Sure. So one of the things I think is really interesting about this movement is that there's not been a huge increase in the share of people who say they don't want to have children. Instead, what's really happening is people are still generally saying they want to have kids and they want to have two, maybe three, but they're saying not now. They are taking parenthood and decisions to have kids really seriously. And so they look right now at the future, at their own lives, at the world around them, and they're like, now's not a good time, so maybe later. And they keep making that decision to push it off and push it off, because now's not a good time for them. And then that's how you end up with lower birth rates, because some people will find that it is never a good time.

[Tonya Moseley]

Lisa, in your reporting, you featured a popular couple that has kind of been like rock stars in this movement, the Collins. They describe themselves as techno puritans. Who are they and how many children do they have? And kind of what's their overarching messaging?

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

The first time I heard of the Collinses, and I think this was a moment that maybe anyone who's heard of them possibly saw, is there was an article that sort of named them the Elite couple Breeding to Save Mankind, which is a great headline. And, you know, they have a very specific visual appearance. Simone Collins wears very chunky, memorable glasses. She dresses in a specific way.

[Tonya Moseley]

She dresses like a puritan. She dresses like from another era, another.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Time, sort of, but like from Etsy. As she, you know, will tell you, they are very open about having designed their look and their appeal to draw attention. They have four children now. They have another one on the way. They plan to have as many as possible. And Simone has said that she is willing to die in childbirth to have as many kids as possible and sort of, you know, advance this movement.

[Lisa Hagan]

Well, I think what's interesting about them is that they have evolved in how they appear in the media. They are now a very specific brand, and they are cultivating that brand. And one of the things they talk about in their brand is their view of, you know, everything is data driven. Everything they're doing is very calculated and designed to be really efficient. And that's how they figure out what kids and how to have kids and spacing and all sorts of things and parenting. Except there was a profile of them a few years ago where Malcolm sort of swatted his child in front of the reporter, and the reporter was sort of aghast at it, and he said that his wife saw it on, like, a nature documentary, that this is what, you know, a lioness was doing to her cubs and they thought that was good.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Tigers.

[Lisa Hagan]

It was tigers, yes. There you go. So I'm thinking to myself, wow, data driven. I'm like, well, as a family sociologist and demographer, I can tell you there's a whole lot of research on corporal punishment and child outcomes and well being. So that data was, I think, inconvenient. So they are data driven when it's convenient and not data driven when it doesn't fit their brand.

[Tonya Moseley]

What do the Collins think about ivf? Did Simone Collins actually have her children through ivf?

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Yeah, they say that they've used a lot of procedures in their births. They're very pro. They're interested in leveraging any and all technology that exists sort of without limitations, really.

[Tonya Moseley]

I think what's so interesting about what you all are sharing is that there is like no one main pathway to building a greater population. Like there are several different segments of this movement that have varying, different ideas on how to do that. Dr. Guzzo, can you talk a little bit about the three segments of the pronatalist movement?

[Lisa Hagan]

Sure. So we've talked about the Collins and they sort of fit into this tech world where sort of, you know, they want to use the best technology available to have the best and brightest children and make sure their children, you know, have the best possible chances in life and sort of maximize their own fertility. And then you have sort of the more religious groups who would not want to use technology, who would be against IVF because life begins at conception. And so destroying embryos is destroying human life. And they're really concerned about getting people married earlier and having them have births within marriage. And so they are not interested in raising necessarily teen birth rates unless they are marital teen birth rates. So they're really focused on the two parent family and really it needs to be married to and preferably Christian. And then you have sort of the more racist groups who are very concerned that somehow true Americans, and I say that with sort of quote marks, you know, true Americans are going to be outbred by immigrants. And so this is a longstanding idea. So we've of course heard about it in the great replacement theory. But this goes back 25 years. You know, Pat Buchanan wrote a book, the Death of the west in 2001, about sort of the danger of immigrant populations coming out and coming to the United States and having more children than native born, true real Americans, and that this was going to ruin our society. So this is not a new idea. I would say they all had. So you would think the Collins have been pretty clear that they don't necessarily care about race or ethnicity. Having said that, when you talk about having the best and brightest and using technology, you are really darn close to eugenics. We have done this in the United States before where we have sterilized poor women. We have sterilized women who were considered feeble or unfit. There are tons of really rich but sad research on Mississippi appendectomies. You know, about women of color getting sterilized against their will. And so these are some of the same ideas about who should and who shouldn't have kids. So you want to have the best and brightest kids. Does that mean that people who are having kids the old fashioned way are somehow second class citizens? Is that what we're moving towards? It's very science fiction y, but it makes many of us who are in demography and know our history very uncomfortable.

