Episode 209: The Untended with Mattea Kramer

This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Mattea Kramer, a writer who comprehensively explores weighty ideas about drugs, power and powerlessness, and the voice in your head. She's been published in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Guernica, and The Washington Post, and she has appeared on MSNBC and on radio stations across the country. Her first novel, The Untended — the focus of this episode — will be published in May 2025. In The Untended, Casch Abbey is a waitress, single mom, and recreational boxer who falls in love twice: first with a veteran who secretly grows pot on a rich man’s land in Vermont’s Green Mountains, and then with a painkiller that eases her long-buried pain. After her foot is crushed under the wheel of a station wagon, Casch loses her waitressing gig and goes broke — and the meds for her foot are her only source of relief. But when the drug is recalled due to outcries of widespread addiction, Casch’s dependence imperils her already tenuous life, as cravings lead her into her small town’s simmering netherworld. Intimate and exhilarating, The Untended will upend your every assumption about who is a hero and who is worthy of love. In this episode host Michael Shields and Mattea Kramer explore the consequential themes present throughout The Unintended having to do with addiction, corporate greed, PTSD, generational trauma, and so much more.

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