Stories of people who are haunted, not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people.
Prologue
Ira reads an excerpt from James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places. (4 minutes)
Hearing Voices
Ira with Lynnette Nyman, who, as a girl, recorded her parents fighting with a cassette recorder she got for Christmas. (15 minutes)
Act Two
Binjamin Wilkomirski and New York writer Blake Eskin try and figure out if they are related.
NOTE: A few years after this interview aired, Binjamin Wilkomirski and his Holocaust memoir Fragments were shown to be fabrications. Blake Eskin chronicled this story in his 2002 book A Life In Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. (20 minutes)
Ghost Story
An excerpt from Heather Woodbury's epic eight-hour solo show WhatEver: An American Odyssey in Eight Acts. (7 minutes)
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Act Three: Airel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, And Me!
Host Ira Glass talks with contributor Adam Davidson about how Adam's teenage diaries are filled with his dream of someday becoming the prime minister of a country where he does not even reside.
Act Two: Life In The Fast Lane
For millennia, people have tried to reach a spiritual promised land by fasting.
Act Three: Ashes
How writer (and frequent This American Life contributor) David Sedaris and his family reacted when Sedaris's mother—a lifelong, unrepentant smoker—developed lung cancer.
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