[Tonya Moseley]

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guests are NPR reporter Lisa Hagan and demographer, sociologist and fertility expert Dr. Karen Gazzo. We're talking about the resurgence of the pronatalist movement. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Moseley and this is FRESH AIR weekend.

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[Tonya Moseley]

Dr. Guzzo, like do incentives work? I mean, $5,000 in this economy to have a baby?

[Lisa Hagan]

They don't work. I mean, there's so much research on this that really shows that countries have tried this. And so they have this little tiny bump. They might change the timing. You might decide to go ahead and have that first kid, or you might decide to have your second kid a little bit sooner. But by and large, they do not have any appreciable impact on birth rates overall or the number of births people have over their own lifetimes. They don't work because it costs, on average, something like $300,000 to raise a kid from birth to age 18. $5,000 isn't going to cut it. We had the expanded child tax credit of the American rescue plan in 2021 that halved child poverty, and we did not vote to expand it or continue it. And so the idea that we would be revisiting this in a different way on a much more limited basis is really concerning.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

I just want to also mention expanding the child tax credit is something that J.D. vance has talked about specifically, and he had an opportunity to vote to expand and extend the child tax credit and did not. So I think something that's important to mention is that the pronatalist groups, for the most part, have a tendency to be very supportive of the Trump administration and specifically what Elon Musk is doing with Dogecoin. But these are not policies generally associated with helping families that are struggling.

[Lisa Hagan]

And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue plan is that it wasn't something that was just, you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age 6 and you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it. So it went to everybody. These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are, again, trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.

[Tonya Moseley]

You mentioned how these types of ideas do not work, but I was just wondering in other places, in other countries, because I know that Hungary and Russia, I think even Singapore, have introduced these kinds of incentives like tax breaks and housing benefits. I think that Hungary even offers free fertility treatments. How effective are those types of measures?

[Lisa Hagan]

So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel, because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs, they're very careful about how they extend them. So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families, they don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family. So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote, unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work when they have kids. They want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids. We know that actually having parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust childcare infrastructure is really important.

[Tonya Moseley]

Elon Musk has been evangelizing. He's been sending these dire warnings that unless the low birth rate changes, civilization will disappear. He's framing it as the biggest threat to civilization. What do you make Dr. Guzzo of tech leaders kind of stepping in? I mean, some technopronatalists also argue that a bigger population means, like more geniuses and innovation.

[Lisa Hagan]

Yeah. So Elon Musk is interesting in the sense that there are a lot of people in the tech world who are good at math and think that makes them good at demography because it's a math related field. But they don't really understand some of the theories, some of the ways we do modeling and think about this. So at one point, Musk was projecting something and he had projected us all the way down to zero. And I was like, well, no, that's not right. But he has this huge influence and so people are listening to him. So it is important to take him seriously. But some of the stuff he just says, to be honest, is pretty bonkers. He has this whole thing about C sections that women should have C sections because then it allows their baby's brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers. I mean, babies heads, their skulls are not fully fused for an evolutionary reason to go through the birth canal without, you know, crushing their brains. And so this, the idea that we're listening to this guy, I mean, it chills me.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

It also deeply ignores the fact that those are really personal decisions that carry real health risks for people giving birth. Right. So it's a very specific focus on the product of the birth rather than the person doing the birthing.

