Revisiting: The Longest Shortest Time
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This is Sound School with the backstory to great audio storytelling. It comes to you from PRX and from Transom. I'm Rob Rosenthal, the host of the show. If you ever need a good laugh, dive into the archive of Sound School. Sometimes the things I said in old episodes are hilarious. Don't get me wrong, I think the old episodes are good, but now in 2025, they're practically antiques, like a missive from a bygone era.

Let me give you an example. An episode from 2011 when Sound School was called Howe Sound. At the end of the show, to promote the next episode, I said this. On the next Howe Sound, more about podcasting. More about podcasting? Imagine that, huh?

I would never say that now, but back then, I mean, think about it. 2011, what's that? Nearly 15 years ago, right? Podcasting at the time was BS before serial. Not a lot of people knew what podcasts were. The great tsunami of commercial interest in podcasting had not swamped everything too. It really was another era. And at that time, again, around 2009, 2010, 2011 or so,

People working in audio storytelling had mostly been working for public radio. Reporters and producers and the like were trying to get their heads around what podcasting meant to them. Going back to that moment where I was promoting the next show, here's who I said I was going to interview. I talked to Roman Mars about 99% Invisible, his podcast about design and architecture. In 2011, my listeners might have said, Roman Mars? Who's that? Or 99% Invisible? I'd never heard of it.

Now, of course, a few years later, Roman practically became a household name and 99% Invisible skyrocketed to the top of the charts.

But when I talked to him, he was still figuring everything out. And he did so, check this out, he did so by producing two versions of each 99% Invisible episode. One version for the podcast, plus a shorter version for broadcast on a local public radio station in the Bay Area. And he was doing this all by himself.

See what I mean? Old episodes of Sound School, I mean the really old ones, are the audio equivalent of time travel. And that's what we're going to do today. Set the Wayback Machine for 2011 and an episode featuring Hilary Frank and her podcast, The Longest Shortest Time, to show about parenting. And she had just launched it.

I picked this episode with Hillary to revisit, partly because it made me chuckle. Because wait until you hear some of the questions I posed to Hillary about the difference between narrating for broadcast and narrating for a podcast. But I also picked it because The Longest Shortest Time is back. Hillary started the show in 2010. It became wildly popular, and the stories ranged far and wide. Episodes with titles like

36 questions to ask your partner before having kids or car births. Another one was called sperm shopping by color. My dad was my first Oprah. Baby making while queer. And my newborn, the a-hole.

Over the years, the show earned many awards and tips of the hat. Hillary and the team eventually produced over 200 episodes. But by 2019, Hillary decided it was time, time to wrap up the show. As she put it, her creative biological clock was ticking. And she didn't see herself as the kind of producer who works on a single show for their entire career.

So she stopped making The Longest Shortest Time and she moved on to other projects, like the fictional podcast series with teen actors called Here Lies Me. She's also been working on an original audiobook that's due out later this year, and it's called Wedlocked.

Fast forward to 2025, and apparently the alarm started ringing on Hillary's creative biological clock because the longest shortest time is now back after a five-year hiatus. Episodes are dropping as we speak. And I'll let you know what she has in store for the next iteration of the show. But first, I want to go back to the moment when Hillary was a podcast toddler and podcasting itself was a toddler.

I featured an entire episode of The Longest Shortest Time on that old episode of Sound School, which you're about to hear. And you'll definitely hear that it was early days for Hillary. For starters, the production values were a little bumpy. But back then, I said I was inspired by Hillary's entry into podcasting because it was kind of punk rock, DIY, a sort of I just decided to do it story. In fact, that's how she got into public radio a decade before that.

It was totally punk rock, which is where we'll pick up the archive episode of Sound School with an anecdote about how Hillary got into audio storytelling in the first place. In 1999, Hillary was in grad school for drawing.

She wanted to write and illustrate young adult novels. But radio called to her, This American Life in particular. Hillary told me she was dying to get a story on TAL, even though she didn't have any experience. I had been pitching them for a long time. It was kind of back when the show had just gotten started and kept getting rejection after rejection.

