Matt and Eleanor Friedberger do not, it seems, like each other very much. When they were growing up in Chicago, the children of an English historian father and Greek-American mother, Eleanor (who’s now 27) would never bring friends over to the house because Matt (now 31) would be so horrible to her. “I was a little s***,” he admits. “I was at my smartest when I was 11, and I never really got any smarter.” He has no memories of Eleanor from his teens because, as she points out, she spent years avoiding him.
As adults, the Friedbergers initially enjoyed a polite, if fairly distant, relationship. Matt moved to New York and played in bands, Eleanor went travelling. Then, in 2000, the two of them