[Tonya Moseley]

Elon Musk has a lot of kids, but he definitely is not a traditional family man that's something that's also been discussed in thinking about traditional family, lots of kids, the nuclear family, and just this need to have more children.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Of course, there are folks, especially on the sort of religious end of pronatal advocacy, who, you know, say, you know, I don't love everything about the way that Elon Musk is building his family, but there is a sometimes explicit, sometimes underlying acknowledgment that he is the biggest beacon of this issue. He's very rich, he's very powerful. And folks in the pronatalist movement, though they may not agree with the way that he's living his life, they would all love his support and for him to continue doing exactly what he's doing. And so that sort of tells you about the focus on purpose rather than any of the specific values or disagreements these communities may have with each other.

[Tonya Moseley]

Dr. Guzzo, one of the things I'm trying to reconcile are the thoughts in the past around pronatalism along with today's action. So, for instance, during the Cold War, population control was seen as a kind of master key. So American elites actually believed population growth caused poverty, and that poverty then turned into communism. How does this square with today's movement?

[Lisa Hagan]

So one of the things that's interesting is that this all has this idea that reproduction is the future and it's the key to everything. And all we have to do is control women. So for me, it's always really hard to separate the arguments about populations from the fact that this is about what women should or should not do and who gets to decide what women do. And so when I think about low birth rates right now, and what does that mean for, you know, the economy? Well, it does mean potentially fewer workers. But then we also have things like technological advance. We're having a whole separate conversation about the meaning of automation and robotics and AI. So maybe we don't need as many workers. And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now either. If we wanted to raise birth rates right now, young people are, yeah, I want to have kids. I just can't right now for these reasons. We could try listening to those reasons, or we can say, you know, we're going to give you a medal if you have six.

[Tonya Moseley]

Lisa, I was just wondering, you mentioned how Vice President J.D. vance has kind of echoed these worries that Trump's White House has been asking for suggestions from married couples to boost birth rates. How empowered does the movement feel with perceived allies in government, that all of this will turn into Concrete policies. Did they talk about this at all during the conference?

[Daria Burke]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Natal Con was a very celebratory moment for folks. They certainly wouldn't argue and say that they've brought this conversation about, but they're so excited by the fact that things that they were talking about, you know, previous to this iteration of the Trump administration are now being discussed by people in very powerful positions in our country. Absolutely. The other thing that you will hear a lot, you know, there are a lot of different groups, as we've discussed within this movement, but they have a through line. And the through line is that our current culture is messed up, either culturally or through policy or feminism has screwed things up, birth control, whatever it is. But what you hear a great deal less about are that there are perhaps other options for why things are messed up. And so I think what this does is it takes dissatisfaction with the very difficult world that we're all trying to survive in. And it says, hey, the solution is more babies, and sort of leaves out this whole range of other things that we might be talking about to improve people's lives and confidence to bring children into the world.

[Tonya Moseley]

Lisa Hagan and Dr. Karen Guzzo, thank you so much.

[Dr. Karen Guzzo]

Thanks for having us.

[Lisa Hagan]

Yeah, great being here.

[Tonya Moseley]

Dr. Karen Guzzo is a demographer, sociologist and fertility expert. And Lisa Hagan is a reporter for NPR. In the Shrouds, a new thriller from 82 year old Canadian writer, director David Cronenberg, Vansant Cassel plays a wealthy tech entrepreneur who has devised an unusual technology to help people still grieving from the loss of their loved ones. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

[Capella University Ad]

