Dear Reader,
I’m delighted to announce that my daughter, Lisi Tesher, who’s been a trusted friend to the Ellie column for over a decade, will be joining me in sharing the writing duties several times a week.
There’s a long tradition of families who give advice, established by the famed syndicated columnists Ask Ann Landers (taken over by Esther “Eppie” Lederer from the original author), and her twin sister, Dear Abby (Pauline Phillips, a.k.a. Abigail Van Buren).
Lisi is a natural to join me in this tradition. She’s a committed people person — outgoing and loyal to friends from varied backgrounds and interests, maintaining contact with them over many years. She’s positive in attitude, sympathetic to others’ issues, and meets any personal challenges head on.
Her empathy and skill at encouraging people and offering helpful suggestions when they speak to her of their personal or relationship problems can reassure you that she’s the right fit to share this task with me.
She has long been involved with this column, as the first pair of eyes on the finished copy, which she edits and then sends to the Toronto Star editors. She follows up with any editorial questions, and speaks regularly with Torstar Syndicate staff, providing the column to newspaper and digital readers across Canada.
She also researches readers’ submissions to the resources featured on my popular website, which she also manages.
Lisi and I sometimes have discussions regarding someone’s letter expressing despair, and I can see she is instantly ready to shine a light through that darkness, with a fresh look at the writer’s issue.
And Lisi and I have worked together many times. We jointly hosted an advice hour several years ago on the Canadian radio station, CFRB, with both of us answering questions from callers in real time. Our responses had to be instant, and Lisi was quick off the mark — always respectful and caring, while never abrupt or dismissive. Lisi and I jointly gave a speech about relationship advice to a large Chicago audience of women, when the Ellie column appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, and she has partnered with me during other speaking engagements in Toronto.
Her empathy and intention to encourage people is her own hallmark.
Lisi is a wife, mother, sister, aunt, niece, cousin; she is an important part of a close-knit, diverse and caring family, and is also a loyal, trusted friend.
I have loved the opportunity the Star has given me to be a voice of advice and guidance in response to the tens of thousands of questions and concerns entrusted to me by so many of you who continue to read this column through nearly 20 years.
That’s why it’s so important to me to express my full confidence in Lisi — and that you will be able to trust in her voice and her ability to speak to readers directly.
During these recent COVID years, particularly during the virus’ spread, I recognized that readers’ anxiety, stress and isolation required more than the cleverly snappy comebacks of the famed early syndicated advice-givers (as in the Landers’ gem, “Wake up and smell the coffee!”). That was then.
The long history of newspaper advice columns and their writers — popularized in England, where they were dubbed “agony aunts,” though sometimes written by male editors — dates as far back as the late 1600s. Some of the female writers who became so popular in America from the 1950s wrote under pseudonyms, so husbands wouldn’t be embarrassed because their wives worked. Imagine!
As for tradition, Lederer’s (a.k.a. Ann Landers) daughter, Margo Howard, wrote the Dear Prudence column for eight years. Pauline Phillips’ (a.k.a. Dear Abby) daughter, Jeanne Phillips, continued her mother’s original advice column from 2002.
Now, I’m so proud to have Lisi share a bigger role in the column, writing her own responses to the many who have regularly read this feature and to the curious new readers.
We will both appear separately, on various days of the week, online and in print, in the Toronto Star, and across the Torstar network, also syndicated in the many newspapers where you’ve been reading me.
Watch for Lisi’s first column on Monday, May 30.