I want this podcast to prove that regardless of whatever ‘daddy issues’ you possess, you can achieve anything you want.

That’s how actress Angharad George-Carey opens her debut podcast Daddy Issues, in which she interviews various, successful subjects on how fatherlessness has impacted their lives. Clara Amfo, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, and Sir Tim Waterstone are just a fraction of the successful people who grew up with some form of an absent father: dead, estranged, or just not around.

I found Angharad’s podcast on a rainy Thanksgiving in LA, during which I roasted a particularly foul-tasting squash for lunch at Jameela’s. I was alone, reflecting on how far I’d grown from childhood Thanksgivings. Far because I no longer visit the city I grew up in, the friends I knew, or the man who raised me.

Angharad and I both came of age without dads. Hers died in a Sri Lankan car accident when she was eight, leaving behind a scar across her forehead that is easily mistaken for a particularly dramatic vein. My father left on the day I turned 12. 

As I watched the slices of squash turn to tiny burnt morsels, I listened to Angharad interview Sharmadean Reid,  a renowned author and beauty entrepreneur who grew up just minutes away from her estranged father. “Who cares if a thousand people like my photo on Instagram, or who cares if I got an MBE from the Queen?” she said. “My dad’s not the one patting me on the head saying, ‘well done,’ so it literally means nothing to me.” 

A month later, it rained again. This time I was at Angharad’s mews house in Notting Hill, quickly rushing into a photo shoot only moments after arriving at her front door.

In the photos, we laugh together, making the most of the cold morning like we’re old friends. This bizarre, nearly instant, connection, we soon realised, was in fact not random, but a shared lifetime of common side effects.

“I started writing about grief because I was experiencing it so vividly that I couldn’t not write about it,” Angharad says, taking a fry off my plate. We’ve moved to the pub for tequila sodas, a drink I rarely opt for in December. But Angharad is good at leading a discussion, and somehow convinced me that today, a week before Christmas, was the perfect day for tequila.  

As a young actress in London, Angharad found herself grieving, 17 years later. After surviving the car accident that killed her dad, Angharad and her siblings moved from Hong Kong to North Wales. Angharad was eight, bound in a wheelchair and covered in scars. “I would walk around my grandma’s garden and pinch myself thinking I’d wake up,” she says. “I lost who I was.” 

Throughout her schooling, Angharad, like so many of us, learned to cope. She points to her forehead. “I was literally scarred from it in a way that my classmates could see,” she explains.“I became someone who constantly had to talk about this car accident and make jokes about it and make it sociable. I was denying continuously how I really felt.”

Knowing how to talk about absent fathers, whether they’re dead or estranged, is difficult. In America in particular, we glorify the ideal of a nuclear family. Refusing a relationship with your father, or being refused a relationship with your father, is unnerving to the general public, evident in the press surrounding Meghan Markle’s wedding. In a society built for men, women with difficult relationships with their dads, or ‘daddy issues,’ are shamed as mentally unstable and sexually predatory, dangerous to men. If you don’t get along with your dad, how are you going to get along with the man that owns the business, or the building, or even, the restaurant?

“Truthfully, men have been allowed to be absent for so long,” Angharad says. “It’s normalised in society. Whereby talking about how shit that is, and how that makes someone feel, is seen as a ‘mental health issue.’’

This denial is why I at first found Angharad’s podcast so unsettling. My favourite podcasts are about failure, love, and sexual predators: three of the more traumatising things I’ve experienced. And yet, a podcast about the repercussions of fatherlessness is so personal it feels like a confrontation.

“That was my point!” Angharad says. “I wanted to create a vocabulary for other people to say, ‘Oh, that’s how I feel.’”

As we delve into the nuances of ‘daddy issues,’ I mention a scene in Netflix’s You, a hit show about a serial killer disguised as a lovestruck Brooklyn bookseller. Unaware of her boyfriend’s violent past, his blonde, blue-eyed girlfriend pushes him against a wall, unbuttoning his shirt. “You know what they say about girls with daddy issues,” she says, grabbing his dick.

Angharad lets out a huge sigh of disgust. “Oh my god!” She exclaims, before listing the fetish porn that shows up when you Google the term. Videos like, ‘She has Daddy Issues’ and ‘Damaged Little Girls’ feature subservient younger women, violently dominated by their male partners.

This porn is, like most things, evidence of the patriarchy. When men hold the most power in a society, masculine approval not only dictates how a marginalized gender is perceived, but what we have access to, and whether or not we’re physically safe. All consequences that impact our confidence and sense of worth. If women are rejected or abandoned by their fathers, they then crave their worth from relationships with other men, hence the porn trend. “Just like how we reclaimed slut-shaming, I wanted to reclaim ‘daddy issues’ through a sympathetic lens,” Angharad says. “I wanted to get rid of the shame. That’s how you change something.”

I admit to her that I hate the term. The idea of ‘daddy issues’ has plagued me for most of my life, making me feel like a second rate partner purely because I don’t have a relationship with my father. This paranoia was made worse when in my first semester of college, an older fraternity boy asked if I was into him because I had it. ‘Daddy issues’. It always feels like a punch to the abdomen, and I rarely hear it used to describe boys. “The phrase Daddy Issues is so misinformed and thrown around completely ignorantly,” Angharad explains. “Men have daddy issues as much as women if not more.” 

In Angharad’s conversations with successful men, a pattern emerged. Just like women without fathers fear for their romantic lives, men without fathers worry about repercussions in their professional lives. They crave a strong patriarch to model themselves after, a leader to drive them towards success. But both of these fears are proven false by Angharad’s podcast. Fatherless women don’t have to be in toxic relationships, and fatherless men don’t have to be mediocre. It’s just what our society tells us.

When interviewing The Hon. Julia Samuel, renowned British psychotherapist and pediatric counsellor, Angharad asks what the common antidotes may be for those living without fathers. “Busyness,” Julia replied.  “And any kind of anesthetic.” 

Every guest on this podcast has reached incredible success. They have, in other words, remained busy. While some admit they turned to partying or other forms of escapism, there is no doubt that a lack of a father can inspire many of us to work harder to create our own legacy. We don’t have an example of the older male boss at home, and so instead, we become that boss ourselves.

I thought about this three months later, on a subway ride through Brooklyn. To keep me company I played Angharad’s episode with Lord Malloch Brown. I listened as he described being 13, fatherless at a school full of boys with busy, notable fathers. 

“I was less money than most students,” he says. “And I did feel in some ways, like the orphan kid who had a much greater impetus to get into the world and make my own way and get past what was, as they say, a broken childhood.”

As I stood on the subway, listening to a man 40 years older than me, esteemed for a career I know little about, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh,” I thought. “That’s how I feel.”

—

As we finish our drinks, I repeat my favorite part of every Daddy Issues episode back to the host.

I want this podcast to prove that regardless of whatever daddy issues you possess, you can achieve anything you want.

“I wrote that first line for myself,” she says. “I wanted to remind myself that I don’t have to be defined by my past. I don’t have to be defined by my dad or my non-relationship. Perhaps you’ve let your dad define you, but in other ways you haven’t. And I feel the same about me.”

To continue the discussion surrounding Daddy Issues, follow Angharad on Instagram.  Series Two launches May 5, 2020 and features guests such as Jada Sezer, Grace Carter, Elizabeth Ilsley and Liam Hackett.