When the Shrouds premiered at film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as his most personal work, a deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife from cancer in 2017. The movie is about a man named Karsh who lost his wife Rebecca to cancer four years earlier. That's not the only similarity. If you know what Cronenberg looks like, you'll see that Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel with a silvery shock of hair, resembles the director. Maybe not a dead ringer, but close enough to give you a chill and a bit of a chuckle. That's the thing about the Shrouds. It's deeply morbid and sad, but it's also disarmingly funny. Karsh is the mastermind behind a company called Gravetech, which allows people to monitor the remains of their dead loved ones before the body is buried. It's wrapped in a high tech metal shroud equipped with an MRI style scanner. And so at any time, with a swipe of your phone, you can watch a feed from the grave of the decomposing body. It's not just on your phone either. The feed also goes to a screen built into the person's headstone. Karsh himself uses grave tech, obsessively keeping close tabs on his wife Becca's body at all times. This has naturally made it difficult for him to move on. One amusing early scene finds Karsh on a blind date with a woman who heads for the exit the minute she finds out what he does for a living. The next day, Karsh is debriefing the date with Becca's sister Terry, played by Diane Kruger.

[Lisa Hagan]

Another bad date last night she put.

[Daria Burke]

Off by your desperation like the last one.

[Lisa Hagan]

Amount of practice.

[Tonya Moseley]

It's been decades since I had this abusive woman.

[Lisa Hagan]

I'm never really sure whether I'm flirting or not. That's what you get for having had a successful marriage.

[Daria Burke]

I don't have that problem.

[Lisa Hagan]

Should I give up trying to find a girlfriend?

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Or should I just sink gracefully into terminal asexuality?

[Lisa Hagan]

You'll never replace Becca.

[Tonya Moseley]

I'm not trying to.

[Daria Burke]

I did love that body, which you provocatively said was a lot like mine.

[Capella University Ad]

You have her body.

[Daria Burke]

I have my own body.

[Capella University Ad]

Cronenberg is often described as a master of body horror, a subgenre he helped pioneer with early efforts like the Brood and Scanners and recently pushed to audacious new extremes with the wondrously icky crimes of the future. The label can be misleading, though. Cronenberg's films are even more cerebral than they are visceral, and he's never been purely interested in grotesque for grotesque's sake. The Shrouds is certainly a body horror movie in perhaps the most relatable sense. It's about the physical ravages of illness and death. At various points, Karsh sees Becca, also played by Diane Kruger, in dreamlike flashbacks that reveal exactly what the cancer did to her body. I can't think of a filmmaker besides Cronenberg who could present the body this way with clinical directness, undimmed desire and real tenderness. Early on in the film, someone vandalizes the Grave Tech cemetery, ripping the headstones from their foundations and hacking into the video feeds for reasons unknown. The Shrouds isn't just a horror movie about corporeal decay. It's a thriller steeped in techno paranoia. To get to the bottom of the vandalism, Karsh enlists the help of Terry's ex husband, a computer whiz played by an unnervingly twitchy guy. Pearce Karsh also relies on an AI personal assistant voiced by, you guessed it, Kruger again, who doesn't seem entirely trustworthy. There are whispers that the vandals are aligned with shadowy Russian and or Chinese forces, hinting at a mass data theft conspiracy that may or may not exist. The Shrouds never fully coheres as a mystery. In the end, it's an intriguing but not especially satisfying puzzle. I didn't mind that about it. Cronenberg isn't out to provide easy answers. He's saying that we live in such a 247 Internet fog now. Who knows what could be out there, mining the most human and vulnerable parts of ourselves our habits, our yearnings, our relationships. This isn't a new theme for Cronenberg. He's always been fascinated by the way technology alters our minds and even our bodies. In his 1983 classic Videodrome, the director inserted a Betamax cassette into his protagonist's torso, literalizing the idea of what TV is doing to us. The Shrouds isn't nearly as graphic, but it doesn't have to be. It's set in a world where most of us have all but fused with our phones already. All of which is to say that this seemingly death obsessed movie about grief and desire and the unsettling power of technology to assuage them is also a movie about life in the way more than a few of us live now.

[Tonya Moseley]

Justin Chang reviewed David Cronenberg's new film, the Shrouds. Coming up, writer and executive Daria Burke will talk about her new memoir, which explores her childhood in 1980s Detroit amid addiction and instability and the years she spent trying to outrun the past by building a carefully curated, outwardly successful life. I'm Tonya Moseley, and this is FRESH AIR Weekend.

