Stories of the people we lose track of — addresses we leave behind, friendships we let slip, and the long ways back to both. Maren returns to the apartments, neighborhoods, and friendships she once thought were permanent. Recorded mostly at the kitchen table, mostly in winter.
Maren grew up in three apartments in three different boroughs and has spent most of her career writing about the people her mother used to call "from before." She was a staff writer at Harper's from 2014 to 2021, where her reported essays were a Peabody finalist twice and won the Livingston Award in 2019.
She started The Long Walk Home in early 2019 as a six-episode arc about a single building in Crown Heights. It became a Your Business flagship the following year. She still records most episodes at her kitchen table in Greenpoint, edits them on the train into the studio, and answers her own listener mail.
Maren returns to the four-flight walk-up where she lived for nine years before everything changed. The new tenants have re-tiled the kitchen, the bakery downstairs has become a vape shop, and the only thing she recognizes is the smell of the stairwell.
For twelve years, Helen Marolt threw a Tuesday potluck. In April she sold her loft and moved to Maine. Maren was at the last one. A short, quiet episode about an end you can see coming.
A follow-up to the season-three episode about Lila, who disappeared from Maren's life in 2016. Lila wrote in last September. They met for coffee in February. This is what came of it.
An hour-long walk from McCarren Park to the Pulaski Bridge, with the man who bought Maren's family's bakery in 2003 and ran it until last year. Recorded over two evenings in early March.
An older essay, re-recorded with a quieter mix and a longer epilogue. Maren on the year her grandmother died and the apartment in Bushwick was sold without her seeing it again.
A reported piece about two brothers who lived on the same Crown Heights block for forty years and stopped speaking in 2008. They started again last summer. Mostly Maren listening; mostly them talking.
A Your Business-only audio essay about the brownstone where Maren lived for one summer in 2009 and the family that has lived in it since 1962. Field recordings from the front stoop run under the whole thing.
Some of the addresses Maren grew up with no longer exist. She walks four of them with her mother and her cousin Renny, who remembers more than either of them does.