It starts with a novel about a woman who steals from her employer, marries into money, and eventually disappears on her own kids. It ends with a hard, unresolved argument about loyalty, guilt, and who actually holds women to impossible standards.

Are women each other's worst enemy? Not men, not the patriarchy in the abstract, but women, tearing down other women who speak up, judging mothers who walk away, staying silent when it would cost them something to defend each other.

Also: book recs, the "human doing" trap, a Paraguayan Senator's lame excuse for attacking the great Kylian Mbappe, and why nobody should be tipping 20% in Montenegro.

💌 Our Substack & Show Notes:
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📚 Read Ksenija’s Novels:
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📚 Ksenija on Goodreads:
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🎙️ ABOUT TRANSATLANTIC BOOKMARKS

Hosted by European novelist Ksenija Popović and American engineer Sue Graham Johnston, Transatlantic Bookmarks is a weekly literary podcast that uses books as the starting point for conversations about culture, history, psychology, morality, politics, and the questions hiding between the lines.

New episodes every Saturday.

👉🏻 CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:30 Tipping Culture

10:23 Expectations of Loyalty and Compliance

15:02 The Impact of Aging on Women

21:57 Compliance vs. Performance and the Human Doing

29:07 Mothers Abandoning Children

43:20 Class Distinctions, Politics, and Morality

50:03 Living Up to the Public Image on Social Media

53:37 Coopting Feminism to Justify Abhorrent Behavior: the Case of the Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla

59:35 Trump's Intervention in the World Cup

01:03:22 Book Recommendations