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Support for FRESH AIR comes from whyy presenting the Pulse, a weekly podcast about health and science. Each episode is full of great stories and big ideas fueled by curiosity and wonder. Can you learn to listen to your intuition? What should electric cars sound like? Why can it be so hard to get an accurate diagnosis? How do fungi communicate? Check out the Pulse, available where you get your podcasts.

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[Tonya Moseley]

Daria Burke's life seemed pretty great. A big career in marketing, amazing friends, a resume filled with accolades. For two decades, she perfected the art of image, not just her own, but for major brands like Estee Lauder and Facebook. But underneath was a story that she has spent most of her life trying to outrun. Burke grew up in Detroit in the 80s and 90s when jobs were disappearing, crime was up, and the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging communities and families. And her home life mirrored the city. Both of her parents struggled with addiction. She didn't grow up hearing bedtime stories or celebrating birthdays. She has no snapshots of her childhood, just memories of her and her sister basically raising themselves beneath her perfect exterior. Burke says she moved through the world in shame until one day a few years ago when she discovered a photograph of the car crash that killed her grandmother when she herself was seven. Her grandmother was the one person from her childhood who made her feel safe. And that image unearthed a well of buried grief and set her on a four year journey into brain science, trauma research, even epigenetics, which is the study of how our genes are influenced by our environment. At one point, Daria Burke even had a 3D scan of her brain to see how trauma had shaped it. She's written about all of this in her new memoir of My Own making. Daria Burke, welcome to FRESH air.

[Daria Burke]

Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor.

[Tonya Moseley]

Well, Daria, I want to start our conversation with the day that you discovered the details of your grandmother's car accident and death. The article you found said that your grandmother's car had stalled on the freeway and she was rammed from behind from another car and she was on her way to your house. You were around 7 years old at that time. She was on her way to come pick you guys up for church. What did your grandma represent to you that not just what she represented to you being this loving person, but what she represents in the way that forced you to confront the other parts of your childhood, the stuff that you kind of had been running from all of your adult life?

[Daria Burke]

I think she represented a before time when things were good, even if I couldn't fully remember all of that. She represented a safety and a stability and a level of care and attention and intention that Was markedly absent after she passed away. And I think it was easy to tell myself a story that that was the shift that her death was the end of these before times that were secure and safe and loving and nurturing. Very much driven by her presence, because.

[Tonya Moseley]

The after times, those are the times when then your mother began to fall into addiction.

[Daria Burke]

Yes. I have memories that have come back to me. I write about one of them in the book that suggests that perhaps she was using before my grandmother died. And. And I imagine that grandma was probably a bit of a buffer for us as kids in some way. Her presence was so formidable and consistent that I think it would have been quite difficult to actually have the same kind of proximity to my mother's addiction that I had after my grandma died. And so it's when I was around age 7 or 8 that my earliest memories of my mother's addiction emerged, and where I have great clarity on that shift in her behavior and in the ways in which we related to her and could rely on her.

[Tonya Moseley]

Is there a memory that comes to mind for you when it was strikingly clear that your mother had a problem?

[Daria Burke]

It's interesting. I don't know that I would call it. I would have called it a problem Because I was so young. I knew pretty early on that my mother was not like other mothers in that we weren't having snacks made for us when we got home from school. She wasn't hovering to make sure that our homework was getting done. Dinner could be a bit of a scavenger hunt at times. And so I even then started to get the sense that something was different. I think my fear around people learning about how things were at home began probably between 8 and 9, when we wouldn't really want our neighbors to go beyond our front porch, and we didn't want them to come into the house because they might find that we didn't have our electricity had been turned off, or we didn't have running water, the gas had been turned off. We often didn't have a working telephone. So I didn't get my phone number out to people generally, really, until high school. But it was really clear to me that there was something that should be hidden from people. And that was, I would say, my first instinct.

[Tonya Moseley]

Did you ever feel ostracized from the kids? You were hiding this big secret from them?

