Their Dad Wrote a Sex Book, Then He Died. They Made a Podcast.
A Podcast About Sex & Grief
By The Dodenhoff Brothers
Some people inherit watches. Some inherit debt. We inherited an unpublished dating manuscript our late father wrote after his divorce. The book, 29 Second Chances at Love, opens with a detailed account of him going down on a woman while his kids do homework in the next room, which is a bold way to begin both a book… and a legacy.
So when we turned it into a podcast, resurrecting his voice with AI, the question became unavoidable: would he have approved? Not only to post it, but to laugh at it? To find the absurdity in a middle aged man's endeavor to enshrine every last detail of his sexual experiences?
It goes without saying, we weren't the target audience for these pages. Frankly, we're still not sure who is. That uncertainty is part of what pushed us toward the podcast, not just to tell the story, but to figure out where it fits.
The Reference Point: My Dad Wrote A Porno
Early on, My Dad Wrote A Porno felt like a natural reference point. A son reading his father's explicit writing aloud shouldn't work as well as it does, but it does because it commits. That gave us a kind of permission. If something is honest enough, specific enough, and fully leaned into, an audience will meet you there.
Still, what we found ourselves sitting with wasn't just absurdity. There was something heavier underneath it, something that only really becomes clear when you read his words directly. At one point, he writes:
"Was this really happening? Was this really occurring with my three boys just steps away down the hallway and this girl's best friend and my ex business partner just thirty feet away in the kitchen? None of this seemed to matter as the irony of the situation was overwhelmed by my explosive sexual desire."
Of course, context matters. Usually, it harms our father's case, but let's set the scene. In his late 40's, he entered a separation agreement with our mom and gained half custody of us (three boys, aged 5 to 10 at the time). We imagine many things enter a man's mind following separation after 14 years of marriage, but our dad wastes no time in revealing his priorities. He wondered, in a life or death sense, whether he would ever feel the touch of a woman again.
He did. 29 times, approximately. Hence the title.
In trying to make sense of that, the mix of intimacy, compulsion, and exposure, we kept coming back to Death, Sex & Money. That show lives in the space of things people usually don't say out loud. What we're doing feels like pushing even further, taking something that maybe wasn't meant to be shared at all and giving it a microphone anyway.
Still, don't pity us. Our dad was a great father. He just, well, died. Which turns the bizarrely humorous, screwball adventure story into something else entirely. While writing about his fight with cancer, he succumbed to the disease and left the unpublished manuscript behind.
Ridiculous —> Heavy
That shift, from ridiculous to heavy, is something we didn't plan for, but couldn't avoid. And it's where shows like Terrible, Thanks for Asking (Now Thanks For Asking) started to resonate. The ability to hold grief and humor in the same space isn't something you engineer. It just shows up if the material demands it.
Sifting through his things after his passing, we found the manuscript. The opening passage sets the tone immediately:
"OH…MY…GOD!" I thought. There IS life after divorce! She was lying back on the couch. I was on the floor on my knees between her knees. Gently grasping the sides of her panties, I began to pull. My heart raced even more and I started to sweat heavily. I moved my hands to her knees and slowly separated her legs… But, I'm starting to get ahead of myself."
Bringing the book to life through the podcast has brought that original question, of his approval, into sharper focus. But we've found this is mostly a question for people who haven't listened yet. Once they hear the unfiltered, fully committed words he left behind, paired with our attempt to make sense of them, the answer becomes clearer.
In a word, he wrote it to be read. So yes, he would have approved.