But I had emailed them and told them that I was a writer and that I wanted to know how to find out what themes they were working on so I would know what to pitch. And, you know, like the only thing that made me a writer was that I like wrote things down. I was not published at all. They, it was like a small enough show that at the time they just, they took me

for my word and put me on this list. And I started getting emailed these lists and I saw that one of the themes they were working on was apocalypse. And I had this friend and he was my roommate at the time and he was obsessed with the end of the world, but in a really secular way.

Like he would go jogging every day, but not really for the exercise, more so that when the world ended, he would be able to run away from wild dogs. And so I interviewed him on my parents' answering machine that had like the microcassette in it and then cut the tape basically like by feeding it into this like shiny red boom box.

that had a regular-sized cassette in it, and then I would read my script into that boombox, and you would hear all the clicks and everything. It sounded very homemade. I first became aware of Jamie's fascination with the end of the world when we lived together in Boston. We were in the kitchen, waiting for dinner to cook, and he said, "I've got this question for you, and I don't know how to ask it without influencing your answer." He paced around a bit and said,

So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think that the world is going to end? I took the question as a joke. Yeah, right. The world's really going to end. But I soon realized that this was a subject Jamie would not allow to be so easily dismissed. And he had the book collection to prove it. There was a time when I couldn't...

pass a bookstore, a used bookstore, without going in and buying books about solar energy. I put this thing together, FedExed it to This American Life, and said that it was for their apocalypse show. Whether or not I read the books...

or had time to read the books ever, it didn't seem to be an issue. It was just a matter of collecting them in case it all fell apart, I would have the references.

I have a really good one about edible plants. And the next day, I got a phone call from Ira Glass asking me how I figured out how to do that, like how to do something that sounded like their show. And we had a phone conversation where he invited me to continue to pitch stuff to them and

They commissioned the next idea I had and had me do it in that same style with the answering machine and boombox. See now, I've never eaten a cattail. Possibly I never will. But if it ever went...

And that's how Hilary Frank's radio career began. She continued producing for This American Life. She eventually interned there. And then she freelanced for All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Day to Day, Marketplace, Studio 360. She was an editor at Weekend America. I mean, that's an inspiring, I just decided to do it story, right? Well, guess what? Hilary's done it again. And here's what happened.

I gotta be honest. I mean, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't know, but it's really tough making a go of it as a freelancer. You're always on the hustle for another story. The pay isn't stellar. That takes its toll after a while. So eventually, Hillary stepped away from radio. She edited an audio tour and produced some other non-broadcast content, but no radio to speak of. Then her daughter, Sasha, was born. It was the first time I hadn't worked in a while. And I was starting to feel like...

All I was was a mother. And we had recently moved out to the suburbs in New Jersey. And it was all feeling like a little stereotypical to me. Like my husband would go off to work and I would be at home with the baby, you know, being the domestic one. And that was fine. That's how I wanted it. But I also felt like I wanted...

I wanted to define myself a little more broadly than as just a mother. And so as she connected and chatted with other mothers, Hillary was struck by something all producers have been struck by at one time or another. The conversations I'm having right now could be good radio. There was one discussion in particular that rekindled her spark for radio storytelling. So my daughter, Sasha, I take her to this little baby music class and, um,

Her teacher told me this story about how her son, when he was a newborn, hated lullabies. And I just found that so interesting because, you know, she's a music teacher. And of course, she used to try to like lull him to sleep with lullabies. And she kind of like romanticized what that would be like. So he would cry and cry and cry. And she'd be like, I know the thing that's going to work is singing him lullabies. And it did. It had the opposite effect. Like it would just make him scream even worse. And

And it turned out later that she discovered it was because music is so stimulating to him that it would just wake him up more, even a lullaby. As we were having this conversation, I was like, wow.

you know, I can make radio out of this and I don't even need anyone to buy it. I don't need to pitch it to a show. I can go home and I can make this on my computer and, you know, put it out there and I can like develop an audience. And, um,