[Daria Burke]

Not at that age. I don't know what anyone knew, if they knew anything. They never said anything. And so my earliest. You know, if I think about it now in reflection, I think the first people who probably had instincts, were probably folks in my life when I was in high school. And I think I had a different kind of freedom and could therefore be in places with friends and with their parents. That maybe created more points of exposure. I think as small children, there wasn't a lot of investigation or interrogation necessarily. And to be fair, one of the boys who lived next door, his mom had four children. Each of the children had a different father. You know, they had their own kind of chaos, for lack of a better word. And so everyone had their own story that they were living in. And I imagine it's easy to get lost in the details of your own life when you're also working really hard to put food on the table and keep the bills paid and take care of aging parents or whatever the case may be. I will say that there was one moment that there was a song that came out in the 90s about. It was children taunting another child that.

[Tonya Moseley]

The child's mama's on crack.

[Daria Burke]

Crack, that's right.

[Tonya Moseley]

Yeah, that song.

[Daria Burke]

And I do remember when that song came out, just wondering if anybody would figure out somehow that that was my story, that that was true for me. And I hated that song because it felt like I was being taunted through.

[Tonya Moseley]

The radio with friends or with others. And that song came on.

[Daria Burke]

I mean, kids would sing it at school. And so it was. It was there. And I think I just tried to pretend like, you know, nothing was wrong, and I would just sort of ignore it and wait for it to go off or wait for people to stop singing it. No one ever. But it always felt very much like I was at risk of being exposed.

[Tonya Moseley]

What did the kind of poverty you lived under look like?

[Daria Burke]

Well, my mother didn't work, and we typically weren't getting child support from my dad. And so we lived on public assistance. My mother got food stamps, and there was a small check payment, cash payment, essentially, that we got every month. And so it summed together maybe around $500 or so, 300 or so dollars of that was food stamps. And then the rest came in cash. That was really just enough to cover the mortgage payment and maybe the electric bill or the utilities. They were off and off, and so those bills were going unpaid. We would generally do, like one big grocery store trip at the top of the month, which was like Christmas. It was always so fun. But my mom, generally, she was getting food that we could kind of fix ourselves a lot of, like, ready made and heat to eat, or just bread and cheese and hot dogs, that kind of stuff. Cereal, milk, you know, she'd get eggs and things that she'd make us for breakfast from time to time. But when it ran out, there was no second big trip to the store. She usually would do that first big trip and then sell the food stamps, the rest of them, for money that she could then use to buy drugs. So we grew up without a lot. I write about a time when I actually went to the grocery store to steal food because we didn't have any in the house. It was quite scarce.

[Tonya Moseley]

So much of your childhood, as you write, was about getting out of Detroit. Like, you daydreamed about that a lot. And you write about knowing, just intrinsically knowing, that there was another life waiting for you. How did you know that as a kid without being exposed to these other ways of living?

[Daria Burke]

In some ways, I think it was just this act of faith, and not a religious faith, but like an inner knowing that there was another way to live that was possible beyond what. Certainly it helps when you have media around. And so TV and books played a role in that for me as well. I suppose it was a blessing to have grown up as a Cosby kid, you know, to be able to grow up and witness a family that was so different from mine and parents who were not only present, but they were successful. And you had a mother who was a lawyer and a father who was a doctor. And. And there was conversation about art and about school and education, and we saw loving discipline. And so I think I could grasp onto some of the images that I saw on tv. And I was such a reader that I think it fed my escapism as well in that way. And every chance we got in school to do anything different, whether it was a field trip to a museum or to a farm or the zoo, it just all felt so expansive for me. And I really held so tightly to the possibility that there was another way to live, even though I didn't have a lot of evidence that it was real.

[Tonya Moseley]

What books were you reading? Was there a specific. I know what I was reading during that time. I'm just curious. What were you reading that took you to other worlds? That really opened that up for you?

[Daria Burke]

Okay, so by the time I was 10 years old, I was reading Danielle Steele.

[Tonya Moseley]

Oh, really?

