The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. The sugars are here, speaking

straight into your ears. I'm Steve Olman. I'm Cheryl Strait. This is Dear Sugars.

Oh, and this sugar, you see it in my way.

So, Cheryl, I was reading two things in conjunction. Reading letters from our inbox and also just

happened to read this story that was in the New Yorker recently, some months ago, called

FAQ, like frequently asked questions by the writer Allegra Goodman, whose work I love,

and it was really such a brilliant story, and I just could see in my little brain this

connection to all these letters we've started to receive at Dear Sugars. The story deals

with this young woman who returns home from college, and she's sort of seemingly adrift.

The way the story is presented, and it's brilliant in this sense, is that the parents

are very concerned. They have all these anxieties about whether their child is depressed.

She doesn't seem to be taking action when she's going to get back to school, get back

on track, and so forth. And as the story progresses in a way that good fiction has of sort

of defamiliarizing us, making us see the world in a new way, what we actually come to see

is that the parent's vigilance is a form of neediness. It's a kind of dependence that

they have on their child, and what she realizes at the end is that she has to liberate herself.

And what's so interesting, the connection I made to the letters that we're getting in

our inbox is that a lot of people from both directions, parents and kids are struggling

with this question of, when do I stop paying for my kin? As parents and as kids, how long

should I be on the family dole? And it's become so much murkier in our generation. You and

I grew up in a time where I think for many young people it was just understood when you're

18, you're not entirely on your own, but you're mostly on your own. You're not coming

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