So I set up a time to interview her and we, you know, and I put it together and did it. And then I was like, I guess I'm podcasting. And podcasting she is. Hilary now hosts and produces The Longest Shortest Time. It's a podcast about parenting. She subtitles it The Truth About Early Motherhood. Hilary says she's had almost 10,000 listeners to the podcast and all she did to promote it was write to 100 friends. Let's take a listen to one of The Longest Shortest Time podcasts. It's called Don't Make Me Be Your Miracle.

afterward, Hillary talks about one of the big differences she's discovered between producing for radio and producing for a podcast, voicing. In fact, listen closely to her voice. I like to think of myself as a strong person, you know, like physically strong. I can beat most women I know in arm wrestling. And way back when I was in middle school, when I wasn't good at pretty much anything having to do with gym, I knew that when we did the president's

physical fitness challenge tests that I could bench press more than my own weight. Um, and that when we did the hang, like, because the girls didn't have to do pull-ups, um, we just had to hang from the pull-up bar when we did the hang. Um, I knew that I would be the last girl hanging, like all, all the popular girls would drop off long before me. And so, um,

Whenever I felt terrified of childbirth, which was pretty much the entire time I was pregnant, I would just remind myself of how strong I was. I'm one of those people who...

Really kind of didn't want to have an epidural if I could at all avoid it. Not really to prove my strength, but because I had taken this natural childbirth class. And in that class, I learned that basically like an epidural or any kind of drugs that you get were just the first step in this long slippery slope towards C-section. And I wanted to avoid, you know, major surgery if at all possible.

In that class, the teacher told us that 93% of the women who gave birth at this particular hospital got an epidural. And I hate to say it now, I really, really hate to say it, but I judged those women.

I thought, well, they gave in because they hadn't prepared well enough. And me, I'm preparing. I'm taking this class. I'm doing my prenatal yoga. I'm reading the Ina May Gaskin books. Women have been doing this for thousands of years. And I'm strong and I'm ready. But it turned out that I couldn't do it naturally. I'm one of the 93%. And I still sometimes have my moments where I'm

I feel like I failed, like I failed at childbirth. And then someone reminded me a couple months after my daughter was born that, yeah, sure, women have been giving birth naturally for thousands of years, but lots of women used to die in childbirth, even the strong ones. And today we're going to hear a story of a woman who could have easily died in childbirth, but didn't.

This is the fourth episode of the Longest Shortest Time podcast. I'm Hillary Frank. Megan is a woman I know, kind of a friend of a friend. And she'd been hoping to have a natural childbirth, you know, just like me. And she had this situation where her water broke. She went to the hospital, but she wasn't dilated at all. And so they gave her these drugs that basically brought on her contractions like crazy. And the thing about Megan is she is a nurse practitioner.

And she knew what could go wrong with an epidural. She knew you could get spinal headaches. She knew that the practitioners who were putting them in can miss. She had actually almost passed out as a nursing student because it was so gruesome to watch. And so she had told herself that she did not want an epidural. But when it came down to it, she just knew that she needed one.

So she gets the epidural and her son Jack turns sunny side up, just like my daughter did. And she tries to push him out and she tries to push and she tries to push and she can't get him out. So she winds up getting an emergency C-section and it actually winds up going so smoothly that she wonders why they didn't just do that to begin with.

So she goes home and she seems to be healing fine. She's walking around. And then she starts waking up at night because she's having trouble breathing. She feels like this pressure on her chest. But she tells herself that it's just her milk coming in. And then a week after they went home,

They have to bring Jack back to the hospital to get some pretty standard tests done because he had been a little jaundiced. And I remember just trying to get dressed and put my makeup on, my clothes on. I kept having to sit down because I was getting really winded. And so when we went back to the hospital, I remember saying to Jack,

my husband and my sister, you take Jack to get the blood work drawn. I'm just going to stop in the emergency room. They're probably going to laugh me out of there, but I just want to make sure that everything's okay. So, um,

because I work in the same hospital system that I ended up being a patient, all the technicians who were doing these tests were telling me exactly what they were seeing. You know, they normally don't do that, but since I was a colleague, they were joking with me and telling me, you know, what was going on, and things looked okay. And then the last thing I had to get was an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart. And I said to the tech, you know, will you tell me what the results are? And he said, well...