[Daria Burke]

And I don't know where I got these books from. Someone in my mother's life must have been a part of one of those membership clubs, you know, where you could sign up for. Remember, Columbia House Records had it for CDs, and then there was one for books. So I had come Across Full Circle was the first book of hers that I read. And it was like a salmon pink cover. And that was what I was reading. I was not reading Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume. I was reading Danielle Steele and then eventually the romance novel Girl and then Terry McMillan. Yes, that.

[Tonya Moseley]

Why did you want to write a book now? Everything about you is out there, or these particular things about you are out there in a way that kind of leaves you exposed. These are things that for so long, you didn't. You tried to hide.

[Daria Burke]

There are a couple of reasons. I think the first one is that there was something specific about the telling of my story in this way that was a knitting together. All of these selves that I had shed along the way towards survival and a reclaiming of them and an honoring of them. That felt really important to me. And I suffered in silence for years because my story was a secret. And I only told very few people along the way that I didn't want that for other people. I wanted the little kid who felt like they were escaping in books and looking at stories that felt so far and away from their lives to maybe find this book, the teenage version of my. To find it in a library or having been gifted it, and to see themselves in a story that also affirmed that their reality didn't have to be their destiny, that everything that they had inherited, they didn't have to carry. And that was so deeply important to me, just personally. And I think had I allowed myself to share my story with more people, I wouldn't have been so alone in that journey for as long as I was. I got so much out of stories as a young person. So this is certainly my offering in that regard. The other reason, though, that I wanted to tell my story was because when I learned about post traumatic growth, that was such a revelatory moment. But it also felt like a mission. I had this mission suddenly that I wanted to tell people about this phenomenon that occ for people who experience adversity as well.

[Tonya Moseley]

And can you slow down there? Because we know about post traumatic stress, we often hear, like, stress at the end of post traumatic. What you're talking about is post traumatic growth.

[Daria Burke]

Yes. It's a phenomenon that occurs where amidst or on the heels of an adverse event or traumatic event, some people actually report experiencing a greater sense of personal strength or greater. Stronger relationships, deeper spiritual values, a greater sense of possibility in their lives. And I was, first of all, fascinated by this idea that alone felt. I understood that that spoke to what I saw. And when I thought about my own life and my own experience. And I wanted to understand more and what I learned. There's two things about post traumatic growth that I think are phenomenal that everyone must know. The first are the conditions under which we tend to experience it. And there are three things that are common with people who've reported experiencing PTG after a traumatic event. One is that they have a supportive community around them, so they know that they've got a loving environment of people who are there for them. The second is that they find a way to make meaning with what happened and make meaning of what occurred in their lives in whatever way, great or small. The third, which is really hard to do, but important, is that they find the benefit of what happened. And I think in so many ways I saw my own story, the benefits of my story, such that I could be a witness for someone else, that I could share this with someone else. And then it's the who who is most likely to experience post traumatic growth. And that really blew my mind. It's people from impoverished backgrounds.

[Tonya Moseley]

Why is that? Is it the grit?

[Daria Burke]

It's the grit. It's the capacity to sort of make a way out of no way. So it's people from impoverished backgrounds. It's people non white people, typically, and women. And when I look at all three of those populations or identities, experiences, they're all groups that have been forged despite conditions that weren't always favorable to them, to us. Right. As a girl who was born poor and black and female, I was consistently consuming messages, right. Even subliminally, that I shouldn't want very much, I shouldn't have very much, that I wouldn't have the wherewithal or the intelligence or the strength to create the kind of life that I've made. And so in learning that these populations are actually most likely to experience growth and a sense of strength and greater sense of relationships after trauma was really revelatory for me.

[Tonya Moseley]

Daria, thank you so much for this conversation. This was such a pleasure. And thank you for this book.

[Daria Burke]

Wow. Thank you so much. This was incredible.

[Tonya Moseley]

Daria Burke's memoir is called Of My Own Making. FRESH AIR weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. FRESH air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with Terry Gross. I'm Tonya Moseley.

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