It's possible to turn off your emotions and go on autopilot for brief periods with the people you love, and it's possible to shut them down completely. Writer Dani Shapiro reads from her memoir Slow Motion: A True Story.

Eleven adult siblings need to divide their dead parents' stuff. But they don’t all get along.

Larry speaks English. His dad speaks Chinese.

A woman, who got in a car accident and was in a coma for 52 days, woke up having forgotten the last two years of her life — during which she'd divorced her husband. Producer Miki Meek spent a week with this family, in the midst of their difficult situation.  (14 minutes)

Producer Alex Blumberg introduces us to Richard, a former executive at a big time marketing firm who smoked pot daily — sometimes at work. As it turns out, Alex is intimately familiar with how Richard's getting high kept him from focusing on the important things in his life.

Producer Alex Blumberg conducts an investigation, perhaps the first ever, into this American subspecies: People who compulsively imitate their mother's voices in everyday conversation, well into adulthood.

Twenty-six-year-old Jose William Huezo Soriano—a.k.a. Weasel—grew up in Los Angeles.

Tamar Brott, on growing up with two music prodigies, and Sandra Tsing Loh's sister Kaitlin, a ballet prodigy.

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.

Barbara Adams, a former member of the Whitewater trial jury, showed up for jury duty wearing a full-scale costume from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ira dissects a discussion on an Internet mailing list about fandom, inspired by Adams' celebrity. Also: Temple University professor Cindy Patton's childhood infatuation with G.I.

Scaachi Koul is trying to learn a language native to her parents, and heads back to Calgary to ask why they never taught it to her in the first place.  (21 minutes)

Where do parents go when they’re deported? For some, the answer is: as close as possible to their kids. That often means Nogales, Mexico.

Ayelet Waldman says her dad is a bookish man ... a very smart man ... but no man is everything his kids want him to be.

A surprising number of coincidences involve grandmothers — that’s one of the things we learned doing this show. One grandma has so many coincidences happen to her, it drives her granddaughter, 16-year-old Juliana Bontrager, to try to beat her at her own coincidence game.

The Lancet's new study of deaths in Iraq, by the same research team that did the earlier study, yielded an astounding number—650,000 civilian deaths. Producer Alex Blumberg talks to Ira about the debate over this new study.

When Emily Helfgot was ten, her dad was a sex therapist on a call-in radio show, which thoroughly embarrassed her. He also kept a stack of Playboy magazines in their house, in plain sight.

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. After a lifetime of barbed, funny remarks, no one in the family is prepared to talk about their feelings.

This is another story of a young person making a huge, life-changing decision about his own fate while still very young. Hillary Frank tells the story, about her own little brother—and his trumpet.

To end this show about parents and children at mealtime, a story about what happens when children have to become the parents. Dave Eggers' mother and father died when he was 21 and his brother Toph was 8.

Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City with a story about whether it's possible to be a good person if you're not a Christian.

Claudia Perez talks about how her 21-year-old brother was shot and the family thought he'd die.

Turning 25 has always been a very specific deadline for Linah Mohammad: a deadline to get married.

There are many kids who do not gradually discover that grown ups don’t have a handle on everything.  These kids already know. Miriam Toews’s novel, “Fight Night,” is about a nine-year-old named Swiv who takes care of her grandma and manages her mom’s mental health struggles.