If the results are good, I'll tell you. But if they're not, the cardiologist is going to have to tell you. And then partway through this test, he just went white as a ghost and was shaking and said, you know, the cardiologist is going to have to talk to you. Wow.

But I remember I just ran down the hall after him and I was yelling. I'm like, you have to tell me what's going on. You know, the next thing you know, I was in ICU. They were telling me that my heart was failing, you know, that I might need a heart transplant. And my heart rate was already like 150, 160. And they're saying, oh, you have to relax and keep your heart rate down. So nothing happens. How did you get yourself to do that? Well, I just remember thinking that, you know,

I'd have to feel a lot worse to die. But I didn't know...

whether to trust that voice or not. Because at the same time, as a patient, you're just put in this really powerless place where the doctor just comes in and tells you how you're doing. Right, and you're used to being on the other side of that. Right, right. So what were you diagnosed with? Postpartum cardiomyopathy, which is a form of heart failure that is just specific to pregnancy. The prognosis is...

They say something like it's a diagnosis of thirds, where a third of the people die, a third of the people survive but are always kind of actively in heart failure, and then a third of the people either fully recover or recover enough that they're not actively having symptoms. I think it took...

few weeks before we knew that I that I wasn't gonna die but it was many months before we knew which of the other categories I would be in. Wow so all this time you've just had a baby and like are you able to care for him at all?

No, I only got to see him once or twice in the 10 days I was in the hospital. They did kind of smuggle him in at one point, but...

He brought him in in his car seat with like a million blankets over him to keep him from catching anything in the hospital. And then I just remember kind of like unwrapping this package. I had my baby in it. And my parents said like they hadn't seen that look on my face since I was a little kid at Christmas or something.

So what is it like in those early days? I mean, like, it's the most important responsibility a person can have, right? Like taking care of their child. And what's it like in those early days when you have that responsibility, but you can't take care of that responsibility? Yeah.

I felt at the time, like he doesn't really need me specifically. Like he needs love and he needs someone to hold him and feed him, but it doesn't have to be me right now.

Later, I think when he got a little older and there were times where he did need me specifically and I could feel how that really fulfills some fundamental need in a person. Then I looked back to that time and felt much more conflicted and even resentful that even though I was so grateful to everyone taking care of him, that they got to have that time instead of me.

And so what was your prognosis for future pregnancies?

So they told me pretty much, you know, from the beginning when I got my diagnosis that I had less than a 50% chance of surviving another pregnancy, and that was even being generous. I mean, John and I both come from two children's families, and that was just, you know, automatically assumed that's what we would have. I remember my mom saying to me, oh, yeah,

I can really see you adopting a sweet little girl from China. You know, this was like hours after I was told this. And what was your reaction to that? Well, I think, you know, I was...

seeing it as my mom's typical way of trying to make everything better but I also kind of believed it I mean I definitely over time very much came to believe that the reason why all this had happened is because there's this child out there that we're supposed to save and and so you do have another child now you you recently had a baby named Owen and um did you adopt him

No, we started out looking into adoption and just ran into a lot of roadblocks. So he was carried by a surrogate, a gestational carrier. That's the, I guess, politically correct term these days. So then how is this different the second time around? I mean, like, obviously another woman is carrying the baby, but other than that, how was this process different?

