Five years ago, one of the most popular podcasts of the time called it quits. The Longest Shortest Time was around for nearly a decade before its host, Hillary Frank, put it on hold, in 2020.
But now, it’s back. It was one of the first self-sustaining podcasts, exploring what Frank calls the “surprises and absurdities of raising other humans — and being raised by them.”
Frank told The Show, the landscape around reproductive health has changed, along with conversations about consent and bodily autonomy. And she felt the pull to come back. You’ll even hear her now-teenage-daughter in one episode. Frank joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
HILLARY FRANK: So, before I did The Longest Shortest Time, I was kind of on the teen beat. I wrote young adult novels, and most of the stories I did for the radio were about teenagers. When I started The Longest Shortest Time, making a living as a podcaster was not a thing.
And so I had started it about a year after having a baby. Just sort of like as a way to keep my foot in the door, let people know that, like, I could still work, you know, ‘cause I, I hadn't been making stories in a little while, and, it was kind of my calling card. And then, like, miraculously, it grew and became my job, but I never really intended to be a parenting reporter.
I don't know. It, it, it wasn't what I had really wanted to do. It was more like I like telling stories and my heart kind of always was like with the teenagers still, and I also like it really is a lot. It's a grind to be putting out a weekly show. And I just reached a point where I was like, I need a break from this. And I made a fiction show called Here Lies Me about middle school. And I worked with real teenagers, real, real young actors to make the show and it was really fun.
GILGER: Yeah. So a change of pace and sort of going back to your roots a little bit, it sounds like. So talk about the decision to bring this back now. Like when you started Longest Shortest Time, you had just had a baby in this kind of traumatic way, we should say. And like that was a lot of your motivation for starting this podcast. You wanted to talk about these things that no one was talking about at the time. Now that baby is a teenager, right? Like this is all coming full circle for you.
FRANK: She's 15. Yeah, yeah. So I, the show, I put it on hiatus five years ago, right? So that was right before the pandemic. That was before Roe fell. Just so much has changed with how we think about reproductive health and consent, sex ed, bodily autonomy, the ways that babies are made.
All of this stuff is so in flux now and so different from how we were thinking about it five years ago. And it just felt to me like there are new stories to be told that I would like to tell. And I also think there's so much about raising a teenager and being a person who is like going through perimenopause now, whatever that is, I still don't entirely know, but I intend to find out. It's just like so ripe for a discussion. So I, I just felt like I, I felt a pull back in.
GILGER: Yeah. Well, and so, like you said, your, your daughter is now a teenager. And teens, it sounds like, will be central to this kind of new incarnation of Longest Shortest Time, right?
FRANK: That is right. So, I am going to be talking to teenagers and about teenagers, but, in addition to the regular show, I also have a premium feed for the show, LST Plus. And in that feed, something extra that people get is a special show that I'm calling You Know What.
And it's because it's about everything having to do with, you know what. And, so it features three really fun, smart, thoughtful college kids, and we take questions from the audience. So it's kind of an ask the college kids show about sex dating and relationships.
GILGER: Wow. OK. So, a unique approach to that as well. It sounds the conversation around parenting has changed, especially, you know, there's a lot more of this, I think just around raising little kids, having babies, there's a lot more truth telling in that realm, which I think you should credit yourself with starting the conversation in many ways.
FRANK: Thank you.
GILGER: But do you feel like that's what you're trying to do here with teenagers, like talking about those things that are still not talked about in the same way?
FRANK: Yeah, and I think it's even, it's even like worse than that. It's, it's like not even, even that we're not talking about it, but those conversations are being suppressed now. And I live in a district where it's pretty, it's pretty diverse, it's pretty liberal, and it's not like the school system doesn't want sex ed to be taught. There is a mandate. I live in New Jersey. There's, there's a state mandate to teach sex ed, and there are a few subjects that are required. One of them is consent.
I discovered when my kid was entering 8th grade, that she and her classmates had gotten zero sex ed, just nothing. And, you know, it's not because the school system didn't want to be doing it. It's because it turns out this stuff is just kind of left in the hands of gym teachers to decide how and if they're gonna teach it. And in a lot of cases, I think they feel they don't feel prepared to do it. They feel awkward about it. And so some of them skip it.
And so I think a lot of schools are doing a bad job or no job at all of teaching kids about this stuff. And in the meantime, people are losing rights, and we just like, we need kids to know how people get pregnant, you know? We need them to know that, know the connection between sex and pregnancy and the menstrual cycle. These are like basics that people need to know before they start engaging in sexual activity.
You know, nobody wants a pregnant 8th grader, and nobody especially wants like a pregnant 8th grader where there's nothing you can do about it.
GILGER: Yeah, that's so interesting. It's just not happening, so you're trying to create it, but it's happening like you're creating that conversation in a world in which I think being a teenager probably looks very different than it did for you or I, or it did for teenagers 10 years ago. I wonder how you think like, the current culture, current technology, current political landscape plays into this.
FRANK: Yeah, well, there's so much. I mean, porn wasn't readily available when we were younger, and it looked a lot different than it does now. Kids are able to just access all kinds of stuff, immediately through their phones, and then at the same time, you have like healthy education about sex and consent being suppressed by powerful figures. And so these two things in combination I feel like are a really dangerous cocktail for young people.