Um, you know, with Jack, Jack kicked me like crazy all through the pregnancy. And there was this one certain kind of movement that I kept feeling. And then when he came out and was a tiny baby, there was this movement that he'd make with his arm. And I was like, oh, that was what I was feeling for the last three months or whatever, you know. And

You know, we don't have any of that with Ellen. I mean, there's always that question in the back of my mind when he's crying. It's like, does he miss her? You know, he knew her body for nine months and all of a sudden he's with me and John. He doesn't know our smells and our sounds. And it's like, is that part of the reason why he's unhappy right now? But also it's so similar because in this really small,

way that I never thought would be the case, both of my kids have ended up kind of being these, what feel like to me, like these miracle kids. Like, I could have died the first time around and Jack ended up being completely healthy and happy. And then with Owen being carried by someone else and just that the process is so amazing that it can even take place. Yeah. Owen is this

Miracle child, I guess. But does he also just feel like...

a baby? Yeah, that's totally right. I mean, it's, it makes me laugh because, you know, we just were on this high of, we can't believe that after all we went through with this crazy process that it worked and we, we have a baby and, um, you know, we bring him home and, you know, within a couple of days he realized that, you know, he's not sleeping at night at all. There's, you know, he's, he's has what turned out to be reflux and probably colic and, um,

Megan's heart is still not quite back to normal, but she's been living basically symptom-free for four years.

Thanks for listening to the Longest Shortest Time podcast. I'm Hilary Frank. If you want to know more about my birth story, which I mentioned at the top of the show, I wrote about it on my blog. It's the first entry at longestshortesttime.com. There's also a post there about the natural childbirth class I took.

And as always, I'm looking for moms and dads to tell me stories about their struggles in early parenthood. If you'd like me to consider your story, go to longestshortesttime.com and click contact.

That's Hilary Frank, producer and host of The Longest Shortest Time. Well, Hilary produced radio for about 12 years before diving into podcasting. She's noticed a few differences between the two. For podcasts, the length doesn't have to be exact. Deadlines are somewhat flexible, and she's changed how she writes. She doesn't. There's no script. I go into my bedroom with the tape recorder after I've produced the piece, and I have like a few bullet points that I want to hit.

And so I just kind of make it up as I go along and I just start telling a story or talking about whatever I want to talk about as I go. And I try it out all different kinds of ways. And then I go back into my office and I

try it out and I cut it together and inevitably there will be something that I missed or didn't say right and I'll need to go back and re-record a few things and that process, I do that process two or three times until it's just how I want it to sound. I'm really interested in that idea that you don't script yourself. Like for a broadcast piece you would script yourself and for these you don't. Yeah, but you know what? It's made me wonder is like if I go back to doing more traditional radio work

Might I do it a little bit more like this? You know, because I think I feel like my read is so much better than any of the reads I've done on radio stories. Why do you suppose that is? Because I feel I feel looser and I feel like I don't have to stick to the script. And so I sound more like I'm talking because I am basically just talking.

Do you think that there's other things about podcasting that would influence your production of a broadcast piece? Yeah, I mean, you know what? Like doing these pieces too, I really feel like I'm speaking to a specific audience. And when I've done radio stories, I kind of hate to say it, but I don't picture the audience. I just go in and I'm like talking about whatever I'm talking about. And...

And like I go and I read my lines and I'm done. And now I really think like I'm talking to people who like it's kind of thrilling. Like I'm talking to people who want to hear what I have to say about this. I think that if I were to go back into a studio to record for a regular radio story, I might picture an audience more clearly.

And I don't know that that would change my writing necessarily, but I think it might change my read. That's producer Hilary Frank from an archive episode of Sound School produced back in 2011. I should say the production values on The Longest Shortest Time have improved greatly. So did the storytelling. It's actually an interesting assignment to listen to the show over time to hear how Hilary improved as she was finding her way.

And you can definitely hear those improvements in the current iteration of the show. Hillary says she'll now focus the program on reproductive health, stories about sex ed, consent, periods, menopause, and as she wrote with an exclamation point, teens, because I love teens and I have a teenager now. Speaking of which, I highly recommend the first episode since the show has returned, The Staircase, it's called.

It's about Sasha, her 15-year-old daughter, and unwanted male attention. That episode with Roman Mars I mentioned, you can find it in the Sound School archive. There are hundreds of episodes to explore. Discover them at transom.org. They're also in your Sound School feed, so start digging.

This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom. I'm raising my mug of tea in thanks to Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jarrett, and WCAI. And thanks to you as well for listening. I'm Rob Rosenthal in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe.