Debbie Millman:
Josh Brolin has led a wild life, and I’m not just referring to his acting career in his just-released memoir, From Under the Truck, we learned that he started stealing cigarettes at nine, got stabbed in the belly button in Costa Rica, and had a stint in prison. From Under The Truck is a book about Josh Brolin’s trajectory as an artist and an actor, but it’s also about what it was like to grow up on a ranch with a mercurial mother, hit it big in a movie as a teenager, become a day trader in his 20s, and be nominated for an Academy Award at 40. Josh Brolin, welcome to Design Matters.

Josh Brolin:
Thank you, Debbie. Thank you so much for having me on.

Debbie Millman:
Josh, I understand you do a wildly impressive Richard Burton impersonation.

Josh Brolin:
From who? Who said that?

Debbie Millman:
I read that somewhere in my research.

Josh Brolin:
I don’t know. You know who does the greatest Richard Burton impression, who’s from the same area is Tony Hopkins. There’s nobody that does a better Richard Burton impression than Tony Hopkins, but mine’s okay.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Josh Brolin:
I’ll throw it in there somewhere along the line, but I feel moved.

Debbie Millman:
Well, congratulations on the publication of your memoir, From Under the Truck.

Josh Brolin:
Thank you. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that writing the book was perhaps the most humbling experience of your life and definitely the hardest you’ve ever worked on anything, and I’m wondering why so humbling and why so hard?

Josh Brolin:
I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true, if it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything because the work ethic aspect of my life I think is set, and it has always been set. I remember when my dad said at one point, “I remember when you went to war,” and I don’t know when that was. I think it was sometime in my 20s. It was meant as a positive, as an affirmation that I finally said, “I’m not going to play with this. I’m not going to just kind of dip my finger in this. I’m going to give myself entirely to it.” And it was the same thing with the book, I’ve always written, and I think when I finally decided to stop writing books and putting them in a dark corner to start disintegrating and tell nobody about it, I said, “Put it out there.”

There’s something that happens in your 50s, where you just kind of say the fear is a different type… My relationship with fear has changed. I don’t care as much anymore, or even if I do, I care about slightly different things, and there’s going to be negative connotations to everything that I do, maybe that’s being in this acting business for 40 years. So my version of fuck it finally came to fruition and I just wrote it, but I cared. So I care about sentence structure, and I care about writing a literarily viable book. It’s not just about, “Hey guys, look at my life. I was four years old, and they knew I was going to be a performer. They knew it from the start. Then I met famous people and life just got great.” I’m not interested in that trajectory.

Debbie Millman:
If only it were that easy.

Josh Brolin:
If only it were that easy.

Debbie Millman:
Now, I understand it was your dad who first encouraged you to write down or draw what you were thinking on a piece of paper as a little boy and I believe you have… I read that you have something like 90 journals.

Josh Brolin:
I do. Yeah. I don’t know if it was my dad. Interviews are great because you guys end up finding out things that I don’t even know or I haven’t thought about in 40 years or 50 years. Maybe he did. There’s a book that he used to read called Cyber-Cybernetics and say it was going to change your life. He still mentions it. He’s 84 years old, and he’s still talking about the same book, but I think that there’s something in that book and The Art of Dramatic Writing. God, I haven’t thought of that book forever. I think it’s Lajos Egri or something like that, and he mentioned that book to me at a very young age. I think I was in my teens, and I read it. For some reason for me, the expression of writing was the one place I could be completely honest.

Debbie Millman:
Why do you think that is?

Josh Brolin:
I don’t know. And when I look back at those journals, some are very angry, some are very contracted, and then there’s things that are very poetical about them. And in the way I was looking at things that I didn’t feel like I could express to my little ruffian buddies because I thought I would get slammed for it. So it was the one place of solace and liberation I found myself was in journals. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You described From Under the Truck as unconventional nonfiction. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Josh Brolin:
I would probably describe me as nonconventional nonfiction or a bit fictional. Jennifer, a mutual friend, Pastiloff, she sent me something this morning. Somebody had asked a child about writing in their journal, “Have you written your journal yet?” And the child responded, “No, the words are still stuck in the pencil.” And I said, “I want to think on that plane all the time.” You just hit the nail on the head of… And whether it’s absurd, whether it’s considered absurd or not, there’s something about that leap of the imagination that I want to live in all the time. And I don’t think it’s wrong to live in that all the time. It doesn’t negate the practicalities of life.

So I think that when I was… I think I was around… I was in ninth grade in high school, and there was a guy named Mr. Visser, and I was writing, it was an English class, it was a lit class. And he came by and he was reading my stuff and he said, “Technically, you’re all over the place.” He didn’t say that. He used other words, the F word, but he said, “All you need to do is write, just keep writing.” So there was something about my writing that he felt was going to flourish at some time. So there was always some focus on it from the outside of people who took the time to, and I say this emotionally, see me. I had my outer layers, surfer, tough, fighting, drinking and all that stuff, and then there was this softer, more imaginative person that didn’t feel like he had the space to live that outwardly. So journals were that for me.

Debbie Millman:
Early on in the book, you state that you have made your life harder than it needed to be.

Josh Brolin:
For sure. I learned from the best.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your upbringing. You grew up on a 230-acre ranch in California. You were primarily raised by your mother, who in many ways is the centerpiece of this book. And you describe her in the book in this way, and I’m going to quote you, “She was armored with a character so unique and memorable that to die would be an insult to her mythology. She’d be leaving behind an easy breeze, a cloudless sky, no music on the radio. She was the zap in every electrical current we had felt. She was the alcohol in a mixed drink. She was the wildness in a sunset just after a horrible storm had passed.” There’s a really vivid description. I’m wondering if you would describe her as happy.

Josh Brolin:
No, but I too don’t think that’s the goal. There’s something that I mentioned in my book, and not to insult my father at all, but I think that there was this idea, this status quo idea of waking up in the morning and saying, “Good morning, are you happy?” And I’m like, “Why is that the goal all the time?” So I think that my mother and what I got from my mother is maybe a little too much. You embrace whatever’s going on. Life is a potpourri, and sometimes you’re angry and sometimes you’re sad, and sometimes you can’t explain it. And sometimes you’re ashamed for no particular reason that maybe you can pull from your past. And it’s this kind of therapeutic idea that if you just go to the right therapy, you can exercise that thing that will finally set you free. And what I’ve learned in doing a lot of therapy and just from a very, very early age, 13 years old, I was paying for my own therapy.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Josh Brolin:
Yeah. There was a guy who used to go to sleep on me that was therapeutic literally, but that’s what I mean by making it tough. I wanted to experience everything. I wanted to know. I was curious. And I don’t say this from a victimized place, coming from the chaos that I came from, I became insatiably curious about why do people do what they do, why are they reacting like they’re reacting, but I’ve found later on in life that it’s my relationship with it that makes the difference. Tony Hopkins had said something to me once, he said… Sober. He said, “How great is it that we’re like this?” And I was like, “What? What does that mean? What?”

And he said, “We’re just angry. We’re edgy.” I go, “Why is that a good thing? Is that a good thing,” I said. And he’s been sober 40-something years and one of the greatest human beings I know. And he said, “Yeah, because alcoholics given this thing that this engine that seems to live in us that never quite idles properly left to its own devices can be the most hurtful destructive thing imaginable, but directed in the right way, given the right tools can be the most productive enlivening thing imaginable.” So that was a moment in my life where I was like, “Oh, it’s my relationship with it,” as opposed to having to change and be somebody else and get rid of something that is innate in me.

Debbie Millman:
You became sober at 29, two years after your mother died. What provoked you to try and stop living with the anger in such a destructive way?

Josh Brolin:
I think there was another level of drinking and using I went to try and get closer to my mother. It was almost like I was writing a true crime novel, and I was at the epicenter of it. The night my mother died, she had pulled a .22 on her boyfriend that was saying, “I’m out of here.” And he was trying to leave and she said, “You’re not going anywhere.” And then she was chasing him in the car, and she ended up turning a corner that I know very well because we still have that ranch and then hit the tree at 70 miles an hour or whatever, and everything was heightened. So I think I just heightened what was already stratospheric, and it scared me. And I didn’t choose. There was an intervention with some friends. I always liked sober people because they were more honest and could count on them. And people said, “I think it’s time.” And I tried it, and I stayed sober for a while, but I didn’t stay sober forever. I never wanted to stay sober because I felt like sober was invisible.

Debbie Millman:
What does that mean?

Josh Brolin:
It means that I didn’t feel like I had a personality on my own. I felt what drinking did for me, and it absolutely did do it for me for a while. It gave me a personality. It gave me a voice. I didn’t have the fear filter, the massive fear filter that everything had to be pushed through. I’m scared. I’m sober. I go talk to a girl. She’s not interested in me. I’m polite. I’m this. I’m drunk. I put out my hand. A girl grabs it, and we’re together for the next three months or three years.

I don’t know why that works that way. I don’t like that it works that way. I don’t know if it has to do with confidence or false confidence or whatever it is, but it seemed that when I drank, it all went more smoothly until it didn’t, until it bit me in the ass, and it always eventually bit me in the ass. And now sober, I think to cut to years and decades later, there’s a form of sobriety that I feel that I’ve found that deals with the fear as well as and much less self-destructively or destructively than alcohol did, but alcohol was a great friend for a while.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you said that your childhood… And this is a quote from the book, your childhood was on a leash of the whims of your mother, and your world revolved around country, western, outlaw 18-wheeler culture. Great line. Now, this included drugs, a lot of drinking, performing in a punk band, surfing with a group named the Cleo Rats-

Josh Brolin:
Cito Rats.

Debbie Millman:
… [inaudible 00:13:45] this stint in juvenile detention and prison. Now, you said that if you weren’t in prison at the time that you were, you’d have been dead. Why is that?

Josh Brolin:
Well, it was the Cito Rats, C-I-T-O.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, sorry about that.

Josh Brolin:
No, no, no, that’s okay. Because I’ll have a couple of guys call me, for sure. Why would I be dead? Because a lot of us died, a ton of us, not a few, 36. So there were a lot of guys that I grew up with because there was the heroin epidemic, there was punk rock, there was just normal self-destructive. Everything that we’re talking about that was heightened and more vivid living from my mother was also a culture that I was in the nucleus of in Santa Barbara, and you can’t even tell that story because it’s fricking Montecito. So you mentioned Montecito and self-destruction, and people go, “Oh, silver spoon self-destruction. I get it.” You know what I mean? And back then it wasn’t like that, it was a very… I’ve never seen anything before it or since. It was all kind of instigated by this Sid Vicious mentality, Sex Pistols mentality, and it doesn’t exist anymore.

I’m in Santa Barbara again, it’s lovely here. I’m more geriatric, and I’ve found a flow. But we moved back to Santa Barbara fairly recently, and I contracted a mild case of Bell’s palsy. I was so scared of moving back. I was telling my wife, “You don’t understand. You’re not supposed to understand, but if we move there, our little girls are going to end up in prison. Do you understand? This place is paradise in disguise. There is an underbelly,” and it’s not. It was, but it’s not. There was something about that time and place and that group of kids and how parents were in the ’80s, that all lent itself to a lot of… Destroying a lot of really brilliant people who I miss dearly.

Debbie Millman:
Josh, you talk about your brother in your memoir, and I want to read a line that was one of the most moving and really sad. Your mother hired a woman named Ramona to help her, and you describe her in the book as your mother for seven years, but she left to raise her own children, and you include the date. You remember the date, September 4th, 1981. You were 13 years old, and you describe your brother in the following way, “Jess was nine, and that was the last I saw him, for it was at that moment when he drove his personality inside the garage of his brain and closed the door.” Did he ever come out?

Josh Brolin:
No. Yes, he came out in his own way, in a way that he could control, in a way that made him comfortable just like I did. I think how he dealt with his surroundings was very different because he’s a different person. I think he-

Debbie Millman:
And younger, yeah.

Josh Brolin:
And younger. But I think he got… The irritation toward my brother was more than what I got. I got the normal severe, albeit severe impatience, but my brother didn’t have fight in him. He had violence in him, but he didn’t have fight. He didn’t have wherewithal. I just think he was more sensitive. He was more affected. I protected him as much as I could. And then I kind of went off and did my own thing once that Cito Rat deal started to happen. But I think my dad describes it now, he said, “You were very protective. You were always shaming us for the bad parents that we were toward Jess.” I talk to my brother all the time now, so he’s doing very well. I mean, I called him about writing that stuff and I said, “Are you okay with this? I wanted to check. Are you okay?” And there’s some things that I read to my brother and he is like, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s how it went,” which is always going to be the case-

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Josh Brolin:
… because his perception and my perception of it, but I think we’re a pretty open family now, and we kind of look at it through the lens of absurdity, and I think pleased that we survived it. There’s a lot of humor in my family. There’s a lot of compensatory humor in my family. So we exist on that plane most of the time.

Debbie Millman:
You got your first movie role, the starring part in the 1985 Steven Spielberg story, The Goonies. You were 17 years… I just re-watched it by the way. It still holds up. It still holds up. You stated that to prepare for the part you were reading Stanislavski, and you asked Steven Spielberg if the tunnel in the film was a metaphor for your mother’s womb.

Josh Brolin:
Womb. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I remember his face being very patient and nodding while I was talking. And then he’s looked down and then he looked up and he said, “You know what? Why don’t you just say the words that are on the page?” And I was like, “Okay, that’s what I’ll do.” I want it to be good. I want it to be-

Debbie Millman:
Of course.

Josh Brolin:
I want it to be good. I was reading Stanislavski. I was reading Grotowski. I was reading Antonin Artaud. I was reading about the Theater of Cruelty. I was in it. I was in it. I just want it to be better.

Debbie Millman:
I think that’s probably one of the themes of your whole life if you wanted outsider’s perspective now that I read your memoir. Your next two movies were Thrashin’ in 1986 and Finish Line in 1989, and you didn’t make another movie for another five years. And you said the problem back then was that you were a C-minus actor who had no nuance, no depth, and no innate natural skill. You began to supplement your income as a landscape artist and then day trading. What made you decide to play the stock market?

Josh Brolin:
I had met a friend, Brett Markinson, who’s still a close friend, and I had met him. I did something called Into the West. It was like a mini-series. It was a Western mini-series. And I had done an episode of that, and they flew us to New York to promote it, and they were flying us back. And it was a friend of a friend, Skeet Ulrich, who introduced me to Brett Markinson. And we just laughed for six hours on the plane back. And I asked him what he did and he said he trades stocks, and I said I was always a math guy. I was always very good at math. I was always the guy who was actually looking for extra credit from the math teacher because I had just enjoyed doing that. And he said, “Yeah, well, it’s all about reading graphs.” And then I just started asking question after question after question, and I liked him and he liked talking. He liked teaching.

So I wasn’t making a lot of money. I was working once every 12 months, 14 months or something like that. I never was in a position for two decades to know while I was doing a job what the next job was going to be. I always went this long span of time auditioning and seeing the normal people in the hallways. And thank you for coming in, Josh. That was wonderful. Lie. And knowing that I wouldn’t hear from them again, popping up from behind the couch and pretending like I have a gun with my thing, and I’m in the black forest in Germany, whatever it is. You know what I mean? It’s all so ridiculous and just shame spiraling my way through this career. And when I would finally get a job, it was great. But trading just brought, I don’t know, it allowed me to utilize a part of my brain and find my way through this labyrinth of discipline that I really enjoyed because he said, “Any instinct that you have in trading is meaningless.” I have a feeling this is going to happen, should not exist in your vocabulary.

Look at the graph. It’s all practical. And once you really learn how to start reading the graphs, all you’ll see is fear and greed, and you’re playing off that. You’re playing off momentum stocks. You’re playing off the foundation of a company. You’re not looking for the big win. You’re just looking for little breaths on an upward trajectory. And I did, and I got it, and I made a lot of money. And I would never do that today because I don’t have the time and a bunch of young kids. I remember when I was trading, my older kids, they’d be like, “We have to go to school. Please God, get in the car.” I’d be like, “One more. I’ll be right there. I’ll be right there. I’ll be right there, yo.” And it’s not gambling. It was really a design, and I had a lot of fun doing it. So I won more than I lost, and that was the point. And I was able to survive a little bit longer and still call myself an actor.

Debbie Millman:
At that time, you described it being one when no one wanted to hire you, you would then cast as, and this is actually one of my favorite roles of yours, as the bisexual ATF agent in David O. Russell’s brilliant-

Josh Brolin:
Brilliant.

Debbie Millman:
… 1996 film, Flirting with Disaster, which co-starred Ben Stiller, Lily Tomlin. Oh, she’s amazing in that film.

Josh Brolin:
Amazing.

Debbie Millman:
Patricia Arquette. Now, I read that you actually improvised the scene where you lick Patricia Arquette’s armpit.

Josh Brolin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
True?

Josh Brolin:
Yeah. That was just supposed to be a kiss. We filmed it. It was supposed to be a peck. And David O. Russell very smartly said, “This is boring. It’s not working.” I said, “What about… I don’t know, what if I suck on her toe or what about something like that?” And then we’re thinking about it. He said, “Suck on her toe. I don’t know.” And then Patricia said, “What about licking the armpit?” And she had grown out her hair for that role. It was more like a hippie mom. And I was like, “Nah, I don’t know about that idea. That’s not…” And David goes, “Oh, that’s great.” So we did it. We’d have wet wipes on the side to wipe off my tongue. And then David says, “I know the armpit hair is really getting in the way for me.” So then we did it a third time with no armpit hair, and that was the one.

Debbie Millman:
Your role in that movie… I don’t know. I feel like that’s the movie where you became an actor. You were so good in that movie.

Josh Brolin:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You were unrecognizable in that movie.

Josh Brolin:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
In so many ways.

Josh Brolin:
I had done a lot of theater before that with Anthony Zerbe, and I felt like I had done roles like that in the past. I had just never… I was still stuck, I think in people’s minds in a certain way. It was a jock or they didn’t know what to do with me or that… So Miramax did not want me to do that film. They actively tried to get David to get somebody else to do this film.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Josh Brolin:
Because I think, at that point, what was I? 27, my mom had just passed during the rehearsals of that film. And I just think I was a guy in their minds that should have hit and didn’t. So I was like damaged goods. I was rotting fruit. I think that role was like Mark Wong or something. I wasn’t even right for the role, the way it was written. Wong was not me, but I came in and I auditioned. They let me audition. I kind of improvised through some things and he really liked me, so he forced me down their throats. And then I ended up being like a Miramax guy after that, and he used me for several roles until I turned down a role, and then I was blacklisted for 10 years.

Debbie Millman:
At that point, did you feel like your acting had improved? Because I forgot that you were in that movie. I forgot that it was you in that movie. It was such from all of your previous roles. When I was looking at your filmography, I’m like, “Oh, my God. He’s in one of my favorite movies,” and I didn’t even realize it.

Josh Brolin:
I love that movie. I love that experience. And I was such a fish out of water because like I said, I had done roles like that on stage, and I was a Harley guy, and I was riding my Harley to work. And so there was some rebellious thing that I was playing out some idea of that. And then you see Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal. And I’m like, “You’ve got to be…” I so don’t belong here. I don’t blame Miramax for not wanting me. Why am I here? And we developed that character, he was just a bisexual ATF agent.

And we did the tattoos, we did the armpit licking thing. We did the scene in the back of the car where we’re talking about proper blowjobs and all that kind of stuff. And it was really fun because I felt like, was I a better actor? No, but I felt like it was more along the lines of my sensibilities. It was character. It was what interested me, what are people about, what’s behind the cosmetic presentation, it’s like when I researched Wall Street too. When you take a bunch of billionaires out, they’re going to present a certain type, get them drunk, and then you get to find out some real stuff, and I found out some real stuff.

Debbie Millman:
Two movies figure prominently in your memoir, The Goonies and the 2007 film, No Country for Old Men, which was the first movie you made with the Coen brothers. What made you decide to focus on these specific films?

Josh Brolin:
There’s something about my… Even saying, I enjoy being an actor was tough for me for a very long time. There was something emasculating, emotionally emasculating about the idea of saying, “Yes, I’m an actor, that’s what I do.”

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Josh Brolin:
I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the celebrity that I experienced my dad kind of endure. There was never a celebration in it. There was always a massive discomfort in it. And I think this idea, this confusion of are you an actor or are you a celebrity? Do you know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Josh Brolin:
And I’ve always said that with any kind of success in this industry, people immediately resort to this idea that you are walking through a life on a red carpet just waving at people. And this is part of the memoir, is in reaction to that. You go, “Listen, it’s all dirty, it’s all messy. We’re all trying to find our way through the muck and the molasses, and find our value and what that means and that changes and all that.” And that’s to me, what becomes this celebrated communal experience, is when we all go, “Oh, we’re all going through different versions of the same thing. How great. Cool. Let’s lean on each other. Let’s share with each other.”

So I think if there’s any intention, it’s that. So I lean away from this idea of like… And then I was nominated. And there was Michael Shannon and there was Robert Downey, and we’re looking at each other and we’re going, “I hope it’s me. I hope it’s me.” Of course, it’s going to be Heath because Heath had just died and it just would have been horrible had it not been Heath and he deserved it anyway. But who really deserves it and what is the academy anyway? I mean, I could go through all that, but it’s super boring to me.

Debbie Millman:
Well, during the filming of No Country for Old Men, you met the writer, Cormac McCarthy, and you became friendly with him. And you write in the memoir about a conversation you had with him about your careers and the realization that there is the work… I’m going to quote you, “There is the work, then there are those who respond to the work. That’s it. You’re a genius and you’re a disaster of an artist are close cousins.”

Josh Brolin:
Yes, yes. I don’t know who wrote that, but that’s cool.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you quoted it.

Josh Brolin:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that was you, Josh, I think that was you.

Josh Brolin:
I did. I wrote that.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t think that was Cormac.

Josh Brolin:
I’m proud of that. No, it wasn’t Cormac. And the funny thing and why I think Cormac liked me and why I loved him, was there was me trying to find out what writers inspired him. And that moment in the memoir where I tried to get him to sign a typewriter, and he just would have none of it. He just wasn’t interested. He was interested in talking about the Santa Fe Institute and the scientists around him. And he was much more interested in the alchemy of things than he was in the status of things.

So, he did give me that one moment where he was like, Hemingway’s short stories were pretty good.” I was like, “Thank you.” But I’m sure it’s like Brando talking about acting. There is just an innate talent. Cormac said it to me. He says, “I don’t know what I do. I just sit down and it comes.” And I think that was probably the most astute, honest thing that I had ever heard anybody say professionally where some people just have a talent and a gift. And whatever they’re working out and sentence structure in their head, they refuse to take anything less than what they know is the best of what they can do, but it’s all a very quiet, silent process.

Debbie Millman:
But it’s also about sitting down and doing it every day.

Josh Brolin:
And he did it every day. I was with Cormac the night before he died. It was me, his ex-wife and his son, and that’s it, helping him drink little sips of Diet Coke. And he was starting to go, and yet, he was telling amazing stories about him drinking wine in Paris with Andre the Giant and these crazy stories that were so fun that he was telling that night. But he still had on a little tiny piece of wood, that typewriter that he’d written 25 years of books on that was right at the foot of his bed right up until the moment he died. So he did, he just did, and I liked the idea of doing. And going back to what you were saying just quickly about the most humbling process of my life, because the most inspiring people, men or woman to me in my lifetime has been writers. That is what has inspired my life more than anything. It’s what freed me from my family.

When I read Ray Bradbury for the first time, when I read Martian Chronicles, I was like, “I had no idea you could go to these places.” And then suddenly, I got turned on to all these writers, and then I got turned on to George Saunders, who just wrote this book that I just read for the second time and that’s how I met Jen. And now I’ve been talking with him, and I was like, “Dude, when I was 18 years… No, 19, 20 and 21 reading Gogol, reading Tolstoy, reading Turgenev, reading on the floors of these bookstores in Los Feliz, I mean, my whole life opened up. It was fanfare. It was great.”

Debbie Millman:
What was it about the Russian literature that compelled you so much? Was it that sort of Slavic sense of doom?

Josh Brolin:
It was Slavic sense of doom, but there was always a sense of humor in it. There was always a sense of almost making fun of the weight of their cloud, their storm, which I loved that contrast because I felt the same way. I mean, obviously, I identified with it. It was like if you write Diary of a Madman or you write Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky, you’re like, “Oh my God.”

But even in the story about Little Johnny, who obviously is me, and told in a kind of Dr. Seussian cadence, when he’s looking around and the mother is screaming and she’s throwing these massive mugs through the window at the father who’s coming home late because she knows he’s been somewhere where he shouldn’t have been. It’s all so black cloud, it’s so full of black cloud. But at the same time, and why I wanted to have that Dr. Seussian cadence is because it’s ridiculous. It is surreal. It is absurd. What the fuck are we doing to each other? It’s amazing what us little weak humans do to each other.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, especially now.

Josh Brolin:
Especially now. And I go, “What is that idea, even with my neighbor who is a far right-wing belief system and all that?” And I go, “Listen, we don’t have the same beliefs, but in that very primitive, primal country way, I know that my kids are safe with him and his kids are safe with me. And when it all comes down to it, I want to know those people still exist. Even if I hate your belief system, I want to know you have my back on a very, very human level.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think it’s fine to have different points of view and disagree, as long as it doesn’t come to fisticuffs and killing.

Josh Brolin:
That’s what I mean, killing. And you’re like, “Why would you… Oh, you believe that? Well, I don’t believe that. You’re bad. I’m good. Bam. I just did something good.” You know what I mean? And we can go off on a whole tangent, but again, it comes back to this very simple thing of what makes people tick. I am forever fascinated and thrown by what makes people do what they do, and also amazed.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s sort of why I do the show. I’m endlessly fascinated by how people become who they are and how do what they do. But speaking of violence, you played a character, you played a villain. Actually, Thanos has been voted the greatest villain of all time, even besting Darth Vader-

Josh Brolin:
Crazy.

Debbie Millman:
… in the Avengers film franchise. And Avengers Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time. You’ve said that you were eventually able to find Thanos within you, but you had to go looking first. What did you have to find?

Josh Brolin:
The humanity in him. It’s the same thing that I did with Dan White. Dan White as a human being disgusted me. Big fish in a small pond, went into a big pond, realized he was a small fish, was being bested by a gay man. I mean, the ego just dying on the vine. And there’s something that I find even though it hurts, very enlivening about my ego being lacerated because I know a great lesson is around the corner. And I think that that’s come with age and that’s come with tools and all that kind of stuff. But Dan White, I did the same thing where I was like, I don’t have to like this guy. I just have to know… I did the same thing with W. It’s like, yeah, we can watch CNN and find out how much we hate George Bush. But what is the trajectory? Why did he stop drinking? He was the black sheep of his family. He wasn’t the golden child. How did this happen? That’s interesting to me.

So when I was doing it, here comes the Richard Burton. When I showed up with the Russos, I had this, “In my craft or sullen art, exercised in the still night when only the moon rages and the lovers lie abed with all the grief…” I had this presentation of this kind of Shakespearean presentation. And they were like, “Yeah, I don’t think so.” And they started referencing movies that I loved, like Apocalypse Now. And they’re like, “It’s okay if you scratch your nose, if you have an itch, if you want to fix your hair, if you want to feel your muscle, if you want to…” Whatever it is, we just humanized him. And we played, and played, and played, and improvised, and improvised, and improvised. And I think that’s what people responded to. I was very proud of that, strangely enough. I never thought I would be proud of a mocap character, but I really am.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a scene when you are annihilating Gamora’s planet and you take her, you adopt her, and you hold her hand, her tiny, tiny, tiny little hand in that giant hand of yours, the character’s. That for me felt like the character had heart. You write about in your memoir how at one point, you were positive that something in you was broken and that it is the brokenness in a character that you’re most drawn to. Is that still the case?

Josh Brolin:
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m broken. I think I’m cracked, but it’s like I remember reading The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo and this idea of getting rid of what’s no longer needed, that the sculpture already exists inside, kind of like what we said about the child and the pencil and the words living inside the pencil that just haven’t come out yet. And I think that I’ve adopted this idea that I’m just continuing to let go of things that I thought were necessary, that don’t feel to be as necessary anymore. So as opposed to what am I made of foundationally, I think I’m made of some pretty good stuff. I think whatever God put together in what I was intended to be and was when I was firstborn, I’m slowly tapping into now. It’s just taken me 56 years.

Debbie Millman:
In the Avengers movies, End Game and in Infinity War, you talk about your behavior and motivation being inevitable. You used that word again in your most recent appearance hosting Saturday Night Live and you used the word three times in the book. Is that your word or was it the writer’s word in the script that you fell in love with?

Josh Brolin:
There’s something so weighted about the word, inevitable. And I like the idea of playing with maybe… I’m just thinking about it now, this idea that you can’t change something. And I go, “Yeah, but why not?”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Josh Brolin:
Why not? Again, it’s another status quo word that instead of discarding it immediately, I choose to have a massive relationship with it, and then I’ll discard it at some point. But yeah, I do like the word, in all honesty.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a good word. It’s a really good word.

Josh Brolin:
It is a good word and it’s a challenging word. Destiny is another challenging word. What does that mean? It’s all predetermined. Do I have any control over it? What do I feel about control? What do I feel about all that stuff? But I do like the lessons. I do very much like the lessons. They hurt, but I do like them.

Debbie Millman:
Josh, you’re also starring in the Dune franchise. The second installment was recently released to great reviews, great box office. And while on the set, you began writing verse about the experience, which was recently made into a book titled, Dune Exposures, which features your words alongside photographs taken by Greig Fraser. Can you talk a little bit about how that book came about?

Josh Brolin:
That was really Tanya Lapointe, who is Denis Villeneuve’s partner and producing partner, partner in life and producing partner on set. She had read some things that I had posted and that she knew because I’ve known them for a long time. And Greig was taking pictures on the set just here and there of film pictures, all film. And she said, “Why don’t you guys try and put something together? It’d be fun to have something for the movie afterwards.” And we put together an initial book that cost way too much money. And we used paper that was too good and we did whatever it was and nobody bought it. And then we did for the second movie, we used stuff that we had written and photographed from the first movie and the second movie, put it together and it became a bestseller. But it was nice. I felt good and I felt able in the memoir. I took out a lot of poems in the memoir. I took out probably 20 poems. And that the suggestion-

Debbie Millman:
Why? Why? Why? You played with format so beautifully in the memoir. Why did you-

Josh Brolin:
Because I didn’t want to saturate it with that and it’s really truly my first love. Recently, I said, “Did I write the first poem?” Because I don’t remember reading a poem, but I do remember writing a poem when I was eight years old and showed my mother, this circular poem about death. And she was like, “What is this?” She found it. “What is this? What does it mean? Should I be worried?” I don’t ever remember reading a poem. So, obviously, that was something in me needed to express in that way. Maybe because it was mathematical. I needed to pattern things mathematically in order to feel closer to it. I don’t know. I don’t know. But my relationship with poetry has always been very intimate.

And I think I got a little scared. Doing a Dune book is one thing, it’s celebrating something together that we did that focuses on the movie. It’s not necessarily on the book. It’s celebrating something that is already accomplished and praised and all that. Whereas a memoir is just… I didn’t realize. I’ve talked about it in this way. Nobody understands when you’re actually doing a scene, how naked it feels because you’re all just juggling ideas and emotions and vulnerabilities and all this. Nobody actually knows what’s going to turn out well, ever. They go, “How did it feel during No Country?” I go, “It’s like any other time.” We were laughing. We were worried. We weren’t sure if things were going to work. When you hire Javier to play Chigurh and he has a Spanish accent, is that going to be seen as ridiculous? Is it going to be seen…
So it’s all a big question. And when you’re writing a memoir, I now have realized you’re in that all the time. It’s the dream where you’re naked in the playground all the time, which you know, I know now. I’m not one to spiral. I’ve been spiraling because I go, “And I created it.” You want to be honest, you want to be naked, you want to put it out there. You care about this. You care about putting out an unconventional memoir because you’re into prose, or poetry or whatever it is. And okay, then do it and suffer the consequences, pal. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I mean it in the most enlivening way, potentially enlivening.

Debbie Millman:
Well, if you are afraid of it, you won’t be able to do it. You just have to, as you said in the intro, your monologue on Saturday Night Live, “You just have to take the cold plunge.”

Josh Brolin:
You just got to do it. And I remember even when I was doing that, Lorne was like, “Yeah, that’s not funny.” And I go, “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just trying to be me.” I think that there’s something that will be accepted during that monologue if they realize I’m not trying to be SNL funny. I’m just trying to say, “Hey, I’m here doing this thing. They’ve asked me to do it and here I am.”

Debbie Millman:
Half naked, taking the cold plunge.

Josh Brolin:
Half naked, taking the cold plunge. Play it. Why not?

Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you, Josh.

Josh Brolin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
At the very end of From Under the Truck, you state, “I am right where I’m supposed to be fully aware and shame no longer follows me like a reticent dog being belly dragged on a leash.” For anyone that’s still being belly dragged around on a leash, what is the first thing you’d suggest that they do to break free?

Josh Brolin:
Oh, don’t believe the lie that fear is helping you survive. I think survival mechanisms are absolutely like alcohol was for me in a lot of other things, were absolutely necessary. So that’s why I don’t shame myself for it, even though I feel bad and I’ve confronted the idea of hurting people and hurting myself even. But it was needed. I don’t know if I would have survived without it. And I don’t know that I would have survived without that fear that kept me in check, but I love my relationship with fear now. I love it. I love my relationship with the challenge and I don’t think I’m trying to turn myself into mincemeat now. I think that I’m trying to grow, whatever that means. I don’t love that word. How about germinate? Germinate into ultimate innocence.

Debbie Millman:
Josh Brolin, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Josh Brolin:
Thank you. I was so excited to do this today. Thank you very much for this morning.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Josh Brolin:
Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Josh Brolin’s just-released memoir is titled, From Under the Truck. You can also see him on the big screen in Dune 2. I’d like to thank everyone for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Voiceover:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Josh Brolin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Part of the point of keeping a journal is so you’ll have a record of everything that’s happening to you and that you don’t forget. In many ways, it is evidence of living. But what if, years later, you forget you even wrote that journal? That is what happened to Carson Ellis. A few years ago she found eight typed pages documenting the week she moved to Portland as a young artist with no money and few prospects.
Carson Ellis says she’s now a little embarrassed by some of what she refers to as the twee phrases and intellectual name-dropping of her younger self, but maybe because she’s now the successful author and illustrator of best-selling books like Home and Du Iz Tak? she did not run from that younger self. Instead, she took that journal as is, and illustrated it. Her brand new book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary evokes the alternative art and music scene in Portland at the turn of the century and the heart of a young woman living through it all. Carson Ellis, welcome to Design Matters.

Carson Ellis:
Thank you, Debbie. Thanks so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Carson, I understand that you would love to be a fly on the wall during Medieval Europe. Why is that?

Carson Ellis:
Wow. Gosh, I don’t have an answer for that question. I often say I think I would maybe rather be a fly on the wall in Medieval Europe than a woman living in Medieval Europe. I think I would love-

Debbie Millman:
Fair enough.

Carson Ellis:
… to see just day-to-day life during that period because I love the art and the fashion, and the architecture and just the simplicity of a Medieval life is really appealing to me. But it’s not appealing to me in a practical way. I don’t think I would want to be living then. I’d rather be a fly on the wall observing.

Debbie Millman:
The funny thing about being a fly on a wall, flies are just generally not very popular insects. I’d rather be a butterfly-

Carson Ellis:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
… on a wall or even a ladybug, which I know some people love and some people don’t, but they’re so much prettier.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, that’s true. I might amend it because flies are like my least favorite animal. A butterfly animal, maybe a praying mantis.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, definitely. Carson, you were born in Vancouver to parents you have described as hippies who were living in a van with a wood stove. They were also then in an apartment that they were evicted from. Where did you all go during this very sort of time of upheaval as you were a baby?

Carson Ellis:
Well, first of all, my parents don’t totally agree with this description of them as hippies, but on paper they feel like they were hippies to me. They did have this wonderful-sounding tricked-out hippie bakery van that they lived in. I can’t remember if they were evicted, but they didn’t have a place to live when I was born. They were staying at a friend’s house. They were in Vancouver, BC. My maternal grandmother lived in New York and came out to Canada and convinced them to move back to New York with her. So they did. My Canadian dad and my New Yorker mom moved to Brooklyn where my dad went to work for my grandpa, his father-in-law at a printing company.

Debbie Millman:
And then you moved to Mount Kisco up in Westchester, and I believe you lived in a rented carriage house of a former country home of a Vanderbilt until you were about seven. What was that like?

Carson Ellis:
Gosh, Debbie, you did so much good research. It’s so cool. It was amazing. Yeah, so what it was was sort of like the country estate of a wealthy New York family. It was a Vanderbilt and a Hammond, and their kid, or one of their kids was actually John Hammond, the famous music producer. And I think that was probably their country home or something. But by the time we lived there in the ’70s, the big estate house had gone to ruin. It was sort of decrepit and there was an old caretaker who looked after it. We lived in the carriage house, so it was sort of like a big loft on the second floor where we lived and the downstairs would’ve been, I guess where there would’ve been carriages and maybe horses. And it was on a dirt road. There was a pony that lived across the street that I was quite attached to.

There was just acres and acres of wood and pasture and I was allowed to roam. And so I led a wild childhood or wild as in very outdoors childhood, and I did a lot of drawing and a lot of exploring in the woods and stuff.

Debbie Millman:
I understand that you started drawing comics very young with cats and leg warmers, singing and dancing to Pat Benatar.

Carson Ellis:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And stories about a girl who got a horse for her 10th birthday. I’m wondering if that was inspired by the horse next door.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, it was just aspirational. It was inspired by my desperate desire to have a pony when I was a little girl. The horse across the street was a wild horse. I mean, it was domesticated, but I don’t think anyone had ridden it. So me and my friend who lived across the street were always trying to climb on its back and it would race across the field. Although I was a wild horse, but I always was like a horse kid who was desperately wanting to have a horse as a kid, and so I wrote stories about it and drew comics about it and stuff.

Debbie Millman:
It seems that by the time you were in elementary school, you were already drawing your own stories and also writing them, so you were drawing and writing. You’re doing basically what you do now in elementary school.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I think that’s true. I don’t know how often I was actually finishing anything. I have sketchbooks with lots of starts and not lots of finishes, like the first couple pages of a story. A story that maybe would have chapter one lettered in very elaborate typography. I would’ve spent more time lettering the words chapter one than actually writing chapter one, that kind of thing.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still have these journals and these books that you were making from back then?

Carson Ellis:
I do. I still have a lot of my childhood sketchbooks. My mom saved them.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you were a loner as a kid and preferred to hang out in the woods hunting for bugs and salamanders, catching crayfish in the stream behind your house and climbing trees, and I was wondering, were you shy or just introverted?

Carson Ellis:
I think I was both, and sensitive, but I think I really appreciated time by myself as a kid in a way that looking back, I feel like maybe was a bit misunderstood. I think I was often alone by choice, just it was comfortable and I really liked my own company. But I also think I was shy. I remember not being that comfortable befriending other kids or spending time with especially big groups of kids when I was little.

Debbie Millman:
When you were in high school, you took a weekly art class for teenagers interested in creating a portfolio for college applications. What kind of art were you making in that class and what did you think of what you were making?

Carson Ellis:
I didn’t like that class very much. It was taught by this woman who I think my grandmother knew. She was an abstract expressionist and she was probably my grandma’s age, so she was probably in her seventies back then. She taught a class for kids that wanted to beef up their college applications with extracurricular kind of activities, so she would have you create a portfolio and then she would reach out to her various connections at universities around the country and try to help you get into one.

And I was a bit resentful of the experience because everybody made the same portfolio. It was like we’re all going to copy this [inaudible 00:08:45] collage and then we’re all going to make a woodcut print from a photo in a magazine. None of it was my thing, and it sort of felt like it was steering me away from my art practice, which was actually a thing when I was a teenager.

I had kept a sketchbook and I was drawing all the time. So I felt misunderstood in this class. And there was one other kid, it was all girls in the class, and there was one other kid who I felt like I felt kindred to because she also was just someone who loved to draw and I remember feeling like the other kids. No offense to them if they’re out there, but that they were just doing this thing along with their French club and their chess club and their lacrosse to get into a good school, and I didn’t appreciate it, I don’t think.

Debbie Millman:
As you were going through high school, I read in another interview that you did that you described yourself at that time as an unhappy stoner with abysmal grades and slim prospects for graduating. And the art class was actually the low point of your always very low week. Carson, why were you so bummed out at that time and how did you make sense of the world and your art?

Carson Ellis:
Oh man, Debbie, that is such a deep question. Why was I bummed out? I was just an unhappy teenager. I think I grew up in Westchester County, New York, and I feel like it was a pretty conservative environment. I went to a really big public school, kind of like a sports-centric public school, where the focus was really good grades and moving on to an Ivy League college after graduation and none of that really made sense to me. It didn’t seem like who I was. I don’t know. I think I was just a sensitive kid who didn’t quite feel like she fit in.

I think I had been teased a lot in middle school and while that wasn’t really something that was happening to me as a teenager, I think I still had a lot of baggage like childhood baggage that didn’t really go away until I left high school and moved far away from the town I grew up in.

Debbie Millman:
I really think that anybody that doesn’t get teased in middle school or junior high school peaks at that point in their life, and that’s the best it ever gets. I think everybody else that gets teased goes on to bigger and better things.

Carson Ellis:
Well, that’s wonderful to hear.

Debbie Millman:
At least that’s how I want to make sense of the world.

Carson Ellis:
I’d like to make sense of it that way too. I do. Those were definitely my middle school years. It’s true for so many people, but they were definitely the sort of nadir of my existence and it was sort of all uphill from there.

Debbie Millman:
Same.

Carson Ellis:
But high school was rough too. I think I was just unhappy. I was just kind of like a depressed, hormonal teenager. And I think art at the time, I loved making art. I drew all the time. It was this super important central thing in my life, but I don’t think it was necessarily something that was connecting me to the people around me. Certainly not in the way that it does now that I’m an adult.

Debbie Millman:
Was it difficult for you to get into a college that you wanted to go to?

Carson Ellis:
Well, I had very bad grades, but I didn’t…

Debbie Millman:
How bad? Like D’s and F’s or B’s and C’s?

Carson Ellis:
Some D’s and F’s. I had to graduate from high school. I had to go to summer school for chemistry and also gym because I missed so much school that I didn’t pass gym. I hated gym so much.

Debbie Millman:
Did you have to wear a uniform?

Carson Ellis:
I didn’t have to wear a uniform.

Debbie Millman:
We had to wear these blue and white stripes, horizontal stripe uniforms. It was just hell.

Carson Ellis:
That actually sounds kind of cute, but I just wore my gross sweaty gym clothes and I hated it. I really didn’t care in high school. I was just kind of didn’t care about much, and so it didn’t occur to me to try to pass gym, and it didn’t occur to me that it would be a big deal if I didn’t graduate from my school. I was just in that place as a teenager. And then I did graduate. My grades weren’t good.

I did get into one really good college and that was Bennington College in Vermont, but it was super expensive. I think at the time it was one of the most expensive private colleges in the country, and I didn’t get into a couple places I applied, but I did get into the University of Montana, which was the only place I really wanted to go to anyway.

Debbie Millman:
It feels having lived in your life for the last couple of weeks as I was preparing for the interview; it seems that there’s a lot of serendipity to you ending up at the University of Montana. You said this at the time, “I chose UM because I had seen beautiful photos of Montana in magazines and felt powerfully drawn there.” Also, it was a relatively cheap school that I could get into with my abysmal GPA and perfect lack of extracurricular activities. I had nothing to recommend me, but a portfolio of goofy high school art and an earnest college essay framed around the promise of starting anew. But despite being bad on paper, the University of Montana accepted me.”

Carson, you go on to say that you were mysteriously powerfully drawn to Missoula and that you felt happier there in a way you don’t think you ever did in New York. What do you think that was about? What was this pull that was bringing you there?

Carson Ellis:
I think it’s a constellation of things. I think for the biggest part of it probably was just being able to start somewhere new where I didn’t know anyone and where nobody knew me. It’s so hard to start fresh in life, and I think just going somewhere so far away to the Rocky Mountains, I could just be the person that I felt like I truly was. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain in a way that doesn’t sound kind of silly or hokey, but I think being able to start fresh and also Montana is so beautiful.

I moved there and that landscape and just being in that wide open place coming from the suburbs of New York where every town abuts another town. I didn’t even realize there were places in America where you could drive for a half hour and not even drive through a town. It seemed like amazing to me just how much space there was and how much natural beauty there was and how big that sky truly is. So it just felt good on all fronts to me there.

Debbie Millman:
At this point in your life, you knew you loved illustration and that was what you wanted to do, but there was no illustration program at the University of Montana. What did you end up majoring in and what do you think you might do professionally at that time?

Carson Ellis:
I do think when I went to the University of Montana that I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to be an illustrator when I was in high school, but I don’t think I was thinking in practical terms, so I knew there was no illustration program there. I studied fine art and I got a painting degree, and I guess I thought that would be the same thing. So I graduated with a painting degree and had no idea how to be an illustrator. I had no plan, but I also didn’t really know what… I didn’t know anything about illustrations.
I didn’t know the difference between book illustration and editorial illustration and all the different areas that you could potentially be working in as an illustrator. And I definitely did not know how to put together a portfolio or who the art director was, or I just didn’t know anything when I graduated. So it was harder than I thought it would be to be an illustrator without having studied in a school, I think.

Debbie Millman:
I had absolutely no idea that there was even something called an illustrator when I was in college and thought that printers did everything that had to do with design. And look how my life turned out. It’s so funny how we don’t even know about these things. And now especially, there’s no way that when I was a little girl, I could have said, “Gee, when I grow up, I want to be a podcaster.”

Carson Ellis:
I know. I think in some ways it’s a boon to be so blissfully ignorant. At least looking back, I feel that way.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, no, I agree. Now, is it true that when you were in college, your college roommate was Colin Meloy?

Carson Ellis:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You had co-ed roommates in college?

Carson Ellis:
No, he wasn’t my roommate in the dorms. He was my roommate in a big party house with a bunch of people.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Carson Ellis:
So I lived in the dorms for the first year at the University of Montana, and then I lived wherever. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a while with a boyfriend, and then I moved into this big house. I think there were four or five people that lived there, and a couple people had moved out and Colin and I were moving in at the same time.

Debbie Millman:
Was it a memorable first meeting?

Carson Ellis:
I think so. I remember seeing him and thinking like, “Whoa, my new roommate is really cute.” And then he remembers seeing me moving in and how I had only a plastic bag full of clothes, like a garbage bag full of clothes and a skateboard, and one of those invisible man dolls. I don’t know if you can picture that. It’s a plastic model of a human with all of the internal organs on the inside. It’s like an educational tool, and I had one of those for some reason, and he was intriguing. So we both made some kind of weird but positive impression on each other.

Debbie Millman:
And would you say looking back on it now that there was a spark or was it just like, “Cool dude, cute.”

Carson Ellis:
I was like, “Cool dude, cute,” but I had a serious boyfriend and he had a string of girlfriends. He was dating a lot of people, and so we were very fast and close friends and remained fast and close friends for a lot of years. We have the same birthday and we would’ve moved into that house at the end of the summer in August or September, and our birthday is in the beginning of October. So by the time October rolled around, we were already good friends and had throwing a joint birthday party. The first of many.

Debbie Millman:
Colin is a musician. He ultimately went on to become the founder, guitarist, and singer for the band, The Decemberists. At the time, he was already making music and you started to collaborate with him to make a lot of art for his band at that time. What kinds of things were you making for him?

Carson Ellis:
Mostly posters, like flyers. Flyers I would make with Sharpie, and then we would Xerox at Kinko’s and hang up around town. I think I did make one CD cover design, but it was for a live CD. And I remember I pretty sure I drew it on a scrap of paper in a bar with ballpoint pen. So it was a pretty low-key affair.

Debbie Millman:
After college, you moved to Vermont and Minneapolis, and San Francisco, and you worked as a cocktail waitress and a bartender. Were you making art at the same time?

Carson Ellis:
I was, yeah. I was always making art. In fact, I was making a lot of art back then. I think by the time I had graduated from college, I had a pretty dedicated art practice, and because I had graduated with a painting degree, I was trying to be an illustrator, but I really didn’t know how to do it. So I was mostly being a painter and I was making these big oil paintings and trying to have shows and sell them.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of subject matter?

Carson Ellis:
Sort of fantastic subject matter, like ghostly people flying up into the sky. There’s one painting I made that was a giant dog as big as a mountain walking over a small village of houses. I don’t know, dreamy stuff, strange stuff.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to move to Portland?

Carson Ellis:
I was living in San Francisco, and it was so expensive there as it still is. It just gets more and more expensive, but this would’ve been like in 2000. I had friends there that I really loved, but maybe I hadn’t really found my creative community there, per se. I worked as a cocktail waitress and I lived in this very, very cold, unheated warehouse, this big metal airplane hanger warehouse. So many of my friends from Missoula from college had moved to Portland.

So I would go up and visit a lot, and Colin was there, and he was my favorite of all my friends there. I would go up there and it just seemed like everybody was living such a life. It was so much cheaper and they had heat. It was very, very welcoming. I just felt like I met people so much easier there. And people in San Francisco, I felt like I couldn’t really figure out where I fit in as an artist, and I didn’t really feel welcomed per se, but when I went to Portland, people were like, “I’m having an art show. Be in my art show, make a comic for my zine, make a flyer for my band,” and it felt so easy, so much easier. So I just moved there.

Debbie Millman:
By your late 20s, you began to get editorial work for some local weekly papers. What kinds of creative briefs were you getting from those papers and what kind of work, aside from the comics and the zines were you doing for the newspapers?

Carson Ellis:
I was doing editorial illustrations and I really was faking it till I make it kind of thing. I didn’t know how to use Photoshop or scanners. I remember my very first color illustration job was for the cover of the Willamette Week, which was a weekly in Portland. And I think I had pretended that I knew how to color something in digitally and I ended up having to ask the art director to talk me through it over the phone.
So there was a lot of sort of demoralizing moments in the beginning where people were very, very kind to me and helped me figure out how to do all this stuff. And I don’t know. I just did whatever editorial stuff came my way. At the time, I feel like a lot of the art I was doing had a Russian or Slavic influence to it. And so I know one of the first editorial jobs I got was an illustration of a Yugoslavian band or something. And so I think people were seeing my work and, I don’t know, just figuring out where it fit in, what would jive with this kind of stuff I was doing.

Debbie Millman:
When did you and Colin get serious and decide you were going to make a life together?

Carson Ellis:
Well, shortly after I moved to Portland in 2001. And at that point we were friends for three years or something and collaborating on various stuff, and we were very close friends by that time. And then I think we hooked up sometime that spring and then had a confusing on-and-off relationship for maybe a year. And then, ever since then, we’ve been together. So I think since 2002 or something, we’ve been a pretty steady couple. I don’t remember when we decided to have kids, but we did make a conscious decision to have our first kid, and he was born in 2006. So a few years later we were like, “Let’s have a family.” We didn’t waste much time. We dove right into it.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about how you met Steve Malk and how that has impacted your career.

Carson Ellis:
Oh, that is such a lucky stroke for me. So Steve Malk is my literary agent, and he’s incredible at what he does, and he’s also a wonderful dude. And this would’ve been, I guess probably around 2005. So at this point, I’d made a bunch of Decemberist record covers, and I had done a bunch of editorial work and I was starting to do more stuff like posters for other bands, but also the cover of a literary magazine, that kind of stuff. Just doing more illustration work generally. And I think I was just on his radar. And so he contacted me out of the blue.

My goal all along since I was a kid really was to illustrate kids’ books and perhaps to write them too. And so he contacted me to ask me if I wanted to do this work, and I did very much, but I was skeptical because I thought I maybe didn’t need an agent.

I didn’t know how the whole system worked. In fact, that’s kind of like a theme in my life is not quite understanding the system I’m trying to work within. So I was kind of working on a picture book pro bono with Colin for Editor. An editor had approached me and said, do you have any ideas for books for kids? And I said, “Well, yeah. My husband and I wanted to… Or my boyfriend and I wanted to collaborate on something.” So we pitched it to her and she said, “Oh, that’s great. Can you make a dummy?” And of course, I didn’t know what a dummy was, but I worked on this thing anyway. And eventually I was at a place where I sort of needed to check in with her and get some feedback, and I couldn’t really get her. She was very busy and I couldn’t get her to respond to me.

And I was like, “I’ve done all this work and I can’t get this editor to get back to me and give me any feedback.” And that’s about the moment Steve contacted me out of the blue and I was like, “Well, I don’t really need an agent because I’ve already got this illustration gig with this editor.” And he was like, “Well, I know that editor. Would you like to have a book deal, actually get some money for the work you’re doing?” And I was like, “Actually, I would.”

And so I was skeptical at first, but thank God I hired on with him because he has been so wonderful to work with. I don’t know. I don’t know where I’d be without him. But he did get me a book deal for this first book that Colin and I were working on together. And then it sort of fell through because the editor went on to another publisher. Kind of a long, boring story, but I’ve worked with him ever since.

Debbie Millman:
What was it about children’s books that appealed to you so deeply?

Carson Ellis:
I think I’ve always been drawn to illustration from the time I was little. I think probably whether we know it or not, we all are a little drawn to illustration because it’s our first introduction to visual art. Most of us as kids, we’re seeing our first art, we’re reading our first prose and poetry in the form of picture books. So that’s a big part of it. As a grown up now who’s been doing this work for 20 years, I think a big part of it for me is just how important that work seems to be.

Making books for tiny people who are going to interact with art and literature for the first time is like an honor and a privilege. I think as a kid, when I first… And it was really when I was a teenager, when I started thinking that that was what I would want to do with my life because I found the book, Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, and it was such a weird, ambiguous, beautiful, dreamy book that it made me realize that a picture book could be anything and that it had this giant amorphous audience.
And that’s an incredible opportunity to make weird, incredible art because kids are really open-minded readers, way more open-minded than we are as adults. And this opportunity to combine text and imagery, both things, interest me and especially did as a teenager. I liked writing poetry and I liked drawing, and I was like, “Where do these things combine well? How do they work together in a meaningful way?” And it felt like picture books was the answer.

Debbie Millman:
I spent many years in my 20s and into my early 30s trying to rebuild my childhood and even into my middle school years library, because those books saved me, and I wanted them around me again. But, there are a couple of books that I don’t remember the names of. I just remember the color palette and the illustrations. In many ways, I feel like those are the ones that got away. I’m wistful for them, and I probably will be for the rest of my life. Here’s, I would say, not a month or so that goes by that I don’t wish that I knew what those books were titled so I could have them again.

Carson Ellis:
I think that’s so relatable. People always ask me what the picture books were that I loved when I was a kid. I don’t really remember most of them, but I remember them the way you do, almost like you remember a dream where you have this glimmering peripheral memory of something that’s more sensory than it is memory. Yet, I know those books were probably so formative, and they’re up in my brain, and forming everything that I do and everything that I make and all of my interests and obsessions as an artist, but I don’t know what the actual books are, which is wild.

Debbie Millman:
This book, actually, it’s really interesting. The book had a Carson Ellis-esque in my mind, in my memory that I’ve constructed about this very ethereal, very beautiful. It had blues, and it was about… At least there was a part of it that this little girl was going to sleep, and on her night table next to her was a couple of trinkets and a glass of water. Some people have been like, “Oh, is that Good Night, Moon?” I’m like, “No, it was not Good Night, Moon.”

Carson Ellis:
You’re like, “Duh.”

Debbie Millman:
That would be easy to find. I remember being so enthralled by this book that I actually want… I set up my night table to look exactly like hers, because I loved it so much. I just did the memory of that. I could reach out and touch it. That’s how powerful it is.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, books are really powerful for all of us, but I think especially for kids, they just live in them in a way that we don’t really remember how to do as adults, which is a really just… It’s such a profound relationship to have with art.

Debbie Millman:
Your early experiences illustrating children’s books were for other people. You illustrated Trenton Lee Stewart’s book, the Mysterious Benedict Society. I believe that was your first illustration commission for a book. You worked with Lemony Snicket, who is also known as Daniel Handler. Maybe I should have said that the other way around at a party, and he asked you to collaborate on a project. What was that experience like working with Daniel?

Carson Ellis:
That was an interesting one, because there was also a composer in the mix. That book is called The Composer is Dead. So, it came with a CD with an original score, and it’s… The format of it is a little bit like Peter and the Wolf, where you can read through the book and listen to the music that accompanies it. It’s a murder mystery set in an orchestra. I don’t think I talked to Daniel that much while I was working on it, nor Nathaniel Stookey who was the composer. I think we all did our separate jobs, which is typically the way things go with illustrating picture books.

Debbie Millman:
I was really surprised to read how little interaction you had in those early books with the authors that sometimes the authors would see your work, and they’d be like, “This is great,” and then that was it. So, there wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth collaboration the way you worked with, say, Colin on the Wildwood Chronicles.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, that’s true. I think now, for the most part, I think I’m mostly working with people I know pretty well at this point. Those are my favorite projects. Right now, I’m working on a book with Mac Barnett who is a very close friend of mine, so I’m able to go back and forth with him a lot, and it’s part of the fun. But typically, the way it works is authors and illustrators are… The author does their job, and they pass the book on to the editor, and the editor then works with the illustrator, and the two don’t really interact very much.

Debbie Millman:
You illustrated books for other people for a decade before you began working on writing and illustrating a book of your own. Your first book was titled Home. It came out in 2015. What inspired that book? It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s absolutely gorgeous book.

Carson Ellis:
Thank you, Debbie. I had aspired to write my own book for a long time. Since I was a kid basically, I think I always wanted to do it. It just was hard to come up with an idea that I liked enough to move forward with. I think at that point, I was such a student and enthusiast of picture books that I was like, “I don’t want to make a one, and all my ideas feel mediocre,” and not even in a self-doubting way, just in the way that I was like, “I don’t think I’ve hit upon something yet that’s really worth my time.” Sometimes I would have ideas that would be half formed, and I would mention them to Steve, my agent, and he would be like, “Yeah, maybe. I think you need to flesh that out more.”

So, I had a lot of false starts, and then I realized that maybe I’m not naturally a narrative storyteller, and that that’s not the way I want to tell stories. So, Home was a book, so basically just a poem about homes, but I came at it more from an illustration angle. I thought like, “Well, if I don’t feel like I know how to write a book, but I do know how to illustrate a book, what do I want to illustrate? What do I love to draw, and what would I love to draw for 32 pages? What would keep me really excited and inspired throughout the whole book if I could draw anything?” I do really love drawing homes and environments, interior spaces.

I love books that feel interactive and dynamic, because a lot of the time, picture books are read over and over and over again. I think if you can ask questions, and have a different conversation each time, and imbue a story with your own imagination or the imagination of the kid reading, it becomes this changing dynamic experience, which is really a beautiful thing that picture books can do that a lot of other books can’t. So, those were my premises that I wanted to write a book that would be fun to illustrate, and I wanted to write a book that would ask questions of the readers, and ask them to tell the story of the book.

Debbie Millman:
Do you plant Easter eggs in the books so that people reading it over and over and over again could begin to see secondary things or tertiary things to help advance their imagination in some way?

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, I do. I especially did that with Home, because Home is a book about homes. It’s a book about mythological homes and homes around the world, and homes under the sea, and homes in outer space and all kinds of homes, but it’s also a book about being an artist, and the interests, and obsessions that we are constantly coming back to that make us the singular creative people that we are. A lot of the time, those interests develop in childhood. So, there are these long threads that run through our creative lives. So, it’s a book about all these places really, environments, obsessions, interests.

Then, at the end, you see the artist in her studio, and she’s surrounded by souvenirs from all these places that you’ve visited as a reader throughout the book. So, you can go back through the book, and find where all the little things in the artist studio at the end are. There’s also a bird, a morning dove that’s on every spread of the book that you can look for too, and then I’m in the book. So yeah, I do tend to chuck them full of Easter eggs or things to search for. I think as a person who maybe is not super comfortable with narrative storytelling, I think a lot about the picture books that I love that also seem to be written by people that love to draw, and for whom the storytelling or the narrative aspect of it is maybe secondary.

I think of people like Richard Scarry, and a book like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, and there is this vague story that runs through it. These pigs are on their way to the beach, but really, that’s not what that book is about. It’s about picking out all these tiny little details, and imagining the backstories of this hitchhiking fox or whatever, this chimpanzee driving a banana car. That’s the fun of that book. I think there are so many ways to make a book that’s engaging for kids, and one of them is just to fill it with details, so they can be pointing things out and wondering about them.

Debbie Millman:
Tell me about why you have a resistance to narrative storytelling. What is it about that that makes your bristle?

Carson Ellis:
It doesn’t make me bristle, and I love and have so much respect for it and wish I felt more comfortable with it and better at it, but I just don’t… For example, I think some parents are really good at sitting down with their kids before bed and telling them a story. My husband’s really good at it. He can just make up a story. He’s great at storytelling, and I just don’t. I’m freeze-faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. You’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations. The bar is very low, and I still feel frozen by it.

So, it’s not that I bristle. It’s not what I’m good at. I think I’m good at combining text and imagery in ways that feel novel and maybe explore the form a little bit, and find new ways to combine those things into the shape of a book without telling a narrative story. Someday I’m going to do it, but I just haven’t thought of a good one yet.

Debbie Millman:
Well, your next book, Du Iz Tak, came out in 2016, and the book is one of the most unusual picture books I have ever encountered. You wrote it using a language that you invented. Can you talk about how you did that and also how you approached the marketing folks at your publishing house to let you do this?

Carson Ellis:
That book, the germ of the idea for that book was very simple. I had just planted some seeds, and they were sprouting. I was excited that they were sprouting because I’m a gardener, and there’s always a thrill when those first initial leaves push up through the soil, and you’re like, “It worked. They’re growing.” So, I was lying in bed with my kid thinking about that, and I was thinking about a plant’s life cycle, but I was also thinking about the cycle of enthusiasm, how when the plant first grows, you’re so excited, and you’re paying so much attention. Each leaf that grows is exciting, and you notice it, but then the days get longer and warmer.

It grows faster and faster, and you stop paying attention to it, and then the next thing you know, it’s this big tangly plant. Then the next thing you know it’s wilting and falling over and returning to the soil. So, I was thinking a lot about that and how I would love to make a picture book it, but I was aware that the concept would be boring to most kids. I think kids also-

Debbie Millman:
Why? Why?

Carson Ellis:
I think a lot of kids really love planting things and watching them grow. I think that is a thing that interests kids, but I don’t know if the… It seemed like it needed another element to it to make it be a fun thing to read a book about. It’s very fun to plant some seeds and watch them grow, but does that excitement translate to a picture book on its own? So, I was thinking about when I was a kid and how much I loved these microcosmic worlds of creatures I would find if I flipped over a log. I think that was… Probably of all the activities I partook in as a kid, my very favorite activity was flipping over logs, and seeing what I could find underneath them.

So, I took that idea of the plant growing and dying, and I added this community of little creatures around it. I thought that that could just be a wordless picture book, but it felt kind of static. It felt like it needed something else to make it be more immersive and also funnier. I actually was working in my studio on this book or thinking about it anyway, and I had my kids with me. My husband was out of town, and I was trying to work and entertain a one-year-old and an eight-year-old. So, I put on this show called Pingu, which is like a claymation cartoon about a penguin.

He speaks an invented language, and he’s so funny, and everybody loves him. Despite this big seven-year age gap between my kids, they were both watching Pingu yammer on in his ridiculous gibberish language. They were on the floor laughing, and I thought, “That is what this world of bugs needs. It needs its own language.” So, that was the idea for the language. Then writing the manuscript for it was hard, because the only text in it is dialogue, and all the dialogue is in an invented language. So, I wrote it like a screenplay or something with a lot of artist notes, author notes like, “These two damsel flies enter, and one of them says to the other, “Du iz tak.” The other says, “Mana zoot.”

So, I wrote the whole book out that way, and I showed it to my editor at the time, Liz Bicknell, who is just a very trusting, wonderful editor or was. She retired. I didn’t give her a glossary or even tell her what the words meant or anything, even though they do have a translation. They do all mean something. She just didn’t totally understand it, but was like, “I trust you. Go forth.” I need to see what these characters will look like, and I need a little more information, but it seems like an okay idea.

Debbie Millman:
Did you write it first in English, and then translate it, or did you write it and then translate it?

Carson Ellis:
I didn’t ever translate it, weirdly. I just gave her a manuscript that was all gibberish dialogue, and the notes that describe the action on the page. They knock on the log, and the door in the log opens, and there’s a pill bug inside, and they say this. So, I didn’t ever tell her the translation. I don’t even think we talked about it, and that she realized necessarily that it was translatable until the book was done, until I had finished making it. I think that’s fine, because I felt really strongly. So, the book is…

The dialogue is all in an invented language, but I was really conscientious about creating a language, and using it contextually in a way that if you’re the kind of brain that really wants to translate it or decode it, decipher it that you could, but it felt really important that it also work as a book if you have no idea what they’re saying, if it’s just noise. I think that’s part of the reason why I didn’t give her a translation, because I wanted to make sure that it worked, whether or not you knew what they were saying.

Debbie Millman:
There are some sites where people have tried to write it in English, I discovered, as I was doing my research, which I loved, but you’ve said that Du iz tak means, “What is that?” Do you find that kids reading the book are easily able to comprehend the plot and what is happening even though they don’t know the language so to speak?

Carson Ellis:
Yes. I think it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on in the story just through the pictures. When I read the book aloud to kids, I don’t translate everything as I read it, but I’ll translate a few things here and there strategically so that when I get to the last page, when there’s a little cricket that wanders out into this field of little growing plants, and the cricket says, “Du iz tak,” and then I say to a group of kids which means, and they all know. They all yell out, “What is that?” Because I think by that time, you’ve heard it repeated in the context of people pointing at a thing and wondering about it so many times, and kids are just so intuitive when it comes to language. I think kids understand that book in general a lot better than adults do.

Debbie Millman:
Can you share a couple of lines from the book with us?

Carson Ellis:
Oh, sure. So, there is a page where these three beetles wander out. They’re meant to be children. Though I’m never sure if it’s clear. There’s this green shape in the middle, and it does appear to be a plant that’s unfurling. One of them says, “Du iz tak.” Another one says, “Ma ebadow unk plonk.” Then the third one says, “Du kimma plonk.” The second one says, “Ma nazoot.” Do you want the translation?

Debbie Millman:
Yes, please. How’d you know what I was thinking?

Carson Ellis:
So, du iz tak means, “What is that?” She’s pointing at the plant. The second one says, “Ma ebadow unk plonk,” which means, “I think it’s a plant.” Then the third one says, “Du kimma plonk,” which means, “What kind of plant?” Then the second one says, “Ma nazoot,” which means, “I don’t know,” which is another phrase that gets repeated a few times.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I love about all three of your children’s books is perspective, the perspective that you bring to the book, the perspective that a reader can bring to the book. There’s so much nuance that overlaps that they could be read in so many different ways at any number of different times, and that felt very much apparent in your most current book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, but this is the first adult book that you’ve both written and illustrated. The book relays the story of one week of your life. In 2001, the monumental week, you first moved to Portland, Oregon.

That week, you decided to keep a journal documenting every single thing you did each day, everything you ate, every book you read, every time you checked your email. Why that week at that time, and why so much detail?

Carson Ellis:
I don’t remember why that week, and I didn’t remember anything about this journal when I found it. I just found it in a box of ephemera a few years ago. I couldn’t remember why it even existed. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years or something. I was like, “Why would I have kept not only this journal for one week, but a journal that was so meticulous, such a detailed, meticulous chronicle of everything I did?” But then I spoke to my friend about it who is in the book a lot, my really old friend Emily. I asked her if she remembered anything about it, and she was like, “I do. You kept that journal, because you were worried that you were losing your memory. It was some kind of memory exercise, because you always were feeling like you were too forgetful, and you were somehow trying to boost your memory by writing down everything that you did.”

So, I think every morning when I woke up, I wrote down every single thing that I could remember from the day before. It was the week I moved to Portland, and I think… I don’t know if there’s significance to that. I’m not sure if that was intentional. I’m not sure if it was something that was helping me get my bearings in a new city. My sense is that at the time, I was 25 years old, and I had just a million half formed art ideas in my head, and this was just one of them, a bunch of just ways of being creative that I was exploring and trying to find some purpose for in my creative practice.

Debbie Millman:
You said that the text doesn’t read so much like a journal that you feel that it reads more like a stoic catalog, and that you don’t reveal much emotionally. I have to say, Carson, I don’t agree at all. That to me doesn’t even feel like we’re talking about the same book.

Carson Ellis:
Sure thing.

Debbie Millman:
There’s so much emotion in it. What’s so interesting about it is that there’s a lot of emotion because the things that you don’t say that give a sense of there being deep emotionality in it.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I mean, I think my favorite books are books where we’re not hearing from a narrative voice what the characters are going through. We’re witnessing it, and we’re discerning it from context and dialogue and stuff. So, I guess in that way, this book is similar, where I don’t really ever say how I’m feeling, but because you see everything I’m doing, and are privy to so many of my conversations, you can see that I am broke. I’m probably in love with my best friend who I’m hanging out with all the time, but he’s dating all of my friends-

Debbie Millman:
Sleeping with in the same bed, but nothing is happening.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, we’re sleeping in the same bed, but we’re “just friends.” There’s so much longing and unfulfilled stuff in it that it is. I agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of feeling in it, but I think I really go out of my way to not actually express anything, which does seem counter to a diary, because I feel like other diaries I have kept, I’ve kept them because I was in some of moment of emotional tumult, and I wanted to be like, “Dear diary, I’m so unhappy because of this reason and this reason, and there’s none of that in this book.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s certainly very unselfconscious, but that’s also what I love about it. You know that this young woman is in love with this man, and he’s bringing her pizza every night, because she’s so broke. She doesn’t have money for dinner and… I don’t know. There’s so much unsaid beauty in it. What made you decide, once you found it again, that you wanted to make it into a book and make all of these, I think 20 or 30 illustrations, paintings for the book?

Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was. It’s just like I woke up, and I put on this song, and then I ate this bagel. Then I checked my email, and no one had written me, and then I took a shower. It’s like just page after page of that. I realize I’m not really selling it, but I think there is something to that. For one thing, it’s such a time capsule both of my life, which was so different then because I was broke, and I wasn’t a working artist, and I was also transient and in constant transition when I was 25 years old, but also because we were in the middle of this radical cultural shift into a digital age.

So, it was like my email was novel. The internet was novel, and I had no sense of how profound this shift was or the magnitude of it, or the fact that it was irreversible, and that we were all moving headlong into a era of digital everything that we would live in, whether we wanted to or not. So, there was something moving about that, and I do pine for a time before my iPhone and my social media. So, it was very, very sweet and moving to be taken back to that period and also to that period in my own life. Then also, I feel like because it is, I do think of it as a pretty stoic account of that week, and so it just felt like a thing that would serve from illustration.

I was like, “Oh, the other side of the story is all the emotional poignancy and resonance of that week,” and maybe that could be something that would be in the art if it’s not in the text, or maybe those two things would communicate with each other to tell a more interesting story or something. I guess as an illustrator, I think I’m always trying to find places where art helps text be more interesting or sophisticated, or tell a story that is a little deeper, because you’ve combined it with some visual element, and this occurred to me as a good candidate for that.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, what I find so remarkable is that the paintings are so vivid. They really do help expand the text in a lot of ways, and because it is so matter-of-fact, you never really tell your reader how they should feel. It almost feels very objective in a lot of ways. There’s nothing purpley about it. It’s all very clear, and then you see these beautiful paintings that seem to perfectly articulate the memory. So, I think there’s such a nice duality to that without sounding really eye-rollingly ridiculous. There’s such a nice play between the very ethereal, very beautiful memories as paintings or paintings as memories, and then this very matter-of-fact way of going about your life.

Carson Ellis:
Thanks, Debbie. I was hoping for that, and I was hoping that the two things would feel like these separate voices working together to tell a story like the voice of the 48-year-old painter, and the voice of the 25-year-old writer who are the same person, but not really. So much time has passed.

Debbie Millman:
Do you see this 25-year-old version of yourself as part of who you are as integrated into who you are? How do you feel about these two women when at 25, when at 48 that share the same soul?

Carson Ellis:
They feel like they’re the same person, but they also feel really, really different. It did feel certainly more like I’m collaborating with an author than it felt like I was writing and illustrating my own book.

Debbie Millman:
As you were re-reading what you had written so long ago, did certain memories that you had about that time get changed by what you had written? Did you remember things differently than you wrote them? Part of what I love about reading some of my very, very old journals is that this somehow feels evidence of an accurate memory.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, I know what you mean, because memories change so much over time through the retelling and through the remembering of them. They’re like a game of telephone happening in your head over decades. I guess so. Colin, my husband, who’s in this book so much, he feels like that week in our lives, there are so many things that happened that he remembered even before we found that journal and read it. He thinks it’s uncanny, because he was like, “That was our first December’s show, and I remember that trip to the racetrack, and we climbed on the building and made that movie.” We remembered all these things.

So, it happens to have been a week full of memories that we held onto regardless, and maybe it was because it was my first week there, so it was… Everything felt important and big, and there was a big transition happening in my life. I don’t know, but I’m not sure. There wasn’t anything that I came across in the journal that I was like, “Oh, that’s not how I remembered that.” It was all basically how I remembered it, maybe because I had written it down 20-something years before, and that had somehow cemented it in my head in a way that it wouldn’t normally have.

Debbie Millman:
That climactic scene on the top of the roof felt so cinematic. I understand that your friend Nathan… You asked your friend Nathan to find an old video, which included an image you were hoping to find for the book. How difficult was that?

Carson Ellis:
It was amazing that Nathan found it, because I think he’s had to dig through a bunch of old hard drives, and he dug it up for me. It’s a video that he took. At the very end of the book, we climb up on this building, and we’re climbing on some ladders, on some scaffolding, and just running around being naughty, trespassing people. So, it’s like weirdly meta. I talk about how we did this thing, and he filmed it, and then we go back to the warehouse, and we all watch it together, and how eerie and beautiful it is climbing on the roof. It’s in black and white, and just the sound of the highway in the background.

Then he sent me the thing after I had read this scene over and over again, and I got to see it in real life what it actually looked like, and it was so strange. It was very, very moving. I definitely cried. Now when I read the book, I’ve done a reading, and I’m going to be doing a few more in October. I actually show that video while I’m reading that part of the book, and it just feels like so many different ways of experiencing it coming together. Oh, I don’t know how to describe it. It was a funny thing to watch that video, and very moving.

Debbie Millman:
Carson, before we finish the show, I’m wondering if you could read a little bit from One Week in January: New Paintings for An Old Diary.

Carson Ellis:
I would love to. I’m going to read the end.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good.

Carson Ellis:
Which is Friday. It’s one week, and so this is the last day. I’m going to start about halfway through the day. Colin called Emmy, and asked her if she wanted to come to the track with us. She did, so we picked her up and went to Portland Meadows to bet on horses. It was rainy, and we drove down to MLK instead of I5, and got lost. Colin was being a real brat. To everything that Emmy and I asked, he would say no. When I patted him on the shoulder, he said, “Don’t touch me.” I said, “You’re never coming to the track with me again, are you?” He said, “No.” I said, “That’s mean.” He said, “Good.” I said in my head, “I hate Colin Meloy.”

We got to the track in time for the third race, and I told Colin that I was so mad, and went to get a hot dog, a program and a beer. I placed my first bet $2 across on the number six, and went to the paddock to look at my horse. Then I saw Colin, and was still angry, so he half-heartedly apologized, and we made up. The only good bet either of us made was the same bet, three bucks across on a long shot, and we both won $24. Emmy made one bet on a horse named the Cisco Kid in the fifth race, and lost. I was wearing Emmy’s Grandma’s rings, my red dress and red high heels for luck. Our luck was never very good though, and we left after the sixth race.

We dropped Emmy at home, and came back to the warehouse where I fell asleep on Colin and Steve’s couch for about an hour. Nathan woke up at 10 to 10, and the three of us walked downtown to see Marjorie, Lucia, and Heidi in a dance performance at an art school. I kept slipping and falling all the way there because of my lucky shoes. When we got there, it had just ended, and we all felt dumb for missing it. I walked around and looked at the art, which was bad except for a painting of a rooster on a pane of glass. Heidi then drove Colin, Nathan, and me to a bar called Fifteen, where we got so drunk. Colin drank screwdrivers. Nathan drank beer, and I drank scotch.

I started talking to a boy named Donald, and Colin pretended to be my jealous boyfriend. Then I slipped and fell on a ramp going down to the bathroom because of drunkenness and, again, the lucky red shoes. I broke two glasses, one with scotch and the other with water. Two men rushed over to help me and brush me off. I was sad because my scotch was now on my dress, but one of the men offered to buy me another, so I didn’t care. Then Marjorie came and introduced me to a guy named Shantos in Elvis Sunglasses, who was some sort of promoter or something. We talked about me making some posters for him, and exchanged numbers.

The owner of the bar brought me another scotch, because I had fallen down and broken mine. I went back to talk to Donald, but he told me he was looking for his one true love, and tucked my hair behind my ear. So, I left and sat down with Lucia, Jebediah, Colin, Marjorie, Nathan, and some of Jebediah’s friends. Nathan was sad because the hot girl that he hadn’t worked up the courage to talk to had left. Colin and I started singing poke songs as loud as we could, and slamming our fists on the table. The bouncer came by and told us to shut up, but we didn’t. Another guy collecting glasses said to us snidely,

“Is that really necessary?” But still, we sang.

I vowed never to return. Then we got up to go home, and Nathan tried to solicit a ride from Marjorie who was in the midst of a conversation, and I said, “We ought to walk anyway, because we were so drunk.” A couple of blocks from home, we spotted some scaffolding on the roof of a building with 30-foot ladders tied to either side. Nathan somehow got on the fire escape, and busted the chain that was securing the lowest part of the ladder, and keeping it from touching the ground. It was one of those seesaw-type ladders. It was raining now, and I ran to get Nathan’s bag, and slipped and fell on my ass.
We climbed the fire escape to the roof, and Nathan got out his video camera. Colin and I each climbed a ladder on either side of the scaffolding. I was still wearing high heels, and climbed so carefully. When we got to the top, we were dozens of feet up with about 30 feet between us. After some time, Colin put a cigarette in his mouth, and yelled to me, “Do you have a light?” I yelled back, “Yes, come down and we’ll have a cigarette.” So, we climbed down and ran around on the roof, going up some more ladders, and looking into a creepy brick room. Nathan had filmed the whole thing, so we went home to watch it.
When we got back on the ground, we started running, and I yelled, “Wait, you guys,” and fell on my ass once more. I had left my red candle that I stole from the bar on the ground next to the building, but I couldn’t find it, and decided to come back for it the next day. We walked home in the rain, and went straight up to Nathan’s. First, we watched the rap video that we made in San Francisco for [inaudible 00:35:26], which was so funny. Then we watched the video of the roof, which was beautiful and eerie with only the noise of cars on the highway and some yelling in the background. We shared the last two cigarettes and the last two beers between the three of us.

Nathan rewound the tape, and we watched the whole thing again with outtakes from [inaudible 00:35:46], scenes of Colin and Nathan driving out to San Francisco, and some video shot at the Shanghai. Colin went to sleep, and Nathan and I talked about lost love. “Now, I’m sad,” I said. “Now, I’m really sad,” said Nathan. I kissed him good Night on the cheek, and went to bed.

Debbie Millman:
Carson Ellis, thank you for making so much work that matters. Thank you for this gorgeous, gorgeous book One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Carson Ellis:
Thank you so much for having me, Debbie. It’s been a pleasure and an honor.

Debbie Millman:
You can read more about everything Carson is up to on her website, carsonellis.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting this show, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Milllman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Carson Ellis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
My guest today is a puzzling guy, yet he’s also kind of magical. His stage show is truly enigmatic, and his career as a TV producer is all of the above. Puzzling, magical, and enigmatic. I’m talking about David Kwong, the magician, puzzle creator and producer, as if that weren’t enough, he’s also a writer. His first book, Spellbound, was written for rational adults, and it’s about applying the principles of magic to our projects of persuasion. His second book, which just came out, is for kids, sort of. It’s titled How to Fool Your Parents: 25 Brain Breaking Magic Tricks. David Kwong, welcome to Design Matters.

David Kwong:
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Debbie Millman:
David, is it true you were hoping to have your first child on April Fool’s Day?

David Kwong:
That’s very well-researched. Yes, indeed. She was born the day before, she was born on March 30th.

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question. Did she make it?

David Kwong:
But it would’ve been great, but she just turned a year and a half, it’s so exciting.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in upstate New York. You grew up in Brighton to parents who were both professors at the University of Rochester. Would it be safe to say you had a rather intellectual childhood?

David Kwong:
Yes. Doing your homework was the number one rule, and you could say that they weren’t exactly thrilled when I decided to become a magician, but we’ll get into that just a little bit.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Well, speaking of magic, you were seven years old and you went pumpkin picking with your dad at Bauman’s Farm Markets and encountered your very first magician. And you described to him as bald, wearing big brown glasses, sporting the warmest, friendliest smile, and carrying a bunny rabbit. He then went on to perform a trick that would change your life forever. And if you can share that trick with us, I would love to share that with our audience.

David Kwong:
This trick is still considered one of the greatest sleight-of-hand tricks of all time. It is the little sponge ball trick. And what the magician does is he puts a sponge ball in the kid’s hand, he holds up a second one, he makes it disappear. And then with a magical wave, the kid opens his hand and he suddenly has two. But of course, my mind was blown, but what really transformed everything for me was that he did the trick again, and this time he did it to my father. And as you mentioned, my father is an academic, a biochemist.

To me, he’s the smartest man in the world. And once again, the magician put the little sponge ball in his hand, made the second one disappear. My father opened his hand and he had two, and I turned to my father and I said, “How did that work?” And he flashed me this sheepish grin and shrugged his shoulders and said, “I had no idea.” And I’m telling you, that’s when I knew I had to be a magician.

Debbie Millman:
And that magician was Bob Bowman, who kept professionally doing magic well into his elderly years.

David Kwong:
Yes, and in fact, just two weeks ago, I did my first hometown show at the Rochester Fringe Festival, and it took years, but I finally got in touch with Bob and invited him to the show, and he came. He said, “I taught you well.” He jokingly took credit for everything, but what a thrill it was. Every magician remembers the first magician they ever saw, and it was really special to have him see what my career has turned into.

Debbie Millman:
Magic became your childhood hobby, and I read that you and your brother would send secret coded messages to each other right under the noses of your parents. How were they coded and what kinds of messages were you sending each other?

David Kwong:
Well, my first code that I loved and is in the book is the pigpen cipher, and that involves making a grid and assigning different parts of tic-tac-toe grid to letters. So if you just put down the lines and the angles of that tic-tac-toe grid, you can communicate furtively with your sibling and do it right under the noses of your parents.

Debbie Millman:
Were your parents ever able to crack the codes?

David Kwong:
No. No. We kept changing the rules. I mean, we had all sorts of codes we would do at the dinner table where we’re flashing each other different symbols and numbers of fingers and tapping the fork a certain number of times. And if we thought they were catching on, we would just change it up.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you also began playing Scrabble and solving crosswords with your mother when you were 10 years old. I have a lot of questions about this because I played Scrabble as well as a kid, but was not in any way competitive. Not only was I not competitive, I didn’t really understand stand beyond just putting letters on a board and making little words. There was no strategy.

There was no competitive sense of how to really play the game until I was much, much older and read Word Freak and started to really try to ultimately get on the circuit, which I never did. My wife did, but I did not. So how competitive was your mother? Was she a particularly good player? Talk about the dynamic between the two of you playing when she’s an adult and you’re 10 years old.

David Kwong:
My mother is the original word nerd, so she’s a history professor at the University of Rochester and always encouraged to this kind of activity, solving puzzles, playing games. We’re still, to this day, every single day, getting on the phone and solving the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle together, and we don’t stop until we get genius, of course. So this was something that she instilled in me at a very young age. And perhaps where our personalities diverge is that I suppose I’m very competitive. And when I realized that there were lists and lists and lists of obscure words that you could memorize to give yourself a leg up, again, get one over on your parents, I decided…

I mailed away. I mailed off a membership application to the National Scrabble Association, and they send you back a packet full of the two-letter words and the three-letter words and the four-letter words and the…

Debbie Millman:
Now you can find them online, but yes, absolutely.

David Kwong:
So I had a membership card from them. So there I was memorizing all those words, but she fostered this wonderful environment of learning and creativity. And around the same time we’re playing Scrabble, she takes me to the Wellfleet Public Library in Cape Cod one summer to hear a lecture by Will Shortz. I mean, this is the activity we’re doing, right? We’re not going to a Cape-

Debbie Millman:
Tell this. This is such a great story.

David Kwong:
We’re not going to a Cape Cod baseball game. We’re going to hear Will Shortz speak at a library. And I was 16 years old and I brought my puzzle book to have him sign it, and he divided the audience in half. Well, first he told wonderful stories about the New York Times crossword and people proposing to their better halves in the crossword and all sorts of fun tales. And then he divides the audience up and he plays games with them. And I did particularly well in one category, and he signed my puzzle book to a puzzle champ.

And truly, that changed my whole life. And jumping forward decades, I think I really channel a lot of that spirit of dividing the audience in half and making people feel smart and playing games with them. It really all goes back to Will.

Debbie Millman:
Didn’t he also ask the audience to figure something out that you were able to figure out? I think it had to do with the word skeptical.

David Kwong:
Very good. Yes, it was skeptical. And I think if you remove a letter from that, you get a cereal. And it was Special K, does that track?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

David Kwong:
It was something like that.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. I think it was… He asked for an anagram of Special K and T and you got skeptical and you said that was the proudest moment of your childhood.

David Kwong:
It absolutely was. And to get to meet him and for him to recognize that burgeoning talent was really an important milestone.

Debbie Millman:
There’s such an interesting history of crossword puzzles, and I’ve learned so much from reading both of your books and just following so much of your work. But I learned from you that the editors of the New York Times first considered crossword puzzles a primitive sort of mental exercise. They considered it frivolous and a sinful waste of time. Can you talk a little bit about what changed their minds?

David Kwong:
Yes. Well, the first crossword puzzle was 1913, I think, in the New York World. And they became all the rage, and there were crossword parties and musicals, but the New York Times really dismissed them. And it wasn’t until World War II when suddenly everyone had to retreat indoors, and there was this worry of bombings coming and blackout hours, I believe is what the Times called them. So the quote, I’m going to butcher it, but it’s something like, “In light of these blackout hours, we should proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact there will now be bleak blackout hours.” Something like that.

Debbie Millman:
I read that the founding crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, said that you can’t think of your troubles when solving a puzzle. I love that.

David Kwong:
That’s absolutely correct. And she was the giant, and she was the assistant to the man who created the puzzle back in 1913, Arthur Wynne. But then she got to take up the mantle and become the Times‘ first editor, and she revolutionized the puzzle. She created the rules, the symmetry, the word count, and the balance there, and we’re still obeying those rules today. I’m sure we’ll get into that.

Debbie Millman:
I want to continue a little bit more with your origin story before we get to some of those specifics, but I have a lot of questions about that too. When did you actually start making your own original puzzles?

David Kwong:
The first New York Times crossword I submitted was probably in 2003.

Debbie Millman:
But just for yourself as entertainment or practice before… I’m assuming that the first puzzle you made wasn’t good to go with the New York Times, but I could be wrong because you are pretty much a genius.

David Kwong:
I had many, many rejections, many rejections from the Times. Before that, I started by making word searches and other easier types of puzzles. And then I had a friend from college, Kevin [inaudible 00:11:19], who had gotten a number of puzzles in the Times, and he showed me how to do it, and I started submitting, and I had them rejected and rejected and rejected. But we got a puzzle in together. We had a joint puzzle in 2006, I think it was 2006. Yes. And it was such a funny thing that happened because it was this diabolical puzzle that… Basically, the idea was that the central answer was outside the box.

It was how you must think to solve this puzzle. Outside the box was an answer. There was no app at this point. It’s all in the newspaper. So the letters of think, T-H-I-N-K were literally outside of the box, outside of the grid of the puzzle spilling into the margins of the newspaper. And Will found this so diabolically tricky that he said it had to be on April Fool’s Day, and it happened to be a Saturday that year. So it was both-

Debbie Millman:
The tough day.

David Kwong:
The tough day, and the tricky day. And boy is that a nerdy trophy that lives on for us.

Debbie Millman:
You ended up going to Harvard University where you actually convinced the history department to let you get your degree in magic studies. So how on earth did you do that? Had anybody ever done that before?

David Kwong:
I wish the diploma actually said that. It says history department, history concentrator, but I did… What a wonderfully open department to encourage students to study what they’re passionate about. So it was history, I think specifically intellectual history was my concentration, but I meandered away from that. And I really fell in love with the cultural history, the entertainment history of American vaudeville and theater and the golden age of magic at the turn of the last century. These enormous touring shows of Thurston and Keller, and of course the Great Houdini.

And I was fascinated by Ching Ling Foo, the first great Chinese Asian superstar and the imitators like Chung-Ling Soo. Shall I tell that story, Debbie?

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I mean, I’m here for all of your stories. They’re so good, and I learned so much in such a joyful way.

David Kwong:
Thank you. I was fascinated by this when I was 19 years old, and I’m fascinated by it now. I’m still working on a one-man show about this. Ching Ling Foo came over in the late 19th century to the US, and he was performing at the World’s Fairs, and he sparked this craze for Chinese magic. And we’re talking about firecrackers and rice bowls and producing enormous bowls of water full of goldfish. People couldn’t get enough of it. And Ching Ling Foo, he was the master, and he called himself the official court conjurer to the Empress Dowager of China. And then the imitators came along. So everybody’s doing Chinese magic now, and one of them was Chung-Ling Soo.

And Chung-Ling Soo starts claiming that he’s the official court conjurer to the Empress Dowager of China, and they have this magic fight in the press about who’s the real Chinese magician. And they challenge each other to this duel, and they’re going to meet up and see who can do tricks better than the other person. And then Ching Ling Foo, the original Chinese magician, says, “You know what? This is beneath me. I’m not going to come.” And he doesn’t show up. And Chung Ling Soo, the great marketer, parades down the Strand in London and declares himself the winner. And he goes on to great fame and fortune. Ching Ling Foo basically goes back to China and does not have the incredibly successful world touring career that Chung Ling Soo has.

Now, it gets very interesting with Chung Ling Soo because his most famous trick was called Condemned to Death by the Boxer Rebellion, and this was a trick where he would catch a bullet on stage. Now, Chung Ling Soo, he spoke Chinese on stage and it was translated by a translator to English for the audience. Now in 1918, he’s performing the bullet catch trick and something goes terribly wrong, and the rifle fires, the shot rings out, and he clutches his lung and he collapses on the stage. And he says, for the first time in perfect English, something to the effect of, “Something’s gone terribly wrong. Bring the curtain down.” I don’t remember exactly what the quote is, but in perfect English.

And he dies that night, and this is when the public largely realizes that he was a white man pretending to be Chinese, and his name was William Robinson. And he was a brilliant illusion designer, and he had an incredible magic show, but there was a very deep case of appropriation going on at that time. And it’s a fascinating period. I don’t think a lot of people knew what an actual Chinese Asian person looked like. I think people didn’t care. It’s really hard to know what was going on.

Debbie Millman:
Well, that story, from what I understand, really set the stage for your honors thesis, which examined Asian impersonation in magic shows.

David Kwong:
Yes, I’ve been fascinated by it for a long time. And what’s most interesting to me is that there’s this really delicious tension between revering these… I’m talking about the impersonators here. They’re revering the mystic Oriental east for the magic that comes out of there. The mysticism is enhancing their magic shows, but at the same time, they are scorning these immigrants for coming to the west and they’re mocking them, and you get both at the same time. You get these people dressing up like the great bumbling Chinese Buddha, so they’re kind of waddling about the stage and bumping into things and dropping things.

And then at the same time, they’re producing beautiful fans and silks and bowls of goldfish, and they’re the celestial beings all of a sudden. So you get both at the same time. It’s fascinated me for decades. And I’m working on a show right now that tells these stories, but also I am reflecting on being both white and Asian at the same time, and how I’ve struggled with that and how that’s shaped who I am.

Debbie Millman:
How have you struggled in that way?

David Kwong:
Well, everybody wants to fit in, and I think, though I had a very accepting childhood, there have been moments where I haven’t felt included. Harvard was tough as progressive as a campus as it is. There are also elite clubs where it’s hard to be an awkward half-Chinese, Jewish kid. It’s not like it was in the 1950s, but it’s still not easy.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that you started the Magic Club with Adam Grant?

David Kwong:
Yes, I did. That’s our dual claim to fame. He’s a very talented magician. We actually worked competitive at one point. We had these two different warring magic clubs, but then we fused them together.

Debbie Millman:
How did all of your research on race or how has all of your research on race influenced your ideas about magic?

David Kwong:
Well, I think that magic is something universal, and we see the practice of illusion springing up all over the world independently. So we see magic spring up out of India, the home of mystery, but that’s largely through the lens of the West, I think. We are seeing it spring up out of Japan as well, and where there more experts in manipulation and sleight of hand for the stage. I’m still working on how that all shakes out in terms of what’s an acceptable way to appropriate those other cultures and to have those themes.
I think some of it’s warranted. I think full impersonation is not good, but at times it’s okay to portray a mythical story about something that’s come out of Egypt or an ancient Egyptian trick. I don’t know. It’s delicate. It’s delicate.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated from Harvard in 2002, but rather than pursue a career in magic at that time, you actually considered going to law school? Really?

David Kwong:
Well, looking back now, it’s hard to imagine that. But I was a humanities major. I have these two academic parents. Let me put it this way. I did not want to be just a kid’s birthday party magician. So I’ve always loved the performance art of it, but I did not myself think that there was a professional career in being a magician other than becoming the next David Copperfield or Penn and Teller or Lance Burton, was another guy who was big in the nineties. I didn’t think that that was attainable, and I didn’t want to be what I thought was the rest of the field, doing the bar mitzvah circuit. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve done plenty of bar mitzvah parties, but anyway, that’s-

Debbie Millman:
Who among us.

David Kwong:
So I didn’t think there was a career path worth pursuing there. So I first went into working in media. I’ve always been drawn to the world of entertainment. My mother always jokes, “Did I not give you enough attention when you were a kid?” So I took a job at HBO, I took a job at DreamWorks Animation. I was all over television and film. I’ve kind of had little forays into becoming a professional magician, and eventually, it kind of exploded, and you can’t ignore your childhood passion forever.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you performed a particularly bewildering trick for the CEO of DreamWorks at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg, but I couldn’t find what the actual trick was. He had a very specific directive for you after seeing the trick. So I’m wondering if you can share more fully about that story.

David Kwong:
So that trick is my signature trick at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Is that the kiwi trick?

David Kwong:
No, no. Well.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

David Kwong:
The kiwi trick is very good. I did not invent the kiwi trick, which is someone signs a dollar bill and they cut open the kiwi and it’s inside. It’s an amazing trick. And Debbie, what’s so funny is that I do this performance called The Enigmatist, which I’m sure we’ll touch.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, I’ve been there.

David Kwong:
Yes, I know.

Debbie Millman:
I’ve seen it. I was the recipient of the kiwi. I had just trolled the internet trying to find the answer to that. That to me is absolute transformative magic. It’s crazy.

David Kwong:
Well, let me underscore that point further because The Enigmatist is mental gymnastics. I am doing math on the fly. I’m building crosswords on the fly. It is this nerd fest of cerebral juggling with one kiwi trick in the middle, which is the only physical impossibility that I do in the show. And it just shows you how impactful that is. People remember that signed dollar bill to that impossible location. That’s what we call that type of trick to an impossible location.

Debbie Millman:
So for those that have not seen it, and I don’t think anyone’s life is complete until they see this trick because there is just no way to figure it out. But you ask somebody to sign a dollar bill, and then somehow it goes into a lock box somewhere. Then a kiwi ends up with the dollar bill inside the kiwi without the kiwi having one mark on it. It literally has teleported into the kiwi. I held the kiwi, I looked at the kiwi. There was no way for that dollar bill to get into the kiwi, and I still can’t figure it out.

David Kwong:
Yes, you’ve accurately described that trick. Good memory.

Debbie Millman:
I told you it was transformative. I believe in magic. I’m like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. I do believe in ghosts. I do believe in ghosts. I do. I do. I do. And that’s the way I feel about magic. I feel like this magic everywhere. So when you see tangible evidence, it’s like, “Okay, there’s more to the world than I can ever perceive.”

David Kwong:
That’s great. The trick that I did for Jeffrey was my signature trick. It’s become the trick that anchors my entire show, and that is my crossword puzzle trick. And it wasn’t long before that at my 30th birthday that I unveiled it and I threw a party for myself, and I did it at the Magic Castle, and I invited all my friends and I thought it would be fun to entertain all of them. And I came up with this effect where I have somebody choose a playing card. I tell everybody I’m going to build a crossword puzzle as quickly as possible. There’s a blank crossword puzzle grid. They’re yelling up words and phrases to me, and I’m drawing on my decades of experience making these things, and I build one as quickly as possible.
And when I finish, I reveal that the playing card is hidden in the crossword, that I have threaded it throughout the crossword. I’ll never forget that applause and bringing down the house that night for my friends. And I knew I had something special and it’s transformed my entire career. Suddenly the light bulb turned on for me. That I could take my two worlds, my two passions, puzzles and magic, and I could cross-pollinate them to make something new. So this cerebral character, which is just myself to be honest, I have a lot of fun just being myself on stage. But this presentation of cerebral magic was born, and I was still working at DreamWorks Animation at the time in story development, and I had the opportunity to perform it for Jeffrey at a retreat.

I knew it was a big moment. I’m thinking, “I’m going to impress the CEO here. I’m going to move up as a producer. This is great.” And when I finish, when I circle the last letter in that hidden playing card, he goes, “What are you doing here?” And you know what? My boss felt the same way. So when I asked for a leave of absence to go work on the magic movie, Now You See Me, my boss at the time, Damon Ross, he kicked me out of the nest and he’s like, “Get out of here. You’re not coming back.” And that’s what happened. And that was a big hit, that movie. So fun, if you’ve never seen it.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a wonderful movie.

David Kwong:
Great popcorn movie where magicians are robbing banks.

Debbie Millman:
And you came up with all of those illusions, right?

David Kwong:
I didn’t come up with all of them, but I was-

Debbie Millman:
The effects.

David Kwong:
I was in charge. I was the head magic consultant, but it draws on a lot of stuff from David Copperfield. There were a lot of wonderful contributors to that movie. It did so great that it propelled me, and coupled with I had finally figured out my approach to magic, pulling back the curtain. That’s what all of these things have in common, right? Now You See Me teaches the audience about a lot of these principles of illusion, and that’s what I really wanted to imbue into the story. And I worked a lot and collaborated with the screenwriters. Ed Solomon delivered this incredible script about these magicians robbing banks. And they are teaching the audience along the way how misdirection works, how the illusion of free choice works.

And pulling back the curtain has become really a lot of what I’ve been known for. Hence, the book Spellbound: The Seven Principles of Illusion. Hence, the kids book with 25 Tricks that I’m teaching. And I’m part of the 1% of magicians that don’t pretend to have superpowers in any way. Derren Brown’s another one. Penn and Teller have been doing it for decades. But most other magicians, and there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just their approach is that they convince you that they have a mind reading ability or some sort of supernatural talent.

Debbie Millman:
See, I think that you and Darren are both faking. I think you both have supernatural ability, but you’re just trying to sort of mislead us or misdirect us, as you would say, into thinking that you’re just a mortal human. But that’s another conversation for another day. You worked on a whole slew of movies since, you consulted on Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation. You worked on The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch. How do you feel about cryptology? Is that something that you’re also quite good at?

David Kwong:
I’m not that good at it. I respect it. I’ve dabbled in it. There are people that are incredible experts of it, and they are usually employed by our government. But it’s all in the same world that I play in. And in The Enigmatist, I’m standing in front of a bookshelf that has 16 hidden codes in it. More important is that I am telling the story in The Enigmatist, of America’s first codebreakers. So the narrative that I weave throughout my own personal journey is of William and Elizebeth Friedman who were the first cryptographers. And it’s really like a nerdy love story, how they find each other.

Debbie Millman:
I love it. I started trying to crack cryptocodes in Long Island Newsday when I was in seventh grade, and I would stare at them for hours trying to figure out what it meant that one letter stands for another. And then one day I saw it, and I realized at that moment that most four-letter words that start and end with the same letter is the word that. Occasionally it’s dead, but usually it’s that.

David Kwong:
Wow. So are you talking about cryptograms, right?

Debbie Millman:
Cryptograms, yes.

David Kwong:
Where any letter or any symbol represents another is replaced every single time by the same corresponding letter.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, yes. And I was so proud of myself, David. I cut it out. And to this day, 50 years later, I still have that cryptogram that I cut out from Long Island Newsday in the 1970s.

David Kwong:
Wonderful.

Debbie Millman:
Did not expect to share that story with you.

David Kwong:
No, that’s great. That’s why we walk around with the first playing card we ever picked in our wallets, and these things are a part of who we are.

Debbie Millman:
How did you first establish your career as a magician making a living?

David Kwong:
Well, Now You See Me was what got me out of the desk job, so to speak. And then it was a leap of faith at that point. And I’m gigging around Los Angeles and trying to make a living, trying to earn as much as I made as an assistant at DreamWorks. So my bar was pretty low. I told myself if I can make the same amount as someone who was answering the phones at DreamWorks, then I should keep going. And I have to say, and this is how one of the many ways that we run into each other, the TED Talk stage made a huge difference. They asked me to give a talk. They saw what I was doing with puzzles, and I had this enormous opportunity in 2014, so it’s been 10 years to speak and perform on the main stage.

And I asked Will Shortz if I could hide a message in that morning’s crossword puzzle to correspond with the day I was giving a talk. And he agreed and he said I could do it as long as it didn’t compromise the integrity of the actual puzzle. So this was a bonus message if you knew where to look for it. And of course, I told the whole TED Talk stage where to look for it. That was a pivotal moment for me because it solidified me as a thought leader, and it put me on the speaker’s market. And the speaker’s market, as many people know, is it’s that corporate market. And suddenly I realized I’m not going to be the birthday party kid’s magician. I can do big corporate ballrooms.

Honestly, Debbie, I still love doing it so much. I could be… Just last year I spoke at Davos, and this was in January. I spoke at Davos and a couple of days later I was in Omaha, Nebraska doing a show for a food distribution company. And audiences love it equally. All over the world, everybody loves magic. And I can be on a stage in a hotel ballroom in the middle of somewhere in Florida. I’m always in Florida where companies do their retreats. I’m on stage doing a corporate magic show, and I cannot believe that I get to support myself doing magic. It’s a dream come true. It’s awesome. Every single time.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said this on the record, “There’s no magic in magic.” So what is magic?

David Kwong:
Oh, that is a … You’re throwing it back on me. I like it. I start the show with there’s no magic in magic. And I have a slide up behind me at that exact moment, which is the saw a lady in half illusion from 1921, and I reveal how it’s done. I show, at least in that version, that there are two ladies that fit in a single box there. And I’m pulling back the curtain right away, and I’m saying to the audience, “None of this is real. It’s all tricks. They’re all puzzles. I’m trying to fool your brain. And please go ahead and see if you can crack these puzzles while I’m performing. Feel free to let me know if you figured something out.”
Okay. So that’s my irreverent approach. So what is magic? Magic is the unexplainable. And magicians, perhaps unfortunately, are the great skeptics. And it’s hard to find something unexplainable for us. We’re always looking for that rational explanation. I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful there’s something out there that’ll just knock me to the ground. You can bet I’m going to go try to find the explanation immediately, but I’ve yet to really … Oh, I don’t know. It seems kind of sad in a way, but that’s what drives me, is I’ll see someone do something and for a moment or longer than that, it’ll fool me and I’ll think, “Oh my God, how did that happen?” And you feel it. Magicians call that getting burned, when a magician performs something and another magician doesn’t know how it’s done. Oh, you got burned by that guy. We feel it, like, “Oh my God, what did that guy just do?” But you can bet, I am immediately on the phone calling my friends, trying to figure out what did that guy do? I got to be able to do that myself.

Debbie Millman:
So you could go see Derren Brown perform, and you can figure out how he does things? Can you see more than we do because you know what to look for?

David Kwong:
Yes. We all speak the same language and we have all the same tools. I might not know exactly what a magician has done in that specific moment. And Derren, boy, his illusions are very layered and very deceptive. He’s one of the greats. I think he’s incredible. So I always say, “We might not know what they did exactly, but we know how we would do it.” I know how I would do it in my own way.

And what I mean by that is in a magic trick, there is an effect, which is what the audience experiences. And then there are multiple methods, or there’s the method on how you pull it off. And usually there are multiple methods. There are many different ways that you could arrive at the same effect. So I’m holding up my coffee cup. If I’m going to make it disappear, I’m going to snap and it’s going to be gone. That’s the effect. The method could be I have a string that pulls it into my jacket. The method could be that it’s not a porcelain mug, but it’s actually made of paper and it can quickly be crumpled into a ball and go up my sleeve, or maybe it’s a fake table with a hole in it and it goes into the table. There are a lot of different methods. So usually I know what somebody’s doing, but not always. But I usually have a pretty good idea, and if I go home and think about it, I can recreate how I might do it.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that illusion works because the brain is wired to fill the gap between seeing and believing. Why is that?

David Kwong:
Well, our brains are imperfect and we are bombarded by stimuli. In any given moment, there are just all these things hitting our brains. We can’t possibly process them all. So we jump to conclusions, and we jump these gaps and we correlate A to B. And it’s the only way we can function, and block out certain stimuli and make associations with others. And magicians play around in that space. And magicians will force you to correlate a given A with a given B, even though they might not directly relate to each other.

Debbie Millman:
Once again, another Wizard of Oz reference. There’s good magic and bad magic, good witches and bad witches. How are con artists perceived by magicians? Because a lot of the principles that they use … And when I was much, much younger, 30 years ago, I was the victim of a con. And so I’m super, super intrigued by the work of Maria Konnikova, for example. So how do you see cons in relation to magic?

David Kwong:
They’re not far apart. We’re playing around in the same sandbox. Obviously, con artists are predatory, but con artists are using your assumptions against you. But the most salient thing that a con does, and the way it succeeds, is it is preying on your emotions. And the mark so wants to believe that something is going to be possible. Magicians, like all storytellers, if they can get you to engage emotionally, you’ll believe more what you’re seeing.

Now, it is very delicate. When does a magician cross the line and go into something that is in the con artist space? There’s a wonderful documentary that addresses this, and it’s called An Honest Liar. It’s about the late great magician turned skeptic, James Randi. And James Randi says, “A magician is the most honest person, because he’ll tell you he’s going to lie to you and then he does.”

So there’s this contract with the audience, that we have this license to fool you and this license to lie to you on stage, but it gets murky. It gets murky when you start preying on people’s emotions. Obviously, the end of the spectrum where I am, we’re saying that none of it’s real, so we’re not getting into that. But as you get more and more toward manipulation of people, you have mind readers and mentalists, which are still magicians performing, but they’re skating pretty close to getting you to believe that they are contacting your deceased relatives, right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. We could all be Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost.

David Kwong:
In Ghost, yeah. But there’s still a contract there that it’s for entertainment, right? Derren Brown is very clear about that. But then you get into the tarot card readers and the fortune tellers and the spiritualists. And that’s the category. Spiritualism is the term that encompasses everything here. They are using the same tricks as magicians to prey on your emotions. When you’re going into a fortune teller, a psychic, they are using cold reading, which is making determinations on the fly about who you are, or they’re hot reading you. They are looking you up based on your name, based on your credit card. They’re coming to the table with all sorts of information, just like a magician might if they wanted to convince you that they were a mind reader.

So again, this is why magicians are the great skeptics, as I mentioned. And even Houdini, in 1921 I think … Maybe it was ’26. I’m bad with dates, I’m sorry. He testified in Congress to get spiritualism banned from Washington D.C. And he was a big debunker, that Houdini. Big old debunker, saying that none of it’s real. And spiritualism-

Debbie Millman:
I guess people want it to be real.

David Kwong:
They really do.

Debbie Millman:
They do. They really do.

David Kwong:
Most people do.

Debbie Millman:
They want to be able to know, yeah.

David Kwong:
Most people do. And in An Honest Liar, they talk about how James Randi debunks … I think it’s Peter Popoff and the other televangelists and the big, big evangelists who are saying … They’re calling people up on stage. They’re doing harm because they’re saying, “You’re healed. Your cancer’s gone. You don’t have to go to the hospital anymore.” People so want to believe that this is true. So even though James Randi debunks all these people and exposes that they’re wearing a wire and they’re getting information ahead of time or in the moment about the people coming on stage, guess what? The whole room is filled the next night. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. They want to believe in something. It’s such an interesting part of who we are as humans.

Debbie Millman:
That’s sort of why I love your new book so much. Now, your first book, Spellbound: Seven Principles of Illusion to Captivate Audiences and Unlock the Secrets of Success, that came out in 2016. And it’s very much an adult book for deep thinkers. And this new book, in many ways I feel like it should be called the “Beginner’s Book to Creating Magic.” It’s like Peanuts. It’s a book that appeals to children and children will fundamentally understand, but adults reading it will also know. It’s like a you know that I know that you know that I know that there’s so many layers here. And I think, for everybody listening, it’s a wonderful gift to give a kid but it’s a wonderful gift to give yourself.

David Kwong:
I’m so glad you said that. It says 8 to 12 on the jacket, but I think it’s 8 to 100. It’s really … Because the tricks are good. I picked really good stuff to reveal. And by the way, I had to figure out what was okay to reveal. You can’t do everything.

Debbie Millman:
That’s my next question.

David Kwong:
It took a lot of time and research and calling other magicians to say, “This is really good. Is it kosher? Am I allowed to do this?” So I believe that I found the right balance with all the tricks in the book.

Debbie Millman:
Were the other magicians that you spoke to okay … I mean, is anything that’s in the book against the Magician’s Oath? You include an oath in the book for people to take. But the fact that it is all now available to people, how do other magicians feel about this opening the door to understanding how some really, really good tricks and illusions and codes are created and solved?

David Kwong:
We are in a very complicated time right now, first of all. I would’ve answered this differently 10 years ago. There is magic exposure all over TikTok and Instagram right now in a way that is just … Oh, it hurts my heart. I still think that magicians as performers are going to be just fine. Don’t worry, everybody. We’re going to be fine, because there’s a lot of audience out there. And I think that even if you learn in a quick video how something is done, if you go to a live magic show, you’re not really going to be armed to decipher what’s going on on stage.

I guess what I’m saying is the book is … The tricks that I’m revealing there are safe. I think the rules are as follows. You can reveal anything that you’ve come up with yourself. If I’ve invented it, I can reveal it, because the cardinal rule is you don’t want to ruin someone’s magic show. If someone is doing something right now and it’s a signature trick, stay away from that. And there are not a lot of professional magicians, so we’re aware of what people are doing. The other rule is, and it’s in concert with that one, is if something is like a hundred years old or more, if it’s an old trick that you’ve dusted off that no one’s been doing for a while, you can also talk about how that … That’s why I feel comfortable exposing the 1921 version of saw a lady in half.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Although I didn’t know that, and it was like, “Wow, of course.”

David Kwong:
Yeah. But there are more deceptive ways that people are doing it now, and so I would stay away from that. And then of course, if someone has dusted off something from a hundred years ago and they’re doing it now in their show, then you need to stay away from that. So there were a few tricks that I was circling that I asked my friends about and they said, “Yeah, you probably shouldn’t do that because this person does it in their show.” So these have all been vetted.

Debbie Millman:
25 tricks. There’s so much I learned about the language of magic, and I’m wondering if I can ask you about some of my favorites. What is the difference between forcing and free choice?

David Kwong:
Forcing … Okay, so don’t call the magic police on me. Now, forcing is when you make someone choose something. So that could be a playing card, that could be a coin, it could be a number. But forcing only works because your audience is believing in that moment that they have free choice. So they work hand in hand. It is the illusion of free choice.

Debbie Millman:
And there’s a word for the magician’s choice. It rhymes with artichoke. I can’t pronounce it myself because it’s too hard.

David Kwong:
Equivoque. Yes, that is a specific technique for forcing one object from three. You got to pick up the book to learn that one.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you learn all of this in the book. That’s why it’s so amazing.

David Kwong:
It’s really clever. And the way equivoque works is it’s important in a magic trick that you never tell your audience what the end of the story is going to be, right? So you pivot the trick based on what choices they may have freely made, but because you’re in control of where the trick goes, they believe that this is what was intended the entire time.

Debbie Millman:
So that’s sort of related to one ahead, right? One ahead. The term, one ahead.

David Kwong:
No. One ahead is a little bit different. One ahead is … And by the way, you can mix and match all these things for a very confusing and deceptive multi-layered illusion. But one ahead is the idea that … The cups and balls is a classic trick in magic. It’s one of the oldest tricks in magic. And usually, the way it’s done is there are three cups and three balls, but you have a fourth ball that is secretly underneath one of the cups already.

And I mentioned Penn and Teller before, who are the great irreverent magicians who pull back the curtain. They famously did the cups and balls with clear plastic cups. So you can go on YouTube and watch them do it with clear plastic cups. What makes that such an entertaining routine is they do it at lightning speed, so you can’t really track what’s going on. And Penn’s a juggler, right? He does it so fast and you’re like, “Okay, I get there’s a fourth ball, but what the heck is happening?”

So one ahead is the idea that there’s a ball underneath the cup already that you don’t know about. So if I’m holding a second ball in my hand and I make it vanish, then I do a magical gesture that it’s filtering through the air and getting transported to underneath that cup, you are one ahead with that ball that they think is the same. And if you go back to the story I told before about the sponge ball in my hand, that’s a one-ahead trick.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

David Kwong:
Yep.

Debbie Millman:
What is an out?

David Kwong:
Oh, an out is a backup plan for a magician. For every trick that I do in my live show, I probably have three outs prepped. And you learn the hard way. You learn by screwing up. So that kiwi trick that you love so much, I have a second kiwi in the drawer of the desk on the stage because I have learned that people take a bite out of that kiwi, they’ll throw it up to me and it’ll splatter against the wall. All these things have happened. So I have an out. I have a second kiwi there. Now, that’s kind of a mundane example of an out.

And out on the fly using improvised technique would be if you chose a playing card and you put it back in the deck. Let’s say you chose the four diamonds. And I triumphantly pull out the seven of clubs, and I genuinely make a mistake. I say, “What did you have?” You say, “Four of diamonds.” I go, “Oops, I didn’t mean to do that.” Then I can very quickly, because I’m deft with a deck of playing cards, I can find your four of diamonds. And I can use some sleight of hand to change that seven of clubs to the four of diamonds. And it’s as if I wanted to screw up on purpose, and setting myself up for this moment when I get to do a transformation of one card to the other. Again, this works with what I mentioned before, is you don’t know what the story was supposed to be. So then you shape everything around that moment that just happened, and you make it seem like … See, I messed up on purpose so that I could change the card.

Debbie Millman:
How often do you really ever miss up?

David Kwong:
All the time. All the time.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

David Kwong:
At least a couple times a night because … And that’s what makes the show so fun for me as a performer, is you never know what curveballs you’re going to get from the audience. You never know when, I don’t know, your hand’s a little sticky and something’s going to just not … The sleight of hand move’s going to get screwed up.

Teller, I keep referencing these great magicians, he has famously said … When something goes wrong. You didn’t know about this, it was behind the scenes, but a piece of tape would come loose and it would cover up the hole that is needed to hide something in so you can’t jam it in there because it’s blocked, right? And Teller would say, “Well, now we know that can happen.”

And it’s like these things go wrong, but the show must go on. And the stakes are so much higher for a magician because we need to preserve this illusion of control. And you’re this marvelous character that can’t ever screw up, that you have these superpowers, right? So it’s fun to figure out ways around these unpredictable screw-ups.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about a stooge. A stooge is a magician’s secret helper. How often are they actually used?

David Kwong:
They’re used all the time. There’s a great debate about whether or not stooges are considered artful or not. A stooge is a plant in the audience. And you can pull off some really incredible miracles. If you say, “Somebody yell out their favorite animal,” and someone says, “The Amazon river dolphin,” and you happen to have that written down on a card because you stooge them. Why not? I say why not? I don’t use any stooges in my show, but they can come in handy.

Debbie Millman:
Two last questions. Which is the favorite magic trick included in your book? What is your favorite magic trick of those 25?

David Kwong:
There’s a trick that I love that’s called It’s News to Me. I can describe this, and all of you can try it. In fact, I think I’m going to put it on my website. So I’m going to put it on howtofoolyourparents.com. I’m going to do this trick, or actually, I’m going to do it with a young magician on the Today Show on the 18th of October. So after we do that, it’s going to go on the website and you can do it yourself.

Basically, you have a strip of newspaper, you’re holding an article. You’re running your scissors up and down it vertically. Tell me where to snip. Anywhere. They have free choice. They tell you where to cut, and you cut, and that piece of article falls to the table. And you pick it up and you say, “Read the top line.” And they read the top line.

And then before the trick, you’ve pointed out there’s an envelope, a prediction envelope. And they opened it up and inside is a piece of paper with that exact line written on it, and you have forced that line. And the way you’ve forced it is because … See if you can picture this. The article is actually upside down. Now, the headline, you’ve cut out the headline separate from the article. So the headline is right side up. But you’ve taped beneath that headline an upside-down column. And because people don’t look closely and you don’t give them the chance to, they can’t see that all of those letters are upside down. It’s just a blur of text, of black text on newsprint. So wherever you cut, it’s actually the bottom of that strip of newspaper is always going to be the bottom, which then becomes the top. It’s hard to …

Debbie Millman:
Ingenious.

David Kwong:
Yeah, it’s hard to describe.

Debbie Millman:
No, it’s ingenious. Well, there are pictures throughout the book that really do help articulate the instructions, which was helpful to me because I’m more of a visual learner.

David Kwong:
And what I love about that trick and all of the tricks in the book is that they are all clever. And this book is a celebration of being smart and brainy and clever, and that’s what I really try to impart to everybody that reads it.

Debbie Millman:
And creating wonder.

David Kwong:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It seems as if we’re in a bit of a, I guess, golden age of word games. Wordle was so popular. The New York Times bought it from Josh Wordle in 2022. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a new game that seems to have come out called Alphaguess, where you have to guess a word. You type in any word. You start with any word, and then the website will tell you whether the selected word of the day is either before that word alphabetically or after that word.

David Kwong:
Okay. So you’re homing in on what it is. Okay.

Debbie Millman:
On one word. So I’ve been doing it now for a couple of days, and I think the best that I’ve gotten is 12 words before I get it. I read about it on Jason Kottke’s website, kottke.org. And so I’ve been doing it every day, but it’s wonderful. Why do you think that word games are so appealing right now to more than just folks like us?

David Kwong:
Well, the social sharing is what made Wordle really spread like wildfire, that I got it in two or I got it in three. And it’s so accessible. Everybody can do it. Can I recommend my favorite game? And it’s hard.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, please.

David Kwong:
It’s called Quintumble. Q-U-I-N-T-U-M-B-L-E. Quintumble. I do it every morning. Sometimes it takes me 30 seconds. Other days, it takes me seven minutes if it’s really tough. And there are basically four dials of letters that you’re turning to make five words. And it’s tough. And I love it. I love it.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I can’t wait to try it. David, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for writing this wonderful book, and joining me today on Design Matters.

David Kwong:
Well, thank you for having me, and I’m glad you loved it so much. It’s really-

Debbie Millman:
I did. I really did. David Kwong’s brand new book is titled How to Fool Your Parents: 25 Brain-Breaking Magic Tricks, but it could also be called “How to Fool Just About Anyone.” To read lots more about David, you can go to davidkwongmagic.com. There, you can also sign up for his awesome newsletter. You can sign up for his awesome newsletter, which David is going to tell us how to pronounce.

David Kwong:
Enigmatology. Famously, that was Will Shortz’s major in college. Enigmatology. So I’ve borrowed that word from him.

Debbie Millman:
And then you can solve an original crossword every issue. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

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Debbie Millman:

One of the contenders for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars this year is Sarah Polley’s latest movie, Women Talking. The movie is intense, closely observed, hopeful and disturbing, and a must watch for anyone interested in complexly beautiful stories. This is Sarah Polley’s fourth feature film as a director. And it’s now clear that she’s in the midst of an extraordinary new chapter of her career, which is also included acting in over 40 films, stage work, producing, writing, and directing television, and the writing of an extraordinary memoir. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get to talk about much of that today. Sarah Polley, welcome to Design Matters.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Sarah, with all of the accomplishments and success that you’ve had and some of which that I’ve just listed, is it true that your real ambition is to win at Wimbledon?

Sarah Polley:

I think it was when I was 10 for about five minutes, and someone interviewed me during that five minutes. And what’s great is I’d never actually played a tennis game. I’d only smashed a ball against the garage door. But yeah, I did state at an interview when I was 10 that I wanted to win Wimbledon. I’m the least athletic person you’ll ever meet in your life.

Debbie Millman:

I thought that was really charming and it’s so interesting how no matter what we accomplished or no matter what we are able to achieve, there’s always something else that we have set our sights on. At least that’s what I found with so many creative people. Both of your parents were in show business before you were born. Your mom was well known for playing Gloria Beecham on 44 episodes of the television series, Street Legal. By the time you were five years old, you had a part as a penniless child in the movie One Magic Christmas. Do you remember wanting to be an actress at such a young age or was it something that your parents encouraged you to do?

Sarah Polley:

It’s a really good question, and what I’ve thought a lot about. At one point, I was working on a documentary about child actors that I never went through with. And what was really interesting in that research was that I could find almost no child actor who didn’t claim it was their idea and that they pushed their way into it and their parents knew better, but they just had this indomitable will that their parents couldn’t contend with. And everyone told that story, including Shirley Temple who started at three and who clearly had a really overbearing stage parent. So that was my story for many years. I’m not sure about that story anymore. I will say I don’t think my parents were the archetypal terrible stage parents. They weren’t ogreish for sure, but I do think my mom was a casting director and an actor. And I think all of my siblings at some point went up for audition. So I have to imagine it was instigated by my mom. And I think early on, I liked it. And then I think that quickly changed around eight or nine.

Debbie Millman:

How does one go about even getting a part in a film at five years old? How do you have the presence to audition?

Sarah Polley:

I think that child actors generally come from the pool of overly precocious children, which is a dangerous thing because usually with precociousness comes a delay in other more important deep ways. So you become very good at pleasing a room of adults and impressing a room of adults. And I think so much energy goes into that when you’re a precocious child, that less development and work goes into actually figuring out who you are and what your actual instincts and intuitions are.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that you grew up trying to fit yourself into characters other people had written. This included Beverly Cleary’s iconic character, Ramona Quimby on television, Alice from Alice Wonderland on stage, who played Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam’s movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and became famous starring as Sara Stanley, the heroine of the television show Road to Avonlea, which was based on the classic beloved books by LM Montgomery. How do you learn how to embody other characters so thoroughly before you’ve even figured out who you are?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, I think it’s complicated and maybe a little bit perilous. I think playing Ramona was a great thing for me at seven and eight, because it was this character who was so alive and honest and not always palatable. She knew she was, she was incredibly outspoken, she was really assertive. She was so completely herself. She suffered sometimes for her inability to conform, but that was what was wonderful about her. So that was great and so was Sally Salt in that sense, in terms of embodying that character. And your identity is still forming. You are very informed by this game of imagination that goes on for months and months in which primarily older men are telling you you’re doing a good job or not doing a good job, based on being the thing they’ve constructed for you. It’s a really problematic way to grow up, I think, especially as a young woman. So I found that tricky and became more tricky as I became a teenager and into early twenties, just in terms of parsing out what is my identity, versus what am I constructing to please others?

Debbie Millman:

In several of your roles, Sally Salt and Baron Munchausen and in particular, you are exposed to really, really rough working conditions for a little girl, so much so that you once had to be ambulanced to a hospital. How do you make sense of that now looking back on it? I know that you’ve written open letters to Terry Gilliam. I know that you’ve spoken to your father about how you felt about being put in the line of danger, so to speak. How do you feel about that looking back on it now and what you went through?

Sarah Polley:

It’s important to preface what I’m going to say by saying I think that it’s terrible I was put in those positions and I think that children shouldn’t be in unsafe working environments and perhaps shouldn’t be in adult working environments, period. I will say that after this many years, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to stand up to a hundred people and stop production, especially if you’re a parent that comes from a background where you don’t have access to this kind of world. My parents weren’t wealthy. My mom was an actor and at the end of her life had this small part on a TV show, but really was an aspiring actor and a casting director on Canadian Productions, but not in this big heady world of movie stars and a big budget production.

And I do think for most parents, it would be very difficult to stand up and shut down a production because you were uncomfortable with something that was happening to your child. Ideally me as a parent, I would think hopefully that would come easily. But I think that’s actually underplaying what a emergency room mentality develops on a film set. And I have seen over and over large groups of adults, many of whom are very good, decent, conscientious people become complicit in situations that were unsafe or unhealthy for kids or other vulnerable people. I’ve seen it so many times, that I’m reluctant to sit back and judge those peoples as individuals for not having the courage to stand up. I think I blame more a system that allows it to happen. I think that the people who do have authority, producers, directors, have to take a lot of responsibility and be accountable for conditions that arise on a set, because I think I did have crew members over the years in various unsafe working environments I was in as a kid, risk their jobs or lose their jobs, in order to protect me.

But that was the cost. It was very real. So I think over the years, I’m far less angry at the individuals and far more focused on the structures and what are the rules and what are the protections in place for kids and why don’t we have a third-party child psychologist for instance, that’s not employed by anybody involved in the protection or the parents? But is maybe employed by the union to be there to independently have agency to say, “This is not okay. This isn’t unsafe.” Why don’t we figure out how to make this better? I think kids shouldn’t work more than a small amount of every year if they’re going to work at all. I highly discourage parents from putting their kids into professional environments. But I do think kids will always be in films and television. So what can we do to make it much safer and to create roles for people who are there solely to have agency to disrupt a production, if it’s not going well for a child?

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how you had a mother who made you feel like life and the world were really exciting. But two days after your 11th birthday, she passed away from cancer. Yet you still kept working, getting bigger and bigger roles. How did you manage through this?

Sarah Polley:

It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because my oldest is turning 11 tomorrow, and so suddenly, this moment where the age I was and two days after my birthday that she died, looking at what 11 means is really interesting. It’s not quite what I remembered it. And my kid is both more responsible and competent than I remember being and also vulnerable in a way that I don’t remember myself, but I’m sure I was. I think the one thing I’ve noticed from my own kids is they’re built to adapt and they’re built to be resilient and to move on to the next thing. And I think that the things that happen to you as a kid really wait until you’re an adult to come crashing down on you in so many ways, because I think we are just built to be moving and changing and growing, and that gets folded into the experience. And I think it wasn’t really till much later that I recognized how truly difficult it was.

Debbie Millman:

After your mother died, you and your dad were left on your own. By that time, all of your siblings had already moved out. You were the youngest. You’ve written how your dad who prided himself on not being a father effectively fell apart and retreated into a [inaudible 00:10:54] cystic funk. So I have two questions about that. It’s such a major thing to have read. First, why did he pride himself on not being a father?

Sarah Polley:

He had this untraditional way of seeing the world and that permeated everything. So to him, it was a point of pride that he wasn’t taking on a traditional role of a father. He instead was a friend, that he didn’t have authority over me. He would never tell me what to do. There were no rules, there were no bedtimes. There was nothing I was not allowed to do. And so that was his thing, was, “I’m not your dad. I’m your friend.” Which on the one hand was wonderful. And I shared books with him and long conversations late at night and had this really interesting non-judgmental relationship with him or from him. But at the same time, there was nobody to catch me either. Nobody was going to notice if I didn’t come home. So it was a feeling of profound insecurity and lack of safety coupled with this wonderful gift of having a father who really thought I was great.

And I think the older I get, the more I realize what a gift that was, that to have a parent who truly values your brain and is excited by your mind and thinks you’re a really wonderful person just at his core, I think he really loved me. And I think as I get older, I’m more and more aware of what a gift that was. Now would I have preferred to have some structure and some safety and some boundaries and some sense of being safe as a kid? Of course. Would I trade that feeling of insecurity for a feeling of security with a parent who didn’t make me feel like I was really great when I was a kid? I’m really not sure at this point. Ideally, you have both. But yeah, so it was a very complex relationship. And certainly, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there.

Debbie Millman:

How bad was his [inaudible 00:12:54] cystic funk? Were you actually taking care of him?

Sarah Polley:

To a certain extent, yeah. I know I would get up and go to work at four or 5:00 AM in the morning, often in the dark. And I would’ve slept in the clothes I was going to wear the next day, ’cause that seemed to make more sense to me than having to get dressed to the morning. I know that no one had done laundry in years in that house.

Debbie Millman:

He went from bed to bed, your sibling’s beds with clean sheets till they were dirty and?

Sarah Polley:

Exactly. And the mess and the mice and the maggots just piled up. It was really pretty squalid. And I would come home and he’d have watched TV all day and smoking and burning holes and the armrest of the recliner. It was pretty bad. And I think he was genuinely depressed, and I think he may have been autistic and have had never been diagnosed and actually did have struggles with communicating or connecting to his own emotional life and communicating that to others. He was very isolated. My mother was his entry point and his connection socially and to the world. He was a man of that generation where every physical thing had been taken care of him since the day he was born, all by his mother and then right into his marriage. And so I just think he came apart and didn’t even know he had come apart, and didn’t have the resources to look for help.

So I look back on him with a very big degree of sadness and compassion at this point. And I think it was very painful for him when I moved out because really there’s no one there to take care of me. I didn’t want to live … We lived way out in the country and I wanted to live closer to my school, my friends. And I think in his mind, he got abandoned, which of course is really complicated and not quite accurate when I was 14 and leaving and he wasn’t taking care of me. But in his reality, that was the truth, and I think must have been extremely painful for him. I stayed close to him until he died. But yeah, I look back and go, “I so wish he’d had more support in order to come into himself.”

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written that at 11 years old, there was some part of you that felt you were responsible for your mom’s death. Why is that?

Sarah Polley:

I think that’s what kids do when things go wrong or a lot of kids. I think you try to figure out the way you’re responsible for things or could have altered them. So I think that took me decades to come to, as a sense that somehow this had been my fault. I think that when she was sick, there was a lot of denial about how sick she was, both from her and a lot of people around her. I think that my intuition was that there was something really serious going on. So I would talk about my mom having cancer and dying, even though that’s not language that was being used in my house. So I think what happened was that when she died, my sense was I had made up that she was dying, and by making up this lie that she was dying, had somehow willed it to happen.

And I do think there are incredible mental gymnastics that kids can play, again, watching my own kids, in order to twist themselves into being responsible for things they’re not responsible for. And the thing as a kid too is there’s often no one there to check your work, unless you’re an incredibly communicative kid. You go through 20 stages of a problem and no one’s there to correct the 10 strange logical leaps you’ve made on the way somewhere.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned leaving home when you were 14. You decided you were grown up enough to go. Your dad let you. By 15, you dropped out of high school, you were living with your 19-year-old boyfriend. No one called child services.

Sarah Polley:

No, it’s interesting. And it’s funny because a lot of people knew it was happening. And I think probably if I was to put myself in the position of one of the adults who knew this was happening, I would’ve looked at it and gone strangely I think I was in the best case scenario for me at that point. So the 19-year-old boyfriend that I had at the time, it was a high school dropout, and on paper, this is not a good situation for a 15-year-old girl, ended up being an incredible caretaker of me. And we still remain very close friends. And when I had this major spinal surgery when I was 15 years old, he was Florence Nightingale. He cooked for me and he took care of me in a way that almost nobody else I think could have. Certainly a better job I think, than my dad would’ve done at that time. So I think that the adults that did know what was going on didn’t intervene because they could see, even though this was clearly problematic and not perfect, it was probably the best case scenario for me at that moment.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned surgery. You had been diagnosed with scoliosis four years earlier during a routine insurance medical exam for Road to Avonlea. For our listeners, can you describe exactly what is scoliosis?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, so it’s a curvature of the spine and it’s often diagnosed around adolescence, and I think majority in girls, although it happens to boys too. And I had a very severe curvature of my spine. So my spine was in an S shape, and it caused one shoulder blade to jet way out. And my whole body was pretty lopsided and I was hunched over to one side so that the tips of my fingers touched the side of one of my knees. And I think by the time they operated, it was over I think 65, 66 degree curve in my upper spine.

Debbie Millman:

Were you in pain?

Sarah Polley:

I was pretty uncomfortable. I would get back spasms. I had to wear a fiberglass brace 16 hours a day. It was really constricting. I don’t remember being in a ton of physical pain, but I would say a lot of discomfort

Debbie Millman:

Because you had that brace on pretty much the entire shoot of Avonlea.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, they had to design my costumes and it was very limiting in terms of how I could move. And as an adolescent girl, it’s like it’s already … There’s nothing more embarrassing than your body changing and growing and puberty, and then you have this added thing on top of it to be embarrassed about. It’s not an easy thing to wear a brace with scoliosis as any kid who went through that will tell you. But the brace ultimately didn’t work. And I had to have the surgery anyway because once I moved out, I just ditched the brace and there was no one there to stop me.

Debbie Millman:

The motivation to finally get surgery on your spine is one of the most poignant chapters in your memoir. And I’m wondering if you can talk about that specific decision at that particular time to have the surgery.

Sarah Polley:

So I was in a production of Alice Through the Looking Glass at the Stratford Festival, and I was 15 years old. And I started to have incredible stage fright. The kind of stage fright that started around noon, and I would be in a state of panicky sweats for seven hours. I would be in the rehearsal room, in the basement of the theater hours before every show, sobbing uncontrollably in terror, that I was going to forget a line on stage that I would humiliate myself on stage. I kept this terror as a complete secret. I didn’t confide in a single person, including the many wonderful adults that were around me. The actors in that company were great and would’ve been incredibly supportive. But I was so ashamed of the fear that I couldn’t speak it. And so it grew like a monster.

And I had been avoiding seeing an orthopedic surgeon for years since I had moved out. I had stopped wearing my brace. I knew that my spine was growing completely out of control into this curve. I had a sense I might need surgery, and I had just avoided that, ’cause the thing I had been most terrified of in the world was having this scoliosis surgery. But at some point, the terror of being on stage, which became a kind of madness. I actually started to think I was through the looking glass as Alice and everything was backwards and I had to run to stay in place. And the whole horrifying narrative of that journey of Alice Through the Looking Glass mapped itself onto this breakdown I was having. And I think unprocessed grief about my mother dying. And I-

Debbie Millman:

And your world was upside down really.

Sarah Polley:

No, exactly. There were just too many resonances. It was like the whole thing was a metaphor for the life I was living, and this idea of growing bigger and smaller and not knowing whether you were big or small. And there were so many things that were echoes and haunting for me. And so in my addled brain, I realized the only way out of the terror of being on stage is this bigger fear, which is to have the surgery. And if I can tell people that I have to drop out of this play because I’m in agony, because of my back, which I was uncomfortable, but I wasn’t in agony, then I can get out of this play without having to tell anyone I’m afraid. So I ended up going to this orthopedic surgeon. And thank God I got this most beautiful doctor who figured out really quickly that first of all, that I did need the surgery, that I genuinely did need the surgery.

Secondly, that my claims of agonizing pain were actually referring to something else, which was this crippling anxiety about having to go on stage, and that I needed his help in getting out. And without making me say it, he just said to me, “I once had a patient who really needed to start playing baseball. And he wasn’t in that much pain, but he really needed to stop playing baseball. And so he got a note from me so he could stop playing baseball. So would you need a note like that from me?” And I said, “Yeah, I do”, because the surgery wasn’t urgent.

He said, “Well, I’m going to book you in a couple of months and I’m going to give you this note.” And he gave me this note basically saying I had to drop out of the play because of my spine and how much pain I was in. And I got out of the play and it really saved my life. I really don’t know at 15 how out of control I was. But I expect that my life was in danger, in terms of what I would’ve done to get myself out of that play. And I think he saw that and really saved me the trouble of having to tell that story. It was really an amazing moment for me, of him stepping in like that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I also want to point out that it only became utterly unbearable when the show was extended. When you got that news.

Sarah Polley:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

You needed to take action ’cause you were counting down till the end of the run. It was like 10 shows away and then it got extended and-

Sarah Polley:

That’s right. I was think 10 shows away from finally being done after 60 shows. That’s right. And then they said, “We’re doing this extension. We’re taking the show to Toronto.” And I think that’s when I just realized I couldn’t possibly add on more to my tally.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s … Yeah, new subject. During the Gulf War, that happy time, you wore a peace sign to an American award ceremony. And at the time, Disney had picked up the rights to Road to Avonlea for US distribution, and they asked you to change the shirt and you refused. Did that affect your future relationship or at the time the relationship they had with Disney?

Sarah Polley:

I don’t know because it’s so hard to track it. I know that it was some award ceremony in Washington. There were a bunch of senators at my table. And it was my mom’s old big ban the bomb sign, her peace sign from the seventies or something. And I remember them saying, “Maybe you should take that off.” And then I remember getting a call later from an executive at Disney saying, “We’re not a political company. You need to not make political statements.” And I was like, “Well, as a matter of fact, you are quite a political company. If memory serves, you’ve been quite political.” So I don’t know. My memory is that I was brought in for a lot of auditions for Disney movies before that point and none afterwards. But I don’t necessarily trust my 12 or 13-year-old militant activist brain to remember things accurately at that age. But that was my memory. I remember going around saying, “I’ve been blacklisted by Disney”, which I think was a stretch. But I do know that I did have a confrontational conversation with them about it afterwards.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you then did really become a genuine political activist. You handed out leaflets for the Ontario New Democratic Party. You organized a protest against the provincial, progressive conservative government. You lost two back teeth in a fight with the police, supported the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, spoke out against income inequality. And in 1994, even considered studying political science and philosophy at the University at Oxford. At that point, did you see your fame as a distraction from what was really important in the world?

Sarah Polley:

I definitely did, yeah. I knew that I wanted to do something political. I thought that had to do with grassroots organizing. That was absolutely my whole life between the ages of 16 and 18, and then ongoing after that, although I was acting a little bit again by then. But yeah, I couldn’t for the life of me see a life in film or in the arts. I really wanted to be on the ground. I think it was getting to see firsthand what regressive policies could do to people’s lives. So they hacked away at welfare. They hacked away at healthcare, they hacked away at education. And so I really saw the province I lived in change dramatically in a short space of time. So it felt urgent. And I just think, especially at that time in my life, I just couldn’t imagine how you could sleep at night if you weren’t doing everything you could to fight this.

And so I ended up having this really amazing community of activists that took me in and became my family. And I had an amazing political education, really amazing grassroots, direct action organizers. And also a couple of very activist MPPs in our provincial parliament who took me on and mentored me. So I dropped out of school, and every day I would go to the library and read what I’d been instructed to read. And I’d go and have these amazing conversations with politicians and activists. And I just felt like I was getting the most electric education, but also with boots on the ground.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get your two back teeth knocked out? Who did you have a fight with?

Sarah Polley:

This story I think has been exaggerated over the years and probably mostly my fault.

Debbie Millman:

The truth comes out.

Sarah Polley:

Mostly my fault as a teenager in my telling of it. So I did get teeth knocked out. That is true in a riot situation. So there was lines of riot cops in front of us. We had broken over the barriers. We got surrounded by police on horseback on one side, and we were up against this phalanx of riot cops in front of us. And then in this melee, I got one tooth I think was knocked out at the time. And then second one was loosened and came out on the weekend. But here’s the thing that I left out of that story: They were baby teeth and they were already loose. So I totally feel like I lied. Even though it’s true, exacerbated, those teeth were coming out anyway.

Debbie Millman:

But you were already a teenager. What kind of teeth were they? How could they-

Sarah Polley:

No, I was late. I was late. I lost my last baby teeth when I was 19 years old or something ridiculous.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I don’t know. Being hit enough to knock a tooth out despite … It sounds pretty gruesome.

Sarah Polley:

It was better the way I used to tell it where I just got smashed in the face and teeth went flying and blood was everywhere. I miss that story. I miss having no self-awareness.

Debbie Millman:

Well, so this is something I want to talk to you about when we start to talk about the films that you’ve directed, this nature of storytelling and truth and memory and perspective. It’s all so subjective and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. But by the time you were 20, you were cast as the lead role in Cameron Crowe’s film, Almost Famous. At the time, folks were already booking you for the cover of Vanity Fair. It was clearly a superstar making role. You decided to pull out of the movie. You had the part, you were already on set. You decided to pull out and said that the decision was pure survival.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

In what way?

Sarah Polley:

So I think first and foremost, I had a really strong sense that I would not survive being famous generally, that being famous on that level was such a threat to my life and also my identity as I knew it. I think that people survived that type of fame and still maintain some sense of themselves or some integrity or have their relationship still intact, are made up some pretty resilient stuff. I just knew that it wasn’t the life I wanted. The idea of a whole bunch of people that I didn’t know knowing who I was just sounded like a horror show to me. I think also because my early experiences with fame had not been positive, it wasn’t something that I had illusions about. I think also I was a political activist at that time. So the idea that character during the Vietnam War was following around a rock band, was like, “What is she doing? I literally just couldn’t connect if anyway.” And like-

Debbie Millman:

Girl, get a grip.

Sarah Polley:

“She should be on the street. Go get it on the street. What are you doing?” So I think that I just also had trouble with that. And even just being in costume fittings for that role and realizing, “Oh, we’re trying to make this iconic figure for people to be attracted to and for women to want to emulate in some way.” And there was something about it that I started to feel deeply uncomfortable with, and it was a really interesting thing that happened about the time the film came out. I remember having this costume fitting where they put that fur coat on me, that she wears in the film actually. And it was this idea of how do we make her sexualized? And I remember putting on this pair of pants that I really loved and they really showed off my hips, which I was really excited about, ’cause I’d been a really scrawny kid and I had these awesome hips that I was really proud of.

And I remember the costume designer saying, “No, those don’t work.” And then we kept doing some other stuff and then I said, “Can I try those pants on again?” And her saying, “No, you look dumpy, they make you look dumpy.” And I realized that my having hips was a problem in Hollywood. And I just remember in that moment going, “Oh, if I stay here, I’m going to get an eating disorder right away and I’m going to start to hate the things I love about my body, which is the fact that it’s starting to look womanly and curvy.” And it just felt like the beginning of something really destructive. And I remember trying on that fur coat and just this idea of making this character really sexy.

And then I remember when the film came out, Naomi Klein phoned me, who was a friend at the time, and she was at a Radiohead concert. And she said, “Oh my God.” She was like, “You’re right. I’m seeing a lineup out the door right now of groupies wearing that same fur coat.” And this character had become this iconic thing, that these young women had been emulating it. That was my fear I think in playing that part, was that there’s something about this that I don’t want to be part of making this a model for people.

And again, it’s a bit earnest. It’s a bit overly earnest really, when I look back on it and who knows if I’d make the same decision today? But I know that those are my reasons for it. And I do think that I was right that a better life was waiting for me than being really famous. And in fact, not doing that film led to me making my very first short film in the sudden time that I had to myself, and finding my voice as a writer and director. And that was somehow realizing where I was supposed to land.

Debbie Millman:

You went on to write this about the decision to leave the film. I think those moments where you decide not to do something in the face of nobody understanding that decision are the moments that form you, that carve you out. It will always be a part of who I am, how I did that. You also write that after the decision, before starting to work on your own films, you went into a pretty serious depression. How did you manage in and out of that?

Sarah Polley:

I think it was a hard thing to let that many people down. I let a lot of people down when I dropped out of that role. That was the role that everybody wanted and people had worked very hard to get me considered for. And I certainly really disappointed Cameron Crowe and everyone involved in that production, including the producer, Lisa Stewart, who remains a very good friend of mine.

And so I think that that ended up being a really sad feeling. And also there’s a sense of directionless when this thing that you’re supposed to want, you find out you don’t. And so if you don’t want that, what do you want? I did go into a depression and somewhere in that depression, I came up with this idea for a short film. And I’d never thought of writing and directing films before. I’d wanted to be a writer, but not of films. And I started to make it with some friends and with some old crew members I knew. And through the process of that collaboration, just the intensity and joy of that collaboration, I think I really found the path that I wanted to be on.

Debbie Millman:

You shot your first shorts and then went back to school. You graduated from the Canadian Film Center’s directing program and within two years, won a Genie Award for your short, I Shout Love. How did your career as an actress impact your approach to directing?

Sarah Polley:

I think at first, it worked against me. I think at first my experience as an actor actually made me incredibly self-conscious with actors. So I’d be overtalking everything. I’d be constantly funneling the direction I was giving through what my own ears would be and if it would throw me off or not. And I was really overthinking it. And in fact, I strangely think it took me some distancing for myself, from my own experience as an actor, to be able to gain confidence as a director.

But what I do think I really learned from it that was helpful was I grew up listening to film crews complain. And I knew what weighed them really unhappy. I knew what frustrated them. I knew where they felt unacknowledged, unseen and dismissed. I knew how it felt when people worked hours that were too long, when communication was poor. And so that became a really big driving force for me, was to try to create an environment where the working conditions themselves were healthy, which I just feel like isn’t enough of a conversation on film sets, the idea that we actually are responsible for creating a working environment that’s healthy.

Debbie Millman:

I Shout Love is about a couple about to break up. And Tessa, the female lead, convinces her boyfriend Bobby to spend one last night together to make a video reenacting the happy moments in their relationship. And this motif of subjective perspective is embedded in your first two featured directorial efforts, Away From Her, which came out in 2006 and the 2011 film Take This Waltz, both of which garnered awards and accolades. Both films show how feelings of love and longing morph over time. And I realize that the use of time is really embedded in all your films. And I’m wondering, first of all, if you would agree. Time is almost a character in and of itself, as people change and then reckon with those changes almost after the change has occurred.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you. It’s also so fun to get to talk about I Shout Love because no one has seen that movie. Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because what I’m reminded of when you’re talking about it is I always end up having this conversation with Luke Montpelier, who’s my director of photography on most of my films, about the sun being a character and the movement of the sun being a character. And how do we show that? Because it becomes so important, what happens in the course of a day, either in a relationship, or in the case of women talking, in the case of this community’s conversation. And also this idea of different perspectives and looking back at things and people being so sure of their versions of things, especially in relationships. But really everywhere. It’s this idea that we’re clinging to a narrative. We’re rigid with it, we’re immovable with it, we’re holding on tight with white knuckles, and it’s indirect conflict with somebody else’s or everybody else’s narrative. And what do we do with that and how do we make sense of it?

Debbie Millman:

Both Julie Christie and Michelle Williams, the female leads in both movies Away From Her and Take This Waltz, have a complex inner life that in many ways is in direct opposition to how they live outwardly. Do you feel that that’s the case with most people? I get the sense that there’s an aspect of that in most of your lead characters.

Sarah Polley:

I do think I’m deeply interested in that. I’m deeply interested in how incongruous somebody’s life is with the life they’re living. And it’s been really interesting because on this press tour for women talking, I’m meeting so many people and I’m finding the question I keep asking everyone I meet, whether they’re on the team for a studio or working on another film, also on the trail, I always want to know what would you be doing if you weren’t doing this? Or what did you want to do that you didn’t do? And if you could trade your life right now for anything, what would it be? And there’s almost an implosion when you ask the question of a lot of people. A lot of people have an answer to that question that’s both really revealing and often very painful. And you realize most people are not living the life … Not just that they want to in terms of being able to get where they want, but are not making decisions on a day-to-day basis in a way that they feel is true to them.

Whatever their circumstances are and whatever their limitations are, there’s a sense in which there is this gap between who we want to be and who we know ourselves to be, or who we know ourselves to be and who we’re behaving as. And I just think that’s so interesting. Certainly, I feel that all the time, and I think you feel that a lot as a parent. There’s always this deep chasm between who you thought you’d be as a parent and who you actually are on a day-to-day basis. But I think I’m really interested in that space between the life you’re living and who you feel you either should be or who you deeply are.

Debbie Millman:

You did make that decision when you decided to drop out of Almost Famous, which is an interesting metaphor just as a title, and then started to direct. It seems like you did take that stance for yourself, which is one of the most difficult things to do, as somebody that teaches a lot of young people, young undergrads, early grads, that they’re making the decisions that ultimately impact who they become. Taking that first step, that having that courage to live a life that you dream of, is something that most people are deeply afraid of doing.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, I think I was so lucky to have any agency at all when I look back. And I look at so many of the people I knew and friends at the time had no agency at all to change and thinking if they had wanted to. But yeah, I do think that those choices that can be unpopular at the time can so deeply inform the rest of our life, I think in a positive way. And I had it again recently because yes, I’ve been writing and directing films and I love doing it. I think that when I was a child and really consistently throughout my life, what I most want to do is write a book. And I hadn’t done it, and I’d resigned myself to the fact that my life didn’t have space for it.

And I think might have been when I turned 40, when I just went, “So this is just the deal you’ve made with yourself? You always want to do this thing and you’re just not going to do it, ’cause there isn’t space for it. There isn’t time for it. Well, what if you just decided there was? What if you just did that?” And so I think for me, getting to write that book was the biggest thing I’ve ever done for my younger self and my current self. But just that idea of honoring what it is you would’ve done if left your own devices, or if you were lucky enough to get to do what you wanted to do if left your own devices, because I think although I love making films, it is an extension of the life I had as a child and being a child actor, which wasn’t necessarily something that I ran headlong and into or chose.

And so the idea of rewinding and going, “Okay, well if I had some choice, I probably wouldn’t have gone into film at all.” I think my gut is I would’ve gone to university hopefully and maybe studied politics and literature and I think written books, I would hope. And so to get to go and do that just felt really life altering in some essential way.

Debbie Millman:

Well, while we’re on the topic of the book, I was going to ask you about this a little bit later in our conversation. But talk about the title. Talk about the title of your book.

Sarah Polley:

My book is called Run Towards the Danger, and that’s a quote from the amazing Dr. Michael Collins at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And he runs a concussion clinic there. And I had a concussion that lasted on and off for three and a half years. I had a giant fire extinguisher fall off a wall onto my head at a community center after I was swimming one day. And I was in a state of brain fog and headaches and confusion, inability to multitask. Certainly not looking good forever being able to make a film again. Having really intense troubles with night light and noise. And it went on and off for about three and a half years.

And then finally, I went to the UPMC Concussion Clinic. And I saw Michael Collins and so much of the advice … And up until the point of seeing him, had been, whether it be lie down in a dark room or take naps or listen to your body, some people would say, “Take a walk”, and do things. But as soon as you feel your symptoms come on, rest and then don’t go back to it till you feel better. His advice was diametrically opposed to this. So his advice was … And I want to be clear before this advice, he also gave me a very specific regimen of both physical exercise and vestibular exercise. And I can’t ignore that because this advice, I think without that scaffolding is irresponsible.

But with that scaffolding, his advice was, “If you remember nothing else from this meeting today, remember this: Run Towards the Danger. So anything that triggers your symptoms, you need to do more of. Anything that’s uncomfortable for you, anything that causes pain, whether it be light or noise or crowded environments or parties or grocery shopping, the screen time. All of the things that provokes those symptoms, you’ve been avoiding them, and it means your brain has become much weaker at handling them. So you actually have to train that back to health by doing all of the things that make you most uncomfortable.” So this mantra of Run Towards the Danger became the centerpiece of my recovery, where I had to just run headlong into the things that I’ve avoided for years in order to protect myself. And the only way I could get better was by doing more of them. So of course, this was a huge paradigm shift for me in my life and ended up permeating every aspect of it, in a really beautiful life changing way. And I was completely better in six weeks.

Debbie Millman:

It’s really incredible. The full title of your book is Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, which is just such a stunning title. And it includes pieces on your childhood career. Obviously, the devastating concussion injury and the painstaking recovery, your own sexual assault by a journalist years earlier and the aftermath. One of the things that I often talk to my students about is the notion of confidence. And they’re all very sure that they’ll do something that they really want to do when they find the confidence. I’ve come to realize that confidence is really just the successful repetition of any endeavor. So the more you do something, the more likely it is, you’ll get better at it and then develop confidence. You can’t just go and get confidence off the shelf. And it seems like running towards the danger is putting yourself in a position to begin to confront the things that you maybe feel are dangerous, but ultimately help define who you are.

Sarah Polley:

And this notion that you do something alongside your anxiety. You don’t wait for it to pass, you don’t wait for the confidence to come, you don’t wait to stop being anxious. You do it at the same time as feeling the anxiety. And I think we have this conversation around anxiety right now I feel culturally, that has to do with overcoming it so that we can do something or solving it so that we can move forward, or listening to our body and honoring our anxiety. And I actually feel like, “No.” It may be your companion. It doesn’t mean you don’t keep going. You don’t wait for it to leave. It may never leave. But I think you’re right. I do think that … I think Callie Khouri said this once, the writer of Thelma & Louise, where she said to a bunch of young writers and directors, “The only difference between the people you respect and you is they’re doing it anyway.” They’re terrified and have all the same doubts. They’re just doing it anyway.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, you talk about that in actually the essay about your stage fright when you were younger and how you were so interested in how Barbara Streisand had been able to manage … How it took her 30 years to get over the stage fright to begin performing again, because she forgot the words to a song that she was performing live in Central Park when she was practically a teenager, and then how she managed to move through that. I don’t know that you ever get over things like that. You just have to live with them and act as if it’s okay to do it anyway.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, and it’s interesting how these things come and go because I found recently I’ve had to be on stage so much in the last six months of traveling with women talking and make speeches and be on stage I feel like sometimes four and five times a week. And I’m just suddenly not afraid of being on stage anymore. This has plagued me my whole life, and suddenly it’s just gone. I literally just sit there and wait for it almost like I’m lonely for it, for the anxiety to come before I go on stage.

I’m waiting for my buddy, Terror, and he just doesn’t show up anymore. And I just think I’ve done it so much that it exhausted me. And so it’s funny because so much of the advice around anxiety is to move away from the triggers. And that must be appropriate in some situations when things are really acute or where there’s some kind of PTSD. In my case, I find not moving away from those triggers, but actually doing more of the thing that I’m finding difficult, has been key. And it came directly from that concussion recovery of, “Let’s find more triggers. Let’s make a game of this and let’s do it.”

Debbie Millman:

In Take This Waltz, the character that Michelle Williams plays so beautifully, has quirks that she only shows her husband. She likes baby talk. They also have a really unique way of articulating their love for each other with these profoundly violent almost insults. And it’s heartbreaking when she tries to reenact this way of communicating with the man she leaves her husband for. And I’m wondering if you think that we all show up as the same person over and over again in our relationships?

Sarah Polley:

I think yes and no. I have a friend who always says, “We find someone who will take us and then we reveal ourselves”, which I love. Because I do think at the beginning of the relationship, I think what people fall in love with isn’t just the other person, but the promise of being someone else than someone better ourselves. And then I think so much of when people feel they’ve fallen out of love has to do with, often not always, is to do with this sinking realization that you are still yourself, that you haven’t been fundamentally altered.

So it’s also falling in love with an image of yourself. I think that is true, but I also do think that for me anyway, there have been relationships in which I have felt the support to grow and evolve and be the best version of myself. And I would say specifically the relationship I’m in now, which I had not been in for very long when I made Take This Waltz. So I think that it’s not like all relationships are created equal, and it’s just us no matter where we go. I do think people give us the space and the room to grow, and some others don’t. But I do think it is a crushing moment when you realize that the parts that you don’t like about yourself have followed you into a relationship you thought was going to solve that.

Debbie Millman:

Michelle Williams character feels very dependent on who she’s in love with. And at the end, it’s a little bit ambiguous. She goes back to reenact a happy moment with the man she left her husband with by herself and goes on an amusement park ride that was particularly magical. And you play the same song, the song by The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and it’s a little bit ambiguous. I wasn’t sure if she was finally content being on her own or if she was just longing for the past. And given my opportunity to ask you about it firsthand, I figured I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for this spoiler.

Sarah Polley:

Sure. It’s funny because I saw this debate online about this moment recently between people who thought one thing and someone else who thought she was just really happy in her new relationship, and this person was being taken down by these other people. And so I re-watched it because I was trying to remember what I intended. And I think that there’s everything in that moment. So she’s writing the scrambler. And I think what we see across her face is sadness and emptiness and a sense of being alone and resignation to that, and joy at discovering that she can live with that. And an ability to suddenly be present in the moment of this beautiful experience while knowing it’s not going to solve anything for very long. And I think in my mind, in that moment, what she’s really experiencing is the reality of impermanence.

I think the whole film for me was really inspired by Buddhist philosophy and people like Pema Chodron, who talk so much about there being a gap in life and this idea of emptiness. And so I liked the idea of we see a character at the beginning of a film and there’s a feeling of emptiness. And so she completely rearranges her entire life and starts a new life in order to fill that emptiness and ends up where she began with emptiness, because it is part of the reality of life. So in my mind at the end, there is a profound sadness that she hasn’t been able to solve that emptiness, but also a communion with it and acceptance of it, and moments of passing delight, which I think is what she realizes she can hope for in this life.

Debbie Millman:

I love that. Views of shared reality are reflected again in your remarkable 2012 documentary Stories We Tell, where you challenge the idea that any one narrative can accurately portray and reflect reality. And this came with your shocking news that your family wasn’t quite what you thought it was. And I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about the plot of the film of this documentary.

Sarah Polley:

Sure. So I found out when I was 27 years old that the man who raised me, my dad, who I’ve been talking about, was not my biological father, and that my mom had had an affair with a man named Harry Gaulkin in Montreal in 1978, and they had conceived me. And I was raised as part of my family with my siblings not knowing this. There had always been rumors that I was the child of some actor in some play maybe, but it was really a joke. It never was really serious. What was interesting was that after this happened, there was this revelation and my dad found out, my siblings found out. I would start to hear people tell the story to others. And the stories that we were telling were very little relation to each other. Even down to the details of how I found out my biological father was my biological father.

Everything had been shifted or changed, or details were missing or added. In many ways, I felt in order to help fit into the context of the narrative that that particular person in our family had about our family. So I became really interested in the idea of capturing all of the competing and conflicting and sometimes complimentary narratives about the same event in a family. And this idea of a story told not by one voice, but by a chorus of voices. So I was just interested in looking at all the different ways we fictionalize and shift and change the details of our narratives, not willfully and not intentionally, but out of some sense that there is a narrative we are somewhat attached to. There’s a story, there’s a meaning we’re attached to, that everything must slot into, and the way we do this unconsciously. It just got its talents into me. And I got so excited about the idea of capturing my dad’s version, capturing Harry’s version, capturing all of my siblings version, and having them tell the story in these conflicting ways.

Debbie Millman:

What did making that movie help you understand about the nature of truth and memory, whether it be others’ versions or your own?

Sarah Polley:

It’s a good question. I think I became less dogmatic about truth and more interested in what people need emotionally to survive. People were telling the stories that had meaning to them and sometimes they weren’t right. But it didn’t make it not okay from my point of view for them to live alongside that story that they were telling. It was a lot of I think staying out of the way. I think one of the things that I loved about the process was I had to sit with each of my family members and really listen. And when you’re making a documentary, a really great tip I got from another documentary filmmaker was when someone finishes answering a question, don’t jump in with your next question, because it’s entirely possible they’ll want to fill that space. And in that space, what they might give you is far more potent and unintentional than what their constructed answer might be.

And how often do we do that with our family if they tell a version of events we don’t agree with? We jump in, we correct, we argue, or we say, “Actually I remember it this way.” But to actually have to listen and to hear people go to the end of a story and leave those silences and let it be their version and not impose my own, you learn a tremendous amount that you’ve missed about how people think and feel and who they really are. And I think there’s so much about our families, where they have remained strangers to us in a way that so many others wouldn’t because we’re imposing layers and layers of years and years of small interactions that build into one monolithic narrative that we then ride a bull around that relationship. And so to have this very delicate space of listening and finding out where you’ve just been entirely wrong is really interesting.

I actually had a really interesting experience with a family member recently, which for me, shone a light on this whole experience, where I talked to a family member recently about something that was happening to me that was exciting. And then I was inviting them to come stay at my cottage. And they were giving me responses that I’m used to over the years of, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And in my mind, I knew exactly what was going on in this person’s head. What was going on in this person’s head was, “Why do I have to hear about this great thing that’s happening to you? I don’t care. And yeah, sure, I’d love to come to the cottage.” This person was never going to come to the cottage and they were humoring me. And I could just feel the cynicism and the judgment dripping.

It’s someone I actually have a very good relationship with, but I know that there’s parts of me that irritate them and these were present in the conversation. And then the most astonishing thing happened. They hung up the phone, but they didn’t hang up. And I was just about to hang up and I realized they hadn’t hung up. And I suddenly heard them call out to someone else in their household and say, “I just talked to Sarah.” And I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to hear all the criticism that I’ve always known is there. But they’ve never said out loud.” This is an openly critical person. And what they did was they conveyed to this person how excited they were for me about this thing that had happened to me, and how excited they were to come that summer to my cottage. And it was so palpable, the joy in their voice and the pride and the excitement about seeing me.

And I realized that I had for my entire life been reading a narrative into this person’s tone of voice and gesture that did not exist. And it was so horrifying. I’m not somebody who’s constantly reading in negative things to the people I know. But this was just something I knew from probably 800,000 misunderstandings built up over decades. I had created a narrative that wasn’t true. And the only way I would’ve ever known that would be to have been able to hear this thing I wasn’t supposed to hear after a phone call they hadn’t hung up on properly. And so for me, that’s actually in many ways what Stories We Tell is about. But it was an amazing moment for me to realize I’m still doing it. I’m still mapping and projecting stories about relationships onto people that aren’t real. And we all do that every day in ways we don’t get to have the big reveal that we were wrong.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. How did the realization about who fathered you biologically impact how you felt about your mother and your father?

Sarah Polley:

I think at first, I felt tremendously guilty for finding it out. And it actually took a close friend of mine after months of just feeling terribly guilty for finding this out to say, “Do you understand that by finding out this information, you didn’t cause anything? You didn’t actually make this happen. You’re not responsible for your mother’s affair. This isn’t something that you did or that you’re responsible for that is in any way bad.” And I didn’t know that. I thought by finding the information out that I had somehow hurt my father. I didn’t tell my dad for a long time. I actually didn’t tell him until a journalist threatened to print the story who had heard it from somebody else. And so that was actually the impetus for telling my dad in the first place. I think with my mom, oh my God. My mom was one of that generation of women who was expected to do all of the housework, all of the cooking and cleaning, all of the childcare and provide half of the income to the family.

So she worked crazy hours in a profession that was incredibly dismissive and horrible to women. She had absolutely no support at home. We didn’t have help in anything. So she’s running around vacuuming and cleaning and dusting and trying to get meals on the table and doing all the grocery shopping because my dad also didn’t drive. She’s waiting hand on foot on kids and a husband. And I just think any joy that woman got in her life, I feel no judgment for. So if she went away and did a play for a couple of months in Montreal and got to feel herself and have joy and not have to be responsible for everybody in the world for five seconds, I find that really hard to judge. I’m a big fan of monogamy in my own life. I live a very different life than my mother did, with a lot more freedom and agency and support and an equal partner in everything.

So I just think I can’t find it in my heart to judge her on any moral grounds, that she had a beautiful affair and kept that for herself. I think that many people would’ve just snapped and not been able to care for their kids with that kind of pressure. And if this what is helped her get through, good for her. And she lived a short life. My oldest brother always says that. He always says she only lived till she was 53, and I’m so glad she had some fun while she was here.

Debbie Millman:

Your voice is mostly in the background of Stories We Tell. And in many ways it feels like your father Michael’s film as he does most of the narration. Can you talk about that decision?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, sure. So I really fell in love with my dad’s voice in this film. And I think in part because when the revelations first came out, people were saying, “You should make a film. It’s so interesting.” And I thought “It’s not though.” I’ve seen the movie before of someone fighting their biological father and it’s very interesting in my life, but that to me isn’t a cinematic experience or particularly original. But what was interesting was my dad’s response, which was one of absolutely no judgment towards my mom. In a way, all of his failings as a father suddenly disappeared and he suddenly was this person who was incredibly concerned with taking care of people. He was deeply upset that my mother had felt that she had had to keep this secret and carried that with her until the end of her life, and that she couldn’t have relied on him to understand and be okay with it.

He was worried about me taking on any kind of guilt about it. He was excited for me to get to know my biological family. He was just extremely magnanimous and did a lot of self-reflection about ways in which he had not supported her or been an equal partner. And he was just an extraordinary thing to see him do. So that became interesting to me. And then the difference between his version and Harry’s version and my sibling’s versions became deeply interesting to me.

And the way we were clearly fabricating or making things up about the story to suit whatever overall narrative we had about our lives, was really interesting. So I became much more interested in other people’s voices than my own. My version of that story actually isn’t in the film, and who knows if I’ll ever even tell it. It’s very different from all the versions that are in the movie. And what was interesting is I think that suited everybody just fine because then I wrote my book, which is really just my version, which was a lot trickier I think for people, because suddenly it wasn’t, “Okay, I’m giving this narrative to everybody except myself.” It’s like this is my story, and that’s a lot harder for people’s stomach, I think.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, what was so interesting to me, I saw the movie before I read Run Towards the Danger. And the Michael in the movie and the Michael in Run Towards the Danger almost felt like two different people. I was also astounded by his magnanimous response to your mother’s relationship with Harry and your subsequent birth. He was very willing to take on the responsibility of that need in her, because of his own lack of participation in the marriage at times. But the Michael in Run Towards the Danger was far more complex and tricky to like.

Sarah Polley:

And I think we all probably are that way. I think probably all of us could have a story written about us in which we do seem magnanimous and almost heroic, and we could have a story written about us that would make us seem monstrous or … Maybe not. I don’t think my dad seems monstrous, but that focused on our failings. And I think we are many things, and my dad was certainly many things. He was this incredibly tolerant, philosophical, unjudgmental, progressive, beautiful person. A brilliant writer, able to take responsibility for his part in what happened in his marriage that led to this affair. And he was also someone who was deeply negligent of a child and crossed a lot of boundaries you shouldn’t have and let me down. And so I think at various points, he let me down terribly, and he really did come through in this moment.

So because the film is about that moment, I let him shine as brightly as he did in that moment. I don’t think I would’ve written the more difficult stories about my dad when he was alive. But I can’t imagine wanting him to be exposed in that way before his death. It doesn’t affect him now, and it does affect me deeply, to be able to tell the truth of my life and to not have to be protecting him anymore, I think is really important for me.

But I also weirdly don’t think he’d argue with any of it. One of his only big criticism of Stories We Tell was, “You’ve made me look like a saint and I’m not.” We all know I really let you down in so many ways, and this is a fiction. I was like, “Well, the movie is about many versions and this is one version of you. And it is true actually that you are this great in this moment.” But I don’t know how much he would argue with the portrait painted in Run Towards the Danger. I think that I would be more concerned about telling that story when he was alive because I don’t think he would be prepared for other people’s reactions to it.

Debbie Millman:

At the end of the film, Michael narrates the following, and I’m going to read this verbatim because I like it so much: “And there is a fly buzzing around me as I write. It will buzz around looking for food, and once sustained, it may seek a mate. It will never know why. It’s just simply been sentenced to follow the demands of millions of ancestors for that fly. The word why does not exist. I will go on. I will go on.” I felt that to be one of the most beautiful yet heartbreaking parts of the film. And I’m wondering do you have the same response? Can you talk about what that meant to you, that little snippet?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah. I think my dad was someone who really was comfortable with the chaos and absurdity of life and the not knowing and the meaningless. For him, I think life was meaningless and yet that didn’t bother him. It was part of its beauty, is that we are just here for a minute. And I think he was also someone who just delighted in small things like a beautiful cup of tea and a book, and he didn’t need a lot to be happy. And so a lot of the film, he’s looking at this fly and imagining its thoughts. And something like that would give my dad pleasure for weeks.

Hee was able to just hone in on something philosophically and live there and need very little else. And he was a beautiful person to spend time with for that reason. It was a beautiful brain to get to be inside. And it’s funny because for all of the problems with him as a parent, as a kid, he was one of the people I most liked spending time with as an adult. I think so much for his capacity to just get lost in the joy of a thought or a concept, and his excitement about being lost in his mind.

Debbie Millman:

Your latest directorial effort, the film Women Talking is out now. It’s nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Adapted Screenplay for the screenplay that you wrote, and one for Best Picture of the Year. It’s up against films like Avatar and Elvis and Top Gun. Congratulations on-

Sarah Polley:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

This remarkable showing. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, and it’s about a group of Mennonite women in Bolivia who are trying to figure out what to do after discovering that men in their community have been using a cow tranquilizer to knock them out and rape them. The victims include a four-year-old baby as well as women of all ages, including women that are elderly. What attracted you to this story?

Sarah Polley:

So I think that I was so drawn to this idea of this conversation that this group of women have, this group of women in this community who are basically elected to decide whether they’re going to stay and fight or if they’re going to leave, or if they’re going to stay and forgive the men and do nothing. And these women come together, many of whom don’t agree with each other on this fundamental question, and they have to sit together and come to some consensus. And it was this incredible act of radical democracy of what democracy should actually look like, if we’re forced to contend with each other and each other’s very uncomfortable positions and beliefs, and have to find a way forward.

I found the debate so alive and electric and the premise so hopeful, having to figure out what is the way forward. Not just reckoning with the harms that have happened, which is something they also have to do and find language for, but also what’s next. And there’s a pivotal moment where Ona says, Rooney Mara’s character says, “Perhaps it would be useful to think not only what it is we want to destroy, but also what we want to build.” And I think that in this conversation about not just gender-based violence but systemic injustice and looking at inequity and this idea of looking forward and looking for what’s next, just felt to me like water in the desert.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that the visual language of the film was inspired by the first serious piece of art that you bought over 20 years ago by the Canadian photographer Larry Towell. Can you talk about how it influenced the film?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, so I was obsessed with this series of photographs for so long. And it’s a book you can get called The Mennonites by Larry Towell. They’re these incredible, very respectful, compassionate, beautiful photographs of Mennonites living in very conservative traditional colonies. And I’ve had a lot of interactions with Mennonite colonies over the years in a certain area of Ontario that I went to a lot. So I have Mennonite friends. It’s a faith and a culture that I’ve always been deeply interested in, especially the focus on the collective and the lack of individualism and the lack of materialism.

And there’s just been a lot that I think I’ve learned from those communities. And so these photographs were really important to me. And so a lot of the imagery in the film was inspired by Larry’s photos. And there’s a general tone of respect that I really wanted to emulate too. We’re telling a really horrific story about something that did happen in a Mennonite colony, at least the background events did in Bolivia in the early 2000s. And because we were telling such a difficult story, it was really important for me to focus on also the beautiful aspects of this culture and to have that be part of the package as well.

Debbie Millman:

In your film, the characters articulate the broad range of responses to trauma, anger, resignation, collapse, silence, and explore how some victims of abuse judge others for having different responses than their own, or for falling apart in the ways that they feel they haven’t been allowed to for themselves. And this is something that my wife also explores in her book, Not That Bad: Essays on Rape Culture. And it breaks my heart that women not only judge the trauma response of others, but also the trauma response of themselves as if there’s some prescribed way to grieve or to suffer. And I thought that the way in which you portrayed the various responses to be very empathetic.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you. And of course, Roxane’s work has been a huge influence on me and certainly was very present in my mind as I was making this film. What I loved about Miriam’s book and what I tried to translate to the screen was this idea that there’s not one valid response. That there’s this myriad of responses to this violence that ranged from anger to sadness, to paralysis, to equanimity, to fury, to a sense of just desperately wanting to maintain the status quo of not wanting to confront, of wanting to confront, and that all of these would be understood equally. So one of the things that was most important to me in my process was taking the time to write a draft from each character’s point of view as though they were the only important character in the room. And I did that twice, just to make sure that I am really feeling this story through their eyes.

So whether it’s a character that I feel connected to or not, by the end of that process, I had to understand and empathize with every moment of what they said and did through only their eyes. One of the things I love about, for instance, Sidney Lumet’s movies, is I think what you can sense in his movies, is that he just loves all his characters. So even if their behavior is really hard to understand or maybe even offensive, he has clearly taken the time to not judge them and to understand them. And so that for me, I’ve never heard him talk about that, but that’s what I get from his films.

And so that became endemic for me, this idea that I’m going to love all of these characters [inaudible 01:17:28] and love what they do. I’m going to love what they say. Even if it’s not productive, even if it’s destructive, I’m going to understand through their point of view, not my own, because I do think this idea of the perfect victim has been so damaging to so many of us who’ve gone through this, both exactly in terms of other people’s judgments of us, but also our judgments of ourselves and how self-critical we can be about not responding the way we think we should have.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, think back when you were a little girl, thinking you were responsible for your mother’s death. Of course, we think we’re responsible for anything bad that might happen to us because that’s the way we’re raised now I want to talk to you about Francis McDormand’s character because you do want to love her. Just what you said about writing the film from even her perspective. And this little bit of a spoiler alert here, so cover your ears if you haven’t seen the film, Francis McDormand chooses not to go with the rest of the women. Why?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, and it’s interesting. So we changed this actually from even how we shot it. So originally, her character who is on the site of stay and do nothing and forgive the men, she and her family end up not being in the [inaudible 01:18:45] for the conversation because they think it’s against God to even have the conversation. And the way the film used towards the end was her character is actually running to a buggy to go to the city to alert the men. And Salome, Claire Foy’s character, who’s actually had to use the tranquil … Again, plug your ears if you haven’t seen the film. But has to tranquilize her son in order to take him with them, which is actually breaking a lot of rules that they’ve set out for themselves in terms of being pacifists about this. Also, in this original version, they used the cow tranquilizer on Francis McDormand’s character, stop her from going to the city to tell the men. And so her agency was taken away in that moment.

And what we changed it to is we didn’t have Claire go on this kind of spree. It was just very specifically to bring her son with her. And it was very late in the editing process. We were almost finished the movie and we suddenly realized we had this shot of Francis watching the hayloft from way earlier in the movie. And we just got really interested in the idea of what does it look like to actually sit on her face as though she’s watching the wagons go off and the buggies go off and she’s not part of it. And what I loved about what that did is I think that it did make you feel more for her in that moment. So it wasn’t just this enemy they’d had to defeat to go off.

And I really have issues in general in movies with the concept of villains. I think it’s a really harmful concept. I don’t think we should have them. I think we can have people do terrible awful things, but I think if we don’t seek to understand some part of their humanity, we’re just doing all of us a great disservice. And I think what we had done is we’ve made her too much of a villain. And I think in choosing that moment of her looking off and just trying to read her face as she sees her whole community leave without her, as she tries to maintain this religious order in her mind that is going to be so harmful to her, I think it got us one step closer to empathizing with her in some way.

And I think because that side is not that well represented in the film, the stay and do nothing, people aren’t that well represented because they’ve actually lost the vote before the film even starts, it was really important to have the best actors possible to play those parts. People we could love in an instant or at least wonder about in an instant, because we weren’t going to get to spend much time with them.

Debbie Millman:

Francis McDormand’s face in that shot is … It actually reminds me a little bit of the amount of emotion conveyed in living in that space that Michelle Williams has at the end of Take This Waltz. It’s just so much of the human dilemma right there. That’s what we contend with as we live. One of the things that I found really interesting was how you stated that you were more interested in exploring the culpability of systems that allow violence against women to happen than in judging individual men. And I thought that Ona’s decision to bring her son was a really hopeful sign that there could be a different way of behaving, and there could be a different way of thinking about entitlement and agency. And I loved that she went to that effort to bring him along.

Sarah Polley:

I am a tremendously hopeful person, and I have not always been. And I would say that’s something that’s really developed in the last few years. And part of that has been the unwritten and most useful articles and essays of the Me Too movement that will never be written, I don’t think, were the private conversations that a lot of men were having with themselves, some of which I got to hear. So I got this amazing window through a couple of people I knew into what it felt like to reframe things, have language for things, realize things that had felt like coming onto someone was actually the way you were doing it had actually felt like harassment and oppressive, realizing that something had crossed a line with something that you had interpreted a different way. I think that there were people who had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about what they had done. Not because they were scared of being caught, but because they realized they had created harm. And will never get to read those essays, sadly.

So I don’t think anyone’s going to be brave enough to write them, but I think they happen, and I think they happen more than we know. And I did see a transformation in a few people. Not everybody, and God knows a lot of people just ended up running scared and being terrified they were going to get caught and did everything to protect themselves. So it’s not all like roses. But I do think that we are capable of looking at ourselves and of some kind of accountability. And I do think that it’s possible to learn different roles for ourselves and having different expectations for others in terms of what the expectations are in terms of gender. I just think that we’re capable of great change. I’ve seen it enough in my life that I believe it. And I’m not coming from a place of being totally naive either. I’ve obviously experienced great harm as well. But I just feel incredibly hopeful based on what I’ve seen in my life, that there is a chance for transformation and change at least.

Debbie Millman:

Women Talking is a remarkable film. And I know a lot of people that are going to be rooting for you on Oscar night. So-

Sarah Polley:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Our fingers and toes are crossed. I have one last question for you, and it’s about politics. I read that you sometimes consider dedicating more time to politics. And for some reason, age 57 is planted in your brain as the year you’ll make a more concerted move in that direction. And I’m wondering if you still feel that way.

Sarah Polley:

So 57 is the age I’ll be when my youngest is 18, because I have friends who are in politics who have little kids and it just looks so hard. And I think it’s so important for people with young kids to be in politics. And so I don’t want it knock that. I think it’s amazing. I just know that I don’t think I would have the energy for it. I do think about it a lot. I don’t know. I think I used to think maybe I was interested in some elected role. Not leadership, but maybe some role as an MPP in Ontario. I think now, I’m not certain how well I would do with the willful misrepresentation of things that I said or the actual malice that comes at you on a daily basis.

Just the tiny whispers I’ve experienced of that, I really get through the day and through my life dependent on my very steadfast belief that people are intrinsically good no matter what their behavior tells us, that deep down we’re really good. And I think many moments in a politician’s life I think would challenge that so intensely that it might really be hard on me psychically. So I’m not sure if it would be such a public rule, but I do feel like over the course of my life generally, and before 57 too, I would like to be dedicating a substantial amount of time to things I believe in. And here, it would be the fight to preserve universal public healthcare and a massive reinvestment in education and in public schools and homelessness, which is increasingly an issue here.

Debbie Millman:

Sarah Polley, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you so much. This podcast means so much to me and I listen to it so regularly, and I’m astonished that I’m here in getting to talk to you. So thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. I am astonished as well and so grateful. Sarah Polley’s most recent film is Women Talking. It is nominated for two Academy Awards. Good luck with both. We are all so hoping you win. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman. I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Sarah Polley appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Welcome to Design Matters. Celeste, my very first question for you today is this. I understand that you can fix almost anything. The list includes leaky faucets, your dishwasher, your son’s windup toys, and even large appliances like dryers. How did you get to be so handy?

Celeste Ng:
I guess in the spirit of honesty, I should say, I will try to fix almost anything and I have managed to fix most of the things that you mentioned. It comes from my dad actually. He was a physicist by profession, but I think he had this real mechanical engineer bent and throughout my childhood he was just always fixing things. And I first was enlisted kind of unwillingly as the flashlight holder and then the tool fetcher. But then through doing that, I think I learned that you didn’t have to be afraid of taking things apart. Like if you paid attention, you could generally put them back together, figured out how things worked, and so now if something’s broken, I will usually tinker with it for at least a while and try and fix it.

Debbie Millman:
Anything stump you?

Celeste Ng:
I was not able to fix our last washing machine, but I felt really redeemed because when we finally called a repair person, he told us that they’re not really designed now to be fixed. They’re designed to die after five years so that you have to buy another one, which made me …

Debbie Millman:
That forced obsolescence, [inaudible 00:01:43] capitalism.

Celeste Ng:
… Yes, it made me really angry, but I also felt better about the fact that I had been unable to fix it.

Debbie Millman:
Fair enough. You were born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Your parents moved from Hong Kong in the late 1960s to Indiana. Your dad got his PhD in physics from Purdue University. Roxanne taught there as well. What made them decide to leave Hong Kong when they did?

Celeste Ng:
I think it really was the opportunity to come over and study. My dad was coming over to start his PhD program and my mom had just finished college and she wanted to come over and continue her studies also. And my dad had gotten a scholarship over here and so they decided to come over and I think a lot, especially now that I am a parent, about how they just moved away from where all their family was and never went back. I mean, they went back to visit, but they never lived there again. That I think has really shaped both how my sister and I grew up and our whole worldview, the idea that you can pick up your life and go somewhere and that there might be things that are worth that.

Debbie Millman:
Your family moved again from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights, Ohio when you were about 10. At that point, your dad became a physicist at the NASA John Glenn Research Center. I went to John Glenn High School by the way. And your mom became the Department Chairwoman in chemistry at Cleveland State University and the President of the National Honors Society for Women in Chemistry. So you really come from a family of slackers?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, we are known for just sitting around and not doing anything.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you said your parents chose Shaker Heights because it was relatively racially integrated, but I read that your sister told you when your family first moved that kids put firecrackers in your mailbox, and a man accosted you and your aunt outside Tower City, spitting and screaming terribly racist insults. How did this impact you as you were growing up?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, the incident with the firecrackers in the mailbox, that was in Pittsburgh when my parents moved and I was I guess still in the womb, and so I didn’t remember that and they actually didn’t tell me that story for a really long time. The incident at the bus stop where there was a man who was shouting racist things at me and my aunt who happened to be visiting from out of town, that was in Cleveland. And I think what I took from that is that even though Shaker Heights was known as this sort of model of integration in that it was, I think at the time, it was about 50% white and 47% Black and then 3% other, something like that, that those numbers don’t necessarily speak to the lived experiences of people who are there every day. And that just having people living side by side does not mean that all the problems of racism are solved, which again, I know sounds crazy.

But it also I think sort of made me aware of the ways that just talking about race in the community, I think made me see other experiences I had later on that had to do with racism or where I encountered racism, it made it seem like something that wasn’t just this lightning bolt out of the blue. It made it seem like it was something that had roots in history and that had very deep sort of roots in our entire nation’s history, and I think thinking about it that way made it feel like something, okay, we can try and do something about this. We need to try and do something about this. It gave me a context for all of that.

Roxane Gay:
I’m also from the Midwest and not from a very integrated place at all.

Debbie Millman:
Nebraska.

Roxane Gay:
Omaha, Nebraska. Hi Mez. My cousin’s here. We’re holding it down for the O. And I know that it can be challenging to go back home in your writing, but Shaker Heights is a place that you have visited in your fiction. And so how do you think about writing your way home and exploring what that kind of a community is for the characters in your work?

Celeste Ng:
I will be honest, I was really scared to write about my hometown and in fact, my first novel is set in a made up community because I wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of trying to write about a real place. But when I started writing my second book, which is the one that takes place in Shaker Heights where I grew up, it really came out of a desire to do exactly what you were saying, Roxane, of actually trying to look back with at least some degree of separation. And figure out what is this place that formed me for better and for worse? And how did that shape me into the kind of person that I am? That was integral to the whole writing of that book, was trying to understand what it meant to grow up in a place that wanted itself to be this really integrated, really harmonious, really forward-looking place that succeeded in that in many ways, but that also really fell short in a lot of different ways and had all of its own sort of blind spots.

Honestly, it felt like a huge responsibility to try and be accurate, but also not to be, I guess snide is maybe the word I’m looking for because I think many people, including me, you have certain feelings about your hometown, especially if you have moved away from your hometown. There’s often the things that you’re like, “Of course they do that. I’m back here again.” That feeling and I tried to kind of put that on the side so to speak, so that I could try and be a little bit fairer. I don’t know if I succeeded. I still get a little nervous when I go back to Shaker Heights to visit people because I always am like, are they mad at me here for trying to look honestly?

But I thought of it as like writing about maybe a family member that you know like an aunt or an uncle or a cousin where you love them, you want other people to see all the things about them that are great, but you also feel like you maybe need to acknowledge a couple of the things that they do that maybe are really problematic and you want to kind of have both of those things sitting next to each other.

Roxane Gay:
And I think that came out especially in Little Fires Everywhere, and I was thinking about the epigraphs at the beginning of the novel and the one from Cosmopolitan back in the 60s where the woman was explaining that Shaker Heights is everywhere else but where you might in another community have 100 people at your wedding reception. People from Shaker Heights might have 800, and I thought that was a brilliant epigraph that put, because first of all, 100 people at a wedding is a lot, so who on earth would be having 800? And so I was really interested in seeing how you kind of set the stage for readers to see that the way people inside a community see it and the way people beyond the community see it can often be two different things.

Celeste Ng:
Absolutely, and that epigraph came because while I was doing research about the history of the town, which I didn’t know a lot about. Being there, I think you don’t often know all the stories of the place that you grew up in. I stumbled across this article from Cosmopolitan in the days before it was sort of a women’s magazine, it was kind of a general family magazine, and they did a story about Shaker Heights being sort of the richest community in the country at that time. And I kind of read every line of that article, my eyebrows just kept going up and up and up because I think I was reading it as you were saying, not exactly the way that it was maybe intended to be as it was written.

But going, “You think you’re just like everybody else, but I think that your sense of what everybody else is may not be totally accurate.” And it was sort of things like that where I was really trying to strike a balance between being honest about how this community sees itself, has seen itself for a long time, but also the ways in which they might not be seeing themselves as accurately as they think they are. I think that’s still one of the things Shaker Heights is working through to this day.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up, I understand at one point you wanted to be a paleontologist.

Celeste Ng:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
And then an astronaut.

Celeste Ng:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Were you assuming you were just going to follow your parents into the sciences?

Celeste Ng:
No, I don’t think I really thought about either of those as science, honestly. I just thought they were really cool. So I grew up in Pittsburgh until I was almost 10, and there’s an amazing museum there, the Carnegie Museum, and they have really cool dinosaur skeletons. In fact, I was just there for an event and I had a couple of hours and I was like, I’m going to see the dinosaurs. I just thought there was something really cool about this whole other world and these really big creepy bones, and that seemed like a plausible career choice when I was five. And then I got older and realized that maybe finding dinosaur bones is actually a little bit more difficult than it sounds, and there’s not actually that many spots for paleontologists, and then astronauts somehow seemed more realistic. I don’t know how to explain that one other than that. I guess it was sort of this sense of exploring a new world

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. We were recently in Mongolia where there are quite a lot of dinosaur bones.

Celeste Ng:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There’s a plethora of dinosaur bones there. There’s whole groups of people that just go to dig up dinosaur bones.

Celeste Ng:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
It’s quite astonishing. You started writing stories, poems, and plays in middle school. What inspired you to first start creative writing?

Celeste Ng:
The truth is I actually started doing that a long time before that, even before middle school. The story in my family is that I was a really early reader. My mom says that I taught myself to read at two. I can’t verify that because I don’t remember, but I do know that I don’t really remember a time before I could read. I do remember being at daycare and it was nap time and everyone else went to sleep and I was bored and I took out my book and I got in trouble for reading the book because I was supposed to be taking a nap.

But I think I just started writing stuff because that was how I made sense of the world. I would read books and certain parts of them would speak to me and they would help me explain myself to myself, and other parts, there would be new places and I would love the idea of learning about a different time or a different place, and I wanted to do that. And so I just started writing stuff and I would write little poems, I would write plays and I would make my cousins perform them, and we would charge our parents admission. I mean, it’s just always been a thing that I wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:
Monetize it right from the beginning?

Celeste Ng:
I think that that might’ve been how I convinced them to do it because they were like, “Why would we do this?” I was like, “Well, we can charge admission and then we’ll split it up.” And I think that was how I lured them in because there was definitely some coercion involved on my part.

Debbie Millman:
Tell us, if you can, about the influence that Diane Derek had on you, your fifth grade teacher at Woodbury Elementary.

Celeste Ng:
Oh, I love Mrs. Derek. I love that you looked and mentioned her and that I get a chance to talk about her. So at least at the time, we did these little pullout classes and they called it, I think they called it WARP, which was Woodbury, the name of the school, Alternative Reading Program, but it was sort of for kids to get a little bit of extra English language arts, I guess. And she was one of the first teachers who made me think that being a writer was something that I could actually do. She would ask us to write short stories and she would ask us to write poems. She would encourage us to learn about different kinds of poetry, and so she’d be like, “Okay, you’re going to learn to write a haiku. Try doing this. You’re going to try and learn to write one that’s rhyming. You’re going to try and write something else.” That was the first time that I’d seen creative writing treated like a school subject. And she also was, I think the first person to introduce me to what I thought of as a real published writer.

There was a writer who wrote a series of books about mice and different animals called Red Wall and Moss Flower. And so these animals would have adventures and they had swords and they fought each other. And he came to our school to give a talk, and I remember she dragged me because I was shy into the library where he was signing books, and I had got a copy of his book and she said, “This is Celeste and she wants to be a writer.” And he signed the book for me and I still have it. It was the first time that I was like, oh, she said that out loud. She said I want to be a writer, so that’s actually a thing I could do. So it seems strange to say that a teacher I had when I was 10, was such a huge formative influence, but I think that those teachers do, they leave their mark and you feel their influence on you forever.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that what you were writing back then was really terrible. It was necessary for it to be terrible. And so I’ve two questions. Why was it terrible? And why was it necessary for it to be terrible?

Celeste Ng:
The terrible part, I feel like maybe if you take it in the context of a kid writing, maybe it wasn’t terrible and it was just not very good. There was a long period where I was like, if you use bigger words, the poem is better. And we had this big thesaurus in Mrs. Derek’s classroom and we were all doing it. So I remember writing a poem about a gemstone, and the only thing I remember was that it definitely involved the word [inaudible 00:16:03]. And so there was a period where I was kind of learning about how to use language. The bigger word isn’t necessarily the better one. There’s maybe other things you need to think about.

I also, I think that I was sort of experimenting. I remember I wrote another poem. I read some novel that took place on a whaling ship, and so I wrote this long rhyming, semi metered poem about whaling and how great it was that they were going out and killing all the whales and getting oil because that was the book I had just read. And my sister still, she’s still really proud of this poem because I feel like for her, that was one of the first real poems.

But I think a lot of it was just I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s like if you gave a baby a musical instrument, they start making noises, and those early noises are maybe not super melodious, but that’s how they’re kind of figuring out how it works. And so that gets to the second half of the question, I guess. It was necessary because it was me figuring out what my relationship to language was. It was me figuring out what my relationship to different genres was and me figuring out what subjects actually spoke to me versus whaling and this green rock that I had written a poem about. Those didn’t have a connection to me, but I started finding my way to what did through that.

Debbie Millman:
When did you think your work wasn’t as terrible?

Celeste Ng:
Much, much, much later. I think by high school I maybe didn’t loathe everything that I wrote, but honestly, I don’t think it was probably until well through grad school that I would kind of look at something and go, “I think this is actually okay. I think this is actually good.” And honestly, earlier today I was looking at my manuscript and texted a friend about how was it too late for me to take back the pages that I had submitted to my writing group for feedback at our next meeting? So I think this is just still kind of an ongoing me problem.

Roxane Gay:
I have a question because the more successful you get, the harder it is to find that space to experiment and allow yourself to write badly. Are you at all able to find that space that you had when you were a young person?

Celeste Ng:
I think that’s what I’m looking for, but it’s really difficult because you become more aware of the fact that if you’re lucky, you’ve developed an audience. But then once you know that there’s an audience, it’s hard to not think about them. For me, I am sort of a people pleaser by nature, but it means a lot to me that there are people who care about what I write and if they’re going to read what I write, I want to do right by them. I want to give them something that is worthy of the time and the energy that they’re going to give to my work, and that puts pressure back on me.

Alex Chi, who is a writer that I really admire on the page and off the page said once that, “When you are a beginning writer, you’re writing in a silent room, you’re writing in a room where the door is closed and you can kind of do whatever you want, and nobody tells you that when you publish something, you crack open the door and then you can never quite get it all the way closed.” So there’s always going to be this little bit of outside noise coming in. And so I think when I’m writing now, what I try to do is I drink a lot of caffeine, either coke or tea, and I eat some sugar. Honestly, this is what I do, not sugar.

Debbie Millman:
Swedish Fish?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah. Actually I have a bag of them in my desk, and then I just try to, for half an hour or an hour, write whatever comes out and just turn off that sensor. And for me, the Swedish Fish and the caffeine appear to be part of that formula. But I think you’re right. You have to turn that voice off at least when you’re starting a project or you kind of get paralyzed and you trip over your own feet.

Debbie Millman:
You went to college for English, your major was in English at Harvard University. When did you decide, okay, I actually do want to pursue writing, not become an English professor or a journalist and take it seriously and then go on to get an MFA?

Celeste Ng:
Pretty late. I went to Harvard thinking I would study English because I knew that literature and reading was really what I loved. And there wasn’t at the time a lot of support for creative writing. And so I wasn’t even thinking about that. And I thought, okay, I’m going to go work in publishing and then I will write on the side. So that was my sort of get out of jail free card that would allow me to be a writer. And I did that. I got a job in publishing, and I think I started in September and I think by October I was like, this is not the industry for me. I need to leave this industry and do something else. And my escape plan then was I’m going to go and become an English professor.

I’m going to go, I will get a PhD, and then I will get tenure, and then once I have established myself, I will write on the side, which now is even less plausible than becoming an astronaut or becoming a paleontologist.

Roxane Gay:
I love that that was your escape route from publishing. Like, I bet it’s easier over there.

Celeste Ng:
I know. That tells you something about how much I knew about anything at that point. And it was really at that point where I had an amazing teacher who had been the teacher for a couple classes, and I said, “Can you give me some advice? Can you help me write a rec letter? What do I do?” And she was finishing her PhD and I think she was the one who’s like, “You should really make sure you want to do this before you go down the PhD path.” And she was like, “Look, if what you want to do is write, why don’t you do that first? Why don’t you move it from the side and put it right in the front and you should go get an MFA?” And I think my actual response was, “What is an MFA?”

And she was like, “Okay, let’s talk.” So I was at this point, I think I was 23, 22, 23, and it was really solely because again, of that one teacher who was like, “Look over there. That might be what you’re actually looking for,” that I went and I started taking creative writing classes and really trying to put together a portfolio and kind of went from there and never would’ve done it without her.

Debbie Millman:
I think it’s so interesting, so many people that I speak to have a safety path and they wrestle at the very beginning of their career about the safety path or the risky path, but the safety path is no easier. It’s just safer because there’s less to lose in someone’s mind in terms of what is really at risk. At the University of Michigan, you won the Hopwood Award for a short story you wrote titled “What Passes Over.” And in this story, you begin to write about themes that you’ve continued to write about in your subsequent fiction and essays, the dynamics between family members, secrets, double lives, the impact of race in both relationships and societies. And as I read “What Passes Over,” and then another early piece you wrote titled “Girls at Play,” which won The Pushcart Prize in 2012, I found it really interesting to see the seeds of your work take shape. Do you look back at the work that you did 10, 15 years ago and think this was necessary to create this?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting to look back at those early stories because in some ways, they almost feel like a different writer wrote them, which I guess is sort of true. With each piece, I like to think that I develop in some way as a writer. And so those stories I wrote almost now 20 years ago, I sure hope that I have grown and developed some over those 20 years. But at the same time, I see sort of the same DNA running through them. Like you say, I see certain themes about what are the things that parents and kids have real trouble talking to each other about? Or what are the ways that they still try and connect despite loss, despite grief, despite all kinds of things? I see myself starting to just kind of dig at those themes and there’s still the themes that I’m working with now. I’m still digging in that same hole. I’m just maybe a little farther down.

Debbie Millman:
Roxane wants to ask you about your novels, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about “Girls at Play” because it is one of those short stories that there’s a before and an after in your life. It’s a startling story. It is about a group of outcast, high school teenage girls that meet a slightly younger new girl in town named Grace and the girls indoctrinate her into some of their world, but have a hard limit on sharing everything until they don’t, until they can’t. What inspired this story? And it’s on the internet, I want everybody to Google “Girls at Play,” Celeste Ng and read it before you go to bed.

Celeste Ng:
Maybe read it in the morning. It depends on what your goals are.

Debbie Millman:
It’s stunning.

Celeste Ng:
I remember actually specifically, I don’t always know what inspired a story, but in this case, I was having dinner with a dear friend from college and we’d met up with his sister who was connected to an elementary school. And we were just chit-chatting about this and that, and she mentioned this trend that was happening where girls would wear these jelly bracelets on their arms. They’re kind of like a rubber band but not as stretchy, and they come in all these different colors, and I remembered having some when I was a kid. And she said that the understanding among the teachers at this school was that this was basically a sex game, and that different colors would represent different sex acts, and the boys would come up and pull off the bracelet of what they wanted, and then the girls would have to do it.

And I don’t actually know if this story was true or if this is just an urban legend, but she said that and this scenario popped into my mind about what girls are doing that? And what would lead them to do that. And then what would happen also if this other person who wasn’t sort of initiated into that game came in, where would they want to guide her? Would they want her to go down that same path or would they want to try and keep her from that? And that’s really where the story came from. It was one of the first stories that I wrote after grad school, so I feel like I wrote it, I took the training wheels off and I no longer had teachers to ask for advice or other things. So that was one of the first ones that I had to do on my own.

Debbie Millman:
Do you ever envision having a collection of short stories?

Celeste Ng:
Maybe. I’m still proud of those short stories, and I still love them, but I feel like they aren’t me anymore. Again, I wrote them a long time ago and I think that now I would make different choices if I were writing those stories. Not that I did it wrong, but just I’d tackle things differently now or bits that I had taken from reality I might use differently. I think again, those are the sort of things where you’re feeling your way through and you’re learning how to do stuff. So I don’t know. I don’t want to disavow them, but I don’t know that I want to put them out there again.

Debbie Millman:
They’ll be in the box set, the Celeste Ng box set, the early years.

Celeste Ng:
That’s it. They would be like the early years, they’d be like, oh, this is before you learned what you were doing. These would be like the early tapes.

Debbie Millman:
No, I have to hold you there because these stories are pulsing through my blood right now. So no, they’re good.

Roxane Gay:
They’re very good. I know that you make miniatures as a hobby.

Celeste Ng:
I do. The secret has gotten out now. Everybody knows.

Roxane Gay:
Listen, the minute you tell a reporter something, it goes in your internet file, and then we get to pull it up for conversations like this. I love miniatures. I’m obsessed. They’re so great.

Celeste Ng:
I did not know that.

Roxane Gay:
Yes.

Celeste Ng:
Okay, I’m going to send you some miniatures now.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, please do. Anytime you take something that’s normally really big and you make it super tiny.

Celeste Ng:
Oh my God.

Roxane Gay:
Do you watch the videos on YouTube where they make the tiny fucking food?

Celeste Ng:
The tiny food, the tiny real food?

Roxane Gay:
Oh my God.

Celeste Ng:
If you guys have not seen this, you should just go Google it or it will probably just pop up in your Instagram now that we’ve talked about it, that seems to be how the algorithm works.

Roxane Gay:
Yes.

Celeste Ng:
They crack like a quail egg, and they put it in a tiny bowl and they whisk it up, and then they put in tiny flour, and then they light it over a candle and they make a little tiny pancake.

Roxane Gay:
And then they put a little tiny carafe of syrup and then they go …

Celeste Ng:
They pour it over. There’s another one where …

Roxane Gay:
It’s too much.

Celeste Ng:
Similarly where they make tiny food, but then there’s a gerbil and the gerbil gets to eat the food. Have you seen those ones?

Roxane Gay:
Oh, I haven’t seen that one.

Celeste Ng:
They’re really cute. So they only make foods that I guess gerbils can eat because I guess there are some things that they cannot, but they’ll make the gerbil like a tiny little burrito with vegetables in it, and then at the end, they give it to the gerbil and it eats it.

Roxane Gay:
Oh my God, I’m so delighted because every time they open that little tiny dollhouse oven and then put the candle in it, and then that little candle heat makes the piece of bacon fry, I’m just like … But anyway …

Debbie Millman:
You heard it here first on Design Matters, anything can and will happen in live radio.

Roxane Gay:
I loved what you said about the practice of making miniatures, it’s more about looking at something closely than it is about controlling a tiny world, which I thought was really interesting coming from a writer, because in many ways when you’re writing, you are trying in some way to control the tiny world that comes out of your mind. And so how are the ways that you look closely at your work and what comes out of that looking?

Celeste Ng:
I don’t remember saying that, but I 100% agree with it. So good job past me.

Roxane Gay:
Good job past you.

Celeste Ng:
Exactly. I bet there are miniaturists who do miniatures because they want to control things. I think for a lot of people that is … They want to make a world in which they can control every detail. They can make it just how they want. You can’t have a fancy palace in real life probably, but you can have one in miniature. And for me, that’s not actually the appeal. For me, the joy of it is having an excuse to look at things. So if I’m making, for my mom’s birthday, I made her a little miniature bookshelf that had a lot of her favorite things on it, and one of her favorite things is water lilies. That’s her favorite flower.

So I was looking at all these photos of water lilies and looking at the colors of the petals. They almost glow, like the petals are so thin and translucent, and they often start with white, and then they kind of blush to this dark fuchsia at the tip. And I don’t know what the flower part name is, but the part in the middle of the flower, it looks like something that was not made by nature. It looks like the spout of a watering can. It’s kind of weirdly shaped and it’s got holes in the end. And so I was spending a lot of time looking at it. I swear I’m going to answer your question in a second, but there’s something really kind of lovely about looking really closely at something and just paying attention to it.

And I realize that’s what I do when I’m writing also. I will spend a lot of time either physically looking at something or mentally looking at it and thinking about it and trying to find a way to give it shape. So in writing, I’m trying to give it a shape in the right words. And in miniature, I’m trying to give it a shape more physically. But I think for me, that is it more than anything else. It’s really an excuse to just kind of enjoy how cool the world is and how many really interesting and weird things there are out there that a lot of times we don’t even notice. But if you’re paying attention, there’s tons of weird and interesting stuff.

Roxane Gay:
Like Debbie, I love your short story, “Girls at Play,” and anytime someone uses collective points of view, it just makes me think we’re all in this together and there’s a sense of foreboding because you think something happened to us. And there are these details of girlhood, this haunting ending, and it got me thinking about all of the various craft elements that work in concert to really make that story into something so masterful. So how do you get there where you have an idea, you start with these wristbands and then you come up with these young girls and then Grace and it all comes together. And so how do you make creative decisions about tone and point of view and place and all of these other things that come into good fiction?

Celeste Ng:
For me, it all really comes from the character and a lot of times it comes out of the voice. And so in that story, it’s told in the first person plural. So there’s a group of girls and they’re speaking almost like a Greek chorus. That voice came first and then that basically made all the decisions for me. I could figure out what things they as a group would talk about. They would say, “We do this, we do that.” It tells me too what kinds of details that character or those characters would notice. For me, that’s like the first decision. It’s like the first cut and it removes all these other possibilities and then what’s left, it’s much easier to figure out once I’ve got that voice.

So it always starts with figuring out who the character is and getting to know them, getting to know how they talk, getting to know what they think. It’s a lot like if there’s someone you know really well, like a sibling or a best friend, you have a pretty good idea of what they would do in any given situation. You can kind of guess, and that’s really sort of what I’m doing. I’m following that character and kind of letting them be them.

Roxane Gay:
That’s interesting. And that act of almost surrender where you let the character be what they’re meant to be. I know that to do that I think in some ways requires hope. There’s hope for the character to become what you know is possible for that character. There’s hope for the world of the story. And one of the things you do in your fiction is bring in elements of the very real world that we’re living in, including discrimination. And in recent years, we’ve seen a rise in anti-Asian discrimination, we had a pandemic, and you’ve addressed this in interviews and social media, you’ve engaged in fundraising. And one of the things that has stuck with me across many interviews is that you still do believe in this idea of hope, and that you’ve said that books do give us space for it. And so what do you find hopeful, if anything, about fiction, and what does that hope give us as readers and writers?

Celeste Ng:
That’s a big question. I think the thing fundamentally that makes fiction seem really hopeful to me is that at its heart, it is imagining something that is not real. It’s basically sort of saying, yeah, this is the real world, but can we make the universe a little bigger? Can we make it include something that isn’t our regular world? And the sense that fiction, because you go into it knowing that it is made up, that it’s very upfront about that. It’s not trying to trick you. It’s trying to say, yeah, I know that’s not true, but can you just imagine for a second? And that act feels really powerful. It feels like kind of elbowing out space for us to then make actual change in the world. And to me, that feels really fundamentally hopeful. It makes extra space for the possibility of change.

Imagining a counterfactual is a really human thing, and it’s also one of the things like early in childhood, they talk about kids, when they can start to hold in their mind the possibility of something that is not real and know the difference between those. That’s sort of one of the big stages of mental development, and I feel like we kind of need a booster on that as we get older as well. We need to be reminded that there’s more stuff than just the world as it is and more stuff than just what we can see or else we don’t have anywhere to go.

Debbie Millman:
I think you quoted Margaret Atwood and her approach to writing A Handmaid’s Tale, how though it might not be true, she wanted the toads to be toads.

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, she said if she was going to make an imaginary garden, she wanted the toads to be real. And so in that sense, even though she was going to make this space in which characters who do not exist in real life do things that they didn’t do, she wanted to have roots in reality so that you could see the links between the world she was making up in The Handmaid’s Tale and the world in which we live in, and the history we come out of.

Roxane Gay:
In your latest book, Our Missing Hearts, you shift a bit from realism and literary fiction to speculative fiction, and it’s really quite dystopian. And you’ve said that your reasoning for doing that was spurred by, of course, Trump’s election. So how did writing this particular book help you think about hope differently? And is there anything that you’ve learned through a pandemic and a very tumultuous political climate that you’ve been able to incorporate in your writing?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, I started writing this book really as a way to try and find hope, I think. I had the roots of the story pretty early, and it started off as a fairly simple story about a mother and son. And then as we moved into the Trump years, I was really sort of struggling to find hope. And so part of the book is me working that out on the page. Why should we continue to have hope? Which was I think a question that I was asking myself a lot in those years.

What I learned from it, I think maybe is part of what I just said earlier, that sense that even just the act of imagining is kind of hopeful, but also I learned about myself that I turn to art of all different kinds to kind of balance myself and to give me hope. During the pandemic, I was reading a poem every morning because that would give me some strength to get through the day basically. There was one poem in particular that I liked so much that I ended up typing it and I hung it over my desk so that I could look at it.

Debbie Millman:
What poem? Can you share that?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, it’s a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. I think it’s helpfully just titled “Poem,” which makes it really difficult to Google, but it starts off, “I lived in the first century of World Wars.” And then it goes on and says, “Most mornings I was more or less insane.” And she goes on to talk about how the news is terrible, the newspaper is bringing these horrible headlines, the radio, the television are bringing terrible things. And she’s trying to write her poems and she’s really struggling. And all of her friends are also, as she puts it, “More or less insane for similar reasons.” And what ends up happening in the poem is that she eventually gets herself to work by thinking about who’s going to read this poem in the future? Who is she writing to? And thinking to herself that maybe she’s writing these far away messages that are going to reach people who are far away from her or maybe even far off in the future. And that that act of connection is what is sort of making it possible for her to get to work.

And that felt really resonant during the pandemic when we were all kind of physically as well as mentally isolated from each other. And it spoke to me because I’d been wondering, what am I doing? I’m not a nurse, I’m not a scientist, I’m not working on the vaccine. I’m not helping people in the hospital. I’m sitting here with my laptop making up stuff and thinking that actually maybe writing stories and finding ways that people can connect with each other on the page, maybe that’s also contributing, maybe I’m just rationalizing, but at least that’s sort of one of the things that I discovered through the process of writing this book.

Debbie Millman:
In Our Missing Hearts, you describe Margaret, the mother of Byrd who is the young protagonist of the novel in this way. “That was his mother, formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.” Did you have anyone in mind as you were creating Margaret’s character?

Celeste Ng:
Oh, I mean, my mom for sure, myself also, and actually, I mean, honestly, most of the moms that I know. I will broaden it, not even just about moms, but I think if you are a parent, there’s kind of a monster inside you that’ll come out if your kid is in trouble and needs you. It’s the story about the mom who can lift up a car when the child is pinned underneath it, and something that I kind of like thinking about that I’m super nice, but also don’t mess with me in the wrong ways, that kind of feeling. I kind of like that.

Debbie Millman:
There isn’t a date as far as I can tell in Our Missing Hearts. It could be a year from now, depending on the election, it could have been three years ago. I’m going to talk about some of the specifics of the book, but I’m going to try really hard not to do too many spoilers. In the book, there are new laws of the land in the United States, and they’re referred to as PACT. Can you share what PACT stands for?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah. It stands for Protecting American Cultures and Tradition, and it essentially sort of makes it criminal for you to be doing things that are seen as un-American. And you think about that for a minute. You can also see the ways in which this law might be wildly abused or turned against certain groups of people.

Debbie Millman:
The three pillars of PACT are as follows, “Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And to protect children from environments espousing harmful views.” When I type that up, I realize that there are certain parts of the US that are already living within these pillars, and I found that a bit terrifying.

Celeste Ng:
Like Roxane, when you said it’s quite dystopian, I was like, it kind of was when I wrote it, but it wasn’t actually as dystopian as I hoped it would be. And it is becoming less dystopian, or I guess our world is becoming more dystopian. I mean, there are now multiple places in the country where, I’m trying to think of how to put this in a way that you’re allowed to put in the podcast.

Roxane Gay:
You can say anything on the podcast.

Celeste Ng:
I can.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah.

Celeste Ng:
So I’m allowed to swear.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah.

Celeste Ng:
I wish I had checked that with you beforehand.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, no, I’m a big swearer. I’ve sworn on her podcast.

Celeste Ng:
This is good to know. Well, so there are plenty of places now where if you are caring for your children in certain ways, if you give your child gender-affirming care or you accept that they’re going to use pronouns different from the ones that they were assigned at birth, you can have your children taken away from you. If you are giving your children books to read that are deemed unsuitable by the state, you can get punished. Librarians can get punished for that. That’s not happening in just one place. That’s happening in multiple places.

And when I’ve been talking about the book recently and people describe it as a dystopia, I always want to say how far away from where we are is it. It goes back to that idea of the toads being real, that all of the things that I put in the book, I didn’t make up out of whole cloth. They were laws that had been proposed, and a lot of them now have come to pass. That’s the scary thing about dystopia is that what makes it feel resonant is the fact that we’re not actually as far from it as we think we are.

Debbie Millman:
Well also how people respond to being in the dystopia. One of the things that I was thinking about in relation to how people responded in the book to PACT, you outline how being a person of Asian origin or PAO is not a crime. And write, “PACT is not about race, it’s about patriotism and mindset.” And I was wondering, people in the novel felt very unhappy, but there aren’t more people in the novel objecting, or at least not that we’re aware of. And I was wondering if that was a very intentional statement on the fear people have about fighting back or talking out or defending those that might not be treated properly or fairly.

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, that’s absolutely something I was thinking about. If you heard echoes of the Patriot Act when you heard that bit that Debbie just read, that was one of the laws that I was thinking about. I learned in researching this book that the Patriot Act is not actually one specific law. It’s actually about a billion inundations to current laws that were there. It’s really difficult to read it, but one of the few parts that you can read is a little passage in there where they take pains to say, “This is not about Muslims. We don’t have any problems with Muslims. Muslims, we’re totally fine with them. We accept them in America, but any Muslims who don’t do what we want to, those are the ones we have a problem with.” And it was very striking to read that kind of so blatantly stated.

And that’s one of the things I was thinking about, that it’s really easy, I think for people to know that a thing is happening to a group, but if you’re not in it, it’s a little harder to step forward and do something about it. And that’s understandable. That’s human. You stay out of other people’s business a lot of the times, and you don’t put your own neck on the line unless there’s a reason. But the question is always, at what point does it not become academic for you? At what point do you feel like this is an us problem, something’s happening to us, versus something’s happening to you over there?

Debbie Millman:
You included a Japanese myth about cats in Our Missing Hearts and have said that you are fascinated by the way that folk tales and language are both remembered and altered as they pass between generations. What made you decide to include this particular myth in the novel? And if you can extrapolate a little bit on what the myth is for our audience?

Celeste Ng:
Yeah, this story, it’s a folk tale called “The Boy Who Painted Cats.” And it was first rendered in English by this guy named Lafcadio Hearn, who super interesting guy in and of himself. He was an Irishman, then he moved to America, then he moved to New Orleans, and he wrote down a lot of their stories. And then he moved to Japan and became a Japanese citizen and took on a Japanese name. So he had roots in a lot of different places. And I read this folk tale when I was a kid. It was a children’s book. It’s about, as you can surmise, a boy who paints cats, but he’s in trouble because he never does the things he’s supposed to do. He’s just always painting cats on the walls and on the floor, and it gets him into trouble. And he ends up finding out that the drawings that he makes actually have a power. They help him fight a monster in the flesh. And I’d read it as a kid and it made a really big impression on me, partly because the picture in which you actually see the monster was very striking.

But also because I think it spoke to me on the level of what maybe art can do. And it had a resonance with this story that I was forming. And then this interesting thing happened, which is that I asked my sister if she remembered the story and she was like, “Kind of, I don’t remember it exactly. Sort of. Ask mom.”

I asked my mom and my mom was like, “I have no clue what you’re talking about. I have never heard this story before in my life.” Couldn’t figure out where this story had come from. It’s real. It’s in the library. And I’ve been unable to find the version that I remember with that really striking picture. And I bought all these different versions, and the version that I remember is slightly different. And so for the second part of your question, you remember the parts of stories that resonate with you and you kind of fit them to your life and the meaning that you make out of them. And a different person’s going to get something different, you’re going to get something different later on. I think that’s why the fairytales live on because they’re so malleable. They can kind of adapt to whatever we are trying to understand about ourselves.

Roxane Gay:
Speaking of fairytales, over the past several years now, you have sold millions of books and you have a very passionate readership.

Debbie Millman:
Three New York Times bestsellers.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. You’ve hit number one on the bestseller list. So not only have you written books, but you’ve written excellent books, which is not an easy thing. And in a piece in Time Magazine last year, you talked about the different iterations of vulnerability that come with writing success. And I was really moved by that because it’s not something that there’s a lot of space to talk about because it is so hard to make it as a writer that when you achieve some measure of success, everyone just expects you to be thrilled and that there’s no downside. So I was curious about what you have learned from those vulnerabilities and what have been the pleasures and the challenges of writing success.

Celeste Ng:
This is where it’s really helpful to have friends who are therapists. One of my best friends is both a poet and a therapist, which is kind of an amazing combination. And as I think my books were starting to find their audience, I was feeling a lot of conflicted things. Like you were saying, Roxanne both really thrilled and honored and actually kind of humbled that people wanted to read what I had written. But also feeling sort of vulnerable about that and not really sure how to handle both of those things. And my poet therapist friend said to me, “Those things don’t cancel out. It’s not like there’s a positive and a negative and you add those two numbers together and you get a zero.” She’s like, “They just exist next to each other.” As simple as that sounds, that was kind of an eyeopening thing to just recognize that if you’re lucky, you get success, but there’s also going to be downsides and they come along together and you kind of have to accept that.

And so I guess I’ve moved towards a more zen sort of feeling about it being like, this is what it is. It all comes together. There are so many joys. And one of them honestly, is when I hear from people and my books have meant something to them. Really, it sounds so cheesy, but it’s a huge gift, if I talk to a reader, a young reader or an older reader or anything, and they tell me, “This book reminded me of my family, or it made me understand something about myself, or this expressed something that I was feeling, but I didn’t know how to put into words, and then you put it into words.” I feel like that is the nicest thing that a writer can hear, and that’s probably the highest of the highs. And although they’re not measured on the same scale, it does make me willing to put up with all of the bad stuff, that there’s nothing like hearing that you made a connection with someone.

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Speaking of family, the ending of Our Missing Hearts is ambiguous. And without providing any/too many spoilers, I would like to think that Byrd and Ethan and Margaret are eventually reunited and that Margaret’s sacrifices were worth it. Is there a happy ending in your mind for this family?

Celeste Ng:
I think I wanted to leave that open as a possibility for sure. I don’t know that there is not a happy ending. This sounds like I’m being cagey, and I don’t mean to be. I am, but I’m not on purpose, because I think that what happens to them, the hopeful part of the story has already happened in the book. Whether they end up together or not, I want that for them too. But the change that’s happened has already occurred by the fact that she’s made a sacrifice and so on. This probably makes no sense if you’ve not read the book.

Debbie Millman:
I think it does a little bit. [inaudible 00:53:17] top line.

Celeste Ng:
I think, I guess what I mean is that for me, the happy ending is that there is still a possibility that they may end up together. There’s this great quote from Ann Patchett where she talks about the meaning of the book being between not the reader and the writer, but between the reader and the book itself. And what I take that to mean is that you bring your own experiences and your own interpretations to a book. And that’s actually a good thing. That’s actually part of the book. And people that I’ve talked to have very clear opinions about what they think happens after the last page. I found this actually about all three of my books. They come up to me and they’re like, “Can you please confirm for me that this is what happens?” And I’ll be like, “That sounds great.” And they go away and they’re happy. And then another person comes in and they have the exact opposite interpretation.

Debbie Millman:
It’s like The Sopranos, the end of The Sopranos.

Celeste Ng:
And they’re like, “Okay, but I think this happens. Can you confirm?” I was like, “If that makes sense to you, then that’s what happens.” That’s the space I think that I want to leave open for the reader.

Debbie Millman:
I think I can live with that. We love to watch procedurals, and I think somebody years ago asked me, “Why do you like to watch those crime shows after all the things you’ve been through in your life? Why do you want to be reminded of it?” And I said, “It’s because there’s always a happy ending. The bad guys always go to jail.”

Celeste Ng:
Yes. I have a similar feeling about procedurals. One of the things that I do like about being on the road is that I think Law & Order is just always playing at some point on some station.

Debbie Millman:
Mariska is always there. She’s always out there.

Roxane Gay:
USA, ION, HGTV, the most reliable television on the road and also internationally.

Celeste Ng:
Yes. So there’s something soothing about that. But I like it for the same reason, and I’ve had this discussion with my mom. My mom is a huge mystery lover, and also she has not met a murder mystery that she does not love. And I find this really funny because my mom is pretty mild-mannered person and what she says is she likes them for exactly like what you were saying, Debbie. She feels like they’re very moral. She’s like, “There is at the end, they get the person or they at least affirm that was wrong what you did.” She feels like they’re very affirming in that way.

Debbie Millman:
And they get punished for it.

Celeste Ng:
And she finds that very satisfying.

Debbie Millman:
I do too.

Celeste Ng:
And so she goes back because she’s like, “They’re going to get it. Father Brown is going to figure out who did this, and then he’s going to go back and have some tea and the world has been put right again.”

Debbie Millman:
We’ve just discovered Murder She Wrote.

Roxane Gay:
I was just about to say we have, during the pandemic, we really got down with Columbo, all of it.

Debbie Millman:
All 10 seasons and the movies.

Roxane Gay:
So good.

Debbie Millman:
And the pre-movie that started the series.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. And now it’s Murder She Wrote, and it’s just amazing how Jessica Fletcher just shows up and the police in every city in the world are like, “Yes, please. We can’t solve this without you.”

Debbie Millman:
Because she’s a famous writer.

Celeste Ng:
Right. You’re also, at least for that first season, you’re like, how are there so many dead people in this Maine town?

Roxane Gay:
I know. Cabot Cove.

Celeste Ng:
Yeah. Don’t live there.

Debbie Millman:
So before we ask our last questions, I was wondering if you could read a passage from Our Missing Hearts for our audience. Mostly, I would like you all to hear this if you haven’t read the book because of the language. If you want to provide one or two sentences about where you’re starting from.

Celeste Ng:
Yeah. This is well into the book, but I think it’s right, you don’t need to know a lot about what’s led up to this moment. But the he in this section is Byrd, who’s a 12 year old boy, and throughout the novel, he’s been looking for his mother who had left the family a number of years before. And so this is a scene in which they are together, and I think that’s maybe that’s all you need to know.

Debbie Millman:
Perfect.

Celeste Ng:
“The wail of a siren slices through the window plastic, rising, here, gone. The only sign of life in the world. With a finger, he drills into the corner of the plastic stretching it until a pinprick hole spreads. He bends down, puts his eye to it. Outside, he expects only more blackness, but instead what he sees is a dizzying array of light. Lights glimmer from window after window in a glittering mosaic, a sea of lights, a tidal wave of lights, washing down over him in sparkling droplets. Each of those lights is a person washing dishes, or working or reading, completely oblivious to his existence. The thought of so many people dazzles and terrifies him. All those people out there, millions of them, billions, and not one of them knows or cares about him.

He claps his hand over the hole, but still he can feel the light sizzling against his skin like a sunburn. Even curling up inside the sleeping bag, the covers pulled over his head, brings no relief. Out of him, pours a cry so long buried. The sound of it is like an earthquake in his throat, a name he hasn’t uttered in years. “Mama,” he cries stumbling out of bed, and the darkness reaches up and tangles around his ankles, tugging him to the ground.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s curled up tight in a ball and a hand rests warm and heavy on the tender V between his shoulder blades: his mother. “Shh” she says as he tries to turn over. “It’s all right.” She’s sitting on the floor beside him, a less dark shape against the dark. “You know I felt the same way,” she says. “The first night I spent on my own.” Her palm, warm and soft on the nape of his neck, smoothing the hairs that bristle there.

“Why did you bring me here?” He says at last.

“I wanted,” she begins and stops. [inaudible 00:59:33] finish. “I wanted to make sure you were all right. I wanted to make sure you would be all right. I wanted to see who you were. I wanted to see who you would become. I wanted to see if you were still you. I wanted to see you. I wanted you,” she says simply, and this is the only explanation she can give, but it is what he needs to hear. She had wanted him. She still wanted him. She hadn’t left because she hadn’t cared.

The understanding seeps into him like a sedative, limping his muscles, scooping smooth the hard edges of his thoughts. He leans against her, trusting her to bear his weight, letting her arms twine around him like a vine around a tree. Through the tiny hole he’s poked in the window covering, a thin strand of light, pierces the black plastic, casting a single starry splotch on the wall. She strokes his back, feels the nubs of his spine under the skin like a string of pearls. Gently, she sets their hands together, finger to finger, palm to palm, nearly as big as hers, his feet, perhaps even bigger like a puppy, all paws. The rest of him still childlike, but eagerly lolloping behind. “Birdie,” she says.”I’m just so afraid of losing you again.” He looks up at her with a fathomless trust of a sleepy child.

“But you’ll come back,” he says. It’s not a question, but a statement, a reassurance.

She nods, “I’ll come back,” she agrees. “I promise I’ll come back” and she means it.

Roxane Gay:
Thank you so, so much, Celeste. I have just one …

Debbie Millman:
Wait. I just want to say one thing.

Roxane Gay:
Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Do you see why I want a happy ending? Do you get it? Just hearing that. Don’t we all just want that beautiful, happy ending filled with love and comfort? You were going to ask a question Roxane, I’m sorry.

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s all good. I agree. This is a perennial question that writers are asked, and you may or may not have an answer, but what are you working on? What can we see from you next?

Celeste Ng:
I am just starting to kind of dig into a new project. I think that it will deal with the same sorts of themes that I think I always come back to about families, in particular, parents and children, and what gets lost between generations. It will probably also be looking at the experience of being Chinese-American and the experience of being other versus feeling like you are included. And I think it’s going to have to do with miniatures. Yes, I feel like I’m jinxing it.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a callback.

Celeste Ng:
I feel like I’m jinxing it by saying this, but I’m like, I think this is the book in which they’re finally going to work their way in. Check back with me in two to three years. But I’m kind of looking forward to writing about miniatures as well as making them. So I hope they make it.

Roxane Gay:
Oh my God, you can make little miniatures and take them on tour and give them to people. I mean, there’s a lot here.

Celeste Ng:
I would absolutely do that. I love making miniatures, but I don’t have a dollhouse, so I’m constantly like, what do I do with this extremely tiny basket of apples? So I’m going to send you some miniatures.

Roxane Gay:
Excellent.

Debbie Millman:
Celeste Ng, thank you. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining us today on this very special live episode of Design Matters, as part of On Air Presents at Arts at the Armory in Boston. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do … I’m looking at the front row and this young man is saying it with me, and he got me all flustered. You’re adorable. We can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we could do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Celeste Ng appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Stella Bugbee is the Style editor at The New York Times. How does one get to be the Style editor at The New York Times? Well, if you are Stella Bugbee, it has been a winding road through the world of New York media. Stella got her start in advertising, and later became the design director at Domino Magazine, just as print was getting overtaken by all things digital. She then led the relaunch of New York Magazine‘s The Cut, which became a wildly successful online style and culture site. Now at The Times, Stella joins me today to talk about her circuitous journey through the terrain of contemporary media. Stella Bugbee, welcome to Design Matters.

Stella Bugbee:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Stella, I understand you were born in a giant mesa with no electricity or running water in New Mexico.

Stella Bugbee:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Why there?

Stella Bugbee:
They were living in Los Angeles, my parents, and looking to go back to the land. And my father tells a story that they rolled out a map of America and sort of looked for a spot that seemed remote and interesting. I did then go back and find a whole Earth catalog, I think it was from 1975.

Debbie Millman:
Great [inaudible 00:01:18].

Stella Bugbee:
That said, “You should move to New Mexico.” And I thought, “I wonder if it was really their idea or they were just responding to the zeitgeist.”

Debbie Millman:
They ended up moving to Washington DC, and then moved to Brooklyn as you went into fifth grade, I believe.

Stella Bugbee:
Sixth grade.

Debbie Millman:
Sixth grade. Sixth grade. But I understand you felt like a New Yorker well before that. When you found your spiritual resting place, standing outside Canal Jeans on Broadway. What happened when you did that?

Stella Bugbee:
So, my mom had met my stepdad while we were living in Washington, and we came to visit him and I was really into fashion. I don’t know what that even meant, but I was really into clothes. I was 10, and he took me to Canal Street outside of Canal Jeans, but there also used to be this incredible flea market on Broadway right across the street and also up the block, and there was antique boutique. And I had never seen such a concentration of youthful people dressed up in cool clothes and I thought, “I have to just live right here forever.”

Debbie Millman:
I felt the same way about the collection of stores right by Washington Square Park off of 8th Street.

Stella Bugbee:
All the shoe stores, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Capezio, Reminiscence. And Reminiscence was my all time favorite store and I saved… My dad lived in Manhattan, my mom lived on Long Island with us, and I saved up to get a kind of not quite turquoise blue, a little bit more green in it, jeans and canvas shirt set.

Stella Bugbee:
Sounds good.

Debbie Millman:
So, there I was in these sort of turquoise-bluish-greenish jeans, the same color, short sleeve shirt and white Capezios. I just felt like that was it. There was no higher I could go fashion-wise.

Stella Bugbee:
The height to fashion for you. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You’ve written that you felt that you could carry the black and white striped bags stuffed with vintage clothes from Canal Jean up and down what you considered the Riviera of style, spanning Broadway from Canal to Houston. And that everything wrong in your life would be okay. What wasn’t okay at the time? Was it just being in sixth grade or parents getting divorced or…

Stella Bugbee:
I don’t know where to start. Yes, my parents were getting divorced. I am an only child. We had moved around a lot. I didn’t feel particularly settled. I had some substance abuse issues in my family. It was rough. I had a bit of a rough time early on, and there was something so soothing and escapist about seeing all this fashion and just kind of fitting in.
The other thing is that Washington DC, at that time, I don’t know what it’s like now, but it felt very financially segregated, I’ll just say. So, you kind of had to pick a lane and you had to stay in it, and it was very preppy. And even then I didn’t really particularly identify in that way, and I was just instantly felt like, “I’ll find some people here that will like me for the way I want to be.” And that was pretty obvious, just waltzing up and down that particular stretch of sidewalk. And at that point in New York, it felt really expressive. You just saw people walking around in wild outfits all the time.

Debbie Millman:
I really had this sense, as I was starting my research for today’s show, that you were a native New Yorker. And I went into my research thinking that, and then found out that no, you were born in New Mexico and then lived in Washington. I just had this sense that you were a true blue native New Yorker, as I am. But I’m glad that you’re honorary.

Stella Bugbee:
I think wherever you spend junior high school is who you are.

Debbie Millman:
I think that’s true too. Absolutely.

Stella Bugbee:
That’s so formative, that becomes you.

Debbie Millman:
Your grandmother worked at Bonwit Teller. For those that might not know or remember, was the Barneys of Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. And your grandfather always carried around a beautiful Ralph Lauren bag, which I now know you carry.

Stella Bugbee:
Oh no, it was Vuitton.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Vuitton.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So interesting.

Stella Bugbee:
He loved Vuitton and he was very, very showy in a funny way, but also kind of dandy. I think what you’re remembering actually is a story I might’ve told you about carrying his Vuitton bag always to the Ralph Lauren show. He’s no longer with us, but I carry that bag in just as a kind of wink to myself and to him because I think he would’ve really enjoyed attending that show, so that’s my honor to him. But yeah, it’s beat up and destroyed, and I carry it anyway.

Debbie Millman:
When you were in high school, you and your poetry were featured in Sassy Magazine. How did Sassy discover your writing?

Stella Bugbee:
I had attended Bennington College’s summer program for writers, and I thought I was going to be a poet. I thought, really legitimately thought, that was going to be my life. And I had a teacher and she got me very involved in a program that worked with deaf poets, and we would translate each other’s poetry. And through that, I got into the New Rican poetry scene.

Debbie Millman:
Poetry Cafe. Yeah.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s quite a moment.

Debbie Millman:
Did you do slams?

Stella Bugbee:
I did. I wasn’t very good at them, but I did participate, and then I don’t actually know how Sassy came about, but I think somebody saw me there and they were doing a whole story about teenage poets. So, I was one of maybe three or four people featured. And I was very, very certain that that was my career. I was adamant.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of poetry were you writing?

Stella Bugbee:
Not very good poetry, actually. I mean, teenage poetry. I was really interested in poetry, actually. I think it’s still something I’m actually quite interested in and have become interested in anew, even in the last five years or so. And thinking about the way that poetry applies to what I’m doing now. I know that sounds really pretentious, but it does in terms of headlines and things like that. And I was just interested in forms. I got really into very technical, formal poetry, sestinas, things like that.

Debbie Millman:
You can send those to McSweeney’s. That’s the only poetry they accept.

Stella Bugbee:
Oh, really?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Stella Bugbee:
Sestinas in particular, very hard form. But also, I loved concrete poetry, and I think that actually that’s what led me into thinking about typography, and was one of the reasons that I ended up choosing design when I ended up choosing design.

Debbie Millman:
Magazines were abundant in your house growing up, your parents had a subscription to Interview Magazine and Vogue, which you started reading when you were young. You also had a subscription of your own to Martha Stewart Living. What did you think of these magazines at the time?

Stella Bugbee:
I think that I’m someone who very much bought into the idea of aspirational lifestyle as a young child, and it was very real. You sort of felt like, “If I get Martha Stewart Living and I learn how to make cookies and make people happy and have a nice home, my life will be better.” And I think a lot of that did stem from the tumult of my earlier childhood and wanting stability and things like that.
But I really loved imagery. I think there’s something about the kind of imagery and the styling of editorial imagery that I bought into 100%. I really loved it. And whether it was Vogue or whether it was Interview, which was super cool, or whether it was Martha and food, and I don’t know, I wanted to live in those images.

Debbie Millman:
Did you have any favorite models at that time?

Stella Bugbee:
I didn’t. Models have never been the thing that interested me. I was always really interested in styling. I spent a lot of time thinking about Vogue and thinking about Old Vogue later on in my career.

Debbie Millman:
Grace Mirabella Vogue or Diana Vreeland?

Stella Bugbee:
No, Anna Vogue.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Anna Vogue.

Stella Bugbee:
Because that was my Vogue. And I think she was really speaking to a kind of perfectionism that had a certain appeal to me at that time. The idea that you could be perfect, that you could aspire to be perfect. Now, of course, I know that that’s not true, but at the time it was alluring.

Debbie Millman:
I understand you really fell in love with design when you first saw Reagan Magazine. What intrigued you most about that, aside from the glorious typography and everything that was happening in that magazine?

Stella Bugbee:
I think it broke every rule. I was a first year art student at Parsons and trying to pick a major, and I could have gone any number of ways. I was really interested… and I was also studying writing at Eugene Lang, so I thought, “Well, do I want to be an illustrator?” That was really fun and briefly toyed with that.
But then there was such a magazine moment happening. It wasn’t just Reagan, it was Wired, it was wild. Wired was just doing the most experimental, interesting stuff with language. And I think, again, getting back to that concrete poetry side of things, I was fascinated by how far you could push language and still have it maintain readability, and what it felt like as a reader to be encountering language all blown up. And it just felt like this really experimental rule-breaking moment for typography, for language, for editorial, for creating a scene.

Debbie Millman:
Though you really loved fashion, your parents didn’t think it was a valid thing to study or to devote your life to. How come?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I have said that before, but I think I would revise that. I think it just wasn’t part of our consciousness. It wasn’t that they actively would’ve said, “Don’t spend your time doing that.” It just-

Debbie Millman:
Well, if they were hippies, it might feel-

Stella Bugbee:
We didn’t know anybody who did that. They were school teachers, and came by life in a very different way and they were very literary. My mom has two MFAs in literature and it just wasn’t something that they thought it was a career in, exactly. They had no context for it, so they didn’t look down on it or something. Now that I’m a parent, I have a little more sympathy for where they were coming from. They were probably just totally unable to imagine what a person does in fashion.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that you went to Parsons as well as Eugene Lang, so you double majored in design and writing. Aside from poetry, what other kinds of things were you writing?

Stella Bugbee:
I initially thought I would study poetry and create writing as intensely as I studied the art. But what happened was I got into the art and I just fell in love with design, really and truly. It was like I didn’t know that a person could spend their whole life thinking about this stuff.
And once I realized that not only could you, but you could live doing that, you could make a living, it was like a real job. I kind of abandoned thinking about poetry because it felt so much less connected to what was happening in the world, and I just really wanted to be at the center of what was happening, and kind of in the center of culture. Though I loved the writing and the poetry, it felt much more niche to me at the time. So, I sort of abandoned it, to be honest. I didn’t end up graduating with the double degree. I only ended up with the BFA.

Debbie Millman:
You worked for Kate Spade when she and Andy Spade opened their first door on Thompson Street, and you said working there was a revelation. And when you were a sales girl at the original Hatbox size store, you felt like you’d been invited into a dreamed up world of creativity, an old-fashioned wholesomeness. I’m wondering what’s the biggest thing you learned from Kate Spade working for Kate and Andy?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, every detail mattered to them, and that was an important lesson. But also, you have to remember that in the ’90s, there was no internet. And so all your references, all your visual references, they came through hard work. You had to track them down, you had to accumulate a knowledge base that was yours. And they were so aesthetic and so knowledgeable and so tasteful, actually, in their own personal lives. And they were trying to take all of that knowledge and translate it into a brand, a fashion brand. And that was really cool to watch somebody do, and it was early days, small, tiny little store, and you didn’t really know what was going to come. I mean, now it all seems inevitable, but at the time it just felt very creative.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was so different than anything else. There was so much context to the way they were creating their store and the aesthetic of their clothes and the whole Kate and Andy Spade experience.

Stella Bugbee:
I have so much more respect now even than I did at the time for how difficult it is to start a brand from scratch, especially a fashion brand, and have it resonate with people, and as quickly as that brand did. I mean, she had a background in editorial as well, and he had a background in design and advertising. And so I can look back on that and realize exactly the levers that they were pulling and all the tools they were using, and they had a ton of experience going into that building of that brand.
But it was not a sure thing. I mean, it’s an amazing endeavor to take on and have the confidence to try something like that. And then for it to succeed as wildly and as quickly as it did, just speaks to how sure-footed they were right out of the gate. And I think I got to see that up close and it was very natural to them. It seemed very natural to everybody who worked there.

Debbie Millman:
I’m glad that that brand still is around.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, and to see how it’s weathered these massive changes versus the small indie production that it was initially.

Debbie Millman:
You worked seven days a week when you were in college. You also had an internship with the legendary magazine designer, Roger Black, while you were at Parsons, and you worked on publications including Men’s Health and Reader’s Digest, and you said it was there that you learned graphic design was good training for decision-making. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that.

Stella Bugbee:
Somebody was asking me the other day, “What did you like about art school? Why did you study design?” And I said that I thought a design education shows you how to solve problems. It shows you that there’s always more than one answer, and that freeing your mind up to have more than one answer for every single problem just makes you, I think, more empathetic to every problem that you’re trying to solve, and it makes you a better decision maker.
It’s like you have to make decisions really quickly sometimes, especially in editorial, and you have to sort of thought through all the other possible outcomes in order to make those decisions. I think design, really, it makes you realize you shouldn’t be too precious, I think. And working in magazines is very fast-paced, so you’re just making quick choices and then you’re onto the next magazine.

Debbie Millman:
And it’s also very subjective. There’s not only one answer to every question, but there are many that are really viable.

Stella Bugbee:
Totally. And that’s what I loved about the critique class process, and eventually I ended up teaching at Parsons, but I loved these classes where you would have a problem and everybody had the same problem and nobody had the same solution. And we had to, at that time, in those kind of classes, present three ideas and have valid reasoning behind why all three of them could work. And I saw that process play out in the actual workforce later on, but I treasure that lesson. I think it’s one of the most important things that design school, and all those internships and working at all those various magazines, taught me.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, there’s something so interesting about going into a crit thinking your work is really solid, really good, feeling really proud of yourself and then see other people blow you away. And so you always have that, “What would that person have done?” And keeps you really striving, I think.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, and I think working on different magazines made me think about different audiences. And when you think about there being a different answer or a multitude of answers for any particular problem, it makes you think about solving the same problem. Let’s just say you’re basically solving the same problem for Reader’s Digest as you are for Men’s Health, but maybe for a totally different audience. So, how do you speak to what does the reader of Men’s Health need and how does the information you’re trying to design in that space speak to that reader? And how is it different than at…

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, especially with Reader’s Digest, which at the time had a bazillion subscribers. It always amazed me how many people read and subscribed to Reader’s Digest.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, it was wild. The other thing is, I didn’t care about either of those two publications, personally. I wasn’t invested in their content that I was working on, which I think was also a good lesson because I didn’t have to be necessarily to dissect them as problems to be solved. Right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So, right out of college, you said that you got a job doing the exact thing you wanted to do, but within six months you realized you did not want to do that job, and so you called your mother and said, “I picked the wrong profession and it’s too late. Now I’m stuck for the rest of my life.” And she said, “Stella, you’re 22. You have plenty of time to change.” You disagreed and told her she didn’t understand that you had, at that time, invested so much in your career. You don’t have to tell us what the job was, but was that when you thought you should have gone to culinary school instead?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, let me be clear. I loved that job, and I loved those people and I loved that… It was really, I didn’t think I picked the right profession. It was not that any job would’ve been the right job for me.

Debbie Millman:
So, it was working in design.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I was worried that being downstream from the decision-making process was upsetting to me at the time, which I’m sure is a relatable thing for a lot of young designers. And I knew even then, that the design part of it was only satisfying to me when I had some say, at least, in the content part of it, and I didn’t really know how to translate that into what… I didn’t know how to take all this stuff that I’d been doing, all this work I’d been doing, all these internships I’d had. And I loved design, but I didn’t really know how to solve that problem.

Debbie Millman:
Did you have that much confidence in design decision-making at that point to feel that you could do the bigger job?

Stella Bugbee:
I didn’t know what the bigger job was, so yes, I did. I had enough confidence to go start a company with my two colleagues and friends from college, so that I could have a little bit more control and be a little less downstream. I don’t know if that was confidence or just willfulness or what, but I-

Debbie Millman:
Drive, ambition.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I think what you’re describing and what I called my mom to try to articulate, and not super successfully, was just that I wanted more control over what I was doing, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to get it for a long time in this profession. And I didn’t know how to fix that problem. I think that’s a conundrum that a lot of people come up against in design.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I briefly started a company, I believe I was 26 or 27, for much of the same reasons, but though I had the drive and the ambition, I didn’t have the experience. I mean, we did it and we did it fairly successfully for four or five years, but I was never proud of what we were making because I didn’t have the skills yet to understand how to make things that were better.

Stella Bugbee:
I absolutely ran up against a similar personal, sort of a lack of skills or just even experience in general. Wanting the control doesn’t mean you have the judgment yet. I knew that after that, even after doing that, even after trying to gain control over it, I actually had to go back into the workforce and get more experience and learn from others some more.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. One of my favorite anecdotes that I read about you was when you were a very little girl, you went to a job fair and somebody asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up and you said, “In charge.” I could so relate.

Stella Bugbee:
There’s a pattern already. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So, you’ve had a number of really interesting jobs in that first decade of your career. You worked for Drew Hodges at SpotCo, the agency that does most of the theater campaigns for Broadway. I believe you worked on 52 campaigns that first year. You also freelanced at The New York Times Magazine. You worked at Ogilvy and Mather’s brand integration group and also began teaching, as you mentioned, at Parsons. You also worked at two independent magazines, Bene and Topic. Now, during this time, you also got really sick. Can you talk about your diagnosis and what happened after?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah. I got sick right after college, and so that phone call that I made to my mom was also part of that. I thought, “I don’t know exactly how I’m going to work this hard, being sick.” I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. And so I spent a lot of years just trying to figure out how to balance the ambition that I had with the truth, which is that I was not feeling well, a lot of the time. That did affect a lot of decisions that I made, including the decision to have children earlier than I might’ve necessarily, had I not had Crohn’s disease. But other than that, I mean, I just trucked along. I wouldn’t say that I let it get me too down.

Debbie Millman:
You said that it was really intense to be sick in your early 20s because people didn’t understand you, that you were so different and in such a different place, you weren’t able to go out and party as much. How did you manage the ambition with the illness?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, also to be fair to other people, it’s not something I was talking about with anybody. So, if people didn’t understand, it’s also just not something that I was super open with it. It wasn’t something anybody was open with back then, I don’t think, as much as it is now. Now I meet people who tell me they have Crohn’s disease all the time. It’s sort of a common diagnosis. But back then I felt very embarrassed.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Stella Bugbee:
I don’t know, because I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t want that to define my life at all. In fact, I resented that it was there at all. You say, how did I balance it? I just didn’t really want to deal with it at all. Todd, my husband, Todd St. John, he’s also a designer. And sometimes we look back on that time in our lives and think, “Why didn’t we travel more? Why didn’t we do this or that?” But a lot of it, I think, was that there was work and then there was time where I needed to rest.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you also found yourself unexpectedly expecting twins when you were 28 years old, so that sort of changed everything.

Stella Bugbee:
Also [inaudible 00:25:40] on the travel. But I think he also worked really hard, and the two of us worked really hard in our 20s, and so we didn’t leave a lot of other time for socializing, especially if you count in the illness. There was a lot of time where after work I was tired.

Debbie Millman:
You ended up having to go on bedrest when you were pregnant. How were you feeling about where your career was going at that point?

Stella Bugbee:
I was not particularly hopeful at that point.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you thought it was a career apocalypse.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I thought it was over. I thought my career was over. I didn’t really know what to expect, actually. And I think a lot of people I’ve spoken to feel that way on the cusp of their first child, of radical insecurity about whether or not they’re going to want to come back to the way that they had been working or whether they will be invited to come back into that pace. I, at the time, was working at Ogilvy, and it was really intense.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God. I heard when Brian Collins used to bring in bags of donuts, it meant that everybody was staying overnight.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah. I never stayed overnight, but I did eat a lot of candy late at night. Yes, I mean, I also really enjoyed that and I had incredible colleagues there and people that… I mean, for me, that was grad school, almost. It was an amazing experience, but it was very intense and not something you could go back to with Crohn’s disease and twins, clearly.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I look back at the pace that I had in my 20s and 30s and don’t know how I managed to stay alive. Actually, I look back on it now, I’m like, “How was that possible to stay up that night after night after night?”

Stella Bugbee:
Although it was really invigorating to work there, and David Israel and Weston Bingham and Alan Dye and…

Debbie Millman:
It’s a dream team.

Stella Bugbee:
And Brian was incredible. So, I just felt like I was in a very lucky place and I wouldn’t… If it took a lot, that’s what it took because I just wanted to be around those people.

Debbie Millman:
So, you then unexpectedly get pregnant. You’re on bedrest, you file for disability. You are considering the possibility that you’re in this career apocalypse, and there you are at 30, sitting in a sandbox with your two children, your twins, thinking you had to figure out your career, which you thought was pretty much over. And Domino Magazine calls you asking you to come in and meet with Deborah Needleman. What job did she end up offering you?

Stella Bugbee:
She needed a design director because Michele Outland was leaving, and I had thought to myself… I haven’t actually done editorial since college. I had done sort of independent projects, as you mentioned, but not at a high level. I really thought I needed to learn that. So, I was scared to go and meet with her, but we got along right away, and I loved the magazine. And I remember calling Todd and saying, “I think this is going to maybe be really hard, but it’s going to change our lives, and my life and I got to do it.” So, that was that. I started right away.

Debbie Millman:
You worked at Domino for three years and oversaw the design of every editorial page. You designed and directed the Domino Book of Decorating. You managed the art department, every aspect of the creative creation of the magazine. The magazine shut down and you left. And at that point, you got pregnant again. And at that point, you truly thought that you weren’t going to do anything ever again. Why?

Stella Bugbee:
When Domino shut down, that was a very insecure moment, I think, for everybody who worked there, and…

Debbie Millman:
It was just heartbreaking. It was such a great magazine.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah. And it was very heartbreaking to see a whole entire staff get locked out all at once. That was sort of when I went to work in fashion for the first time. I went to work for Raul Martinez. That year that I spent working there, or a little more than a year actually, was my PhD. If Ogilvy was my master’s, then AR Media was a deep course in fashion and fashion photography and fashion branding. And I spent an entire year hanging out, reading Vogue magazines in their library, coming up with campaigns.
And so that was really a seminal, unexpected turn. It was back to branding, away from editorial, but it was… At that time, Raul was also going back to be the design director of Vogue. So, it felt like this perfect hybrid of the two worlds: branding and design and editorial, similar worlds, and fashion. And it was my first kind of real foray into the highest level of fashion.
And then I got pregnant, and then I thought I just… Every time a life change that happens, I think it’s very destabilizing. For me, it has been. Maybe some people are more prepared for things like that. I was not expecting that to happen, and I was a little destabilized and things were going great at AR. So, why did I think it was the end of my life? I didn’t see the path. I didn’t know. I think some people see their careers and their lives as a linear-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I don’t know anybody like that.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I didn’t, and I couldn’t quite imagine what the next step would be.

Debbie Millman:
In an interview with Molly Fisher, she asked you if it was possible to be ambitious and happy, and you said you didn’t think so.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still feel that way?

Stella Bugbee:
I think that the last couple of years have been a real reckoning with ambition. Culturally, the whole culture has looked at what we think of as acceptable amount of hours to work, acceptable amount of time to spend with work, whether is work your family or is work, work. And we’ve thought a lot more about boundaries than I think we ever did when I was coming up in any of the professions that I got to work in. Yeah, I think I would revise that. Yeah, there’s a certain amount of misery that comes with ambition because you’re just always wanting something. You always want a little bit more.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you want more.

Stella Bugbee:
Whether you want it for yourself or you want it for the project or you want it for the world, that’s a good thing to always be striving to try to get something better or make something better, bring something out of a group of people. Whatever it is, may leave you a little wanting in the end you never quite achieve the ideal, but I’m trying to be both. I’m trying to be both happy and ambitious now.

Debbie Millman:
Same, same.

Stella Bugbee:
But I think culturally we’ve adjusted our expectations a little bit as a whole entire culture, and that’s been really interesting, and I think healthy and good, actually.

Debbie Millman:
I do too. I think there’s something really wonderful about the idea that you don’t have to go into the office every single day.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, or just like the horizon for what’s possible. When you have a pandemic or we had to shut down for so long, that had never happened in my lifetime, and it raised all these questions like, “Well, what is the horizon for success of anything, of a project, of a lifetime, of a relationship of a job?” If you have to put everything on hold for two years, well, that just stalls everything that you thought you were going to be doing, and maybe that was okay and it gives you a moment to reconsider what you should be thinking the horizon is for something. I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but-

Debbie Millman:
No, absolutely.

Stella Bugbee:
… that adjustment or the correction we are now in because of the ability to take that adjustment, I think was really one of the most important things that’s happened in my lifetime to the whole world. I can’t think of anything that’s had that big of an impact on how we think about time and how we spend it.

Debbie Millman:
During COVID, I remember… or during the roughest moments of COVID, I remember thinking, “I’m changing my life. I am going to do things differently. I’m having different priorities. I’m going to organize my time in a different way.” And that didn’t last.

Stella Bugbee:
What have you held onto?

Debbie Millman:
The desire to do it.

Stella Bugbee:
I feel a pretty profound change in that horizon. I think it’s okay to take a little bit longer to do things. It’s okay to be kinder to yourself and others about the time it takes to do things. And I think that’s helping balance that thing that you’re talking about is ambition and happiness.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Stella Bugbee:
Because I think that that’s really the tension is the timeframe.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And I’m also aware of when I feel really happy, and it’s very rarely centered around achievement.

Stella Bugbee:
That’s good.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. The knowledge is power, right? So, let’s talk about The Cut for a little bit. You started working at the New York Magazine‘s The Cut as a consultant in 2011. First to help relaunch New York Magazine‘s digital vertical, you ended up agreeing to join as the editorial director the next year. And in the 10 years you were there, you essentially reconstructed what was originally a Fashion Week blog and created a full-fledged magazine brand in its own right. What gave you the sense that you could do that, aside from just always wanting to be in charge?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, so New York Magazine has actually a precedent for a project like this, and that is Ms.

Debbie Millman:
Ms. Magazine.

Stella Bugbee:
And Adam Moss, who was the editor at New York Mag, I think that he thought there was space to push this, whatever he was calling, we were calling it a Women’s Vertical or whatever, into a vital internet publication. I stress the internet part of it because I think there was this permissiveness to give somebody, maybe untested, a chance, and that was the writers, that was the editors, that was the photo team. It wasn’t a whole bunch of experts coming in who’d already done a bunch of stuff. It was a bunch of young people. And we didn’t necessarily know exactly what the rules were, so that was good.
I’m not sure that I had the confidence necessarily to come in and do that, but there was a lot of interest in pushing things, and Adam was very experimental. And I had worked with David Haskell, who is now the editor-in-chief of the magazine on Topic, which was his project that you mentioned earlier. And when we worked on Topic, I remember thinking, “I just actually want to be picking the topic.”
It was Rob Giampietro and me and David. And while I was of course interested in the design, I was so much more interested in thinking about assigning stories for a specific topic, or picking the topic and then thinking about how to represent that. And so David, he knew that that’s sort of where my interests lay. Plus, I’d been working in fashion then for a year at that point before that, and it just was a strange job, and I had a strange resume, and it enabled me to pull upon everything I’d done up to that point.
It let me pull the branding and the art direction and the editorial ideas and put them all in one place, which lucky, so lucky, to be able to use all these weird experiences that didn’t necessarily add up to anything until that moment. So, it wasn’t necessarily that I had the confidence, just I had a really strange group of skills that applied in this particular instance, and then I ran at it, head on.

Debbie Millman:
I found this quote, something that Adam Moss said about you when he hired you, “The very unusual thing about Stella is that she has this big, important editorial job and has never been an editor before.” He went on to state that he, “Would’ve been unlikely to appoint a design director to run The Cut had he not already gotten to know you when you consulted.” And he stated, “What we saw then was that Stella was a natural editor with a crystal clear vision and incredible sense of story and great news judgment.”
Stella, what I love so much about this is that you succeeded by creating a magazine and a brand that you’ve described at various times as, “A smart, funny, clear-eyed look at fashion, beauty, and issues that matter most to women, that also blends a literary feeling with a punk feminist sensibility.” What could be better than that? How were you able to sell that and figure it out and then sell it in such a clear-eyed way? I mean, that’s what he said, in a clear-eyed way.

Stella Bugbee:
My main goal was to create a space where the people working on that project could say whatever they wanted to say, in the tone they wanted to say it in. So, it was always very much about the community. I used to make this arm motion where I put my arm kind of in a circle and I said, “I’m just keeping the space open so that we can do what we want and say what we want, and that we’re not being forced into a silo by some advertising category.” I think that’s really… if you look at most magazines, they were created for the purpose of advertising categories.

Debbie Millman:
And you created this for a certain sensibility, it feels like an attitude almost.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, psychographic, I’d say. But I firmly believe that there were people who wanted to talk about serious things and silly things at the same time in the same place, and that was fine. And I defended that urge more than anything. And it changed dramatically year over year over year. And so it wasn’t just that I had that vision from the beginning, it was sort of like, “Well, I got that done. What else can we do and how else can we grow? And who else can we bring on and what other voices can we put forth and what other challenges and ideas?”
And while that was all happening, the magazine was also feeding me incredible pieces. And I was working with the people who worked making the print magazine all the time and the editors on that. And I had an incredible partner in Lauren Kern who’s now at Apple News, and she was sort of my editorial partner on the magazine on the print side.
And once that came about, when she joined, I think that we all saw the real potential for it to be something very impactful. And again, we just all ran at it. For me, I didn’t want to squander that opportunity ever, at any moment. I thought, “What if no one ever gives me this opportunity again? I have to run at this.” And I wanted to give everybody else that sense that we got to run at this because we don’t know that this is a guarantee that we’ll always have a place to say and think and be ourselves, even with the precedent of Ms., having come out of that publication, which is really powerful. And I was operating a lot on other publications backs. I think you mentioned Mirabella, the actual Mirabella.

Debbie Millman:
Right. Grace’s magazine after Vogue.

Stella Bugbee:
Was an incredible magazine. Sassy. There was a precedent for some of what we were doing.

Debbie Millman:
Remember New York Woman?

Stella Bugbee:
New York Woman.

Debbie Millman:
Woman. Yeah.

Stella Bugbee:
New York Woman. Yeah, and in fact, I met with the editor of New York Woman early on in my time at The Cut because Pam Wasserstein knew her. And we went out for lunch. And it was important to me to note that we were part of a pretty healthy legacy actually, and we were just doing it on the internet for a new audience and building an audience in that space.
But a lot of people had tried to do what we were trying to do. And in fact, I have the very first issue of Mirabella, and I got it when we were relaunching The Cut in 2018 just as a kind of reference, and I couldn’t believe how contemporary it was and how it felt like it could literally be running now.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk about fashion a little bit.

Stella Bugbee:
I love fashion.

Debbie Millman:
You said that from the time you were little watching your grandmother at Bonwit Teller, you remember understanding that fashion was a form of social currency. And that people who had money looked really different from people who didn’t, and that they were treated very differently depending on what they wore. As a result, you’ve been fascinated with the way in which fashion and power overlap, and the way in which fashion and self-expression overlap. My question is, how have you incorporated expressing that fascination in the way you approach fashion and fashion journalism?

Stella Bugbee:
I think that a lot of fashion journalism is prescriptive, or at least it has been historically, and exclusionary. That’s why a lot of people have resentment toward fashion. They feel talked down to and excluded, whether it’s because they don’t fit in the clothes or they can’t afford the clothes or they’re for some reason excluded. It’s an industry and an art form that thrives on hierarchy and cast systems almost, and I don’t like that about it at all. I sort of reject that, and I kind of want everybody to feel like it’s something that they can and should embrace for themselves the way they would enjoy food or the way they would enjoy a great book or music, so that it’s a very personal, approachable part of your life.
And to go back to being in design school, for example, when I was in design school, I started seeing the world through design and it enriched my life. I got, “Oh, and this is why a chair looks the way it looks, and this is why Coca-Cola cans look the way they look.” And for me, fashion has that same thing. It’s like, “Well, you can choose to look however you want. Let’s think about that.”
And I would hope that certainly at The Cut, and perhaps less so at The Times, just because of what we’re doing at The Times, it’s very, very different. But I really wanted to start to open up a conversation for people and say, “You’re invited to this conversation if you want to be, on your own terms, and it’s fun, and you should want to cultivate a relationship to fashion and style for yourself, for your life.” Because it’s part of life, it’s really fun. So, a bit of taking away that power that fashion tends to have over people because it makes them feel excluded, that was important to me.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I’ve loved in quite a lot of your fashion coverage over the years is how you sort of democratize some of what we think about when we think about fashion, and also the range and the way that you put things together. But I really loved how obsessed you were for a little while there with Birkenstocks, and this was before Birkenstocks were back being Birkenstocks. And I’ve loved that you embrace both high and low at the same time. And it’s not just a matter of, “Here, we’re going to go high. Here, we’re going to go low.” You can match this up however way you want to, as long as you feel good and comfortable in whatever you’re doing.

Stella Bugbee:
I mean, I think one of the things that we were told… The magazines that I absorbed and loved so much that were so aspirational and exclusionary as a child didn’t always allow you to hold the complexity of the high and the low, of wanting to both talk about fashion and politics, of wanting to be able to indulge in something expensive, but also wear unique… Those complexities, those dichotomies, those contradictions are of life. It’s what everybody has inside of them.
And I think I was really interested in just letting all those things exist together. And I think that that’s when fashion becomes meaningful to people. One of the reasons why I cover the red carpet and what I think is interesting about, let’s say a red carpet event, is that’s where most people see the highest fashion come alive. It’s where they understand a gown. It’s not on a runway, and it’s not in their closet. It’s on their favorite star, whatever, movie star, musician, reality TV star, whomever it is.
And that’s a very fun space. I mean, it’s not stupid. It’s very fun. It’s very important that we think about the ways in which those intersections happen. So, I was very interested in collapsing some of the hierarchy around what was good and what was bad, what was high, what was low, what was accessible, what was off limits, and to whom. That’s really important.

Debbie Millman:
Is there a difference in covering a Met Gala versus going as a guest to the Met Gala?

Stella Bugbee:
Oh, sure, definitely.

Debbie Millman:
In what way?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, I’ve never been a guest at the Met Gala, to be clear. I mean, I think the most interesting thing for me about working at The New York Times is really thinking about those differences. What is the difference between covering? What is the objectivity that you bring as a reporter or an editor at The Times? How does that change your relationship to power, to the people in the room? How do you hold those people accountable when they’re not being honest? How do you-

Debbie Millman:
How do you? How do you do that?

Stella Bugbee:
By keeping yourself not a guest at the Met Gala. You have to be a little bit outside of that, and that’s the price that you have to pay. You get to sit in the room and enjoy some of those spoils, however you have objectivity.

Debbie Millman:
You see what’s really going on.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s a real… that kind of dynamic. Once you’re a guest at the table, you can’t be a journalist.

Debbie Millman:
How do you decide what you want to cover?

Stella Bugbee:
At The Times, the way the Style section works is sort of broken down roughly. We have a fashion team, we have a generalist team, so there’s news, there’s just stuff that’s happening. We got to cover this. It’s happening. And we try to set ambitious targets for that in terms of like, “Well, who’s interesting? Who do we think is pulling all the levers? Let’s go after that person in terms of let’s get a story about them. Let’s introduce them to a reader.”
And then there’s just like, “What is the reader interested in and what do we think is going to light their minds on fire? What do we think they’re going to share in their friend group chats?” That’s a big thought that’s always in my mind. And I don’t know, there’s also just a certain intangible instinct, and you never really know, but you just sort of develop over time, especially if you’re really looking at patterns over time of internet traffic. I mean, we have so much information available to us, and that’s the thing.
It’s like, “Well, you have to really read the tea leaves.” You start to think, “Well, why did that story do really well and not that one? And what’s the learning from that?” And not let that affect what you’re assigning too much, right? You have to think about what you think is interesting, what’s moving the conversation forward. And that’s the sensibility. That’s an intangible thing, actually.

Debbie Millman:
Before any publication went online, you didn’t know what people were necessarily interested in most. Yes, “Can this marriage be saved?” From Ladies Home Journal and so forth. But now, you know how many people are actually reading every single article that they’re reading and the direction that they’re going and so forth.
And in some ways, when you’re going through the paper, I still get the Sunday paper, you go through and there’s a lot of opportunity for discovery because you’re just seeing things as they pass by on the page. When you’re online, you tend to look for things like, “Thursday night into Friday morning, Modern Love will be up.” Social cues. You know when to find things, and you don’t have as much opportunity to discover unless you’re being fed, “You might also like this.” Which you have to then to decide whether or not you think it’s worth clicking. How much do stats actually matter to you? And I’m not talking about The Times. I’m just talking about you and your taste and what you believe should be published.

Stella Bugbee:
They don’t matter to me. I’m looking at them, I’m curious to see them, but I’m not going to not do a story that I believe in based on that at all. We came out of a decade, those of us who worked online, where a lot of decisions were made based on that, and I’m not sure that that was to the benefit of the content, always. And luckily, The Times really doesn’t dictate what we do in that way, which is really helpful. But I’ve developed certain instincts. I have a sense of, I think what’s going to be interesting to people and is there tension in the story? Is it a widely known subject matter? We just did a story about Barnes & Noble.

Debbie Millman:
I love that story and I love the images. It was so great to see all the different Barnes & Noble styles.

Stella Bugbee:
Well, that’s a design story, right? A total branding and design story. And several people on my team were very surprised at how big of a hit it was. But I knew it was going to be because I think there’s this huge interest in that brand, an innate interest in Barnes & Noble, why it’s not succeeding. I think actually people want it to succeed. So, what were they doing? And they’re doing something really weird, actually.
And I kind of thought, “That one will probably be a hit,” and you just develop instinct for what you think people will want to read. And I’m certainly not always right, by any means, but that’s kind of the way I use that information that I get every week, and actually every day, is just a sense of people really are interested in things that they already have emotional investment in. You write about Victoria’s Secret, people are going to read it. They’re curious about that brand, regardless of what you say about it. So, there’s certain topics that you sort of recognize will be interesting.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that, “Runway show going requires stamina.” Is that because of the pace?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, there are people who just love going to fashion shows, and I think they’re really interesting, especially if that’s your beat and that’s what you cover. But the grind of going to maybe 50 in a row, especially if you’re a visual person, you have to pace yourself. It’s a lot of images, if you’re thinking about it that way. I mean, sure, experiencing that just on Instagram when I’m not, let’s say I’m not in… I didn’t go to Milan or something. I’m experiencing it as a reader and as a viewer, it’s a lot to watch other people experience it. Imagine being there. It’s a lot of images.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel about your own fashion when you’re watching shows or in the midst of the fashionistas?

Stella Bugbee:
Probably like most people, I have a fraught relationship with fashion. If we’re talking about what I wish I could have versus what I have. But this season, I tried a different approach, which was while I was walking around and going to shows, I started keeping a list on my phone of reminders of things that I actually like so that I wouldn’t lose sight of my own desires and my own taste, just to remind myself, “You know what? You really like this and you really like this.” And this is a hard-won, decades-long project to develop what you actually like. Don’t be too swayed just because everything is shiny.
And that’s a different approach than I’ve taken in the past, and I think that that’s been healthier. Because otherwise, you can get very wrapped up, very quickly, in kind of the dizzying aspect of all of this new, beautiful luxury, very distorted reality, which most people… I don’t think most people change their fashion every six months.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s just that in technology that have that sort of forced obsolescence embedded in it, which is so hard to manage emotionally because you want to sort of be stylish or in style or have the latest, greatest whatever. But that’s a lot of pressure, it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of consumption.

Stella Bugbee:
I mean, the real hardcore fashion is for the very young, who change their fashion all the time and are trying to figure out who they are and are using style as a tool to do that, or the very wealthy, who can afford to do that. For the vast majority of us…

Debbie Millman:
And the very skinny.

Stella Bugbee:
Yes, the body that can handle that kind of change and can afford to handle that kind of change. The vast majority of us will buy a coat in 1990. I’m looking at you. I know-

Debbie Millman:
Oopsie.

Stella Bugbee:
I know you still have a coat that I admire from 1990, and keep it, right? And so how do you bridge that continuity of self year over year? That’s not something that you can sustain changing all the time, most of us. So, then you have to develop your own personal taste, which I think gets back to my goal for all of us, which is cultivate your own taste, have confidence in what you like, make your list, “This is what I actually like,” so that you’re not feeling swayed all the time or insufficient because you can’t participate for whatever reason: money, age, body, any of those reasons. It helps to have a strong foundation and understand what you actually like. And then I think you should just totally lean into that. No trends, nothing. Find yourself and enjoy yourself with fashion. That’s my main goal in life.

Debbie Millman:
Just have fun with it?

Stella Bugbee:
Is to divorce it of its power over our minds and to gain some control over that and say, “I really love this.” I love it the way I love this couch that I bought 25 years ago, and I keep recovering this couch. Well, you know what? I love this coat I bought in 1990 and I’m going to keep wearing it. I think that that’s really important, both for the Earth, for our minds, and for some semblance of control over that industry.

Debbie Millman:
You said that we can’t fix how anybody feels about their body, but we can disabuse people of the idea that certain styles are only for certain people. Do you think that designers are really paying more attention to that now?

Stella Bugbee:
There was a moment where I think we saw this little window open up and it seemed like that was going to be a priority. I’ve actually seen incredible backsliding in the last couple of years. This season was abysmal for body inclusivity. You’ll have one or two people in each show. And some brands are doing great, I should say that. But then I think with the introduction of Ozempic, it’s like everybody just gave up. I don’t know. I mean, it felt very-

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:57:29] that way.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, it felt like market changed all of a sudden. And fashion is cyclical, and it’s not that deep, as we would like it to be. So, some of these changes that were kind of promising and exciting, we’ll see if they stick.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you had a lot of ability to help reframe the way people think about style and beauty and size at The Cut. Do you feel you’re able to do that at The Times as well?

Stella Bugbee:
The Times project is super different.

Debbie Millman:
In what way?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, it’s not a luxury sales project. We’re not making fashion shoots. We’re not really telling people what to buy so much. I mean, there’s Wirecutter, but we’re not a luxury fashion magazine. We’re a news organization. We’re part of a news organization. I don’t see my role as sorting through and telling people what to purchase. Even our critic, Vanessa Friedman, she’s not doing that. We’re not doing that. We’re taking what’s happening and we’re explaining it to people, but we’re not saying, “Here’s the 10 greatest coats you can buy right now.” That is not part of the project. So, it’s really different, and I don’t really even see that as part of my job as much as it is to document what’s happening in fashion right now.

Debbie Millman:
Right. As we’ve been talking, I realized what it was that I loved so much about your leadership at The Cut, which was I never came away from reading The Cut feeling bad about myself. And I’m not really in the same position when I’m reading The Times because it is more journalistic and it’s not as whimsical, I guess. But I hope that your voice can come through those pages as you continue to work there.

Stella Bugbee:
Well, I would certainly hope that you would never read the Style section and feel worse for wanting to know about any of that information. That’s important. And to treat the subject matter seriously, I think that’s a big important characteristic of the Style section is that we take it as seriously as anybody takes anything that they do there. But we also still have a lot of fun.

I wouldn’t want anyone to come away reading one of our stories, feeling worse about themselves or bad for wanting to know about it. And I think a lot of what we do actually is give people permission to enjoy the stuff that we’re covering. And within the context of The New York Times, that’s pretty important because there’s a lot of very serious, gut-wrenching stuff that happens in the sections other than mine. And that’s okay to then turn to us and enjoy yourself over here. I think it’s really important to say, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Come on over here and enjoy yourself.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So, this is my last question. You’ve had a long, illustrious, circuitous career, but you’ve also had some painful, harder times, and you’ve written about how when you look back, it looks like it was intentional, but you’re old enough now to admit that that was not the case. It seems like it was premeditated, but it was all accidents the whole time.
I think that’s really helpful for people to hear as they’re navigating their own ambition and their own career paths. It seemed like at the time, you had no idea whether you would recover from the various obstacles in your path. How do you think you were able to overcome those obstacles and what has it taught you about control?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I have said that I felt like it was an accident, but actually one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last couple of years is that I looked at all these things as opportunities. So, they felt accidental or they felt like unexpected, is maybe a better word, but I was always able to look at each opportunity or each experience and say, “Well, this will complete a little puzzle piece that I’m missing. I don’t know about fashion, not really, not at the level that Raul Martinez knows about it. What can I get by working with Raul Martinez? That’s the highest level, he’s really good at it. What will I learn from this man?”
And it wasn’t necessarily clear to me what I would do with that, but I knew that it would give me this critical piece of knowledge and a way of looking at the world. And the same for Adam, and the same for Drew Hodges. I saw these people and these opportunities not necessarily in a connected way that was obvious at the time, but that they each offered opportunity for growth and to complete a sort of thing I was lacking.
And so I think that’s how, in retrospect, it makes more sense to me. It’s like, “Well…” And I would hope that that’s still the case. I still sort of think of that. I look at these incredible colleagues that I have and these people at The Times who’ve worked there for 35 years and who just know so much. And I think like, “Well, what does it feel like to put myself next to the people in this room and what can I learn from them?” That’s how it’s made sense.
It’s less that, “Oh, it’s all been accidental and oops, here I landed here.” It’s more that if you see an opportunity or if you are given any opportunity, find the little core inside there that’s going to give you the most knowledge that you can then take and apply to something else, or try to find the thing within any experience that completes a missing part of your education.

Debbie Millman:
Stella Bugbee, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Stella Bugbee:
Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s been a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
To see more about what’s Stella does, all you need to do is read the Style section of The New York Times. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Stella Bugbee appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
When Suleika Jaouad was a young woman, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. That career plan was upended by a cancer diagnosis when she was 22 years old. But in spite of being told she had only a 35% chance of survival, her creative spark didn’t diminish. They turned inward. Suleika wrote about surviving cancer in “Life Interrupted,” her Emmy Award-winning column and video series for the New York Times. She’s also written a New York Times bestselling memoir about the experience, titled Between Two Kingdoms. More recently, her cancer returned, and she had a second bone marrow transplant. That experience is chronicled in the multiple award-winning Netflix documentary American Symphony, which also features her husband, the celebrated musician, Jon Batiste, as he composed his first symphony for Carnegie Hall. Suleika Jaouad, welcome to Design Matters.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. I’m so honored to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Suleika, I am so thrilled. I have an unusual question for you as my first question. I understand that you have an irrational fear of sharks, and I kind of want to know how any fear of sharks could be irrational.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I’m someone who, every time I go on vacation to a place where there is any body of water, I immediately Google the number of shark fatalities in that place.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Suleika Jaouad:
And it’s something I’ve had from the time I was little. It doesn’t matter if I’m in an ocean, or a lake, or a pond, I have a deep fear of what’s beneath the water, and what I can’t see.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I do too. I really, overall, have a somewhat irrational fear of the ocean. In that, I really like to be able to see my feet in the water. Something about being grounded, I guess.

Suleika Jaouad:
I love it.

Debbie Millman:
In any case. Like me, you were born in New York City, but you were constantly on the move in your early childhood. You moved from the East Village to the Adirondacks, followed by stints in France and Switzerland, and Tunisia. By the time you were 12, you had attended six different schools on three different continents. Why did your family move around so much?

Suleika Jaouad:
It’s an excellent question. One that I asked myself quite a bit, when I was little, because like a lot of little kids, all I wanted was to feel normal. Whatever that meant. My dad is originally from Tunisia, it’s where his entire family lives. It’s where, actually, my parents and my brother now live. My mom is Swiss, and they both immigrated to New York in the ’80s, and I think they were really trying to figure out what home meant for them. My dad was a complet professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and my mom was a painter.

And so, in those early years, I think they were shuttling between their respective homelands, and the home that we were trying to make for ourselves in upstate New York. And the truth is that shuttling has continued happening, so home was really an elusive concept for me as a kid. And it’s only pretty recently in my life that I’ve been someone with a fixed address, who doesn’t live out of a suitcase. And it certainly was a slightly destabilizing way of growing up, but I think it also forced me to become a chameleon. I was an expert new kid on the first day of school, and I look back on that experience and I think, for so many children of immigrants, especially when you speak one language at home and another at school. You become a kind of translator between your family and the world. And those skills, I think, have made me a writer. Those skills of observation, of customs, of idioms, of all kinds of things.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think it gives you a very particular kind of awareness, as you’re trying to make sense of how and where to fit in. And when you first came back to the United States and started kindergarten, you actually didn’t speak a word of English, and have said that the curse of the mixed child who grows up betwixt cultures and countries, creeds and customs, is too white, too brown, too exotically named and too ambiguously other to ever fully belong anywhere. And I understand that, at that time, you wanted to legally change your name from Suleika, which is your name in Arabic, to Ashley. Is that true, to Ashley?

Suleika Jaouad:
The coolest girl in my fourth grade class was named Ashley, and her nickname was Ashtray, which was-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, gosh.

Suleika Jaouad:
… even cooler to me. So not only did I want to legally change my name to Ashley, but I wanted my parents to call me Ashtray, which of course they refused, and rightfully so.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It reminds me of the character from Euphoria. Is the Arabic pronunciation that I attempted the correct way to say your name in Arabic?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, that’s right. So both my parents pronounce my names differently. Suleika, In Arabic. Suleika, in French, in English, or as my husband who’s from New Orleans says, “Suleika.” So there is always confusion around the pronunciation of my name, but I remember that first day of kindergarten so distinctly, the terror of being in a place where you don’t understand what people are saying, where people are laughing when you’re attempting to speak the language. And I think I had a self-consciousness around language, and around English specifically, from such an early age.

I’m still someone who, whenever I hear a turn of phrase or an idiom that I’ve never heard before, I immediately write it down and then proceed to try to use it as much as possible in every single conversation for the next couple of days, until I’ve mastered it. But I think that feeling of otherness really felt like an albatross. The tyranny of cafeteria lunchrooms, when you’re the kid showing up with couscous-

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good word, tyranny.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and tajine. And at that age, all I wanted was a Pop Tart, or very orange American mac and cheese. And I think at some point, by the time I turned 12 or 13, I realized that as much as I wanted to assimilate, as much as I would have loved to inhabit the Ashleys of the world, that just wasn’t going to be possible. And so, embracing that otherness, and I guess leaning into that difference, became my ammo.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that hustle is your family’s defining trait, and I’m wondering if you can share why you feel that way, or in what way?

Suleika Jaouad:
So my dad is someone who grew up in a family of 13 children, both of his parents never learned to read or write, and he is the only one of his siblings to have left Tunisia. And he worked all kinds of odd jobs while he was embarking on his studies, from a bell hopper at a seedy motel, to all sorts of things. And my mom, in particular, I think is someone who embodies that sense of hustle. When she first came to the East Village in the ’80s as a young aspiring artist, she was trying to figure out how to pay the bills. And so she started what she called the International Language School, and hired all of her friends as language tutors to wealthy business people uptown. And of course, this wasn’t an actual school, it was her landline and her apartment. And she would answer the phone and pretend to be a very official sounding secretary.

But I think that instinct to survive, to figure out how to make things work, to pivot as needed, and to adapt and move forward at all costs, was really a guiding tenet in our household. And we were firmly middle class and upstate New York, but there also wasn’t any sort of security blanket beneath us. So even when it came to college, I was fortunate to have the option of attending the school where my dad taught free of charge, but my parents made it very clear, “If you want to do something beyond this, that’s on you, you’re going to have to figure that out. You’re going to have to pay for your own way.”

And because nobody had helped usher their way, relative, especially to the way my dad grew up, we had immense privilege. We were living in the United States, and going to a good public school, and had access to education in a way that wasn’t so easy for him. And so there was always this sense that, given the leg up that we’d had, it was our responsibility to make something of that. To figure out who we were, and what we wanted to contribute to the world.

Debbie Millman:
You started piano lessons when you were four years old, at the urging of your parents, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that you chose music for yourself. And your music teacher at Lake Avenue Elementary School stood in front of the class with a dozen stringed instruments lined up at the front of the room, and asked you to choose your instrument. Tell us what you chose and why.

Suleika Jaouad:
So as well-intentioned as my mother was, she was very sort of stereotypically Swiss about her approach to my piano lesson. So I was forced to practice every single day. I studied the Suzuki method. I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it. And I remember that day in that fourth grade classroom so distinctly, because everyone was clamoring for the popular instruments. For the violins, for the cellos. And no one, with the exception of a couple of supernaturally tall boys, were interested in the double bass. And I immediately felt drawn to it, for two reasons. One, because I liked the fact that my teacher had told me that no other girl had expressed interest in playing it, and it seemed like its own kind of outlier in the orchestra, which was very much how I felt. But also because the mischievous part of me liked the idea of picking the instrument that would inconvenience my parents the most. And so, that’s what I did. And to my surprise, and I think to my parents’ surprise, I fell deep in love with the bass.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you gave your bass a name?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, Charlie Brown.

Debbie Millman:
And why is that? Is it, I was trying to imagine why it was Charlie Brown, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the round nature of the instrument, or the sort of wah-wah noise that the parents made, sort of as a way of being more defiant with your parents.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly. I think all of it, and it was a totally ridiculous sight. I was too small to carry this very large instrument, so my dad would have to shuttle it around for me. And in those early years, I would have to sit on a stool in order to reach all of the places on the base that I needed to reach. But I loved it, because it’s also the only instrument that you hug with your whole body when you play it, and you hear every note vibrating through your chest. And there was just this grounded feeling that I had, whenever I got the chance to play it.

Debbie Millman:
You went to band camp at 13. I sort of had this vision of it being like an episode of the TV show, Glee. I have no idea if that’s accurate or not. What was that like for you?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was far more awkward, I can tell you that than anything that might ever have appeared on Glee. So I was in the orchestra camp and I loved it. I had gotten a scholarship to attend, and I felt like this portal had suddenly opened onto a world of possibility. I’d never considered playing music seriously, but I remember feeling for the first time, the deep sense of satisfaction that comes when you’re building a muscle and you see it getting stronger.

Debbie Millman:
Isn’t that remarkable?

Suleika Jaouad:
And I could actually watch that incremental progress happening, in real time. And I decided, pretty much after that summer, that I was going to become a double bassist, and I wanted to play in the greatest orchestras in the world. And that was my big dream, at that age.

Debbie Millman:
And this is where you met your now husband, the Oscar and Grammy winning musician, Jon Batiste. What was that first meeting like?

Suleika Jaouad:
Correct. Jon was in the jazz camp. He was all braces and gangly limbs. And I don’t think he would mind me saying this, because it’s how he described himself at the age, but he was just sort of shockingly, gloriously awkward. And I remember, the first time I encountered him, I tried to speak to him. And he was so shy, that he barely said a word back. But what I remember most distinctly was the end of summer concert, where all of the parents are invited to come and to pick up their children. And Jon played so extraordinarily, so virtuostically, despite only having played the piano for a year or two at that point, that everyone in the auditorium leapt to their feet and gave him a standing ovation, which is not something that happens at end of summer band camp recitals. And I just remember thinking, “This is someone extraordinary and intriguing,” and that was that.

Debbie Millman:
No crushes?

Suleika Jaouad:
No crushes.

Debbie Millman:
No chemistry?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, I think, intrigue. The crush came later. The crush came about three years later.

Debbie Millman:
Now I understand, and I don’t know if this is correct or not, but I found in my research that he wrote his first song for you, at that time. Is that true?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, it’s not true. And it’s also a point of discussion between Jon and me, at this very moment. So what I remember, which is not what he remembers, is that he dedicated a song to one of the ballet dancers, because there was also a sort of parallel ballet camp. And there was mass giggling at the top of the auditorium. But he told me, recently, that it wasn’t him who dedicated the song because he was far more interested in video games and jazz, than he was in girls. And he would never have dared do anything so bold and forward, so I’m clear.

But what he did tell me as we were discussing all of this is that if the jazz musician dedicates a song to you, don’t get too excited about it, because they can improvise anything on the spot. It only counts if the dedicated song makes it onto an album.

Debbie Millman:
Ah. So, “Butterfly” counts.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 16, you won a scholarship to attend the pre-college program at Julliard School, in New York City. And for the next two years, every Saturday morning you got up at 4:00 AM so your dad could drive you the 45 minutes to Albany, to catch the Amtrak to the city. And after a long day of orchestra rehearsals, masterclasses, music theory, and auditions, you began to struggle with the schedule at school. And ended up striking a deal with your parents about the rest of your high school education, and I was wondering if you can share what that was?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, that experience, that pre-college, I think was one of those fork in the road moments that we all have, but that was a big one for me. I was really struggling at my high school in upstate New York. I was getting mixed up in the wrong crowd, I was rebelling. I was a terrible student. And at one of these end of summer band camps, I had the opportunity to play a bass solo, and someone in the audience approached my parents afterward, and invited me to come to New York City and to meet someone by the name of Homer Mensch who was the principal of the New York Philharmonic, and to bring it back to sharks, he famously played the opening sequence of the movie Jaws, on his bass, that duh-duh, duh-duh.

Debbie Millman:
Wow, that’s incredible.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. And it was extraordinary. I mean, it really changed my life. For the first time I was meeting kids who had a kind of ambition I’d only really read about in books, who had the discipline to spend seven, eight hours a day alone in a practice room. And who wanted everything, who wanted the world. And coming from a small town, I wasn’t used to being around people like that. I had this sense that I wanted to sort of thrust myself into the greater expanses of the world, but the how of that was completely unclear to me.

And so by the end of that first year, especially because of Homer Mensch and his mentorship and support, he really made me feel like I had the possibility of actually seeing this dream through. But with the commute, and with the number of hours that I needed to practice in order to keep up, it was becoming completely untenable. Because not only was I waking up at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, I was waking up at 4:00 AM every day of the week, to get in three hours of practice before I went to school, so that I’d have time to do three more hours when I got home.

And so the deal with my parents was that I could drop out of high school, but that I had to take at least two days of classes at Skidmore College, where my dad taught, and where I could attend for free. But the one thing that I look back on and marvel at is, they didn’t say to me, “You have to take pre-calculus,” or you have to take whatever the equivalent of your high school classes were. They gave me ultimate license to choose whatever I wanted. And so what I thought was my way of minimizing my schoolwork actually became the very opposite, because I was taking modern dance, I was taking a Women in Literature class, I was taking a class on Nabakov. I was reading all kinds of things that I hadn’t really had the opportunity to study in that way. And over the course of that year, I realized that while I loved music, there was so much more that I was hungry to learn about.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you loved the literature classes so much that you were taking, you started looking up English syllabi at different schools, and assigning them to yourself. I thought that that was sort of a wonderful example of how you assimilated your family hustle.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, totally. Actually, I remember it so distinctly. A few girls from my high school had gone to a very fancy boarding school nearby, and I desperately wanted to attend, because I had just watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Suleika Jaouad:
But all the girls show up on the first day of class, and they’ve already read the textbook, but not only are they smart, they’re fabulously cool and funny and fierce. And so, I wanted to inhabit a world like that, and that wasn’t a possibility for us. And so what I did was, I looked up the syllabus at that very same boarding school, and tried to teach it to myself.

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
I’ll just add that, you asked me about my crush on Jon. My very first day at Julliard, I was on the 1 train going to the campus, and I was with my friend Michelle. And we saw this young man who was behaving kind of strangely, and people were sort of looking at him. This young man was singing, and playing air piano, by himself. And I looked at him and I turned to my friend and I said, “I know that guy. That’s Jon Batiste from New Orleans. I went to band camp with him.” And then I said, out of nowhere in the way that 16 year olds do when they just run their mouths, I said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.” And then I completely forgot about it, only to discover that he was also a student at Julliard.

Debbie Millman:
I just want to let that sink in for a second. You applied to Princeton University where, you not only got in, you got a full scholarship. And while there, you played in the university orchestra, but you also applied to the creative writing program your freshman year. And were rejected. And you’ve said that you took that rejection particularly badly. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt a huge sense of being an imposter, when I went to Princeton. I remember when I was thinking about leaving Julliard, my teacher, Homer Mensch had died, and I had been reassigned to the only female bass teacher at Julliard, and I was so excited to finally get to study with a woman. But rather than the kind of mentorship I’d had with Homer, it was the very opposite of that. She was tougher on me than everyone else, and she could be quite cruel. And I remember coming back from a weekend with a friend, visiting her brother at Princeton, and saying to her, “I visited this school and I never even considered that I could go to a place like this, but I’m interested in applying.” And what she said to me was, “You should do that. You should go to Princeton. You’re pretty enough that you’ll marry a wealthy man by the time you’re 22, and that’s a far better career path for you.”

I felt such rage in that moment, and such humiliation. That was the thing that propelled me away from music, because I did not want to continue studying with her. And that left a kind of chip on my shoulder, that proved to be useful, in the sense that it lit a fire under me. So when I did get accepted, I felt equal parts excitement and terror. I remember watching every episode of Gossip Girl in preparation for what I imagined a school like Princeton to be. I also read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, but I had no sense of this world I was about to walk into. And so to receive that rejection first semester was confirmation of something that I feared, and hoped wasn’t true, and took to be true. And so after that, I would write for myself. I would write little fictional stories. I wrote obsessively in a journal, but I put the idea of pursuing writing seriously to the side.

And the irony is, there are a couple great writers from my same class who published beautiful books, and I’ve since learned that they too were rejected from the creative writing program. So I think, at that age, rejection can be devastating, it can be motivating for some. But I didn’t have the kind of confidence in myself, and my ability to look beyond that sort of outward validation, or outward confirmation of my failure.

Debbie Millman:
In your junior year, you came across a journalism class in the course catalog titled Writing About War, and it was being taught by the journalist Thanassis Cambanis. What gave you the strength or the courage to try again?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I was a near Eastern Studies and Gender Studies major, and I was studying Farsi, I was studying Arabic. I had spent every summer traveling to the Middle East, and traveling back home to Tunisia, and doing research. And so I felt not a sense of confidence in my ability to write, but I felt confident in my knowledge of this region and its complexities, enough to apply for this class. And I loved everything about it, from moment one. And writing about war is easier said than done from Princeton, New Jersey. But even that proved to be such a fascinating challenge.

Debbie Millman:
You traveled across North Africa and the Middle East to study women’s rights through narrative storytelling and oral history, and this led to your writing your senior thesis about the subject. I believe that one of the chapters was titled Voices of the Voiceless, and it detailed the under-reported stories of women in Tunisia, and it also included your grandmother. Your thesis won several awards, including a prestigious award called the Ferris Prize. Did that change your ambition to be a musician? Was that when you sort of had to decide, “Which direction am I going in?”

Suleika Jaouad:
I knew pretty much as soon as I left Julliard that I did not want to be part of the classical music world, even though I continued to play, and to love music. But it changed my sense of confidence. I had started school feeling so unsure of myself, and unsure of my own merit and right to inhabit this world, and there were so many things about that school that proved really challenging. I mean, if you’re on full financial aid, you have a work study. And the very first job I was assigned was serving fellow students in the dining hall. And I’m not above serving anyone, but there was such a clear sense of divide, even optically, because a lot of my fellow work study colleagues were fellow students of color.

And to sit there, and to serve the richer students, was just such a bizarre way of being put in your place. And there were so many examples of that, during my time there, but more than anything I just flourished in this environment, where there was so much to learn. There were so many extraordinary professors. There were unlimited research and travel grants available to me. And by the time I graduated, I knew not necessarily who I was, but what my potential might be. And so those awards, for me, meant something. Because I started out as a struggling student academically, and I had worked really hard to get to a place where I felt I had steady footing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written a lot about bridging the gap between what you found interesting, and what might actually be practical or possible, especially at that point in your life. Did that have any influence in what you were choosing to do, in terms of what your parents’ expectations might’ve been for you at the time?

Suleika Jaouad:
When I graduated college, I knew I wanted to be a war correspondent, but how to actually do that, how to get your foot in the door felt completely mysterious to me. And so in a strange version of my own coming of age rebellion, I decided to do the opposite of what my sort of artsy-fartsy parents had always done, and to get a job at a corporate international law firm. And the notion of 12 hour days, and wearing a power suit, was very intriguing and exciting to me. Although, that excitement was very short-lived once I actually started that job. But I think like a lot of people at that age, I had this sense of time, time to figure out who I was, time to bridge that gap between my reality and those daydreams. Time to do it all.

Debbie Millman:
You went to Paris, you rent an apartment, you started working as a paralegal in this law firm. But then, you developed a high fever, painful sores in your mouth, and wrote this in your journal. “Something is terribly wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but it feels like there is a deadly parasite growing in my body.” But it was worse than a parasite. And is it okay to share what happened next?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So after a year of feeling sick, of going to see various doctors, who would treat whatever ailment I showed up with without really assessing the full picture, I started to feel like I was unraveling. One doctor prescribed me an antidepressant, another after a week long hospital stay in Paris, where they ran every test they could think of except for a bone marrow biopsy, which they felt wasn’t necessary for someone of my age, released me with a diagnosis of burnout syndrome. And essentially told me that I needed better work life balance, and to take care of my mental health.

And so I felt this sort of cleaving happening inside me, where I knew something was wrong, but no one seemed to be taking me seriously, and people were telling me it was literally in my head. And I started to wonder if I was a hypochondriac. I started to wonder if I was going crazy, in some kind of way. And so in a sort of perverse way, after a year of this, I ended up in an emergency room and learned that my blood counts were so low that I needed to immediately get on a plane to fly home to upstate New York, otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to fly at all. I arrived to Paris in very high-heeled boots, and I left in a wheelchair.

And when I got my actual diagnosis, I felt relief. I had a very aggressive form of leukemia, a kind of blood cancer. And while that wasn’t welcome news, it was terrifying news, it was gutting news. I felt relief to be believed, to have an actual diagnosis that I could wrap my tongue around, and hopefully do something about.

Debbie Millman:
The doctors in the United States told you and your parents, point-blank, that you had about a 35% chance of long-term survival. So overnight you left your job, your apartment, your independence, and became patient number 5624. At one point, your doctors told your parents to hurry to the hospital, because they weren’t sure you were going to make it overnight. And in your memoir, you write this. “How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age 22? Do you break down in sobs? Do you faint, or scream?” What were you telling yourself about what was happening in that moment?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I remember feeling a kind of bifurcation, a sense that there was my life before, and now everything that would come after. And that the person I’d been, the dreams I’d had, were buried. I’d never experienced anything like that. I was at an age where most of my friends had never dealt with serious illness. But that being said, I also had a kind of helpful naivete about what it means to be very, very sick.
And so, when I entered the hospital that first summer, I packed all kinds of books, and I very cheerfully told my parents I was going to use this time to read through the rest of the Western Cannon.

Debbie Millman:
And then War and Peace, when you were done with that.

Suleika Jaouad:
And War and Peace, which, of course I never read any of those books. And by the end of that summer I learned that not only was the chemotherapy I’d been doing not working for me, but that my leukemia had become much more aggressive. And at that point, my only option was a clinical trial that had not yet been proven to be safe, or even effective. And I think it was the first moment where it occurred to me that I might actually die, and imminently. And that the sense of infinite time to figure things out had been an illusion, an illusion that we all live with. I’m not special, because I got sick at 22. Our time here is short and fleeting, but to confront my mortality in that way, and at that age, was a sort of world shifting change for me. And I spent those next couple of months in a deep depression.

I remember closing the blinds on my hospital room window, which overlooked the park. And when I’d entered the hospital, I felt really excited about that. It seemed like a great asset. But looking out the window, seeing people going to work, seeing teenagers making out on park benches, all of that was a reminder of a life that I no longer could participate in. And I felt profoundly terrified, and profoundly stuck. And I think worse than the brutal side effects of the treatment, worse than the weeks and months spent in confinement in a hospital room, was the sense that I had spent my entire 22 years on the planet preparing for a life, without actually having lived it. But in those early months, it was hard to imagine what I could possibly do from the confines of my hospital room, from the confines of my bed. And I really struggled with that.

Debbie Millman:
It was there in the hospital that you wrote, “time stalked you like prey” and, go on to write that “there’s a tipping point, a special kind of claustrophobia, reserved for long hospitalizations, that sets in around week two of being locked in a room. Time starts to elongate, space falls apart, your desperation begins to border on madness.”

And so I guess somehow, in the face of all of this despair and suffering, as you’re facing some of the most difficult challenges of your life, you decide to start on two creative projects. A 100-day project wherein you and your family members all participate in undertaking one small creative act every day. You started journaling, which was really a return to a creative act you had started pretty much since you could first hold a pencil. Why journaling?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I had started and stopped enough projects in the hospital to know that I needed to set the bar very low for myself, otherwise it was going to result in further defeat. And so, I decided to return to the thing I’d always loved. And the reason I’d always loved it is because to me, the journal is such a sacred space. You don’t have to write beautifully, or even grammatically. You’re not doing it for anyone other than yourself. And you have this invitation to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self. And so that appealed to me, especially at a time where I was feeling so many things that I couldn’t say out loud.
And this is a thing that happens to a family when they get sick. Everyone is trying to put on a brave, stoic face for one another. And the byproduct of that is that everyone ends up siloed in their own private fears and anguish. And so having this place where I could write down all of the things that felt impossible to talk about. What it was like, falling in love while falling sick. The sense of being a burden that can accompany being a person who requires a significant amount of care. Sexual health and infertility caused by chemotherapy, the social awkwardness of being sick at an age where your friends are outplaying beer pong, or doing whatever else.

And in the course of keeping that journal, I felt both a kind of catharsis, but I also felt my excitement and my ambition come back to me. Because I realized, at some point during that hundred-day project that I was using my journal as a kind of reporter’s notebook. I was observing this new kingdom of the sick, this new hospital ecosystem, that once again, I was the new kid, and that I was having to figure out how to navigate. I was having to learn to speak medical-ese. I was befriending the fellow patients in the cancer unit. I was getting to know my nurses. I was learning about the body. And while it wasn’t war correspondence, it felt like a kind of reporting from the front lines of a very different sort of conflict zone.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote this about your biggest fear. “What scared me more than the transplant, more than the debilitating side effects that came with it, more than the possibility of death itself, was the thought of being remembered as someone else’s sad story of unmet potential.” Nevertheless, by the end of the 100 days, you realized as long as you were stuck in bed, your imagination would have to become the vessel that allowed you to travel. And though you couldn’t be a journalist in the way that you imagined after graduating, you were actually reporting from a war zone, in a different kind of conflict zone. You then went deeper and launched a blog called Secrets of Cancerhood.

Suleika Jaouad:
Oh God, so embarrassing.

Debbie Millman:
Not at all, not at all. And you stated-

Suleika Jaouad:
And I must, I’m very impressed by your research abilities.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. Thank you. And you stated, “Cancer isn’t something that makes you want to share. It’s something that makes you want to hide.” And this, Suleika, is sort of my big question for the whole interview. Did it scare you at all to be so candid and so direct? So raw, so real. You put it all out there.

Suleika Jaouad:
By the time I started that blog, I had spent almost an entire year in total isolation, shuttling between my childhood bedroom in upstate New York and the hospital. And the few friends I had told about my illness hadn’t… Not all of them, some were wonderful, but some of them hadn’t responded in the way that I’d hoped. And I think when they couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to show up, they stopped showing up at all. And so, I didn’t talk about what I was going through. On my Facebook profile, it still said that I lived in Paris, and people were still posting on my Facebook wall asking if they could crash on my couch.

But at some point that isolation became more painful than the risk of opening up. And I was preparing for a bone marrow transplant, which I knew I might not survive. And in the weeks leading up to that, I felt this force within me, to try to do some of the things that I had always wanted to do in whatever way I could, big or small. And the big one was writing. And while I always imagined myself as the kind of writer, who either through reporting or through fiction, would help other people tell their stories.

The story that was available to me, within my limitations, was my own. I remember my mom giving me a hardcover copy of Frida Kahlos’ diary, and pouring through it and feeling so deeply connected to her. Both because she had suffered a kind of life altering accident, at approximately the same age as my diagnosis, but because she had managed to find purpose in her pain. And that, for me, became a kind of guiding light. That the material that was available to me, even if it made people uncomfortable, even if it made people want to look away, had a power in it that I could tap.

Debbie Millman:
Your blog became immediately popular. And one of your journalism professors from Princeton shared it with an editor at the New York Times, and you were offered to write a piece about your experience. And in a moment of utter brazenness, you said you’d rather write a column, and in an effort to make it as accessible as possible, include video. That’s sort of the moment to me where it was like, “Ta-da!” Where did that courage come from? Where did you manifest that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, the funny thing is, I would never have dared be that brazen pre-diagnosis. I would’ve been thrilled for a fact checking position at any newspaper, let alone the New York Times. But I had lost so much, and I knew that within the next month, I might lose it all. And so it felt like there was very little left to lose. And for the first time in my life, I asked for exactly what I wanted, because nothing could be scarier than what I was already experiencing. And so, that’s what I did. And the fear came when the editor said yes, because suddenly I was like, “Oh crap, how do I actually pull this off?”

Debbie Millman:
Well, bent over your laptop, you wrote about how you traveled to where the silence was in your life. You wrote about your resulting infertility, and how no one warned you of that outcome. You wrote about learning to navigate our absurd US healthcare system. You wrote about guilt. You wrote about how we talk, or don’t talk, about dying. On March 29th, 2012, your column and the accompanying video series called Life Interrupted made its debut, and just a few days after that, you underwent your first bone marrow transplant.

And you said this about the experience. “The confluence of these impending milestones was dizzying, a dream and a nightmare dancing the tango.” Which seems to be a little bit of a pattern in your life, which is really cosmic and mystical and mysterious, in every possible way.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I feel like I’ve been the recipient of immense good fortune, and the recipient of immense misfortune, and often exactly at the same time. And that was a big one, for me. I was entering the most treacherous phase of my treatment, but at the same time, overnight upon launching the column and the video series, I went from being extraordinarily isolated to waking up the next morning to hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all around the world. People who were not necessarily sick, but having their own life interrupted experiences, be it losing their job, or going through a divorce, or grief, or some other kind of upheaval that had brought them to the floor.

And for the first time, too, I was hearing from people like me. I heard from a young man, a few doors down from me in the bone marrow transplant unit, who had my same type of leukemia. And just to know that there was another human, roughly my age, a few doors down, brought a sense of comfort and companionship that I hadn’t had in a long time. And one day when I was being wheeled out of my room to get a CT scan of my brain, I remember pausing in front of his door. And there was a little tiny window, and I wasn’t allowed to step inside because the germ risk was too high, but I knocked on the window. And he waved, and I waved.

And just that moment of connection, that realization that you are not the only person suffering or struggling in that particular way, that in fact all of us struggle, all of us have our hearts broken, all of us will confront our mortality at some point or another, suddenly made me feel less like a freak, and more like I was just part of the human condition and experience.

Debbie Millman:
Your work on Life Interrupted won a news and documentary Emmy Award, and after 1500 days, working to survive, 1500 days. You were discharged from the hospital on May 16th, 2014. And yet, when you finally emerged from your nearly four years of treatment, you learned that surviving is not the same thing as living. While you felt that it should have been a celebratory milestone, you wrote that you never felt more lost. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, we talk about the challenges of reentry with regards to veterans returning from war, but for whatever reason when it comes to surviving a traumatic experience like cancer, the expectation is that you’ll immediately and gratefully and joyously return to the world of the living. And I wanted that more than anything. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, but I was also reeling from those four years, I had been in survival mode for four years. And I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen if I did survive, what would happen after.

And it took me a long time to understand that I was grieving. I hadn’t had the time to grieve, I hadn’t had the privilege of having enough energy to even allow myself to fall apart. And I was grieving so many things. I was grieving my 20s. I was grieving a relationship, that hadn’t survived my cancer treatment. I was grieving my best friend, Melissa, who I’d met in treatment, and who had died only a few weeks earlier. And so as much as I wanted to be this happy, healthy, 26-year-old young woman that the people around me wanted me to be, I just couldn’t. And so, to my surprise and with a great deal of shame, I felt whatever scaffolding that had propped me up during those four years collapsed, and I just went inward.
I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t a cancer patient. I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been pre-diagnosis.

My career, albeit what felt like a miraculous one, was anchored around the experience I was trying to move on from. And I was still physically struggling with the long-term side effects of my treatment. And so, more than anything, I desperately wanted to move on from all of that, only to of course realize that moving on is a myth. As much as we want to, we can’t stow away the most painful parts of our life, and skip over the hard work of healing and grieving. And that while moving on wasn’t going to be possible, I had to figure out a way to move forward with what had happened, and that became my work.

Debbie Millman:
You talk very eloquently about Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor wherein she writes, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well, and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

And Suleika, one of the things that you write about so beautifully in your book, is that space between the two kingdoms, which became the title of your subsequent 2021 memoir. Can you describe that space between, a little bit?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So on paper, I was better. I no longer had cancer, I was cured. But off paper, I couldn’t have felt further from being well. And so I was in this kind of liminal space, where I was no longer part of that hospital ecosystem. That cavalry of doctors and nurses and family that had surrounded me were no longer there. Yet, I couldn’t have felt further from relating to or being able to inhabit the kingdom of the well. So much so that in that first year, I remember missing the hospital, wishing I were back in treatment. Not because I wanted to have leukemia again, of course, but that was a world I understood. That was a world I knew, I had built a home for myself within its confines, and it was the outside world that had become disorienting and terrifying to me.

And so, I began to look to the language of ritual, to these rites of passage that help us move from one place to another, that help ease that transition between no longer and not yet. And we have all kinds of rites of passage. We have funerals, and weddings, and baby showers. But I realized that for me, and at least at that time, there really wasn’t much in the way of survival. There wasn’t going to be any treatment protocols to help guide my way forward, and that I was going to essentially have to create my own. And so that’s what I decided to do, in my own kind of way.

Debbie Millman:
Your memoir Between Two Kingdoms is about not only your experience with cancer, but the aftermath, which includes this sort of between space. And then the 15,000-mile road trip you took to kind of find yourself again, through the people who wrote letters to you and people that you had met in this journey. As you wrote the book, you kept a Post-it note above your desk, and it stated, “If you want to write a good book, write about what you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write about what you don’t want to know about yourself.” How hard was that to do?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt slight terror, even just hearing you read that line from the Post-it note. It was extraordinarily challenging. I had read so many illness narratives that sort of mirrored the hero’s journey arc, where the final act was being cured, and people seemed to return from that experience better and braver and wiser for what they’d been through. And because of that, I think I had this expectation of what that would look like for me. And because of that, I also had an immense sense of shame, when my lived reality did not sync up with that. I felt like I was somehow doing healing wrong, or recovery wrong. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, and wanted to make the most of that.

And so in writing this book, I really more than anything, wanted to talk about aftermaths. About what is required of us when we survive, and that large gap between surviving and living. And I wanted to tell the truth of that reckoning. And it was interesting. My first drafts, I used to jokingly say, were full of lies. They were full of aspirational lies of what I hoped that process of recovery might look like, but that just wasn’t the truth for me. And so, writing that book forced me to really excavate the truth beneath the truth, beneath the truth. And I struggled especially with part two of the book, with the road trip, with that chronicling of the recovery. And it took me a year of just banging my head against the desk to realize that the issue was I was writing about recovery in the past tense, and it wasn’t past tense for me. Recovery was and is an ongoing process.

And once I understood that I was allowed to change tenses midway through the book, which I did, and to write that part in the present tense, I felt like I was finally able to access the truth of it. Which is to say, that there wasn’t some neat, tidy bow at the end of that story. That road trip was the best decision I made in my 20s. It forced me to inhabit the world again, to figure out how to stand on my own two feet, to find out what was on the other side of my fear. But the lingering imprints of my illness, especially on my body, didn’t go away. I didn’t return from this road trip magically healed, somehow. And so, I wanted to figure out how to put into words what it to exist in that messy middle, where you’re neither well or unwell or happy or sad. But you’re existing in that chorus border.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I find so remarkable about your book is that you don’t have to have experienced a bout of cancer, to appreciate the will that you have to survive. And that survival could be against any type of injustice that’s endured by the body. And there’s so many ways that we are confronted by that now. And so, it is a book of hope for anyone that’s experienced any type of injustice to their body.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
While you were writing your book, COVID descended upon us, and you quarantined at your parents’ house. Jon joined you for this, because you had had now, a blossoming romance. He joined you with your family, and that’s when you first started on an online project you titled The Isolation Journals, wherein you invited some of the most inspiring authors, musicians, community leaders, unsung heroes you knew, to write a short essay and a journaling prompt. And on April 1st, 2020, you began sending it out as a free newsletter. And within a month, 100,000 people had joined you from all over the world.
So here in another instance of creating a whole community, and with beauty out of tragedy and longing, sort of the world tragedy, that effort is ongoing. Talk about what the Isolation Journals mean to you now, and the kind of work you’re doing with it.

Suleika Jaouad:
So my friend Liz says that whenever you’re deep in a project, inevitably another idea for a project appears, and she calls these other ideas her mistresses, and they’re doing the dance of the seven veils-

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and trying to beckon you over. So the Isolation Journals was that for me, I was in the final throes of finishing my book. I had no business doing anything other than that task, but I couldn’t help but feel that so much of the pandemic, especially those early days of quarantine, felt familiar to me. The isolation, the face masks, the sense of hypervigilance, the kind of creative workarounds that were needed in order for us to continue existing within these new constraints. And so I wanted to share this creative practice, and really it’s a spiritual practice for me, of journaling, that has helped me through all of my most difficult passages.

But I knew that I wanted there to be a connective piece, to try to mirror the experience that I had 10 years earlier in that hospital room when I launched the column, and opened my inbox to all of these messages. And so I invited this community, we called them the Isolation Journalers to, if they wanted, and there was no pressure whatsoever, to share some of the writing that they were doing. And it was extraordinary. It’s, I think the work I’m most proud of, because to share your most vulnerable self, I think is one of the most terrifying things that we can do. But so often, when we dare to be vulnerable, it creates a reverberation, where vulnerability begets vulnerability, begets vulnerability. And of course, we learn that we’re more alike than we are different.

And so to watch that happening in real time, to watch people sharing their stories of love and struggle and sickness and grief, at a moment in time where the entire world was between two kingdoms, was just breathtaking. And that project continues strong today, I never know what to call it, because newsletter doesn’t quite do it justice, even though that’s the form it’s delivered in.

Debbie Millman:
Your book Between Two Kingdoms came out on February 9th, 2021. Was an immediate bestseller. November of 2021, two things happened. Your husband Jon earned 11 Grammy nominations, the most of any artist that year. And you also learned that your cancer had returned. How were you able to manage this dichotomy?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was such a surreal gut punch. It was the thing I’d always feared. It was my biggest fear, for a decade. And the thing is that when the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. And so, for so many years, I’d been afraid of rebuilding my life, afraid of falling in love again, only to have everything collapse. But I’d done that. I had built a career for myself, a life for myself, a love for myself that I was so proud of, and I’d finally regained this sense of safety in my body. And to have a relapse of leukemia, a decade out from transplant, is so rare. There’s less than a 1% chance of it happening. And once again, overnight, our world changed. We packed up our house, we had to re-home our dogs, which I think was harder than even the news of the recurrence itself, and we basically moved back into the hospital ecosystem.

But again, great misfortune, great fortune. I felt like I was lucky to have been through this once before, because I thought a lot about how I’d want to do it differently. So with regards to Jon, that’s the kind of thing that could lead two people to split apart. When one person is on a meteoric ascent, and the other person is suddenly confined to a hospital bed. And one of the very first things I said to him was that I didn’t want him to press pause on his life and on his work. I have watched him work so hard and for so long, that I wouldn’t have felt good about him missing out on this huge moment. But also, I learned to be a caregiver can be as challenging as it is to be a patient, sometimes more so. And I wanted to protect our relationship.

And I had spent the last decade building a beautiful community of family, and chosen family. And I wanted to not just lean on Jon, but to do the hardest thing, I think for most of us, which is to ask for help and for support. And so I was really fortunate this time around to have my parents with me, to have my very closest friends, and to have Jon there. And we navigated it in our own strange way. We got married on the eve of my bone marrow transplant, which as Jon put, was a kind of act of defiance. A way of saying we had a plan, and while it may look very different, we’re going to keep moving forward with that plan. But also, I think for both of us, having our own creative practices was the thing that both kept us individually grounded, and allowed us to come together.

Debbie Millman:
The dichotomy, both the sublime and the sad, is documented in the stunning documentary American Symphony, which was released last year. And the film follows you both, as you’re going through your bone marrow transplant, and Jon is creating his first composition to be played at Carnegie Hall. Going to the Grammys for his 11 nominations, as you watch, while you’re in recovery. Once again, you’re skating between the sort of beauty, and despair. How did you get to such a level of trust with the director, Matt Heineman?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was an ongoing process. I mean, Matt was a friend of Jon’s, and a collaborator, so he was a known entity to us, which helped. But it was really challenging, and Matt was so willing to reimagine the contours of this story every day, every week. And we would have conversations all the time about where the boundaries were, and those would shift, depending on how I was feeling. But ultimately, we knew that we wanted to capture this, not because we had any idea of what the outcome would be. I didn’t know if I was going to survive long enough to see this film come together, but to document what it is to navigate those peaks and valleys in real time, not just individually, but especially as a unit, felt like a worthy exploration and project. And it really took a massive leap of faith for both of us, and for Matt included, because we did it without funding, without a distributor, or anything like that. And we wanted the freedom to figure out what this could be, without any sort of directives coming from the outside.
And so I think what helped was that it really was often just the three of us. And because my immune system was so compromised, it was just Matt holding the camera. It’s not like there was a giant film crew there. And so we really built a deep friendship, and went through so much together, in the course of that time. Although Jon jokes that he had to draw the line one day, because our safe space was the bathroom. We knew that if we went into the bathroom, the camera would not follow us. So we would take bathroom breaks, just to kind of get our heads together.

And one day Jon was taking a shower, and he saw the door crack open, and he saw the camera lens come through. And Jon went, “Hello?” And he said, “Don’t worry, I’m just filming you from the waist up.” And that’s when we were like, “Okay, we need to reassess where the lines are, here.”

Debbie Millman:
Suleika, you just celebrated the two year anniversary of your second bone marrow transplant, and joyfully you were able to join Jon at the recent Grammys, where he was once again nominated for a pile of awards. There’s something about this that feels incredibly full circle, and I read that lately, you’re forcing yourself to make more necessary optimism. And as a result, I understand that you’ve committed, in that necessary optimism, to write two more books. And I was wondering if you can tell us about those.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So unlike the first time, I don’t have, and I never will have, a clear end date in terms of my cancer treatment. I am in treatment indefinitely, for however long or short that may be. And so, in a way, it’s been wonderful because I am more present than I’ve ever been. And it makes that sort of big, bold daydreaming about the future, a scary exercise, because I don’t know if I’m going to get to exist in that future. But I know that I don’t want to be someone hemmed in by fear. And so I’ve had to force myself to make long-term plans, like a book, which as you know takes a very long time not only to ideate and write, but for it to come out into the world. And I’ve had to kind of find ways of planting a flag in the future, as an act of optimism, as a way of saying, “I will be here. I will see this through.”

Debbie Millman:
After the transplant. Your doctor advised you to live each day like it’s your last, but you embraced an alternative approach. And I’m wondering if you can share what that is.

Suleika Jaouad:
So it’s a thing people say a lot, that you need to live every day as if it’s your last, and of course they mean well. But it’s also a phrase that has always filled me with a sense of panic, the sense and the pressure of needing to make as much meaning out of every moment, which honestly is fine in the short term, but an exhausting way to live. And I’ve come to believe that if we were all to live every day as if it were our last, our planet would implode. We’d be emptying our bank accounts, and declaring bankruptcy, and we’d be cheating on our spouses and eating ice cream for every meal.

And so, rather than doing that, I needed to find a gentler way in. And so what I decided was that instead, I was going to try to live every day as if it were my first, to wake up with a sense of curiosity and playfulness and wonder, that a newborn baby might. And it’s shifted my whole mindset, when it comes to the idea of indefinite treatment. It’s removed the pressure, and rather than figuring out how I can get the most out of my life, it’s shifted me into a place of thinking about what I can give, what I can give to my beloveds around me. What I can give to my work, what I can give to my body, to nourish it in this moment. And it’s really helped me also feel the sense of permission to do absolutely nothing. To have unstructured time, to doodle, to nap, to take the pressure off of feeling like there needs to be a sizable output. I think it’s what’s really helping me, figuring out how to swim through this.

Debbie Millman:
I’m wondering if you would be willing to read a short excerpt from Between Two Kingdoms. It’s one of my favorite passages in the book, and I was wondering if you’d share that with our listeners?

Suleika Jaouad:
I would love to.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts, and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now, instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Catherine’s experience and her insights sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive, and yet here she is, surviving. ‘You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,’ she told me before bed. That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life sorrows than loving.”

Debbie Millman:
Suleika Jaouad, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a joy, and let me just go ahead and say it on the record, but my favorite interview ever. You are a wonder, and I’m so, so grateful to have gotten to have this conversation with you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. I’m going to cry.

Before we go, I do want to let people know that adding your name to the Bone Marrow Registry is quick and easy, and painless. You can sign up at jointhesymphony.org, and all it takes is a swab of Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a lifesaving cure.

Suleika Jaouad’s memoir is Between Two Kingdoms, and the Netflix documentary she’s featured in and executive produced is titled American Symphony. You can see lots more about Suleika on her website@suleikajaouad.com. That’s S-U-L-E-I-K-A-J-A-O-U-A-D.com. And that is also where you can sign up for receiving the Isolation Journals weekly newsletter.

This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Suleika Jaouad appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Oliver Jeffers:
This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures, really, truly. And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. And it’s a bombardment and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, artist and picture book author, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his career and about reframing humanity’s problems.

Oliver Jeffers:
We prioritize being right over wrong, but if we replace the words right and wrong with better and worse, it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers came on the podcast eight years ago in 2015 to talk about his work as an illustrator, artist, designer, and author. We had a lot to talk about back then, and we have a lot more to talk about now because Oliver Jeffers has been busy. He has written and illustrated several more New York Times bestselling books for children. Helped make an animated film based on his work, which won an Emmy Award, and has had exhibits of his artwork all infused with his particular brand of contagious optimism. His latest effort is his first illustrated book for readers of all ages. It’s called Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. He joins me today to talk about that and so much more. Oliver Jeffers, welcome back to Design Matters.

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie. I can’t believe it’s been eight years.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t either.

Oliver Jeffers:
It’s just gone by in the blink of an eye.

Debbie Millman:
And I love how our friendship has evolved in that time too. When I first interviewed you, I barely knew you at all. I was so nervous. I’m still a little nervous, but now I’m a lot more comfortable.

Oliver Jeffers:
We know each other well and I am also prepared for how thoroughly you do your research.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you. Before we talk about some of the newer things that you’ve been doing, because there’s so much to talk about, my first question is one I’ve asked you before, but I love your answer and I love hearing more and more every time you tell me. You learned to draw by looking at John Singer Sargent’s ears in his paintings.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I learned to paint by-

Debbie Millman:
To paint. Yes. There is a difference between drawing and painting. I should be clear.

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I learned to draw by copying the comic book strip Asterix.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And even now thinking back on it, it might well be why there’s still bendy legs and arms. None of my characters seem to have elbows or knees. And then looking back, showing them to my son now, it was like, oh yeah. So I would just copy them and then figure out just the way in which I drew a line differed slightly from the way that he drew line and that I enjoyed it. But the painting thing, I didn’t really have any formal training as a painter, and I considered myself, I’m going to be a painter and was making paintings and then figured out I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I think a big part of art is just getting in and experimenting with materials to see what they can do for you.

But the way that he figuratively paints an ear, when you’re up close, it looks like it’s three simple gestures done in a burst of energy. But when you step back, it looks like a human ear. It looks like it’s alive. And I couldn’t really figure out how he did that. And it just was painting the idea of life rather than making it look like a photograph in every single tiny gesture. And years later, I learned that, yeah, he did do it in three or four strokes, but what you look at might’ve been the 50th or 60th attempt at doing so, which made me feel a little better.

Debbie Millman:
Have you figured out how he was able to achieve that type of realistic accuracy with so few strokes?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think he just was a very adept observer. He knew his materials and he could see color in pretty beautifully and unique ways. To be honest, no, I never figured it out. The man had a wonderful skillset and it just seemed to come from him naturally.

Debbie Millman:
It first occurred to you that there was power in art when you were nine years old. You were asked to step out of class to make a set for the school play. What kind of power did that give you?

Oliver Jeffers:
It gave me, I think, a bit of purpose and a bit of value. The power being that I can use art as an excuse to not do other things, partly, but then no two human beings are exactly alike. And a lot of the Western education system is teaching everybody exactly the same things. And I do believe it’s changing somewhat now, but when I went to school, it was like everybody had to do geography and English and mathematics and science and some of those things some people are good at and some of them they weren’t. And I wasn’t a great student and whenever the art came along and that had a practical application in the real world, that was that this is maybe something that I can do because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.

Debbie Millman:
How did you know you were good at it?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because they asked me to step out of geography class to help design the set of the school play. And I think back then I knew that I had an ability to be able to make something that looked like something I wanted it to and for it to be visually satisfying, even just to me.

Debbie Millman:
How did your understanding of power in and with art evolve after that experience?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, after that experience … That was in primary school. And in secondary school, I went to school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. And back then … What year did I start secondary school? It would’ve been 1990 maybe. The education system in Northern Ireland was divided. It was segregated between Catholics and Protestants. And the school that my parents sent me to was one of the first integrated schools where both Catholics and Protestants went together. And because not a lot of people were on board with that, the numbers were very low and to qualify for basic funding from the government, they had to take in all the kids that were kicked out of all the other schools, including all the rough schools.
So some of the toughest roughest kids in Belfast were going to this school. None of them cared about education. There was a lot of violence. And I recognized that art had currency because some of these kids were coming to me to ask me to draw their favorite band on their school bag or make a design underneath their skateboard. And then I sort of fell under, not their protection, but they’re like, “Oh, he’s okay. Leave him alone.” But it was something I had to offer to my peers, and it really helped me through school because my parents were encouraging me to be an artist. I was not mocked for it in a school where everybody was being mocked for having an interest in anything. And as I say, it was something that I enjoyed and it gave me value.

Debbie Millman:
Did being around rough kids force you to be rough, or were you able to have some sort of boundaries around who you were and what you needed to be?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never had any interest in violence or roughness, but it did teach me a way to be able to speak in a way that I think somebody else will understand. So I could adapt and I could hold different ideas in my head at the same time and I learned to be able to say and show something in one way that these kids would get it or saying something in another way that these adults would get it. And so yeah, that duality really started to seep into my work back then.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think it’s still there?

Oliver Jeffers:
The duality is absolutely still there. Again, growing up in Northern Ireland, we used to joke that we were bilingual because we could speak both Catholic and Protestant. You knew how to pass the test by going through a certain area or a certain neighborhood. But even the visual language of duality is something I recognize came from back there. Like there’s a graphic nature using typography that definitely came from the loyalist militant murals that were peppered everywhere. And then there’s a whimsy and a narrative, folky charm that came from the Catholic murals that were everywhere around. So yes, the dualities … I think nothing is ever directly simple in one single thing and I could see the truth in that at an early age.

Debbie Millman:
You just mentioned your parents were encouraging of your art talent. There are a lot of creative people in your family. One uncle is a documentary filmmaker, another uncle organized festivals and wrote poetry and painted murals in Belfast. Did that give you a sense from an early age that being an artist was a viable career for you?

Oliver Jeffers:
Not really, because neither of them were particularly successful when I was young. But my mom and dad were both quite enlightened, and my dad was a teacher for years, and he always thought that the way the education system was set up there was fundamentally wrong. He always said that the two most difficult things a human being learns to do is how to walk and how to talk. And yet when you get into school, the first thing you’re told is to sit down and shut up.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love that.

Oliver Jeffers:
He always told us that remembering a lot of facts doesn’t prove intelligence. It just proves you’ve got a good memory. And the sheer sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity and imagination. He could see that I was interested in something and so we were encouraged. Me and my older brother both went to art college. And when I met my wife who studied engineering, I was the first person she’d ever met who didn’t have a proper job. And I didn’t quite realize the rarity of that until I was a bit older.

Debbie Millman:
You said that everything in your life changed as an artist when you learned to stop copying others and listened to the way your hands wanted to draw and paint. I find that so interesting given the very first thing we talked about was how you were copying the comics. How did your hands want to draw and paint?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I think whenever anybody is seriously considering being an artist, you go through that phase of being inspired and imitating as a way to find what it is that you’re capable of doing. But at a certain point, you have to progress beyond that and find your own voice, really. So when people have asked, how did you find your style, I realize that you don’t really find your style, your style finds you. You just get out of the way of that. You know the way you would say sometimes, oh, that person can’t draw a straight line as a way to say that they’re not very good at drawing? Nobody can draw a straight line.

Debbie Millman:
Agnes Martin.

Oliver Jeffers:
Okay, apart from Agnes Martin. Is that true?

Debbie Millman:
Uh-huh.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Apparently she did-

Oliver Jeffers:
How long?

Debbie Millman:
All of her drawings, all of her grids she did by hand.

Oliver Jeffers:
What?

Debbie Millman:
I don’t even understand how that’s humanly possible so maybe it’s not really true.

Oliver Jeffers:
But I don’t think that takes away from the point. Most human beings’ attempt to draw a straight line is never perfect, but all those wiggles and bumps in that attempt, that is your style. That is the way your hand likes to move and how to draw. And yes, at a certain point you realize that no piece of art ever ends up the way that you think it will. And what’s important is to react to what you’re making as you go along rather than keep trying to change it so that it fits this preconceived notion of what it’s going to be. So to react to the real world. But at around that time when I was in art college, the reason that I wanted to make art was brought into question and I think it was that epiphany that changed the way that I was doing it, where yes, I was in the process of finding my style, but I was also always looking for validation externally. For the teacher to say I had done a good job or for other people to think I was cool and like me.

And at one point I put my hand up, this is an art college in foundation year and had a great art professor painter called Dennis McBride, and I’ve put my hand up trying to get him to talk about my work. And he just turned around and he says, “Oliver, you’re like a child always looking for sweets. Who do you make art for?” And it really hit home because I was stunned that he’d called me out like that. But as I thought about it into the evening, I was like, “I don’t know if I like the answer.” Because I was making art so that other people would think I was good or cool or for validation. But then I was like, “Well, why am I making art?” And I learned that I have to make art that I want to make and that the validation that I seek is my own.

Because when you think about it, if you try to picture somebody’s face is like, who’s approval is it that I need? Probably can’t really come up with anyone. And so my work shifted around then and I began really truly making art for myself. And that was hammered home in my final year of college when my mum, who had been sick for my whole life, she passed away. And at that moment, I was old enough to understand the magnitude of it, but young enough to still be malleable to have not fully become the person that I was to become. And suddenly everything fell away. All the things that I thought were important and all the issues that I thought were important and other people’s opinions just dropped away, and I could just suddenly see quite clearly what was important. And I, from that moment on, began striving towards that.

Debbie Millman:
You got your degree in college and in art school in visual communication, and did that initially in an effort to find a job, but realized in college-

Oliver Jeffers:
That I’m unemployable.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you decided that you never wanted to actually work for anybody because you didn’t like being told what to do.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I think you learned that when you were working in a bookshop in college.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. I worked at a bookstore chain in Northern Ireland, and it worked well for me for a while because I could do the shop windows. And so I was doing these displays, and then the occasion time that I was put on the floor and was sort of being ordered around, it just didn’t sit well for me. I think more than once in the couple of years that I was there when somebody asked for something, I would say, “Oh, no, sorry, it’s my first day. I don’t know. Ask somebody else.” But that was actually the last job I ever had. Because I was coming into my last year of university, and the word from head office came down that they were going to uniform the window so they didn’t get to bespoke them, each person. And so I lost that little gig that I had of going into work and actually just making these installations in these windows. And then I think I lost all interest in gainful employment at that point.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pursue a book deal with How to Catch a Star back in 2004? Talk about how that all ended up happening. Because in looking at the trajectory of your life from your origin story to that moment in 2004 when you got a book deal based on a book you had worked on in college, it seems as if this was effortlessly meant to be, and I know that it wasn’t. So talk about the details that led you to that defining moment in your life at that point.

Oliver Jeffers:
I took a year off of art college in between my third year and my final year and in that moment I was making paintings because I thought, I’m going to go off and I’m going to be a painter. And some of the concepts I was playing around with were playing with these impossibilities but mildly believable impossibilities rather than fantasy. And this one moment happened where I started painting or concepting a painting that was of somebody doing something that was physically impossible, which was trying to catch a star. And then I started making other paintings of other attempts to do that. And when I got back to college, I was thinking about the style in which I was doing it, and I started harking back to some of the simpler illustration styles that I’d been inspired by when I was a kid reading books. And at a certain moment, the penny just dropped.

And I’d been talking to a friend who had mentioned picture books and was suggesting that my skill set might lend itself to that. And I was sort of playing about with this concept, but rather than as a series of paintings, as a book. And it did, it kind of happened quite naturally that first time. I fell into it. And for college, I decided how close can I get to a finished book? And what ended up being the final product of that when I graduated, I thought this is as good as if not better than anything else I see in the bookshops out there. Now, the late ’90s, early 2000s was not a great time for picture books. It was, I think a pretty bland period. So the competition was quite low. So I sent off my concept to publishers expecting months and months and months of, have you read it yet? Can I speak to somebody? But I did my research and I put together a little package that was really well-considered. Because whoever says you never judge a book by its cover is … That’s wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Hasn’t been in the book business ever.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or in any business. Because we all do it every day in myriad ways. And I got a phone call, I think two days after sending a note from two different publishers, one in the USA and one in the UK, saying they wanted to publish this work. At that point, I realized that the book that I’d made in my final year was in watercolor, and I’d never used watercolor before. Why I chose watercolor, still don’t really know. But I was like, I think I can do a better job of that. So I did re-illustrate it, and then learned as I was going and the book published. They wanted to do a two-book deal so they asked me, “Do you have other books up your sleeve?” And I said, “Yeah, of course.” And I had no notion whatsoever. So the second book that I made was probably the hardest book I’ve ever had to make because I was making it from the start knowing it was going to be a book rather than falling into it.

Debbie Millman:
I know that you were particularly influenced in something that Maurice Sendak said about how he approached creating books for children, and he said, “You cannot write for children. They’re too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.” And so you started your career making picture books without really having any sense of how to make a picture book. You weren’t studying picture books, you weren’t involved in the production of picture books. What drew you to that form?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think the book in its simplicity is just the perfect vehicle for this relationship between words and pictures telling a story. And I went back and looked at some of the books that I enjoyed and seeing some of them was like, there’s real life concepts here, but they’re distilled down into such a pure form that they have to really know what they’re saying. And then this idea of reducing things back to simplicity was something that really appealed to me. But just what is the fewest amount of words you can use and what is the sparsest artwork you can use that conveys fully the emotion and the structure of the story? It just drew me, and I did have a knack for it that I don’t particularly know where it came from. But yeah, I think the one thing that Maurice Sendak said that I really gravitated towards was, “I don’t write books for children. I write books and somebody says they’re for children.”

And I don’t exactly do market research when I’m making a book. It’s not like I think, oh, I wonder what type of stories kids want to hear and then make towards that. I just really make books that I find satisfying and just going through the motions of the narrative arc is like, does this work? Does this not? And if I can make it work for me, and both me as an adult, but also the me as a child that I have just a tale memory of, that works for me.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that when artists combine image and words, it forms something that could be more powerful than just seeing the same content in a sentence or a paragraph or separately as a piece of art. And you said that people read images in a different way than they read words. So I’m wondering if in addition to talking about the specific form of a picture book, if you can talk a little bit about what happens in art or literature when words and image are combined in some way.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, when words and image are combined in a book, you can use the words to contradict the images, or you can use them to say almost nothing, but they are a different ingredient rather than repeating themselves. And so really truly the only full coming together of the notion happens inside the head of whoever’s reading the book. And in that way, they then become a co-creator. So they’ve got an access point, they feel a sense of ownership, and they can project themselves into that. But we learn how to read pictures. We learn how to read faces and rooms way before we learn how to read words. It becomes, I think, much more intuitive. We’re visual people. And there’s only one way really to read a sentence, which is in a linear way, but with reading an art, it’s more cyclical. We do tend to have a flow of sweeping from left to right generally, but you can play with that in a non-obvious way by having the left-hand side image sparse, and then the right-hand side busy with some sort of focal point. And so there’s an ability to be able to play with the tone, the space, and the emotion of an image that then combined with words creates this subtle flow that you don’t even notice is happening.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your style a little bit. You talked about at the top of the show how you copied the comic and realized that your characters didn’t have any elbows and didn’t have any knees. They were very round rather than linear. But you are able to draw or paint almost anything realistically in great detail. So you have this sweeping capability. What made you decide to work in a way that is more fast, that’s more … I mean, I’m struggling to find the word because it isn’t really simplistic.

Oliver Jeffers:
Minimal.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a certain sense of ease to it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I could have made some of those paintings with a very realistic figure of a boy and very realistic background, but then I’m filling in all the detail and the reader doesn’t get the opportunity to do that. And what I didn’t intend, but have learned since is because the drawings were so simple, kids thought that they could make that, and they would, but also because the geography was so vague and just suggestive, and what is the fewest ingredients you need to put this so you have a sense that it’s on land and it’s a rough time of day, but no more. That everywhere I would go on book tour in those early days, the kids would think that the books were set where they were from. And that’s what happens when you do make it simple and you do leave out as many details as possible so that people can apply their own sense of self and their own story to it.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you normally find that the faster you draw something, the more charming it is because the more human it is.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. At that point, you’re drawing how that image feels rather than truly trying to depict the reality of it. And it happens every time, which is, I would always revert back to some of the early sketches. Well, I have a sense of how this page will look, and I’ll just sketch it out quickly, and then I try to do it much more detailed and I trip myself up with it loses that personality and it becomes tight, and that tightness is cold and it’s off-putting.

Debbie Millman:
And it’s so interesting how you can always tell when something is tight.

Oliver Jeffers:
You can. Overworked, overthought.

Debbie Millman:
Tortured. I call it tortured. And when I’m drawing anything, even if it’s just words that I’m drawing, I have to go through that torture phase before I get to the ease. And that’s some of the most torturous experiences that I go through these days. How do you get to that other side? How do you learn or how do you know when you’re drawing charm?

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh. I think does it convey the emotion that I think it needs to convey in a simple way and then mix in with that a quality of line. Does the drawing look good? And you could do something a couple of different times. Yeah, that one works slightly better. I think it’s intuition. I think, as I say, we all understand body language. We all understand somebody else’s facial expressions and the way that they’re sitting and the way that they’re moving, and we understand momentum in art. And it’s when it can do those things with just a couple of lines, there’s just a charm that comes with that. But how do you recognize that? I don’t know. Does it work? Yes. Move on.

Debbie Millman:
Well, not to belabor this … Because I am. I’m torturing with these questions because I’m so curious about them. You are able to convey charm in a letter form, and you’re able to convey charm in a shadow.

Oliver Jeffers:
I didn’t realize that I was able to do that, but my writing is my writing. I moved from a studio in West Belfast to a very tiny studio in New York, and there was not enough room to lay out the way that I had previously worked and so I was forced to contain, and I would put things away and put things in drawers so there was open space, and I would label those drawers, and I like the way my handwriting looked, and so I would just take a little more time and do it. And through the sketchbooks, I always loved that combination of words and pictures as a way to even make notes for myself. And the way that a word in a painting can change the meaning of the painting, not only the meaning, but also the visual aesthetic of it, because that becomes a focal anchor, a design anchor.

Say it’s all sort of abstract and sweeping or large, and it’s devoid of a focal point. You put a word in there, that word becomes that visual focal point, let alone the meaning. And so over time, I’ve enjoyed the way that my handwriting looks and would label things. People seem to be drawn to it, and then never being able to find the right type font that really quite worked for all my books and trying to learn how I could actually put my own writing into my books. Over time, it just became part of my visual language. And when I’m doing a very large book signing line, people always say, “Oh, your wrist must be hurting.” They say this often enough. I was like, “It’s my shoulder.” It’s because you draw from your shoulder, not from your wrist. And I suppose that then doesn’t really change the signal between your body and your brain if you’re working at scale or if you’re working small.

Debbie Millman:
Fascinating. I didn’t know that it comes from the shoulder.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I don’t know if it does for everybody, but for me it does.

Debbie Millman:
Since you were last on the show, you’ve worked on some extraordinary projects with a variety of clients, including now having a list of books that goes about 20 deep. In The Guardian many years ago, you stated that you define your work into three categories. The books you make, the paintings you do, and other. And I’m wondering if you still organize it that way.

Oliver Jeffers:
No. The books I make, the paintings I do, and other. I mean, maybe. There was a big separation for a long time. The books were over here, and the books were about storytelling, publishing. Almost joyous distraction in a way, entertainment. And then the art was about question asking and a totally different style that was open-ended and much more … I suppose I was trying to be highbrow, but there didn’t need to be any kind of a conclusion to those. And over the last 10 years, they’ve started to become closer together. Now, one of the reasons that I really leaned into figurative painting is because when I graduated from art college, got my book published and started becoming known as the picture book person, I would be sending my work off to galleries and they’d be interested until they realized like, oh, you’re the same person who does these illustrated kids books, and they would lose interest.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because I think back then illustrated kids books were not seen as sexy or fashionable, and there was this sort of ego and pompousness about the art world, which has changed massively in these last 20 years. But the illustration was sort of looked down upon, and especially picture books were looked down upon. As I say, it has changed. And the art world itself is less defined by you can only do one thing. So I deliberately kept them apart in one sense because I didn’t want to confuse people, but in another sense, the publishing contract did come very easily. And so I possibly maybe took that for granted a little bit.

And then because I couldn’t break through into this fine art thing, I valued it a lot more because despite that lesson of wanting external validation, clearly I was still seemingly, I need to be in this world.
So a lot of the time now, the concepts that I’ll come up with will manifest in multiple ways, including a book and including a project and they overlap massively. I have a difficult time defining the boundaries between them anymore. Other than that sometimes with a book, the final piece of art is the physical object that you hold in your hand. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the piece of paper looks like that the art is made on or the ingredients that are needed to get there. That’s really one of the only differences that there is no one single thing.

Debbie Millman:
A couple of years ago when that categorization was more in effect, one of the first projects that you became globally known for was the work that you did for U2, and with U2. The band U2. And is it true that you met Bono, the frontman of U2, because his wife was reading your books to their kids?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never heard that.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I read that in some of my research. I thought that was so cool.

Oliver Jeffers:
That’s possible. I met him actually in a bar. A friend of mine worked with them, and I was trying to get them to move to another bar, and we were there and were like, “No, no. We got to wait for my boss to come.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then the next thing, Bono comes in and sits down. He was like, “That’s Bono.” And so we’re talking and we just get into conversing about art. And he asked me what I did, and I says, “Well, I write and illustrate picture books.” And when I’ve said that before to people, they kind of go, “Oh, cool.” Don’t really know what else to say. But he said, “Wow, what a responsibility.” And I was like, “Whoa. How so?” And he goes, “Well, you’re a human being’s first counterpoint of their cultural world.”

And I just thought that was a very astute way of looking at it. We did get talking. I sent him an art book that I’d made at that point, and then he had asked me to start doing some small collaborations. Firstly, to be part of a workshop that he was doing at Ted’s. Because I was also at TED that year doing the handwriting for it, which led to me making a film about the charity One.org, which then led to just working on a lyric video and a music video. I worked with my friend Mac Primo on those. And then just bit by bit, they just kept getting bigger and bigger because I think they liked what I did, and they valued my opinion and right up to the point where it meant working with Es Devlin on the Songs of Innocence and Experience doing these drawings that was recreating the youth that they had growing up in Dublin.

Debbie Millman:
And also the relationship that Bono had with his mother, Iris.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with a band of the stature of U2 that I’m sure have very specific ideas about what they like and what they don’t like, and how did your own taste and your own desires to create something in line with your aesthetic choices, how did they merge?

Oliver Jeffers:
Beautifully. And one of the reasons that I kept working with them is that they treated me as a collaborator rather than a gun for hire. They were coming to me because they liked what I did, they liked the way that I thought, and they handled that with respect. So it was never a case of, oh, no, make that more U2 or make that more rock and roll, or whatever it was. There were conversations about, is this the best way to do this? Can we emphasize this point a bit more? But generally, it was very respectful and yeah, as I say, treated as an equal and as a peer and a collaborator rather than we’re paying you, do what we tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever have creative differences?

Oliver Jeffers:
No, not really, actually. Because they were concentrating on the music, and I think that’s one of the reasons that they work so well, is that they hire people whose work they respect and they trust in that.

Debbie Millman:
You are very much an artist in and of your own right. You write and illustrate your own books, you create your own art. Every once in a while, you do illustrate books that aren’t authored by you, and are longer than picture books.

One in particular that I wanted to talk to you about was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne. If you can talk a little bit about the subject of the book and your approach in doing this work, because it is really, in looking at the larger high altitude view of your work, it’s very different in its tone.

Oliver Jeffers:
It is. Until that point in my picture book career, there had been a likeness to everything. There was some poignancy, yes there, but there was a lightness to it. And the fine art that I was doing, the painting that I was doing, that was an exercise to explore some of the deeper and docker issues and themes that I was thinking about.

I know John Boyne. We met on the book fair circuit, can’t actually remember where, but we became friendly, and I had read that book and had a very, very powerful reaction to it.

And he was saying that it was the tenth-anniversary edition coming up, and we just got talking and it was like, “Has that ever been illustrated?” And he said, no, he was actually, would I be interested in doing it?
And at that point, the film had just come out, and we both agreed that I should not watch the film, just because, if you watch the film and then you read the book, you can’t help but picture whoever the casting director has casted.

So I didn’t watch the film, and I just went through it, and was just thinking, again, trying to employ some of those visual language vocabulary techniques I’ve used, saying something with the barest amount of information, and keeping the colors very, very minimal. So there’s only charcoal ink, pencil drawings, so basically black and white, with a very few spots of red, and a very few spots of blue, kind of a sky blue.
And I tried to remove as much information, so oftentimes, when it’s Bruno, who’s the kid … Basically, the story is, I think he’s a 10-year-old boy whose father is a Nazi officer, who is asked to then run Auschwitz.

And this becomes clear in his misunderstanding of the world, as he’s moved to the house next to the camp, and he sees the people behind the fence.

And then, because nobody explains to him what’s going on, so he makes up his own version, to the best of his understanding. And he sees a small boy, as he’s walking around the fence, and they become friends and they talk about what life is like in either way, and they decide to let’s find out.

So Bruno tries to sneak in, and I’m not going to ruin the ending of the book for anybody who hasn’t read it, but for example, whenever it’s the picture depicting whenever Hitler comes to the house with his famous actress, girlfriend, wife, whose name I-

Debbie Millman:
Eva Braun.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yes. I depicted Hitler just with a square in the middle of his face, which was his mustache. And I depicted Eva Braun with just the red lips of the lipstick. And then, I depicted, I can’t remember the name of the young officer who becomes very violent, just always with this shadow under his cap, and then, these piercing blue eyes, sort of that idea of the Aryan purity, and these explosions of color every once in awhile, just to be able to show the emotion of the story, and as simple but beautiful as a way as possible.

Debbie Millman:
What did working on that book do to your spirit?

Oliver Jeffers:
I had to do a lot of research for it, to understand what Auschwitz looked like. Now I studied World War II in history at A level, so I knew my way around that period of history, and I’ve seen the images, but then, really looking at the images, because you have to draw them.

I think I made a post at the time, just saying, that things like this are important to remember, so that we don’t repeat them. There was a heaviness, that kind of permeated over me, the entire time that I was working in that book. And I think possibly, at that time, I was working on Stuck. And I needed that lightness to balance that darkness.

Debbie Millman:
If you look at this overarching, again, narrative arc of your work, so much of it, even when discussing difficult things, discussing climate change, deciding the future, talking about the future of humanity and illustrating the future of humanity, the work is very light and hopeful.

This was one case in your work, where I felt that it was very dark, and that was startling to me. And I was wondering what that might have done to your psyche, while you were working on it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And actually, at that point, I think I was beginning the experimentation with the dip paintings, and I thought that there was going to be a darkness in that, because that whole project is about exploring death.

Debbie Millman:
And memory, what we do and don’t remember.

Oliver Jeffers:
And memory, and how the two are related, and how the idea of knowing that life is finite, how that changes how you project yourself into a completely unknown future. It ultimately became more of a project about memory and storytelling, and the vulnerability of memory, than anything else. So that the people that I would paint these portraits of, they were all linked by the experience of having witnessed death firsthand, and in different ways.

Sometimes, it would have been somebody had lost a parent, or sometimes a partner. One of them was an EMT driver who would discover dead bodies. One of them actually was a government assassin, who had killed in cold blood, and seeing what the similarities were with that proximity to death.

The paintings themselves are beautiful. And there’s this, I think, a deep hope that kind of permeates from it. But doing some of those interviews was heavy.

Debbie Millman:
For somebody that hasn’t seen your drip paintings, how do you describe them?

Oliver Jeffers:
They would be typically portraiture painting, like oil painting, in a frame. But the entire bottom three-quarters is a solid color, because I would have painted these portraits, and then I would submerge them into a lot of paint, to permanently obscure the majority of them.

And I would do it in front of a small audience, and no photographs would ever exist of the entirety of the painting. The future of that legacy would exist only in the minds of the people who were there.
So I would ask them afterwards what they remember seeing, and then I would ask them months, sometimes years later, about what they still remember seeing, and just how much changes

Debbie Millman:
Having witnessed one, and it was the drip painting of John Meda, because I knew the experience of watching the painting being dipped would require my remembering certain things. I became hyper aware of the buttons on his shirt, the color of the shirt, the expression on his face, and so forth. But all these years later, the only things I remember are those things that I just mentioned.

Oliver Jeffers:
It changes the way you look at something.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s all I remember. I couldn’t tell you if you had specific questions about other things.

Oliver Jeffers:
What way was he facing?

Debbie Millman:
I couldn’t tell you, but I could tell you about the button. I can tell you about the button, and that’s about it. So it’s interesting what we deem memorable in the moment.

I was trying to stuff my head with facts about it, so that I could remember more. And in fact, I think I’ve remembered less.

Oliver Jeffers:
Because you were trying to remember?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. It’s been such an interesting experience doing those. One of the sitters I was painting … People ask me, do I have an emotional experience, when I’m doing them? And the answer is yes, but in a different way than everybody else is.

I’m having an emotional experience, because of the collective, I suppose, mood, the collective emotion in the room. But I’m also worried that I’m not going to kick a can of paint over, remember what I have to say, the technicalities of it.

And when I was painting one of the sitters in the studio, and that’s a strange experience, if you’ve ever had your portrait painted, and especially as somebody who’s painting the portrait, you stare at somebody for an uncomfortably long time, but you’re not looking at them. You’re looking at some small, again, detail.

So I was with this sitter, and I kind of did a little laugh, and he goes, “What was that about?” And I was like, “Oh, well, I suppose I’ve just finished painting your ear. It’s probably the best ear I’ll ever paint.” And then, I thought, “Oh, well …”

Debbie Millman:
John Singer Sargent be damned.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, yeah. And then, I thought, “Oh, well it’ll be gone soon.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Oliver Jeffers:
And I’ll go through the emotion of it while making the painting.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that your career as an artist has been fighting against the portraiture, the sort of deep detail and finesse that’s required in portraiture, that you’re so good at, and yet, really have in many ways rejected?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Have we talked about this?

Debbie Millman:
No.

Oliver Jeffers:
Every time I start a new painting, or go into a direction of a body of work, I was, “I’m going to be loose this time. I want to be big, and I want to be loose.” And I invariably keep getting back to being tighter at that scale. And I somehow can’t find the freedom and energy that happens intuitively, with the book art, on a large scale painting.

There’s just something there where I keep having to … I don’t know. I’m learning how to trust myself, and it’s still something that I strive towards. So one of the pieces of advice that I give myself is, “Just use a bigger brush.”

Debbie Millman:
Ooh, interesting. So interesting, because in the video you did for you too, I was actually marveling at how well your handwriting worked in a large scale, when you were writing on walls of buildings, and in walls at your studio. And I was wondering how that felt to you.

Oliver Jeffers:
The handwriting has never been an issue at scale. When I write big on a painting, or on a wall, it still looks the same as I do when I write small, but it’s always the image making. I use acrylic sometimes, I use oil sometimes, and with both of them, they have their pros and their cons.

With acrylic at a small scale, there’s an immediacy and a charm to that. But when you apply that large, just something in my head, I can never get the colors quite right, or it dries too fast. And then, with oil paint, it’s almost the opposite problem.

So I think everybody is learning, always, as they grow and they develop, and figuring out both what their body is capable of, what their head is capable of, but also what the materials are capable of.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting to be so close to watching your trajectory as an artist.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a real privilege.

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
There were two projects I want to talk to you about, before we get to your current book. In your film, Here We Are, the protagonist is a precocious seven-year-old who, over the course of a day, learns about the wonders of the planet from his parents, and a mysterious exhibit, aptly named, The Museum of Everything.

And you said this. “Here We Are, of all my books, seems the most relevant for the world’s current reality, as it began as a sort of comedic routine in pointing out the obvious. But slowly, it dawned on me, the importance of re-remembering the basic principles of what it is to be alive on this earth, and appreciate it right now.” So I’m wondering, what motivated that re-remembering?

Oliver Jeffers:
The book Here We Are is the first book I’ve ever made that’s not a story, it’s a set of observations. It’s quite literally coming home from the hospital, with a two-day-old baby, and figuring out, what do we do now, figuring out how to introduce him to the world. As somebody who’s an over talker and oversharer, I just began narrating everything I saw around me, thinking it was really funny.

It was like, “Welcome home, son. This is your front door to the apartment that you live in, the apartment is one house in a bigger building. Buildings are these things that we make.” And really, just entertaining myself by pointing out all the things that he could see. And around that time, the world was angrier and scared than usual.

Now, maybe I was seeing it from the different perspective of being a parent for the first time, so suddenly aware of the world that he’s walking into, and that I’m responsible, really and truly for the first time, for somebody other than myself.

But in 2015, when he was born, that was when the Brexit vote was happening in the UK, and that was very divisive. And it was the first year that Trump was beginning to run for election here. Everything seemed polarized, and there was a lot of anger and blame and division, and the consensus was that everything is falling, sliding backwards somehow.

As I was explaining the world to him, I wanted to change the way in which I was explaining it. I didn’t feel that it was going to be, even though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I was like, “I want to tell you the good things before we get to this. There’s night and there’s day. This is the only place in the universe where people live. There are people, and people come in all shape, sizes and colors, and we may all look different, act different and sound different, but don’t be fooled, we’re all people.”

And just the simple truths, that I’m sort of trying to remind him of the beauty of what it is to be alive, here and now.

As I was writing him this letter, it occurred to me that maybe other people would benefit from re-remembering these things that I was re-remembering. So it became the book, Here We Are, which is this, it’s almost a guidebook for new arrivals on Earth.

Debbie Millman:
Or for re-remembering what is important.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or for re-remembering. The editor at the time joked, he said, “This is a book for new people, new parents, and misplaced adults.”

Debbie Millman:
How did you translate that to a film?

Oliver Jeffers:
Actually, with difficulty. Because, so Apple TV wanted to do an adaptation of it, as a half hour short. Because there’s no story in the book, they were saying, “that this is going to be an educational film, if we just stick with this list of observations.” So we were looking for a way in, we were looking for a narrative.
Philip Hunt, who was the director at Studio AKA, heard me give the anecdote of giving my son the tour of the apartment, and then, the, “Wow, he really knows nothing.” And then, that changing to, “He really knows nothing. We’re going to have to teach him everything.” And that became a bit of the idea of the story.

But the theme and the emotional heart of the story came from this idea of the book trying to point to a true north for people who felt lost. So in the endpapers of the book, there is that, “This is how you find your way home. This is north.”

They decided, “That’s what we can make the arc of the film about. Let’s take this, not as a baby, but age him seven years, and have it be this one day, where it’s about this idea of truly understanding the magnitude of everything, feeling lost by it, but using that as an opportunity to bring it back to a simple core truth.”

Debbie Millman:
And a way forward.

Oliver Jeffers:
And a way forward, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Which, I think, is the common denominator between both the book and the film. The film is narrated by Meryl Streep, and includes the voices of Chris O’Dowd, Ruth Negga, Jacob Tremblay. What was it like to see and hear your ideas come to life in this way?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, bizarre. I was secretly hoping I’d be cast. No, I’m joking. Chris O’Dowd was my idea, and whenever he said yes, I was like that, “It’s perfect.” He’s just got that right amount of charm and humor.

Of course, Meryl Streep as Mother Earth, it was pretty perfect. That was a beautiful moment. It was, of course, supposed to get a big premiere in California, but that happened right in the middle of-

Debbie Millman:
COVID.

Oliver Jeffers:
COVID, so that got pulled.

Debbie Millman:
But you did win an Emmy, so you’re on your way to an EGOT. The last project before we talk about your current book is the poster you worked on with Darren Aronofsky for his film, The Whale.

I’d love to talk to you about that, and get an understanding about how that came to be. The poster that you made was quite different than the film that was used in mass production, far more beautiful, far more subtle. Just was wondering about your approach to doing that project.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, that came from a conversation with Darren. Darren kindly agreed to come over to Belfast speak at this festival I was putting around this giant sculpture project of Earth’s place in the solar system, and talking about using the microcosm, as a way to look at the microcosm.

He spoke brilliantly, and we were hanging out, and I was showing him around Belfast, and he was saying about this new project, and we talked about the idea of doing a piece of art for it, and we talked about the film, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was like, “I think I have an idea, right off the bat.”

I sketched it out, and it was like, “I love this.” The premise of the film is a girl who’s reconnecting with her father, who is close in the last week of his life, and he’s obese, and I can’t remember, like 600 pounds, when they can’t really leave his apartment, but there’s this sort of sad story about them trying to reconnect. And it’s called The Whale.

Now, of course, the whale is not a reference to him. But it’s more of a reference to Moby Dick, which is a story that he keeps reading over and over and over again.

And I had just this immediate flash of a concept, which is paint the surface of the sea, and then, below the sea, you see this sofa with this whale sitting in it, that’s got human legs, on a breathing machine, and then, this girl in a scuba outfit who is there, but distant. It’s like, she’s come from one world into his world, but there’s still this distance between them.

Debbie Millman:
But she’s also trying to communicate with him, to try to find a way in. How was the work utilized in the making of the film, and in the promotion.

Oliver Jeffers:
It was used as promotion afterwards. It was a limited edition print that went out. Actually, when I got to see the film for the first time at the premier, so not before, and that really, then, the penny sort of dropped about what the film was about. It was like, “Wow, this is kind of even more apt, than not.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I saw a very early screening. And I can tell you, that when I first saw your poster, I was astounded, how you could see into the film, without even having seen the film?

Oliver Jeffers:
But maybe that was, rather than having seen the film, I talked to Darren. So we didn’t talk about the film, per se, but we talked about the idea and the themes and the emotions of the film. Almost without that excess information, it allowed me to see what I wasn’t supposed to do.

Debbie Millman:
You just published your brand new book, Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. I have one big question for you about this.

Oliver, you’ve sold over 15 million children’s books. What made you decide to write one targeted to people of all ages?

Oliver Jeffers:
I never set off to do anything, thinking, “Here’s who this is for,” and I’m doing this, because I think, as I say, “people will like it, and this is going to hit the current trend or market or anything.”

It’s the second book that I’ve made that’s not a story, it’s a list of observations. Though, in thinking now about it, those observations started 45 years ago. They really had started to take root over the last 15 years, when I moved from Northern Ireland to New York, and then, since moving back from New York to Northern Ireland, where I’m part-time based now, that’s when I started actively trying to take these patterns that I could see that were rippling out in society in many ways, and look at them from a long enough lens view, to make sense of them somehow.

So a lot of the work that I do is about perspective. It’s about taking a step back, and looking at something from far away, or back through time, rather than just the microcosm of this moment in this time.

So the “Our Place in Space” sculpture project that I was referencing a second ago, it was about human conflict where it, in Northern Ireland, we have been at that conflict culturally, less violently over the last few years. But the Belfast that I grew up in was a very violent place, and it was very divided between an us-them mentality between Catholics and Protestants.

And then, moving to New York, and trying to explain to well-educated people that, “No, actually, I’m not from Ireland, it’s Northern Ireland, which is a different country,” and people really not knowing or understanding, and truth that I learned, was not really caring, either.

It just made me look back at home in a different way, and it just seemed like a tragic, poignant waste of time and energy, all of this, what was all consuming, in terms of identity. When I was making Here We Are, a big part of that book was if you’re giving a human being a tour of our planet, you start off with location.

So I started looking at Earth’s place in space, and I was reading about how astronauts speak about looking at Earth from a distance, and came across the overview effect. I could see that the way I was describing Northern Ireland, from the distance of New York, was not unlike the way that astronauts were describing looking at the earth from the Moon, where there’s some of those famous quotes like, “It makes you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, and drag him a quarter of a million miles away, and say, ‘Look at that.'”

This idea of the separation, of these manmade borders, these lines, these stories that we’ve constructed, that really keep each other apart, it just seems like not the best use of our time. When I then moved back to Northern Ireland from here, I was quite really shocked, watching the 2020 election campaign, and how even more brutal it was becoming, and could suddenly see, because I was in Belfast at that point, that it felt like the USA was where Northern Ireland was in the 1970s, where one group’s identity was defined by the existence of somebody else, by the existence of a perceived enemy.

That really got me thinking about, “Well, why do people think like that? In Northern Ireland, why do we do what we do? What is it people actually truly want?” And asking those questions, “What is it that people truly want,” why do we go against our own best interest, time and time again? And at that point, it was impossible to have a conversation about US politics that was not just explosively conflictual. And.
I’ve been all around the USA on book tours, and I’ve met all sorts of people, and I’ve sort of joked, that I was like, “I’ve never really met anybody who wants to be an asshole.” There’s just people who double down on a misunderstanding that happened about how they have been perceived. And it was like, “Can I ask a question, in a sincere enough way, that people will answer it in a non-defensive way?”

So I put up the social media post, saying, “Calling all Republicans, can you please,” because I know many Republicans that who, have basically I believe the same set of values that I do, “Why is this becoming so polarized? Please explain to me the world that you want, without mentioning anything you don’t want.”
Because, in these conversations, people just tend to go towards what they don’t want, in a negative sense.

We all begin with this sense of defensiveness and negativity. So it’s preemptive, that when somebody speaks to you from the other perspective, that it’s an attack. How could you mitigate that, and have a genuine conversation?

So, when trying to really truly understand, I asked people on the other side of the political spectrum to me, to describe the word that they do want, rather than the word they don’t. And the discourse that happened afterwards proved, I think, my gut intuition that we’re all just so busy trying to be understood, that we forget to try and understand.

And it led to the creation of the poem at the end of Begin Again. And then, in taking that into consideration about, a lot of the issues that draw most people’s time and attention are actually massive distractions away from what we should be worrying about, which is making sure that life can continue to survive on this planet. So, streaming all of these different thoughts and experiences that I’ve had, and observations that I’ve made about the stories that people tell themselves, led to Begin Again.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how one of the goals in creating Begin Again was to create a single narrative about who we are, in an effort to collaborate and address the many crises we are facing. Do you think it’s possible to have a single narrative about who we are now?

Oliver Jeffers:
To answer that question, think about the way people say that New York City is, it’s a great melting pot. That’s not true. Because that would imply homogenization, that everybody’s the same. New York is a giant salad. It’s made up of all different ingredients, but it works together, somehow.

That’s more what I mean about this. It’s almost the same set of goals, morals, and values of what we’re being driven towards. Now, the way in which I think a lot of this has happened, is that things have just accelerated so massively, so quickly, that we can’t really keep up with things anymore. This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures really, truly.

And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. It’s a bombardment, and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

And because we’re coming out of this period of, I suppose, consumerism, where it’s all just about, “Stuff will make you happy.” We’re learning now, and we see now, that stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s actually other people that make you happy.

And that can, I think, be one of the stories that we can all rally around, is then, the things that people do want, what came out of that social media post, which sort of ended up in the poem, was that it’s all human beings want safety. They want community, they want dignity, and they want purpose. And everything else is just leveraged towards that.

Those should be accomplishable, that should be accomplishable. I think we can all agree that we want life on Earth to continue, and to exist, and that is the single story that we should get behind, instead of where we are now.

And this is the one thing that I learned about in Northern Ireland, trying to apply why people do go against their own best interests is, we have somehow got to a point where being right is the most important thing. We prioritize being right over wrong more than anything else.

But if we replace the words “right” and “wrong” in any conflict or debate with “better” and “worse,” it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen. And it’s not, then, about ego or self, or the past, or justifying the past. It’s about, “Well, what do we do now? How do we make this better?”

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like most about Begin Again is the notion that, in order for us to really truly survive and thrive, is to become part of the same powerful plot. What do you envision that powerful plot being?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I envision that powerful plot being, so we started off as villages, and then we grew to towns, and then to cities, and then nations. And maybe the next natural progression is land.

I have multiple passports, which I probably shouldn’t advertise. People ask me where I’m from, and it was like, the easiest answer was, “I’m a citizen of planet Earth, man.”

And that is, again, sort of easy and idealistic to say. But that one, same powerful plot, I think, is the awareness that we feel better, when we know we matter and we fit in. So it’s a return to the sense of community.

A little anecdote I’ve been telling about the real snap of that, the inception of the moment of Begin Again is, when I was back in Northern Ireland, right before lockdown hit there, but you could see it was coming. I got talking to this old lady waiting to cross the road, with a couple of big bags of shopping, and I asked her, “Oh, you’re getting ready for the lockdown?” And she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do you think it’s going to last for a long time?” She said, “You know, I think it is. Because for awhile, I thought this was going to remind me of the war,” she said. She was around during World War II, and Belfast was heavily bombed in World War II, because we made all the planes and the ships for the British Army.

She goes, “I thought this was going to remind me of back in the war, but it’s not. Because back then, we all tried to see how we could help. But look around, everybody’s just trying to see what they can get away with.”
How do we return back to that sense of, “How can I help?” Or as Nicole Stott, the astronaut says, “How can we go from being passengers on this spaceship earth to being its only crew?”

Debbie Millman:
What do you see as the difference between being a passenger and part of the crew?

Oliver Jeffers:
“What’s in it for me?” Versus, “How can I help? I have a job to do here,” versus, “I’m here to tick. This is all from my convenience.”

Debbie Millman:
So what can everyone do to make everything better for everyone else?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think we have to remember the importance of community.

Debbie Millman:
You conclude the book with a beautiful piece of poetry, and I’m wondering if you can share that with us today.

Oliver Jeffers:
I will happily share that, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And give us maybe a little bit of backstory, as to how you arrived at this part of the book.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, it was in the deep question asking of a lot of people, everywhere I went, what they actually wanted, how they felt now, versus how they wanted to fail. This real sense of understanding is that we are all collectively chasing the wrong things.

We’re using the wrong measuring stick to value success. And in remembering that we as animals are actually much more simple creatures than we give ourselves credit for. So it’s called The Heart of It.
When you dig deep enough, by asking the why behind the why enough times, you come to a truth at the heart of it. That all people, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what they believe, just want the same things. A den, a pack, position, and direction.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers’ latest book is Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. You can find out about all the other things he’s been up to on his website, oliverjeffers.com.
This is the eighteenth year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.
I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Best of Design Matters: Oliver Jeffers appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Country folk, pop, blues, Americana. Call it what you will, and you still won’t capture the moving, memorable music of Rosanne Cash. One of the country’s preeminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Rosanne is also an author of four books, including the best-selling memoir, Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. She’s one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. And in 2021, Rosanne was the first female composer to receive the McDowell Medal awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She joins me today to talk about her music, her writing, her 45-year career and the 30th-anniversary re-release of her album, The Wheel. Rosanne Cash, welcome to Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Hi Debbie. Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Rosanne, is it true that at one point growing up you had a pet monkey?

Rosanne Cash:
I didn’t have a pet monkey and my mother did, and I don’t know what she was thinking and it still creeps me out that she did.

Debbie Millman:
So it was yours by proxy then?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, no, not even. I kept my distance. That is the first time anyone has ever asked me that question, so kudos.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You were born in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you and your three sisters moved to Encino, California after your parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Havenhurst Avenue when you were three years old. Do you have any memory of what that house was like?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, we bought Johnny Carson’s house. My mother always told this story, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, that Mrs. Carson left a pie in the oven. It’s possible.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Rosanne Cash:
Possibly true. I do remember the house. I remember one day coming into the living room and seeing a film crew in our house. There was this show called Here’s Hollywood, and they had come to interview my dad, my mom, and at home, come see how he lives at home, and I remember how much I resented having this television crew in our house and thus began a lifelong suspicion of journalists.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s not where I thought you were going to go with that.

Rosanne Cash:
The press company accepted.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I know it also made you skeptical of fame and the lack of privacy that it really caused your family, especially your mother.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, that’s true, and that’s really the takeaway from that story about the television crew is that I just hated the intrusion. I hated opening our private life and so did my mother. My mother was incredibly private and I had no illusions about fame that I knew it wasn’t glamorous, that it didn’t make you happy, that it didn’t fulfill all your needs as a human being, and it was bone-crushing work. I saw my dad beyond exhausted. And yeah, so I’ve always had a very real understanding of what fame means and how destructive it could be.

Debbie Millman:
In your beautiful memoir, Composed, you described your earliest memory and you wrote this, “My earliest memory, perhaps the earliest possible flawed template for my life dates to when I was around two years old, we were visiting my mother’s parents in San Antonio and my grandfather, Tom, the bespeckled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, ‘Look at the birds Rosanne,’ and I thought to myself with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture, ‘Oh, am I supposed to pretend to be excited? I’m supposed to act like a child.’ And so I did. I squealed the obligingly feigned alarm at the gathering birds and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually a compelling need to please people can be deadly.” That paragraph says so much about who you were, who you are. Have you gotten better with the compulsion to be a people pleaser?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yeah. That’s one of the beauties of age, isn’t it? You just don’t give a what people think of you at some point. There’s an urgency that goes along with aging that you have more to say, less time to say it and trying to please people by your work or the way you live or the way you speak or who you are, how you look, what shoes you wear, what songs you sing, that all of that is distraction from the real work and the truth of being that you have little time left to live and be, and I am aware of that every day now. It moves me to tears to think about it, the sense of urgency that overcomes me sometimes. Bob Dylan said it about performing that people-pleasing was death for an artist. You get outside yourself, you get self-conscious. You try to moderate or twist or define or truncate who you are and what you do, and then the world doesn’t have you.

Debbie Millman:
I was really struck in your early years how much you needed to be the adult. One of the things that really struck me was the creation of imaginary friends that you… A lot of children have imaginary friends. I had one named Goonie, but she was a little girl like me, and I insisted that she have a table setting at the kitchen table and so forth, but yours were adults, which is really, really unusual and I’m wondering if you can talk about what kind of imaginary adult friends you made at the time.

Rosanne Cash:
I’ve wondered about that too why my imaginary friends were adults, and I’ve talked about this with various therapists over the years, and I think it’s because there was a lot of chaos in my life and in my parents’ marriage and my dad on the road and using drugs, and my mother just beside herself with fear and grief and worry and anxiety and anger, and I did a really smart thing. I created adults who were perfect, who saw who I was and loved me as I was and were protective. One of them I still have with me.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
I still talk to her once in a while.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to not ask you about her only because I know that you’ve been reticent about talking to them at all, talking about them at all rather.

Rosanne Cash:
I have. I have. I don’t tell people their names. I don’t like talking about them.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I totally respect that. You ended up at that time needing to be more of an adult in your family. You were the person your three sisters turned to in times of trouble, ultimately became the child who had to pretend not to be a child. So much so that you began to hate the very word child. And I also was struck by the fact that you never cried, a fact at the time that you took great pride in. How did you manage through this time?

Rosanne Cash:
So my mom was not fully present. My mom had some really wonderful qualities. I learned discipline from her, her domestic skills and arts were so refined and beautiful, president of her garden club, dozens and dozens of close friends. But during that time when I was young and my dad was on the road and their marriage was falling apart, my mom was out of her mind, out of her body and often literally hysterical. And I had three younger sisters and I took it upon myself to be an adult. And if my mom was taking up all the emotional space, there wasn’t much room for me to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
I think that that’s maybe a common thing for children who have a parent who’s off the rails. And my other parent was, at that time was a drug addict and he was gone a lot. So my family is well known, but it’s not that different from other families who the addiction is the hub of the wheel.

Debbie Millman:
Did you know your dad was a drug addict at that time? You were so young.

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, no, no. People didn’t talk to children about that. I don’t even think my mother understood it. There just wasn’t the consciousness about it as there is today.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read another short excerpt from another book that you wrote, your book, Bodies of Water, and you say this about your childhood. “The summer I turned 11, I felt too big for my body, too small for my heart, confused by the secrets and fears that permeated the very atoms of the air inside my home, and far too old from my age.” You go on to write, “When I was 11, I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn’t come true, I stopped talking to people who didn’t listen. I lost hope and retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself, my own particular jewels under lock and key.”

Rosanne Cash:
I forgot I wrote that.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by in reading that was the notion that your strange self needed to be protected. And in some ways that gave me a lot of hope in thinking about who you became, that you didn’t disappear that person, you just hid her under lock and key.

Rosanne Cash:
Definitely. And she’s the one who’s the artist and needs protection. And as I felt safer as I grew older then she’s the source of creativity.

Debbie Millman:
I love that you referred to this strange part of yourself as jewels.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, yeah. I had this image of myself, that strange little self in, she had a secret cave and in the cave where all the records she wanted and all the books and access to all of these wonderful things, and it was private and I could lock myself away and nobody could say a thing to me. Sometimes I still wish I had that space to go to. Well, I do in my mind, because that’s only place it ever was.

Debbie Millman:
I’m glad you protected it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 12 years old, your parents split up and your dad moved to Tennessee. You and the rest of the family moved to Ventura to a house you’ve described as a sixties fantasy come to life. And you said that that, with that move, someone opened up all the windows and let the air and light inside your life. For most children, young people, divorce is really quite traumatic. It seemed like that began a part of your life that actually improved.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it did. We had been living on the top of this mountain top alone, no children around, nothing around except dry brush canyons and rattlesnakes, and it was very solitary. It was the worst part of my mom’s life and the worst part of her craziness. And I think the divorce, I remember thinking maybe now both of them can be happy. It was a relief. It’s like, somewhere I knew this was not going to work and they had destinies elsewhere separate from each other. And so moving to near the ocean, which the ocean is like a religion to me, so moving near the ocean, my dad cleans up. They both have new partners. I was then on the verge of being a teenager and was discovering so much music and poetry and books, all of those things I love so much. So yeah, it was like the light came in. It was fantastic.

Debbie Millman:
You went to high school at St. Bonaventure in Ventura and wore your Catholic uniform very short, which I love you, and a small group of classmates who were a little left of center called yourselves, the Anarchy Society. And at that point you thought you’d become a poet. What kind of poetry were you writing?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, Debbie so bad. Just beyond, it should be burned in a bonfire with rituals so that nothing ever comes back from it. It was just terrible. But at one point, this is so odd, but I got a letter from this woman a few years ago and she said, “I was your babysitter when your mom went out of town and you were in your young teens.” And she said, “And you asked me, how do you put poems to music?” And I thought to myself, why in the hell would I ask a random babysitter when I had a great songwriter as a parent? But I remember I read a lot of poetry then, I wrote poetry, and then in my late teens I learned to play guitar and I started putting it together.

Debbie Millman:
At the time you also considered becoming an archaeologist or going to medical school, and I know you’ve had a lifelong interest in science and physics, but what compelled you to think about archaeology or medicine?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I love science. I love thinking about what neurons do and the plasticity of the brain and all of that, and I love history so much, and I thought, Oh God, it would be so great to live in a kibbutz and dig up ancient artifacts. And I actually took a summer course in anthropology at the local college, and I’m still really interested in history and science. It’s source of great curiosity and actually quantum physics as well now. The poetry in theoretical physics is so beautiful, dark matter, the event horizon, mutual attraction.

Debbie Millman:
Quantum entanglement.

Rosanne Cash:
Entanglement. Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about dreams. Over the course of your life you’ve had a number of significant dreams that you’ve written about. You also shared that Carl Jung had stated that a person might have five big dreams in their lives, and that dreams that provoke a shift in real consciousness. And I believe your first one occurred when you were 13 where you were playing cards with your mother and your grandmother in a small house. You were old in the dream and aware that your life was nearly over. Can you talk about that dream and how it impacted you and your thinking about yourself at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
It was so profound to me, an experience that it seems reductive to even call it a dream, but I was asleep and this vision came that I was old as you said, and that I was at the end of my life and I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother, and we were just mechanically putting the cards down on the table, and I realized that I had done that my whole life, just putting the cards down one after the other, and we weren’t really speaking. There was no connection, just playing the cards. And I woke up in a sweat and it frightened me so badly and I realized that you had to make a choice to be awake in your life. And that kind of inertia and lack of awareness could creep upon you without you knowing it.
And I made this vow to myself in the bed as I woke up, I said, I will never be a card player. And I’ve referred to that dream in myself, thought of it so many times over the decades, and I even started once writing a story called The Card Players about it. Yeah, it’s been a guiding light that dream. If Carl Jung is right and you have five big dreams, that was my first one.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your second one in a little bit, but how many of those five do you think you’ve had?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I know of two others, so maybe I’ve had three. Have you had any?

Debbie Millman:
Well, ever since I read that, I’ve been thinking about it and I had one dream when I was in fifth grade as my life was falling apart, as my parents had gotten divorced, my mother got remarried and married a criminal and a bit of a monster, and I had this dream that I was looking out my back bedroom window and saw a pool party and knew that I was invited and was worried that I was late, and I went to the pool and I jumped in and everybody was saying, don’t cross that line, which was one of the buoys that you see in a pool or in a lake, and I wanted to. I went under the line and started drowning. At that moment in my dream, I was back in my room and the walls were cracking. I felt like I was being strangled to death by the water in this whirlpool. I don’t think I’ve ever told this dream to anybody by the way.

Rosanne Cash:
Really? But it stayed with you your entire life since-

Debbie Millman:
It stayed with me my entire life and in the very, very, very first diary that I ever wrote, I wrote about it that I’d had this dream, and that’s also why I am able to remember it, I think pretty accurately. I’m not remembering a memory of it. I’m remembering what I wrote about it at the time, which was vivid, and I think I was aware in that dream of my life about to fall apart. Up until that point, it was difficult but not unbearable, and for the next four years it became unbearable, and I think that was my higher self preparing me, I think, without my younger self then knowing it.

Rosanne Cash:
I would definitely call that a big dream.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. But I don’t know that I’ve had, and I’ve really been thinking about it because it’s come up in so much of your work that I’ve read, I’ve been thinking, what are the other big dreams? I think most of my other dreams are more conscious and more aspirational than psychological.

Rosanne Cash:
And organizing your experiences. Yeah. Another big dream I had is that I dreamed about my husband before I met him.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
That one I don’t know about. Tell me.

Rosanne Cash:
I was sitting with him at the bottom of the ocean and I felt this profound, pure love. I looked at him at the bottom of the ocean where we were sitting together, and it was this overwhelming feeling that I had never experienced before of complete connection with another human being and how pure that love was. And I could see his eyes and his hair and it was him. I woke up and I thought, I want to feel like that in my life. And then it wasn’t long after that I met him. And it hit me the second I saw him, that’s the man who was in my dream. And then I thought, my life is going to get so complicated.

Debbie Millman:
And it did. It did. I want to go to that-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh God.

Debbie Millman:
… that part, but I do want to talk a little bit more about your origin story because the day after you graduated high school, your father took you on tour with him, and that’s when you learned how to play guitar. You learned from your stepmother, June Carter Cash. You learned from her sister Helen, from Mother Mabel Carter, as well as Carl Perkins, all of whom you were on the road with your father at the time with. Did learning to play music come as easily to you as writing poetry?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, for my skillset, yes. I’m not a great guitarist, a great technical musician, but it did feel incredibly natural to learn those, particularly those Appalachian ballads, the first songs I learned to play on guitar, it just made sense to me. I could see the shape of the chord changes. So that part came naturally to me. Now, I’m not a natural musician like my husband and my son are, who can hear very sophisticated chord voicings and chord progressions, and who have really advanced facility on a lot of different instruments. I don’t have that. I’m jealous of it, but the part that I do have is very natural.

Debbie Millman:
It was at that time in your life that you discovered your passion for songwriting, that you’ve talked about remaining undiminished to this day and led you into your life as a writer and a singer and into really your family’s vocation. Did you struggle at that time with the idea of following in the footsteps of your family?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And having to measure up.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I didn’t want to be in the shadow. I didn’t want to invite comparisons. I didn’t want the life. I knew what the life was like. I didn’t need that much attention. I was a shy person. I thought I would write songs purely for other people, and I was deeply passionate about that and about that career path. But I wrote songs, made demos of the songs, and I was in Germany at Christmas party with my friend who worked at Ariola Records, and she played it, my tape for the head of the label, and they wanted to sign me to make an album. And I was staying with her and I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. And she finally dragged me to a doctor and she said, “What’s wrong with her?” And he said, he talks to me for a while and he said, “She’s depressed.”

I was, I was trying to make a decision, did I want to do this in my life? I knew if I made an album, I knew everything that came with it. Then you toured, you had a public life, you had to figure out how to keep your private life safe, all of that. And then I decided to do it. I decided to make the record. That’s not to say that my life as a performer has been from by default because I did choose it, but it was not an easy choice.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do it?

Rosanne Cash:
Maybe the connection. I wanted to feel my songs connect with people. I knew there was something about my voice that was good. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it, but I knew that the tonal quality of it was pleasing and that there may be something I could do with that. But then I spent years feeling like performing was about being judged, that you went on stage so people could pick you apart and judge you. And then I came to understand that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
I interviewed a designer named Bob Gill, very, very famous designer, very famous in the sixties and the seventies especially. And after I interviewed him, I went and saw him speak somewhere and the audience wasn’t quite laughing at his jokes and he said, “What are you? An audience or a jury?”

Rosanne Cash:
Well, good.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you wrote your first good song in 1978. You were 20 years old and you were in, I think the same friend who sent your music to Ariola, Renata Damm’s apartment in Germany, and it was titled, “This Has Happened Before,” and you’ve said this about the song. “It was a young woman’s song, tentative and too self-referential, too navel-gazing, but not to an extreme that would make you squirm. It’s well constructed, painstaking even, and I could hear the hard work in it. I was very proud when I finished that song, and it was the first time I felt like a real songwriter.” And this is a question that I ask almost every songwriter that I’ve ever interviewed. Can you talk about what happens to you when you’re writing a song? Where does a song come from?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, God. A song comes from a mystery. There’s a mystery about songwriting that if you could pin it down and say what it was, then it wouldn’t be songwriting anymore. It comes from some creative source that’s undefinable like all creative work, I think, and to tap into that and get the thrill of that energy of being inside it and having it inside of you, that’s the ultimate. I’m sure you know it in your own work too. It’s like you know when it’s jagged and troubling and then you know when suddenly it opens up and that you feel this rush of it being right, everything’s moving as it should. And writing a song, sometimes in the beginning I’ll have that burst of inspiration and I see the full potential of the song, even though I haven’t written it yet. Then I start working and then it’s drudgery. It’s like painstaking, as you said, finding the right line, finding the right word, the chord progression, turning that line over in your hand like Natalie Goldberg said, “Turning it over in your hand like a rock until it’s smooth.”

Then all of the doubt and self-annihilation, like, why am I doing this? This is shit. What made me think I could become a songwriter, Bob Dylan, why should I bother Bob Dylan at all? And if you can just put that aside, the internal critic long enough that you can then get home with the song, get to the end of it and complete and then edit. And there are some songs that the thrill of it all opening up has been longer than the drudgery part and others where the reverse was true.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how your friend in songwriting mentor, John Stewart, told you that we’re all just radios hoping to pick up each other’s signals and have stated that you’ve spent your whole life trying to clear the static. How do you do that?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, boy. It’s a daily process, isn’t it? I know what frees me up, solitude, the ocean, going to look at visual art, talking with someone I really respect, who’s also an artist, going to a new place, nature. Yeah. There are a lot of things that clear the static.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album came about because your friend gave your songs to a record company in Germany. And I love that despite having a parent who was one of the most famous singer-songwriters in the world, you were recommended to your first record label by a friend in Munich.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I also read that you wanted to change your name because you didn’t want to be associated or think that your success or any success that came was because of any family favor.

Rosanne Cash:
I did think about changing my name to Rosanne Rivers, which is my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and I just mentioned that to my dad that I was thinking about changing my name and he didn’t say anything. And then when I made my first album under my own name, he said, “I’m so glad you did that.” It would’ve hurt him. And he’s told me that, that he would’ve been hurt by that. And I see why now. I’m proud of my legacy. There’s no reason to deny it, but as a young person in her early twenties, I was just floundering. How do I carve something out for myself?

Debbie Millman:
Well, while you were making your first record, a record producer named Bernie Von Ficht had wanted you to record a song called “Lucky,” and despite his plea, you refused. He went on to give it to another artist who ended up having an enormous hit with it. And you’ve said that you wouldn’t have recorded the song even if you had known it would sell triple platinum because you knew you’d have to sing it for the rest of your life.

Rosanne Cash:
It’s so true.

Debbie Millman:
Were you always that certain of what you wanted to record?

Rosanne Cash:
Oddly-

Debbie Millman:
But where did that strength come from?

Rosanne Cash:
I don’t know, but oddly, yes. From a really young age, I had this right or wrong, this powerful sense of what song was right for me, and I betrayed myself a couple of times when someone twisted my arm, but not that often. I don’t know where it came because early on that would’ve just been pure hubris because I didn’t know anything yet except I knew that. I don’t know how I knew it. Maybe it was because of everything I listened to from early childhood on. Maybe it was just I was always a very determined, ambitious person. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
How were you managing the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, performing for the public and balancing that with your distaste for fame and attention?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I had a lot of anxiety, so much anxiety and trying to learn how to balance it, wanting to keep my private life and working really hard to do that. Learning how to work with a band, I was a neophyte, was trying to figure it out, and I didn’t have much confidence as a performer. I was developing a lot of confidence as a songwriter, but not so much as a performer.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album was only distributed in Europe and is now a collector’s item?

Rosanne Cash:
I hope not.

Debbie Millman:
It is going for quite a lot of money on eBay. When you came back to the US, your album Seven Year Ache was a huge hit and the song itself reached number one in the country charts the week of your 25th birthday even crossed over into the pop charts where it reached number 22. Two more number-one singles followed from it, “Blue Moon with Heartache,” and “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train.” Now, despite the recognition and the accolades, you said that during that entire period, you felt a constant slow burn of panic.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I did.

Debbie Millman:
What was your family thinking at this time? What did your mother and father think about what you were doing and your stepmother? And were they helping you manage through that panic? Did you share that with them?

Rosanne Cash:
No, I didn’t share it with them. I’ve not been good about that through my life of asking for help. I wish I had actually, my dad could have helped me more. Well, I had a baby at 24, and then this big record at 25, it got to number one on my 25 birthday, and I was just terrified. I was panicked as a new mother. I was panicked that I was becoming famous, and yet Debbie, there was something so, I don’t want to say preordained because that sounds very grand, but it seemed like, Oh yeah, this was always going to happen. This is what was meant to happen. Deal with it.

Debbie Millman:
By the time you released the album Rhythm and Romance in 1985, you were sure you were never going to set foot in a recording studio again.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I had a miserable experience making that album.

Debbie Millman:
Is that your least favorite album?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, probably because it was so hard making it, and it was right in a period in the eighties where we just overused all kinds of layered sounds, synthesizer sounds. It’s probably coming back and being trendy now. Everybody loves what’s going on in the eighties, but it was three producers. I made it in New York, LA and Nashville. I started on April 16th of one year, and it finished on April 15th of the following year. There was an executive producer I didn’t get along with, and we literally had yelling fights in the studio. It was just painful all the way around, and at the end of it, I said, “I’m never making another record.” And then I started getting notices from my record label, from the lawyers that I was in breach of contract that I owed them an album, I owed them an album. It kept coming, and I would just tear up the letters and throw them away.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering what changed your mind.

Rosanne Cash:
Rodney Crowell changed my mind.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Your first husband, producer of many of your early albums. One thing that I read as you were beginning to record King’s Record Shop, your next album, was that you read an interview with Linda Ronstadt wherein she stated that in committing to artistic growth, you had to refine your skills to support your instincts.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that made such a deep impression on you that you clipped the article to save it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Did that impact how you were approaching King’s Record Shop?

Rosanne Cash:
It did. Yeah. I put that in my wallet. I cut it out and put it in my wallet, and I thought, anything that’s fraudulent up to this point, anyway I’ve been a dilettante, anyway I’ve just been posting or being cavalier about my work, it has to stop now. I kept that in the forefront, and I remember it being hard. It was like, now you know if you’re on your phone and there’s something really interesting about somebody’s talking to you and trying to get your attention and you keep pulling away and looking at the person who’s talking to you, but going back to your phone, which is an awful thing to do, by the way, that’s what it felt like when I was trying to pull myself into a deeper relationship with my own work.

Debbie Millman:
And yet King’s Record Shop had four number one singles, which was a first for a woman in the industry.

Rosanne Cash:
Yep, it was.

Debbie Millman:
Did that success come with any pressure to continue doing the same kind of work? The opposite of what Linda Ronstadt was recommending?

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely. The guys at the label, they see that and they’re like, okay, go do that again. It was enormously successful.

Debbie Millman:
Especially if this was the contracted record.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, just go do that again. Deliver it to us. So I had a lot of leverage with them, and I was starting to write some very dark songs. It was right at the beginning of when my marriage was falling apart, but I had a lot of leverage because of the success of King’s Record Shop. So I went to the label and I said, I want to produce the next record myself, and I want a lot of money. And they said okay to both. So I got a lot of money. I went in the studio with these dark little songs, hired the band, hired a great engineer, Roger Nichols, recorded it analog, and everybody was going digital at that point, but we recorded analog, and I made this album that I thought was the truest reflection of who I was up to that point, and the label didn’t want it.

Debbie Millman:
I know, I’ve listened to it so many times in prep for this interview as well as listening to it when it first came out.

Rosanne Cash:
Interiors.

Debbie Millman:
Interiors, yes. And it’s so interesting. So many people talked about it as your divorce record, but you weren’t divorced yet, so it was this, as you would put it, postcard to the future. I see it as a departure record-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… and a conduit to a new way of making music. That felt like almost like the necessary stop to clear everything out to then begin again.

Rosanne Cash:
You’re absolutely right. It was a turnstile. It was a-

Debbie Millman:
Turnstile, yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
… and it was a reset, and it was the culmination of pulling my face away from the phone, to use that metaphor again. It was like, okay, I’ve committed to this deeper relationship to refining my skills so I can support these instincts, as Linda said.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the album, despite the record executive’s response, the album was nominated for a Grammy.

Rosanne Cash:
It was.

Debbie Millman:
You Lost to John Prine, so basically you didn’t lose.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s so true. In fact, I would’ve been embarrassed if I had won against John Prine.

Debbie Millman:
How do you view that work now? Because at the time, you thought it was your best work to date. The record company didn’t think so. They didn’t support it, so it didn’t sell as well because it wasn’t supported, not because it wasn’t very good. Obviously it was nominated for a Grammy. How do you view that work now all these years later?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I should say I was signed to the country division of Columbia then, and it was nominated in the folk category, so the wider industry got it. They knew it wasn’t a country record. And the country division of my label knew it wasn’t a country record, which is why they didn’t want to do anything with it. But people outside of that got it, and then they put it in the right category for the Grammys. So how do I view it now? I view it as the moment my life changed. I view it as the moment that I recommitted and some of the songs are a little navel-gazing. I wish I had sung certain things better. I wish I had arranged it. I wish I had been a more deft producer. All of those things, you can look back at your work and go, Oh, I could have done that better, but it’s an accurate reflection of the moment, except for one thing.

Debbie Millman:
What?

Rosanne Cash:
There’s one song on that record that makes me cringe, and it wasn’t my fault. Well, it was my fault because I let it on the record, but when I finished the album, I played it for Rodney who hadn’t heard it in the studio at all, and he loved it, and he said, “But it’s not finished. You need one more song. You need something that’s really up-tempo. This is a really dark ballad kind of record.” I was devastated when he said that, and he says, “No, come on. Just try write this song with me.” And so we wrote this song called “Real Woman,” and I was not interested, not attached to this song, but I thought, well, maybe he knows something I don’t know.

So I just almost divorced myself from the recording of that one song. I did my part, he was going to put some guitars on his overdub. I went shopping like, okay, do it. I’ll come back and listen later. And I came back in and he played it, the overdubs for me and what he had done, and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think it sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial,” but I put it on the record Debbie. That’s my fault, but I can’t listen to it now.

Debbie Millman:
If you re-release it, you can take it out.

Rosanne Cash:
I will. But I told that story, I wrote about that in my memoir, and after Rodney read my memoir, he goes, “Oh man, I really cringed when I read that chapter.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I thought you were very nice to him in the memoir.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I was.

Debbie Millman:
What is it like to weather the whims of an audience, and how much does that impact how you feel about what you do?

Rosanne Cash:
There are certain ways it does impact me. The letters I get when people say, this song got me through a really hard time, “Black Cadillac” got me through losing someone, or Interiors was my divorce record. I listened to it through a really painful time. That means something to me. I don’t take that lightly. That’s an honor if you can help someone vicariously in that way. I got really also, this is funny, I got really discouraged a few years ago. What is the point? Why am I doing this? I’m at the point of irrelevancy and I said something on Twitter, I’m sequencing my album, but I wonder what the point is. Nobody listens to albums in sequence anymore because you stream and it random play or whatever it’s called.
I said, nobody cares about that. And I got instantly back a couple hundred tweets. I care, I care, I care. Take your time. Sequence it like you want it done. That’s the way I want to listen to it, the way the artist hears the sequence. And I was floored, and I think that there’s a core audience that I have that has stayed with me through thick and thin, through the bad records, through the good records, through the bad shows and the good shows, and they let me know they’re devoted and I’m devoted to them. Like I said, it’s energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about trying to perform or performing for the 6% of the audience who are poets.

Rosanne Cash:
Only on a bad night.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, only on a bad night, because I was like, that seems like a really low percentage of the people that would be coming to see Rosanne Cash. I would imagine that they’re all poets at heart.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I took that line from my friend and mentor, John Stewart, who’s sadly no longer with us, but he said, because I called him up after I had a bad show, and I was lying in bed after the show just filled with anxiety like, Oh, God, what I did, dah, dah, dah. And I called him up next day and just vented, just terrible. And he said, “So you had a bad gig. What do you want me to do? Realign the planets? Sing to the 6% who are poets.” And that’s on a bad night when people are on their phones and aren’t listening. But the other times I can feel it when 94% are connecting with me.

Debbie Millman:
I think this is around the time you had another of your significant dreams about an old man named Art.

Rosanne Cash:
That was around the time of King’s Record Shop when we were talking about deepening the relationship. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe that… Well, can you tell the dream? I think it would be better if you should.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. I dreamed that I was at a party, and at this time I should say I had cut out Linda Ronstadt’s interview and put it in my purse. So sometime after that, I dreamed I was at a party and Linda was sitting talking to a man named Art, a little old man, and they were deep in conversation and they were sitting on a bench, and I went up and I sat next to Linda and I tried to join the conversation and Art looked at me very coldly, and he said, “We don’t respect dilettantes,” and he turned away and continued his conversation with Linda. Oh my God. I woke up just devastated. I knew what it meant.

Debbie Millman:
I would love for you to tell me what it meant.

Rosanne Cash:
That I was, as I said before, that there was moments of just coasting, of just casually touching the work instead of really going deep into it, being distracted and just showing up for the bare minimum or this is all an inside game, you realize. I don’t know that other people would see that or know that, but as an inside game, it was real. And the larger idea of art was telling me that I better start showing up or I was cut out of the party, out of the conversation.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was a good dream to have, as difficult as it was, it ended up propelling you to move to where you really wanted to live, which was Manhattan. You moved to Morton Street in Greenwich Village, one of the greatest streets on the planet, just a few steps from Matt Umanov Guitars. It’s really interesting, your moth talk. You talked about how New York at that time was kicking your ass until the real you showed up. And I love that New York does that. New York kicks your ass until you really show up.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
How did it do that for you? How was it doing it for you at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it was complicated by the fact that I was going through a divorce when I first moved to New York in 1991, I was confused. I was in love with John Leventhal, but we weren’t together. I was writing songs that were just gut-wrenching from the depths, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and I didn’t have good friends in the city yet, although I had been to the city many times that I knew people, I didn’t have a deep network that could support me.

All of the little things like the construction guys would yell at you, and the homeless guy who threw a rock at my head and getting lost, and part of the story I told in the moths about getting on the subway, it was when we used tokens on the subways, not a metro card. Getting on the subway with a token in my pocket and realizing that I had left my wallet at home and that it was my last token, and getting out of the subway into a downpour, like a monsoon and having no money to buy an umbrella or get back on the subway or get a taxi and just standing there going, what-

Debbie Millman:
Now what?

Rosanne Cash:
Now what? So yeah, it kicks your ass.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, but you have to tell the best part that you get a phone call.

Rosanne Cash:
Okay. The best part. I wasn’t going to tell that. So I had my five-pound nineties phone with me. You remember those old phones?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
And at that moment, the phone rings and I stepped under an awning and answered the phone, and I miserably said Hello, and his voice said, “Rosanne, this is Al Gore.” And I said, “Mr. Vice President, so nice to hear from you.” And he said, “I’m over at the Regency,” or wherever he was. He said, “Can you come over? I want to talk to you about this new environmental initiative I’m doing, and I’d want a concert attached to it, and I wanted to talk to you about that,” because I had done a couple of things like that for him before. And I thought really quickly, and I thought, I can’t walk there. I’ll be a drowned rat by the time I get there. I have no money to get over there. So I made some excuse to not go meet the vice president to help save the planet.

Debbie Millman:
I am glad that you ultimately did meet and continue to work together.

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
But there’s something so wonderfully human about that story. It allows me to forgive myself for so many things.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
I just need you to know that.

Rosanne Cash:
I’m so glad. I suffered for you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Rosanne, most of your albums since the album after Interiors, which was The Wheel, Rules of Travel, the multi-Grammy Award-winning The River and The Thread feature you writing almost all or co-writing with your husband, as you’ve mentioned, the Grammy Award-winning musician and producer, John Leventhal. I’m wondering how do you feel your writing has evolved since Kings?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I think that I don’t overuse nature metaphors like I used to. I think that I am not as navel-gazing, that I’ve turned outward, that I’m not as subsumed in the intricacies of romance all the time, although that’s still very interesting to me. But that there are wider subject matters out in the world that I’m interested in writing about as well, and that I’m more willing to take on difficult topics and not care how they’re received.

Debbie Millman:
In many ways, I see your work evolving very similarly, the way Joni Mitchell’s work has evolved, where the writing is so much more sophisticated. There are poems that could stand on their own, there are poems set to music, and they tackle deep human experiences, sometimes including love, but certainly not entirely.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I am incredibly honored to be compared to Joni in any way, I revere her. But yeah, the song that comes to mind right now is a song I wrote two years ago called “The Killing Fields.”

Debbie Millman:
I love that song. That song is magnificent.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. And it’s not on any album, but I wrote it during the Black Lives Matter protests about lynchings in Arkansas.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Rosanne Cash:
I knew that’s not going to be on Top 40 radio, but it was essential that I write it, and I’m incredibly proud of that song. And I saw how it should be laid out before I wrote it, and I saw that it should be in the tradition of a narrative ballad, so it was like building the structure and foundation of a house before I could fill in the verses.

Debbie Millman:
After the success of The River and The Thread, you won, I think three Grammys for that album. Folks were telling you that you had to make another record just like it. Hadn’t they learned already that wasn’t the path you were going to take? But how hard is it to move away from what you know is successful?

Rosanne Cash:
It’s not hard for me. I still have that same youthful hubris of going, but I know what’s right for me. After The River and The Thread, which I love that record, I’m proud of that record, but after that, there was so much happening. It was the Me Too movement. It was Donald Trump getting elected. I’m the mother of five children. It was tearing me apart, and my daughter said to me after Trump got elected, she said, “I feel like I don’t matter,” and that just killed me. It just struck me at the core. And all of this swirling around, I thought, I have to write. I want to make a record that’s addressing these things, that’s about feminine experience, capital F, the betrayals, the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss, all of it. And so that’s what I set out to do.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, in addition to weathering the ups and downs of the music industry, you’ve also had to weather some difficult health issues. You lost your voice for two and a half years due to polyps. Several years ago you had brain surgery. The technical term for the procedure you had was, I’m going to try to do this, a decompression craniectomy and laminectomy for chiari one syringomyelia.

Rosanne Cash:
Chiari one.

Debbie Millman:
Was I even close?

Rosanne Cash:
Pretty close.

Debbie Millman:
That resulted in you getting 19 staples-

Rosanne Cash:
In the back of my head.

Debbie Millman:
… the back of your head.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. That was fun.

Debbie Millman:
So two and a half years of polyps and then at least a year’s recovery from your brain surgery, how were you able to manage a life without music during those times or a life with different kinds of music?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, a life without singing, really, that was an eye-opener. When I had the polyps at first, I thought, well, it’s not going to make that much difference to me, because I think of myself as a writer first and a songwriter and losing my voice, it’s not going to matter. I was devastated. I had no idea how central to my self-image my voice was. So losing it. That was painful and hard. But I did develop this cottage industry of writing prose, and I kept getting commissions to write essays for different magazines. So that was-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, New York Times was the wonderful pieces.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. Everything from Martha Stewart Living to the Times to Rolling Stones. So it was a little doorway that has panned out very well for me. And the brain surgery, it took a couple years to recover from that. That was really hard. And I’m recovering from knee replacement surgery right now, which is really difficult. But at bottom, I’m an optimist and I think of myself as a healthy person, and I don’t like leading with disease and injury. I don’t like that to be part of my-

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I was actually even struggling to decide whether or not to include it, but I felt like it showed so much about your resilience and your stamina, and then when I saw that you said that at a various forms of personal catastrophe comes art if you’re lucky. I thought, okay, that’s an optimistic way of looking at these really hard things.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I think being an optimist is the number one responsibility in parenthood because you can’t steal a child’s future by being pessimistic. You can be pessimistic about your own life, but man, keep it to yourself. Don’t pass it on to your kids, because they have everything ahead of them. And luckily, I’m naturally very optimistic, and I think my kids they take that on.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, the last thing I want to talk with you about is the brand new re-release of your album, The Wheel. It has been remastered as an expanded edition to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary. Congratulations on that.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like revisiting these recordings?

Rosanne Cash:
I should first say that I got the master back from Sony after 30 years. It was in my contract.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was in your contract. I was going to ask you if you had to buy them back.

Rosanne Cash:
No, it was in my contract. There was a 30 year reversion, so I got it back, and I didn’t expect to feel the way I felt when I got it back. I didn’t expect that ownership of my master recording after all these years would be an almost spiritual experience. There’s just something about it. It’s mine. So John and I decided to form a record label to remaster it and re-release it. It was never released on vinyl the first time because in ’93 you weren’t pressing vinyl.

Debbie Millman:
CDs. Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
So it’s on vinyl the first time. We’re doing a double vinyl thing where the other record is a live recording I did in 1993, and I rewrote new liner notes for it. It’s a beautiful package and everything. To revisit it, I don’t like looking back generally, I really don’t, because I go back with two critical, an ear, go, I should have sung that better. Oh, I sound like such a baby. Why didn’t I change that line? But owning it gave me this window to looking at it differently, which is that it was an incredibly important time in my life. It was the first record that John and I made together. First songs we wrote together. We developed a partnership in both music and in life that has lasted all these 30 years. We fell in love while making that record, and it started a whole legacy for me. So I love the record for what it is. It’s an accurate reflection of that time, and I feel really proud about putting it out again 30 years later.

Debbie Millman:
RumbleStrip is the name of your record company. Are you going to re-release any other of your acquired masters?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, they’ll start falling like dominoes. I’m going to start getting a lot of them back, because some were 30, some were 35 years. And yeah, I am going to re-master and release some of the old ones. I don’t know which ones yet.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, I want to end the show today with another short excerpt from your memoir. You state, “I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself, but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.” Rosanne Cash, thank you for putting your mind to it. Thank you for making so much art and music and writing that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a wonderful experience to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne Cash’s latest album is the 30th-anniversary re-release and remastering of her extraordinary album, The Wheel. You can read more about her body of work and her new record label at Rosannecash.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Rosanne Cash appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman (00:00:00):
As longtime listeners know, I do a lot of research for this podcast. I go deep on internet searches. I read, listen, and transcribe other interviews. I try and unearth forgotten early work. I don’t call my guests’ friends or parents or former teachers. But by the time I interview someone, I feel like I know their friends and parents and former teachers. Research is something I love most about creating this podcast almost as much as the actual interview.
(00:00:32):
This week, my guest made it a little bit easier for me. That’s because much of Isaac Fitzgerald’s life is already revealed in his New York Times bestselling book, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional. Here, we are privy to an extremely unusual origin story. There is poverty and privilege. There is a boatload of booze, a lot of drugs, and some porn. This is all shared with Isaac’s sure-handed prose and unflinching self-awareness. Dirtbag, Massachusetts came out last year in hardcover, and the brand new paperback was just published. Isaac Fitzgerald, welcome to Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:01:14):
Debbie, thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here. I’m such a big fan of the podcast and of you.

Debbie Millman (00:01:20):
Thank you. Now, Isaac, is it true that you consider Terminator 2 to be one of the greatest action movies ever?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:01:27):
I’m going to correct you, greatest movies ever. I’m sorry. I love Terminator 2. It’s right up there for me with Casablanca. I think it is a perfect, perfect movie. But yes, in terms of action movie, it is amazing.

Debbie Millman (00:01:43):
Why do you feel that way?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:01:45):
Okay. First off, Arnold Schwarzenegger is incredible. This is one of the things that I deeply, deeply believe. And the more that we learn about him as a human being, I think the more that that is revealed. If you look at the documentary Pumping Iron from way back-

Debbie Millman (00:02:00):
Way back,

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:02:01):
It’s so easy, right? I get it. You watch Conan, you watch the first Terminator, it’s very easy to be like, okay. He was just this big strong muscly man, and they threw him on to film. But no, he actually worked very, very hard to get into Hollywood in the first place.
(00:02:16):
Second off, many people told him he would never make it because of his accent. And third, he was incredibly smart. He’s a calculated individual. It’s one of my favorite things about Pumping Iron. Was he nice in that movie? Absolutely not. But he’s getting in the heads of his competitors, and you can tell he’s just so driven.
(00:02:36):
So to see him get such a large shot, in Terminator 1, of course incredible film, he is the villain. But to see him getting a shot at basically being the anti-hero of this film, I just thought it worked so well.
(00:02:51):
The second thing that I love, and I think it’s something that drew me to it as a kid, Eddie Furlong. First off, great haircut. That’s what I talk about in the book.

Debbie Millman (00:02:59):
Well, you mimicked his haircut, which was my next question.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:03:03):
And let’s get to that in a second. But I just want to say real quick, I think why it imprinted on me at such a young age, why I loved it so much. Of course, the action’s amazing. Sarah Connor is such a strong female lead. It’s incredible. But the thing that I really think I love about it is it’s about protecting a kid. And I think when you grow up in a home or you have a childhood where you maybe don’t feel protected, the fantasy of that movie is what if there was a giant robot, Arnold Schwarzenegger, there to protect you at all times? And who, child, adult, whoever doesn’t want that sometimes?

Debbie Millman (00:03:40):
Oh, okay. I get it. I totally get it.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:03:43):
Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:03:44):
Let’s talk about your haircut.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:03:45):
Yeah. Sorry, that’s the spiritual, but let’s talk about the aesthetics.

Debbie Millman (00:03:50):
Your hair. You mimicked Eddie Furlong’s hair in the movie. Eddie was the young boy that Arnold Schwarzenegger was protecting. And you did this, I believe when you were in grade school. So what about his hair was so alluring to you?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:04:06):
I just thought he looked so cool, and I wanted to emulate that. I think when you’re young, you see something on the screen and you think, “Maybe I could be that cool too.” And for me, what is hair except for this incredible thing that we get to change, or keep the same however we want to present. But all the time.
(00:04:25):
And as a young person who felt a little sad, I felt a little disconnected from pop culture. All my friends had been talking about this movie. At that time, I had yet to see it, and all of a sudden I’d seen a poster. I was like, “Maybe if I get this haircut, people will think that I’ve seen this movie that is apparently so cool that all my friends can’t stop talking about it.”
(00:04:47):
And I think that’s something I’ve been a little obsessed with my whole life, which is how I present. And when you’re poor, you maybe can’t buy new clothes. When you’re poor, you definitely can’t get the new shoes. But hair, even if it’s just your friends in their bathroom, was something you could make an attempt at to try and convey, “This is who I am, this is how I want to be seen by the world. I might not have Nike’s, I might not have the Reebok pumps. I might not have the right shirt, but I can do the right haircut.”

Debbie Millman (00:05:19):
Absolutely. I’ve written at length about how as I was growing up, we were also quite financially challenged. My mother was a seamstress, and so I learned how to sew at a very young age, and both she and I made my own clothes. But oh man, did I want a pair of Levi’s? Oh man, did I want a pair of Levi’s? It was the ’70s, and my mother offered to stitch a little red tag on the back of one of the pockets of the Modell’s dungarees, and I was like, “Mom, that would be worse. That would just be worse.”

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:05:55):
And it is. It’s that heartbreaking moment when you know your parents are trying their best to provide, and what a beautiful thought. And of course, I’m sure as you look back in that moment, it’s a loving memory. But when you’re a kid-

Debbie Millman (00:06:08):
Oh yeah, I felt so deprived.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:06:10):
Yeah. And you feel crushed in that moment, and that is really tough. You’re like, “If only I had enough money to buy the right clothes, then I could truly express myself.”

Debbie Millman (00:06:23):
Yeah, it doesn’t work.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:06:25):
And that’s right. That’s what you find out later.

Debbie Millman (00:06:27):
Yep. Too bad, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody could just say, “You know, it’s not going to give you what you think.”

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:06:33):
That’s right.

Debbie Millman (00:06:35):
Well, in classic Design Matters interview style, I ordinarily start with a person’s origin story and then work up to their most current work. But today, I want to start our interview by talking about your recent memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts. And I found an interview with you on The Rumpus from 2011 wherein you stated, “I love memoirs, but I don’t think I have it in me. I don’t think I have the courage.” What changed and where did that courage come from?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:07:05):
I know you hear this all the time, but Debbie, you are incredible. Your research is incredible. I love this and I love that you’re bringing this up. This is absolutely the truth.
(00:07:16):
In 2011, I’m sure I was saying this back in 2008, 2006. I would go to a party or I would meet somebody, and I would tell them about my childhood. And people would have whatever emotional reaction they have to it. Surprise, sympathy. Every once in a while though, somebody would say… Especially as I started to hang out with more and more artists, more and more writers, “Hey, have you thought about trying to tell this story?” And that’s what I always said. I love memoir, but I don’t think I have it in me to share my story, to write my story.
(00:07:50):
What changed? One was I learned how to write via craft. And it wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I started to recognize wait, maybe writing is something you can improve at. Maybe writing is something that you can practice. Maybe if you do it over and over and over again, maybe if you read the people that you love, you can kind of just learn through osmosis a little bit, just surround yourself with the type of writing that you love. Maybe you can figure out a way to tell your own story. That was first.
(00:08:24):
But second, I think much more importantly was I learned that my story was maybe a valid one to tell, because that’s what I think I’m really saying in that moment. When somebody would ask me, “Hey, would you ever tell that story?” “No, no, no, no, no, no.” What that really meant was I didn’t think my story was important enough. Why would anybody care about the story that I have to tell? There are so many different stories out there in the world. And something I loved from a very early age was interviewing other people, and highlighting, spotlighting, turning the spotlight on other people’s stories. It’s something I loved to do from a very early age.
(00:09:03):
It wasn’t until I was maybe in my thirties that I started to realize that’s because I desperately wanted to tell my story. That’s what I couldn’t admit to myself. That’s what I’m not saying in that 2011 interview. The right answer to that is I’m dying to tell it, but I don’t think it’s important enough. I don’t know how to.
(00:09:21):
And it wasn’t until I watched many, many people, Roxane Gay is a great example. Bad Feminist is a loadstar for me and many other friends, people that I have in my life that I’m lucky enough to call friends or say that I love. I watch as they create their stories, I watch as they put their stories into the world, and I slowly start to realize maybe there’s a chance I could figure out how to do it.

Debbie Millman (00:09:45):
In that same interview, you said that you write like you tell stories, with a lot of bullshit. But I didn’t get the sense while reading your book, there was an iota of bullshit in it. There was no bullshit. It’s no bullshit. It’s a confessional, a no bullshit confessional.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:10:04):
Well, I think again in 2011, and now we’re talking over a decade ago, which is wild. Again, you’ve read this, I haven’t thought of this interview probably in forever, if ever. It’s so interesting to see the way that my shields are up, and that’s the best way to describe it.

Debbie Millman (00:10:21):
I love that. Yeah.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:10:21):
I’m saying, “Little old me, I’m not worthy of telling my story. Little old me, even when I tell my stories, even when I do write, don’t worry. It’s just bullshit.” The phrase I love is Irish storytelling, which of course I come from a long history of people who if the fish was this big, maybe it was a little bigger when they tell the story again. And that’s a long tradition.
(00:10:44):
But I think that was also my own way of muddying the waters and not having the strength or bravery to put myself front and center yet. And what changed in the last decade is I realized, wait a second. There is a way to tell these stories. Maybe these stories could be of use to other people. And it’s actually in the scraping away of the bullshit that I’m going to find the stories that I want to tell. And this book, it’s a short read. It’s what I love about it. I wanted to write a book that 14 year old me could stuff in their back pocket and read.

Debbie Millman (00:11:17):
I know. That’s why I really love that we’re talking about the paperback.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:11:20):
Yeah, the paper… Yeah, exactly. This book was always supposed to be a paperback. God bless you, Bloomsbury. God bless independent bookstores. I understand more money is made off hardcovers, but I have always wanted a paperback. And so I wrote it short, but how does it get to be that way? Well, no, I wrote a lot of bullshit on the page, and then it’s about scraping that away to get to the diamond center of the story.

Debbie Millman (00:11:45):
You start the book with a line you knew from a young age you wanted to use someday, assuming that you know it by heart. And I was wondering if you can share it with us.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:11:55):
Absolutely. “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” And that’s it. That line-

Debbie Millman (00:12:04):
It’s like right up there with, “Baby shoes, never used.”

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:12:09):
Listen, first lines have always been an obsession of mine. “Call me Ishmael.” First lines and last words. Those are the things that I’m somewhat obsessed with. And I knew from a very early age that in that sentence, I had something special. And even before I could allow myself to think about writing my own story, which you can tell, 2011, I wasn’t even close to being able to admit that I wanted to tell my own story. I knew just in personal interactions, it was this beautiful line, because it was part a joke, part the truth. But most important, part deflection. I could say it, the person would kind of laugh, and then I could move on and turn the attention back to them. So I knew I had this great line in it.
(00:12:55):
What happens with the book is that what happens when I don’t turn that attention to the other person and then just actually write the rest of the story after that sentence.

Debbie Millman (00:13:05):
You describe your parents as smart, itchy, unsteady, people both in their thirties when they met, confused and lonely and searching for some kind of salvation. But they wanted to find it the hard way. Why the hard way?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:13:20):
The truth about my parents, and there’s many truths about my parents, but the truth about my parents is that they had it. They had a good life. Both of them. Maybe a little different income, maybe this that. There’s a little trouble there. But they had a family, they had love, they had security.

Debbie Millman (00:13:43):
They each had children with their previous spouse.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:13:45):
They each had a child. It was, for lack of better word, it’s basically the American dream of that time period. They had it. So when I say the hard way, I’m almost saying it in a complimentary style. Because instead of settling for that, which clearly wasn’t satisfying them, instead of just saying, “Hey, this is the life I’m going to live. I’m going to just keep doing it.” They decided to take big risks and make, let’s be honest, messy, messy choices, and messy mistakes. But I think it was in hopes that life could be more fulfilling and life could be happier.
(00:14:33):
And that’s incredible in a way. It’s something that I actually deeply admire about them. It’s not to say it’s not complicated, but I think they chose the hard road. They could have lived a less happy life, but more stable. And they decided to roll the dice again, and it was hard and a difficult path. But I’m impressed by that.

Debbie Millman (00:14:58):
You were the accidental byproduct of the sin, so to speak, between two devoutly Catholic divinity students. And you state that this was your mother’s panic fling, one final push against the life that was expected of her before she settled down. Now, from everything I’ve read about your mother, this affair seems so out of character to her.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:15:22):
And that’s what I think makes it so daring. No offense to my pops, love you dad.

Debbie Millman (00:15:28):
Wasn’t out of character for him.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:15:28):
Love you, dad. You’re great. But it was pretty in character for you. But for her, I think that’s what made it such an incredible reach, and something that I think she then struggled with for the rest of her life, which you see. I think she has always struggled with the decisions that she made around this time in her life, and figuring out how to come to peace with that, and who can’t relate to that?

Debbie Millman (00:15:52):
Was he ready for the consequences of their affair? And it’s a two part question. A, was he ready for the consequences of the affair? And B, I assume she was madly in love with him.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:16:06):
So this is what I can say. The story as I know it is that my mother had actually called it off. She had said, “Hey, we can’t do this anymore.” I think my father had been in that situation before, and he said, “No problem, but what if we took one last trip to the White Mountains?”

Debbie Millman (00:16:30):
It’s always that one last trip.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:16:34):
That one last trip.

Debbie Millman (00:16:35):
It’s always the one last trip.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:16:35):
Always that one last trip. And that’s what they-

Debbie Millman (00:16:36):
Condoms.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:16:38):
And that’s what they would do. They would go to the White Mountains, they would tell their spouses that there was a divinity school trip that there wasn’t, and they would go.
(00:16:48):
And the way it’s been told to me is they were then out of touch. My mother then realizes she’s pregnant. She has a choice. She has a few choices.

Debbie Millman (00:16:57):
She has a few choices.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:16:58):
She has a few choices. She can tell her husband it’s his. She can have an abortion. She can figure out one of the other million choices that come after that. I now know, I didn’t know this when I was writing the book, is that she and my father get back in touch. And he really was pushing for her not to get that abortion, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know. And it’s kind of beautiful, kind of fascinating. I do think she loved him very much, and I think he loved her.
(00:17:38):
What I don’t think I knew even when I wrote this book was that in a way, they were coming together to try and actually love me. These are the things that happen that you get told after you write a memoir. But I do think they realized they were in a tough spot, and the only way out was through.

Debbie Millman (00:18:04):
Once you were born, their wreaked havoc on their lives. They blew up their lives. You and your parents were unhoused. You lived in the Haley House, which was considered a homeless shelter in South Boston, but you loved it there.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:18:21):
On paper, I’m growing up unhoused. On paper, I’m living in shelters. On paper, I’m experiencing something not many other children are experiencing. I loved it. I was surrounded by other human beings. I was so inquisitive.
(00:18:37):
I was so chipper, annoyingly chipper I’m sure. There are certain people in the shelter, I’m sure that were like, “Keep that kid away from me.” But I loved being surrounded by so many people in such a strong, caring community.
(00:18:53):
So on paper, they eventually get out of that situation and they go live in the woods. That should be, now it should be the fun childhood part, but that’s when things actually took a turn for the worst. My warmest memories as a child is living in inner city Boston in the ’80s when things were very rough, surrounded by people who had rough backgrounds, but who really loved me. And I so appreciate that.

Debbie Millman (00:19:18):
You and your mother moved to a town called, Athol, Massachusetts when you were eight years old. Your dad stayed in South Boston for work supposedly. You’ve written how everyone else in the state called it Rat Hole, Massachusetts or A-hole, Massachusetts. Athol also happened to have the highest teenage pregnancy rate per capita. How did you and your mother moving to the country impact your relationship with both of them? I mean, she really thought she was doing the right thing by you, I assume.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:19:52):
No, that’s right. This is the thing that you see as an adult. You see how your parents were actually trying to make decisions to improve your life. But as you’re experiencing them when you’re young, you don’t understand that. And the shock of the change, and especially if you feel like you’ve gone from a happy place to a sad place, can feel overwhelming.
(00:20:18):
This is something I think about a lot. When you’re a kid, your world is your home. Also, maybe school secondary. That’s it. Those are the spaces that you occupy and those are the places that are most important to you. If an adult comes home and they’re angry, that anger fills your whole world.
(00:20:45):
Now when you’re an adult, maybe your boss was a jerk. Maybe you got cut off on the way home. Maybe X, Y, or Z, the bills aren’t being paid. There’s a million reasons why you’re feeling anxiety, why you’re feeling stressed out, why you’re feeling mad or angry. You don’t even realize that you’re feeling this small child’s whole world with that anger.
(00:21:09):
A few years can pass, and you’re having a rough patch. A few years pass, and you’re like, “Ooh, that was tough. But hey, things are getting better now.” Because when you’re older, a few years is not that long of the amount of time. When you’re eight and your mother or father both have hit a four-year rough patch, that’s half your life. That’s all that you know.
(00:21:35):
So I understand now that my mom was trying to do her best. I had been mugged, at gunpoint. Somebody had been shot on our front steps. Our neighborhood was rough. The living situation we were in was rough. She was doing her best to get me out of there with the low amount of means that she had, and this was the option. To move out there. Her parents were from that area. There was a farm, there’s a house. We can go there. I can see that now.
(00:22:08):
But when I was a kid, all I knew was that there was this place that I liked. I loved the people, I loved the community. Now it was me and my mom, and my mom was getting very sad. Of course, because she’s wrestling with this decision, which to her eight years ago is a pretty recent decision actually. But to me, I’m like, “Why is she so sad about something that happened so long ago?”

Debbie Millman (00:22:35):
Was she sad that your dad was now living back in South Boston while she was trying to raise you in a house next to your grandparents, in a place that she thought would be more bucolic?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:22:48):
Yeah. No, I mean, listen. I think her sadness was very complex and I think there’s mental health stuff there, which I struggle with as well. But if I was to take a shot in the dark, I think she dreamed of a bigger life. And is there misbehavior on my father’s part? Absolutely. Her parents, again, also coming from rough backgrounds, so their stuff… There’s no fault to be laid at anybody’s feet, but they were definitely tough on her.
(00:23:21):
She wanted to live a bigger life, and here she was back where she grew up, in that same area where she always thought she was going to get away from. And she’s raising a kid next to these parents who are rather judgmental. There are other complex reasons why she was sad. But I think at that moment in her life, the question for her was, “How did I end up back here?”

Debbie Millman (00:23:47):
Yeah. It seems as if at this point in your life, your parents really lost themselves. They lost their center. Your father began to have affairs. He drank too much. He was physically abusive to you. This is going to be rough to say out loud. Your mother confessed she had considered aborting you and shared that information with you in a car ride, told you that you might’ve been better off dead. I mean, you were eight years old when she told you this.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:24:22):
That’s right.

Debbie Millman (00:24:23):
I don’t even understand how that could possibly be something you’d ever recover from.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:24:27):
Yeah. I mean the most human answer I have is I don’t know if I have yet, but I think I’m working on it. I think that’s the work of living. But no, I want to sit there for a second. It’s okay. I will say in that moment, I don’t fully comprehend what I’m hearing.

Debbie Millman (00:24:52):
Did you even know what an abortion was?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:24:52):
I did. I think because of Catholicism, I understood what she was saying. And I understood that she was sad. And so I knew when she said maybe it would’ve been for the best. I know that she’s sharing in that moment that we’re all in a tough spot, and I think she’s questioning her decision. I got that.
(00:25:20):
But when you’re young, I don’t think you totally have an idea of what death is yet. I understood what, but I don’t think I fully grasped what she was saying. I mean, it wounded me. I want to be clear about that. It did wound me, but I don’t think I realized how hard I was being wounded in that moment.
(00:25:40):
What I really remember from that moment is how unhappy she was in recognizing that. Not fully understanding what was being said, but truly fully understanding that my mother was unhappy.
(00:25:57):
And then I think there’s a second realization, which is, “She shouldn’t be saying this to me.” I knew that. I didn’t fully comprehend what it was, but I knew that she shouldn’t be saying it to me, because there should have been another adult. There was somebody else, a friend, a parent who was maybe more sympathetic, a partner who was maybe there, who she should have been able to share that with. But that’s when I realized how alone she and I truly were.
(00:26:32):
So many years of my life have been spent being angry at that moment. I think now, I can recognize how sad that moment must have been for her, and how truly alone somebody has to feel to say that to an eight-year-old. It wasn’t coming from a vicious place. She didn’t mean to wound me. I think she wanted very much not to be. But I think she felt so isolated and so alone in that moment.
(00:27:06):
And I internalized that in a real way. It’s been something I still struggle with, absolutely self-esteem. But also, I don’t know if we want to chalk this up to be an Irish, optimistic, that same chipper kid that was running around the homeless shelter, but there was a part of me that it made my life feel special. It made me realize that there was a risk taken to bring me into this world, and that two people might’ve been making mistakes left, right, and center and constantly, but there had been another option for them too.
(00:27:51):
And it almost made me feel like there’s the saying, and I’m not trying to be glib or trite, but everything after that felt like icing. My life was mine to do what I wanted to do with it. That’s how I came to think about that moment.
(00:28:07):
Not in that moment when I was eight. But not long after, probably around 12, when I started taking more and more risks, I started to realize, “Hey, I might be in extra innings already.” There’s a weird freeness to that feeling.
(00:28:22):
And yeah, it’s tough. Obviously you shouldn’t say that to an eight-year-old. It was a defining moment in my life. But I’d be lying if I said it was all hardship on my end. It was very sad, very wounding, but in a way it was also freeing.

Debbie Millman (00:28:39):
It does get worse though, Isaac. I mean your mother becomes suicidal. She made a couple of serious attempts on her own life. You write how she talked about wanting to die so much, that you not only got used to it, you started thinking about it too, and rigged a wooden board by your bed, which could have killed you. Can you explain to our listeners what that was?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:29:07):
Yeah. So basically when I hit my teen years, I start to have a lot of issues. There’s a lot of violence, there’s a lot of anger. A lot of bad things happened, but then we didn’t talk about them.
(00:29:23):
So my mom would attempt a suicide. I would witness it, we would handle it, but no one ever, then said, “Hey, that was a lot. We should probably talk about this.” It was a very New England, okay, onto the next thing. So I think I had so many emotions inside of me that I didn’t know what to do with. So I find drinking. I find drugs at a very early age.
(00:29:54):
But I’m also very aware of suicide, and you go back to what I was told when I was eight. I’ve been grappling now for four years, which again, when you’re 12, is a third of your life, with do I deserve to exist or not?
(00:30:12):
And so I made a contraption. We had so many knives in my house. We’re very outdoorsy. We love to camp. I still do. And so we had a lot of knives, and I got a bunch of them together, and I basically made this contraption that I would pull out from underneath my bed. And the knives were all sticking up, because sometimes I’d roll out of bed. And in my mind, suicide was a sin. But this wouldn’t be. This would be, I’m kind of giving God an option to give me an out.
(00:30:49):
And so I didn’t do it every night, but it was under my bed at all times, and I would bring it out, and I would set it up on the times when I was probably feeling sadness, and I did that probably throughout my entire middle school years. Which again, two years, if we really wanted to get into the math of it, probably not a ton of times. But when you’re a kid, it doesn’t change the fact that that’s where I was at mentally, and with no one to talk to about it.

Debbie Millman (00:31:17):
Did anyone care for you at that time?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:31:20):
That’s a complicated question, because truly, I want to say this. I had a roof over my head. Sometimes, I was cooking the meals, but I had meals. I do think they cared. Was I neglected with massive amounts of time alone? 100%. I’m not here to pretend that that’s not true. I was on my own constantly.
(00:31:47):
But part of that was because they had to work whatever jobs they could get, and that meant they weren’t around a lot more, because they had to pay those bills. So alone, yes. Cared for, in its own way, I do believe I was. But at that point is when I start to make decisions that start to put myself in danger on my own.

Debbie Millman (00:32:10):
It does seem as if one of the things that helped you and comforted you was reading, and you write how your parents’ faith in literature was as strong as their faith in Catholicism, maybe stronger. And even before you learned how to read, you learned how to respect books as a second religion. Your apartment was bare except for milk crates overflowing with novels, and plays, and history books, and collections of Shakespeare. Your dad read you The Hobbit when you were five. He gave you On the Road when you were 11. He also gave you books by Charles Bukowski and Ken Kesey, books you refer to as the classics for making sure your kid turns into an upstanding citizen. You’ve said that you came to know each other through books. It seems like you came to know yourself in a lot of ways through reading and writing.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:33:04):
Yeah. Books mattered to my parents. I wanted to matter to my parents. So of course, I started to care about books too. And it’s not hard to look at my entire life and realize how I put books at the burning hot center of my entire existence. But it was also a gift they gave to me. This is a perfect example, he said, “Was anyone caring about you at that time?” I was very alone, but even before my dad moved out of the city, he recorded himself reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, because he knew how much I’d loved The Hobbit when he read it to me. And he used to send me out the tapes. I mean, perfect person? Absolutely not, but that’s an effort. You can’t-

Debbie Millman (00:33:56):
We’ll give them a point then. We’ll give him a point.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:33:59):
That’s making an effort right there. Right? And so they believed in education, and they believed in literature. And I think they believed in making sense of oneself through seeing what else was out there in the world, and that is something that I picked up from them.
(00:34:17):
I love this quote from this play. It’s called The History Boys, and it’s a British play. And I’m not going to be able to do it verbatim, because I’m not that good of an actor, but the gist of the quote is a professor’s talking to students, and he says, “The best things about literature, about books, is you’re reading them. And you can come across a phrase or an expression of a feeling, or perhaps a deep hidden desire. And you see it there on the page. You think you are the only person that’s had that thought ever, or only had that experience in your entire life. You see it on the page. It’s like a hand comes out and grasps your own, and you feel less alone in the world.”
(00:35:02):
I know my parents believe in that power. I know they gave me that power. I’m sure we’ll get into it at some point, their reaction to the book, but I can just share right now. My father, when he reads it, writes me a letter. One of the things he said was, “Well, you can’t say we didn’t give you things to write about.” Which again, I mean, but it’s Irish. It’s very Irish, it’s very, and I do think they themselves had this ambition of living a life worthy of being put down on paper. And in their own way, I think they very much did. And I think in a weird way, they wanted that for me.

Debbie Millman (00:35:53):
Even with the early drinking, your teachers, your librarians all recognized how smart you were and encouraged you to apply to Cushing Academy, which was a private school. I assume you had excellent grades in order to do that. You got in. You’ve stated the school took a giant gamble not only in accepting you, but in giving you a full scholarship. Why was it such a gamble?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:36:23):
I mean, one, it was only 40 minutes from where I was from. Friends could come and pick me up in their trucks. There was a chance that I was going to be not a very good student. Again, my parents instill in me this understanding that if you just show up… Because you’re absolutely right. I can just be immodest for a second. I tested well. I always got good grades. No matter how much trouble I was getting in, I never skipped school. I would always show up, because I knew in some way, the better grades I got, the less people would be on my back. That was always my thinking is, “Don’t draw attention to yourself. You can have more freedom to be a fuckup in a way, if you’re not raising all of these flags.” But when I get to this boarding school, I remember being like, “Okay, I really have to get it together now.”

Debbie Millman (00:37:20):
But you didn’t really, and that’s when you started snorting Adderall, and Ritalin, and partaking in other legal and illegal substances.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:37:27):
And that’s what I’m saying is I remember being like, “This is going to be different.” And then I got there, and that’s when I realized a huge thing, which is, “Rich kids are fuckups too.” Because that’s what happened. In that first year, I went in with such a large chip on my shoulder. But I remember being like, “They’re giving me this scholarship. This feels like a big risk. I got to show up.” And as I go through that year, one, I realize rich kids just have better drugs, sometimes often more neglectful parents. And it’s a great awakening for me, because I had not really traveled outside of the state of Massachusetts at that point. All of a sudden, I’m meeting people from all around the world. Again, I’m back in the system that I was in the Catholic worker. All of a sudden, I’m surrounded by people with all these diverse backgrounds, all these different ways of living. I get to learn from them. I’m so excited. My mind is engaged in that way, because I’m no longer lonely in the woods. I’m now surrounded by people once again. But in my head I was like, “Oh yeah, but they’re jerks. They’re rich.” I had this real class chip on my shoulder.
(00:38:35):
And it was through my first year that I started to realize, wait a second, don’t get me wrong. Some of these kids are massive dickheads. But some of them are incredibly kind and incredibly caring. And that’s when I started going home and seeing friends from my hometown, and recognizing some of those people are still people I love to this day and I’m very much in touch with them.
(00:38:58):
But all of a sudden realizing, “Wait a second, some of them are also huge assholes,” and definitely wouldn’t like maybe some of my new friends from other parts of the world. And what does that mean? If for a long time, I think I really believed in… There was almost a saintliness to being poor. And I start to realize class is actually this more complicated thing.
(00:39:25):
Now, don’t get me wrong. I learned how to code switch. I’m one way when I’m home. I’m one way when I’m at Cushing. But I started to bridge this idea of understanding that knowing people from not my background could be really good and interesting people, widen my world in this new and incredible way. And what more do you want in an education than that? So they took a risk on me for sure, but I’m so glad they did.

Debbie Millman (00:39:52):
You loved bars from the first moment you drank in one. I think you were 14, but you’d been drinking since you were 12. You, as I mentioned, were experimenting with all sorts of drugs and substances. How did you not die? How did you not get addicted?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:40:15):
I want to be clear, I’m not going to say I didn’t get addicted.

Debbie Millman (00:40:19):
Really?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:40:19):
Yeah. I used a lot. I do think, and this is the first time I’ve really thought about this and tried to connect these things, but there’s something about that same mentality that I just mentioned about showing up to school. Fuck off all you want. Screw up all you want, but get your work in. Show up to class. You’re not going to get in as much trouble. I had run ins with the police. I would take cars for joy rides.

Debbie Millman (00:40:55):
You are really lucky you didn’t end up in jail.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:40:57):
No, I know. I know. And I have many friends who did. But the joy rides is a great example. I want to be very clear, not condoning this behavior, but I would bring the car back.
(00:41:12):
And this is what I’m talking about. I have always been a big drinker. That is going to be an ongoing struggle in my life. I’m lucky in that I do not do drugs the way that I used to. But when I did, I always had these weird bumpers. “Okay, so-and-so brought this to this. Oh, hey, we’re going to go get”… “You know what guys? Good luck. I think I’m going to call it a night.” Call it self-preservation, but I don’t think that’s right because I think I was interested in self-destructive behavior at that time. I just think I had that same mentality of like, “Okay, go to class. It won’t raise red flags.” Couple day bender, go for it, man. Have fun. It starts to become a weak? No, you got to get out of there. I think I’ve always been good at setting up little responsibilities for myself to make sure that I didn’t completely go off the deep end.
(00:42:08):
It’s tough, because drugs are really fun. And when you have low self-esteem and low sense of self-worth, a lot of those drugs in a way give you that same feeling of that hand grasping that book. You feel either less alone or cocooned from a world that causes you pain. But I think I knew at that point I at least wanted to live, and so I didn’t follow the path all the way down. I always returned the car.

Debbie Millman (00:42:42):
And you got good grades. You got good enough grades to get a full scholarship to George Washington University.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:42:46):
That’s right.

Debbie Millman (00:42:47):
You studied politics. What were you thinking that you would do at that point professionally?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:42:52):
Again, it’s a long history of librarians and teachers showing up for me and being like, “Hey man, maybe you can do something a little bit more. Maybe you can dream a little bit bigger.” And that happens to me throughout my life. But they were like, “What about college? What do you want to do?” And all I knew was that people liked when I talked, and people were like, “Well, that’s politicians. Maybe lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, politician. So go study political science.”
(00:43:17):
So somebody just told that to me and I just stuck with it. And I did. I went to school for four years. I maintained my scholarship. I did well. I worked many different jobs, because that’s what they don’t tell you about a scholarship is they’re like, “Congrats. We’ll pay for the school and we’ll pay for the food. No walking around money.” And when you’re in a boarding school, that’s one thing. But when you’re at a college, it’s another. And so I had to work the whole way through, and I graduate and I start working for a guy. This is not in the book, but it’s in another essay. I worked for a guy, his name’s Patrick Murphy.

Debbie Millman (00:43:50):
Yeah. He was elected to Congress in 2006.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:43:54):
That’s right. Blue wave. Hell of an American, youngest Democrat on the hill, Iraq War vet. I love him very much. But after that I was like… Basically, I just got out and I started doing the work that I studied. I realized, “I’ve wasted a college degree. I don’t want to do this at all.”

Debbie Millman (00:44:07):
You hated it.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:44:11):
I hated it. That’s exactly right.

Debbie Millman (00:44:14):
Well, then you then followed a girl to San Francisco. Aside from the girl, what was your plan at that time?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:44:20):
I mean, this is where we get into a real free floating time.

Debbie Millman (00:44:23):
Yes. Is that what inspired you to begin working with the Free Burma Rangers?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:44:28):
Well, I think this is another fun moment to share a story that’s not in the book. I moved to San Francisco. As you said, I move out there for a girl. I think she was very surprised when I showed up. I think we talked a lot on the phone, and there’d been a lot of sweet nothings, and there’d been a lot of, “Yeah, come out to San Francisco.” And then I was like, “I’m here.” She’s like, “Whoa, okay. Holy smokes.” She’s living in a place with many different roommates, not many bedrooms. So she’s trying to get me out of the house and she says, “Look, there’s this place, I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s on Valencia Street. There’s a sign. It says storytelling and bookmaking workshop. Why don’t you go down there?” And so I go down there.

Debbie Millman (00:45:13):
That’s 826, right?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:45:13):
826 Valencia. I didn’t know anything about it.

Debbie Millman (00:45:18):
I love that you went in there blind.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:45:20):
I went in there completely blind, and I walk in, and it’s very clear that they’re having an open house. And I’m like, “For people who are interested in learning how to make books.” I have read my entire life.
(00:45:31):
But up until that moment, I was not very aware of a contemporary writing scene, and I definitely didn’t realize that being an author was a way you could still make a living. I’ve grown up with books, mostly old books. Nothing about, “Oh, hey, this is a job option for you.”
(00:45:49):
And so I sit down. Quickly becomes apparent that this is a volunteer organization that is looking to get adult volunteers to work with kids. I’m 23 years old. I’ve written a kid’s book now. I love kids now, but at the time I was like, “I’m not interested.” But I knew it’d be rude. Again, this gets back to that same self… I was never that much of a jerk. I was like, “I can’t just walk out.”

Debbie Millman (00:46:12):
Right. I remember you writing about you didn’t want to be rude.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:46:15):
Yeah, exactly. So I didn’t want to be rude. So I sat there and I looked around and I raised my hand when it came time for questions, because I asked, “Hey, what’s this?” And it’s all these different pieces of paper that are framed on the wall, and they’re covered in markings. They’re typed up, but they’re covered in markings. I said, “What are those?” And they said, “Each of those pages is a piece of a manuscript. A manuscript that eventually became a book. But we do that here because we’re a writing organization for kids. Writing is a very lonely ark, but we want them to realize either their teachers, or their parents, or volunteer here, or eventually if they become a writer or an editor can give them feedback. They don’t have to take all of it, but it can help improve their story.”
(00:46:56):
And it was the first time in my life that somebody had talked about writing as craft. Up until then, I thought you either had it or you didn’t. You lived in a white tower, and you just wrote perfect prose, and that’s how you’re a writer. That was the first time that I realized, “Wait, maybe I can take these stories.” I wasn’t ready to write my own memoir, but I was like, “Maybe I can write something that is of use to other people eventually.”
(00:47:22):
And that’s the gift that moving to San Francisco gave to me. That was the first place. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I do end up working with the Free Burma Rangers, Zeitgeist, The Armory. We can talk all about that. But 826 Valencia was where I found a community of writers. And in that moment I thought, “Maybe I could do that.”

Debbie Millman (00:47:41):
How long after you had that experience did it take for you to become the director of publicity at McSweeney’s, which is Dave Eggers’ publishing empire? 826 is the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students with their writing skills. Started by Dave Eggers and his wife.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:48:02):
Seven years.

Debbie Millman (00:48:03):
Seven years, wow.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:48:05):
I’m really excited. This is another… Just know that I got a job at 826 Valencia. Eventually, I volunteered for six months. I became an intern. I was working at Buca di Beppo to pay the bills. I got a job as an executive assistant to the executive director of 826 Valencia. Wonderful woman, Ninive Calegari. She’s incredible. I was probably the world’s worst executive assistant. I was 23 years old. I was very bad at scheduling. I was very bad at everything.

Debbie Millman (00:48:35):
It’s kind of what you need to be able to be good at when you’re an executive assistant.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:48:38):
So God bless Ninive. She very gently let me go, but I remained connected to the organization. So I was in that world for a very long time, and it wasn’t until I was 30 that I ended up working for McSweeney’s. Did a better job the second time around.

Debbie Millman (00:48:54):
I want to go back to your working with the Free Burma Rangers, because I think that was a big transformative experience in how you thought about yourself. And for those that might not be aware, the Free Burma Rangers self-describe as a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement, working to bring help, hope, and love to people in Burma.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:49:15):
That’s right.

Debbie Millman (00:49:16):
They also illegally smuggle medical supplies over international borders, into conflict zones to assist with medical aid for people who are being attacked by the Burmese Junta. How dangerous was this for you?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:49:31):
It was dangerous for me, but not nearly as dangerous it was for the people that we were trying to help. And not nearly as dangerous for me as it was for the volunteers who worked to make that organization run. I have a lot of respect for Dave Eubank, and his family, and the people that make that organization work.

Debbie Millman (00:49:53):
Your life was in danger several times in that experience. What provoked you to want to do this?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:49:58):
I think it has to do with that exact same kid who is pulling those knives out from underneath his bed. I knew I wasn’t going to take my own life, but I do believe I was obsessed with putting my own life in danger. I think that came from a lack of self-respect for myself, a lack of self-love for myself, and the knowledge that I was empty in a certain way.
(00:50:23):
But maybe, and this is where we get into the almost optimistic side of myself, maybe I can turn that emptiness into something that could help others. And that’s what appealed to me about the Free Burma Rangers. I could go over there and put myself in danger, and maybe it could help somebody else.

Debbie Millman (00:50:41):
Before you left the US to do the work, you wrote that you had to figure out how not to want to die. Did the experience change how you felt about your life?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:50:54):
Yeah, I think the experience helped me value my life.

Debbie Millman (00:51:00):
You write this in your memoir, you say, “I know that for the rest of my life, I will, from time to time, think that the world would be better off without me. But it’s happening less as I get older. I will always be trying to stop wondering what exactly I’m good for, to instead make peace with the fact that I deserve to be alive. And from that, more calm and steady place will be better able to wrestle with what I can do for myself and others without needing the crutch of certainty.” Has publishing your memoir helped you with that?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:51:33):
Yes. The memoir has helped me have a better relationship with my parents, but it’s also helped me have a better relationship with myself. I think in diving into these stories, and finding value in them in a way helped me find value in myself. This isn’t something I expected. I want to be clear about that. It was in no way a goal. But as I move through the world now, I’m feeling myself having a lighter ease.
(00:52:02):
And again, to that same point, it doesn’t mean it’s all the time. But right now, this book, part of the art of it, part of the doing it, part of the writing it was sitting down and looking at things that I realized I couldn’t look directly at for years and years and years. And there was some real relief and some real self-realizations that came from actually sitting down and looking directly at these moments and these memories.

Debbie Millman (00:52:36):
After leaving Burma, you returned to San Francisco and got a job you had coveted for some time working at the legendary bar Zeitgeist, which you describe as a metal bar, meets dive bar, meets German beer garden aesthetic. Why was that job so important to you?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:52:57):
I loved Zeitgeist, from the second that I set foot in it. I could not have told you why at the time. But now looking back, it is so clear for me to draw a direct line from the Haley House in the south end of Boston, that shelter for the unhoused, to Zeitgeist, which was a wonderful loud bar where people from all walks of life could feel at home, could feel safe. And then above that bar, there were two floors of housing.
(00:53:31):
So it was truly a community unto itself. And of course, in the moment, I didn’t realize that. But looking back and through therapy, it becomes so clear to me what I loved about that place was it reminded me of the last time I truly felt loved and safe, which was before I was the age of eight.

Debbie Millman (00:53:51):
You said this about working at Zeitgeist. “The bar could give me everything I wanted all in one spot. A place to drink, talk, laugh, grieve, think. A place that comforted me with the old and familiar, and exhilarated me with the fresh and strange. A place I worshiped and worshiped at.” And then you go on to write, “When you live a small life, it’s important to have small dreams. Working at Zeitgeist was mine.” Did you really think that your life was small? Do you still?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:54:27):
No.

Debbie Millman (00:54:28):
Okay, good.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:54:28):
No. Debbie’s like, “I’m going to give this man a hug.”

Debbie Millman (00:54:33):
Well, no. I relate to a lot of… I’m a lot older than you, but I had that same period of life from eight to 12, which I call the black years. And so I know what that does to a person. I really understand wanting more. I understand wanting to feel like you matter, hence Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:54:57):
And wanting to feel loved, and wanting to feel something new, and wanting to get away from this place where you feel so worthless.

Debbie Millman (00:55:04):
But it felt like that was such a big dream, and I was so happy when you get your job there. I mean, you wanted it so badly. And even your first experience there, you’re practically thrown out by the bartender who you offended by accident, trying to impress him. So it felt like it was a big dream, and it felt like that fueled more big dreams somehow.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:55:24):
No, and I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it. But I think at that point… So truly, I lived on the same block as the bar. So at that point, I think… And again, I’ve never talked about this, Debbie, but you’re doing such a good job of drawing these things out of me and having me think about them in real time. And I really think this is right.
(00:55:44):
Just taking a crack at it here, but I loved the shelter. I felt so isolated and alone in the woods. Then I go to boarding school, more community, college more community. Then I move across the country. I hadn’t traveled much. All of a sudden a big move.
(00:56:03):
I think I was seeking out that kind of small structure, again, the second I got there, because it all felt so big. Boarding school for me was great, because there were rules that I broke, of course. But there was a small room that I lived in. There was a routine. I think I was looking for a return to that smallness. And so I lived on the same block. There was a bar that made me feel at home. I wanted that job so much.
(00:56:26):
I mean, that’s why, some people when they’re in their twenties, they’re moving to Hollywood, they’re going to take a crack at acting. They’re moving to New York. Even San Francisco, I was drawn to 826 for different reasons. I was drawn to Zeitgeist because I was like, “This feels safe, and this feels like a place where I can just be for a little while.” And in its own way to come around to what you’re saying, I think that was a big dream for me.

Debbie Millman (00:56:50):
Yeah. And it was like an intimate dream. A dream of intimacy.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:56:53):
There you go. Exactly, a dream of intimacy where I could just exist and try to actually figure out who I was.

Debbie Millman (00:57:00):
You’ve mentioned The Armory a few times. The Armory was a building where pornography was shot. Kink.com was born there. And let’s talk about your experience working at kink.com and working in the porn business.
(00:57:20):
You were an actor. You came to the experience with quite a lot of body issues. How did you manage through the anxiety to be able to perform sexually on camera for other people to see?

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:57:40):
I have had body image issues my whole life. I still struggle with them. I think many of us do. It is what it is to be human. And this is one of these beautiful juxtapositions in my life that I’m actually… Again, in the moment I didn’t quite realize. But looking back, I’m so fond of. Because as a kid, I always felt like I was too big. I move out to San Francisco, I’m still feeling that way. There’s one photo in the entire book, though. You can see how rail thin skinny I am.

Debbie Millman (00:58:08):
Yeah, ribs showing.

Isaac Fitzgerald (00:58:09):
Yeah. But yet, I still had this fascination and obsession with the fact that I was too big, that I was not attractive. So how does one come from that mentality to not long after that being on camera in pornography?
(00:58:26):
And this is the most Mr. Rogers answer about a porn question you are ever going to get, but it comes back again to that community. Through the literary community that I was hanging out with in San Francisco, I began to meet sex workers. I began to meet porn workers. San Francisco’s only seven miles by seven miles. It’s a wild, wonderful city filled with artists, filled with dreamers. And I was working, one, at a bar that was truly one block away from The Armory, so a lot of these performers were coming to that bar. Also, other people, Quentin Tarantino. Many people used to come to this bar. And so that was amazing to be kind of brushing up against that.
(00:59:09):
And then also through the literary scene, a lot of these sex workers were writers, were visual artists, had their life of expression that was not just through pornography. And so these became my friends. And they were loving, encouraging people.
(00:59:28):
And so that’s what happened. I began spending time with these people. And eventually they were like, “Hey, no pressure. But if you’re interested, here’s what the job’s like. Here’s what the money would be. If you want to swing by, you could maybe,” I mean, as you know from reading the book, it was more of a, “Hey, somebody didn’t show up. We could use you in this scene.” But it didn’t change the fact that through those connections and through those friendships, I was made to be put at ease.
(01:00:04):
And the camera, instead of being voyeuristic towards me, started to make me feel, “Oh, hey, this is the job place where no one is judging me for taking off my shirt.” Obviously I’m fulfilling some type of duty here and I’m getting paid for it. So in a way, that whole situation made me feel more at ease with myself. It made me feel wanted. It made me feel like I was helping out in a way. And instead of actually being ashamed of myself, for the first time, I’m not going to say that I loved myself, but I was able to say, “Hey, I’m obviously adding value here.”

Debbie Millman (01:00:52):
Were you self-conscious about having sex as a performance?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:01:01):
So the first time-

Debbie Millman (01:01:02):
You were very naive in that first time.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:01:04):
I write about it in the book very, and I was in a van. And yes, I was more self-conscious of everything that was happening. But I would say the next time… So I go and I get tested, because that’s what you have to do-

Debbie Millman (01:01:19):
For STDs.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:01:20):
Exactly. And I show up to perform. And as somebody that had consumed a lot of porn, you have certain ways. But the real thing is you show up and they’re like, there’s pizza, and everyone’s hanging out in a robe, and there’s a lot of laughing and joking, and then kind of an, “Okay, here we go.” But then there’s a nice… It’s not just like, go. They made a really nice, safe feeling space, and you would kind of ease into it.
(01:01:46):
And so I knew the director, I knew the person working the camera. I trusted these people. And so I don’t remember feeling self-conscious. Or if I did, I knew that I could ask to take a break. That was the power of that first moment in the van. I’m watching this giant hulking man over the woman, and it turns out the woman is the director. She can say stop at any moment. And then of course, I’m not going to give away too much of the book, but he reveals things about himself that are wild-

Debbie Millman (01:02:15):
Which was wonderful. So well written.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:02:18):
That moment was such a wonderful moment for me. And so now, when I’m in that, I knew that if at any moment I felt uncomfortable, I could say something and everything would stop. And that gave me a sense of control that I wasn’t used to in my life.
(01:02:34):
And what felt amazing is that I knew everyone else in that scene felt that way too. Everyone had control to make it stop. And so that, I want to just be clear, almost rarely, rarely happened. Because I think we did all feel so safe with one another.

Debbie Millman (01:02:53):
Why did you stop?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:02:55):
I was just in my twenties. I wish I could tell you there was this big moment, or maybe I was dating somebody who all of a sudden was very uncomfortable with it, and they drew a line in the sand. But that’s not what happened. I kept doing it. We were all hanging out. Another opportunity came up. That opportunity took me away. All of a sudden, I was working more and more. It’s this website, this culture magazine called The Rumpus. And all of a sudden, I just didn’t have as much time to… You get a couple of asks and then eventually I’m like, “Oh wait, maybe I don’t do this anymore.”
(01:03:29):
And this is true of Free Burma Rangers too. Not to equate these two extremely… One’s a Christian organization, one’s a porn company. But with both of them, I think there was a part of me that always thought I would come back, but I never did. I kept moving forward.

Debbie Millman (01:03:44):
When you were working at The Rumpus, you helped sculpt and sharpen pieces by authors including Cheryl Strayed, and Saeed Jones, and my wife Roxane Gay. And you’ve been described as having an innate, almost indescribable ability to know what reads well on the page. How did you hone that?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:04:05):
Where did you get that quote?

Debbie Millman (01:04:06):
Well, I don’t have footnotes at the moment, but I can send you a link.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:04:12):
Okay, okay. That’s incredibly kind. So I do have what I call progressive views on grammar. I didn’t go to school for any of this stuff. I cannot tell you a comma splice. I am not perfect at that. I don’t know the terminology. But what I do know is if you read something out loud, you can tell if it hits your ear right or if it hits your ear wrong. And so that is what I brought to The Rumpus.
(01:04:37):
And I want to be very clear, when I say I helped, sharpen is a perfect word for it. I was not making… I was working with such talented people. They were such good writers. They were turning in such beautiful, heartfelt, well-written pieces. But I could always read it out loud, and I would always either write an email back or maybe get on the phone and it would always just be, “Hey, this one sentence, I don’t know if it’s doing exactly what you want it to do.”
(01:05:03):
And that’s what gave me that… I didn’t go to school for writing, but that’s when I learned I could do that to other people’s work. Maybe I could do it to my own. So that’s how I write now. I create a giant pile of words and sentences, and then I just read it out loud over, and over, and over again until all of it hits my ear right.

Debbie Millman (01:05:21):
You moved back to New York and began working at BuzzFeed. You became the site’s first editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-hosted BuzzFeed News’ morning show AM To DM, with again, the great Saeed Jones. Did you really come back for the job or did you come back for your family?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:05:44):
I mean, a real fun answer is Saeed left San Francisco. He actually lived out there for a year. We’d started this new friendship, and we said this very heartfelt goodbye. And then six months later, I was living in New York. So there’s one way to look at it in which I came to New York for Saeed Jones, because I love him so much.
(01:06:03):
The job was of course what made me think I could afford it and gave me the opportunity. But 100%, the actual answer is I had been estranged from my family for almost 10 years, but my brother and his wife were having a kid. My sister was very soon to have a kid with her husband. I had turned 30, and I realized that I was already going to be the weird uncle. I’m always going to be the weird uncle. I didn’t want to be the weird uncle who lived 3,000 miles away.
(01:06:37):
And I also think at that point, having gotten through my twenties, I was able to understand the difficulties that my parents had suffered themselves in a new light. And so I was drawn back to the East Coast to say, “Let’s give this another shot.”
(01:06:52):
I loved California. I loved the West Coast. But I wanted to give my family a chance, and that was the real reason I came back east.

Debbie Millman (01:07:07):
During Covid, you started to leave your apartment in Brooklyn just to walk. You began to explore New York City, and realized that you’d taken the city for granted a little bit. Eventually, your walk stretched to two a day in the morning and the evening. You then set up an ambitious goal of walking 20,000 steps per day. It’s like 10 miles. What provoked you to do this?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:07:37):
As we’ve been talking about, sometimes you look back on a time in your life and you can see it for what it is. That was a break in my mental health.
(01:07:48):
I was going through it, but I loved it. And that’s the truth. I immediately saw health benefits. I just want to quote this wonderful writer who I love Garnette. He talks about moving through the world at a human pace. And for him, he’s always very careful to say, “It doesn’t just have to be walking. There’s many different ways to move through the world at a human pace.” But for me, it very much was, I discovered it through walking. Leaving your phone in your pocket, not having earbuds, moving through the world at a human pace.
(01:08:26):
And I found so much comfort in exploring New York City, and just putting one foot in front of the other, in finding a life that wasn’t obsessed with everything going on in the world, especially during that time. But just focusing on where I am in the moment, and walking does that for me. I think we are all built to move through the world at a human pace. And I think when we get caught up in many different aspects of the world now, it’s so easy to get disconnected from that.
(01:09:00):
So I started walking 20,000 steps a day. I wrote about it for The Guardian, and that’s when I saw the biggest reaction to anything I’d ever written in my entire, entire life.

Debbie Millman (01:09:10):
Absolutely.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:09:11):
And you realize that so many people are interested in just figuring out this simple way of being, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.

Debbie Millman (01:09:21):
So this success of the article sort of went viral, inspired you to launch a weekly newsletter titled Walk It Off. What do you write about?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:09:32):
So I love to interview people. I love to basically take a friend for a walk, an artist that I respect. But to be honest, I’m actually hoping to reach out to other different folks working in other different industries. And I find the conversation that comes from a walk is so freewheeling and so intimate to be walking with somebody, and then just quietly record the conversation. And then I’ll take it home and I’ll transcribe it. So some people are like, “It should be a podcast.” It’s like, no, I really love then kind of taking what was said and putting it almost on a pedestal, shining it. That same with sharpening it, the way you were talking about my editing. It’s my way of finding exactly the gems in this conversation, and then I present them to the reader, and I love doing it.

Debbie Millman (01:10:20):
It’s a great newsletter. I love getting it.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:10:22):
Thank you.

Debbie Millman (01:10:23):
You recently got another book deal, this time from Knopf. The book is titled American Dionysus, and this is the description I gleaned from Publishers Marketplace. I tried to get more information out from Roxane, but she said, “Just ask Isaac yourself.” So this is the description. “The author walks in the literal footsteps of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, and speaks with the communities of people he meets along the way as he seeks to better understand American legends, both explicit and implicit, and dares to imagine more expansive possibilities for community, faith, and our shared sense of home.” So where you’ve been walking?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:11:07):
Well, so I’m going to share this with you. I haven’t shared anybody, but you know I care about first lines.

Debbie Millman (01:11:14):
Yes.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:11:14):
And so the first line of this book is, “I’ve been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to.” And it opens with me hiding from, basically they’re called bulls, but security guards at a train station, because I’d been walking along these train tracks. What I do throughout the book is I try to walk where John Chapman himself walked, which he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and he makes his way through Western Pennsylvania all around Ohio, and eventually ends up in Fort Wayne, Indiana near where he dies. I love Johnny Appleseed so much for so many different reasons, and I could go on and on and on about them, but-

Debbie Millman (01:11:57):
Well, we’ll get you back on the show for that book too. But tell us a few.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:12:00):
I’ll try to be quick. What you need to know about him is one, he was a missionary of a very interesting form of Christianity at that time called Swedenborgianism, which was this almost philosopher madman from Scandinavia. And so he gets really into his belief, and his faith, and not harming creatures. That’s one of his number one things. So he will never ride a horse. He loves all animals. There’s a real St. Francis vibe to him. So I love that about him.
(01:12:30):
I also love that he’s an American legend. Most people, when I say Johnny Appleseed, they say, “Like Paul Bunion? He’s not a real guy.” But he was. He was a real guy who was born during the Revolutionary War. His father was a minute man, like a soldier. So there’s that Massachusetts background that I’m grounded to.
(01:12:45):
But the thing that I really love about him, his spirituality of course, but it’s more that he was a bit of a madman. He’s planting these trees. The legend of him, he’s just throwing seeds willy-nilly. No, it takes a lot to start an apple orchard.

Debbie Millman (01:13:01):
Oh my gosh, yes.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:13:02):
So he would start them, but then he’d leave. When he planted those apple seeds, at one point, he has paperwork. He loses half of Ohio. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested in money, even though he’s acquiring all this land. He doesn’t own a home. He lives off of the kindness of strangers, even though he doesn’t really need to. He sleeps in the woods.
(01:13:21):
And then the last thing that really sealed the deal for me was when you’re raised in Massachusetts especially, you get educated about him. “It’s apple pies for the settlers, for apple tarts, or all these different, it’s food.” It wasn’t.
(01:13:38):
Michael Pollan talks about this in his wonderful book, Botany of Desire. It was for apple cider and apple jack. It was alcohol. So he’s kind of this wandering boozy American saint. But I knew I’m not Ron Chernow. I’m not going to be able to write the biography on this guy. In fact, a guy named Means did a great job in 2012. But what I can do is I can walk where he walked, and talk to the people that live there now, and try and combine this wrestling that I’m having with my faith and this idea of what makes an American legend.
(01:14:14):
And then the middle part, which I love, is my mom reads Dirtbag. My mom reads the book, and she’s very loving, and beautiful kind response. But one of the things she said was, “Where are all the canoe trips? We camped a lot. Where’s chapter three, the fun camping bits?”
(01:14:31):
And well, that’s going to be in this book now. It’s about how my parents were such outdoorsy people, and at the time, I really kind of shrunk away from it. But as I come into middle age myself, I find myself drawn to the exact same things they were.

Debbie Millman (01:14:48):
I cannot wait to read it. When will it be out?

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:14:51):
I’ve got to write it first. No, no, no, no. We have a deadline, and the hope is fall of 2025. I spent this entire year in Ohio, in Indiana. I rafted the Allegheny. I’ve walked through far too many miles of highway than I’d care to admit. But I spent this whole year out in the world doing it, and now I’m going to go put it all on paper.

Debbie Millman (01:15:17):
We can’t wait to read it. Isaac Fitzgerald, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald (01:15:27):
Debbie, thank you so much for having me. It was an honor.

Debbie Millman (01:15:30):
Isaac Fitzgerald’s book Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional is now out in paperback. To read more about Isaac, you can go to isaacfitzgerald.net and sign up for his popular wonderful newsletter Walk It Off. You can also catch him on the Today Show talking about books.
(01:15:50):
This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Isaac Fitzgerald appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly is radically optimistic about the future. What about climate change, you might ask? Well, Kevin Kelly thinks that new technologies can foster a more favorable trajectory. What about artificial intelligence? He says, “It will usher in a new era of services and products and occupations.” In short, Kevin Kelly is betting on humanity and our extraordinary ability to adapt and innovate. Kevin Kelly is also a person who thinks a lot about the future. Almost 30 years ago, he helped co-found and was the executive editor of Wired Magazine where he currently holds the title of senior maverick. His many books include The New York Times bestseller, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. His most recent is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.

He’s here today to talk about his life, his career, his new book and why he’s so optimistic when so many of us are busy pulling our hair out. Kevin Kelly, welcome to Design Matters.

Kevin Kelly:
Oh my gosh, it’s such a delight to be here. Thank you so much and what a wonderful introduction. I feel like I don’t deserve it, but I am so glad to be chatting with you finally.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely, me too. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Kevin, in your brand new book, Excellent Advice for Living, you state that a balcony or a porch needs to be at least six feet deep or it won’t be used. How did you figure this out?

Kevin Kelly:
I was told this by Christopher Alexander, which is one of his patterns in his pattern language. And once I understood that and learned it, I checked that many times in my own experiences traveling around the world and it was absolutely true. I felt very confident to say, “This is the way.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I want you to know that several years ago I decided to build a balcony off of my bedroom in a brownstone that I own. Now, doing that meant that I might be in some way inhibiting some of the sunlight coming in on the floor below. I didn’t want to make it so wide that it might inhibit any sunlight from coming in. And so I can tell you well beyond anecdotally, because my porch, my balcony is not at least six feet deep, we never use it.

Kevin Kelly:
Never use it, right? Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
We never use it. So when I saw that, I thought, “Oh my God, I wish I had known that earlier,” because I actually think that the way that the sun comes in, the angle that it comes in through the windows, it would not have been in any way …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… impeded by a slightly longer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… patio or balcony, so there you have it.

Kevin Kelly:
Design matters.

Debbie Millman:
If only I could take my own advice. Kevin, you were born in Pennsylvania in 1952 and I read that it just so happens that this was the first year that the word technology appeared in the president’s State of the Union Address. When did you realize that?

Kevin Kelly:
I was doing research. I didn’t realize it growing up. I actually didn’t really have much of an interest in technology growing up, but when I was researching a book called What Technology Wants, I was really curious about where the concept of technology even arrived because the ancients didn’t talk about it and it was like, “When did we started to become aware of it?” And it was actually a fairly recent word that was rediscovered, so to speak, in the 1800s, but never really entered into the vernacular until my lifetime basically. And that’s when people started to talk about it or understand its significance.
Of course, now, it’s the main event in many ways, but that’s been a journey where when I was growing up people talked about the future and it was glorious, but they didn’t even talk about technology. They talked about flying cars, they talked about laser guidance, but they didn’t have this idea that it was a class of something, that it was a category like technology. That’s actually pretty recent.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I really wanted to understand the context in which the word was used in the State of the Union Address, what was that about, so I went back and I looked. It was President Truman. He actually says the word technical, but he says it several times. And in speaking about our potential, he states, “Our technical missionaries are out there. We need more of them. We need more funds to speed their efforts because there is nothing of greater importance in all our foreign policy. There is nothing that shows more clearly what we stand for and what we want to achieve.”

And then he goes on to say, “Our task will not be easy, but if we go at it with a will, we can look forward to steady progress. On our side are all the great resources of freedom, the ideals of religion and democracy, the aspiration of people for a better life and the industrial and technical power of a free civilization.”

Kevin Kelly:
Wow, there you go. I could not have said that better. I think he summarizes my own sentiments about the future and progress. It’s interesting that he mentions progress because that’s not a word that you hear very often these days. And It’s amazing to me that we still need to make a case for progress that you have to convince people that progress is real. In 2023, is that really something that we need to do? Because for me, part of my own journey is understanding the reality of progress, that progress is real and that came partly from a lot of time in the developing world in places like Asia as it was coming of age and seeing firsthand that, “Oh my gosh, progress is definitely real.”

Debbie Millman:
Now you mentioned as you were growing up, you really didn’t have much of an interest in technology. Your father worked in systems analysis for Time Magazine and I read that, in 1965, he took you to a computer show, but you said that you were totally bored by what you saw …

Kevin Kelly:
Oh my God.

Debbie Millman:
… and considered it pollution. And so-

Kevin Kelly:
It was … Yeah, they’re just cabinets and there was no screens, right? They’re just cabinets like refrigerators with tapes that were moving. And the output, the total output was a typewriter typing lines on sheets of paper and that was it. It was like … I’d read science fiction and I knew what computers were and these were not computers. So it was like, “No, I’m not. I have no affinity for these things and no interest in them,” and they were also very huge. They were room size and bigger and not very smart in that way. And they were literally hardly any smarter than your calculator. And it’s like, “No, I think there’s more interesting things in the world than computers.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how, when you were in high school, you don’t recall having a lot of ideas and stated that there were a lot of other kids in your school that you were very impressed with because they seemed to know what they thought. They were very glib and articulate. How would you describe yourself at that time?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, I have a bit of advice in my book that being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points and I’m describing myself because I was a kid that sat in the first row and asked questions the entire time and was very enthusiastic about learning and material. However, the moment I left the classroom that was done. That was over. I hardly did any homework. I did the minimal amount of homework. I was like, “No, I’m present in class and that’s what you get and then the rest of the time is my time.” So I was enthusiastic and interested and curious and that kind of curiosity is also worth a lot in terms of today’s world and that became my job as professionally curious.

Debbie Millman:
I actually think that’s one of the most important attributes to have in life, just to be curious and open-minded.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. I have another bit of advice, which is, if at all, you want to be curious about things that You’re not interested in.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I spent many decades actually, and it’s embarrassing to say this, especially to you, but I think it’s important for people to hear that most of the time up until, because I’m 62 now, I would say up until I was about 40, if I didn’t know of something, I assumed it wasn’t important. How arrogant, right? How ridiculously arrogant. And if I hadn’t heard of it, I just assumed it wasn’t important enough for me to have known. Oh, so humiliating.

Kevin Kelly:
So I’m the other way around. Now if I haven’t heard of it, I’m incredibly curious about. It’s like, “How have I not heard about that?” And I have found that one of the best remedies for this kind of curious of things you’re not interested in is YouTube. So I’ll see some weird thing recommended to me that I have no idea It’s like, “Well, if they’re recommending it, there must be some kind of a following. There must be some momentum there. Let me see what it is.” And there’ll be entire worlds connected to it and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, and now I’m interested in this. I had no idea and now I have an idea,” and that’s very, very powerful.

Debbie Millman:
It’s really amazing how much you can learn from YouTube. It is astonishing. Whenever my wife needs to fix something in the house, rather than call someone, now she goes to YouTube, she gets the directions and does it herself because there are directions to do everything.

Kevin Kelly:
Everything

Debbie Millman:
On everything, everything.

Kevin Kelly:
The combination of YouTube plus Amazon is the solution to life, right? It’s like you get on YouTube, they’ll say, “You’ll need this weird little kind of bolt to do something. Okay, well, here’s the Amazon. You’ll order it there tomorrow and you fix it and it’s like magic.”

Debbie Millman:
So after high school, you were trying to decide whether to go to art school or to MIT and you ended up going to the University of Rhode Island, but dropped out after one year and you’ve said that your one big regret in life is that you even went for one year.

Kevin Kelly:
It’s true. It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
Was it that bad?

Kevin Kelly:
It was. First of all, I shouldn’t have gone to the University of Rhode Island, but here’s the thing, is, again, this is 1969-1970, I applied to colleges having never set foot on any college whatsoever. I was just looking at a book, taking things. I’d never visited a college even for any reason. I knew nothing about the ones I’m really applying to. University of Rhode Island was a little tiny state school where most of the students were commuting and I was out of state and it was grade 13. It was literally like high school, but grade 13. And it was like, “I just need to do something. I can’t sit in a classroom anymore. I need to make something. I need to do something.”

Had there been a gap year, had there been internships, I’d probably have finished, but I needed to do something and so I dropped out and I did stuff and that was the only option I had at that time.

Debbie Millman:
You first became the resident photographer at a photography workshop in Millerton, New York and what inspired you to pursue photography and to work as a photographer?

Kevin Kelly:
I had two parts of my brain. I was a complete science geek and then I love science and I took every single science and math class that our college prep high school offered. So I doubled up in physics, biology, physical sciences, geology and all the mathematics, calculus, algebra, geometry and all that kind of stuff, but I also took every single art course and I loved art and drawing and painting and making art. And I discovered photography basically in my junior year of high school and photography was this combination of both of those. Because at that time, the only way you could do photography was to do the chemical processing yourself. You had to know chemistry to some extent. You had to know optics. It was a very technical art, but it was also art at the same time.

So photography for me was this nice melding, this nice convergence of my interest in science and art. And this was at a time when having a camera, owning a camera was very unusual. I saved some money to buy a used camera. I learned how to do photography by going to the library and getting books. It was just at the beginning when photography was coming of age and the single lens reflex was starting to happen. And so I got involved in this thing and I wanted to learn more and I read about this place in Millerton, New York where you were residents and I went there and I did photography all day every day and I learned a huge amount and that was my university.

Debbie Millman:
You then spent seven years as an independent photographer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in the remotest parts of Asia. You lived on $2,500 a year. You traveled with a Nikkormat Camera and a bag filled with Kodachrome film through Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. And I read that before you left, you called the National Geographic Magazine photo editor whose number you found in a phone book and asked if they needed any photographs. What did he say?

Kevin Kelly:
I remember his name Bruce McElfresh and I was maybe 20 years old and I called him up and I said, this was my first trip, “I’m going to Taiwan and Japan. Do you need any photographs?” And he says, “Well, that’s not how it works here, but when you return, show me your work.” That was amazing. That was amazing. So I did that. I went down, took a train. When I returned, my parents lived in New Jersey and I went to show my work and he was kind of, “Hmm, that’s interesting. Keep going. Show me more work next time,” and I did. And on the second time, they, being National Geographic, was interested in some of the pictures I had taken in the Himalayas and they were considering them for one of the stories.
They, in the end, didn’t use it, but what I understood and was true, was had I kept going back, had I kept doing it, had I do it a third time, I would’ve eventually had gotten some assignment. But along the way, I changed my mind about wanting to be a professional photographer because I, by that time, had started to meet some of them and I decided that I didn’t want that job. I wanted to do that as a passion on my own terms and what I wanted to photograph and I didn’t actually really want to photograph what other people wanted to be photographed.

Debbie Millman:
During that first trip, you shot over 36,000 slides.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
You were taking about two rolls of film, which is 70 pictures a day.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that when you tell people that, they’re absolutely gobsmacked, astounded and incredulous because they didn’t understand how you could take 70 pictures a day. And this was at a time in our culture before everybody had a camera and you’ve written about how in order to take a photo, and this I, of course, remember as well, you had to previsualize what a photograph was going to look like before you shot it. And back then, did you have any sense of how much the discipline of photography was going to evolve?

Kevin Kelly:
No, I did not. So not only did I was shooting two rolls a day, which again was considered insane at the time … My family, we had a Brownie camera and my parents would do one 24-exposure roll a year. So you’d develop at the end of the year and there’d be some pictures from the 4th of July and Halloween and a birthday party and that was for the year. And the idea of two rolls a day was considered some degree of madness and-

Debbie Millman:
It was expensive.

Kevin Kelly:
It was expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Really expensive.

Kevin Kelly:
That’s the whole point. It was equivalent of like $5 today for each time you hit the shutter. And as a kid with no money, that was a lot of money. And so you had to previsualize because there was also no screen, so you don’t even know if you’re capturing and all the other adjustments like the exposure, shutter speeds were all set by hand, by manual. So you have to get it exactly right and get it focused and you don’t know if you’ve got it right until a year later when I was developing the film. And so that previsualization, which is also a term that Ansel Adams used about pre-imagining the image to the point where you see what it would look like on a paper, you imagine the whole scene in all its complexity onto the paper. That was something that I became good at.

It was something that I think is lost often now with the screens, but I had no idea that digital photography would come along. That would seem completely science fiction, and again, I wasn’t really thinking about the future that much when I was 22.

Debbie Millman:
How has the evolution of photographic technology changed the way you take photos?

Kevin Kelly:
That’s a great question and I’ve been asking that at a higher level, not just me, but how does it change how everybody takes photos. And this is in the perspective of the AI coming in. One of the things I’ve noticed is that because photography has become ubiquitous and cheap that we take more trivial things. We take more of the things that are ephemeral and passing and not as monumental, don’t have to be heroic. They’re a little bit more like the Lee Friedlander thing of serendipitous. They’re much more whimsical in general, the photography that people post say. So there’s a little bit more of a … What’s the word? They’re easier. They’re more relaxed. That’s the word I want. It’s a more relaxed photography now than before in general. And people are willing to be riskier frankly. There’s a far more risk-taking and trying things in photography now that doing so doesn’t cost anything.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that we can’t influence the direction of technologies, but we can influence the character. How do you think we’ve done that in the discipline of photography?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I mean, if I had seen where we’re going 50 years ago saying, “Well, photography is going to become something that everybody carries around some kind of camera with them at all times. Each exposure would be free,” the question would be like, “Well, who owns the pictures?” And you could imagine several different versions of this. You could imagine under a different political system where we had a different attitude about copyright and the recent Supreme Court decision with Andy Warhol and the photographer.

Debbie Millman:
Lynn Goldsmith, yeah.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So we could have had a different system where there was much more lax copyright ideas and people could reuse or work upon other people’s photograph without having to ask permission and that would have made a different character to photography where it was much more like you take, it’s immediately in the common and anybody can work with it. And you could imagine other versions or even harsher, where maybe to even view a photograph, you needed permission, okay?

Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly:
And so you limited who could see your work. That would also have changed photography. That’s the case of changing the character of a system in which that technology operates.

Debbie Millman:
As an aside, I worked in the Empire State Building for 12 years, and at one point, the artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister came to photograph something on the Empire State Building. And the Empire State Building forbid him …

Kevin Kelly:
Yes, right.

Debbie Millman:
… to do that because the Empire State Building is copyrighted.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly.

Debbie Millman:
And so you can’t take a photo of the Empire State Building and use it for any commercial purpose.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
But you mentioned, you just said something that I discovered in researching your work that really, really intrigued me and it was the idea of technological inevitability. And in reading your books and many articles, I came across this about the way in which technology has evolved. And you state, “When looking at the order of technologies on different continents in prehistory when there wasn’t really much influence between the continents, they actually follow roughly the same sequence. You’ll have the domestication of dogs before pottery. You’ll have the mention of sewing after pottery. There is a natural sequence which suggests that there is a certain inevitability to technologies. Once you have the previous ones, the next ones are going to happen. And I would say once you invent electricity and copper wires and switches, you’re going to invent the telephone. And once you have the telephone, you’re going to invent the internet.” So the internet was inevitable.

Kevin Kelly:
The internet was inevitable, but the character of the internet was not inevitable. This goes back to our former conversations. We still have a choice about who owns the internet, who runs it. Is it national, international? Is it run by one country or not? Is it open or closed? Those are all things that we have a choice about and they make a huge difference. But the fact that the internet arrived, it’s going to arrive on probably any planet. Where they discover electricity and wiring, they’re going to have an internet, but the character of the internet is going to be different than ours because of those social dimensions that we get to choose about.

And I fast forward this into saying AI, AI is coming. Making minds is something that evolution wanted to do many, many times. It reinvented minds in many different lines of development that were all separate from each other. So minds and artificial minds are inevitable, but the character of those, the quality that we really choose about how it’s run, who has access to it, how much does it cost, is it open or closed, these are all things that we do have decisions and choices about and they make a big difference to us.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that in addition to the internet being inevitable, it is a mutation of technology?

Kevin Kelly:
So I wrote a book, What Technology Wants, and the short answer about what it wants is that it wants the same things that evolution wants, meaning I use the word want not consciously, but the way that a plant wants the light, it leans to the light. So these are-

Debbie Millman:
What technology seeks.

Kevin Kelly:
These are urges, tendencies. So the tendency of technologies are the same tendencies we see in evolution because it is, in fact, an extension of evolution, as evolution accelerated. And so when we look at it that way, where it’s going is towards increasing possibilities, increasing forms. So I say that the evolution of technology follows the same thing, the evolution of life, and it’s aimed in the same directions in which are towards greater complexity, greater specialization, greater mutualism. And so technology will become more complex and technology also becomes more specialized.

And so my prediction would be that, in AI, we’re going to see increasing numbers of specialized AIs to do different things, whether it’s images or language or music or equations or math proofs, that there’ll be increasing specialized versions of them just like we have specialized cameras and that there’ll be more mutualism, meaning that a lot of technology comes to depend on other technologies or may only be used by other technologies, meaning that there’ll be things that we’ll invent that the humans won’t even use like they’ll be invented for other technologies to use. That’s mutualism where they are embedded in the system itself.

And so my view is that those are the inevitable things and they’re not at the species level. So I would say, in evolution, any planet in the galaxy that had a gravity like Earth’s and an atmosphere like Earth, that evolution will have quadrupeds. That’s inevitable because that’s just a physically elegant solution, four legs, very, very stable. But a zebra is not inevitable. That species is completely stochastic, completely random. So species are never predictable or inevitable, but the larger blueprint is. So the internet is, but a website is not inevitable. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone, in particular, is not necessarily inevitable. And so we can say certain AIs are going to be inevitable, but ChatGPT-4 is not necessarily inevitable.

Debbie Millman:
I had my own little epiphany as I was thinking about this inevitability and the way in which the order of technologies on different continents …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… in prehistory all were sort of on the same timetable. And in many ways, while this might seem trivial, I’ve spent most of my career in branding and I believe that the discipline of branding was also inevitable and that you have the same kind of trajectory, if you think about brands beyond consumerism. First, you get religious symbols …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in different continents all around the same time. So you have the symbols in the Middle East, you have the symbols in Brazil or in South America. You have symbols that popped up all around the same time. About 10,000 years ago, all of a sudden humans started to create a symbol to signify their relationship with this higher power. Higher power had nothing to do with it.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
We created those. And then over time, again, we had no way of knowing what was happening on these different continents. We get flags, family crests …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… brand marks of ownership on animals. And then before you know it, Coca-Cola is in every country in the world.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
But I’ve always wondered what triggered those first religious symbols in so many places at the same time with no one else knowing about it.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great question and It’s a great image too of the first person to make a symbol on rock and to say, not just me, but all of us here that this represents us or what we believe, that’s an incredible step.

Debbie Millman:
Right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yes. It’s an incredible step. It’s a kind of an abstraction, which is really very, very powerful, but yeah, that would be interesting if maybe some of the earliest cave drawings were actually branding exercises.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think they were. I would contend that they are because we were creating an organized system of being able to perceive reality that was a shared reality.

Kevin Kelly:
So maybe the wonderful ochre handprints or maybe those are the brand of view, the brand of me, the brand of humans.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, so the notion that most inventions and innovations are co-invented in multiple times simultaneously and independently is one of the properties of something that you call the technium and I was wondering if you could define technium for our listeners.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. So we talked earlier at the very beginning about technologies, plural, that we have a microphone and we’ve got a camera and we’ve got cars and even materials, Teflon, Kevlar. We understand these to be technologies, although it’s broader, because in fact, technologies would include things like a calendar and timekeeping. These are technologies too. But if we think of these as independent little things and in our own lives, our life is a witness to a parade of new technologies as they’re invented. But in fact, the reality is much more complicated because these new things that are being invented rely on other technologies to make them or even to input them like they’re eating them, they’re consuming them.

And so we have really something that’s much more like a rainforest of different technologies that are interdependent, codependent on each other. You can’t do farming today without computers and satellites and telephones and logistics and you can’t do those logistics unless you have food for the workers. And so there is a complete ecosystem of these technologies that are codependent on each other. And the important idea about this ecosystem, which I call the technium, is that the technium itself, the forest itself has certain biases, certain tendencies that the individual components don’t have, that the tendencies are not found in the individual components. It’s a little bit like a beehive, which I was a beekeeper and so the bees live only six weeks, but the hive can have a memory of years.

So there are attributes of the hive that you can’t find in individual bees no matter how hard you look. That’s because systems have behaviors themselves. All systems have certain antics and biases and tendencies. And so I’m saying we have a system of technologies called the technium that’s not just culture, it isn’t Earth. It’s actually active, it’s an agent, it’s doing things and it has certain tendencies and urges and recurring patterns that are not found in the individual technologies that make up and all the technologies together make up this technium. And so the question that I ask is, what are some of those behaviors of the technium at large? And that’s what I get the question, what does technology want?

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the technium is an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. How so?

Kevin Kelly:
I would say in my definition of things that are created by minds, which is what technology is that that would include the dams that beaver make, the nests that birds make, the homes that termites make because they are being created from their neurons. Their neurons are measuring the honeycomb. Their brains are assembling the nest. This way of looking at technology is something that behaves in the same way as evolution does. So you can map the genealogy of different inventions and showing how they mutate. There’s a little mutation which is picked up and it becomes more common. And that is then the origin of the next one. There’s like offspring in children.

So it’s behaving almost identical to biological evolution with one big caveat, which is that, unlike biology, it’s very, very, very rare for anything to go extinct in the technium, but otherwise, the behavior of this as it progresses through time is very, very similar to biology and we see bits of the technium in the sense of things being made from the mind already occurring in the animal kingdom. And so for me, we can view technology as origins that’s not human-made, that actually the origins are actually at the Big Bang. It’s the same origins of the beginning of our universe and life of these self-organizing systems. And so the mathematics of the energy component of technology follows the same kind of laws that evolution does. So whenever we can measure about evolution, we can apply to the technium and see that it’s also very similar.

Debbie Millman:
So if you think about birds making nests or beavers creating their dams, there isn’t a manual that they get.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
When they are creating them, it’s very much instinctual. So they have an ability to be instinctively creative.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And-

Kevin Kelly:
There actually is a little bit more leeway. While a lot of it is intuitive, instinctive, but we know from birdsong and stuff, they actually can learn and change. So it’s not 100% reflexive. There are elements of individual creativity even in those acts.

Debbie Millman:
And so it makes me wonder and I’m just formulating this as we speak, so it might not be quite as eloquent as I want it to be, but if we, as humans, have an ability to be creative and that’s something that many people think that all humans are born with, the whole notion of folks like Rick Rubin or Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity coming through us, the best creativity coming through us, not bias, I’m wondering if there’s some correlation there with this innate instinctiveness in creating the best possible art or invention.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I think there is. And I think one of the things that AI has shown us is that creativity rather than being a high-order rarefied quality is actually very primitive. It’s actually elemental. It’s so elemental that we can actually make machines do it. Rather than it being something that is layered on top of consciousness and awareness, it actually precedes all those and that it’s actually so elemental and fundamental that we’re capable of programming it into machines and so that machines can be creative, certainly with that lowercase creativity of doing something novel. Maybe not through the breakthroughs yet, but certainly at the lowercase. And I think animals have shown that they are capable of having a lowercase creativity in certain cases.

So that to me says that yes, this is elemental foundational level of creativity is something that’s very fundamental to all living systems and that’s what living systems that try to learn and adapt. You could say that that’s one variety of creativity. And I think what we’re seeing is that is something that’s portable, that’s something that we can move and it’s not just the province of … Humans don’t own it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk quite a bit about AI, but I also want for our listeners to be able to understand something that you just mentioned which is called uppercase creativity or lowercase creativity. So I’m going to read very specifically something that Kevin has said so that folks understand. “Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is this stunning field-changing, world-altering rearrangement of that major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, discovery of DNA, Picasso’s Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.” And we’ll come back to the AI conversation momentarily because there’s a bunch of other things that I want to talk to you before that.

So we were talking a little bit about … You mentioned the Big Bang. That’s a door I can’t help but go through. So you’ve written that at the core of the origin of life and its ongoing billion-year metabolism is its ability to replicate and copy information accurately and life copies itself to live, copies to grow, copies to evolve. Life wants to copy. So my question, especially given your earlier experiences in Jerusalem … You know where I’m going?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… do you believe in God? And if so, how does that connect to the notion of evolution on this planet?

Kevin Kelly:
Sure, sure. So I do believe in God, and if listeners want to bear with some of my personal theology, it goes like this. It seems to me there’s only two major possibilities when we think about where did all this, the universe and everything in it, which is quite big as we look out into the telescopes with web and beyond, where did they come from? And so the general two answers are, well, it has always been. It somehow self-created itself. The universe has always been. Or the second one, it was that it began by itself in some weird way. Why? Who knows? And then there’s the other story which is, well, God made it. And then you say, “Well, where did God come from?” Well, he’s always been or always self-made. And all I can say is none of those are satisfactory, but I find the God version to be a lot more interesting and entertaining.

So I prefer the God explanation and my explanation of God is that God was a self-created being, the only self-created thing. And in order to understand itself, it manifests itself as the universe in order to understand what it is. And evolution is the way in which this unfolds, it’s God discovering itself by making things with free will like itself. And we are made in the image in the sense that we are now in the process of discovering who we are and we’re going to make other things like robots in order to understand what we are. We’ll give these other beings some degree of free will just as we have freewill to understand ourselves. And so this is replicating process.

And so for me, the godhood is a kind of all-encompassing being that’s served perfect, but becoming more perfect, which again logically doesn’t make any sense. What does that even mean, where if you are infinite and becoming more infinite? But the idea is that it’s not static. It is a process that itself is becoming more God-like by having a universe, by understanding itself it’s a way of looking at itself. So that’s my short version of the theology. I don’t expect anybody else to believe it, but that’s my view.

Debbie Millman:
You’re a Christian?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You had a religious epiphany …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in Jerusalem in the 1970s. Can you just share a bit of a high-altitude explanation of what happened?

Kevin Kelly:
I don’t know if I can explain it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Kevin Kelly:
But I can tell you the short … There’s a couple versions of it. By the way, the first time I told the story about it was on This American Life and I don’t think I’ve been able to tell it as well since. The short version is that I was working in Iran during the Khomeini revolution, got kicked out, went to Jerusalem to photograph Easter and had a conversion experience in Easter where I really believed that Jesus was the cosmic Jesus. Cosmic Jesus, again, taking that view of the godhood and understanding that, when you have a free will, we’re going to discover this ourselves when we make robots that have free will, is that, when a robot that you made decides to do harm, the question is, what are the consequences? Should the robot absorb it? Does the maker of the robot have any degree of capability? And how do we satisfy the need for justice while still also be loving?

And for me the answer is that the godhood, the creator takes on the penalty itself. It absorbs the penalty in part in order to relieve the being with free will from eternal guilt and the burden of having to suffer the consequences of doing harm. And so for me, that’s the cosmic Jesus and that-

Debbie Millman:
So that everybody is forgiven?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. And so that set me off on a course of an assignment that I believe I got, which was to try and live as if I was going to die in six months. And that set me off on a different course where I graduated from photographing and traveling and I was trying to prepare for this short time of no regrets and trying to deal with things to be ready. And what I didn’t understand at the time, but did later on, was this was providing me with a rebirth experience where I actually went through the whole thing and then didn’t die, but was reborn in a very, very visceral, tangible way that I could not have believed.

And so what was interesting about having six months to live was that I could only do that by denying a future. So every day, I was giving up the future. I was not thinking about … I wasn’t taking photographs because what’s the point? You’re not going to be there in six months. And that restricting of the future was another lesson, because when it came out of it on the other side, I realized that having a future was one of the most human things that was really necessary for our own humanity, was to have something in the front of us and that, if you take that away, you take away a lot of humanity.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s really the only thing that differentiates us from other species, is our ability to imagine …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… a scenario or a future.

Kevin Kelly:
And so I began much more interested in thinking about the future after that.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting because you had this sense that you were going to die and it does seem like that six months was a death of sorts and that you were rebirthed in a new way …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… thinking about time in an entirely new way. Did you have a sense that this was more a metaphysical death or did you believe that it was going to be a physical death and that you might get hit by a car or be involved in some …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… accident and no longer exist?

Kevin Kelly:
I was taking it very literally that I was preparing for the complete death where I would go to sleep that night and not wake up. That was the assignment to me, was to prepare in every way as if this was a complete physical reality. So I was acting as much as I could to be responsible in taking that seriously in every respect. So when I went to bed that night, I was prepared to physically die.

Debbie Millman:
Initially, you thought that, with six months to live, you would climb Mount Everest or go scuba diving or get in a speedboat and see how fast you could go.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. That would be the natural inclination to live life to the fullest, but in fact, I surprised myself because I wanted to see my parents and my brothers and sisters and do ordinary things. Yeah, that was a surprise to me.

Debbie Millman:
You found the ordinary quite exotic when you went back.

Kevin Kelly:
Yes, and that’s I think part of the marvel of life, is finding the extraordinary and the ordinary and finding the ordinary and the extraordinary and I think that was a gift.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about what you did when you were back home with your parents. You said that you helped around the house, you cut shrubs, you worked on a deck, you moved furniture, you washed dishes. Were you bored doing those things or were you feeling very fulfilled by doing those things?

Kevin Kelly:
I was a little bored, because after three months, I got on a bicycle and rode across the US to visit my brothers …

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
… and sisters. So no, I get bored pretty easily.

Debbie Millman:
You returned home again on October 31st from a 5,000-…

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… mile trek on your bicycle to visit your siblings. Nobody knew this entire time that you were in a race against the clock, so to speak …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and that you were expecting to die on November 1st, but you didn’t die. Did that surprise you when you woke up on November 1st? Did you think like Groundhog Day or did you-

Kevin Kelly:
No, no, that’s what I was saying, I literally felt like I was being born. When I was opening up my eyes, the experience from the visceral, from my whole body was a gift like being born. Because as I was opening my eyes and coming to, I realized that I had a future again, that I had everything. And so it was, yes, a surprise in that sense. It was … I mean, surprise is not the exact word. It was a gratitude, it was an appreciation. It was like, if you were conscious and you were born, what would that feeling be? How would you describe that? If you were, instead of being born as a baby, you were born as an adult, there would be an exhilaration that you would feel and that’s what I felt.

Debbie Millman:
You had your religious epiphany when you were 27 and you thought you only had six months to live. After you realized that you were not going to die, you created a countdown clock on your computer to count down the days you had left after figuring out your anticipated life expectancy based on some Medicaid actuary charts …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… that told you that your new projected age of dying was going to be 78.68 years old. I believe you’re now 70?

Kevin Kelly:
71.

Debbie Millman:

Seventy-one. According to the date, duration, calendar, you figured out the estimated last day of your life was now going to be January 1st, 2031. How do you think about that day now?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, so the thing about it is the good news is that my longevity has been increasing. So now, when I look at the tables, it’s like 80, 81 or something. And there’s also something about it. The longer you live, the higher your chances of living longer and then there’s medical advances. And so in some senses, in the last couple of years, I haven’t been losing any dates. I’ve actually been able to maintain the same 5,080 days. And so that’s been a bonus, some gravy, but I think I run it just to sharpen my commitment and my focus during the day, because each day, if I have 5,080 days to do everything on my list, then is doing what I am right now, is it what I want to do? And the answer is, in this case, yes, absolutely, but it helps me focus in that way.

Debbie Millman:
I went and did the same thing after reading about you doing this. I have about 10,000 days left.

Kevin Kelly:
There you go.

Debbie Millman:
I am projected to live until 91, which means only two-thirds of my life is over. I have another big chunk, a big third. What’s interesting is that my grandmother lived until 91 and her sister lived until 91. My mother is currently 81, still going.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So I’m feeling good about that and so the 10,000 days is something now I’m thinking about.

Kevin Kelly:
Well, see, you may say 10,000 days is a lot, but to me, for all the things I want to do, even 10,000 days doesn’t seem like enough.

Debbie Millman:
No, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Are you afraid of dying?

Kevin Kelly:
No, because I’ve already rehearsed it. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I don’t want it, but I’m not afraid of it.

Debbie Millman:
Are you afraid of anything?

Kevin Kelly:
I’m afraid of being wrong about so many things. There are lots of things that I believe that I’m sure will be totally wrong. It’s a different kind of fear, but in terms of actual things that exist today that I am afraid of, no.

Debbie Millman:
From what I understand, you haven’t been wrong about that much. I think the one article … No, no, no, the one article that I think you were really embarrassed about was something called The Roaring Zeros or something like that.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. No, there’s plenty of things I’m sure, beliefs that I have that I’m sure I’m wrong about that people in the future will look back and be embarrassed. My descendants will be embarrassed by what I believed.

Debbie Millman:
Well, fortunately, I think there’s going to be enough other good stuff to cover that stuff up. I want to talk a little bit about your use of technology. In 2010, when you wrote What Technology Wants, you stated that you didn’t have a smartphone, Bluetooth, Twitter. Your kids grew up without TV as you did. You had no cable. At the time, you said you didn’t have a laptop or traveled with a computer. Now, I know now that most of the above you now have.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right, right.

Debbie Millman:
When did you decide to dive into social media and what has your experience been of it?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So I have social media, but not on my phone.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
I have it on my desktop and that works for me in terms of hearing the people I follow or thinking about. So for me, it’s very, very useful. I have a laptop which I use when I travel, but it is primarily again just to do email. I’m an email old school person. So I don’t know, I find it pretty easy to manage or to unplug things. I know people, not everybody feels that same way, but for me, there hasn’t been a problem. We didn’t have TV in our household, not because of the content, because we were actually one of the first families that got the ISDN, and then later on, we were the first with Netflix discs.

My main objection to it was the commercials. Our kids grew up without the commercials and that was the main. And the second thing was also seeing things on our demand rather than having to watch when things were being shown. So it was this idea of content on demand without advertisements, which is streaming these days …

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
… right?

Debbie Millman:
So the inevitable.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly. That’s what we wanted. Because I do remember a great moment, when my oldest daughter was maybe eight or something, no, six or eight, she came to me and she said … Because we had borrowed a VHS tape, a Disney tape, and she came to me and said, “Daddy, daddy, there’s a program in my program.” I said, “Well, let me go see,” and it was an advertisement, interrupted her program. She had no idea what it was and we had a teaching moment about what the commercials are really about. So that was the objection. And these days, we were talking about YouTube, one of the best bargains in the world is YouTube Premium. If you don’t have it, it’s like crazy because there’s no commercials, there’s no ads on YouTube. It’s worth, whatever, I’m paying not to see ads.

And until recently, I went off of Google, which I was a very early, one of the first Google users, went off the Googles because they didn’t offer a version of Google where you paid to not see ads, those sponsored links. So I went to a version of a search engine, it was with Neeva and I’m now going to you.com where you can pay and you don’t see the sponsored ads. So I am totally in favor of controlling what you see by supporting the site in other ways than giving my attention. I’d rather give the money than give my attention.

Debbie Millman:
You stated that the complexity of social media is akin to biology …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and that it’s not a coincidence that we speak of things going viral.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more on why you feel that way.

Kevin Kelly:
I wrote a whole book, my first book called Out of Control, which was about decentralized systems and the parallels between the world of the born and the world of the maid and how when things are complex and complicated enough we can import the behavior of biological systems to manage them, to make them work, to evolve them and adapt them, to make them more alive and organic. And we’re seeing that and one of the ideas is that very large systems like the internet can have an immune system, whereas you cannot ever completely eradicate spam, but you can keep it down to a minimum, just like you have infections or you have cells in your own body. You don’t ever actually eliminate them. You just keep it down to a manageable level.

The general principle is that these systems, when we take some of these biological principles into these complicated systems, we can make them more like a living system, which makes them better for us.

Debbie Millman:
I’d like to read a quote of yours that I found in my research about the state of social media. You state, “We cannot use something for hours a day every day and have it not affect us. We have hints, but don’t really know. As we discover how it works, a wise society would modulate how this technology is used by adults and children. As we begin to understand its tendencies, harms and benefits, we can devise incentives to continually redesign the tech to enhance democracy and well-being. All this must be done on the fly, in real-time, because what we’ve learned over the past a hundred years is that we can’t figure out, we can’t predict what technologies will be good by simply thinking and talking about them. New technologies are so complex they have to be used on the street in order to reveal their actual character.”
That is one of the most cogent statements I’ve encountered about the quagmire of social media, Kevin, and I’m wondering, how can we best manage our relationship with social media? Do you believe that we are addicted and that it’s all a dopamine game and we’re all searching for constant gratification through our devices?

Kevin Kelly:
I think there’s an element to it, but I think the whole point of social media is obviously there’s more going on than just that. And I also don’t believe that everybody that is inherently addictive. I think there are categories. A lot of the studies on social media used right now is based on the US and the US is peculiar in so many ways. Other countries don’t necessarily have the same problems that we have with social media. We don’t have enough data from their use to know whether this is a human thing or just an American thing. And what we do know from the studies in health say is that you don’t want to base policy on just one or two health studies of a thing. We just don’t know enough. It’s so complicated. We need hundreds of studies before we can say, “Definitely, this or that,” and making a policy level.
And right now, we just don’t have enough studies about social media to understand where the harm is coming from exactly. And the third thing I would say about it is, whenever we’re evaluating new technologies, we always have to say, “Compared to what?” “Compared to the existing technology. So yes, dental fillings may cause some harm, but compared to what? Compared to cavities? They’re way an improvement.” The same thing with say influencing elections. I think there’s an overestimation of the role of the social media. You want to say, “Compared to what? Compared cable TV? Compared to Fox News?”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the self-driving cars and the outrage that people had about one car accident.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, “Compared to what?”

Debbie Millman:
There are a million car accidents a year, right?

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
Something like that?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So the idea would be, are we going to prohibit human drivers until they’re 99.99% safe. No, we’re giving a pass to human drivers that we don’t expect or the pass that we’re not giving to the new technologies. “The self-driving cars, how safe are they compared to what?” “Compared to the old. Compared to what we have right now.” And so the same thing with whatever other issues in social media like bullying. “Okay, compared to what? Compared to what happens in the middle school hallway?” And so-

Debbie Millman:
The junior high school gym in my case.

Kevin Kelly:
Exactly. “Compared to what?” So we tend to evaluate new technologies at a higher double standard than we do with the existing technology. And part of what my idea of proactionary stance to technology is that we want to constantly evaluate the old technology too. The FDA gives a pass for approval of a drug, but it should be about reevaluating it all the time in the context of new evidence and the way it’s being actually used. And so we want constant evaluation and I think we should make policy based on evidence, evidence-based policy. A lot of the policy in AI is now being made on imaginary harms. People are imagining what could go wrong. They’re imagining the harms and they’re going to make policy based on those imaginations and that’s very, very dangerous and harmful to the technology.

Debbie Millman:
Speaking of new technologies, on May 4th, 2022, you veered from the type of daily art you were posting on your Instagram page.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
Rather than making daily art on your own, you began to use AI to help make a new type of images.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
What has that experience been like for you?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, part of what I was doing for the year posting a piece of art that I made every day was I would sit down and literally have no idea what I was going to make and I had one goal, which was to surprise myself. I wanted to make something, I was like, “Where did that come from?” I didn’t know that or I didn’t have that in my mind. It came out of the drawing or painting. And that was really fun. And so then when the AI came along, it was easy to do that part of being surprised, but it turned out to be really, really hard to get it to obey you. The AIs are easy to surprise and hard to follow your orders.

And so what I’ve been trying to do is get them to go in certain directions and have things I can imagine. Surprise part is easy, but getting them to do something great is really, really difficult. They call this new art or job of prompting. You’re constantly nudging them and you’re trying to figure out what they want to hear and you’re guessing. It’s like working with a donkey. It’s really hard to get them to go in certain directions. And here’s what the epiphany that I had recently. So I’ve been making for a year, I’ve done this, I’m using Mid-Journey and Dall-e and Stable Diffusion and recently Photoshop has a built-in, which I think they’re going to open AI. But anyway, there’s the fourth one, Photoshop.

And what I realized is that there are images, art that I could imagine, but I didn’t have any words for and a lot of great art you can’t put into words. And that means that, even though theoretically the AIs could make any possible image, they cannot. These large language models cannot make art that’s not tethered to language. It’s bound to things that you can describe. So there’s this whole world of art that I have in my mind that I don’t have words for. Therefore, the AI can’t make it. I can draw because I’m able to transcend language in my mind, but they can’t. And so that was an epiphany that the current crop of AI are incapable of making images that transcend language, which is some of the best art in the world.

Debbie Millman:
I recently heard about the job title prompt engineer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and investigated what that was like. It still seems that all of the AIs, as you put it because it’s going to be more than one or is more than one, aren’t really self-directed and that’s what John Mato once said about the computer, the inherent flaw of the computer was that it could do nothing on its own. It had to be directed by us to do it.

Kevin Kelly:
I think that is true currently. We might see abilities to make it self-directed and the question is, well, how long will it go before it putters out or stops itself? But you’re right. Right now, that is absolutely true. There is no self-directed and what amounts there are is very limited. And that’s one of the things that I’ve also observed is that they have very short attention spans.

Debbie Millman:
But you’re having a lot of fun with it.

Kevin Kelly:
I’m having a lot of fun, but they have short attention spans. So one of the first things we want to do, I had a friend, science fiction writer, we want to make a book, illustrate a book. And the problem was is that it could develop a character and then forget about it two seconds later. It’s like, “No, no, no, come on, you need to remember this.” The new versions of ChatGPT have a little bit more memory, but they’re still just not engineered or not capable of sustaining attention over long periods of time to the same thing. So that’s another failing of them currently as they have short attention spans.

Debbie Millman:
There have been so many headlines about the future of AI in the New York Times.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
The New York Times I think published over 60 articles on AI alone in the last 30 days. Some of them with titles including “How Could AI Destroy Humanity?,” “Big Tech is Bad, Big AI will be Worse,” and the pessimistic, “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
That was an actual headline in the New York Times: “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
How accurate do you think these headlines are?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, they remind me very much of headlines. I should go back and read the New York Times when it was talking about the internet, but we’d certainly heard similar … I wouldn’t say they’re that drastic, but we did hear very dire warnings about the internet and there was, I remember, a Time Magazine cover about, “If the internet continues, spam will take over the world and destroy the internet.” They were saying, “Well, look, how much spam we have right now. If everybody has email, then spam will just kill it.” Of course, the solution was we had spam filters and that spam filters even being embedded at the level of Google. So that’s what’s happening, is that Google is basically filtering the spam before it even reaches you.

So we developed technologies to deal with that issue and that’s what we’re going to do with AI, is there are certainly going to be new problems, biases, prejudices. These are real, but we can invent technologies and solutions that will solve them. They’ll make new problems of their own. So we’re not looking forward to a problem-free future That’s utopia, which I don’t think is possible or desirable, but what I call protopia where we are going to have more problems, but the solutions to those problems are more technologies. So I’m optimistic about that protopia, not because I think our problems are smaller than we thought, but because I think our capacity to solve them is even greater.

And so that’s the missing part, is our ability to keep solving these problems that come up. And if we can never get better at it, then yes, I would agree with the pessimists, “It’s at the end. We’re done,” but the thing is that these new technologies also help us to create new solutions at an even faster rate than before.

Debbie Millman:
I came of age as a designer in that time between doing old-school hands-on …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… drafting table graphic design and then morphing and migrating to an Apple computer. And in that time, there were many, many people, older designers than I was that were absolutely vehement, that nothing creative could come out of a computer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… that …

Kevin Kelly:
It was cheating.

Debbie Millman:
… this was … Yeah, yeah, and then of course, when the iPhone came out, everybody was talking about how this was going to ruin the discipline of photography. And this is another quote I found from you, “We might’ve expected professional occupations in photography to fall as the smartphone swallowed the world and everybody became a photographer with 95 million uploads to Instagram a day and counting. Yet the number of photography professionals in the US has been slowly rising from 160,000 in 2002 before camera phones to 230,000 in 2021.” So I think that you talk about the tech panic cycle and I think we’re in one of those right now with a number of different technologies.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, and we’re dwelling on AI because that is the most recent one, but there are others that cause panic cycles including genetic engineering, embryo selection. These are things that are going to come and we’ll be facing those very squarely soon, genetic sequencing of newborns and all kinds of things are going to be in front of us and there are people … Here’s the problem. The problem is that it is very easy to imagine how things don’t work. That’s entropy. That’s the easiest most probable things or things fail, things don’t work. So seeing the path where things break is easy. Seeing the path where things work in a new way for the first time is hard. It’s improbable, okay? It requires a lot more energy and effort.
And so we tend to take the easy path of just quickly imagining all the ways that these things break and are going to harm us. And going the other direction of imagining the ways in which there’s unintended benefits rather than harms is harder. And I think there are less people doing it. So what I’m trying to spend my time on is coming up with those possible paths where there’s a future ahead of us that I want to live in at least. And I think we benefited in today’s generation from people who thought about Star Trek, the communicator. What an inspiration that was for people making the iPhones. They could see it in their head, “There it was. We can make that come true.” And I think the fact that it was imagined made it easier to make it come true.

And I think it’s hard for us to really have a future that’s going to be really great unless we imagine it first. I think it’s hard to get there inadvertently. And what I’m looking for is we don’t want to ignore the problems. They need great attention and I’m glad there’s many people focused on their problems, but we just need a few more who are focused on the opportunities and who can articulate what one of those good futures might look like to help us make them achievable.

Debbie Millman:
Kevin, before I let you go, I want to talk about your new book. It is a delicious book. It is called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. And you’ve said that Excellent Advice for Living is an inadvertent book and that writing a book of advice was never on your bucket list. What made you decide to publish this book?

Kevin Kelly:
It was born on the internets and it came from a habit that I had of jotting down great sayings by other people. One, I just loved the form, the format of proverbs, just that condensation, the little kind of zip file that you have to unpack. And at some point, many years ago, I began writing down my own versions of things and it was just for the joy and pleasure of trying to compress something into a whole book of wisdom into a single sentence. And then at some point, I realized that as I was getting older that there were things I really had wished I’d known earlier. And so I thought, “Well, I should give these to my young adult children because we weren’t very preachy and I never really gave advice in that way and they would probably benefit from hearing this younger rather than later.”

So I wrote down 68 of them on my 68th birthday to give to my kids and I posted them, not expecting very much just because I’d written them and they went viral and bounced around to such an extent that I was encouraged to do the same thing a year later, 69 and 70. At some point, they made it to the New York Times op-ed page and so I thought, “Okay, there’s something here. I should put them all together in a way that makes it handy to hand someone rather than have to search through the internet to look for them.” And so it was originally to help me. I think of these as reminders, reminding myself of things in a way that I can repeat to myself that I thought would be handy for my kids to help them repeat and change their behavior.

And so some of them are just channeling the ancients and others are very practical things that probably won’t make sense in 10 years, but it could be practical right now.

Debbie Millman:
You stated that when you want to change your own behavior, you need to repeat little behavior modifying mantras as reminders and I do the same thing. I’d like to share some of my favorites from your book. Some are a little too hard, hit a little too hard, if you know what I mean, but that’s a good thing. So here’s some of my favorites, “When you are anxious because of your to-do list, take comfort in your have-done list.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right. The paper version of to-do list are good for that because you can see your have-dones.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, that’s why I like to check things off.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, exactly.

Debbie Millman:
This one is really good, “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

Kevin Kelly:
We are a package of contradictions and opposites.

Debbie Millman:
Right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
A couple of these are pieces of advice that I am taking into the podcast now in terms of how I think about things. So the next two are, “A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier,” and this goes all the way back to that thinking when I was 40 that anything I didn’t know about was not important to know.

Kevin Kelly:
Well, for me, that thing has been learning about the elements.

Debbie Millman:
Oh really? The periodic table?

Kevin Kelly:
The periodic table elements. I was shocked by how ignorant I was of the elements, these basic building blocks of the universe and elements that I had no clue even existed, their names, their profiles. It’s like, “How could I miss? This is universal. This is like any galaxy, any planet, anywhere in the world. They’ll know this, but I don’t know them.” And so I’ve been reading more and more about the elements and hearing about the history of their discovery. It’s just like I’m shocked by how ignorant I was.

Debbie Millman:
Good. That’s a good thing, right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
“Rule of three in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said, then again and then once more. The third time’s answer is the one closest to the truth.” So you’ll be seeing me apply that in the podcast. And then I have three more. This is something I’m working on, too: “Forgiveness is accepting the apology you’ll never get.”

Kevin Kelly:
Oh, yeah and it’s a gift to yourself.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That’s why I said before, “Everyone will be forgiven.” “Superheroes and saints never make art. Only in perfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.”

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. If people think, “Well, I can’t make it because I’m not enlightened, I’m not there,” no, no, no, no, that’s exactly where you want to start.

Debbie Millman:
“Everyone’s time is finite and shrinking. The highest leverage you can get with your money is to buy someone else’s time. Hire and outsource when you can.” I love that.

Kevin Kelly:
That took me so long to understand. As a whole earth do-it-yourselfer, everything that was like the highest quality, but when I realized that the billionaires with all the money cannot buy more time. And so it is the most precious and scarcity that we have, and getting someone else to give you their time, oh my gosh, it’s worth anything.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think so much about time now. I don’t know if you saw the article a couple of days ago, I think it was in nature.com that scientists are beginning to believe that time immediately after the Big Bang …

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

Debbie Millman:
… was slower …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… than time now. And since the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, I’m wondering if that correlates with time feeling like It’s going faster too.

Kevin Kelly:
I asked that exact question five days ago to Brian Green.

Debbie Millman:
And?

Kevin Kelly:
So I said, “Brian, my understanding is that, from the Big Bang, the universe is expanding, space is expanding and that, compared to now, the universe was very tiny. Does that mean that time is also expanding and that, compared to now, a billion years, it went very fast?” He said, “No. So the standard theory is that space expands in time, that time is constant, the speed of light is constant, because if it wasn’t constant, the speed light wouldn’t be constant.” He says, “The standard theory right now is that, no, space expands, but time does not.” He says, “There are some other alternative theories about a flexible time, but they’re all considered not proven.” So I was very disappointed because …

Debbie Millman:
I am too …

Kevin Kelly:
… the same thing …

Debbie Millman:
… Kevin.

Kevin Kelly:
… I was thinking, “Oh, well, a billion years ago, it was only a second now.”

Debbie Millman:
That 10,000 days might just go on forever. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, he gave you a piece of advice and he said, “Tell me if this is good or bad, minimize deathbed regret.” And you felt it was good and you went on to say that the people that you respect the most in your circle are still asking themselves at 70 years old, “What am I going to do when I grow up? Who am I? What am I here for? Should I be doing this?” “That’s actually why I respect them so much because they’re still constructing their lives rather than, say, discovering it or finding it. They’re constructing it,” and I think that’s a really wonderful metaphor. And I wanted to share that with our listeners because so many people that I encounter that listen to the show are always worried about when they’re going to be able to find their purpose or make their mark or do the thing that they were meant to do. And I think that that’s a wonderful way of thinking about the long game or the long now.

Kevin Kelly:
Sure. I think that that’s a direction, not a destination, that awareness of becoming what I say the only and that it’s a lifetime duty, it’s a lifetime chore, a lifetime assignment that you’ll spend all your life to get there and it’s not somewhere you arrive. It’s like an asymptote; you keep approaching it and ideally, on the day before you die, you feel like, “Okay, I fully become myself.” So-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. People talk about making it and I say, “Why would you want to peak until the day before you die?”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
“You don’t want to be a has been.”

Kevin Kelly:
You don’t want to arrive up too early.

Debbie Millman:
Right. Kevin, I want to end the show today by reading a little bit more from your interview with Tyler Cowen about your new book. And this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve encountered in a while and I want to read it in its entirety. You state, “I think there is one little piece of advice at the very end which is your goal in life. Your goal in life is to be able to say, on the day before you die, that you have fully become yourself. I want to emphasize the idea of fully becoming yourself and the difficulty and the challenge to discover what that is, but how powerful it is. And that’s true whether you’re starting a company or becoming an artist or a teacher, whatever it is.

And the reason why I’m very pro on technology is that I think it enables us, helps us generally to become more of ourselves. We all have mixtures of talents that need external tools to help us express things. I am interested in increasing that pool of possible tools in the world, so that all of us have some chance to really express our genius and fully become ourselves.” And, Kevin, then you conclude by saying, “It’s going to take all your life to figure that out. Life is to figure it out. Every part of your life, every day is actually an attempt to figure this out.”

Kevin Kelly:
So thank you for helping me figure it out today.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Kevin Kelly, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. It has been an absolute honor.

Kevin Kelly:
And a real delight. Thank you for inviting me.

Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly’s most recent book is titled Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. You can find out more about Kevin Kelly and all of the extraordinary things he’s doing, only some of which we touched on today on his website, kk.org. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Kevin Kelly appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Roxane Gay:
You can’t tell the story of third wave feminism, punk music, and the Riot Grrrl Movement without telling the story of Kathleen Hanna. Hanna was the lead singer of Bikini Kill and later the bands La Tigre and the Julie Ruin. Over the past 30 years, Hanna has made music and art. She has made necessary joyful, fierce, angry noise. Her feminism, her politics and her activism have deeply informed her music, and her music continues to inform the culture. Now, for the first time, she tells her own story in a new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Kathleen Hanna, welcome to Design Matters.

Kathleen Hanna:
I am very, very happy to be here.

Roxane Gay:
As am I. This is a really exciting day for me. In the prologue of Rebel Girl, you share that you didn’t want your memoir to be a list of all your traumas, and so you left a lot of that on the cutting floor. And as someone who often writes about trauma, that was really interesting to me because a lot of times when we talk about trauma, people assume that trauma is the only thing that defines our lives. And especially for women, that reduces us to suffering and nothing more. So I would love for you to talk a bit more about why you made that decision to leave some of that on the cutting room floor. And then how do you tell your story without some of those stories?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s a great question. The book was 600 pages because I wrote it in TextEdit. Yes, I am a first time author, so I wrote my book in TextEdit. And when my friend Ada Calhoun, who’s a fantastic editor and writer herself, put it into the correct format, she said, “Your book is not 325 pages like you thought. It’s over 600.” So with that in mind, we just had to cut a lot anyway. And I had already started thinking about how much trauma there was and how an audience could deal with it, even though I was really writing it without thinking of an audience. I just wrote it and made it for myself as something I felt I needed to do. But I also didn’t want to retraumatize other people. And a part of the process was me realizing that I always look at the negative.

And in kind of recovering these stories about my life that were less than stellar, I also had to go back in and find the joy. And in doing that, it not only balanced out the book, but it balanced out me as a person and gave me a new attitude towards gratitude. And so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cut too much because I wasn’t just raped once. I was raped many times. And there’s actually some rapes that are not even in the book. My whole joke was like, “I left an ass raped out. Come on. What more do you want from me?” But one of the things that I’ve been dealing with last week because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and I’m sure you know this from being on press junkets yourself, weird themes will come up where people will just in one day ask you the same question that you haven’t been asked.

For whatever reason, the question that was asked of me kept bringing up the cumulative effect of the massive amounts of sexual harassment that I had to contend with at venues all over the world for years and years and years up into Le Tigre where in the book I make it look a little sunnier of like, “Now we’re finally going to get a sound person and not have to deal with all this crap.” But we didn’t get a sound person until four years into the band. So I was still dealing with a sound man who threatened to stab me. And then when I go and I look for help from the people who work there, they’re like, “Oh, he’s a harmless weirdo.”

Roxane Gay:
There are a lot of supposedly harmless weirdos-

Kathleen Hanna:
Harmless weirdos.

Roxane Gay:
… in the world

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. Until they shoot up a classroom and say feminist against the wall.

Roxane Gay:
Correct.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. But dealing with stuff like that cumulatively ended up being its own massive trauma that I’m still wading through today. The fact of walking into each venue and having a different form of sexual harassment happen or just hatred of women or the angry feminist thing precedes you to the venue and men who feel threatened by it are then just, they’re already ready. They live in this town, so they’re ready for you. They’re ready to flip all the seats up in the women’s bathroom because they think it’s funny, which is not a big deal. But when it cumulatively is constantly happening-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
… plus, they won’t do sound for you because they think you don’t know how to hold a mic and you have to walk through the drawings of dicks and women being assaulted on the wall next to people’s band names and sit there while you’re waiting to go on stage and have bouncers threaten you, it’s like then you got to go on stage and pretend everything’s okay. And I do feel like that’s in the book, but recently I’ve been sort of like, “I wish I had a page that was just a list of the worst of the worst to give that feeling of being dehumanized, constantly treated like you’re not supposed to be there” that adds up.

Roxane Gay:
How do you, especially when you were younger, how do you each day find the strength, the energy, the armor to go back into another venue knowing that you’re going to bring with you the accumulation of all of these macro and microaggressions and that you’re going to get more and then you also have to perform and make music and entertain? How did you do that day after day and year after year?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, I just called to say I have no boundaries, you know?

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Kathleen Hanna:
I feel like self-care wasn’t a conversation. I felt like I’d been kind of tamped down until I was 17 and I left home and then I started writing stuff and making lyrics and poetry, and I all of a sudden came alive. That spirit of wanting to find the connection between my lyrics and my singing and other women was so strong. And I had a lot of workarounds. I told myself, “If people didn’t hate you, you wouldn’t be on the right path.” I did have these ways of seeing it didn’t have anything to do with me and reminding myself, “This has nothing to do with me.” And then it was the being on stage. I mean, I really would, as Valerie Salinas said, “Swim through a river of shit” just to be on stage performing. And seeing 16-year-old girls cry in the front row while they sing your lyrics, kind of an experience you don’t want to miss if you ever have the opportunity to do it.

Roxane Gay:
Sure. For sure. One of the things that struck me, especially early on in Rebel Girl, was your articulation that you finally get to tell your own story. And as someone who has been in the public eye for decades now, what does that power feel like to be able to articulate your own story instead of having other people do it for you, whether it’s fans or journalists or anything like that? And then how do you navigate other people telling your story and also thinking that they know the whole of your story?

Kathleen Hanna:
I think I’ll tackle that first one first. I have many policies in my head as if I’m a corporation. And one of my policies is I don’t speak to nonsense. So if my story is told wrong by somebody else, I’m not going to get pulled off the path I’m on to deal with it because it’s a time waster for me and I just don’t care enough. I feel like I learned very early on through some scrapes with public scrutiny in the press that there’s no point, there’s no justice. You know what I mean? You’re not going to get the justice through this mediated system of the press. You’re not ever going to be able to tell your story unmediated or your side of the story. So I just sort of don’t really care about when people tell a narrative about me that’s incorrect because sometimes it might hurt my feelings or something, and so I write about it in my journal and then I walk away. Because I think it’s important to give yourself space to vent about it to friends or-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely,

Kathleen Hanna:
… whatever, and not be like, “I have to be so thick-skinned that I don’t feel anything and I just don’t ever take it personally.” Because I do sometimes take it personally. And on a bad day where I’m feeling really insecure, I might even seek out bad things people say about me, which is a whole other can of worms, but that doesn’t mean I need to publicly speak back to it.

And then the second part is I really didn’t write this book to set the record straight in any way, shape or form. I wrote it because I had to. I wrote it because I did feel silenced, and so that’s a part of it. And it’s a really fine line between setting the record straight and telling your story if you’re somebody who’s been in the public eye, which I’m sure you relate to.

So I told it for myself without an audience in mind just because I needed to turn my life into some kind of narrative so I could wrap it in a bow and leave it. And I could say, if you want an explanation of how I was involved in Riot Grrrl, turn to page 176. It feels good to just say this stuff because you go through all this stuff and you know it’s like a really advanced form of lyric writing. In writing a song, I really learned that if there was somebody who was bullying me in a really particularly horrible way and I didn’t want to give them that tension, I didn’t want to turn around to the person doing spitballs at my head and give them the attention that they were trying to get. And with a lot of men, they do stuff because they want to see the look of humiliation and fear on women’s faces, and they get off on it. And so I don’t want to give them that.

So part of the thing that I would do is just write a fucking mean song about them. And then I get royalties on that song, “Fuck you. Thanks for the inspiration.” There’s something really powerful to me in that. And so there’s something really powerful for me in writing out my story. And I’m terrified to say this because women and all marginalized people supposedly only spew and rant, like everything’s autobiographical. But I did just write it all down and vomit on the page and all of that stuff for 600 pages, and then I went back first with a butcher knife and then with a scalpel, and I was really strategic about the way I edited it. And that felt like I’m taking these things that were once very painful and I’m making them into something cohesive.

Once I put it all out, I was able to look at it and look at myself as a character and really kind of grapple with, “Whoa, that was not okay. What happened in that situation or what I did in that situation was not okay.” And so I was able to look back at things as I was editing especially and grapple with my successes and failures.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. Writing a memoir is very humbling and very eye-opening in the ways that it encourages you to do that reckoning not only with yourself but with others. One of the stories that really struck me was, in college, how you shared how your peers just couldn’t seem to offer you and other women meaningful artistic critique while you were creating meaningful art. And at the core of that is really not being taken seriously, which women continue to deal with. So how did you learn how to take yourself seriously as an artist?

Kathleen Hanna:
I was really lucky that these weirdo photographer girls went to my school and I looked up to them and we started a group outside of school where we were sharing articles from High Performance Magazine. I found a bunch of stack of heresies in an old bookstore that I read. And so I was really getting support from written material that I was finding and from friends in real time who were having the same experiences. And once I found one person to say, “Hey, the way I’m being treated like in my visual art classes, this is what’s happening,” and then another woman said, “Oh, that’s happening to me too,” then it became, there’s eight of us. And then we started meeting, and then I got the support that I needed. And I really started realizing how much more there was for me outside of college than there kind of was within it. Although I’m so happy I got to go.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, of course, of course. And it is always interesting to realize what you can learn in the classroom and then of course what you can learn beyond the classroom.

I’ve been watching a lot of your performances over the past week. And particularly in the earlier ones, I was struck by the unapologetic anger that you brought to the stage. Women are often told that anger is unbecoming and that there’s just no place in proper womanhood for it, and yet you make space for anger in your work, which is incredibly refreshing. How did you come to embrace and celebrate anger, especially on stage where anger is sometimes being given to you from the audience and you just seem to give it right back?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, in a way, you answered the question for me. It’s like walking into a club and getting treated like crap, and then having guys yell, “Shut up” and take it off during the whole performance. How can I not get angry? I wasn’t making strategic artistic choices at that point in my life. I did kind of consider myself a feminist performance artist first and a singer second. And I did understand that I wasn’t performing rage, I was actually feeling rage. And that publicly feeling that rage was cathartic to other people.

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t know. I always go back to this story about when Arthur Ashe first saw John McEnroe play and John McEnroe was such a brat yelling back at the refs and calling them names. And Arthur Ashe, who was one of I guess the first really famous Black tennis players, didn’t have that ability because he had to walk into every room and be the ambassador and be kind and be generous. And in his book, he talked about how he saw John McEnroe just being a brat. I thought at that point in the book, it was going to be like, “And I felt bitter and I felt like I’d been robbed and I had to always hold my tongue and look at this white kid with all this privilege who’s doing this shit.” But no, he was attracted to McEnroe and wanted to coach him because he wanted to be close to that.

I always thought that was a really amazing thing. And I feel like… I mean, definitely I’m nowhere near an Arthur Ashe, but I always felt like it was really telling that it’s like to see someone, whoever, having rage when you so needed to express it can be cathartic and can be something that’s almost like you’re repelled by it, but also attracted to it.

Roxane Gay:
When you started seeing girls to the front at concerts, it was really revolutionary. And as someone who we’re very close in age, I remember how horrible concerts were for girls getting just shoved out of the front and getting harmed in ways that were sometimes intentional and sometimes not, but harm was done nonetheless. Did you know how revolutionary it was to create that space for girls to come to the front?

Kathleen Hanna:
I didn’t really think of it as revolutionary. I remember thinking like, “Punk wasn’t meeting up to my expectations.” I was like, “I came here because I wanted something that was different than the mainstream, and I wanted a place that was progressively political.” I wanted a place that was challenging classism, not in lazy ways like you have to charge $5 at every show, because that can exclude musicians who don’t have money and can’t afford to play $5 shows for their entire careers. But what I found was kind of more of the same. I was just like, “Well, we have to change things.”

And also I always thought a lot of the stuff that we did was really, I wouldn’t say banal, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I didn’t feel like it was very revolutionary at all. I felt like it was just totally normal. I was like, “Okay, there’s only four girls here and they’re all in the back and we’re playing music directed at women and they can’t see.” We want them to start bands, so we have bands to play with on tour because there’s not enough girl bands, though there were a lot of great ones at that time and before. So I’m standing there and I just think, “Oh, I’ll invite them to the front.” I didn’t write about it, an essay about it or anything like that. It was just like, “Hey, come up here.” And then it started to become a thing and

it worked.
People were so angry, men were so angry about it. I mean, we had to write pamphlets that we handed out that said, “This show is an experiment. If you’re a straight white male…” And we didn’t say cis back then, we would hand out these fires that were like, “Here’s why we’re doing this. Please let this experiment happen.” Because the violence would just erupt, and we were trying to do anything to keep more violence from happening.

I mean the anger, it was very intense, but it changed over time to be the more girls came up front and then the more violent the men in the crowd became, the more they became actually our security team because we didn’t have management security. We often had a roadie, but no tour manager, no sound person. We needed them. It wasn’t just this altruistic, “Let’s change the scene thing.” It was also like we would ask them to walk us out to the band after the show and they would protect us from guys who were trying to get up on stage.

I didn’t like putting other girls in that position, but it just is how it turned out. And then it became a schtick. Then it became me cosplay. It felt like cosplay. It was like I’m looking out and I’m seeing audiences that used to be 1% female or female identified, non-binary. I saw all of a sudden so many more people who weren’t straight white dudes at the shows taking up the front, and I didn’t need to say it anymore because we’d gotten bigger and more people were coming and more women were coming. And so it started to be like, “Well, you have to say it because that’s your thing.” And I was like, “I just believe everything should be kind of site specific.” And to sound like a corny MFA candidate, but I was like, “I’ll say that if it makes sense. But if it doesn’t make any sense, it can be dangerous in a crowd of now 500 to 1,000 people to try and get people to change this pact. To try and get people to move around the room can actually create safety problems.”

And so it wasn’t safe to say. And there were already, as I mentioned, a lot of women in the front, so I wouldn’t say it. And then sometimes people would get angry at me and I’m like, “I’m not going to cosplay this angry woman, trope, who always says the same thing.” And then now at the reunion, it’s taken on a whole new meaning.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah.

Roxane Gay:
Especially then, but also now, when you are a public person, when you have a persona that people think is you, they expect things, whether it’s to say girls to the front or to be angry or to do any of the things that you are known by. How do you resist that pressure to be what people want you to be and instead just be yourself? Or, do you?

Kathleen Hanna:
Ooh, that “Do you?” is really.-

Roxane Gay:
It’s so hard to do.

Kathleen Hanna:
… like a mystery novel. I was like, “Or do I?” I’m really lucky I have a really great support system of friends and I have a dog, and my dog doesn’t care if I just played a show or wrote a book. And so I don’t really see myself as iconic. How sick are you of hearing the word iconic? I mean, is it just me?

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s funny because my next question was how does it feel to be called a feminist icon? Some people would see it as a blessing, but it’s kind of a burden to have that label put on you when like you said, your dog doesn’t care. You’re just Kathleen to your dog.

Kathleen Hanna:
And to me, I’m still the girl who went on tour thinking everybody was going to be like, “Oh, yay!” They’re actually bringing really obvious feminism to the table of punk. “Yay!” And that’s not how it went. But I’m still that person inside. I’m still that optimistic. “Everyone’s going to love this,” and then they don’t. And then I’m disappointed and then I just make more art. I mean, I dealt with a lot of disappointment through my life. I mean, I’ve written phrases that were like, Our fan team was called Girl Power, and then we saw as now it’s written on t-shirts at Target, and the Spice Girls use it and all that stuff. But I was able to look at things and be like, “You know what? I’m an artist. I can just keep making stuff.”

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t care if it gets ripped off. I do get distressed by just branding in general. In the ’90s, before branding was kind of a concept that people were talking so much about, it was about hypocrisy and that word. My bandmate Toby came up with this phrase hypochrobrats, where she’s like, “We are hypocrites because we change and we grow and we’re brats. And we can be both.” I love the idea that just because you say that you’re politically progressive, or if you do that in your art in any way, what I have found in my life is that then it will become, “But you’re wearing leather shoes. But you did this.” And then it’ll become this whole thing where people are looking for a reason to tear you down, and so they’ll try to find the things that make you hypocritical to what they think your political viewpoint should be as a way to discredit you.

I just had to step away from that and be like, “I don’t care.” Because the most powerful thing I can do is be a three-dimensional person who changes publicly. The most powerful thing I can do is not stay on an indie label forever because that’s the expectation. Try being on a major label and then publicly talk about how I kind of hated it, it wasn’t my thing, and I really prefer to be on small indie labels and to work independently. But I had to try it to see. And if we get caught in some kind of brand mentality of like, “You’re outside your brand because you’re supposed to do this or do that,” it doesn’t allow us to change and grow. I want to do new things that I couldn’t just stay stuck in one sort of three paragraph thing that ends with “Girls kick ass.”

Roxane Gay:
In a lot of your concerts and in a lot of your work, you openly talked about sexual harassment and rape and the kinds of violence that women and non-binary people or really that everyone deals with, but particularly women. I know that that always encourages people to then share their own stories with you because you kind of open the door and you create this space of recognition. How did you handle and how do you handle carrying your own stories and then having to receive all of these stories from other people?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, for a long time I didn’t deal with my own story at all. I mean, really hard to admit, but I’m 55 years old and I’m still processing a lot of this stuff, partially because I prioritize the care of others over the care of myself, which is a familiar story to a lot of people.

At first, when I was touring with my band Viva Knievel, which was pre-Bikini Kill, I was working at a rape relief domestic violence shelter as a volunteer. And I had learned how to answer crisis phones and how to give resources to people, how to repeat kind of things back that women were saying and help them find their way to psychological and physical safety hopefully in the best case scenario.

So when I went on tour and there would just be two women at a show and I would talk about these forms of violence in between songs, they started coming up to me and saying, “I’ve never told anybody this.” And at first it was the biggest honor. I felt like a woman seeing me on stage and hearing me talk about something and then feeling safe enough to share their story with me felt like I was really honored that they trusted me and I was honored to be given access to their lives.

I would do all that I could to pass on resources and really try to get them to call a local rape relief or domestic violence shelter because that ended up being a huge thing that people were like, “I couldn’t call a place like that because it’s for people with more serious things than me.” And these are women who’ve been gang raped who are telling me someone else has a more serious story. Everybody else has a more serious story. Your pain doesn’t not exist because someone else has it worse. And not dealing with your own trauma isn’t going to make that person’s situation any better. Dealing with your trauma is going to give you the space that you can help other people. But anyways, sorry, I’m going off. First it was a-

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s an important thing.

Kathleen Hanna:
It was a total honor. And after seven years of it, it was no longer feeling like such an honor. It was feeling like a burden. And that’s not to say that I didn’t love every conversation that I had with women who came to our shows. It’s to say that it started taking its toll on my mental health. So in Le Tigre, I started pulling back. We put up a website that had resources not only having to do with sexual assault and domestic violence, but also coming out, kids who were coming out to their parents. I got so much mail in Bikini Kill, kids coming out to their parents and kicked out and feeling absolutely devastated and alone.
And so in Le Tigre, we also put up resources for queer kids. And it felt really great. It felt really great to say, “You know what? I started to say I can do this so that I’m not pretending it’s not happening. This isn’t a big part of our fan base and we can support our fan base without them getting personal one-on-one, face to face contact with me because I was exhausted and I wanted to spend more time on my art.” And that allowed us to have visuals and costumes and dance. Because I wasn’t so wrapped up in the stories of other people and trying to get them help all the time, I was able to protect myself emotionally and be a better performer.

Roxane Gay:
It seems like you’re able to reinvent yourself creatively and to try new things when one project sort of comes to an end and you just seem to be able to throw yourself into something else. How has this ability to reinvent challenged you as a songwriter and now even as a book writer, and how do you find the energy to stay creative?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s so hard.

Roxane Gay:
It is hard.

Kathleen Hanna:
Like, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been really fortunate in that I don’t want to give advice because my life is kind of a mess. But I’ve always searched for great collaborators and I’ve always chosen intellect and personality and humor over craft or formal ability in my collaborators. That has been really successful for me because I’ve worked with people who were learning something new together.

I love the beginning of a project. It’s like the butterflies of when you’re first in love. The thing I loved about punk was that anybody can do it, idea. Of course, it was frustrating when I found out anyone meant white guys could get up there and not know how to play their instruments, but if girls did it, it was like, “You guys better go back and take some lessons because you suck.” But I’ve always sort of loved messing with authenticity after being called fake, a fake band for so long, like, “You’re not a real band. You’re just getting attention because you’re women or because you hate men” or whatever.

Roxane Gay:
Okay.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah, fine. And then in Le Tigre, I got to challenge the notions of authenticity by not having a live drummer and using backup tracks and having costumes and goofy dances and being like, “I’m not going to be cool. I have no investment in cool. I want connection over cool.” And working with people who want connection over cool has given me the ability to sustain my art practice because it stays fun when you work with people like that.

The book was a bit harder. The book was more like, you know those little crème brûlée blowtorch things, like it’s like I had that going on my face all the time. I just felt so… You’ve written a memoir.

Roxane Gay:
I have.

Kathleen Hanna:
It can be like you get this creepy look on your face and you can’t talk to anybody. I just felt like I had to stop writing for large periods of time and take care of myself or try to. But yeah, I think that I’ve had sustainability and been able to change the medium because I love music and I really care about feminism and I care about changing the world and making the world a better place. And so mixing the stuff I care about with whatever medium I’m working in gives me the energy to continue because it’s not just empty formalist experiments, although I enjoy those as well.

Roxane Gay:
There’s something to be said for them. One of the things I read in an interview you did recently with Rolling Stone was when you talked about the writing process and navigating the isolation and of course having to deal with the fallibility of memory. How did you give yourself permission to have a fallible memory and understand the difference between truth and accuracy?

Kathleen Hanna:
Well, I was really lucky because Bikini Kill was touring while I wrote the book and Le Tigre as well, both bands got back together and reunited. And so during the process of writing, some of my breaks were to go on tour. And so I was able to talk to my bandmates about, “Hey, do you remember this happening?” And there were certain situations where bandmates would go, “It didn’t happen like that. It happened like this.” And to have two different people have two different stories, and then my story, it gave me a lot of courage because I was like, Sometimes I would be like, “Oh, okay, well that happened in Spain, so I’m going to mention it was in Spain.” But a lot of it was subjective. A lot of it was like, “Well, you saw it from that side of the stage and I saw it from this part of the stage” You know what I mean? We all saw it through our own different specific lenses. And I realized that as long as I wasn’t getting something entirely wrong, that it really was my opinion and my memory of what happened.

I did check large facts. I did check dates. I did do a lot of research to make sure that I wasn’t completely off. But finding that my bandmates remembered stuff I didn’t about certain situations, there were certain situations that I left out of the book where I actually took revenge on people, very small acts of revenge, but I wrote a note to someone who wronged me and was just like, “Let them have it” in red crayon. And I forgot that I even did that. And hearing that from my bandmates made me feel really satisfied because I didn’t remember that little mini act of speaking back to power. And so that was really helpful, but it was also like they didn’t care that I remembered it different. They weren’t mad or upset or we should all have the same experience of this. They were like, “Oh, well, that’s your opinion.” And us having different opinions actually made my opinion more powerful to me.

Roxane Gay:
What does writing allow that performance doesn’t?

Kathleen Hanna:
Wow. I will say this. The thing they have in common is that they’re both incredibly therapeutic for me personally. And in writing this book and in touring again, I’ve finally been able to say that out loud because the stereotype… I’ve been told my whole career, “What you do isn’t really art. It’s just therapy.” And when we live in opposition to stereotypes, I feel like I’m still relying on stereotypes to define myself. And so I’m just coming out and saying like… I don’t know if you know what EMDR is. It’s like this modality of a therapy that can help you kind of process memories and

put them in a place where it’s in your memory bank instead of your “it’s happening right now” bank. I’ve walked off-stage with Bikini Kill and with Le Tigre and felt like I just did EMDR. I felt like I left a bunch of really toxic crap on the stage. And I also felt like I left in a wake of joy.

I mean, the real difference to me is performance is so physical and I definitely am one of those above the neck thinkers that I stay in my head a lot and I don’t have the mind-body connection that of course I’m supposed to be striving for. I feel like I attain that to a tiny degree when I’m on stage and I’m able to dance and throw my body around and control where the air and my vocals are coming from in my body, which is a really interesting process of being kind of this human computer that I really enjoy the technical part of singing. And so there’s so much more physicality to being on stage.

The thing I love so much about writing is that I’m not being seen, physically seen. I like that I can just have a spaghetti stain on my shirt and my sweatpants and I can write anywhere. I don’t have to have an office. I don’t need a crew to do it. I don’t need a venue. I don’t need to drive somewhere far away. I don’t need to sit around for 12 hours to wait to write. I can do it whenever I want. I love that about it. I don’t like the isolation. I like the not being seen part, physically seen, and I like working alone and not having to do everything by committee, but my favorite part is actually when I hand it over to an editor and I start getting notes and it becomes collaborative because I just feel like by nature, I really enjoy the collaborative part. I like working with other people. I get lonely.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. As a writer, primarily, I love the alone part. That is great. I do also though love the collaboration because then I get to get out of my own head and out of this vacuum I’ve been in and get some real perspective. And I’m very fortunate to have an amazing editor and have always had really great editors to sort of keep me honest and to help me help myself, which I really appreciate because toward the end of writing a book, it can get very lonely and you’re just like, “Ugh, man, I don’t know what I just did. I just don’t know.”

The title of the memoir, Rebel Girl, has varied connotations, not only for you, but for your audience, I’m sure. How do you think about the idea of a rebel girl now versus when the song “Rebel Girl” first came out? And do you still see yourself as a rebel girl?

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t.

Roxane Gay:
That’s interesting.

Kathleen Hanna:
I had weird things about calling it Rebel Girl because I’m not a girl anymore. I had weird things about calling it that, because I feel like the word “rebel” has a lot of negative connotations. It was originally a Joe Hill song actually about a female labor organizer, which I love that history of it. But it has become very feminist bumper sticker. “My other broom is a rebel girl,” or whatever. But it was a good title. And it’s a song my friend, James, who just put out an amazing book called Black Punk Now that I always want to plug because it’s one of those things that’s not only just an amazing book, but an instant classic, I was having lunch with him and he’s like, “You really need to call it Rebel Girl.”

My editor had been pushing for that. Everybody was saying, “That’s what you should call it.” And I was really resisting it, and then I was like, “But I did write that song and it is kind of the most popular song I wrote.” And “Deceptacon” isn’t… That’s another the second most popular song I ever wrote. And “Deceptacon” is not a great book title. It’s just a good title. And it’s a cute picture on the front. And why not? But I addressed it in the book, my ambivalence about that title and how I feel sometimes more like a dirty napkin than a rebel girl, but Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, I laughed out loud when I read that line.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, good.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, no, I did because I thought, “Dirty Napkin. Actually, I would love to read a book called Dirty Napkin.”

Kathleen Hanna:
Maybe that’s part two, Rebel Girl Part II: Dirty Napkin.

Roxane Gay:
My last question is something I love to ask creative people. What do you like most about your work and how you do it?

Kathleen Hanna:
I really love the process of making stuff. I just like making stuff. I love making some instrumental music, putting it on my computer, and then just singing 20 different tracks of nonsense lyrics. Giving myself a week, coming back, and starting to listen and hear what is this song about. And that process of discovery and of being in the unknown place and not being so attached to language that I need it for survival, that I can let language be playful, I love it when that happens, when I become less attached to the direct meaning of words and more attached to the phrasing, the rhythm of them, and in singing the tone. That’s always a beautiful part of making work to me, is the way… All of my work has to do with language even when it’s visual. My relationship with language is the best part of my work, is to watch that relationship change and grow and sometimes be in a really bad place, and then we get together and we have a great relationship again. Those times are when it’s a song I want to sing over and over and over again.

Roxane Gay:
That’s awesome. And I always love hearing when people love the actual process of making and exploring and seeing what language can do. Kathleen Hanna, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Design Matters. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, such a pleasure to talk with you.

Roxane Gay:
Kathleen Hanna’s memoir is Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you so much for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Roxane Gay. Debbie Millman will be back and is looking forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Kathleen Hanna appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Does this sound familiar? “You’re too fat and too thin. Your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong too. Try something else. Forever this.”

Now, listeners, you might think that that’s from the recent movie, Barbie, but it’s actually a quote from Emily Nagoski’s 2015 New York Times bestselling book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. The book enabled people to have a deeper understanding of why and how we have sex and how to feel less critical of and dissatisfied with our bodies. Now she’s back with a brand new book titled Come Together: The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. And we are going to talk all about that today. Emily Nagoski, welcome to Design Matters.

Emily Nagoski:
Hello. It is thrilling to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you, thank you. Emily, tell us about Nagogles.

Emily Nagoski:
Nagogles is a puppet of me. I’m a 40-something white-haired lady with shortish blue hair and glasses, and so is my puppet. And when I was doing promotion for my podcast, the Come as You Are podcast, the production folks were like, “Would you be on TikTok?” And I was like, “No.” And they were like, “But TikTok.” And I was like, “I don’t know.” And my husband, who’s a genius, said, “How about a puppet of Emily?” And they went, “Yes.” And they made me a puppet of me. And I answer sex questions as the puppet, which brings a level of whimsy and gentle humor that helps to prevent people from feeling freaked out because we’re talking about sex.

Debbie Millman:
And did you have any hand in designing your puppet?

Emily Nagoski:
No. They literally just made a puppet, but apparently it was made by the same people who made the sexual molestation puppet from Kimmy Schmidt. It’s professional. The puppet has roots.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s amazing.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, you come from a family of artists. Your father is a photographer, your mother is a professional singer and pianist, your sister is a choral conductor, and your brother is an ethnomusicologist. And you’ve said that you were a black sheep with your science nerdiness. Were you ever tempted to become an artist or a musician?

Emily Nagoski:
My plan in high school and early into college was to be some sort of literature something or other; maybe an English teacher, maybe an English professor. But honestly, I decided to major in psychology because it was the thing I already had the most credits in.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, good planning there.

Emily Nagoski:
I was just being pragmatic. I was like, “I could finish my degree in three years if I choose this major.”

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back a little bit more to your childhood. And we’re going to get real deep real fast. And I hope that’s okay. And I think from reading you, you’re going to be okay with that. You’ve said that you were born and raised in a profoundly dysfunctional and neglectful family of origin where you had to hide.

Emily Nagoski:
You just went right there.

Debbie Millman:
I know. I’m sorry. I did say it in advance, though, and I usually don’t.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Just a giant black hole of the first 18 years of my life. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m sorry.

Emily Nagoski:
No, it’s fine.

Debbie Millman:
You were raised in a dysfunctional and neglectful family of origin where you had to hide away from all the other people in order to stay safe. Why is that? What was happening?

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, the key ingredient there is the alcoholic narcissistic father who was violent toward my mother and siblings, less so to Amelia and me being the youngest and girls, but it creates an atmosphere. And often, the rules in an alcoholic family are like you do not talk about what’s happening in the family, not even to the people who are there having it happen to them with you.

Also, it would turn out, not until 2021 did I know this, but in 1977 through 1995, I was living in this home while also being autistic. My sister and I were both diagnosed on the spectrum in 2021 in our mid-40s, which changes our understanding of what was going on. My experience was that I could very comfortably and easily escape my toxic home life.

And let me shout out to my mother who made it happen. Wow, it’s five minutes and I’m already crying. That’s cool. But my mom is a survivor. Her therapist called her an optimistic depressive or a depressed optimist. She worked hard to make that family exist and to get us through. Terrible environment; mom working as hard as she could to make it decent. And also just no parent is going to be capable of providing an adequate environment for the particular children that we were.

But I had this resource of being able to dwell in books. I would, over the summer, go to the library and literally just get a stack of books, lie on the couch and read 12 hours a day. There was a worn spot in the fabric on the arm of the couch from where my heels rested because I just laid there all day reading. I also worked for the family business in my dad’s photography business, but I could read and escape and be good at school and occasionally go to dance classes. And that was me being successful, even though I had no friends. It didn’t matter because I was good at school and I loved reading.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting how many people I’ve met that attribute reading to essentially saving their childhood.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh god, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And maybe even their lives.

Emily Nagoski:
And I was reading profoundly inappropriate, age-inappropriate stuff. Like I read the collected works of Nabokov when I was 13.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. How did Lolita impact you?

Emily Nagoski:
I am totally sure I did not understand it.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting, I learned in your most recent book how close physical abuse and neglect live in one’s psyche. And that was a real revelation. How were you neglected?

Emily Nagoski:
In a home where the father is violent, drunk, narcissistic, angry all the time, and I have a half sibling who was seven years older than Amelia and I are who was, I’m going to call it a little light sexual molestation when we were young.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, dear.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
No such thing.

Emily Nagoski:
There’s that. Our brother is just barely two years older than we are and was a terrible mess because he was not good at school. He got diagnosed with ADHD in the late ’80s, early ’90s, which is very early for people to be getting diagnosed with ADD, because he was clearly a genius and failing at school. Our half sibling got a lot of attention because they were behaving violently, Ian got a lot of attention because he was failing at school, and Amelia and I were fine; we could take care of ourselves. We were silent and friendless and deeply depressed at the age of 10, but we were doing fine at school. And we would cook our own meals and be in charge, so certainly it would never occur to us to ask for emotional help.

And on one occasion when I was 12, my teacher called my mom to be like, “Things are really bad for Emily at school.” I was very… No friends, because obviously I was a profound weirdo. And my mom tried. It was one of those we’re driving in the car to dance classes, so it’s really captive audience, so mom tries the parent move of having a serious conversation when you can’t escape. It’s really slick of her. And I just could not be opened. We knew not to ask for help. Even though help was being offered, I wouldn’t have known how to accept help.

Debbie Millman:
You also stated that you really weren’t paid much attention to unless you were performing and producing. And I’m wondering if you think that that’s sort of what turned you into an overachiever.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Every quarter, we got a report card. And if we got over a 3.0… Props to my parents for having reasonable academic expectations. 3.2 was really where they wanted it to be. If it was a 3.2, we were doing fine. And if we got a 3.2 or higher, that was report card day, we got to choose what we had for dinner. That was the only time we had takeout pizza. We were also, let me add, food stamps poor, no health insurance poor. The one winter when they hung up plastic sheeting in all the doorways and all of us lived in the room with the fireplace because they couldn’t afford to heat the house poor. Free lunch poor. The only time we got takeout pizza was when we ordered it because we got to choose what to eat. We were literally rewarded with food when we had good grades.

Debbie Millman:
Growing up, your family didn’t talk at all about sex and you never got the sex talk. Instead, there were medical textbooks and encyclopedias in the house and you learned about sex by reading them. Was your understanding of sex at that time clinical? And were you curious about any other aspect of sex or sexuality at that time?

Emily Nagoski:
Yes, I was curious about sex always. You probably heard the story of driving home from the library, and I must have seen the word vagina in a book because I asked my mom on the drive, “What’s a vagina?” And I don’t know what she said, but I remember she had this flash of embarrassment and shock and didn’t know what to do or say. When I got home, I looked it up in the medical encyclopedia, and I was like, “Oh, that’s what it is.” And my mom’s reaction taught me how to feel about it. Again, it’s just a very ordinary, mid-level sex negative American upbringing. A lot of people, a shocking number of people get explicit messages that they should feel ashamed of those parts of their bodies. And I didn’t get that, I just got, “I don’t know,” which is incredibly benign, relatively speaking. But I was reading a lot of romance novels at the library. I would either read them in the library or I would steal them because I felt embarrassed checking them out at the time. One of the first things I did when I got to college… I went to University of Delaware. Go Blue Hens. One of the first things I did was ride my bike to the library, find the sex section, sit down, and read The Height Report.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. How did you even know about The Height Report?

Emily Nagoski:
I didn’t. I went to the sex section and looked for the biggest book.

Debbie Millman:
That’s wonderful. I love that. You majored in psychology at the University of Delaware with minors in cognitive science and philosophy. And at that point, you thought you might be a clinical neuropsychologist working with people with traumatic brain injuries or who had suffered strokes. What changed?

Emily Nagoski:
I loved the brain stuff. You can tell I still love the brain stuff; it shows up in my work all the time. But at the same time that I was earning that degree, I was also volunteering as a peer sex educator. My first year as a peer sex educator, then a sexual violence prevention educator, and then I added on top of that a sexual violence crisis responder. And that work made me like who I am as a human being in a way that the intellectual stuff just never could. I could see the impact I was having on people right there in the moment, and the intellectual stuff couldn’t win against that feeling of being like, “I am making a difference right now in doing this work,” so that’s the path I chose.

My trainer as a sex educator, Annie Lomax, had a degree in counseling psychology. And I thought, I want to do what she does; I’m going to go get a degree in counseling psychology. Turns out that is not the degree that was for me necessarily. Halfway through it, I realized I do not have the magical something or other it takes to sit in a room with people and just be like, “Yeah, interesting. Tell me more about that. How did that make you feel?” I don’t have it. One of the things Amelia and I noticed later on is that I got a degree in counseling, she got a degree in choral conducting. A master’s degree in choral conducting, so we both got master’s degrees in how to feel feelings and listen.

Debbie Millman:
I found this quote of yours, and I think it describes your education perfectly because you also went on and got a PhD. You’ve deconstructed your entire education in the following way: Quote, “I have an undergrad degree in cognitive psychology because of course my first interest was in human cognition, not emotion or psychophysiology, a master’s in counseling because it took three years in a graduate program to teach me to listen and feel feelings, and a PhD in health behavior because it took three years in a grad program to teach me to understand how people make choices about their bodies.” Emily, my question is this: How did this all lead you to become a sex educator?

Emily Nagoski:
That was the origin. I was an undergraduate peer sex educator, and then I went to Indiana University. The reason I went to Indiana University, my boyfriend broke up with me as I was applying to grad schools. And I had only applied to two schools, and I only got into one of those schools, and it was Indiana University. I did not know at the time that that’s where the

Kinsey Institute was. But when I found out, it was like, “Oh, that’s great. I can go continue my training as a sex educator there.” And I lucked the fuck into a job at the Kinsey Institute running Ask Kinsey Now, which is the Q&A service that I ran in particular for the undergraduates at Indiana University. One of my first jobs when I got to Indiana was people would email the Kinsey Institute questions, I would go up to the Kinsey Institute library, which is a globally recognized resource and institution, look up the answers, and email them back.

Debbie Millman:
And did you love it?

Emily Nagoski:
I loved it. I loved everything about it. Every question was an opportunity for me to learn something and apply the skills that I had started developing in 1995 in terms of how to do the education piece of it. And I also somehow managed to get a clinical internship at the Kinsey Institute under Cindy Graham and John Bancroft. The rest of my life, I will be attempting to deserve the opportunities I got at Kinsey.

Debbie Millman:
The title of your thesis was An Agent-Based Model of Disease Diffusion in the Context of Heterogeneous Sexual Motivation. What does that mean exactly?

Emily Nagoski:
I always wanted to write a dissertation with an incomprehensible title, and I’m here to show you that dreams do come true. An agent-based model is a computer model where you set up a game essentially with thousands of agents, these creatures. And you give them personalities and you give them rules to follow. In this case, it was I gave them sexual personalities using the dual control model, which posits that every brain has a sexual accelerator and a sexual brake. People vary in the sensitivity of that accelerator and that brake, and so I would create a population that had some distribution of really sensitive accelerators or really sensitive brakes or really not sensitive either, and I would run it thousands of times dropping a disease into the system to see how the disease diffused through the population. An agent-based model of disease diffusion in the context of heterogeneous sexual motivation. Does that make sense?

Debbie Millman:
It does, it does. I learned in your most recent book that illness can impact intimacy in a very positive manner.

Emily Nagoski:
It can. I’m not going to say what a blessing it is to have an illness because it can whatever.

Debbie Millman:
No, of course not.

Emily Nagoski:
But also having a disability or an illness can necessitate the creation of a context that requires you to think differently about sexuality because the standard narrative doesn’t work for you explicitly. I’m here to say just the giveaway is it never worked for you and it doesn’t work for anyone. But once you have the disability or the illness, you know explicitly, oh, this set of rules is never going to work for me. I need to create a set of rules that are going to work given the body that I have.

Debbie Millman:
What is it about sex that has intrigued you so much over the course of your life and career?

Emily Nagoski:
I do not know. It is an innate… Like I said, I was reading romance novels when I was 10. I was reading The Height Report when I was 18. Nobody told me to go to the library and start reading sex science, I just spontaneously started doing it. It’s fascinating. In my doctoral program I was trying to figure out what on earth I was going to do with my life so I read a branding book, your personal brand. And I had to think through what am I here for? Why do I exist? What is this? And I realized that the thing that revs my engine is teaching specifically how to teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. It was reading a branding book that I figured out and the purpose in life. And I know not everybody has a clear sense of why they are here, but I do, which I consider a privilege and a gift.

Debbie Millman:
Do you happen to remember the name of that book?

Emily Nagoski:
I don’t. It was not a good book, actually. But even not good books can be really helpful.

Debbie Millman:
This might be too personal a question. And if it is, please just ignore it. Have you always liked sex?

Emily Nagoski:
I am absolutely a weirdo in terms of my sexual response because I conform with the culturally constructed aspirational ideal.

Debbie Millman:
What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?

Emily Nagoski:
I have experienced spontaneous desire, like I have craved sex out of the blue, I have become aroused easily. I have had orgasms from vaginal penetration. A lot of the things that I spend debunking in Come as You Are are things that I realized were myths when I read the science. And I was like, “Oh. My experience, which matched the cultural narrative, is not actually the typical norm. I’m the weirdo.” Yeah, it has always been comparatively easy for me until I got married and wrote a book about sex.

Debbie Millman:
Well, we are definitely going to get to that. I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about Come as You Are. You wrote this in Come as You Are: The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body, it could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts, but instead the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body. You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to. I am pissed on your behalf at the world for that lie, and I’m working to create a world that doesn’t lie to women about their bodies anymore.” Here’s my question, Emily: How and why were these lies perpetuated in the first place?

Emily Nagoski:
Once upon a time in what we now call the western world, let’s narrow it historically down to the British Isles, men owned the property and women and their children were part of the property that they owned. The men would go out and fight wars to protect the property and to gain more property, and women stayed home to raise the children who would inherit the property. Because a woman’s body was the property of her father and then her husband, she could not own property herself if she was married; it became the property of her husband. And because her value was in her ability to reproduce children who would care for the property and inherit the property so that he knew he was not sending his property to be inherited by somebody else’s child, her virginity mattered a lot. And the world saw a small fold of skin over the mouth of the vagina and decided that it was a marker of purity so that there could be some proof, some evidence that this person had never had their vagina penetrated before and therefore was not spoiled goods, essentially.

Over the next centuries, for one thing we have learned that people who have given birth can still have intact hymens, so it is absolutely not a marker of whether or not anything has ever been in a vagina. Two, the people who were property started to get a voice and started to be able to own their own property, and eventually in the 1970s get credit cards in their own names. And eventually in 1992, finally in every state in the United States, it was illegal to sexually assault your wife. It’s the patriarchy is what I’m saying. It’s capitalist, misogynist, cis hetero patriarchy is the source and origin of a lot of the lies.

There’s also like a big chunk of purity culture Christianity on top of it. The first plagues of Europe in the common era were all sexually transmitted. It was gonorrhea and syphilis. And it was really easy for the religious leaders who were required to be celibate to come to the conclusion that God was punishing people who had sex. And so there’s the other piece of it that’s like, oh, God punishes the people who have sex. In particular, God punishes the women who have sex because their bodies don’t even belong to them in the first place. The myths originate in the idea that a woman’s body is the property of the men who own her and God punishes us for having sex.

It wasn’t until about 1800 that the idea of women being less sexual than men emerged. Before that, the idea was that women were insatiable and had to be controlled in their sexuality. And then women began talking about their own sexual experiences and were like, “No, we don’t want the sex you are making us have.” It’s a pretty dark story.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a very dark story. And I think it’s important that we really understand where the threads of our current time are coming from, were first created.

Emily Nagoski:
And I haven’t even added on the slavery in America part and what race plays as the way we interpret women’s bodies in particular. It’s dark and bad.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote Come as You Are that society, people are raising women to be sexually dysfunctional.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
How so?

Emily Nagoski:
Sex is dangerous, dirty, and disgusting, and you should save it for someone you love. You should be absolutely pure, not even have sexual thoughts, totally chaste until the night of your wedding when you should be a sex pot, able to give 84 different kinds of blow jobs and have 74 different kinds of orgasms.

Given the nature of our sexual functioning is that there’s a sexual accelerator that notices all the sex related information and sends a turn on signal. And there’s also a sexual break that notices all the good reasons not to be turned on, all the potential threats. We are being taught that sex is sex related and sex is also a potential threat. That means your process of becoming aroused, which is this dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs, when you become sexually aroused, you are also activating all the ways you’ve been taught sex is dangerous and unsafe and dirty and disgusting and shameful. And if you try to drive a car with your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time, you might get where you want to go, but it will use a lot more gas and it will burn your engine. That’s the dysfunction is we are being taught that everything that is sex related is also a potential threat.

Debbie Millman:
The book really catapulted your research and your work into the zeitgeist in a really profound way. Your book became a New York Times bestseller, you’ve given several TED talks that are extremely popular. But something else happened to you during the time you were writing and promoting and touring Come as You Are; you and your husband stopped having sex.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah, for months at a time.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Emily Nagoski:
First, while I was writing it, when I finished the book, it got a little better. Then I went on book tour and it got a lot worse. What would happen is I would try to follow my own advice in Come as You Are, which is to make the most of responsive desire. You set up a time. You put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner’s skin, and your body goes, “Oh right, I like this. I really like this person. What a good idea this was.”

And instead, I would put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner’s skin, and I would cry and fall asleep. Even when I tried, I just couldn’t get there. Wherever there was, it was not a place I could go. And I was like, “Well, I need better information than I gave in my own book.” I did what any good sex nerd would do; I went to Google Scholar and I looked at the research on couples who successfully sustain a sexual connection over the long term. And what I found there was so contradictory of the mainstream cultural discourse about sex in long-term relationships that I wrote a book about it. And also, I found out what I needed to know in order to fix my own situation, which ultimately was the emotional floor plan. Which I don’t know if you want me to go all the way into the emotional floor plan right now.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, we’re going to go there. Yeah, give me a couple more questions and then we’ll go there for sure. I was wondering if your sudden turn off switch was ignited in the same way that people working in an ice cream store stop liking ice cream.

Emily Nagoski:
No. I wanted to want sex. It wasn’t like, “Ugh, please, no sex for me.” It was like, “I would really like.” I started writing in Come as You Are in 2012; we only got married in 2012. We were newlyweds when things got harder. One of the things that did happen is because I was beating myself up about it inevitably… Because I’m a quote, unquote, “expert.” I should be able to fix my own problems very easily. And it was not typical of my experience of sexuality that it would be like, what’s the matter? Does beating yourself up for something, does that activate the accelerator, do we think? Or does beating yourself up for something hit the brakes and make it even harder to want or like the sex that’s available to you in your relationship? Made it so much harder. That happened.

It ended up being the stress. I was so exhausted and anxious and working extremely hard in a very focused way. Sex is my special interest, my autistic special interest. And I can disappear into writing for 10 hours at a time. Rich would bring me food, and I would finish the day with the taste of food in my mouth and an empty plate next to me and not remember having received it. I can focus hard. And switching out of that focus to something else when I was so drained… I had just poured all of my energy into this day of writing; I had nothing left. And I did not know how to balance my energy output between my work and having energy left to be a person with this other person.

Debbie Millman:
How did Rich handle all of this?

Emily Nagoski:
Ideally, he’s a spectacular, wonderful, delight. The occasion when I cried and fell asleep, the first time I told that story, people were like, “He must have been so angry.” And I was like, “No. He was really sad for me.” He put a blanket over me and brought me tea for when I woke up. He was incredibly patient and kind and understanding. It was actually one of the struggles we had to overcome, that each of us was so competent at managing our own lives. We’d both been single for years and could live our lives autonomously. And especially when I was on the road, he was at home dealing with everything at home and I was on the road dealing with my work. And when I got home, it was so easy and comfortable and we’re both so competent that we could just stay in our own lanes. We made excellent roommates, and it required a deliberate shift to decide to rely on each other.

Debbie Millman:
And as you were investigating what was happening, did the two of you seek help? Did you go to a therapist together? Or were you navigating it independently or on your own?

Emily Nagoski:
The only professional intervention we did was we went to a Hold Me Tight workshop, which is Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy. It was a very hilarious experience. But it was two miles from our house; we could go home during the lunch breaks. We both did not enjoy the experience, but in the same way that that book that I did not enjoy helped me, this weekend workshop that we did not enjoy was revelatory and profound and a turning point.

They gave us this very simple deck of cards with conversation prompts or things you want to say to your partner, and there was this one moment when we were just sorting through the cards, what’s a thing I want to say? And he handed me a card that said, “I want to be on the same team.” Sorry.

Debbie Millman:
It’s okay.

Emily Nagoski:
You start with the childhood neglect and then you come to the moment when this dude I married turns out to be my ideal partner, this is what you get. I would say I’m really lucky, but I have had so many years of therapy, I earned him. When he handed me this card that was like, “I want us to be on the same team,” I felt like I knew what to do with that. I understood what that meant. That meant we are going to rely on each other. I’m going to ask for his help, and then I’m going to do the really hard part and accept it.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to write a book about the experience?

Emily Nagoski:
I was talking to my agent about the things I was learning and how it is so… The things I’m learning make the mainstream conversation about sex and long-term relationships irrelevant. I can’t believe there’s not a book about this. And Lindsay was like, “Emily, Emily.” That’s when I decided to write a book about it.

Debbie Millman:
Did you worry at all that revealing your own issues-

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… or sharing your own issues would undercut your expertise as a sex educator?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Absolutely, 100%. And it’s only because Lindsay Edgecombe, my literary agent who has been from the very beginning… I lucked out and got the perfect agent right out of the gate. When I told her, and I was like, “I worry that saying this in public, people would be like, ‘How can she be an expert when she struggled herself?'” Was like, “No. It is such a relief to know that even somebody who knows so much can still struggle in this way.

And let’s face it; I struggled in the face of not that many barriers. We are child-free by choice. We do not have that barrier in our lives. We are two adults in our 30s at the time. There was, quote, unquote, “no reason” why we should be struggling in that way. If it was difficult even for us, even for me… In particular, therapists and sex educators and people who are in training to be therapists and sex educators have pulled me aside and thanked me, and it was such a relief that I was willing to say out loud that, “Just because I do this doesn’t mean I’m a sex monster.”

Debbie Millman:
One thing I was surprised at learning from you in doing my research for our interview was that sex is not a drive. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. The language of biologists drives are motivational systems where your body notices there’s a problem. Hunger is a drive; there’s low energy. Thirst is a drive; there’s the balance of water and sodium and other things is off. Sleep is a drive. And so a little alert goes off, meep, beep. Something goes wrong. It pushes you out into the world to go fix the problem. And the consequence if you do not manage to fix the problem is you literally die. You die of hunger, you die of thirst, you die. You can die of sleep deprivation, you can die of loneliness. Connection is a drive, love is a drive. Sex is not one of those. Nothing bad happens to people’s bodies if they don’t have access to sex. There is no tissue damage. As Frank Beech said in the fifties, “There’s no tissue damage associated with lack of sex.” Instead, sex is an incentive motivation system. And I do not live in a fantasy world. I know that we’re not going to transition to all saying incentive motivation system instead of drive.

Debbie Millman:
Sex drive. Yeah.

Emily Nagoski:
But let’s understand that nothing bad happens to a person if they don’t get sex. Instead, sex as an incentive motivation system means instead of being pushed by an uncomfortable internal feeling to fix a problem, you are pulled by a pleasurable feeling to move towards some, “Ooh, what’s that?” Some object that is attractive to you. Ooh, ooh, what’s that?”

Curiosity is another incentive motivation system. It is just as organic and innate to our bodies, it is just as natural, it’s just nothing bad happens to you if you don’t get it. And we all intuitively understand that there are times in your life when you are less curious or less interested in trying new things. Like when you’re real stressed out, you just want to watch 30 Rock again for the 98th time because it’s your comfort watch or whatever it is for you. Rich was talking about 30 Rock yesterday, and so that is my example today. That’s all. It’s natural, it’s just not a drive.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked a bit about the dual control mechanism that exists in our brains that governs sexual response. And you talked about the two parts, the sexual excitation system or the accelerator. And the other part is the brake. And you write how some people have really sensitive accelerators and some people have really sensitive brakes. And then vice versa, some people have really not sensitive accelerators and have not sensitive brakes. And the way a person’s sexuality functions will differ depending on the sensitivity of their brakes and their accelerators. And what blew my mind was that these are personality traits. It seems to be more or less innate and inborn. Does that mean they’re genetic?

Emily Nagoski:
There does seem to be some genetic component, but there’s only a tiny, little bit of research. It’s not heritable the way something even as fungible as intelligence is heritable. There is some genetic component to it.

Debbie Millman:
Are they changeable, these traits? We don’t know?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
We don’t know. It’s so interesting. I think that should be your next book. How do you-

Emily Nagoski:
But there’s not really… Why change it?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I guess it’s true. Yeah, of course.

Emily Nagoski:
Because people can just vary, and everyone is normal. It’s a standard, normal distribution. Normal in the technical statistical sense of most of us are heaped up in the middle of sensitivity. And it’s only for a small proportion of people at the extreme ends on either side. And the two components, the brakes and accelerator, do not co-vary. You can have a really sensitive accelerator and an average brake, a really sensitive accelerator and a really sensitive brake, a really sensitive accelerator and a really not sensitive brake; they don’t vary together.

For most people, the challenge, if they face difficulties around their sexual functioning, it’s not because of a really sensitive brake or a really sensitive accelerator or really not sensitive of either, it’s because usually their context is just slamming on the brakes. And it’s by changing the context and freeing up the brake that you create change. And I wouldn’t even want to create a drug that gave people less sensitive brakes. Your brake is there for really good reasons. Evolutionarily speaking, if you’re being chased by a lion, that’s not a great time to be turned on. It makes sense that stress would hit your brake. I don’t want to brake the mechanism that is functioning correctly, I want to change the world that is screwing with your brain functioning correctly. It is the culture in particular that is making your brain function in a way that is not ideal for the way we want it to be.

Debbie Millman:
When people struggle with sexual desire, the question to not ask is, “Why don’t I want sex?” It’s really more about, “How do I create pleasure?” Is that right?

Emily Nagoski:
This is a question people ask a lot because the number one reason why couples seek sex therapy of any gender combination is because of a difference in desire. When it’s a heterosexual couple, it’s just as likely to be the man as the woman who has the lower desire, unlike what we often assume. And people are really worried about desire.

But let’s take two examples. Let’s take couple one where partner A says to the therapist, “I was really into sex before, but frankly, I’d be fine if we never had sex again.” And because it’s my story, so I’m going to give them Peggy Kleinplatz as their therapist. She’s a therapist and researcher in Ottawa, the head of the Optimal Sexual Experiences project. And Peggy being Peggy will say, “Well, tell me more about the sex you don’t want.” They will go on to describe sex that is intimate and loving and adventurous and connected. No, of course not. They describe sex that is dismal and disappointing. And Peggy being Peggy will say, “Well, I rather like sex, but if that’s the sex that we’re having, I wouldn’t want it either.” And then comes the gut punch question of, “What kind of sex is worth wanting?” And that’s the starting point. How can this couple figure out what shared pleasure looks like between them? What kind of sex is worth the time and energy that it takes to create? Instead of spending that time frankly watching Parks and Recreation, which is also fun.

Debbie Millman:
You write that humans are taught to be ashamed of pleasure. Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
It’s American work ethnic puritanism. There’s a cultural narrative that I think makes things way worse, but there is actually a neurological piece that is really interesting and I think plays a role. The cultural part of feeling ashamed of pleasure is that is a very old western white Christian tradition, right along with the gender binary and patriarchy.

Debbie Millman:
Yep. That word again.

Emily Nagoski:
That pleasure is a sin, pleasure is a sign that you are wasting your time and doing it wrong. I don’t know why leaders decided that pleasure was the wrong thing. It probably has to do with productivity and capitalism.

Debbie Millman:
What is the desire imperative?

Emily Nagoski:
These are very big questions.

Debbie Millman:
Sorry. I’m so curious about everything.

Emily Nagoski:
Why? Why do we not? The neurological piece, though, about why pleasure is so difficult for us, in 2010 there was a paper published by Charles Carver with the idea that pleasure is a signal maybe in our brains that we can stop paying attention to something. This problem has been solved; we can move on because our brains are problem-solving machines. They’re great at it and they are motivated to do it.

Desire is like, let me scratch this itch. Let me move toward this thing. It’s a kind of dissatisfaction with what’s happening right now and a need to change things. I need to change things. Pleasure is just like everything is delightful right now. This feels good. And, oh, I don’t need to pay attention to this anymore because everything is fine. I need to go focus on a problem so I can make sure things keep changing and getting better. I think people struggle to pay attention to pleasure because it really does take a concerted effort to train your brain to stay with pleasure.

That neurological component on top of the cultural shame around daring to waste your time reveling in delicious pleasure, I think those two things combined make it a hard sell, the idea of centering pleasure. The desire imperative is my name for this idea that it’s supposed to be. Here’s the story: At the beginning of a relationship, it’s hot and heavy, sparks a flying, spicy everything. And as time passes, that gradually goes away until all apparently of your hormones drift off and you’re left to hold hands on a beach at sunset or whatever, white curtains and a breeze, that kind of thing. And once you lose the spark, you have lost really the only thing worth having. And your choices are either to accept that sex is no longer for you or to fight to spice things up to keep the spark alive. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term do not talk about spark.

Debbie Millman:
What do they talk about?

Emily Nagoski:
They talk about pleasure. They like the sex that is available in their relationships and they collaborate actively to create pleasure, to make it easier to experience pleasure together, to explore new pleasures together. They talk about intimacy and authenticity and vulnerability, empathy. Empathy is the meta factor in great sex. Being able to be aware of your own internal experience and your partner’s internal experience at the same time, that is the source of great sex. It is not handcuffs or porn. If you like those, great. I’m not shooting them down, I’m just saying those are primarily tools to facilitate the authenticity and the vulnerability and the exploration and the empathy.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire.

Emily Nagoski:
Sure. Yeah, most of us grow up learning about spontaneous desire where you’re just walking down the street, you have a stray sexy thought, you see a stray sexy person, and just out of the blue you would like… “Ooh, ooh, sex, I would like to have some sex.” You go home to your certain special someone. You’re like, “I would like the sex. Would you like the sex?” And on some magical time? Both of you have the desire for sex simultaneously. You’re interested in the same kind of sex at the same time in the same way at the same level because life is easy like that, I guess.

Debbie Millman:
If only.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s absolutely 100% a normal way to experience desire. And if you experience sexual desire that way, you do not need to worry. You’re not broken. It is normal. And there’s another way of experiencing desire that researchers call responsive desire where instead of spontaneous, out of the blue… Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated Come as You Are, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom. You just want it.

Instead of it being spontaneous kaboom, it is like you have a date night, and so you get the childcare and you put the last of the laundry in the dryer and you tromp up the stairs and you put on the special socks and you trim your ear and nose hair, you put on the body glitter, you turn on the music, you get in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner’s skin, and your body goes, “All right, yeah. Oh, that’s a good idea.” That’s responsive desire. Or it could be you’re just sitting on the couch snuggling and your certain special someone starts touching you in a place and in a way. And your brain receives that stimulation is like, “Oh, that’s really nice,” and so you turn towards your partner and you do something back. And your brain receives that stimulation. Your brain goes, “That is really nice.” And your partner does something in return, and your brain receives that and goes, “You know what, though?” Kaboom. That’s responsive desire. It emerges in response to pleasure where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. And they are both a normal way to experience desire.

Debbie Millman:
Why is the idea of setting up a date night in order to have sex considered inferior to spontaneous sex?

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, gosh. Well, it isn’t by me. Let’s just be super clear about that.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a cultural judgmentalness to it.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. People are like, “Well, if we have to set up a time, if we have to plan, it’s not natural. My partner really doesn’t want me enough if they don’t just want me out of the blue.” I’ll be really honest with you. I’m busy. Aren’t you busy? If something is not in my calendar, it doesn’t happen. And I find that if my partner is willing to cordon off a chunk of calendar time where it’s protected and nothing is going to stop us from spending that time not doing any of the 80 million other things we could be doing… There’s so much other stuff we could be doing with that time. But no, it’s protected. It has got red velvet ropes around it. And that is just for us to get naked and roll around like puppies. That is the ultimate romantic I want you that a person can do for me, from my point of view.

If when you see it on the calendar, you’re like, “Okay. I know for sure it’s going to happen and I know that it’s there and I can fantasize about it and I know that when I know that when I show up, we are going to do something that I am going to enjoy, and I’m going to be like, ‘That was a good idea. We should totally do that again sometime.'” But if you schedule it and it looms in your week, if you are not sure that what’s going to happen in that time is something that you will enjoy, if you experience dread around it in particular, dread is the literal worst, scheduling is not for you. If you don’t like the sex you would be having, scheduling is not going to fix it. What you need to do is figure out how to enjoy pleasure. I would just like to point out how beautiful Thunder is.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually loving the fact that when you talked about rolling around as puppies, your doggy showed up. Your book features, I believe his name is Jaak Panksepp, Panksepp.

Emily Nagoski:
Yep.

Debbie Millman:
His model of the seven primary process emotions. You write that there are at least three dominant models. Why did you pick this specific one?

Emily Nagoski:
It’s the only one that includes sex.

Debbie Millman:
Can you outline what the primary process emotions are?

Emily Nagoski:
Sure. I group them broadly into the pleasure favorable emotions and the pleasure adverse emotions. The pleasure adverse emotions are really simple. You know the fight or flight response? One of the primary process emotions is rage: fight. One of them is fear: flight. And then the third one is less recognizable, but for those who are aware of other trauma responses like fawn, flop, and freeze, there’s a space for that. It’s called panic grief. And it’s loneliness, isolation, despair. Obviously those are not spaces where your brain’s going to have access to pleasure. And neurologically, we know that when brains are stressed out, they’re likely to interpret almost any sensation as a potential threat, something to be avoided. Sensation just feels really irritating or painful.

And then there are the four pleasure favorable spaces. Lust is one of them. There’s also care, which for a lot of people, the experience of feeling really cared for, feeling like their needs are being met, they’re attended to, that cuddling on the couch in front of the fire, holding hands and kissing a little, that for a lot of people has a really direct connection to the lust space, which is where attraction, romance, courtship, and sex happen. Care is complicated, though. Care is huge in mammalian brains generally, but in human brains in particular.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
Because of a thing called the cephalopelvic disproportion. There are two characteristics of humans that makes humans really amazing. One is these great, big, giant brains, these cortexes that just cannot be stopped. But in order to have these brains, we have to have these really huge heads. And we walk upright. In order to walk upright, we need these little, narrow hips. The combination of a great big giant skull and a little, narrow hip makes childbirth really difficult for us. The cephalopelvic disproportion. Consequently, human beings are born when they are underbaked. We are pulled from the oven too soon. You know a baby elephant can walk within hours? How long does it take a baby human to start walking?

Debbie Millman:
Year and a half.

Emily Nagoski:
Actual literal years. Yeah. We are born way too early. Our skulls aren’t even closed. We can’t run away from a predator, we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t even thermoregulate independently. If you leave a baby on the ground, it will just freeze if it’s not eaten by a lion first, which it probably will be. They require constant attention by other people. Our babies are born much too young. They keep you up all night. You have to carry them everywhere that you go. They smell weird, they’re noisy. If they were not so fucking cute, we would leave them by the side of the road.

Evolution in its wisdom created a mechanism that we call the attachment mechanism where when somebody hands you a kid and says, “Here, this one’s yours. Keep it alive,” a thing happens. Christopher Hitchens of all people describes it as your heart beating in someone else’s body. Even if you don’t enjoy the experience, nothing will stop you from caring for the baby. That’s the attachment mechanism. And because our babies are so needy for so long, it is intensely powerful in humans. And it happens to be a system that got co-opted from parent offspring, love, to peer-to-peer love. That same mechanism is at work in the way we attach to our peers. We get into adult relationships, and for a lot of people, attachment is deeply involved in the way we connect with our certain special someones. It’s huge because our brains are so big is why. I don’t know if that was the answer you were looking for.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. No, it was better than what I was expecting.

Emily Nagoski:
The nature of humanity is to have profound, deep, un-irresistible love for each other. And if you are in that caretaking space where you are making sure everybody’s fed and making sure all the dishes got done and all the laundry got done, that is not a care space that is going to be really similar to the lust space. It’s a long journey to travel. We are only on the second pleasure favorable space, so I will move on. Care is complicated because it’s so big.

There’s two other pleasurable favorable spaces. One is the play space. Play is the universal mammalian motivational system of friendship. Play is any behavior we engage in for its own sake because everybody involved likes it and there is nothing at stake. There are so many things I would change about the sexual world if I could, but maybe the thing that would make the most immediate difference is if everybody tried on the idea that they could have sex with their partner and there is nothing at stake. Your relationship is not at stake, your identity is not at stake, whether or not you are being successful at your gender is not at stake, whether or not you’re a good person is not at stake. You’re just playing. You are engaging in behaviors that you like and you’re not going to lose anything.

Object play is one of the kinds of play. When little children engage in object play, you imagine a toddler splashing in the bath, they discover the water. And they start going, “What can I make this object do?” That’s object play. “What can I make it do?” And they splash, and they splash you and it’s hilarious. What if our partners’ bodies are object play? We look at their genitals, and we’re like, “What can I make this do?” And it’s not about performance, it’s not about expectations or doing it right or wrong or blowing anybody’s mind, it’s just about what’s fun? What feels good> what do you like? What do I like? Object play.

And the last of the pleasure favorable spaces as seeking, which is curiosity itself, exploration, adventure. I have friends who sold all their stuff and traveled around the world together, which sounds like a nightmare to me, but they loved it. And for them, the adventure of it was right next to their lust space. Made it really easy for them to get into a lusty state of mind. When I was in grad school, I dated other grad students, and we would talk about each other’s research, and that intellectual curiosity and exploration was basically a water slide directly from affective neuroscience into my lust space. And it took until 2021 for me to be diagnosed on the spectrum.

Debbie Millman:
How has that knowledge changed your work?

Emily Nagoski:
I am much more aware of the ways that I, as the author of the work, am not the target audience, that my experience is not the same as others people’s experience. And I have known that was true, but now I know why that’s true and a lot more about how it’s true. It has also helped me to make sure I include neurotype and neurodivergence as part of my conversation about diversity and the ways that we vary from each other and have to accommodate difference. It has also made me a much more skeptical reader of the science.

Debbie Millman:
You also added two bonus spaces to the seven primary process emotions, the thinking mind or what you also refer to as the office where you plan and reason, and the observational distance or the scenic viewpoint for noticing your own internal experience with non-judgment. Why did you add them? And what do they do in the plan?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. They’re there because they are really essential in understanding how and why things go wrong and how to fix it. A lot of people ask me about, “What do I do when my brain is just stuck in my to-do list and I can’t pay attention to pleasure because my brain is stuck in my thinking mind?” I had to include it a space people tell me they get stuck in and they don’t know how to get out. And they want to, and so I had to include it as you might be here. And if you are, yeah. That’s the part of the brain that is the reason our brains are so big and we have to be born so early is the part that can plan for the future and, “Hey, stop planning for the future and pay attention to the pleasure that’s happening now.”

And then observational distance is the solution space. It is your ability to take one step back from your experience and witness it in a neutral way. It was by going to observational distance that I figured out that when I cried and fell asleep, I was putting my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner’s skin, and instead of my brain interpreting that sensation is, oh, sexy times. Yay. My brain went, “Oh, I’m safe now.”

The second book I wrote I wrote with my sister. It’s called Burnout. The first chapter is about the stress response cycle. And one of the concrete specific evidence-based strategies for dealing with the stress response cycle is connection. Here’s my body touching my favorite person’s body and going, “Oh, I’m safe now. I can relax. I can complete the stress response cycle.” I was bouncing around in the fear space, it turned out. And when my body was like, “Oh, I’m safe. I could cry as my way to get out of that space.” And once I got out, I was just left with how physically exhausted I was, and so that was the nap and then generally the bath and the snack, and then I could get into the seeking space or the place space. When I could observe, oh, here’s the process, I am getting out of the fear space, I’m taking care of my body, and then I can get into a space that’s adjacent to lust. It’s literally four steps I have to go through when I’m in this stressed out state of mind in order for my brain to gain access to sexual arousal. Of course it’s not easy, and of course I need a damn plan.

Debbie Millman:
Your book helps readers develop a map of the different emotional states that exist in our brains and outlines just the way you described how to navigate those spaces to find ourselves in the vicinity of the erotic. And you think of these spaces as the rooms in your brain laid out in an emotional floor plan. Why a floor plan? And can anyone create their own floor plan?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. The floor plan is a metaphor to make Jaak Panksepp’s research, his framework accessible and usable so that you can have a conversation with other people about your internal state. I can say, “I’m in this space and you want me to get here, so here’s the path we have to walk.” The reason the floor plan is valuable is because it… Seven rooms. Even if it’s just the seven emotions, that’s a big space. It’s a complex space. You are not going to be able to get directly into every room from every other room. If I’m in this room, I have to go a long way to get to the place I want to be. If you want me to be here in the lust space, I’m going to need your help transitioning out of this space through this other one so that I can get there.

The floor plan. I’ve had a lot of beta readers on the book. Floor plan, there are some people whose imaginations are so not visual that it doesn’t work for them. They go with a spectrum of colors like it’s a chain series. Some people, it’s just feelings and they can sense that they transition in a certain way. Everyone’s imagination is different. I am not a particularly visual person, and yet the floor plan as a spatial metaphor ended up being the thing that allowed me to communicate and even understand for myself what I needed. And everyone’s floor plan’s going to be different. Let us not spend any time being like, “But I should be able to get directly from my fear space into my lust space. I wish I could just knock a wall…” I wish I could knock a wall down and just get right from my fear space to my lust space.

Debbie Millman:
Is that even possible, Emily?

Emily Nagoski:
No. And you don’t need to because in other contexts in our lives, we know how to get out of the fear space in our lives. We know what helps us; well, hopefully. And if you don’t know what helps you get out of stress, chapter one of Burnout. Don’t even have to read the whole thing, just read chapter one. It’s probably available for free on Amazon. You know how to get out of your rage space if you are even aware that you have a rage space because some people are raised to believe that they, “No, I just don’t get angry.” There are conversations to have about each of the spaces. You know how to get out of them, you can understand what puts you into each of these spaces, and you can know what it feels like when you are transitioning into and out of them.

Debbie Millman:
You suggest that people aim to go to the room next door to lust. Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
Yes. The room next door to the room where it happened. Hamilton joke. Hooray, somebody laughed.

Debbie Millman:
Yay. Oh, of course.

Emily Nagoski:
Not everyone has any idea what I’m talking about when I do that.

Debbie Millman:
Really? That’s sad. That’s terrifying.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s an old reference now.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Aiming for the room.

Emily Nagoski:
The reason why is because of a thing called the… It’s literally called the ironic process. Dan Wagner is the original researcher here. The harder you try to do something directly, the more difficult it becomes. Don’t think about a white bear. I’m going to do something mean to your dog if you think about a white bear wearing a purple tutu with white polka dots on it. And if that bear is wearing roller skates, you watch out. That’s the ironic process. The harder you try to do something.

The same thing goes for sexual functioning, like I’m going to put a spotlight on your penis. Get an erection, get an erection, get an erection. What’s the matter with you? Get an erection, get an erection. If the harder you try to do something, the more pressure there is or demand, the more impossible it becomes because there’s competition between the part of you that’s trying to do it and the part of you that’s monitoring whether or not you’re doing it. Don’t aim right for the lust room, get to a room next door, something that’s close to lust that will make it easy to transition into the lust space.

Debbie Millman:
You discovered that one of the primary indicators of a satisfying, long-term sex life for most people is cuddling. That really surprised me.

Emily Nagoski:
Research averages things together, and so you end up getting middle of… The research on the funniest joke ever really just finds the most benign and offensive joke, the one that activates the least intense extremes of anything. And cuddling, I think, is that thing that it doesn’t do any harm; it does everybody some good. It is the most reliable predictor of sex and relationship satisfaction is cuddling for 10 minutes after sex. When I read that paper, my husband and I started doing it. And we’re like, “Oh, shit, this really works.” All it takes is a very slight intentional effort to stay together for a few extra minutes. It’s delightful.

Debbie Millman:
That really excited me because that’s one of my favorite things to do. It really is.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. It’s not for everyone. Not everybody likes it. But-

Debbie Millman:
Well, I only like doing it with my favorite person and my dog. Can you share what some of the characteristics of partnerships that help sustain a strong sexual connection?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. This has been remarkably controversial; in particular the first one. The first characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term is they like each other. They have a friendship. They admire and trust each other.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that controversial?

Emily Nagoski:
Mostly it’s controversial among the straights. I’m real. I’m not going to lie. I’m worried about the straights. They have lower quality sex than other kinds of couples, and they have it more frequently, so it’s more sex that they don’t like. And apparently, there are people in heterosexual relationships who take seriously the… Genuinely, authentically, not ironically, genuinely they take seriously the idea that friendship and sexual attraction are antithetical to each other. Yeah, I don’t know either. This is one of the things I’ve discovered since the book came out. When I say, “You’ve got to be friends,” people are like, “That’s not sexy.” Are you kidding? All I want to do is fuck my friends. Friendship is the sexiest thing in the world. But yeah, you have to like each other. But really, what I’m proposing is radical insofar as I’m saying that liking each other is more important than wanting each other. There needs to be a basic attraction between you, but hot and heavy, can’t wait to put my tongue in your mouth matters less than like you and I make a great team, and we have a lot of fun when we get together. You like each other.

Characteristic number two, they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters, that sex contributes something unique and important to their connection, and so it is worth cordoning off space and time and energy to connect with each other in this really specific, very, let’s face it, silly way that we humans have of putting parts of our bodies inside parts of another person’s body and licking each other’s body parts. Why would we do that? Because we decide that it contributes something important, and so we look at our lives and decide which things matter less in our lives than that. That’s prioritizing sex.

And then the last characteristic is they notice that they have been following somebody else’s rules about who they are supposed to be as sexual people and what their sexual connection is supposed to be like, and they decide to stop doing that and instead really deeply investigate who they truly are as sexual people, who their partner truly is as a sexual person, which is maybe even more difficult, and who they truly are as a sexual relationship. And they create an authentic sexual connection that is true to them that makes it easy for both of them to access pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, I only have a few last questions for you today, although I really-

Emily Nagoski:
This has been like a fire drill.

Debbie Millman:
There’s so much more I want to ask you and talk to you about. I’m going to have to ask you to come back and do a part two with me. After all this work, after all this research and writing, how are things between you and your husband? Is your sex life more satisfying?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Short answer, yes. Longer answer, did writing Come Together do the same thing to your sex life as writing Comes as You Are? Yeah, 100%. And it did it 10 years later, which means it did it in the context of perimenopause, which is not great and long COVID. I have basically insert chronic fatigue symptoms here. Yeah, I get to the end of writing the book and I’m exhausted and I’m sick and I’m perimenopausal, but I’ve got this book, this 100,000 word tome of how to fix the thing I just broke. And I have to say, we’ve been following our own advice and I think things are better than they have been in all the 13 years that we’ve been together.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s wonderful.

Emily Nagoski:
Because we laugh about it more.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a scene in the movie with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson about marriage where they’re having a very intense fight and she’s accusing him of sleeping with someone else, and he says, “I laughed with her, and that’s what you should be more worried about.” Laughing, playing.

Emily Nagoski:
That movie made me really sad.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve said many times that the most common question you’re asked is, “Am I normal?” This is a two parter. Why do people want to be normal? And what does it mean to be normal?

Emily Nagoski:
Those are both a really big, important questions. And I think I have to answer the second one first, what does it mean? Because if you ask a statistician what normal is, it is a measure of central tendency. It is the mean, median, or mode. And I don’t think when people ask, “Am I normal?” They’re not asking, “Am I within two standard deviations of the measure of central tendency?” I don’t think that’s what people mean. I think what they’re asking instead is, “Do I belong? Am I acceptable within the human community?” I think that’s what they mean when they say normal, because they’re also not asking, “Am I doing sex right?” Because you don’t read a 100,000 word book about sex in order just to be normal. If your partner says to you, “Hey, that sex was really normal,” you don’t feel awesome about that. I want to be the best lover my lover has ever had. I want to be amazing, not just, quote, unquote “just normal.” Normal isn’t even a high standard that we’re hoping to achieve, we just want to know that we are not outcasts as sexual people.

And all of us, everybody, the nature of human sexuality is inherently for us to vary from each other. A sexually reproducing species is successful because it produces variety and diversity. And for humans in particular, variety, diversity, adaptability, flexibility, responsiveness to changes in our context is what makes us so successful as a species. Variety is the point of being a sexually reproducing species. Yeah, you’re normal. And you’re going to be different from literally everyone else on earth.

I have an identical twin sister. Our sexualities are very different. We were raised in the same shitty household. Our sexualities are very different. We’re all going to be different from each other, and it’s really hard for us as humans because we’re… Also, the other thing about humans is we’re basically a herd species. Jonathan Haidt calls us 90% chimp, 10% bee. We’re a flock species like sheep. We’re a herd species. We want to be in the middle where we’re protected. And to be on the edges feels unsafe and can actually be unsafe. And we’re such a powerfully herd-oriented species that if we notice someone who it seems like association with them would make other people perceive us as though we belong on the outskirts, we will push that person away from us toward the outside. And so we will all try to pretend to be normal to move closer to the middle.

We are all worried about being safe within the human community in the same way that it takes deliberate effort to pay attention to pleasure, to value and center pleasure in your life because it’s good for your brain, because it’s good for your relationship, because it’s good for your life and the world. It takes deliberate effort to notice diversity, variety, difference and not freak out about it, and be like, “Oh, people are just different from each other.” I am different from literally everyone I know, and none of us is broken. None of us is doing it wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, I have one last question for you. I understand that one of your favorite movies is Moana.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering if you can tell us why.

Emily Nagoski:
Have you seen Moana?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, of course. It’s a beautiful, beautiful movie.

Emily Nagoski:
Yes. It’s a Disney movie, therefore it’s problematic. We get that. And also, it is a Jungian metaphor for trauma healing. Moana is the Maori word for ocean. Moana is called by the ocean to cross the horizon, find the demigod, Maui, and restore the heart of Te Fiti. The heart of Te Fiti is a literal object. It’s a green, glowing stone with a swirl in the center of it. She does, Moana, crosses the horizon. She finds the demigod, Maui. In order to restore the heart of Te Fiti, she confronts her last worst enemy.
Now, in Jungian analysis of narrative, every part of the story is a part of the reader. Or if you’re interpreting your dream, everything in your dream is you. Moana is the Maori word for ocean. She is called by the ocean. She is called by herself. It’s not like they’re hiding it, it’s not like this is a deep analysis that I’m just imposing on this narrative, her name is Moana. She is called by the ocean.
She meets her last worst enemy, which of course is a part of herself. It is a lava monster named Te Ka that’s throwing balls of lava at her. And because Moana’s superpower is she sees below the surface, she notices the swirl at the heart on this chest of Te Ka, the lava monster, and so she says to the ocean, which is herself, “Let her come to me.” She turns toward the scariest, most difficult, uncomfortable part of herself, the most injured part of herself, the most wounded and therefore raging part of herself with wisdom and compassion and courage. And she says, “I have

crossed the horizon to find you. I know your name. They have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you.”

What is, they have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you, what could that possibly be other than like you were traumatized? They hurt you, and that is not who you are. Your trauma is not who you are. This is not who you are. You know who you are. And she puts her forehead against the lava monster’s forehead, and they breathe each other’s air. And she puts the stone at the heart of Te Ka, and the lava crumbles away and she turns into Te Fiti, the goddess of life and abundance. And I sit in the theater with tears dripping into my snack because when I look at Te Ka and throwing balls of lava, I go, “It, me.” And that is the difficult, dangerous, self-critical part of myself. And if I can turn toward that part of myself with that kind of courage and compassion and recognize that this has the potential to be actually the most powerful source of life and abundance and creativity inside me, save us Lin-Manuel Miranda, you’re our only hope. That is why Moana is my favorite movie is because it’s actually a metaphor for trauma healing.

Debbie Millman:
Emily Nagoski, you are extraordinary. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Emily Nagoski:
Thank you. It was really fun. I hope it was okay.

Debbie Millman:
It was wonderful. Emily Nagoski’s latest book is Come Together: The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. You can read more about her and sign up for her newsletter at emilynagoski.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
My first question is one I’ve been somewhat perplexed as I’ve been living in your life. Is it true that you’ve never tried coffee?

Amy Lin:
That is true. Never so much as a sip, which a lot of people do think is my most psychopathic quality.

Debbie Millman:
That’s what my next question was, and I believe you think or others think that it’s psychopathic.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I think they just think that you can’t possibly survive if you haven’t tasted coffee. And I will admit that the more people have pressed me, the more entrenched I get in this position to move through the world without it. But I do subsist on caffeine. I just drink green tea almost exclusively.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. You grew up in Calgary Canada where you’ve said that there are two seasons, winter and road construction and where it is so cold, your nose hairs freeze together even in May.

Amy Lin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You speak very fondly of your parents in Here After.

Amy Lin:
They’re here tonight actually. Yeah, this is my parents.

Debbie Millman:
Talk a little bit about your childhood. What was it like?

Amy Lin:
I think my parents adored me, but I was odd. I was an odd child.

Debbie Millman:
Was?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, you’re right. You know what? Am, I am an odd child and I think that’s because my parents always allowed me very much to be the person that I was. I even extremely young would insist upon choosing my own outfits. And I had these very long stories that I would tell as a young child and my parents were extremely patient with this because they really, and to this day, encouraged the narrative making that I’ve always done. Even as a kid, I would have this intense scrutiny of the world and I would watch it and I would narratize a lot as a child. I didn’t realize that people didn’t do this when I was a kid, but I would narrate my life to myself in the third person. “Amy is walking” or “Amy is doing this,” and I was always telling these stories. And part of that is because I’ve always felt, in some way, separate from the world and creating narrative was a way of not only understanding what was happening around me, but also of then finding a way to write myself into the story in a way that I could understand.

Debbie Millman:
And whether my parents understood this explicitly or not, they always understood that story making was essential to who I am. And they always encouraged it. I think I was maybe 10, but I got in my head that I wanted a dog and I was begging my parents, “Please, please, please. I’m the most responsible 10 year old in the world. Please, please, please.” And my parents, wisely, were like, “No, we have enough that’s going on.” And so I thought, “Well, I’m going to show them.” And so I got a stuffed dog and a leash and I thought, “I’m going to act like this dog is real. I’m going to create a story that it’s real.” And I dragged the dog around. It was filthy, covered in leaves and dirt. I would feed it water, I would introduce it to people like it was real. And I thought, “I’m going to shame my parents out of the weirdness of this child into getting me a real dog.”

Amy Lin:
Did it work?

Debbie Millman:
No. When people would talk to my mom and say, “Does she really think this dog is real?” My mom goes, “Amy, just a really rich inner life.” Unfazed and always so supportive of the narratives that I would write.

Amy Lin:
I love that. I think you should get a T-shirt that just says, “A rich inner life.”

Debbie Millman:
I don’t need a T-shirt, Debbie. It comes before me.

Debbie Millman:
So did you write stories about this dog?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I mean, I just treated it like it was 100% real. I felt that the oddness of that would compel my parents to substitute a real dog, which it did not.

Debbie Millman:
When did you start writing?

Amy Lin:
Young. I have diaries where my mom is telling me five years old, “Yeah, that makes sense to me.” I have these diaries and there’s pages where I write in very ungainly, childish script, painstaking descriptions of myself, “Amy Lin, six years old, brown eyes, hair that my mother cut with a bowl.” Really specific details.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a part of me, Amy, that wants to get your parents up on stage here to include them in this conversation because I’d really love to know what they thought of all of that.

Amy Lin:
Again, they were like, “We love this.” And so I think, in some ways, I can’t fathom who I thought was going to be reading my six year old diaries, but it was really essential to me again, and I think to mirror myself back to me. I don’t think it was for audience when I think about it. I think it was about trying to understand the person that I was. And writing has always been that as a way of accessing understanding.

Debbie Millman:
When you were a young girl, you used to have small anxiety attacks about the idea of eternal life.

Amy Lin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Amy Lin:
I was weird.

Debbie Millman:
And how do you feel about that now?

Amy Lin:
Well, I actually do think that I thought a lot more about death very young than maybe the average person did, which was not apparent to me truthfully, until Kurtis died, until I started talking to people about death, until I started processing my ambivalence towards living very publicly. When Kurtis died, I am an extremely private person, but I became a very private person with an extremely public pain. And something about that dissonance started causing me to realize that I had really been thinking about death and why people continue since I was very small. And part of that is because I was raised with this idea that when we die, we continue into eternal life. But for me as a child, I couldn’t comprehend this idea that we would want to continue. I didn’t fully understand that. What was so comforting about this idea that there was no end? In some ways, I think the idea of a boundary or the idea of an ending is what brings meaning. Do you know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Amy Lin:
And when Kurtis died, I understood both sides of the comfort that offers because as a child U just thought you’re going to keep going and going and going and going. And I would get caught in this expanding. I would literally feel it in my body, this expanding room of consciousness. And I just thought, “How can there never be an end?” And I was too young to understand that I was experiencing anxiety attacks essentially. And then Kurtis died and I started experiencing very serious panic attacks. And I said to my therapist, RJ, “I think I’ve been having panic attacks my whole life.” And he was like, “You just realized this now?” But that was really what connected it for me.

Debbie Millman:
You got your undergraduate degree in English literature and education. At that point, what did you want to do professionally?

Amy Lin:
I wanted to teach. I have always taught in some form. Probably since my early teens, I’ve been teaching students. I used to teach very, very small students learn how to swim. Then I did summer camps. And so I knew that I wanted to teach and I really love to teach. And I think if I wasn’t a writer, I would think that teaching was my calling. It’s just that writing calls me so much more so. I sat out to teach kids, particularly to teach kids how to write and also to teach children that they are not puny inadequate people, that they are in fact fully-fleshed people. Because that was something to me as a child that I did understand about myself, which is that I was very much moving through the world as my own person. And my parents encouraged that.

Debbie Millman:
In your mid-20’s you became a vegan, you dyed your hair blonde, only wore black, not that much has changed. At that point in your life, you’ve written that you couldn’t feel anything good and steadfastly believed that you were not lovable. Why?

Amy Lin:
I never got a dog. They teach you that you’re lovable.

Debbie Millman:
That’s true.

Amy Lin:
They do.

Debbie Millman:
That is absolutely 100% true.

Amy Lin:
They absolutely do.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Amy Lin:
That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I tried to say when I was 10. How can we trace the roots of our pain? I don’t know when I got it in my head. I just do and it still lives with me. And it’s something that Kurtis loving me as radically as he did was one of the most transformative things because I think when we allow people to love us, part of that work that we have to do when they love us is we must accept that they love us and we limit the love that we have with people if we refuse to change our conception of ourself, if we refuse to accept the ways in which they see us for good and the ways in which they forgive our flaws for better. If we resist that, then we limit how much love we can receive and we limit how much love we can give ourselves and others.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I found so interesting about your feeling of being unlovable was at the same time while your loneliness and unlovability had always dogged you, you also had a longing to meet somebody. And so I want to understand if you can share with me the dichotomy between your loneliness and your longing.

Amy Lin:
I think that people, and I include myself in this, that have felt lonely their whole lives, and I have in a lot of ways, are that way because they long. I think longing is so much behind loneliness, that that desire in some way to connect and that sense that there is something in you that wants to connect but maybe doesn’t know the language to do that or isn’t sure if it’s safe to do that or perhaps has tried to and learned that it isn’t safe to do that, only perpetuates more longing. And this constant need isolates you in a lot of ways.

Debbie Millman:
I think it’s about authority. I think they view you as an authority figure and therefore… You had a first date that went six hours?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, it was long.

Debbie Millman:
So was it love at first sight?

Amy Lin:
I mean, it was just that I talked so much and Kurtis was-

Debbie Millman:
Get comfortable.

Amy Lin:
…so kind, he just didn’t know how to escape, I think truthfully. But we did. I just talked and talked and Kurtis later, unknown to me, would write down every story I told him and there were many, but it just kept going. And I felt, and this is so key to why Kurtis and I were the way that we were, was I felt so at ease with Kurtis and it’s very hard for me to feel that way. And I felt immediately as if I did not have to project or live up to any idea that he might have had of me because I could tell that he didn’t have an idea of me and that I could be the person that I was and that there was a softness in the place that he offered me. And for whatever reason, he just stepped to me very tenderly. And it was an invitation.

Debbie Millman:
Your friends told you to play it cool, but you write how you have never known how to love something in moderation. You go on to say that when you were a child, if it was the winter holidays and you were playing board games, you would keep saying, “One more. Can we please play one more?” Until everyone around you would finally say, “No, no more.” If you were basking in the sun, you’d stay out until you were sick. If you were enjoying going over to a friend’s house, you’d want to go over every day. What did you make of this behavior?

Amy Lin:
I made of it a boundary, which was that I always created this narrative, of course, that I always wanted too much, that I asked too much, that I had too much. And so the need then was to limit myself. I needed to learn how to behave more like other people. I needed to feel a little bit less. I needed to ask a little bit less. I needed to learn the ways that people were moving through the world, which was less. And that all of that for me relaxed when I met Kurtis because there was no need to do that. There was no need to limit how much I was asking because it didn’t seem that I could ask too much. And that was what made that time so special.

Debbie Millman:
But it was hard for you. You write about how with Kurtis, no one had ever just wanted you before. He was the first person that you didn’t have to convince, but you don’t share this with him. You’re embarrassed by your own need and you state, you tried to hide its soft yearning with hard demands. And I know what that is, I know what that’s like. What did you do? What tests were you giving him?

Amy Lin:
I asked for things that no one can really promise anyone. I wanted to see around the corner of the universe. I wanted him to say, which he would say, “We’re going to be together for 50 years. I’m not going to leave. I’m going to be here always.” And I ask that a lot and in lots of different ways, often some loudly, some imperfectly, some softly, but I was always asking for that in some way. And Kurtis was always meaning that. That is the legacy of having loved someone who is as big as the sky. Their capacity for love, Kurtis’s capacity for care just continued.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting to me that you were curtailing your needs, curtailing your desires, your longing, but fell in love with somebody that was so unbounded with that love and joy. You tell Kurtis you’re a substitute teacher, not a writer. Why not both?

Amy Lin:
I didn’t see myself as a writer. I was a substitute teacher at the time. That’s what I was doing. It was before I got a full-time job teaching. I wasn’t writing in any particular way and I certainly didn’t see myself as a writer and it would never have occurred to me to say otherwise. One thing I will say about me is that most places I will show up as I am. And so to me I thought, “Well, I am substitute teaching.”

Debbie Millman:
You write about your engagement very beautifully. You write that the feeling that you had was perhaps the only moment in your life where you feel joy and excitement, so clear, so immediate and so intense that you’re not aware of anything else happening. And I believe that you had just gotten out of the shower and still had the towel around you when he was proposing. When did you realize it had fallen off?

Amy Lin:
When I was cold. There was a moment where I thought, “I’m really cold.” And then I realized that I was also naked. That was a moment that I just didn’t limit. And I think it was a moment truthfully that surprised me because I had no preconceptions of what it would be like. And because I had not expected it for myself and because I did not think it for myself and so I didn’t have any time to get in my own way. It really was, in so many ways, Kurtis’s moment that he had planned for me. And again, I think that’s what you do when you love somebody. You give them the things that they’re trying to give you and also to give themselves. And I really gave myself over to that moment and I stopped narratizing it and I just was in it, which is why a lot of it is lost to me, truthfully.

Debbie Millman:
You got married on a beach named Sugar on November 11th, 2018, but after you got married, you began to fear you might get divorced. Why?

Amy Lin:
Because I’m difficult to live with. That’s how I feel.

Debbie Millman:
No, I think it’s more than that. Don’t you all?

Amy Lin:
I also think anytime I really want something, I just think that for whatever reason it’s going to go away and that anything that we really want we can’t hold onto. Even as a child, I was like this. If I got a, let’s say a Sharpie set that I love, the metallic ones, the shiny ones, I would never use them. I would leave them in a drawer and I would think about all the things I was going to do with them, but I would never use them. And if my sister would come in and want to borrow them, I would, “No, those are for a special occasion.” And then they would dry up and I would just always hold onto them because I couldn’t bear the idea of things ending, especially if I loved them and especially if they were precious. And so when Kurtis and I got married, I just immediately started thinking about, “Well, something this good has to end. Of course it will end.”

Debbie Millman:
You struggle in the relationship as you realize that there are two yous simultaneously existing, the person he thought you to be and the person you knew yourself to be. And most of the time you wanted to try to be the woman he believed you were, but you were not really her. And it seemed to me, Amy, that he always loved you for exactly you and not someone he had constructed. Looking back on it now, do you still feel that he loved a version of you?

Amy Lin:
I think that Kurtis always loved people on their best days, and he got this idea of them on their absolute best day and decided that that was the fullness of who they were. And I think that’s a beautiful gift to give somebody to mirror back to them who they are, even on their worst days. But part of my understanding of love and my belief about love is that we have to hold the fullness of the people that we love. And the reality is we are yes, our best days, but we’re also our worst days. And that there is a part of me, which is where God keeps the knives. I’m the knife drawer sometimes, that’s just the reality. And that was something that Kurtis would refuse about me, that there were no knives and in his world, there were none. And I needed him to acknowledge that actually there were, and actually a lot of them lived with me.

Debbie Millman:
Well just maybe sharp edges.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, and that’s something that Kurtis would argue was, “Oh, well, yeah, okay, so sometimes there’s this, but it’s not that.” And I think I just needed him to see, but sometimes it is that. That’s the reality. And all of us, if we’re really honest with ourselves, have the ability to pull out a knife. That is the reality. And I know that about myself and I’m not blind to that. And I needed Kurtis after our years together, I just needed him to see that. I knew that he would love that. I already knew that, but I needed him to see it. And that’s a complex thing to ask somebody and difficult.

Debbie Millman:
On August 15th, 2020, your life changed in an instant. Kurtis was 32 years old, he went out to run a half marathon with your family and he collapsed mid marathon and died instantly as he hit the ground.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, before actually.

Debbie Millman:
Before he hit the ground. I’m really sorry, Amy.

Amy Lin:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
I called Amy before the podcast, which I never do because I was so concerned about how to talk about something so horrific and so tender. And so if there’s any questions that I ask you that you don’t want to answer, please just say, “Pass.” Kurtis’s heart stopped very suddenly. It’s considered an out of time death. That’s the phrase as it remains unexplained. And you were plunged into acute grief, you stopped eating, you stopped sleeping. You sent your therapist RJ a one line email telling him what happened, and he called you immediately. What did he say to you?

Amy Lin:
He said, “Do not grieve alone.”

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Amy Lin:
Because he knows me. Because I was already preparing to just go into the prairie and lie down and just become with the earth. It’s always been my way. I’m very private. I’ve always processed privately and I think he knew, my therapist is religious, he would say in a divine insight, I know that he would say that, that I was going to need help. And I don’t typically ask for help. And I think he knew that I was in clinical shock, but I think he knew if I’m going to get one thing in through the door, it needs to be don’t grieve alone, connect with other people.

And one thing that speaks to the trust that RJ and I have is that I really listened when RJ speaks. And that was a trust that was hard won. And he will say, because he said it to me before, he said, “I felt like you watched me for the first three years of our relationship. In all the sessions,” he said, “I thought not that you were there so much as you are watching me.” He felt observed. I don’t do that intentionally, but even as a child I would observe things and I realized that I did. I probably did observe him for that long to decide if when he spoke I was going to listen to what he had to say. And so when Kurtis died, we were past that. I already knew that when he spoke I was going to hear him.

Debbie Millman:
He told you that you couldn’t survive alone, but you told him that you didn’t want to, that you were looking for a place to die. You found a mountain called Nameless and a lake called Disappointment. What was his response to you telling him that?

Amy Lin:
He said, “Well, where did you find those places?” And I said, “Google Maps. I’m just Googling.” To which he just nodded. And that’s the great thing about RJ. It’s the great thing about having a trust bond with your therapist is there was no commentary there because he also knows certain points where there are no fly zones with me. And it was a no-notes time. And so he just wanted to know the provenance of those places. And we moved on.

Debbie Millman:
You read a lot of material about what it meant to be a widow and the ramifications. Statistically widowed are two and a half times more at risk of dying by suicide in the first year of widowhood. You also read that you’re 22% more likely than the married to die of other causes such as cerebral or cardiac events, cancer, car crashes. And while these illnesses and incidents may seem random, they’re not. And I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about why they’re not really random.

Amy Lin:
So obviously the suicide risk is because when we have out-of-time death, but really when anyone experiences traumatic death in this way, it causes you to ask questions that lots of people spend a lot of time avoiding. Why are we alive? Why should we continue? How much pain can someone hold? How much pain should you hold? How much pain do I want to hold? These are big questions that take you to the edge of the questions themselves. And when you get there, when you push the questions far back enough, then you are confronting a kind of mortality. And for a lot of people there is no one at the edge there. And you make a decision.

In terms of why the widowed are more likely to die, quite frankly has a lot to do with the fact that grief is not only an emotional trauma, it’s a physical trauma. And so we know that when people experience loss like this, the blood that goes to the front of the brain, which is doing communication, it’s doing memory, it’s doing impulse control, that blood gets diverted to the back of the brain which is doing survival. So it means when you are trying to remember the time that you should be at the doctor’s office, you are going to have more difficulty remembering that because you literally have less brain resources dedicated to memory. It means when you go to cross the street, you aren’t actually going to as accurately gauge whether that vehicle is traveling too quickly to stop because the part of your brain at the front that does risk assessment is offline. It’s not being served at this time.

And so the widowed, they tend to take more risks without realizing it because that part of their brain for a long time is not being physically served. And that’s actually what contributes to this data, which is that even unthinkingly, the widowed, they take more risks with their lives. And also because when someone dies, grief puts so much of what they call the stress chemicals into your body, it jacks them up so high and sometimes for 5-10 years, because acute grief is the first five years and then you enter chronic grief, but you have all of these chemicals, these stress chemicals in your body for at least five years and it’s suffice it to say, not great. That contributes to a lot of disease. It makes you literally vulnerable at a cellular level to more disease.

And so in so many ways, grief threatens your life from risk assessment to disease and then of course to having to confront the questions of why anyone should be here. And that’s all something I read in a haze after Kurtis died, which is shocking to realize and to understand, especially when you are very young. It’s very humbling to understand that so much of our bodies are deciding for us and we would love to participate in this idea that we are deciding. But at the end of the day, Kurtis decided nothing. His heart decided, his body decided. And something that trips me out about that because the body is the only given thing, the only thing that’s given to us. Everything else, all these systems of power and attachment and thought go behind things that we receive, but the body is made, the body is actually given and then the body takes. And there’s something about that reality, that dissonance that is unsettling to live in.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s amazing to me that it’s the reptilian part of the brain that also gets ignited with the cortisol when you go through a trauma-

Amy Lin:
Yes, absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
That also controls your eye blinking and your digestion and your metabolism, your adrenaline, and those are all things you can’t will to happen. You can’t say, “Okay, stomach start to digest now.”

Amy Lin:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
You are at the mercy of your own body. Speaking of which, two weeks before Kurtis died, you fell off a scooter and injured your knee. 10 days after Kurtis passed, you almost die from a series of blood clots in your legs. You also have pulmonary clots. Now most people presenting with deep vein thrombosis which is the technical name of what you had, are over 40 years old. Do you feel that the shock of Kurtis’s death ignited this event in your body?

Amy Lin:
Well, the answer that I have from the many physicians that have looked at my super clotting episode is that I’m unlucky to which I say, “Duh, obviously.” And so when I fell off the scooter and I injured my knee, they think that I had a trauma clot at the site. Okay, not great, but not necessarily life-threatening. But compound that with the fact that I have a pre-existing condition that’s almost impossible to diagnose, which is May-Therner. So there’s a pinch point where I had a clot so old that my body had already just compensated for that. So now we have two pinch points, both of which where there are clots. And then in between, it’s all fine until I stopped eating and I stopped drinking for so long, which of course we know will thicken the blood and all of this combined, they think created this super clotting event, which is to say there are a million ways I could have lived where it wouldn’t have happened to me, but that was the way things fell. And I think it’s just bad luck truly.

Debbie Millman:
You end up in the hospital. While there, you write how part of your brain was screaming, your life is at risk. One part of your brain was telling you to do what you could to live. And since it had been only 10 days between Kurtis’s dying and you nearly dying, you think if you go now, you can still find him. He might even be waiting for you. What other part was telling you to stop trying to live that was overcome by deciding to live.

Amy Lin:
It’s so odd to be in that space and my parents would know, they were there, I kept asking my dad, “Am I going to die?” Which again, I was in shock on so many levels, but to be, I think of my parents, to be the recipient of that kind of question is so awful. I think worse maybe even than being the asker of it. But I was really trying to understand that and I was trying to weigh if that was a good thing or if that was a bad thing. Because my whole life, I’m always trying to think my way through all my problems. That’s what I have. I’ve always been able to think my way through all of my problems. And that’s part of what is so humbling about grief is you actually cannot think your way through it. It’s so Leviathan, it’s so encompassing that eventually you will reach the end of how much you can think about it and then you have to start feeling about it. And that’s where the experience of grief starts to bifurcate you if you can’t accept that reality.

And so in the hospital, I was trying desperately to find a way to hold both pieces of that together, the feeling and the thinking, and to try to understand what I wanted to do. At the end of the day, I decided to continue because my parents were there. They were there in the hospital, which is amazing because it was in the middle of a pandemic and nobody was really allowed in the hospital. And that’s a testament to the kindness of the people who worked there, that they allowed my parents to be there, that I was not alone in this hospital in the middle of a global pandemic.

And as I’ve said before, I believe that our burden, if we are going to love people, is to accept their love when we don’t really want to. And I understood even then, even in the haze of trauma and shock that my parents wanted me to live and that if I loved them, I was going to try to do that. That that was the most important thing. And I’ve said this before, but that’s the best thing any of us can offer anyone is to witness them and to love them and to be there, to be present for them. And in so many ways, witness has saved my life. That was just the first instance of it in that particular moment.

Debbie Millman:
You began to see a grief counselor who told you that the fight or flight sensation that you were experiencing begins to ease around six months. But in month six through nine, emotions heighten and diversify and those months could end up feeling worse than the first months. So this information stated that normal acute grief lasts four to six months before beginning to lessen. But did the material explain what normal grief is?

Amy Lin:
I mean, I think it’s not a secret that I did not love my first grief therapist. And I did press that point, “Well, what’s normal grief? What’s acute grief? What’s chronic grief? What are the differences?” And she didn’t really have any answers for that. What she really was trying to communicate to me was that as bad as it was then, it’s going to get worse. That’s what she was trying to tell me, that the fullness of my emotional range was not yet back online. And she was, in her own way, trying to prepare me for what that would be like. But I wasn’t ready to receive that. And what’s more, I wanted some answers and she wouldn’t give them to me.

So the answer is still, I remain a little bit confused on what that is. And I think it is a point of misunderstanding in grief studies of confusion because I continue to ask people this question, “So normal grief, what is that?” And all grief therapists that I’ve spoken to will say, “Well, there of course, only grief is so unique to each person.” I’m like, “Well then why do we persist in using this term? What’s normal grief?” What I think they’re talking about, if I was to hazard a guess is they’re speaking about the biological stress in the brain. I think that there’s a massive chemical shift that starts to kick in around four to six months, that the reptilian part of your brain starts to think, “Okay, well we can’t be in this state forever.” And I think a physical change that starts to happen and I think that’s what they’re talking about. But then let’s not use the term grief because people think you’re talking about an emotional state. Grief is also physical, but people don’t understand that. So let’s talk about the physical in language that they understand.

Debbie Millman:
You asked your grief therapist if there was an amount of time, and I did that too. 20 years ago, I had a very sudden divorce and I was catatonic. And I remember asking my therapist at the time, “How long am I going to feel like this?” And she was like, “Probably around two years,” and I’m like, “Two years?”

Amy Lin:
I know. I know.

Debbie Millman:
And it was five. It ended up being five. But if she had told me five years then-

Amy Lin:
You would have just Kool-Aid manned your way through the wall.

Debbie Millman:
…I would’ve gone through bridge you were looking for.

Amy Lin:
100%

Debbie Millman:
So you gasped when she told you it might be three to five years. You then went into a specialized grief therapy, a grief therapy which you undertook at the Bob Glasgow Grief Center in Calgary, which is the only one of its kind in North America. There you learned, and this part was astonishing to me, you learned that the five stages of grief that we’re all taught about, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance were never meant to describe the experiences of the bereaved. Those stages arose out of a non evidenced based study that considered the emotional experiences of people diagnosed with terminal illness. So the five stages that we’re socialized with-

Amy Lin:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
…were meant for another kind of pain. I found this astonishing. I had to put down the book for a few minutes.

Amy Lin:
Listen, so did I, and if you read even more about it, the woman who headed that study has openly said, I think pretty much to anyone who will listen to her, “I never intended the five stages for the people who are bereaved. It was about studying people who were diagnosed with terminal illness. What did they process? How did they process it? Can we categorize the arc of their metabolizing of their experience? But somewhere along the way it got universally applied,” and there seems to be no universal footnote to that. I was just as gobsmacked as you were that those stages don’t apply.

And even a quick search on the internet will produce so many articles that tell you that they in fact do apply to you. So that’s confusing as well because if you’re not paying extremely close attention, you’ll just read the first thing that Google returns to you, which often is a website telling you that eventually you are going to do some yoga, wheel pose and you’re going to be in acceptance, which is so false and so harmful to people that are grieving. And it’s also very hard for people who are grieving to pay very close attention. How are they to know?

Debbie Millman:
One thing I really was so grateful for learning in your book is that grief is really considered chronic pain. And you ask a question, I want to ask you, how can grief be so universal and yet so widely misunderstood?

Amy Lin:
I think that art at its best asks questions until it reaches an unanswerable question. And often when I consider work, I will think about the questions that it asks me and think about if I ever get to a question that I don’t know how to answer. And so when I wrote that question, I wrote it because it was the question that when I pushed all the other questions, it was the one that I arrived at. And I think my answer to it would be that we have no language for the grief that we are all in and we have no particular vocabulary or grammar. And grief has its own grammar. That’s the thing. Grief is its own language. And so few of us have any models for it, and so few of us have any teachers of it.

And what’s more, all of us are carting around our really good intentions, which are that we don’t want people to be in pain. We want to make them feel better. And that’s a really good place, but it’s really dangerous for people who are grieving. And I think that’s how we get there when we don’t have a language for it. And what’s more, what we do have an overabundance of language for is how I can make you feel better, the happy clappy. And so everybody leans on that and what’s more, the thing that they don’t have words for, it’s very uncomfortable to go into that place. And when you don’t have any guides for it or any mirrors for it, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to go slashing into the forest by yourself.

Debbie Millman:
You deconstruct the question, “How are you doing?” And you talk about how you get particularly wrangled when people ask you how you are or assume you’re doing better because you were able to get out of bed or put on some makeup and you think that what it is that they’re really asking, and you create this list about how you could respond. Do they want honesty, assurance, platitudes to share their own story if you reciprocate as you feel you ought to access details that might not be welcomed by way of this inquiry? And you actually wonder if they’re actually asking about your grief or your physical ailing body or both. Why are people so afraid of grief in others? I can understand why we don’t want to have grief in ourselves, but why are people so closed off to being able to manage or handle or experience or witness other people’s grief

Amy Lin:
Because they’re not taught to do it. It’s so wild to assume that someone who’s likely never been told, it’s actually okay to sit with someone who’s in pain and not provide some kind of answer. It’s really rare person, and I have a couple of friends actually that are almost divinely possessed of this gift, which is the ability to sit with someone’s pain and feel no need to diagnose it or change it or make it any better and to just witness it. And so people do come by that honestly, but they are quite rare and it’s more likely that people want to move through it or make you feel better. And so they’re afraid of it because when you sit with someone who is in a lot of pain, it’s painful to you as well. And it’s really hard to see the people that we care about, to see them ail. And it’s so difficult to accept this dichotomy, which is the best thing you can do for someone who’s grieving is allow them to be in pain around you and that that is healing, that witness is healing.

And that’s very hard because you are to be in pain as well, and you have to confront what your capacity for pain is, what you are willing to do. And when you sit with someone in grief, you have to then also sit with your own pain, your own grief at their sadness. And that’s where I think it gets very sticky for people, whether they realize it or not, because they begin to look at how much pain they would like to be in and who really wants to do that? And then you start having to see how much water you want to carry for the people you love. That’s what makes people uncomfortable, especially once you go there. If you have grief that you haven’t processed, then you’re swimming in waters without a lifeguard on duty and that’s very scary. And on top of that, someone else is in the water with you.

Debbie Millman:
Another thing I learned from your book is that statistically most grievers will lose their support base at about a year, if not before, because the enduring state of sadness causes people to disconnect and other people can’t handle how sad you are and think you’re not getting any better. People report that year two is so much worse than year one because the support you had from friends and family often goes away. Life goes on for those people, but not for the griever. What would you tell anyone who has a friend or a family member that is grieving about how to engage with the griever?

Amy Lin:
I would tell them that I think people often disconnect because of what I just talked about, which is that they can’t witness that much pain. But I think there’s, again, this idea that we have to see everything and we need to be everything to that person. But I have friends that still to this day, they text me on the 15th and it has been so many 15th’s since, and they still do that. And after Kurtis died, they sent me a card and then they would text me on every 15th. And that’s what they’ve done for three and a half years, which is incredible and so steady and so manageable and so holding in so many ways.

So I would tell people, you don’t need to do these big things. You don’t need to hear everything. You don’t need to do hours of mutual support. You just need to do something that shows that you are witnessing and whatever that thing is, if you can continue to keep doing it, all the better. And I was told this often in grief therapy, which was start smaller. I have such an all-or-nothing approach to everything. And my grief therapists would say, “Just start smaller. Don’t start with you’re going to go for a half an hour run. What you’re talking about? You need a walker to get out of bed. Start with two minutes with the walker around the house.”

It’s the same when you support people in grief, start small, start with what you can offer. If it’s too vulnerable or too painful or too triggering to sit with someone for three hours, call them and speak for three minutes and then say, “Okay, well I’ll call you tomorrow.” Most people can do that, but because we talk so little about grief and we have so little language for it, people have this idea that somehow they need to be load-bearing for you all the time. Nobody can do that. No one could stand up to that.

Debbie Millman:
All of this that you’re experiencing is happening during the pandemic, so you’re also in isolation at that point. You’re therapist actually directs you to start writing about your grief. What did you think of that idea?

Amy Lin:
I thought that was stupid.

Debbie Millman:
But you did it anyway.

Amy Lin:
I did because I trust my therapist and he never pushes any points, but he pushed this one as hard as he has ever really pushed anything. And he said, “If you’re not going to tell people about it, then you need to write it down.” And I thought about it, and he was very insistent on this point. It was like, “Write this down or pick someone to call.” And I really didn’t want to call somebody. I did not want to speak to someone face-to-face, face. And so I said, “Okay, then I’ll write it.” And I started a Substack, which is a newsletter, and it was relatively unknown. It feels much more common to me now, but it was relatively unknown when I started and I made it public, which really concerned my therapist. He felt that it would open me up to commentary that he wasn’t sure I could manage.

But I was just so supremely convinced in my obscurity. I was just like, “Well, my mother is going to read this.” And I really wanted people to be able to opt in or opt out because grief is so all-encompassing. And I wanted people to be able to choose how much they saw or held. And one of the beautiful things about the Substack was that so many people chose to read it every week, which was shocking to me and not shocking to my therapist.

Debbie Millman:
You started the newsletter, the Substack titled At The Bottom of Everything on September 15th, another 15. Yet for the first year after Kurtis died, you were unable to read.

Amy Lin:
Years, multiple.

Debbie Millman:
Years?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I would say almost three.

Debbie Millman:
You’re a writer. Your Instagram is Literary Amy, where you post photographs of the books that you’re reading and it’s like three a week. I mean, you stopped.

Amy Lin:
Entirely. Yeah, I would say in a knife fight between being a reader and a writer, I would choose reader, but by a very small margin and only if I had to. So to lose the ability to focus, and I really did lose the ability to read, was just another thing that I felt grief had robbed me of. And if you had asked me this question, even in December of last year, I would’ve told you that it just was never going to be returned to me. But sometime around mid-January of this year, I picked up a book and it wasn’t painful, which of course I immediately panicked that I was experiencing some sort of stroke or I just thought, “This is it for me. They’re giving me the final dinner before they take me out.” And I think it’s just a part of the physiology of my brain is starting to come a little bit back online, but it’s so odd to be without something that normally sustains you entirely.

Debbie Millman:
Did the writing help bring you back to the reading in any way?

Amy Lin:
No. The reading had to come back on its own time and in its own way. The writing was all about processing and reading for me is not so much about processing so much as it is about understanding. And I think maybe you need a kind of perspective to be able to read and a kind of empathy, certainly to be able to read.

Debbie Millman:
Well it makes you feel a lot.

Amy Lin:
Yes. And when you’re in grief and when you’re processing, so much of your empathy is self-focused. You’re trying to hold space for yourself, and I just don’t think I had those resources. But in writing, you’re trying to understand and when so much of your empathy is directed at trying to hold grace for yourself, that does serve writing because empathy will always open writing.

Debbie Millman:
Your new book, Here After evolved out of the writing that you were doing online. How did the book come to be?

Amy Lin:
Well, I lied to my agent. Came from a lie. She asked me about two years into the Substack, which I still write, and she said, “Well, do you think in all this writing you have a book?” And I knew that I didn’t, but I said I did because I feel this constant need to be the best student in class. And so I felt like I would be letting her down truthfully if I said no. And so then after that, I panicked and I went into the Substack and I copied all of the letters and I put them in a Word document and it came to 110,000 words. And I thought, “Oh, thank God. That’s a book length. Okay. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie.” I was like, “Okay, it’s going to be okay.” But then I started actually reading the letters. And the thing is, the Substack began as a project, which happens organically. That’s what projects do, they happen to you. But books are made and those are two very different things.

And so I realized I didn’t have a book, I had a project that was 110,000 words, and I thought, “Oh, well, this… I can’t have lied to my agent who I adore.” And I began to try to find my way into a book. And it really wasn’t until I started making these text boxes in Word, which are these small boundaries, and you can only fit so much text in them. And I made one for every page of which I had hundreds. And for every page I would put all of the text into the text box and I would read line by line. And if I didn’t feel that that line was something I had to keep, I deleted it and I would only keep these very small cubes. And once I did that for about three months, I began to see this very bright bone of grief, the essential part of my experience. And that was when I knew that I did have a book that I wasn’t in fact, making a book.

Debbie Millman:
The narrative arc of Here After is really beautiful. It doesn’t move through time in a linear way, and it’s all written in the present tense. What made you decide to structure it in that way?

Amy Lin:
A couple things. The present tense came, and it was a point of contention, not strong contention, but during the editing process that it was all in present tense. But the thing about grief is that for me, it completely shattered any sense of time. And when Kurtis died, what was technically past tense, wife, marriage, future, felt so much more real to me than what was present tense widow death, the unknown. And that’s emotionally true, but it’s also physically true. The brain has not yet caught up to the physical reality of what has happened. For the brain, the neurological under understanding of Kurtis, wife, marriage is still very real. The neural pathways are very active.

And so grief makes everything present tense because the past is more real than what’s happening. And then the way in which the narrative fragments and braids and leaps is because grief doesn’t answer to our narrative idea of time. It has no interest in that. And I was constantly seasicking between memory and reality, and I was coming in and out of these ideas of who I was and who I was not and what’s more, I didn’t want this idea in the book that Kurtis was over there and then I was over here. Kurtis remains so present to me, remains so clear in so many ways to me. And I return to him so frequently throughout my days. And I look for him so often where I go. And I wanted readers to do that, to have that experience in the book that you might turn the page and there Kurtis would be, and you hope it, because in my opinion, Kurtis is the brightest part of the book and you’re always sort of hoping that he’s on the next page.

And that’s what grief does. It takes you in and out. It takes you in and out of this hope that you’re never going to get an answer for. And I needed the structure to feel that way. It felt that it had to mirror that, and I wanted to mirror that to griever’s like, “No, you haven’t lost your mind. This sense of here and then there somewhere totally in between is actually in fact what’s happening to me too.” And I wanted the book to feel that way. And some people really love it, and some people, as I just recently read on Goodreads quote, “Really hate it.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, my wife, Roxane Gay, who’s a writer, always says to anybody that talks about Goodreads, “Do not read the reviews.” My last question, at the end of the book, you go on a writing retreat and you attempt to ride a bicycle, something that you were afraid to do given the number of times you’d fallen in the past. Kurtis loved riding a bike and you decide you’re going to try. What made you decide to try again?

Amy Lin:
Well, part of it was the pool could only be accessed by bike.

Debbie Millman:
So it was just a practical thing.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, so much of my courage really is a practical thing, which is that when I was at this writing retreat, upstate New York was in the middle of an absolutely punishing heat wave. And I, because I was new to the retreat, did not know as all the other residents did, that you have to ask for the studios with AC. So I didn’t ask for it. It’s a very old mansion where I was staying, and I got put in what was historically the servants quarters and there’s no AC and the windows are sealed because the bats fly in at night and I was sweltering and everybody who got on their bicycle and cycled to the pool returned looking remarkably refreshed. And I too wished to be refreshed because it was so hot.

And this is the beautiful thing about grieving and loving somebody is that when you live in it for a long time, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes you can access a tiny bit of their courage and their bravery and who they were. And I just thought, “Okay, one, I am so warm,” and my temperature regulation is very important to me. I do not like to get too warm. I don’t like to be too cold. I really want to be the perfect temperature all the time. And I just thought, “Okay, Kurtis wanted me to do this thing. It’s not far. He was always telling me that I could.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m writing this book, I’m going to be brave.” And that’s the funny thing about bravery is somebody tells you for long enough that you can be brave and there isn’t any soundtrack when you do it, you just one day you get up and you just do it. And so I did. I just got up and I thought, “I am so hot. And today is the day to be brave.”

Debbie Millman:
Amy Lin.

Amy Lin:
Thank you both so much. Got to go.

The post Design Matters: Amy Lin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Sometimes you can tell a lot about writers from the names of their books. Here are three titles by Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present, and The History of White People. Nell Irvin Painter is a distinguished award-winning historian, and she’s written a lot about the south in the 19th century and about race. She’s also a retired professor emerita from Princeton University. And by all rights, she could be resting comfortably on her laurels, but she is not because she is also an artist. The title of another of her books is Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. These two pursuits, history and art, come together beautifully in her brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, which is punctuated throughout by images of her paintings. Nell Irvin Painter, welcome to Design Matters.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you so much, Debbie. I’m glad to be here. I love the title of your podcast.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because design does matter.

Debbie Millman:
Yes it does. Yes it does. Now, your parents fell in love at first sight in the Houston College Library and got married when they were 19 years old. They were married for 72 years until your mom died at 91. You’ve said that this made it fated that you’d be a writer, and I’m wondering how the two were connected.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, my parents’ college was actually called Houston College for Negroes.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is very much Texas in that time. It was a jerry-built institution. They knew it. My mother had started at Prairie View. She was the youngest. Where her siblings went, but her father died and left her mother too impoverished. The next sibling, her older brother was at Howard to become a doctor, so he was the favorite son, and my mother, Dona, had to come home to Houston. My father’s family was not as educated as my mother’s family, but my father’s family did want him to go to college. So they met in Houston College for Negroes in the library. So I say I was fated to be a reader and having lived a long life, I took the next step into writing.

Debbie Millman:
What do you attribute to the success of a 72-year marriage?

Nell Irvin Painter:
People used to ask my father that. My father was a very beautiful man, very lovable, very charming with a bit of a wit. And he would say, “Eat shit.” And then my mother would say “No, no, no, no, no, no.”

Debbie Millman:
So I guess it was an older version of happy wife, happy life.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Something like that. Yeah. My father was the charming face of the marriage for decades. And my mother was very shy. Had a speech impediment for decades. Couldn’t talk on the phone until she started getting jobs that were commensurate with her education and her ability. She was a fantastic organizer. So when she retired at 65, she decided she wanted to do something different and she started writing books. And her second book is a memoir called, I Hope I Look That Good when I’m That Old, because that’s what people said to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me. So maybe I should write I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old part two.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll talk to you a little bit about that later on. One of your earliest memories is sitting on the floor with a gathering of your parents and their friends to listen to the presidential election results in 1948. Were your parents rooting for Truman?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. They were rooting for Wallace. I come from a good lefty family. I should also add that people like Coretta Scott … She was not yet married to Martin Luther Jr. She was also rooting for Wallace. And you didn’t have to be very far on the left because Wallace, in addition to running a progressive campaign … It was called the Progressive Party. It was also anti-segregation. And he campaigned in the south to desegregated audiences. So it was a very forward-looking campaign. I thank my parents for bringing me up on the left because it saved me from so many disappointments in my country. I didn’t expect things to change radically as say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Housing Act of 1968. I welcomed all those things, but I didn’t think they were going to be the end of the line.

So I grew up with people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Du Bois and as I say in one of my Hers columns about living in Ghana in the ’60s. So I had an unusual background. And it’s one of the reasons that I very much appreciated Roxane’s stepping out and talking about society and culture and work in general. Because I do believe my background gave me that even though I was very conscious of the pressure only to talk about black stuff. So even now, The History of White People, which is my best-selling book, which I think is my best-known book, it gives people pause. They say, “How should we think about you?” And I say, “As a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Houston.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But your family’s roots reached back into Ascension, Baton Rouge and St. Landry Parishes, Louisiana, Lowcountry, South Carolina, around Charleston, Harris County, Texas. How did you all end up in Oakland, California?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, we were part of the Great Migration, and the easiest way to answer that is by train. My father’s family had moved from Harris County, Texas to the Bay Area in the ’20s. So they were already there. And actually when my parents came in 1942, they looked down on them as Southerners. This is the oldest story in the world of groups whose older migrants looked down on the more recent migrants. But at any rate, my father went first and got partially settled, got a job, and then my mother came. I was just an infant in arms.

Debbie Millman:
I think you were 10 weeks old when they moved.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I was 10 weeks old. Yeah. So these trains … This is 1942. The trains are full. And my mother with two children, my older sibling who tragically died as a young child and this baby in arms, and she said that a black soldier gave her his seat and he stood up all the way from Houston to Oakland.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Your older brother, Frank Jr., as you just mentioned, he died during a routine tonsillectomy.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve written how your parents poured all the love they had for one lost child into you. And the sense of safety you experienced through your childhood endowed you with resources that you recognize now as resilience. Why and how did that result in resilience?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because they were always there for me. They were always on my side. I never had any doubts. I was never subject to physical violence or emotional violence. And I remember at Stanford in the ’80s, I was at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, but at the time I was teaching myself women’s history and women’s studies, so I would hang out with women in gender studies at Stanford. And I was absolutely amazed to hear so many women talk about their mothers as impediments, their mothers as their enemies, my mother, myself, my mother in my way, my mother is the source of miseducation, and I always thought of my mother, my father as my safe harbors in a hostile world.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad is actually the person that first taught you how to draw.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
And what kind of things were you drawing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Horses.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why horses?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know why horses. But I know that that’s a thing that young girls draw. Something maybe eatable. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I was drawing houses with bad grass. I had trouble with grass.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I also drew paper dolls because I liked clothes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So did I. I loved paper dolls.

Nell Irvin Painter:
So these are just every day. I can’t say I did anything spectacular. But I do remember one time I was in class in elementary school and I drew a walnut. I don’t know why. It was a beautiful drawing of a walnut. And I wrote under it nuts to you Mr. So and so who was my teacher. I got in so much trouble over that.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Nell Irvin Painter:
As if I had threatened him with an AK-15 or something. But my teachers always complained that I talked too much. I was obviously a really smart kid who did my work, but also, I knew too much.

Debbie Millman:
You applied to Howard University and you were accepted, but at dinner one night with the distinguished Howard University sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, who was a friend of your dad’s, told you this. “Nell Irvin, you’re too smart and too dark to go to Howard.”

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Why? What happened? Why did he feel that way?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because it was true. Howard University … We’re talking 1960 now. So this is in the olden days. And in those days, Howard University, probably like many other black institutions, was a hotbed of colorism. And so if you look at my generation of educated men, black men, every single wife except my father married as light-skinned a woman as possible. The lighter skinned the better. And of course, this is the time when women in college were trivialized as only being in college to get married. So if you know about those assumptions, it makes good sense for me not to go to Howard. And I heard stories about Howard at that time, which were really … It was such cruelty. So I told this to a team who were filming me. This is when I still lived in Newark. I was in my studio in the Ironbound, and they came. I forget what we were talking about, but I told them about that. And so this is like … It was before Coronavirus, but it was in the twenty-teens, and they said, “Oh, that still holds and it holds for men as well.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So I’m glad I’m not young.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know how I would manage this world if I were any younger than I am truly. You ended up attending the University of California Berkeley, where you were active in the student government, in art circles. You illustrated two covers of the campus humor magazine. You also took a course in sculpture. And I understand you didn’t do particularly well in the class. Tell us about that. Tell us about that experience.

Nell Irvin Painter:
My father did not teach me about sculpture, so I had no way in to sculpture. And I didn’t do any work. I thought that if you were talented, it would just come out. And it was almost like that for me in my regular classes. I didn’t have to work terribly hard to get very good grades. I was an honor student throughout. But I didn’t have any handle for sculpture. I didn’t know sculpture. I didn’t watch sculpture. I didn’t know sculptors. So I made a really terrible project and I got a C. And I thought, “Well, that just proves I don’t have enough talent.” Now, how wrong can you be? I say now that talent is drawing you to something enough to do a lot of it and get good. It’s not so much a talent, but an inclination.

Debbie Millman:
At that point what did you want to do professionally?

Nell Irvin Painter:
What did I want to do professionally? I don’t think I knew. I don’t know. But I was under no pressure to make a decision. My parents were with me and taking care of me, so I didn’t feel like I had to decide.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated with an honors degree in anthropology?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I did. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
At that point, were you considering becoming an anthropologist or did you just know you were going to go on to get advanced degrees?

Nell Irvin Painter:
It wasn’t as hard as that because my parents had already moved to Ghana and I was going to join them, so I didn’t have to make any decisions at that time. I started graduate school in Ghana in African studies, and then there was the coup d’etat and the end of African socialism and Kwame Nkrumah’s pan africanism. And all the reasons that the Irvins had gone there in the first place. So we came home and I finished my master’s degree, still not exactly knowing what to do, at UCLA in African history. I had always liked history. My high school class was tested up the wazoo and I tested at the 99th percentile in interest in history and the 99th percentile in ability in history. But at that point, coming out of high school, the only history that I knew that was recognized as American history was just so Jim Crow. I knew that it was full of lies and I didn’t want to do it. So anthropology was the place to study other people besides white people. And I loved anthropology. So I got my MA in African history and I was actually admitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and that fell through. Well, it had to do with the then love of my life, which didn’t work out, thank heaven.

Debbie Millman:
Right. It’s always so heartbreaking when it’s happening and then after it’s like, what was I thinking?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That was not meant to be. Finally in ’69, my father said, “Okay. We are ready to pay for all the schooling you want, but only in the United States.” So that’s how I got to Harvard.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned being in Ghana with your parents. You wrote that the people of Ghana impressed you from the moment you stepped off the plane and that your experience there was one of the best things that ever happened to you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. And I still say a trillion years later that if I’m at all sane, it’s because I had those two years. Not only outside the United States, but also in a majority black country. And I have not been back. My father went back to Ghana with some friends and was very attracted to buying a house and staying there. But my father also was a real materialist. He said I couldn’t get clear title so he would not buy real estate in a place where his money would not be protected. But I did not go back. But I hear from people who are coming from Nigeria now or Ghana now, and it’s very different. Ghana is much more open to the world in ways that have made it, I think a little richer, but also mean that some of the bad things like anti-gay legislation and just reactionary stuff and even pressure for women to lighten their skin, all of these things have come with the opening since the ’60s, opening in the 21st century. So when I tell people that I was in Nigeria and Ghana in the 20th century, they look back and they say, “Oh, that was the good old days.”

Debbie Millman:
I understand when you were first there, you found being a member of the racial majority disorienting.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It was. Because even though I never lived in the South, thank heaven, I lived in a racist country in which race was the thing that bore down on me the most. And I used it in ways I didn’t realize until I got to Ghana to orient myself in humanity, in politics, even aesthetically. So when all that was withdrawn … In Ghana, everybody was black. The smart people were black, and the dumb people were black. And then the hardest of all was the mediocrities were black. Just everybody. So that didn’t work. So that in Ghana was where I first started really seeing issues of development and economics and the tensions in your ideals and the real world. So I learned so much there that I took into graduate school, and I took into my writing.

Debbie Millman:
When you were at Harvard, I believe that’s where you first met Nellie Y. McKay. Is that correct?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I know you had a deep friendship. You exchanged letters to each other for 30 years. You shared a friendship that sustained you both until her death in 2006. One thing that I thought was really interesting was how she helped you understand why despite your book … I believe your second or third book, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, winning the Black Caucus of the American Library Award. It wasn’t reviewed by the Women’s Review of Books. When she did that bit of sleuthing for you, what did she discover?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I couldn’t understand why this book … Even then in the ’90s, Sojourner Truth was known in women’s history and women’s studies, for heaven’s sakes. I was a recognized scholar. I was well-published. W.W. Norton published that book, so why not review it? So I asked Nellie, who was deeper in women’s studies, and she sleuthed around, and she found that … I think it was the editor told her that a couple of potential reviewers had trouble with the book. And I gather that trouble with the book was my insistence, which I’m doubling down on in a project to come, that Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman,” or, “Ain’t I a woman,” as I suppose it was southernized in the 20th century. Assuming that Sojourner Truth having been enslaved, she must have been a Southerner, which of course was wrong. The project I’m working on now is a series historical essays on Sojourner Truth called Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That. So it turns out that so many people, black women as well as white women, were, are invested in the slogan that a white woman journalist made up 12 years after Sojourner Truth spoke up in Akron, Ohio in 1851. People have told me, they say, “Why are you tearing down Sojourner Truth?” I said, “I’m not tearing down Sojourner Truth. I’m asking you to see more of her than a slogan.”

Debbie Millman:
And her arm bearing in a show of muscle. It was-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. A slogan from somebody else’s art. Frances Dana Gage produced a very dramatic story, which is much more dramatic than anything we have from Sojourner Truth. Because she didn’t read and write so everything we have quoting her comes from other people. And so she could serve this handy, sloganized purpose without knowing that Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker, that New York was a slave state, that there were other black women who were feminist and abolitionist. And some, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, were even more critical of white women as suffrage became a searing issue after the Civil War. So my point is that stopping with a slogan means that you miss out the richness of Sojourner Truth. She’s so much more.

Debbie Millman:
It really breaks my heart now that I know so much more about this story, that this is what she’s been known for, for almost entirely that refrain of a fake speech.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So we can keep the meaning, but we should jettison the slogan.

Debbie Millman:
After that book, you began to write more visually, and in 2006, you published Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. A narrative history whose illustrations are black fine art.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What inspired that evolution in your work?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth.

Debbie Millman:
And so during her lifetime, Sojourner Truth was rather astute about her own image. She commissioned photographs of herself when the technology was brand new.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
She sold cards with the slogan, I sell the shadow to support the substance.

Nell Irvin Painter:
To support the substance. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
How did that inspire you to take that step into more visual art?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, there are a couple of steps before that. So not having words from Sojourner Truth as a biographer, I had to try to find ways to understand her from her. So the answer was her photographs, which she controlled. So one of her favorite photographs, and my favorite photograph is Sojourner Truth sitting with her knitting on her lap. And one of the chapters, one of the essays in the new book is “Sojourner Truth Knitter.” I’m a knitter too. And the story of knitting and black women and white women in knitting, it’s very enjoyable for me as a knitter. So anyway, I got involved in Sojourner Truth visually. And that is what got me to art school. And by the time I got to art school, I was also very much involved with art history. And one of the teachers said … I remember this was at RISD, at the Rhode Island School of Design. Thinking that there was no black art before Basquiat.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, god.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And I thought, oh, boy. Because even when I was a kid, my father’s favorite artist was Elizabeth Catlett. And he actually went to Mexico and came back with an autographed print of hers. So I grew up with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. The modernists who were deeply invested actually in socialist realism you would say. But at any rate, I knew that the art was there. I didn’t know all the artists I finally found and included, but I knew the art was there and I also knew that black artists had said that they wanted to show the unsung beauty of black Americans, and that there were different versions of prominent people like Frederick Douglass, for instance. So in Creating Black Americans, you don’t get a picture that says, this is Frederick Douglass. You get more than one rendition. And I tell you who the artist is and what the artist said they wanted to show. And so of course, that changes over time. So art made my point about various ways of seeing and processing and representing historical figures. And the artist could put the passion in that I didn’t feel that I could as a scholarly historian. I wrote in a way that I wanted any reader, whether you agreed with me or not, to feel that you were reading solidly researched history. So the artist gave the other side.

Debbie Millman:
I really think that that book opened the door to so much of the recognition and popularity of black modern art today, which is some of the most popular art and certainly the most interesting art that’s happening.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good. Good.

Debbie Millman:
The impetus for your award-winning 2010 New York Times bestselling book, The History of White People–

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. It is not award-winning. The History of White People, it didn’t win anything.

Debbie Millman:
Nothing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That was such a hard book for people to deal with.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Nell Irvin Painter:
People would ask me as I was writing, “Are you writing it as a black person?” I would say, “I’m writing it as a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m glad it was a bestseller, but I’m just horrified at the idea that it didn’t win any awards. But in any case, it came from a question in your mind. And I’m wondering if you can share what the question was and what you discovered.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That’s how my book start. My Sojourner Truth book started with the tension between the verbal and the visual renditions of Sojourner Truth. It seemed that there was a tension there because as she was quoted, she was the black power, Sojourner Truth. But as she showed herself, she was a perfectly composed bourgeois. What’s going on here? So that’s the question that started Sojourner Truth. With The History of White People, it seems like Russia’s after its neighbors all the time. And at the turn of the 21st century Russia was after its neighbors in the Caucasus, which is also a long-standing pursuit. Russian imperialism has turned toward the South as well as toward the East. And so Russia had bombed the bejesus out of Grozny, which is the capital of Chechnya, which is the North Caucasus. And there was this really arresting photograph in the front page of the Times of bombed out Grozny. And I thought, well, that looks like Berlin in 1945. What is going on here?

I could find out what was going on there. I could read the paper. But then I thought, well, why are white Americans called in effect, Chechens? White Americans are called Caucasian. And how many Americans even know where the Caucasus exists, where they are? Who are the people? Nobody knew. And I asked a couple of my white friends, “Why are white people called Caucasians?” And they said, “Well, we don’t know. We thought we should know, so we never ask anybody.” And so it was this big mystery. So I delved in and tried to track it down, and I ended up for that part of the book in Germany.

Debbie Millman:
And what did you discover as the way it became socialized?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, this German story, Göttingen University there, the great anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had a collection of skulls. And he is one of the founders of what we consider race science. I still call it race science because it was the science of the times. This is the enlightenment which invented race for people. And so Blumenbach decided that there were five varieties of mankind, and he embodied each one in a skull because he had a big skull collection. And his prettiest skull was from a woman who had been raped to death in Moscow. A woman from the Caucasus, from Georgia, which is the Southern Caucasus. But it was a really pretty skull. It didn’t have dings. The teeth were good. She had never been pregnant, I assume. A very young woman. And in Blumenbach’s scheme, he put the varieties on horizontal. He didn’t rank them vertically. It was all horizontal. And it was physical aesthetics.
So the most beautiful variety was the Caucasian. At the ends were the Asian and the African. In between were the American and the Malay, which is South Sea Islands. So it was a ranking that had to do with beauty and also into a millennia-long slave trade from Ukraine, from the Caucasus into the Eastern Mediterranean. And that trade actually reached Venice and reached Italy, which was a slave society for probably for a millennia. Yeah. Certainly Greece. And the ideal of the beautiful young sexually vulnerable girl, woman is a long-standing ideal, which we recognize in the Odalisque.

Debbie Millman:
Now, this is probably a question that you get asked a lot. You might even hate it. But I do want to ask, as a species, humans are pretty barbaric.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
A lot of times.

Nell Irvin Painter:
A lot of times. Yeah.

Debbie

Millman:
More often than not, it feels.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Certainly one feels that now.

Debbie Millman:
I was on safari in Tanzania a couple of years ago and learned that the zebra don’t hunt prey. Zebras are vegetarians. And while they’re hunted, they do not hunt. Why as a species are we not more gentle with each other? Why do we seem almost genetically predisposed to want to harm or enslave or create rank as a species? Why is that something that is so deeply ingrained in who we are?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, obviously I have no answer to that. However, I would add that that’s not all there is to it. People are capable of kindness and solidarity. But I also notice … We spend a lot of time up in the Adirondacks, and I see animals there. I see wasps and things like that. And they go at each other with a ferocity that is really scary. And so we’re not the only ones in the world who are capable of cruelty. But I don’t have an answer of why that is. I do see in human history that I brushed up against in writing The History of White People, that the story of people is moving, is migrating. Can I use the F word here?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Go right ahead.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It’s walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck. So we’re always churning our DNA and also bumping up against each other, and that’s part of it. But the question you ask doesn’t just pertain to people whom groups define as others. People are capable of doing astonishing cruelty to people like their wives.

Debbie Millman:
Their children.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Their pets.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
From an evolutionary point of view, I just don’t understand why we just can’t be more like the zebra.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Well, there would be too many of us for one thing. There already are too many of us. So maybe balancing the women’s role as creator and the man’s role of keeping the population down. I don’t know. I do not know. And I don’t know of anybody who does know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I just think about this all the time now is I see what we’re doing to each other in the world. What we’ve always been doing, but right now, the amount of cruelty that we’re facing feels unsurmountable. But I’ll talk a little bit more about that later when we get to your most recent book, because you talk about it quite a lot.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I will say one thing here. That in order not to lose my mind, I do not spend time on stuff I can’t change. I try to focus on the state and local. And there are good things going on. I live in New Jersey. There are good things going on in the state and local here. And I give money to local causes and local nonprofits. So I try to keep my gaze focused below the national and international levels. A few weeks ago, I was in New Haven talking with the group who foster young people. Not foster literally, but ease their way into staying into K through 12 and then going on. And in the questions, one man said, “What can we do about all this book banning?” And he’s wringing his hands about stuff that was going on in the south, in Florida, in Texas and so forth. And I said, “We can’t do anything because those policies are made on the local level. If you want to change that policy, you have to run for school board in Florida.” So I would say find a better worry. Find a better worry.

Debbie Millman:
The publication of The History of White People marked a real watershed moment in your life. After the book was published, you decided, despite already having a PhD from Harvard University, you wanted to go back to school to get another bachelor’s degree.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But this time in fine art. What inspired that decision?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Two things. Sojourner Truth and that stay in the art history library had really reawakened my attraction to images and imagery. And the other thing was I just wanted to do it and I could. My husband takes care of me. I didn’t have to worry about … I had the money. And art school is, as you know, absurdly expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And the degree you come out with is not going to pay your rent. So luckily, I didn’t have to worry about my rent. And I wanted the degrees plural, because I wanted to be professional. I wanted to be professional in the way I was professional as a historian. That has not been totally smooth. But with I Just Keep Talking, you see where I got to in ways that I could put the two together. It took me 10 years to put my historical self together with my visual artist self. It was very bumpy. And even now, I cannot go from concentrating on writing to concentrating on drawing without a week or so of just changing gears.

Debbie Millman:
You got your BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. And though you originally didn’t know if you wanted to go to graduate school, you ultimately realized that you did. And you’ve written that this was because you wanted to work harder than the kids did. You wanted to be more intense than the kids were. And you thought graduate school would do that for you. Did it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. It did. It did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tell people, getting a PhD from Harvard in history was a piece of cake in comparison.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that now? How is that possible?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I guess the easiest way is to say that as a historian, I knew what the values and the standards were. In art I did it. So some of the art that I looked at when I was an undergraduate just looked like piles of stuff to me. I didn’t understand how you use visual archives as opposed to how you use historical archives. And I was too tight and too focused on what I call discursive meaning when I started. What I came to later on in graduate school was a real loosening up, and that was something I really had to do.

Debbie Millman:
You went to the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What did the students make of an African-American woman in her 60s alongside them in class?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I think nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That is not true of everyone. We were very small. We were 12. But a couple of them felt old because they were like 31, 32. But I was just this old lady and my bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing. And the thing that really summed it up, at the end of the school year, we were going to take our picture. So everybody assembled at the given time, and nothing happened, and nothing happened and people weren’t there. I am always on time. But I finally said, “Look, I have to take care of this thing in my studio. Call me when you’re ready to take the picture.” And as soon as I left, they took the picture.

Debbie Millman:
Despite all the accolades you got as an historian, you often got what you referred to as stinging criticisms that were one long tearing down in addition to this other utterly disrespectful behavior. One professor even told you that you would never be an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m assuming that that was a white cis heterosexual man. In any case, why did he say that to you, and how did you respond and how did you recover from that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. His name was Henry. He was a printmaking teacher. And this was my first semester at RISD and I was feeling my way. I was not an experienced printmaker by any means, but I tried hard. And he called me dogged, and it wasn’t like, “Oh, you are dogged. You are very hardworking.” No, it was, “You are dogged.” So I called him out on it. Because I knew teaching, and if you’re a good teacher, you don’t say things like that.

So I said, “Henry, that’s bullshit.” He said, “You may sell your work, you may have collectors, you may be in museums, you may have a gallery, but you will never be an artist.” And that stung. I would say-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, my god. Yeah.

Nell Irvin Painter:
What saved me was I had friends at Yale. They put me back together again.

Debbie Millman:
You did a fellowship there, didn’t you?

Nell Irvin Painter:
After I graduated from RISD. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You did a lot of research after that experience and discovered how many people have either been told that they’ll never be an artist or have known somebody who was told that they would never be an artist, whether it’s a fine artist or a poet or a playwright or any field in the arts. And you about this in relation to what you refer to as the talent mystique, the great man mystique and the genius mystique. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I can talk about that actually more easily through publishing. Because the publishing world right now, people are tearing their hair. Oh, it’s terrible. All this consolidation. And in the good old days, an editor could foster a writer, even though the writer was not selling out, and just wait until that writer flourished. And now there’s just, oh, it’s so terrible, the marketing. But at the same time, the early reviews came through. I got two really good, strong early reviews from Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly. And another list maker said, “These are the 45 best books by women of color this spring.” And I thought, “45? Wow. That’s fantastic.” So I wonder if my 45 best books by women of color is related to the good old days gone by when the good old days gone by were white male writers. In the 20th century, there was a tiny sliver of publications by white women. There was almost nothing well known by black women. The breakthrough was with Toni Morrison. And that is like in the 1980s. When I am with other black women writers and they talk about what made the difference from them, they talk about when they were girls and they read Toni Morrison. When I was a girl, there was no Toni Morrison.

Debbie Millman:
It’s astonishing how often I hear from artists, writers, designers, playwrights, musicians, how someone along the way in a position of power or authority told them that they couldn’t be who they ended up becoming and did it anyway. Whether that be doggedness or resilience or just desperation because you can’t do anything else. What do you think those teachers and professors make of your success now? Despite what that teacher said about even if you do this, and even if you do that, you would not be an artist. You are an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I am an artist.

Debbie Millman:
And a successful artist. What do you think they make of that now?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know what Henry makes of it. He was so pigheaded. He says, “I have to say what I know to be true.” So he probably still knows that to be true. But I had a teacher both at RISD and at Mason Gross, who would come into our RISD crits and say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint. There’s nothing on the walls that’s interesting.” And I was mortified. I believed her. I was so pathetic.

Debbie Millman:
Pathetic because you believed her, or pathetic because you felt at the time your work was bad?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I believed her. That’s the crucial thing about the arts, because there are no standards. And I finally decided that what counts as value in art? What is good art? It’s the market that decides. There are no freestanding standards of quality in the art world. So at any rate, she would say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint.” I thought, oh, woe is me. But years later, after I published Old in Art School and she recognized herself, she came up to me with great pleasure. She was so glad to see me. All right. Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you write in Old in Art School, which did win an award-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes. It did.

Debbie Millman:
That one I know for sure. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you write about the difference between objective criteria in history, but how art is virtually all subjective and state this. “What I really liked was stepping away from the tyranny of the archive and being able to move into visual fiction and make things up.” It seems-

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s my great pleasure in art.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It seems like at first it was terrifying, and then it became freeing. Would that be correct to say?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know if it was terrifying. It was challenging in that I knew that I needed to be better at it, but I also knew the way to be better at it was to do it. And if I were teaching in art school, I would say make the art only you can make and make a lot of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You say that that’s crucial for an artist. “Make your own art, make art only you could make and make a lot of it,” is one of my favorite quotes of yours.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It does seem unthinkable to me as a teacher in an art school … Although I teach branding, which is an art, but it’s not a fine art. I couldn’t imagine telling a student that what they were doing had no meaning or value. It just feels like that’s telling a person that they have no meaning or value. And it feels just epically unfair. You are now exhibiting your work all over the world. You’ve had numerous solo shows. You’ve been included in a long list of group shows. You’re a part of many public collections. So I just want to say congratulations to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
And thank you for showing up all those bigots and assholes. But I do want to talk to you about your brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. And you begin the book with a quote by Elizabeth Alexander from her book, The Trayvon Generation. You quote her and state, “Art and history are the indelibles.” Why that particular quote?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I have been such a long admirer of her as a poet and a writer. So she was my host in 2012 at Yale, for instance. So she moves easily back and forth between the visual and the verbal. That is what I wanted to capture. The strength of … She’s really well known now so if I say she said something, yeah, it must be true. And since my book does both the visual and the verbal, I wanted her imprimatur saying, yes, that’s what we need to do.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking features your artwork alongside your writing. And in the essay what 18th and 19th century intellectuals saw in the time of Trump, you state, “For a long time, I assumed that going to an art school and making art separated me from my former vocation as a historian.” But it seems now that you fully integrated both of your practices as an artist and as a historian. Do you feel as comfortable in one as another and in that center of the Venn diagram? Comfortably center in that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good question. And I’m more comfortable as a writer because I’m better known. When I go into art spaces, I feel viewed as just a little old black lady because people don’t know who I am. And even when I was a la-di-da historian, I could go to history meetings and if I wasn’t wearing my badge that had my name with Princeton on it, I was just a little old black lady. Part of my having to flop around and find a place was that my work is sometimes called illustration, which is a bad word. Illustration is inferior to painting. It’s inferior to fine art. And I felt bad about that for a long time. But in 2022, I was at PAFA, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to make another lithograph at Brodsky. And I fell in with a teacher of illustration, and he taught me about editorial illustration. And so I say, that’s what I do now. I do editorial illustrations.

Debbie Millman:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And as somebody who’s been in the commercial art world for a very long time, 40 plus years at this point, I can say that if anybody referred to me as an illustrator, I’d be really proud.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, really? Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Some of the greatest illustrators of our time, Christoph Niemann and Barry Blitt and Maira Kalman. She’s also both an illustrator and an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. She was one of our great inspirations.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that they’re making some of the best work in the world right now.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking is a collection of both formal and more informal writing, and it offers deep commentary on a variety of subjects from history to visual culture. I know you talk a bit about this in the coda, but can you tell us more about your methodology for assembling the collection and what you’re hoping readers will, no pun intended, draw most from it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I took probably three weeks or so at MacDowell just trying to assemble it because there’s much that’s left out. So there had to be relevance to now. So most of the pieces are 21st century pieces, though there are some older pieces that still ring true, like the one from the ’80s about affirmative action.

Debbie Millman:
Especially true now. Especially true.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Exactly. So they had to stand on their own, but also be related to the other things in the book. I depended on my social media people a lot. I would say I’m putting this together and I have essays on history, but I also have essays on southern history. And I started my historical careers as southern historian. So I know southern history, and I know it’s not the same as US history. So I said to my people … Then I was just on Facebook. How should I organize this? Should I put southern history in history? And some of the people said, “No, no, no, it’s separate. It’s different.” They finally ended up by saying, “Well, there should be a section called history, and then there should also be a section called Southern history.” And that’s how I finally did it. And then there was the question of the art, and some of the essays needed art that didn’t exist. So then at Yaddo, I made a lot of different drawings, not all of which got into the book. So I worked back and forth between the words and the images. I think being in art made a difference in the way I start writing, because I’m very likely now to start writing by hand, which I didn’t do before.

Debbie Millman:
Does it feel different?

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter:

It does. It feels slower. And a way to get into questions that were not in my mind, questions that may have no answers. Like your question about why are people so mean? It has no answer, but it’s a really good question.

Debbie Millman:
And I think it’s important to talk about it because I think we need to find the answer.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
In your introduction, you talk about W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of twoness. T-W-O-N-E-S-S. And how you experienced it differently. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your understanding and experience of that twoness.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sure. The quote from 1903 is about the Negro, and I grew up as the Negro capital N, of course. But it was not a bad word at all. It was the progressive word as opposed to colored. So when Du Bois wrote, it was about being the Negro in a situation in which you’re in the minority, and how does it feel to be a problem? But I didn’t know when I went to art school that my otherness would be as being old. And that made such a difference. So when people talk about black artists, and they mean black artists now in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, it’s very different. This summer. I’m going to be 82 years old. So I have been around for a long time, and a lot of the people who were young with me are dead or are not in good shape now.

So I have rather few book prizes because when I was the age of young and up-and-coming historians, book prizes were not being given to black women. And then by the time I get into the age when black women are getting prizes, they are going to younger artists and younger writers. So I look back at modernists like Margo Humphrey, for instance, a fantastic printmaker who never got her due because she was flourishing in the time before the country could see her greatness. So in a way, I am in that cohort, but I’m also in a younger cohort that looks at me if they don’t know who I am as just the old lady. It’s deadly enough to be an old lady of any sort, but to be an old black woman is to be the picture of impotence. Of someone who cannot do anything for you. But the great thing about living in Essex County, New Jersey, particularly living for many, many years in Newark, now we live at the next suburb, which is East Orange. In Newark there’s black power and there are lots of black people, including black women, including old black women who are powerful people. And they don’t get ignored or swept under the rug. But that has not been my experience through much of my life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope that changes certainly with this book, which it deserves to be acknowledged. I want to talk to you about a few more essays. In the 27-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you for your careful reading. I really appreciate this.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was an honor and a pleasure. It’s a fantastic book.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you. In the 2017 essay, “Long Division,” you write about the construction of race through the lens of the work and thinking of writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and the section on race as a determinant for the othering or belonging of people in American culture felt very pertinent to our current today cultural climate. And I’m curious, how do you see us handling this now in the wake of the possibility of a second Trump term?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I see lots of handling. At least two different kinds of handling. One is that we go deeper into Trumpiness. You can’t talk about diversity, you can’t talk about race. You can’t talk about history. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. And we are going to enforce this through the force of arms. That’s one way.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question, especially from the essay. It shouldn’t be this close, but there’s good news too.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Close, yes. But when you considered it in the last, what? Eight presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote. There are more of us than there are of them. We don’t often think of it that way, but it’s been happening. And I would say that even before Dobbs, even before the in vitro of cultivation, conception.

Debbie Millman:
Conception.

Nell Irvin Painter:
The Alabama IVF yeah. Which are going to already have been good for Democrats as women reject this kind of triage between women and fetuses. I also suspect that Trump is going to self-destruct. There’s just too much going on. And he’s been incoherent in so many ways. I don’t think that is going to end the devilment in our country, which antedate him. I don’t know if you can see behind me on this side on the wall, that’s American whiteness since Trump, which I made in 2020. And one of the pages says, weren’t you paying attention? Here’s George Wallace. Here’s Buchanan. Here are these people. And they have been telling you about white supremacy. Historians have been telling you about white supremacy. It is a longstanding ideology in this country. And so as I say, I don’t think Trump is going to make it, your next statement is, oh, I’m so relieved you’re optimistic. No. I am not optimistic. I have been black in the United States too long to be optimistic. I just don’t think that some of the worst is going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Does it worry you though that it’s the electoral college that elects the president as opposed to the many, many more Democrats there are in this country?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. Because as I said, I don’t worry about things I can’t change. If there is a movement … And it would have to come out of Congress, I would support that. I would give my money. I would support whatever Congress people or persons who are pushing for that. But I don’t see any reason to worry about things I can’t change.

Debbie Millman:
At the end of the book, you have a visual essay titled “I Knit Socks for Adrienne.” And you said that particular essay is the most personally declarative piece of art you have ever made. More personal even than your self-portraits.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
And is that because you come out as a public knitter?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely that. It’s absolutely that. I spoke to you a lot about being othered as an old woman, and I had held on to this fear that … I do knit in public. I

have knitted in public for a long time. I knitted in department meetings, I knit in history meetings. I do knit in public. But to present myself as a knitter, that was until that time, a step too far. And now that I’ve done it, I’m really happy because there are so many other women who are so happy that I am out as a knitter. And one of the things that will go into the Sojourner Truth book, the section on knitting, is also about respect for women’s work.

Debbie Millman:
And the craft that goes into so much of it.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
What does knitting give you as an art form that isn’t quite satisfied by your other visual practices?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, for one thing, I can knit while I listen to a book, I can knit on the train, I can knit on an airplane and I have something to show for it. Now, in terms of the visual satisfaction that is going to a yarn store. This is typical of knitters. I have more yarn than I could ever use in three more lifetimes. But the tactile sensation, the textures, the colors, and then the meditative work, all of that is profoundly satisfied in a way I think that feeds my reptilian brain rather than my history brain.

Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting. It’s so interesting about creators that like that tactile and how I have a craft closet filled with felt and all kinds of fabric and thousands of colored pencils. It’s that tactileness-

Nell Irvin Painter:
And you open the door and you see all those colors and it makes you happy.

Debbie Millman:
It makes me feel happy. Absolutely. Absolutely a dopamine rush. Now, you said that your next project is a new biography of Sojourner Truth. Will that also include your artwork?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. But I have two projects and then I’m going to retire. The first one is-

Debbie Millman:
Sure. Sure. Is what I say to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, really.

Debbie Millman:
But tell us about the project.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker And She Didn’t Say That. And so since I and then two other scholarly biographers have published the biographies you need to find out about her life now I can talk around her life. So Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker. The pivot there is the moment when she goes to court to get her son back who was trafficked. And she couldn’t have done that if she were say, in Harriet Jacobs’ North Carolina because the laws had no provision for preventing human trafficking. So Sojourner Truth as a New Yorker, I believe that she carries that sense of herself as a citizen into her public life that we know her and appreciate her for. So the Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker is already contracted with Penguin. The book that I will be thinking about in the fall is about my life as someone who has spent important times overseas and then making layers of experience and thinking about myself as a black American, as American as outside the United States. That book doesn’t really have a title, and it shouldn’t yet. And it also doesn’t have a contract, which it shouldn’t yet.

But that’s the Roxane Gay part of me in a way that says, what I am saying, me is something that will interest you. And that took a big step. Not because I’m a professor at Princeton. Not because I publish with an important press. Not because I’ve had all these books. But because of what I think and what I say will be of interest to you. That was a gigantic step. And I’m not just talking about black people or race in America. I’m saying you will be interested in what I say about whatever I say. That was so hard.

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, thank you so much. You did such a beautiful reading of my book. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You can read more about all of Nell’s books and writing and artwork on her website. nellpainter.com, her brand new book is titled, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Nell Irvin Painter appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
David, I understand that you are planning to title the last book you ever write Basically Fine?

David Remnick:
No, I think I’m going to title it Home By 10.

Debbie Millman:
Well, tell us the story of Basically Fine.

David Remnick:
I have no idea what basically fine is.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was when you interviewed Kenzaburō Ōe and you sent the article to-

David Remnick:
Oh, my God. How do you remember these things? I’m going to confess to you, and this is going to be a problem for you. If I wasn’t married to the woman I married to, I would not remember any of my life. The nature-

Debbie Millman:
Fortunately, I know your wife.

David Remnick:
Yes. Anything before my wife, I have no idea. So we’ll struggle here for the next some minutes, but I’m not kidding around. Kenzaburō Ōe, like a lot of stories for journalists, is somebody that … Kenzaburō Ōe won the Nobel Prize, Japanese author, I think just died very recently. I was assigned to write a profile of Kenzaburō Ōe when I was a writer for The New Yorker and Tina Brown was the editor. I really struggled with this piece. His English was about, it’s better than my Japanese, but it was not great. I came home and I did not have what I like best in this world other than my friends and family and peace and love and understanding, which is a full notebook. A half-filled notebook is hell on Earth, and yet I wrote the piece anyway because that’s what one does. I went into my editor, Jeff Frank’s office, and I saw the note from Tina Brown and it said, “Jeff, I guess Remnick’s piece is basically fine.” Let me just say in the annals of editor reaction, basically fine sucks.

Debbie Millman:
You might not remember anything.

David Remnick:
It sucks really bad. I tried to put it out of my mind, but you thankfully now have reinserted it.

Debbie Millman:
Just to prepare you, that might be happening a few more times. You were born in New Jersey in what you-

David Remnick:
I was, deepest, darkest.

Debbie Millman:
No, I’m going to be bringing up a lot of things that you’ve said before.

David Remnick:
That’s all right.

Debbie Millman:
I need you to know right now that you can trust me that the sources are good. You’ve described your upbringing as an East Coast version of what is seen in the film, American Graffiti, marching bands, football teams, and very middle class in a blue collar Springsteenian way.

David Remnick:
That’s right. No ocean.

Debbie Millman:
You went to kindergarten in a yeshiva. That doesn’t feel particularly Springsteenian.

David Remnick:
Well, from where I come from it is. My parents sent me to a religious school for a year because I was large and impatient and I missed the cutoff date. Do they still have cutoff dates for kids? So I missed the cut-off date, so I was a little on the old side to be waiting yet another year. So they sent me to a yeshiva in Patterson, New Jersey and it was called Yavne. I had my mouth washed out with soap by Mrs. Wool.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

David Remnick:
She should rot in hell. I think I-

Debbie Millman:
Very yeshiva-like.

David Remnick:
By the way, not just any soap. You know that lava soap, which is combination soap and a stone?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

David Remnick:
It was that. I think I said a bad word of some kind like tuchus. That would get you to skip a grade now. Got my mouth washed out with soap.

Debbie Millman:
You were a newspaper junkie as a child and began reading The Village Voice at your neighborhood 7-Eleven.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
I didn’t even know 7-Eleven sold The Village Voice.

David Remnick:
Well, I didn’t, strictly speaking, buy it either. I would sit on the floor of the 7-Eleven and read it cover to cover and that’s what I thought I’d do with my life. I thought even as I got older, I think The Village Voice really had two big moments. When it was first invented, it was invented as a product of the ’60s, obviously. In fact, it’s a new book about … The Village Voice is said to be very, very good. I haven’t read it yet.

Debbie Millman:
It’s covered on today’s New Yorker website.

David Remnick:
I don’t read it. I hear The New Yorker website is excellent, and the magazine is said to be good too.

Debbie Millman:
It’s pretty good.

David Remnick:
Funny cartoons and whatnot. No photographs on the cover though.

Debbie Millman:
Caption contest.

David Remnick:
They have that too. I should subscribe.

Debbie Millman:
I’m really actually hoping you’re going to give me some tips.

David Remnick:
Unsubscribing? Oh, I’ve got a lot of tips on that.

Debbie Millman:
No, no, no, on how to get to the top three in the caption contest. That’s a bucket list item for me.

David Remnick:
Okay. Can I just digress from The Village Voice for a second? Occasionally, I’m invited to a fancy thing, and not very often and once in a while I’ll go because curiosity killed the cat. So I went to this thing and I was introduced to then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and he says, “Hello. Hello.” I was very polite, well brought up in New Jersey and whatnot. He said, “I’ve tried to win the cartoon caption contest dozens and dozens of times and I’ve never won.” Now prior to this conversation, I had had what my dearly departed mother would call a big drink. So I said, “Wait a minute, you’re the mayor of New York. You are the richest person in New York and you want to win the fucking caption contest too?” He just didn’t find this funny at all and he said, “Yes, yes.”

Debbie Millman:
We take it very seriously.

David Remnick:
I think he take himself very seriously. So anyway, I worshiped The Village Voice because it was … The New York Times is the weather and it was the establishment word and all that, and The Voice was this other thing and filled with writers who wrote about themselves. There were different spots in politics and there was feminism. What was that? There was all this stuff about race, although there were very few Black writers, God knows a condition not limited to just The Village Voice at that time. Even in North Jersey, you don’t feel like you’re sitting here in Williamsburg or Manhattan or whatever. It feels a million miles away. So to listen to WBAI or WNEW FM for music or the Caribbean station or this, that, and the other thing, radio is a big part of this imagining another life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you were a child insomniac and you’ve described yourself as an adolescent, no sleeper, all night listener, and eyes wide open, ceiling-staring dreamer.

David Remnick:
That wasn’t cocaine at work. It was just a sense of wanting to be elsewhere and knowing that there was this world across the river. Now, a person with a real imagination, someone like John Updike or name your favorite writer-

Debbie Millman:
Roxane Gay.

David Remnick:
Yeah, would certainly have had the imagination to know that Hillsdale, New Jersey had its own emotional depths and interests as Updike made of his Pennsylvania. I did not. I did not. New York City was where I wanted to be from the time I began going with my parents to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn and great grandmother in Coney Island and in Trump houses, by the way.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Are you still an insomniac?

David Remnick:
Pardon me?

Debbie Millman:
Are you still an insomniac?

David Remnick:
Oh, no. I sleep like a rock because I live here. Mission accomplished.

Debbie Millman:
You started writing for your high school newspaper-

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
… The Smoke Signal when you were 13. From what I understand, none of your classmates were interested in contributing to the paper.

David Remnick:
No.

Debbie Millman:
So you wrote and edited the entire paper by yourself. Is it true you made up different bylines so it wouldn’t seem as if you were writing it on your own?

David Remnick:
I still do. Are you a fan of Rachel Aviv?

Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.

David Remnick:
That’s me. She’s good, isn’t she? She’s really good.

Debbie Millman:
She’s my favorite.

David Remnick:
Patrick Radden Keefe? Me too. Me too.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you put this together yourself via old-school layout and paste-up techniques on your kitchen table. How was it printed? Was it mimeographed?

David Remnick:
Well, let me tell you how paper was. You printed it out and you cut it and used scissors and glue. It was a big [inaudible 00:09:20] It was a big deal and it was a terrible … First of all, beginning with the title. It was called The Smoke Signal because we were the Pascack Valley Indians. They aren’t anymore. I think they’re like the Warriors or something, and The Smoke Signal became the I don’t know what else, but that came-

Debbie Millman:
The Signal, right?

David Remnick:
… 30 years later, not The Signal. That would be the CIA newspaper. I didn’t do it completely by myself, but nobody was really terribly interested in this. That could have been the first signal that the newspaper business was in trouble.

Debbie Millman:
You also got a job for what you’ve described as, quote, “writing stupid little articles for one of the community giveaway papers-“

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
“… featuring information about school board meetings,” but you also described it, and I love this, as the most romantic thing ever.

David Remnick:
Well, I left my house and I asked people impertinent questions and they answered them. In other words, I think reporters discover this very early on or anybody that has a medium that they can put between themselves and the world, a canvas, a notebook. It’s a form of permission. It’s a form of permission, and to have that permission at a preposterously young age and to have what seemed like ancient important people like 40-year-old school board members answer your questions, it was very suggestive of something exhilarating.

Debbie Millman:
You also started to play guitar around that time.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
I believe your first instrument was something you called a gazinta guitar.

David Remnick:
A gazinta guitar would mean a bigger healthy guitar. No, I had a crap guitar, but remember, what was the guitar? The guitar was like a notebook. The guitar is a way to be a part of this thing that was happening that you wanted to be a part of. I wouldn’t have picked up a flute, well, unless you wanted to be Jethro Tull.

Debbie Millman:
I was going to say Ian Anderson.

David Remnick:
Yeah, Jethro and Ian Anderson, but I just desperately wanted to … Look, I grew up in very, in all seriousness, what struck me as a very dull, conventional, hemmed in environment with a mother who was quite ill, who had very serious MS, and how she managed to this day I don’t know, and a father who soon would be quite ill and not be able to work when he hit about in his 50s. There was a certain desire to be another, to enter the big world however deceptive that might be. That certainly was the animating spirit of everything I did.

I learned about that other world through various mediums. One of them was very early bumping into the obvious music, most particularly Bob Dylan, and then you’d listen to that and then that would throw you to reading Allen Ginsberg or, or, or, or, and it happens to a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of people in this room at a certain age, something sparks you, whether you read or listen or you have a friend that leads you in some way. So all these things were very important to me.

Debbie Millman:
How did your parents’ illnesses impact your ambition?

David Remnick:
Well, it suggested that at a very peculiar age early on, and I know I’m not alone in this and I’m far from in the global sense or even in the metropolitan sense, the most disadvantaged, but it suggested that the future would require me to help them. I was the older of two kids. My father struggled on for a while, but he was a dentist and he had very, very small dental practice. At a certain point when he was, I don’t know … I think he lied about it for years because he had a tremor in his hand. His wife is sick, he has two kids to support and he’s screwed in the conventional making-a-living sense. I think he lied about it for a while, but patients, I think you all know as dental patients, we all have an identity as dental patients, that a dentist who comes at you with a shaking hand is not a good prospect for future business. It’s like a bad Buster Keaton movie.

So by the time I came back from Moscow in my late 20s or 30, whatever I was, they were all in debt and things collapsed. Again, I’m not weeping about this except I think back at them and they were much younger than me and they were probably terrified, but in my egomaniacal teenage imagination, I knew that I had to make a living.

Debbie Millman:
How did that impact the choices that you were making about what you wanted to-

David Remnick:
I couldn’t be a novelist. I couldn’t say, “You know what? My parents are going to stake me a little bit and I’m going to move into a tiny apartment with a roommate. I’m going to be the next pick your favorite novelist.” ‘That was not … I needed a job.

Debbie Millman:
What gave the sense that journalism would be a more secure option?

David Remnick:
Let’s just let that sit in the rest of my-

Debbie Millman:
I love that people laugh at my jokes, but that wasn’t really a joke.

David Remnick:
Well, first of all, the journalism business, even though I didn’t know it at the time, was fat and happy in those days. I’m sensing that there are some people here in the audience who are in a state of, when they think about the journalism business or the podcasting business, what’s the word we now use constantly, precarity, which I think became a word three years ago, I’m not sure before.

Debbie Millman:
Along with unprecedented.

David Remnick:
Exactly. As somebody who now is ostensibly in charge of a lot of people, I’m thinking about this all the time. In other words, I’m 65 years old, but I’m working with a lot of people who are 27 and 34, and they want to have an exciting, interesting, engaged life. That’s why they got into journalism and didn’t go work for Goldman Sachs. It wasn’t for the dough. They deserve to make a living, but the whole business model has exploded.

Back to your question, I was so lucky that right out of college, having had internships at Newsday and the Washington Post, I stuck around at the Washington Post. There aint many Washington Posts left anymore. A lot of my friends went to the Miami Herald, which was this terrific, flawed but terrific place to learn and to write and maybe spend your whole career there. There’s barely a Miami Herald.

Debbie Millman:
Do you feel that choosing journalism over becoming a novelist or a poet, I know you also wrote poetry, was a compromise?

David Remnick:
That would’ve really filled the coffers for my parents. They collected elegies.

Debbie Millman:
You could really raise a family on that income. Do you feel like it was a compromise?

David Remnick:
I did at the time. The self-proclaiming of oneself as a novelist, just, first of all, there was no fiction around. It’s not as if I had written anything. I always hear all the time people who say, “I’ve always wanted to write. I want to write,” and I would never answer this way because there’s a certain cruelty in it but, “Then write.” If you’re going to do that, you will find a way. You have to find a way. There are all kinds of writer biographies about how people found a way. Graham Greene was a night copy editor at a newspaper, I presume not making a hell of a lot of money, but enough to eat and house himself. He got up early and he pushed himself and he wrote novels and got started and he was good at it. There is no law that at any given moment there are going to be the world is going to treat you the way you want to be treated. That’s the fact. I needed a job.

Debbie Millman:
You went to Princeton University, which you said getting in was a miracle.

David Remnick:
To this day, I don’t understand it. If I presented the SAT scores that I did have now, there’s no way, and the high school I went to, nobody went to these places. Again, I don’t get it. There must have been some mistake.

Debbie Millman:
You studied-

David Remnick:
I’m not kidding around. I really don’t, I don’t get it. I was top of my class. There were other people at the top of the class and I don’t get it.

Debbie Millman:
They never reached out to you and asked you to come back?

David Remnick:
You know what? I had some stupid nervous interview with a Thai and I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
You studied Russian and French, majored in comparative literature. Your parents thought that majoring in comparative literature was weird.

David Remnick:
My father asked me, “What are you comparing?”

Debbie Millman:
What are you comparing?

David Remnick:
Good question. Smart guy. I was comparing it to dentistry as it happens and Tolstoy won. Concerning how I made my life later in the Russia biz a bit, here were the grades that I got in Russian, C plus and D, and then I got out of the Russian business. What happened was I had had some in high school. The only interesting course that my high school offered was Russian. I think some-

Debbie Millman:
Really?

David Remnick:
I don’t know. We this wonderful man named Frank Falk. I don’t know how he washed up at this high school, but he was teaching Russian. I thought, “Wow, cool.” I took it for four years, and when I got out after four years, I could say those boys are crossing these bridges or something like that and that was it. So I thought third year at least, right? I took the test they sometimes give you, the aptitude test, and Veronika Dolinko said to me, she’s the teacher, she said, “David, I think you should start from beginning.” I said, “Well, surely. Second year then,” and she said, “It is your funeral,” and so it was, and so it was, but I started all over again years later.

Debbie Millman:
I actually minored in Russian literature in English translation.

David Remnick:
There you go.

Debbie Millman:
Just to avoid that whole scenario.

David Remnick:
That’s fine.

Debbie Millman:
While at Princeton, you joined the University Press Club, in 1979, you co-founded the student newspaper, the Nassau Weekly.

David Remnick:
Still exists.

Debbie Millman:
I know. It’s incredible.

David Remnick:
It is amazing.

Debbie Millman:
You also became a stringer for the New Brunswick Home News, the Asbury Park Press- … and interned at the Washington Post and Long Island News Day. Overachiever much?

David Remnick:
Yeah, I guess. I have one quality that I will fess to. I have what my grandparents would call zitsfleysh. I put in front of a task, I will complete it. If I have to write a long piece in three days, I won’t move from the chair. It might not be all that good, but I will complete it.

Debbie Millman:
How are you able to write that fast?

David Remnick:
I don’t know. It’s like … Again, I will fess up to that. The quality somebody else will have to fess up to, I don’t know. It’s like asking how does a seal know how to balance a ball on his or her nose. It’s just that that thing that I learned how to do. I think part of it is that I didn’t learn how to be a reporter by blogging at home, which is another generational thing, and I’ve nothing against that, different qualities come out of it, but I had this traditionalist training of covering police at night and having to do things very quickly. I was a sports reporter for two years at the Washington Post, and you would have to cover ball games at night and write an account of the game in 20 minutes. So you build muscles. Why does a dancer jump higher than we do? Because they spend all day long training. They just do training early on.

Debbie Millman:
You interned at the Washington Post and then stayed there after graduation until they told you to go away for a year.

David Remnick:
I did, and I taught in Japan knowing no Japanese at a Catholic university. So they had this Jewish kid from Jersey at a Jesuit school in Tokyo. The day I landed, the three priests greeted me and they said that I may not date any students. Of course, I’m a really good boy and I said, “Okay.” So I had a rather monastic Japanese existence and I read like a book or two a day. I couldn’t speak any language. I think they wanted me to stay for two years and I stayed six months and I traveled around all over Southeast Asia on $5 a day and all the hashish you could pocket and came back and started a job at the Washington Post for real.

Debbie Millman:
Well, actually, you made a stop in Paris.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
Clad in a Leon Russell T-shirt and $9 Converse sneakers.

David Remnick:
Yeah, those were good.

Debbie Millman:
You made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the subway.

David Remnick:
It’s the earlier time, but yes, I was a busker. So next time you’re on the subway and somebody … I don’t know. What are the most common songs you hear on the subway being sung to you? Give the person a little dough because they need it, but I had a great time. It was really fun.

Debbie Millman:
You made enough money to survive doing the busking.

David Remnick:
Oh, if you stay in a hotel for $4 a night, it doesn’t take long to make that much money.

Debbie Millman:
You returned after you’re a year away where you worked at the Washington Post for the next 10 years. You worked with the legendary Ben Bradley who was the editor of the Post during that time, and you said that you and most-

David Remnick:
And legendary podcaster, Malcolm Gladwell as well.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, I’m going to mention that a little bit. You said that you and most of your young colleagues saw Bradley the way one might see a great orca in a fish tank.

David Remnick:
Right. So they had glass. It was the beginning of the glass office period. He was in his post-Watergate period, so he was already a celebrity and he was incredibly handsome in an old wasp way.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. Jason Robards.

David Remnick:
Oh, my. Jason Robards didn’t come close to looking as good as Ben Bradley and all the presidents men. I’m sorry. He got the voice. He got the great voice and the whole thing and the cursing in fluent French. He had it all going on, but he was also in this late mannerist period. His accomplishments, the big accomplishments were a little behind. He was coasting a little bit, I’d say. He was enjoying it. He was enjoying life, but I was terrified of this guy and I had almost no contact with him. Even when half the hierarchy of the Washington Post came to Moscow, when I was there to interview Mikhail Gorbachev, Bradley just stayed home. He wanted no part of it. I think the jet lag was too much.

Debbie Millman:
What was the biggest thing you learned from him?

David Remnick:
Fearlessness in an editor is essential. If we can be serious for a moment, and I’ve been at this for a while now, and The New Yorker is many things, I hope. I hope it’s funny. I hope it has literary depth, but one thing it has to do is put pressure on power. It has to ask hard questions. It has to not pander to its audience in any way. It has to do hard work, and that’s not always … You don’t always sleep well. We have a lot of safeguards. Beyond the talent and the efforts of the writers, we also have an extraordinary checking department of really devoted people going over every, not just spellings and when So-and-So was born, but really beating the hell out of these pieces to make sure they’re right, but they also have to be fair.

We live in a world that is unbelievably confusing and difficult and contentious and polarized and mysterious, and it’s a high order to get things right. Bradley is among those journalists who knew that like in life, you wake up every day and you make one mistake after another and you have to proceed fearlessly. Otherwise, you’re just not going to have any value to the reader of the greater world.

Debbie Millman:
Given the state of politics in the US right now and the potential futures that may unfold, how worried-

David Remnick:
Again.

Debbie Millman:
Again. How worried are you about the validity of the news being questioned?

David Remnick:
I think it should be questioned.

Debbie Millman:
Well, in terms of what-

David Remnick:
You mean us being questioned?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, us being questioned as fake news, the whole way in which the news has been in many ways seen as false, lies, untruths.

David Remnick:
I think there’s one thing that we need to, at this late date, recognize, concede and deal with is that it’s not so much that Donald Trump is a, because that’s what you’re talking about, not only, but part of it, that Donald Trump is not just an autocrat and a demagogue, he’s also very talented demagogue and very … I’m not sure how talented an autocrat he is, but certainly a talented demagogue that other people trying the same stunts, we’ve seen them in American history and they haven’t been as successful. Our history is filled with demagogues and would-be autocrats and worse, racists, misogynists, and so on, but his ability to lock in to a certain base, psychology and comedy and a sense of arousal at a visceral level is astonishingly effective, maybe not in this room, I’m assuming not in this room.

Debbie Millman:
I’m hoping.

David Remnick:
I’m assuming fairly unanimously, but in the greater world, it is an astonishing thing that you have a president of the United States you can object to whatever particular issue you might have, whether it’s the Middle East or economics or immigration, whatever it is, but to compare one to the other and know that they are in a tie is I think that’s another thing that’s very, very hard for our writers and our readers to make sense of and understand is, how this could possibly be? How it is that we live in the same country that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and, in fact, many of the same voters then voted to elect Donald Trump president? That is an astonishingly complicated piece of business to understand. I think that we do our best and fail all the time and then have to wake up and try again.

Debbie Millman:
You were in Russia during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years. You returned to the US in 1992. You wrote your first book, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. You received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the George Polk Award. After writing over 150 major stories on everything from the Soviet dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky to the Indianapolis 500, you left the Post to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and you were hired by then editor Tina Brown. This was not your first attempt to work there. Can you tell us about the queer letter you sent editor William Shawn when you were still in college?

David Remnick:
This was really ballsy. So William Shawn … The New Yorker was a very, from the outside at least, a very insular special institution. I should say the one advantage of being a dentist’s son is that dentists have waiting rooms and waiting rooms at least then were filled with magazines. On Saturdays after my father closed up shop, I’d go in and read all the magazines. One magazine that I was not especially interested in was The New Yorker. It seemed not for me. It seemed not of the ’70s. I was interested in Rolling Stone, which now seems like of another time.

Debbie Millman:
No. Then it was a Bible.

David Remnick:
The invention of the insight of Rolling Stone was that it discovered that the counterculture was the culture. That’s a profound insight. Think of everything else, what you will or Jann Wenner, whatever, but that was an insight. It was a business, but it was exciting, certainly to a 16-year-old imagination and sitting in New Jersey. So I wasn’t interested in The New Yorker. Then I got to college. I had this teacher, a writing teacher named John McPhee, who, by the way, wrote about stuff that didn’t innately excite me, geology. Then I got into it and it was magnificent. It was like discovering Renaissance painting or something. I just, “Oh, how did I miss this all my life?”

Also, he was a writer as a teacher. He wasn’t a scholar of literature. He was an actual practicing writer. This was enormously influential to me and exciting. That’s what I wanted to do. So The New Yorker became more enticing. I wrote a query letter to William Shawn, who was a gnomic, genius, odd, distant figure. It was like writing a letter to Buddha, and you expected about the same result.

Debbie Millman:
Dear Buddha.

David Remnick:
Dear Buddha. “Dear Mr. Shawn, I’d like to write a profile of this guy Tom Page, who was a squash champion, who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, first family of Dayton Ohio, weirdly rich but had a squash court in his backyard. When he broke his right arm, his strong arm, he played with his left arm and he beat everybody anyway. He took an enormous amount of drugs, and it turned out he’s also quite disturbed and died very young, but he seemed like the profile of a deeply eccentric, interesting person.” I got back the following letter, “Dear Mr. Remnick, Mr. wind covers racket sports for us.” I loved the Mr. Wind part.

Debbie Millman:
love the racket sports part.

David Remnick:
I’m like, “Who the fuck is Mr. Wind?” and then it says, “Sincerely yours, William Shawn,” and that I don’t have this letter kills me to this day. Mr. Wind turned out to be Herbert Warren Wind, who wrote very, very, very, very long pieces about golf tournaments. The structure of the piece would be we came to the first hole.

Debbie Millman:
Go on.

David Remnick:
There would be many columns, which brought us to the second hole, which was a dogleg left of 343 yards, par four. People ask me, “Why are the pieces in The new Yorker so long?” and I say, “You should have seen it back when.” We used to do four-part series on literally on grains. Of course, there were four part series that were brilliant, Janet Malcolm or whatever, McPhee, but there’s a sociology to this too. So why are Dostoevsky and Dickens’ novels so long? There’s so long because in the 19th century, literary magazines were middle-class entertainment and Crime and Punishment being published in the Bell [inaudible 00:34:20] or Dickens being published in Blackstones. This was entertainment for the ascending middle-class audience that was going to read a novel, and they were entertaining and they were episodic and they were realist, and they went on. There’s a sociology to the art question.

William Shawn’s, one of his biggest challenges as an editor, and all editors have peculiar challenges to the time, one of his biggest challenges is, “I need to have enough editorial matter to go next to the gazillion ads I am publishing.” I don’t have that problem. I have a different kind of business.

Debbie Millman:
Well, when you took over in 1998, the magazine had lost an estimated $170 million since the Newhouse family had bought it in 1985. This was not the only precarious time in its history. I believe you are in possession of a letter from co-founder Raoul Fleischmann to a colleague stating that they needed to shut the magazine down in May of 1925, just three months after the debut issue.

David Remnick:
That was before the word precarity was around, but there it was.

Debbie Millman:
It took three years, but the magazine has actually been profitable since 2001.

David Remnick:
Look, I will say this, our business changed a lot. The old style of all magazines was subscriptions were very cheap so that it would get in a lot of hands, and so advertisers would reach as many people as possible of a certain kind of audience depending on what the magazine was or newspaper or television network or whatever it might be. The nature of advertising has changed, and it’s completely and utterly dominated by Google and Facebook. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but something like 75% of the ad market is to that and the rest is scraps. The result has been, in addition to other factors like Craigslist and so on, has been the decimation of mid-level newspapers.

There’s really only a few exceptions to this and magazines, and it’s tragic. It’s tragic. Not that every publication that’s been lost or diminished is perfect, but the changed landscape is deeply, deeply, deeply worrying for all kinds of reasons that we can talk about. The only other alternative that I know of at the moment is subscriptions, the same thing that television’s discovered. Luckily enough, fairly early, we changed our emphasis and we basically said to you, readers of the New Yorker, without saying it, that, “I can’t give this away anymore. You have to pay more than a cup of coffee a week to have this extraordinary thing in your hands or on your phone or whoever you choose to read it.”

The New Yorker, in fact, gives you a great deal more per day, per week than when Mr. Shawn was editing it, but the subscription model, now that we’ve had a lot of success with it for a while, now the subscription model is facing challenges too because you’ve all had this discovery. You’ve all woken up and go, “Wait a minute, I have Netflix, I have Paramount+, I have …” and then there are even apps now to get rid of or shave down your subscriptions.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, which was the original cable system.

David Remnick:
Exactly. So we’re in a time of real flux, and editors spend a lot more time thinking about business than they probably, if they’re being honest with themselves, would like to. They want to be thinking about writing and graphic design and all kinds of things, but if you don’t have your eye on business, and this goes with public radio or look at what’s happening in the podcast business. We have The New Yorker Radio Hour with my colleague David Crass now. We have a terrific time doing this. We’re thinking about how to develop it, make it better all the time, but we also have to pay attention to economics. Otherwise, you wake up and something terrible has happened, and I’m determined.

We’re going to celebrate 100th anniversary next year, The New Yorker. I don’t want that to be an occasion for us to show off at a museum of ourselves. There’ll be some of that to be sure, but I want people in this room and their children to be reading The New Yorker that is a lot better than the one that we have now in the future. So I think about that kind of thing all the time.

Debbie Millman:
When you first made the announcement of your expansion into podcasts, you stated, “While I readily admit to the gall of it, we come to this project with a deep respect for the history and creative range of the medium.” Why did you feel it was galling to expand into the podcast world?

David Remnick:
Because it’s like … I’m not saying we’re Michael Jordan, but when Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls to go play baseball, that was, one could argue it was both galling and a little stupid and like, “Why are you doing that?”

Debbie Millman:
I think it was actually interesting.

David Remnick:
I once said, “Maybe I’ll write a novel.” He said, “Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane.” I don’t believe in necessarily staying in your lane, but there is that instinct toward, “Okay. You know how to do this. You know how to make hamburgers. Make hamburgers.” Sometimes places that expand and suddenly start serving something else fail. I just think it’s enormous fun, and I also think it reaches other people.

Debbie Millman:
Is there an underlying principle or philosophy that is guiding the continued expansion into podcast?

David Remnick:
That’d be good, and they have to make their own way. The latest one, two things have started of late. There’s a culture podcast with Alex Schwartz and Vincent Cunningham and Naomi Fry, which is extremely fun and funny and smart. We purchased a podcast that you probably know called In the Dark, and In the Dark was being run out of, I think, Minnesota Public Radio for a while, and they stayed in Minnesota. This is a reporting and narrative podcast, more like in the mode of serial, say, and it’s really hard to do, and they work a long time on their reporting. They’re working on their third season and they’ve been around for some years. These are serious reporters. I felt that they were kindred souls and so did the head of Condé Nast. So we don’t see them a hell of a lot.

There’s an editor at the new Yorker named Will Davidson who works with them, and Chris Bannon, who heads podcasts and audio in general. Condé Nast isn’t in deep contact with them, but they’re really ambitious. They’re shooting for the moon. They also had a mini season that took a New Yorker piece by Heidi Blake called The Runaway Princesses. I thought it was terrific.

Look, I just listened to a lot of audio. It’s always meant a lot to me, podcasts and radio, and I just thought it was an experiment worth trying. We’ve had failed experiments too. In video, we did a thing with Amazon that I think if we’re being honest, it was a noble failure. It wasn’t embarrassing, but it didn’t take off. It didn’t garner the attention. It didn’t quite work.

Debbie Millman:
How long do you give something before you make that decision?

David Remnick:
Well, sometimes economics will dictate that. Economics might tell you. Quite frankly, audio is less expensive to do, although In The Dark, because it’s so intensively reported, like serial, like any number of other things, that’s more expensive to do.

Debbie Millman:
In a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, you interviewed a meme mixologist. I’ve never heard that job title before.

David Remnick:
God knows I hadn’t either.

Debbie Millman:
Can you share what that actually is for the audience?

David Remnick:
No, I can’t, no. Have you ever had the feeling, and maybe you’re having it right now, that you were interviewing something and the producers have said, “We’re going to interview a meme mixologist,” and you say, “Okay, that that’s fine,” and you get through the interview as if in a haze, and at the end you say, “I really don’t know what that is.”

Debbie Millman:
Fair enough, but no, I’m not experiencing that, thankfully. The last thing I want to talk to you about is music. In your latest book, Holding the Note: Profiles and Popular Music, you state that there’s no one who has meant more to you than Bob Dylan. The passion first-

David Remnick:
I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Debbie Millman:
Anybody here?

David Remnick:
Okay. Well, older crowd perhaps.

Debbie Millman:
This passion was first ignited in 1966 when you first heard the song I Want You.

David Remnick:
That’s right. So weird experience. Again, I don’t remember much. Look, the story I’m about to tell you may be completely false in the sense that it was a novelist named Harold Brodke, and he wrote a novel called The Runaway Soul. The novel opens with his own birth and Harold claimed that he really remembered it, and it was important to him this self-mythologizing at some level because there’s no earthly way that he remembered his birth. I do think this is true. So I want to be honest because-

Debbie Millman:
Well, it could be a memory of a memory.

David Remnick:
Exactly. Because I’m a journalist, just when I read memoirs, I read them in this spirit, all of them, including Bob Dylan’s memoir, by the way.

Debbie Millman:
We’ll get to that in a minute.

David Remnick:
When I was seven, something like that, my mother got sick. She had the first serious attack of multiple sclerosis. My father and my brother at that time must have been four, my father was not able to go to the hospital. I guess I was past the limit. My father took me to the hospital and it was very scary seeing your mother in the hospital bed. Seeing your parents doing anything other than being in the kitchen is scary.

The primal scene, let’s not even think about that, but sick is really, that I really do remember. As I recall, I heard this … We played the radio. My father liked music too and he had good taste, R&B, jazz, classical. Someone was on the radio singing with a voice like this was not Paul Revere & the Raiders. This was not your average pop music. This was not Chad and Jeremy. This was, “The guilty undertaker sighs. The lonesome organ grinder cries,” and what the fuck was he singing about? I was seven years old and it was thrilling.

I was not yet at the age where I was allowed to buy albums. There was this store called E. J. Korvette, a department store, not a high-level one. It was out on, I don’t know, Route 17 or Route 4, somewhere in Jersey.

Debbie Millman:
Korvette with a K.

David Remnick:
There you go. I bought this album because kids can’t decide, that Beatles album or that. So I bought something called Best of ’66, always hedging my bets, and it was okay. Then there was that song. It was $1.99, I think, the album. So I bought other Bob Dylan albums going backwards. So that would’ve been the time of Blonde on Blonde and then Highway 61 Revisited and going backwards and backwards until he was nothing but an acoustic guitar and harmonica.

That was a revelatory thing at a very young. I knew what the Beatles were. Even in the minivan taking us to yeshiva, kids wore Beatles wigs with a yarmulke on top. It’s a great look. It’s a great look, but this was something completely mysterious. To this day, I think the last time I saw Bob Dylan was four months ago with one of my children who’s now 32. They’ve all, well, certainly, Alex Noah have gone with me any number of times. I don’t know whether they’re indulging me or not. I can never quite tell.

Debbie Millman:
In 2004, you were hoping to get an exclusive excerpt of his recently published memoir in The New Yorker. You almost had it in the bag.

David Remnick:
I got screwed with my pants on.

Debbie Millman:
Dylan wanted the cover. Dylan wanted the cover of The New Yorker.

David Remnick:
Let’s just say that Bob Dylan has remained unmoved by and unimpressed by my hero worship. It doesn’t keep him up nights. Apparently, I’m not alone. So what happened was I had heard that he was writing a memoir and that it was good and that it wasn’t like Tarantula, which is, I don’t know, a surrealist experiment. I was summoned. I said, “Well, send the manuscript to the publisher.” I said, “I can’t send the manuscript. It would be like sending the Dead Sea Scrolls to my apartment.” So I went to the Dylan office, I won’t even tell you where it is, but you have to press a button that says, I don’t know, AB Cube Carpets. It’s like a CIA thing. You go up there and it’s just Dylan everything, Dylan tote bags and Dylan albums and Dylan this and Dylan that. If I had gone when I was 16, my head would’ve exploded into a thousand pieces.

They sit me in a little room with a bare table and a manuscript and a glass of water. I sat there and read the book straight through, Chronicles, anyone, and it was terrific. I said to the publisher and the Dylan guy, nice people, “I’m in. Don’t call Rolling Stone. That’s not your audience anymore,” I don’t know, whatever bullshit I told them. I was trying to get it for The New Yorker. I’m a competitive person. We made an agreement and we made a handshake agreement, and it still pisses me off.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

David Remnick:
This many years ago, it looked like John Kerry was running for president. Half the people here weren’t born yet, and it really pisses me off this thing. It got to the summer and they call and they said, “Okay. We’re about to publish it,” and I said, “Great. 7,000 words, the New York bit in the beginning, we’re all set and we’ll try to figure out what to do about fact checking and copy editing. Bob doesn’t necessarily have to be completely involved,” and so on and so forth, whatever shit I was slinging. I just thought everything’s going to be great.

Then they said, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “Bob wants a cover? We have dogs on the cover or bowl of fruit or a joke or Barry Blitt making fun of whatever … We don’t do that. We don’t have photographs in the cover.” I thought I’d changed their mind, and there was a pause and they said, “Bob wants a cover.”

It was like talking to your parents at your worst, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “I can’t do it.” I said, “I’m sure we can find some way to work this out.” “Bob wants a cover,” and that was it. They went to Newsweek. By that time, Bob looked like Vincent Price with a little mustache and a cowboy hat. I thought, “They’re never going to put Bob Dylan on the cover. It’s the middle of a presidential race.”

Debbie Millman:
It’s election year.

David Remnick:
They put him on the cover and they ran this excerpt. Apparently, Bob Dylan survived the experience of not being published in The New Yorker. Then another thing happened. I saw that he had these paintings. He’s a painter. He also makes whiskey and iron gates, a man of parts.

Debbie Millman:
He’s got range.

David Remnick:
He’s got range. These paintings, some of them are kind of good. There was one, a painting of Katz’s Delicatessen, the pastrami capital of the world, and it’s pretty good, and it’s a good New Yorker cover. It’s a New York scene. I make an arrangement. We’re all set to go. Two weeks out, I get a phone call, “Bob doesn’t want to do it.” So I feel our relationship is not on an equal level somehow.

Debbie Millman:
You think?

David Remnick:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Malcolm Gladwell is here today to receive the 2024 Audio Van Gogh Award. You worked together at the Washington Post.

David Remnick:
Did I come in second? I’m just asking.

Debbie Millman:
Maybe next year. You worked together at the Washington Post, and he said this about you. “At the Washington Post, there was one day when David Remnick had three stories on the front page which I don’t think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.”

David Remnick:
Have I ever mentioned publicly how much I love Malcolm Gladwell? Look, that happened, the front page thing, because I was blessed. I was sent to Moscow at a time where American interest and what was going on was singular, and the news and the interest and the varied topics of what were going on every day were so fascinating and, thankfully, so fascinating to our readers at the Washington Post that I think it was the journalistic equivalent of holding out a bucket in a rainstorm and it just filled up with stories. I could go to my mailbox in the morning, my mailbox, and come up with a story just by reading my mail.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you could. I don’t know that-

David Remnick:
Any idiot could. No, no, no, I mean it. At that time, every single day in a newspaper, in a literary journal, something was being published that had never happened before. They’re publishing Anna Akhmatova or Solzhenitsyn or Nabokov or Orwell or, “Oh, my God, there’s the first report we’ve ever seen on the war in Afghanistan.” We forget, now that things are so dreadful in Russia and not only Russia, how dreadful they are, how incredibly promising it was to be alive in Moscow in 1989 or 1990 and, by the way, in the world.

Part of what shaped me is when I was a young reporter, the world was very promising, but it’s always filled with misery. We are half-conscious, crazy people doing the best we can and the worst we can all the time, but there was this moment of promise in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, in South America, democratic promise. I’m not saying heaven on earth, but promise.

For all kinds of reasons that we could spend many, many hours discussing, so much of this was squandered that it’s very hard not to view current times through that prison for somebody of my vintage. I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to go to my rest thinking that this country has given up on its democratic promise no matter how flawed we are even at our best or these other parts of the world. It wasn’t just the fact that I was 32 years old and you’re innately, although I don’t know that that’s the case now with people who are 32 years old, but there was some sense that the world could turn a corner for the better, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the idea that history could go backward so profoundly is instructive about the precarity of human arrangements and behavior and foolishness. That’s why I’m in this business not just because it’s so immensely fun and satisfying, but because I hope it helps somehow lead the other way.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what I can say is that with you at the helm of The New Yorker, it gives all of us hope that that’s possible.

David Remnick:
That’s immensely generous. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
David Remnick, thank you so much.

The post Design Matters: David Remnick appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Before her latest book, Lucy Sante had written, edited, or translated a shelf full of books, fiction and nonfiction, and a mountain of short pieces for magazines like The New York Review of Books. In 2021 at the age of 66, Lucy shared an announcement that she had joined the other team and was transitioning, and that her pronoun, thank you very much, was she. We should consider ourselves lucky for all of the above because she has written about the experience and her life, both wittily and magnificently in her new book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. Lucy Sante, welcome to Design Matters.

Lucy Sante:
Hello.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy, I understand you consider the 1942 book, American Thesaurus of Slang by Lester Berry and Melvin Van den Bark to be your Bible. I’m wondering what do you like most about that book?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it’s a thesaurus of slang. It’s not a dictionary, it’s a thesaurus, so things are grouped in categories, which is very useful for research. If you, say, are writing a crime novel set in 1938, you can imagine what the boss butcher at the slaughterhouse would be called by his men and stuff like this. But also for me, for just a writer, it’s this treasure chest of words and expressions. You dive into it and it opens all sorts of doors in your head.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of slang were Americans using back in 1942?

Lucy Sante:
There were slangs for all kinds of individual professions and settings and sociological groups of various sorts. You could see it in movies from the ’20s and ’30s, people spoke very fast. And the demonic, it was, well, you could write a book about the sociology of it, but it was at a point where people were becoming city slickers. They come in from the country, but they were refashioning themselves as sophisticates of a certain kind.

Newspapers. There were many newspapers, daily ones, and they all had columnists and they were all polishing up their verbal acts. So it was a period of particular verbal invention on the printed page as well as in the street.

Debbie Millman:
You said that the book helped you open the doors for language and that you used to use Finnegans Wake by James Joyce for that too. Ulysses is one of my all-time favorite books and has been so for most of my life, but I find Finnegans Wake impenetrable. How do you decipher it?

Lucy Sante:
Well, I had a brilliant college professor, Michael Wood, who’s now retired, but he writes for the London Review of Books and he gave a reading of a section of Finnegans Wake in an Irish voice because he’s like Anglo Irish or something, but he knew he could read it in the brogue and suddenly it became three dimensional. It popped into relief like just reading it off the page, never had. And so for a few years I was able to recreate that experience in my head when I opened to a random page and heard Michael reading it spectrally.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Verviers, Belgium. In your 2012 memoir, The Factory of Facts, you describe yourself as three quarters peasant. Why is that?

Lucy Sante:
My father’s family has been in the same town I was born in Verviers since at least the 13th century. I mean, we’re there in the very first census, so we don’t know how far back it goes before that. Very localized and a city, a city as far back as it was a Roman villa, but it was a city of some kind by the Middle Ages. My other three quarters, my mother’s side and my father’s mother’s side were all from people from the country, people from [inaudible 00:04:33] and my mother’s side and on my paternal grandmother’s side from Luxembourg, which is basically another state. And so they were farmers working the unforgiving land of the [inaudible 00:04:51] which is very stony and has a very short growing season, and they did that for hundreds and thousands of years.

Debbie Millman:
At the time your father worked in a foundry and have stated that your mother seemed to have two modes in one. She was tearfully, clingy, cloyingly affectionate, cooing, and caressing, and kissy-kiss. In the other, she was a rattlesnake. Do you think a lot of this stemmed from the stillborn daughter who proceeded you?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, it had a lot of causes. It had that stillbirth of my older sister one year and one month older than me whose names I inherited in inverted form, but that was only one component. It was also she was treated very badly by her own parents. She was the idiot of the family and she was profoundly destabilized by the move to the United States. Never really made her peace. Her social orbit was her cousins. They were in the country. Even moving to the city shattered her world and every remove after that broke it some more. So she was this compounded mass of pain from various sources.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned moving back and forth to Belgium, from Belgium to the US four times and started first grade without knowing a word of English. And you picked it up quickly and have written that your instruction was vivid. And I’m wondering in what way was your instruction vivid?

Lucy Sante:
Because I picked up so many words from seeing them on packaging, painted signs in storefronts, billboards, sides of trucks, all kinds of places as well as books and newspapers. But it was all around. I could still see the word delicatessen as it appeared on this shop front in Summit, New Jersey or the penguin decal in the glass door of the drugstore advertising cool cigarettes and noticing that they spell it with a K and it’s not normally how it’s spelled. All these kinds of things and they still live in my head.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I was also somewhat captivated by the cool cigarette packaging logo because I love the way that the O’s were entwined. It’s so interesting how these things.

Lucy Sante:
Those are deco.

Debbie Millman:
Exactly. It’s my fascination with things like that that give me the sense that that’s ultimately why I went into making logos for a living. You’ve written that you were pretty much the only immigrant kid around and that the other kids hated that you read books for fun and knew the answers in class. What kinds of books were you reading at that time?

Lucy Sante:
When I think back on it, especially having had a child myself and having to learn about American children’s literature, I had no guidance, so nobody told me about Charlotte’s Web. I didn’t know any of the classics and didn’t really know what to read. Read in fiction, that turned me off for the most part, and really that’s when I started reading history. There was a series called Landmark Books about American history. I read them all. Also, a neighbor did give me the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I read all of those. Did not read Tom Swift. The scientific boy wonder that did not appeal.

Debbie Millman:
You described yourself as an imaginative and fearful child who saw omens everywhere. What kinds of omens?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, golly. I mean, everything was portent. Everything could be like step on a crack, break your mother’s back, but often it had to do with life and death kind of stuff. It was all about my death, the end of the world. A lot to do with. I write in the book too about how I was completely filled with my parents’ wartime memories. The most traumatic stuff just imprinted itself on me. I did think that planes were going to drop bombs on the house. A shell had just missed my maternal grandparents’ apartment house, landed in the courtyard next door. So this stuff, even though I was born nine years after the end of the war, it still permeated my childhood.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 12, the principal of your school who was also a nun, scheduled a consultation for you with a psychologist. Why?

Lucy Sante:
Because I was in fights every day. I was obviously unhappy. I had no friends at all of any sort. For three years I was deeply alienated. She took pity on me.

Debbie Millman:
Did that help? What was a diagnosis made?

Lucy Sante:
No, I don’t know what happened. I will never know. Nothing. The shrink gave me all these tests then called in my parents. My parents were both furious by what they heard, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I wish I’d asked my father before he lapsed into dementia. My mother would never have told me.

Debbie Millman:
When you were very young, your mother searched your room on any pretext and read every bit of writing she found. What were you writing at that time?

Lucy Sante:
Well, I wasn’t.

Debbie Millman:
What was she looking for?

Lucy Sante:
She was looking for sin. She was looking for smut. She was looking for anything morally wrong because she thought that everything in the world was morally wrong. And Satan was nipping at my trouser cuffs. And she was going to find out the dirt on me. That’s why I did not write anything down. I did not. And I still don’t. This is carried over. Although, I don’t have that paranoia anymore, but I just never got the habits when never kept a diary, which I’m actually grateful for by the way.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Lucy Sante:
Because if you write memories down, your memory will be inherent in what you’ve written and you lose the actual memory. It just gets transferred. So my memories are still wild. I can still roam around in there. They’re not fixed.

Debbie Millman:
Now when you’re writing, when you’re actually… Because you write for a living, do you do drafts or do you sort of pull it all from your head into the writing in that first attempt?

Lucy Sante:
Yeah. I only do one draft, then I work it endlessly. For me, it has to… The thought happens on the page. I can’t do it in my head ahead of time. I may think like the sentence, but once I write it down, it’s not going to be the same as it happened in my head because I was just getting the thought and not the words, and the words are what really structures the thought and that can only happen on the page.

Debbie Millman:
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Lucy Sante:
I was in fourth grade. I was nine. So many things happened around age nine. I don’t know which came first, but I remember that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gibbs told me I had talent as a writer and I wrote a composition on, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I wrote about how I want to be a writer with a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson on the cover.

Debbie Millman:
Now I understand you also drew an underground comic for your school paper. Were you also interested in becoming an artist?

Lucy Sante:
Well, becoming a cartoonist, it’s almost a Belgian national profession. I mean, the golden age of cartooning was at its red hot peak when I was a child there. And everybody here knows Tintin or Tintin and Les Schtroumpfs otherwise known as the Smurfs. But there’s a whole lot more to the Belgium cartoon world. And kids aspire to be cartoonist the way American kids in my generation aspire to be rock and roll stars, and so I tried my hand at it. I wasn’t very good, but I had a strip called Neanderthal Man. He was a superhero.

Debbie Millman:
Around that time, you won a essay contest in your school for Arbor Day. What was that essay about?

Lucy Sante:
It was Arbor Day. It was an essay about why Arbor Day is great. They’re always really why I like trees. I like trees for many reasons.

Debbie Millman:
There was one winner from each of the schools in your town, and at the time you were the only boy when a photo of the five of you was published in the New Providence Dispatch, you appeared in the caption as Lucy Sante, not Luke Sante. How did that make you feel?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, very weird. Again, it’s pretty distant for me to capture the exact emotional pitch, but it was thrilling and embarrassing and my mother immediately scratched it out with ballpoint. But I mean it took up permanent residence in my head, that’s for damn sure.

Debbie Millman:
And I Heard Her Call My Name. You write that you can’t say with certainty when the idea that you might or should be a girl first took hold, but it was probably around age nine or 10. How did that manifest to you?

Lucy Sante:
How did it first start? I saw myself as a girl. I thought about looking like a girl. I thought my interests were pretty much a girl’s interests, although, well, they were like artistic, not very domestic, and I didn’t really know any girls. That was another component. So I had really nobody to measure myself against, but it crept in and very soon it was a very strong emotion that I immediately started at one at the same time indulging in and trying to suppress.

Debbie Millman:
At the time you thought you were the only person in the world who had ever wanted to change genders. You said at the time that you prayed for Jesus to turn you into a girl overnight in your sleep, but don’t remember whether Jesus proposed this or if you requested it and wrote, “There it was and it wouldn’t leave me alone. I trembled from both desperate wishfulness and naked fear.” What scared you most at that point?

Lucy Sante:
Oh gosh. Well, I was young enough to still believe in a certain kind of magic and thought that something dramatic like that could actually happen. And how would my life change? I was just entering the period that never stopped really of conflict with my parents, and this seemed like an additional point of conflict. So I was very wary of it. I desired it, but I also knew it was an impossibility except that I believed in magic. You see all the contradictions, right?

Yeah, I was very confused. I had no guidance of any sort and didn’t for many years afterward, even though a trickle of news items would come my way, and I realized, “No, I’m not the only one, but there are like 48 of us.” Something like that really.

Debbie Millman:
You were admitted to Regis High School when you were 14 on the basis of a written exam, which is a very prestigious private school. You’d never heard of it. A nun who taught you in eighth grade suggested it. You got in and commuted two hours from New Jersey to the Upper East Side in New York City and write that that experience being in Manhattan changed your life. How so?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it just took me out of the immediate constant supervision of my parents for about eight hours a day or more. I was in this big city and everything seemed available. I didn’t have any money, but I read all the underground newspapers. They only cost a quarter and things in general were so much cheaper. So I could go to the movies, I could buy books on this very, very small allowance I had. But I had a universe open to me. The only place that presented me with that much of a range of options previously was the library.

I went from the library to Manhattan, which is like hyper library, so it showed me the world outside. I must have started thinking of my family as a prison very early. I had already this fleeting vision of New York City as we were about to go back to Belgium the first time and didn’t know that we would ever be coming back. And already New York City had established its symbolic function in my mind because it was Halloween and something nobody has seen in 50 years. Just massive crowds of kids running in costume, running on chaperone through the streets.

So when I was admitted to high school and I started commuting and I’d leave the house at seven in the morning and not be back until six or seven in the evening, I had autonomy during those hours.

Debbie Millman:
There was a line in your book that really touched me. You said for the first time the jail door was briefly left ajar. Yep. You went on to get a full scholarship at Columbia University, and in your first year there you got into one of Kenneth Koch’s poetry classes, and you’ve written that you felt that he pinned poet’s wings on your lapel. It was the only class you always attended, fully prepared and not stoned, and its influence was such that the writing classes you later taught for 27 years were always modeled on it. Can you share how he taught you how to teach?

Lucy Sante:
I still don’t know how other people teach writing, right? I mean, I took poetry classes with Kenneth and with David Shapiro and I took a translation class, and those are the only writing classes I’ve ever taken. But in any event, I taught an assignment based class. It wasn’t workshops. Every week I’d assign a reading excerpt and then a writing assignment that would be related to that reading. My emphasis was on voice, on style, on rhythm, and these are very hard concepts to get across, especially to undergraduates, but I tried anyway. It was formalistic, but that’s just a means to an end. I strongly believe in taking a conceptual approach. I mean, my book is an example that it’s structured in a very particular way, which gives the voice room to move.

The fact that it’s a kind of formalistic device, it unleashes the emotions rather than restricts them. That all goes back to Kenneth. And so yeah, I attempted to convey these thoughts to students for all those years, graduate students at Columbia and the new school, and then for 24 years to undergraduates of Bard.

Debbie Millman:
You felt that he pinned poets wings on your lapel, but about a year or so later it dawned on you that you actually weren’t a poet. Why?

Lucy Sante:
Well, the second year I was in his prosody class and I realized that… And here’s the paradox. I’m vitally interested in rhythm in my writing, but I could not bring myself to care about prosody or about verse form like cutting off lines seems arbitrary. I just want to go. So I’m a prose writer.

Debbie Millman:
What did Kenneth think of your writing?

Lucy Sante:
Beats me. I mean, I went to a reading that he gave not long before his death. He’d already been very sick with cancer, but he had a brief burst of energy and he gave a little tour. I went to see him with Jim Jarmusch who’d also been a student of Kenneth’s and Kenneth saw Jim and was like, “Oh my God, you’re here.” Who are you? He didn’t remember me at all.

Debbie Millman:
After you left Columbia, you felt that writing was your only real talent, but you write that you had no idea what to do with it. Sometimes you wrote reviews, you intended to submit to The Village Voice, but then you’d lose your nerve. You got a job as a clerk at the Strand Bookstore. Within a couple of weeks you were promoted to head and sole employee of the paperback department. While you were there, you started a magazine called Stranded and published four issues. Who did you publish? How did you publish and what was the reaction to this zine, essentially? There wasn’t the word then, but that’s I think what it was.

Lucy Sante:
No, it’s exactly what it was. Well, we borrowed it from this venerable Brooklyn based magazine, which no longer exists called Hanging Loose, which gathered individual sets of pages from writers. In other words, you don’t just submit your poem, you submit 200 or 300 whatever copies of your poem, and then we collate. So there was no editing involved. Anybody who wanted to submit that many pages got in. And then I packaged them. It went for four issues.

It was mostly, but not exclusively Strand employees. Kathy Acker is in there. In fact, actually the fourth issue is highly sought after because Jean-Michel Basquiat has a contribution in there and he never worked at The Strand. So it was some very interesting stuff, all kinds of… There’s bad poetry. There’s interesting Xerox graphics.

People collecting the top 10 all time favorite record lists of everybody who worked at The Strand, stuff like that. All kinds of stuff. Oh, and also great long beefs. My argument with X.

Debbie Millman:
How did you first meet Jean-Michel Basquiat?

Lucy Sante:
I met him with some friends of mine and we can’t figure… Or they seem to think we met him at a party. I thought we met him at the Mud Club, somewhere around late ’78.

Debbie Millman:
I think I read in your book that a friend of yours he painted on the refrigerator door and she sold that and also I think… There are a couple of different things that he painted on friends of yours.

Lucy Sante:
Well, the bathroom door and a fresco in the bedroom, which she only had that taken out and sold about 10 years ago. They lived together. They were not a couple exactly, but they shared a residence and he left all kinds of stuff with her. She still has some really substantial amount of… Not there, they’re in storage, but that he just left there because he was a young man on the go.

I mean, he left behind artwork all over town. And actually some of it got tossed. Now, I remember this great and one friend’s apartment, there was this great accumulation of abstract expressionist sweatshirts he’d made with spray paint. And they were kind of chaotic and they eventually just got tossed.

Debbie Millman:
That breaks my heart. You got your first job at the New York Review of Books in the mail room. How did you get that job?

Lucy Sante:
I had a friend, Noah Shapiro, whose father was the business manager. I’d known Noah since freshman year of college, and I ran into him on the street and bingo, I had a job.

Debbie Millman:
After a year there, editor Barbara Epstein hired you as her assistant where you realized you were wildly ignorant of the world and its ways. And I understand you didn’t know how to make a reservation at a restaurant.

Lucy Sante:
I’d never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know that it existed. My parents never would’ve occurred to them to go to make a restaurant reservation. They probably didn’t know it existed either. And in general, the job involved being social in a way, just not entertaining with a glass in hand, but social in the sense of being connected with other people in ways that were completely unfamiliar to me. It was both the fact that I came from this working class immigrant family, but also that I was were suspicious and resentful of the entire adult world. And Barbara, bless her soul, understood this. She basically explained the adult world to me.

Debbie Millman:
What do you think Barbara saw in you at the time? She basically handpicked you out of the mail room-

Lucy Sante:
Yeah, she did.

Debbie Millman:
… into her life. What do you think she saw in you?

Lucy Sante:
I still don’t really know because I mean, did she read anything I’d written? I mean, I guess she probably just, she talked to Lizzie Hardwick whose house had been to a bunch of times with my friend, Darryl Pinckney, and I don’t know, liked the cut of my jib.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that Barbara Epstein gave you the most important gift you’ve ever gotten from anyone shy of life itself, the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. And I’m wondering how did she do that?

Lucy Sante:
It happened a little by little. It’s really hard to say at what moment it tipped over, but I went from… Well, I went from being as much of a wallflower on the page as I was in life feeling that I can’t review this book because I’m not an expert on every detail concerning it, that kind of thing, to realizing that, “Yeah, no, I have an angle. I mean, I read this book that gives me the right to have an opinion about it and proceed from there.” Not just books, but all kinds of situations that, “Yes, I was there. I’m a witness. I don’t need a graduate degree in the subject to express what I think.”

Debbie Millman:
So do you feel like she gave you some confidence to be a writer?

Lucy Sante:
Exactly, yeah. That’s the whole point. This confidence that I found very hard to come by otherwise given everything.

Debbie Millman:
You published your first professional piece of writing in the New York Review of Books in 1981 when you were 27. Do you remember what that essay was about?

Lucy Sante:
It was about Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis Presley, which I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and I was immediately struck by how false it was. I really believe in the lie detector functions of prose. All kinds of syntax, word use, whatever will tell you if this is genuine or not. I mean, it’s not foolproof obviously, but a rough sketch. And his book just wreaked of falsehood. There was nothing sincere about it. He’s whipping up this kind of tabloid fable to sell books and that’s it.

Albert Goldman was not nobody. He was pretty respected critic. He wrote a really good book about Lenny Bruce, but he hated the younger generation. That’s the thing about him. It’s like anybody who came in like post Beatles was trash because they weren’t following this kind of ’50s great man author kind of thing. He took his revenge first with the Elvis book and then with the John Lennon biography, which I also reviewed for the New York Review, which was in many ways even worse.

I don’t even know if those books were in print, but they were really pretty. They were hatchet jobs, more sophisticated hatchet jobs than you usually see, because he was not a dumb guy. Nevertheless, that’s all they were.

Debbie Millman:
What was the reaction to your criticism of these books in your writing?

Lucy Sante:
Well, Bob and Barbara accepted it. It was published. My friends were happy, and I never heard from anybody else.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever feel nervous about being critical of other writers in print?

Lucy Sante:
Not exactly. I mean, sometimes I was always worried about getting things wrong. That was my great terror, especially getting something big wrong, like the intended meaning of this phrase, whatever. So I was belt and suspenders when it came to stuff like that, but that’s the point. Barbara gave me this authority so that it didn’t matter. The fact that I was whatever young person and had no publications on my belt criticizing somebody much older with a whole library of volumes out, I could do it. I was allowed.

Debbie Millman:
You worked full-time at the New York Review, but left on your 30th birthday in 1984, and you wrote this about that time in your memoir. “Writing was a very unhip art in the ’70s, very uptown. My friends all became filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. And the ’80s were really hard for me because three of my friends, three pretty close friends almost simultaneously became world figures, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin. And I thought, I’m fucked. They did it, I didn’t. Bye. See you later.” Talk about that, if you can, a little bit about what that felt like and what that was like for you and how you dealt with it.

Lucy Sante:
The ’80s coming after the ’70s when everybody was beneath visibility, all my friends, it took years for the bands at CBGBs to be recorded. It’s hard to credit now how isolated we felt in Lower Manhattan at that point. We had our own little world, and the rest of the world was completely indifferent to us. But the ’80s people suddenly became rich and famous. It was crazy. Jean-Michel first and eventually Nan and Jim. And I was pretty close to all three of them.

I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t produced anything, but it really hurt because I felt like… And I mean in some ways I still feel like if you’re going to succeed, do it when you’re young because at my age it’s great having the success, but it’s not the same thing as when you’re young, when you can profit in all kinds of ways from this. All I can do is have a quiet satisfaction now, but when you’re young is when you’re tasting things. I don’t know, the world of the senses is open to you, and it didn’t happen to me and I thought, “Well, there goes my chances forever.” Because I also had no consciousness of existing past age 40 or whatever.

And the ’80s were people were treated into… Not their shelves. Well, some people were treated into their shelves, but it’s called class system established, so among the artists which had never existed. And some people were just up there on one shelf and there were various succeeding shelves, and I was maybe down here until I published a book. I was 37 by the time that happened. I’m still sad that I didn’t enjoy the high life of my peers back then, partly because at that point, one’s audience was one’s immediate contemporaries, one’s actual peers, and it felt very valuable to be valued by those people. It’s wonderful being valued by younger people now, but it’s not quite the same secret handshake thing that goes on among contemporaries.

Debbie Millman:
Despite all of your longing, as I would put it, maybe you’ve won a Whiting Award. You published your first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York in ’91. This was followed by Evidence, a volume of crime scene photographs in ’92. Your first memoir of The Factory of Facts in 1998, a super famous collection of essays titled Kill All Your Darlings in 2007, a collection of essays and occasional pieces, The Other Paris, which serves as a sort of bookend to Low Life in 2015.

You’re included in several other books by way of anthologies, introductions and so forth. You taught at Columbia University School of the Arts, the new school beginning in 1999 until your retirement at Bard in writing and the history of photography. So you’ve had a pretty amazing career. Maybe not as star-studded as you would’ve like, but I think anybody listening and viewing

this would think, “She’s pretty fucking cool.”

Lucy Sante:
Well, my greatest achievement is that I really only wrote about stuff I was actually passionate about. I mean, I did a lot of work for hire, but there’s very little that I would not embrace. I mean, not that my writing was always tip top, right? But I mean in terms of I never had to shed my soul in order to do my job.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote that during this time you were writing and you did a lot of work for magazines and newspapers like Interview, and Wigwag, and New York, and Spy, but throughout you felt like you were playing a character more worldly and sophisticated than you actually thought that you were. So you had to keep your real self tightly buttoned up. Is that why you avoided at that time writing more in the first person?

Lucy Sante:
Well, yeah, I was hiding. I mean, the gender thing was only a part of it, right? I was also hiding the fact that I was this nobody from nowhere, a dropout, and with no inherited educational status in my family. I really had a major case of imposter syndrome for so much of my life.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still?

Lucy Sante:
Now it’s shifted. The imposter syndrome is actually… Well, it’s termed dysphoria as opposed to gender dysphoria of the umbrella term. Having a bad attack of dysphoria means having this imposter syndrome is applied to gender presentation.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about yourself in the book about this time in the following way. It’s so beautifully written. I just want to read it out loud. You wrote, “I pretended to myself that what I was trying to conceal was my inferiority to the character I tried to create in writing and in life. I was boring, clumsy, nebbishy, unsexy, squirrely, pedantic, useless, feeble, no fun, eternally on the B or even the C list of even my best friends. To be sure this self-portrait was not strictly a byproduct of gender dysphoria, my parents’ class anxieties, the immigrant experience and the residue of a Catholic upbringing contributed as well.” Lucy, I felt like you could have been writing about me. I love this paragraph so much. I’m wondering if this sense of yourself was why you started your first memoir with a series of make believe versions of your early childhood.

Lucy Sante:
No, that’s not why. Why is because I saw this event that is the bankruptcy of the wool trade in Verviers and therefore the shuttering of my father’s foundry, which made equipment for these factories. I saw that as the pivotal moment of my life, and I want to explore how things might’ve gone had it not followed the path that it did take. So my versions are based on family fears and obsessions of one sort or another spun out by me.

Debbie Millman:
I loved the conceptual quality of providing those various fictional or semi-fictional possibilities for your early life. It felt very Eugene Ionesco in a lot of ways, and I loved it. I loved it. In retrospect, you’ve written that you were dodging self-depiction because you didn’t want to be seen because you didn’t know who you were. And I’d like to talk more about your beautiful new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. First, I’m wondering if you could read a passage about what happened on February 16th, 2021.

Lucy Sante:
On February 16th, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone just for a laugh. I’d had a new phone for a few months, and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape, or hairstyle, I was specifically and exclusively interested in the gender swap function. I fed in a mugshot style selfie and in return got something that didn’t displease me, a picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I’d seldom allowed myself such graphic self-depiction. Over the years, I’d occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman, but had always immediately destroyed the results, and yet I didn’t delete that cyber image. Instead, over the next week or so, I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed beginning at about age 12, snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman I could now see was a coherent phenomenon consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.

Debbie Millman:
Would this be when you say you’d cracked your egg?

Lucy Sante:
Yes. And by the way, people keep asking me how I came up with that phrase, but I didn’t. It’s common in trans world.

Debbie Millman:
I hadn’t heard that phrase before. What happened after you cracked your egg?

Lucy Sante:
The whole process of digging up these photographs and passing them through. It wasn’t a single moment. It transpired over about 10 days. And then I came out to my therapist and then to my partner, and then to my son. I wrote this letter that I sent to about 30 people who are my closest immediate friends.

Debbie Millman:
You write that you’re grateful to whatever force cracked your egg before it was too late that you were saved from drowning. Do you really think it was the FaceApp photos or do you think the FaceApp helped you manifest the courage you needed to take this next step in your life?

Lucy Sante:
The FaceApp photos were transforming. I mean, because I’d never seen what I looked like as a woman. It was like seeing a movie of my alternate life. It was very, very, very powerful. Furthermore, on the mechanical end, it took me long enough to round up all these photographs. It’s scattered all over my house that it broke, and I didn’t realize I had this. I had an internal time lock. I was terrified. After wanting so much to go to the other side, I was terrified of it happening, so I would guard against it. And I didn’t realize I had the system where if I thought about it, if I fantasized, et cetera, it could only be for an hour or two and then bang, it would stop. And that was a safeguard. And looking for these photographs just burst through that ceiling and that really opened the floodgates. So it was both seeing the photographs and the act of looking for them weirdly.

Debbie Millman:
Had you ever shared with anyone in your life prior to your egg cracking that you felt like you were a female?

Lucy Sante:
I came close all week once in my whole life, and that was when I had this wonderful therapist in the late ’80s named Paul Pavel who by the way was also Art Spiegelman’s therapist, and he appears as a character in Maus too. He was a great man, a wonderful person. And to him, I admitted that I tried out my mother’s clothes and we never quite got back to it because not long after I shared that memory with him, he died of a massive heart attack 20 minutes after

I left his office. It wasn’t that same day, but it was not long thereafter. I don’t know. I mean, if Pavel had lived, might I have come out 30 years older earlier than I did? It’s not entirely impossible.

Debbie Millman:
I didn’t come out until I was 50. I’m 62 now, so it’s only been 12 years, and it’s a very different life internally in terms of the amount of freedom that I feel to be who I am. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, even being lesbian was almost a ticket to a very different kind of life, and I already felt so othered that I didn’t want to be any more othered.

Lucy Sante:
Bingo.

Debbie Millman:
After you sent the letter to your friends and came out to your partner and your therapist, what made you almost send another letter to your friends taking it all back?

Lucy Sante:
Obviously, when I was a kid, it was a different story, but when I became an adult, there were main two major impediments to my acknowledging my trans nature. One of them was my ambition. The other was the fact that I am attracted to women romantically, sexually, exclusively. And I thought it would at worst discuss them and at best get me sympathetic hearing, but shut the door to romance forever. So I knew that my relationship which had gone on for 14 years with somebody who were still very, very close, but I knew the romantic part was gone and she would not have wanted to keep going down that road. So I was trying to talk myself. I was so loathed to lose her or in fact to lose the prospect of love that I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.

Debbie Millman:
Before you came out, you wrote that your absorption of transgender lore before the internet was a matter of seeing things out of the corner of your eye and mentally photographing them, filing them away in the vault marked X. Did remembering any of those images help you claim who you are as you came out? I also had a file that I hid the joy of lesbian sex became…. It was a book in my library that was backwards so you couldn’t see the spine, and it were these articles from The Village Voice that I’d read in 1980 about Ann Bannon books. Did you have an actual stash or was it all just mental?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, it was mental because nobody could find out this. It was deeply secret to everybody in my life. Did it help me actualize it? Well, it’s hard to say. Really it took me onto the internet before I even read about people who were specifically like me. I mean, I’d read about drag queens or I’d read about famous sex changes like Christine Jorgensen or something. But it did start giving me this panoramic view of the trans universe, which is much larger and much more various than almost anyone suspect. It did help me realize I wasn’t alone, except that being alone is so ingrained in me for other reasons already that I was reluctant to shed the aloneness in a way.

Debbie Millman:
Looking back on it now, you write how your secret poisoned your entire experience of life and that there was never a moment when you didn’t feel the acute shame of being you. Did you continue to have shame as you were coming out and has that shame abated at all?

Lucy Sante:
No. I mean, it’s funny, but when I started coming out, aside from the specific point of my letter and the two letters in the book, there’s the one letter I didn’t send and the one letter I did send. I was trying to put myself back in the clause in the second letter too, but I abandoned that idea within 10 days because I knew it was real. I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak, I knew this was real and that I had better get behind it. I better claim it. I had better walk proud. I had no choice. It wasn’t like it was a debate. I was proud. I was a little afraid of how it might be received or what people would think. And this remained unchanged to this day. This is who I am, and if you don’t like it that tough, it’s the truth. I am manifesting the truth.

Debbie Millman:
You are now who you’ve described as the person you feared most of your life and you stated that you genuinely like who you are and that you’re turning out better than you imagined or feared. But you also said that you’re unwittingly benefiting from a bad thing, the invisibility of older women. I wanted to tell you something. I read that line to Roxanne, my wife, and she said, “Lesbians and trans folks aren’t invisible to each other at any age.” And I realize-

Lucy Sante:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
… it’s right, right? I love that, and I really wanted to share that with you. You said you’re not only lucky to have had your egg crack at something close to the last minute. You’re also lucky to have survived your own repression. And for anybody that’s feeling their own repression, whether it be coming out as in any LGBTQ plus manner is there anything that you might say to them to help them face that repression?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it really helps if your identity is not entirely bound up. I had an ambition and while it did retard my coming out, it also acted as a counterweight to the fear because I had this thing I was doing. I had the author to present as a shield, so it really helps if you’re not doing this for a living, if you’ve got another identity with which to present the world.

Debbie Millman:
In your book, you quote your friend Daryl, who years ago declared that he was not a gay writer, but a writer who is gay. And you state you are a writer who is trans. How do you feel about your bylines pre-transition? I do see most of them now read Lucy Sante.

Lucy Sante:
Yeah. Somebody changed my Wikipedia entry within half an hour by coming out on Instagram and the New York Review of Books had changed its entire archive going back to 1981 within a couple of days. It’s cool. I mean, obviously, I lived as Luke for 66 years. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t there. I’m not like a younger person who is trying to erase the experience of schoolyard bullying. That hardly happened a decade or so beforehand. For me, I’m far away from all that stuff, so I don’t care that people know that I had this former name. I mean I don’t like looking at the pictures frankly. I’d rather if those went away, but the name and my standard joke is my dead name will never die. Not as long as we still have back inventory. Please buy those books even if we got the wrong name on them.

Debbie Millman:
You write about yourself pre-transition as a walking byline and are still very much aware of your pre-presentation self who you sometimes like to think of as your sad sack ex-husband. I laughed out loud at that line. Do you have affection for your sad sack ex-husband?

Lucy Sante:
Sometimes. I mean, I get impatient and I get retroactively embarrassed sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Lucy Sante:
Well, because he said and did dumb things that’s why. I’m not very patient with dumb things, you see. But in any event, I recognize this is… I had a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn over the course of my life, and I realized that no matter how much I would’ve liked to have been a rock star when I was 24 years old, it was never going to happen because I still had to build a self. And gender transition is only one part of that. There was so much unresolved, so much that was damaged by experience that I had to rectify so much that I was naive about that I had to learn. It was a big, huge process. Just the irony of it is when I was a kid, I remember I wanted to be a precocious child. I wanted to be a wonder. But actually I’m a very late bloomer. You might even say I’m only blooming now even though I’ve been at it for a really long time. Everybody’s rhythm is different.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I have one last question and then a request. You are now nearly 70. Towards the end of I Heard Her Call My Name, you state that transitioning is not an event, but a process and it will occupy the rest of your life as you go on changing. How do you envision Lucy Sante at 80?

Lucy Sante:
I don’t go there. I don’t think about the future. In fact, thinking about the future always freaks me out. And it goes back to that childhood superstition thing, so I’m not going there. Maybe I’ll be alive then, who knows? But probably not. I imagine the way the world is going in general.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope so. I hope you are. My last question is really more of a request. Would you read one last excerpt from I Heard Her Call My Name?

Lucy Sante:
You bet.

My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel the acute shame of being me even as I deny to myself that my secret had anything to do with it. I might feel proud of things I’d done, might even be able to summon the will to entertain ambitions and might describe such things to an idealized self. I sometimes try to make myself believe in, but eventually I was going to catch sight of myself in a mirror and that would destroy me for an hour or a day, or a week. I’ve been in therapy for 38 years, but because I was guarding my secret even in the therapist’s office, no diagnosis ever came close to identifying the cause of my malaise. At some point in the relatively recent past, I came upon a citation from the gnostic gospel of Thomas. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Debbie Millman:
One of the lines in your book that is now imprinted on my soul is this, and I wish it for everyone listening today, “When there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom.” Lucy Sante, thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself. Thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Lucy Sante:
Thank you so much, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy Sante’s book is I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. And you could read more about her at lucysante.com. That’s lucysante.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening .and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Lucy Sante appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Priscilla Gilman:
I am haunted by my father. He has made me the thinker, writer, parent, human that I am. Brought me to my knees, led me into dangerous romantic entanglements. Buoyed me during times of crisis. Informed my reading and writing and parenting in ways I am only now realizing. I am both drawn to and wary of places, people, works of art that will touch that sore spot in me. Unleash that tide of sadness.

My father insisted that the highest form of love demands rigorous honesty. He never whitewashed, never tiptoed around, never equivocated or resorted to euphemism when giving his opinion, or rendering his judgments. Can I attain that level of truth telling and rigor in my own reflection on my father? Can I see him clearly, but with compassion? How can I be at once truthful and loyal, both to him and to my mother, who bitterly divorced him and remained hardened against him until his death?

Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman grew up in 1970s Manhattan in an apartment filled with dazzling literary luminaries. She adored her brilliant father, the writer, critic, and professor, Richard Gilman. When Priscilla was 10 years old, her mother, the renowned literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, decided to end their marriage. This was followed by a cascade of unexpected revelations that fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father and her family.

Her recent memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, is all about what it means to be the child of a demanding parent, and is a candid account of loss and grief, forgiveness, and love. Priscilla Gilman, welcome to Design Matters.

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie. Oh, thank you for that beautiful introduction. It is such a joy to be here. I’m so excited. Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Priscilla, in The Critic’s Daughter, you recount how when you were a little girl, you were read bedtime stories from your Aunt Anne, your Uncle Bern, and your Aunt Toni. Can you share a bit more about them and what made this storytelling so special?

Priscilla Gilman:
So Aunt Ann is Ann Beattie, still my mother’s client and dear friend. Uncle Bern, who is Bernard Malamud, who was one of my father’s closest friends and preceded my father as the President of PEN America actually. Bern handed it over to my father. And Aunt Toni, my mother’s client. My mother had worked with her when Toni was an editor, and then Toni gave her the bluest eye and she sold it, and it came out the year that I was born. And my mother was her agent for her first five books through Beloved. And Toni was a second mom to me, a godmother figure. We called her Aunt Toni.

All three of these characters, two of them sadly gone, one of them still on this earth, were magical tutelary spirits of my childhood. And it didn’t seem special to me, it just seemed like these were the people that walked through the apartment door, or came to the house in Connecticut, or we went to their houses. And they were just endless founts of fascinating tales and stories, and they loved me and my sister, Claire, dearly, and they would always indulge us when we asked for more.

Debbie Millman:
Other frequent visitors were Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jerzy Kosiński. And I understand that Jerzy Kosiński greeted your many stuffed animals with exclamations of delight, and I love that about him.

Priscilla Gilman:
He did. He did. Debbie, one of the things that I realized in going back and recalling all of this about my childhood and then researching a little bit more about who these luminaries actually were in the world, was realizing the discrepancy between a lot of these peoples’ public persona, and what they were like when they were with me and my sister.

And Jerzy Kosiński, he had a mad cap energy and I just remember feeling so happy that I could thrill him and bring a smile to his face. And Susan Sontag was always very kind and very approving of all the terrible drawings that I showed her that I had done. She was not at all the austere, rigorous critic that strode through the world at that time. To me, she was just this cool looking lady, who really liked to look at our drawings and gave us good feedback on them.

Debbie Millman:
I also understand that there was a time when another one of the visitors to the apartment, Martha Stewart, got into a heated debate with your mother. And you don’t actually talk about what the debate was about in your book, and I’m dying to know.

Priscilla Gilman:
No, that debate, I actually found that story in a memoir by Jill Robinson, the writer, and she was writing about, we all hung out in Weston and Westport Connecticut in the ’70s. My parents had a country house there and Martha catered my parents’ parties. And she used to sell her baked goods at this amazing market called Hay Day.

So that’s how I grew up, like this beautiful blonde woman who made incredible baked goods that my sister and I craved. And we were like, “Let’s go buy some of Martha’s baked goods.” I believe that particular debate was about the rising real estate prices in the area, and how much they were going to go up and when it was the right time to sell in Weston or Westport.

Debbie Millman:
I was hoping it would be something about sourdough starters or the…

Priscilla Gilman:
I know, I wish it had been. I wish it had been. My mother was actually surprisingly, Debbie, my mother is a really, really good cook. She doesn’t cook anymore, but in the ’70s when she was married to my dad, she would cook after coming home from ICM where she was the Senior Vice President of the Literary Division, representing everybody from Tom Wolfe, to Michael Crichton, and Anne Rice, all the people that you’ve already mentioned. But she cooked too. She really wanted to have it all and do it all. My poor mom, she exhausted herself though.

Debbie Millman:
Well, your dad, Richard Gilman, he was an author. He was a drama critic for The Nation, for Newsweek, and many other publications. He was the author of five books. He also wrote for the New York Times. He taught at Yale School of Drama for three decades. As you mentioned, he was the President of PEN America. And your mom, Liz Nesbit came to, I love this. She came to New York from a tiny town in Illinois. She got a job as an editorial apprentice at Lady’s Home Journal. Then a $75 a week job as the assistant to literary agent Sterling Lord.

She rose through the ranks to become a literary agent of epic proportions, as we’ve discussed. She’s actually considered one of the most successful literary agents in the world. You share many of the details and more in your memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, which was released last year and just came out in paperback. What made you decide to write this book?

Priscilla Gilman:
My literary agent, Tina Bennett, who was my close friend in Yale grad school, dropped out after a year, went to talk to my mom about working in publishing, and my mom and Mort Janklow hired her. She became a big agent. She’s a character in both of my memoirs. She’s one of my best friends as well as my agent. Had always wanted me to write a book about the intellectual milieu of the 1970s in New York City.

And she knew my father. Obviously she came to my wedding. She’s the agent in the book who reads my father’s writing about Japan and tries to help him. She was like, “You need to write about this generation of critics. You need to write about Stanley Kauffmann, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and Anatole Broyard,” all very close friends of my father’s, “And what criticism meant to them.”

And over time it evolved into something far more personal, as you know, Debbie, and became a book about the break-down of my parents’ marriage, the effects of their split on me, and my very charged, fraught, but deeply loving relationship with my father. And in that transition, there was a lot of fear involved in moving from a more, I wouldn’t say academic, but more intellectual take on this cohort, and making it a more raw, personal memoir.

But she helped me every step of the way encouraging me to do that. And I think having published a prior memoir about my experience parenting my son, who has later got an autism diagnosis in the book, we don’t use the word autism, because he didn’t have the diagnosis then. I was an academic. I got a PhD in English and American Literature. I was an English professor. I didn’t put myself into my work. I wrote objective analyses of literature.

So it was a big transition. But I think my father inspired me, Debbie, because my father wrote a very raw, personal memoir after having written books about modern drama, the word decadence. I love that book too, you should check that out. All about the word decadence. And for his fifth book, he wrote an incredibly honest, revelatory, vulnerable memoir.

And I think that doing that, he grew more as a man and finally came to terms with a lot of shame and guilt that he’d been carrying around. And met the love of his life six months after he published that book, and I don’t think that’s an accident. So he was my lodestar in making that transition and writing something that was so vulnerable.

Debbie Millman:
I believe you’re talking about your father’s memoir, Faith, Sex, Mystery. Is that correct?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Priscilla Gilman:
What a title, Debbie. What a title.

Debbie Millman:
Right. In that book, he starts with a quote from George Bernanos from his book, Diary of a Country Priest. And he states, “When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy.” How hard was it for you to show yourself no mercy as you were writing, or did you fly in the face of that advice?

Priscilla Gilman:
Wow, Debbie. What a fantastic question. I forgot about that Bernanos quote. Mercy is a big theme in my memoir. I extend mercy to my parents by the end of the book, and it’s one of the big themes of my book. How do I write honestly and not sugarcoat and be true to the spirit of my father as a rigorous, truth-telling critic, but yet I do want to show mercy and I do want to be forgiving.

So I think that perhaps I did revise my father’s ethos in my own memoir. And I believe by the end, my father in his own memoir demonstrates mercy towards himself too. Debbie, but in his memoir, he comes clean, to use his phrase, about his complicated sexual makeup. That’s part of the cascade of revelations you started out by saying that I receive when I’m 10 about my father. That he has what we would now call BDSM tendencies. He doesn’t refer to them that way in the book.

Debbie Millman:
No.

Priscilla Gilman:
He even calls them perversions in his own book.

Debbie Millman:
I know. And I wanted to say, you know what? I understand when this book came out, how that might’ve seemed that way.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But if this book came out now, people would be like, “Okay, cool.” It broke my heart…

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yes.

Debbie Millman:
… when I read that he considered these perversions, when he has so much shame about it. Which now would just mean he has some kinky fun in bed.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Debbie, Debbie, I could not agree with you more. I kept thinking to myself as I was working through this, we would call this so mild today, even if it was not mild, even if it was far over on the BDSM spectrum. If you’re a good person, you would accept him and you would embrace him and you would say, “This is who you are.” And there’s a million websites you can go and find willing adults who will happily do everything that you would like them to do with you, no shame. Right.

Debbie Millman:
I’d be like, “Who’s not into that now?”

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Exactly, Debbie. And I kept thinking, and I say towards the end of my book, it broke my heart over and over and over again as I researched my father’s life and read his work, and thought about all this guilt and shame that he carried around. Not only about his sexuality, he was probably bisexual too. I find out later that he had had sex with men, that he had cheated in his marriages, because his wives didn’t want to do what he wanted them to do.

And he had all the shame also about converting to Catholicism from Judaism and not telling his parents, and struggling with writer’s block and depression. And I just wrote, “It broke my heart in that it felt on so many levels and in so many ways, like my father lived too soon.” And I wish every day that my father were still alive to give his blessing to our trans children, to people who have complicated sexual makeups and have shame about them.

And I think one of the greatest things, he smoked as a form of self-medication for depression. He died of lung cancer, and it just was so wrenching to me to realize all of these ways in which he contended with so much shame from his conservative parents. And I wanted to belatedly or posthumously, bestow a blessing on him and say, “Daddy, I do understand, and I accept you in all of your messy humanity, and all your contradictions, and all your complexity. And I wish that I had been able to say these things to you while you were alive.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, let’s talk about his dedication in the book, “For my daughters, Claire and Priscilla, who will understand some of this book now and the rest of it in time.” So he knew. He knew. He knew.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you. That makes me teary when you say that, but yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you described your father as a certain kind of New Yorker in the 1970s. Liberal, passionate, intellectual, clad in denim shirts, bell-bottomed jeans or corduroys with wild, curly hair. And then you go on to state that he loved classic New York deli food, pastrami, pickles, corned beef sandwiches, Chinese takeout. He shopped at Zabar’s and the local mom and pop stores in your Upper West Side neighborhood.

So Priscilla, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I grew up in the 1970s New York City as well. And though my father was a pharmacist who worked at City Drug adjacent to Carnegie Hall…

Priscilla Gilman:
What?

Debbie Millman:
… you could be describing my dad as well. And it was somewhat freaky because he wore the same. He was definitely a liberal Jew. I actually suspect now, and I’ve tried to find more information from my family, but have been unable to. But I suspect that he was bisexual as well. He was into Bette Midler and was going to the baths with his friend, Harvey. They lived together in Greenwich Village right across the street from Horatio Street. He was really, really into Broadway musicals. There were a lot of things, but who knows? Who knows? He’s no longer on this plane, so it’s hard to say. What did you and your dad like doing together back then in the ’70s?

Priscilla Gilman:
Essentially, we liked doing everything together. My dad wholeheartedly embraced every aspect of my sister’s and my childhood world. And I write in the book at one point, I say, “My father was the kindly priest/rabbi/whatever it might be, who presided over the cathedral space of my childhood.” And that’s a quote from Virginia Woolf. And he loved watching Sesame Street, Zoom, all of those classic people.

Debbie Millman:
Zoom.

Priscilla Gilman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom right. Loved it.

Debbie Millman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh. Every time the music would come on, he would come running from the other room to catch it. He loved reading Moreno and Morgan Freeman on that show too. He loved reading to us. He would read to us. My mother would have to say, “Dick, it’s time to stop.” Even when we were tired, he loved reading all the books that we loved. He loved taking us to Central Park and Riverside Park, and pushing us on those precarious metal swings, if you remember those, with no padding underneath them.

He loved romping around physically, throwing a football to me. He loved watching sports with me. My mother often joked that I was the son my father never had, because my older brother from my father’s first marriage was into art and music, but not at all into sports. My father converted me and I was a huge New York Giants fan, New York Mets fan with him. We followed-

Debbie Millman:
As was mine.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh my goodness.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yeah, they could have been brothers. It’s a little bit freaky. It’s a little bit freaky.

Priscilla Gilman:
I wonder if they knew each other, if they ever met?

Debbie Millman:
Richard Gilman, Martin Millman, what can I tell you?

Priscilla Gilman:
Martin Millman and Richard Gilman. You’re having fun up there wherever you are. Know right now you’re hanging out. I love this Debbie. I love this.

Debbie Millman:
Now, what kind of books was he reading you? Were they erudite books by Joan Didion, or were they the books of Dr. Seuss?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, they were absolutely Dr. Seuss, and they were absolutely not at all erudite. My dad was very into the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. And my school, I went to a school called Brearley, which is a girls school in the city that didn’t stock those books in the library, because they didn’t consider them literature. And my father was like, “That’s ridiculous. What Happened at Midnight is a great book,” and that was a Hardy Boys book. So it was high, low, and everything in between. It’s one of the things that my father bequeathed to me. And it’s funny because I was reading Roxane’s Opinions book and I watch The Bachelor. She is the high, low, and everything in between. She’s my kind of girl, my father’s kind of girl. So it was everything from The Wizard of Oz books he loved. He loved the A.A. Milne books, E.B. White, Dr. Seuss, and all those Richard Scarry books we would read. I’m looking, because I have a whole wall of children’s books behind me. The Babar books. Anything and everything, Debbie, anything that we were… Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the Edward Eager books. I was listening to Susan Cain’s interview with you, which was such a great interview, and she talked about loving Edward Eager. Edward Eager writes these wonderful magical children’s books that my father loved. But it was everything, anything that we liked, he invested in it.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad supported your mother in having a major career, and happily took on childcare duties and mostly worked from home. Did he ever resent it at the time, or was it wholehearted support?

Priscilla Gilman:
It was absolute wholehearted support. He was so proud of my mother. He bragged about her all the time. He genuinely loved getting down on the floor and playing. We also had an amazing nanny, who we didn’t call her a nanny, we called her just Carrie. She was like my third parent who came in the morning and left at six o’clock at night. But on the weekends, it was just my dad. We didn’t have a babysitter on the weekends and he would say, “Lynn, you need to go do your reading.” He really, really supported her and was so incredibly admiring of her work ethic and everything that she had achieved.

Debbie Millman:
You were a seven-year-old tomboy who hated wearing dresses and having your hair combed. And in that stage, your dad told you that you might not be as pretty as some of the white pinafore-clad, blonde, wringly little girls in your Sunday School class, but you were something more important. What was that?

Priscilla Gilman:
He said, “It’s more important because you’re smart.” And he patted my head and said something about my brain and how beautiful he thought my brain was, and it just felt so wonderful. Debbie, I think in The Boston Globe review of my memoir, it was such a moving review, because the reviewer really responded to how my father empowered me as a little girl. To be an unabashed intellectual, to love learning, to be curious, to not care about what I looked like, to be really not interested in shopping. My sister would go shopping with my mom and my dad was like, “Let’s watch the Mets. Let’s watch the Giants. Let’s go outside and romp around.” And he just accepted me for who I was in a way that felt so affirming and just put me completely at ease.

Debbie Millman:
Did you at all get upset or feel slighted that he was telling you that you might not be as pretty as some of the other girls? That was what I took away from that line. I was like, “Hey, wait a minute. You want your dad to think you’re the prettiest girl in the world.”

Priscilla Gilman:
I know Debbie. I know. I think I really didn’t. I don’t know. He gave me this confidence because he wasn’t saying, you’re not pretty. He was just, I think the implication was you don’t look like those conventional little, and especially in the ’70s. Like having hair like your beautiful color, my hair was more of a dirty blonde and in between. And he just made me feel like you don’t have to be conventional. It was more that, that was the vibe. Like you don’t have to be the ideal of what a girl should look like in order to be pretty to me, and your brain is more important. And I really took that for what it was.

Debbie Millman:
You were also quite a performer. You got solos in music class at camp, in school performances, but you were always aware that while your dad was proud of you, and really both your parents, they did not want you to take that talent anywhere professionally. Both he and your mother agreed that you should not be given any voice lessons or encouraged as a child performer in any way. Why?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah. So my mother had wanted to be an actress. And she had gone to Northwestern for theater on a scholarship and changed her major from drama to the oral interpretation of literature, which prepared her very well to be an agent, I think ultimately. When she was horrified by how competitive the drama division was, and how these professors were cutting down the students in a very ruthless, mean way. And I think that scarred her, and she did not want her child to be vulnerable in that way. And I think my father in the ’70s, he was the Head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Department at the Yale School of Drama, but in the ’70s and ’60s, he also taught actors. So he taught Meryl Streep, he taught Henry Winkler, he taught David Alan Grier, who I’m still close to to this day. I adore him. And I think he just felt that the life of a performer was too vulnerable. Again, my parents didn’t want me to struggle. They didn’t want me to be subjected to this ruthless sizing up of my appearance or my talent. And they also believed in my intellect, and they always said, “We want you to get a PhD.” They didn’t say necessarily had to be in literature, Debbie, but they were like, “You need to do a PhD in something.” And I was a very dutiful little girl, and once I got to Yale, I stopped acting. So I was in some off Broadway things when I was a little girl, because these people came to my ballet school and they recruited us. They had auditions, which my parents didn’t know about, so then I was already cast, so they sort of accepted it. But they wouldn’t allow me to audition. I wanted to audition for Annie, they wouldn’t allow me to, and I just accepted it. And I was in a vocal jazz ensemble in high school, and I did lots of musical theater and straight theater, but it was always my hobby. It was never going to be my job. And I do think my parents were very well-intentioned, but as a parent, I would do it differently. If I had a child who had a talent and they loved doing it, I loved acting and singing, I would support them in that.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you have certainly with Ben.

Priscilla Gilman:
And I have, yeah. Yeah. And James, who actually sings opera at Yale now.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Well, speaking of siblings, when your little sister was born, I understand she cried all the time. You described her as a fussy, peevish, colicky baby. Your older brother called her the cranky old man. And when she got older, she sometimes made scenes, but you stated that you envied her lack of self-consciousness. Her insistence on advocating for herself and her ability to be herself without apology. Yet it was you who dreaded her setting your father off. So what would set him off? Why did he get set off? And why was it you that took on the responsibility of recalibrating him from those experiences of being set off?

Priscilla Gilman:
My father had a temper, and I would describe him as irritable. Again, I think it was a fluke of his temperament. And I think my sister had a temperament more similar to my father actually. You know how we’ll often say things set us off that remind us of ourselves. I think they were both a little bit cranky. They could get cranky if they were tired or they weren’t feeling good. So my sister would resist doing something that my father asked her to do, or she would be taking too long in a way that was annoying him. And then he would speak to her in an impatient voice and that would set her off. And it was just this drama where I was like, “Oh, gosh. Oh, no, I have to calm them down.” Now, in terms of my role as the peacemaker or the one who recalibrated him, I say in the book that I was blessed with this naturally optimistic, buoyant temperament. And it was legendary in my family and my grandmother, Carrie, my nanny, everybody would always talk about how I never cried when I was a baby, and I was just naturally very happy. And I think both of my parents saw that in me and they celebrated in me, but they also leaned into that. And from a very young age, I felt that my mother, if my father were in a bad mood, she’d be like, “Go in to your father.” And so it was almost like, and I would walk into the room and he would immediately seem calmer, look happier, his face would light up when I would come in. I just had a calming effect on him. I don’t know exactly why. But with my sister, I adore my sister, and she’s my best friend, Claire. She’s actually the curator at The Drawing Center.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I know. It’s incredible.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, my amazing sister. And I love them both so much, and it was extremely painful, because I felt like I had to mediate between the two of them. And I would see both of their points of view, and I would just try to lower the temperature in the room and get them to get along again, so that we could go off on our adventures, the three of us, and play and go to a movie, or do what we wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a lot of responsibility for a little girl. And your mom even told you that your father favored you over Claire, because you never fussed or fretted and never made trouble. And I can understand how a mom might think that that’s something a little girl should feel good about, but it also sets you up for having to continually do that in order to either stay in his good graces, or stay in your mom’s good graces. A really hard place to be. And I know that when your dad’s moods went black, so to speak, you write how he needed to be strenuously pulled back into good humor and regain his composure. And you stated that you sensed his needs with just extraordinary sensitivity and rushed to meet them. Did you feel like you had to do that at the time, or was it just something that was so ingrained in the dynamic of your behavior together that you almost involuntarily felt that you had to do that?

Priscilla Gilman:
I think it was more the latter, Debbie. I do. I think it was, I say in the book at one point, I use a theatrical metaphor, which I do throughout. I structure the book in terms of acts, and I talk about how I was cast in a role of being the one who placates him, and actually everyone in the family, and soothes ruffled feathers and brings everybody back into happiness. And I was cast in that role because it wasn’t a stretch. But no one can be that way all the time. But I think when I was a little girl, it was just it felt good to be that person. And I agree with you that when my mother said that to me, she didn’t say it in a monitory way, like, “You have to do this or he’s going to get angry with you.” She said it more as a way of affirming that I was doing a really good job with my father. And also, and I think it was a really good impulse on her part. She was telling me he doesn’t favor you because you’re better than Claire. He favors you because of the quirk of your temperament. It just matches or fits with his better than Claire’s does. We talk now about a fit, a poor fit, or a good fit between parents. And so I grew up not thinking I’m better than my sister in any way that he’s wanting me a little bit more than her. He adored my sister too, adored both of us as a unit, but when he was in a bad mood, I was better for him. But I think that it really took writing this book, going back into it, looking at pictures of myself as a little girl and over and over, my editor and my agent would say to me, “You need to acknowledge how much pressure this was.” Look at little Priscilla. You were 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. This wasn’t really okay for your parents to be putting this much pressure on you. And it was hard for me to acknowledge that and to say, “I would never do this to my children.” But at the same time, we all cast our children inadvertently in roles, and we have to work hard not to do that. And I never resented my parents. I was never angry at them for it. But as I worked on the book, part of the healing process for me was looking at a childhood that I had thought was halcyon and perfect, and oh, I had this incredible childhood with these wonderfully loving parents, and realized I was actually under a lot of pressure too. It was hard.

Debbie Millman:
It was so heartbreaking to read how you had to rescue your parents at that time in so many different ways. I wonder if there was ever a time where you felt you could just be yourself? Or in thinking about that question, would you even know what yourself needed or wanted at that time, because you were so carefully calibrating who you were to fit their needs?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, I think I didn’t. I think I thought that’s who I am. That’s my value, that’s my identity. And it was close to who I was, but no one can be just that.

Debbie Millman:
Right. In October of 1980, when you were about 10 or so, your parents made the decision to separate. And you write how you sat on your yellow bedspread and wrote in your little Holly Hobbie Journal, “Please don’t let this happen. Please don’t let them get divorced. I’ll do anything if they just stay together.” So I have a couple of questions. First, do you still have that Holly Hobbie Journal?

Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t.

Debbie Millman:
I was hoping.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
I was just talking to another guest about journaling, and she didn’t have any journals as she was growing up, and she’s quite a prolific writer. And I thought, “Oh, that’s so too bad because it becomes evidence of a life in so many ways to have that record of how you felt at that time.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, you’re so right. And thankfully, I did still have it when I took the only creative writing class I’ve ever taken. During the year that I had dropped out of Yale, I took a class at Columbia, and I wrote a piece, a nonfiction piece, that incorporated the journal, and I had the journal at the time. So I had it transcribed in that piece, what I had written.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad took the separation very hard, and he didn’t want it. It was your mother’s decision. He told you that if it weren’t for you and your sister, Claire, he would kill himself. And that meant that your father’s survival was your responsibility. And you wrote that you would do anything and everything in your power, use every ounce of your energy and ingenuity and love to make sure he survived. How did you manage?

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s so interesting, I feel, and that was a moment that he blurted that out, and he was alone with me. My sister was not there when he said that, neither was my mother. And it was one of those moments that just changes your life forever. I realized in that instant how fragile my father was, which I had always sensed, but I never knew it to that extent. And I was determined from that moment on that I had to direct my attention, my efforts, every ounce of my energy, and I use the word ingenuity in the book, to making sure that he knew that he was wholly loved and supported by me. And that even when I was not with him, because I was not with him very much in the first couple of years after my parents split up, that’s what was one of the hardest aspects of it. I was going to write him notes, call him, every time I saw him shower him with love and affirmation. And as you were reading those lines, Debbie, it occurred to me that in a way, I’m still doing that work, because for six years I’ve worked on this book to ensure that he survives. Now it’s a more complicated version of survival, but I’m still doing it. I’m still attempting to keep him with me and to keep him in the world for other people to know.

Debbie Millman:
In the meantime, your mother made it clear to you and your sister that you weren’t supposed to think of this split as a bad thing. And in the ’70s, it was really quite unique for parents to be getting divorced. When my parents got divorced in 1969, people made fun of me in school, because nobody else knew of anybody getting divorced. And they would make fun of me and say, “It’s your fault your parents are getting divorced.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s how uncommon it was. So your mother didn’t want you to think it was a bad thing. You didn’t cry, you didn’t complain, you didn’t express any sadness, so she wouldn’t worry about you. And at 10 years old, you became the mini adult of your entire family.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t want her to worry about me. And you’ll remember that the only time that I cried was when we had to give our dog away. We had gotten this puppy.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t even, this story kills me.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know. And I went in the linen closet and I buried myself in the bedding, and I cried because I had watched the dog running after our car after we brought her back to the breeder, and it just absolutely killed me. I could cry for the dog, but I couldn’t cry for my father, and I did not want my mother to feel guilty. I knew that my mother had needed to do this. I did not blame her. I saw how much happier she was out of the marriage. Nonetheless, I look back on that and I think, “My goodness, I had no one to talk to about this.” Claire didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk to my grandparents or Carrie, because I thought that they might judge my mom because they were all religious Christians and I thought they would think divorce was a terrible thing. I didn’t talk about it with my friends, none of my friends. One of my friends had divorced parents, and I write in the book that Becky Royfee, Katie Royfee’s sister, was one of my best friends, and their parents had been married a bunch of times before. So I felt they were still together, but at least they had been divorced. They had gone through this. And when I was with Becky, I could feel at ease a bit, didn’t feel like I had the Scarlet D on me.

Debbie Millman:
So you were propping up your dad and pretending in front of your mom, and hence Priscilla Gilman overachiever is born.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You overachieved in school. Your A’s quickly became addictive. And while that might’ve been great for the future Priscilla, at the time, is it was what you felt you needed in order to win both your parents’ love. I can’t imagine that that must’ve been anything, but exhausting.

Priscilla Gilman:
It was so exhausting, Debbie. I look back now and I realize I started having all of these physical symptoms when I was in high school. Getting all these sinus infections, and my mother would send me to the endless doctors. And I know now that it was my body rebelling and saying… I had not worked. I had not been a hard worker in school. I’d been like this creative madcap doing theater, doing well in English, but hating math and science and not caring, to I have to get A’s in every single class and get in early to Yale. And I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in my early twenties. Now, was it actually clinical chronic fatigue syndrome, or was it…

Debbie Millman:
Depression.

Priscilla Gilman:
… my adrenals were shot and it was depression. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated high school, you went on to Yale University majoring in English. But you wrote that you never felt as happy, free and as expansive as when you were performing. Nevertheless, your parents remained adamant that you should not study drama in college or take any steps toward becoming a professional singer or actress. Did you ever feel like you could defy their wishes and do it anyway?

Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t even think it would occur to me to think of it in terms of defying their wishes. It was so ingrained in me that my parents knew best, that my parents were looking out for me. That once I started getting the A’s, it was like then we had added on to my parents, my teachers, my professors, this whole chorus of parental figures that were like, “You must make good on your intellect and you must get a PhD in English.” Now you remember that I dropped out of school at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. And that was a big step for me to say, “I’m exhausted. I’m sick. I need to come home. I need to get out of my head.” And I worked as an aerobics teacher.

Debbie Millman:
I know. I know. I have this whole list of jobs you did.

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was so much fun. I loved it. And that was the closest I came to being a performer. And I actually taught David Rockwell aerobics.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good to know.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know he’s been on your show.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to ask him about that.

Priscilla Gilman:
He used to come to our studio. I taught Mary Tyler Moore. I taught a lot of big winks. It was so much fun. I loved it. And I did go into therapy and I did become healthier, and I did get some perspective, but then once I was back in college, it was the lure of the A’s. And I think the other thing to say about it is that the only thing that I ever heard my parents discuss in mutually happy and they sounded like they were getting along and they were close, was when I would overhear them talking about, “Oh, Priscilla is so brilliant. Oh, isn’t it incredible how well she’s doing?” And, “Oh, she’s got to get the PhD, and we’re so proud of her.” And so it was a way not only of making them happy individually, but also of bringing them together and creating a unity. Because their split had been so acrimonious, it took them seven or eight years to get divorced. They were fighting over money. They were arguing in a vituperative way, and they were hardly ever in the same room. And this was something that they both wanted and that they could bond over.

Debbie Millman:
Did you really want to get a PhD in English Literature, or did you do it without even thinking that you had a choice?

Priscilla Gilman:
I think I did want to do it in the sense that I love teaching. And my first teaching job, I was a camp counselor, a theater counselor when I was in high school, and then I was an aerobics teacher. And I still think that everything that I needed to learn about teaching, I learned being an aerobics teacher. And you need a warm-up, you need an arc of your class, then you have a cool down. I still do that when I teach literature. So I really, really wanted to teach. I love teaching. I am passionate about literature. I would be transported in my literature classes. So those two aspects of it, I really did want. What I didn’t like about academia, and I think I didn’t know this. I think I went into graduate school with my idealism intact because of course, my father didn’t even have a BA, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

Priscilla Gilman:
So he had ended up at the Yale School of Drama, and I think that was another thing. My parents were living vicariously through me. They both wanted to have advanced degrees. My mother’s parents didn’t graduate from college. My mother had a degree in a theater-ish degree. They were like, “Oh, our daughter has all these amazing opportunities, and she even got a PhD from Yale.” And then I was hired as a professor in my fifth year. I love teaching the students, but I hated the pettiness of academia, the politics, the publisher parish mentality. The, you must interrogate literature rather than be passionate about it. I’m an enthusiast. You could tell other Zoomers who are, right, I’m an enthusiast. And I didn’t like having to tamp down my enthusiasm and be just this objective, analytical thinker. I wanted to bring emotion and I wanted to bring subjective experience to teaching and writing about literature.

Debbie Millman:
In the book you write that you became increasingly bothered by what you described as the cutthroat environment of academia, its petty politics, its infection by the worst kinds of hazy, theorizing, and irrelevant pompous or inane arguments.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So after two years as an Assistant Professor at Yale and four years as an Assistant Professor at Vassar, you decided to leave academia. How hard was that? How hard a decision was that for you to make?

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was a really hard decision, and there were a number of false starts. So I actually, in 2001, on September 10th, 2001, I sent an email to the Yale English Department resigning my position. And I had decided at that point to join my mother’s literary agency. I had a two-year-old child, Benjamin. And the next day I woke up and it was September 11th. And my ex-husband, my husband at the time, said, “We’re not going to New York. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to bring a child into the city.” Vassar headhunted me and offered me a job, and offered my ex-husband, who was in the PhD program with me at Yale, a halftime position. And I thought, “You know what, this was meant to be.” So I went back in and I went to Vassar. And I said, “Maybe at Vassar it’ll be less cutthroat, it’ll be easier.” And then I found Benjamin was diagnosed with a host of special needs. I had another child, and I thought, “I cannot produce an academic book on this rigid timeline of six years and you’re out. I need to prioritize my children.” And so I wanted to move back to the city and have a wider circle of support, and be in a place where Benjamin could go to a special school. And so I joined my mother’s literary agency, and I worked as an agent for five years until The Anti-Romantic Child was published. And then I just went freelance as a teacher, and a book critic, and a speaker and all of that. But it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. And I’m very fortunate that I’m still able to teach literature. I lead book groups. I teach for Yale Alumni College, and I teach writing. And I don’t have to grade papers or write dry, hazy articles infected with hazy theorizing, Debbie. So it all worked out in the end, but it was very hard.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you talk about ending your career as an academic, ultimately representing your shedding the identity others had wanted for you.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you came to realize that you’d taken on the role of academic in large part to please your parents, then your professors, and ultimately your then husband, now ex-husband.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
How did that decision begin to change the dynamics in those relationships?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it’s such a good question, Debbie. Some of my professors applauded me. And David Bromwich was one of my dissertation advisors, and he was so proud of me and said, “This is wonderful. You’re going to be able to do so much more in the world.” Other professors were furious at me, didn’t speak to me for a while. Said, “We’ve invested in you and we’ve pushed you for these. You’ve gotten these two top jobs and now you’re just walking away.” And they were angry at me. And it was such a maturing experience for me, learning how to say, “Okay. Accept the different reactions that I would get.” Now, my father was very ill already. By the time I joined my mother’s agency, my father was in essentially a waking coma. So he never knew that, and I was terrified that he was going to think, “Oh, my gosh, is this choosing my mother over him?” He was so proud of me when I got the jobs at Yale and at Vassar. But I think the other thing, Debbie, about my father is that when you read those lines from my book, it was so funny. I was like, “Is that me or my dad?” Because my dad would often say that even though he had a sense of insecurity, that he wasn’t Dr. Gilman, he was just Richard Gilman, and he didn’t have an advanced degree. He also felt that being an outsider helped his work, and that he wasn’t inhibited, and he didn’t have to footnote constantly, and he could just write and he could write for a broader audience. And I know that he would’ve found a lot of the constrictions and constraints of academia that I was being subject to. He would’ve found them intolerable. And so in a way, if I went into academia in part to please him, I also left it in part because of what he had taught me. And I do feel that he would be proud of me for doing that.

Debbie Millman:
It seems as if you had a much healthier, you had a whole slew of healthier years with your dad after he got remarried and moved to Japan to be with his new wife.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
When he was diagnosed with cancer, you wrote that you found yourself not wanting to be anything, but a source of sustenance. So you dismissed your sadness as unworthy of consideration. And I’m wondering if you could read another short excerpt from your book about how you felt at that time?

Priscilla Gilman:
Sure. So this is at a part in the book where my father is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer that has metastasized to the brain. And he is overcome suddenly saying, “I haven’t written my life’s work,” and, “I can’t die yet.” And I’m shocked in a way, because I had thought that he was in a much healthier and happier place. And that he had done a lot of growing and that the insecurity that had plagued him for so much of his life was gone, and then it all resurfaced. So I write, “What could ever fill the hole inside him?What would ever assuage his fear that he didn’t measure up, hadn’t accomplished enough, was inferior, lacking, incomplete? He had three devoted children and a remarkable wife who adored him. Shouldn’t he use his remaining days to love and be loved? But even as he frustrated me, even as I saw his meager self-worth, even as I increasingly understood how different I was becoming from him, that he was caught up in ego and marks of accomplishment even as I was moving away from them. I never let on to him that I found his outlook not just sad, but troubling.

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s such an interesting defining moment in the book, because it’s clear that you’ve created some boundaries. Even though you were still trying to buoy him in some ways, you were also like, “You know what, this is as far as I’ll take this.”

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And how did those new boundaries impact the way you wanted to work, and teach, and write? It seems like you’re still doing all three, but on very different terms, entirely different terms.

Priscilla Gilman:
And in a way still performing, because teaching is a kind of performing. I’m still reinventing it every day, but I think I just, and my sister and my brother were huge sources of comfort. And we would increasingly just share with each other how our father was frustrating us. We would talk more openly amongst the three of us about like, “Oh my gosh, when he said this, oh, I just wanted to scream.”
And so I was able to vent it more. And I was in therapy and I was able to talk more about. I think it was in my early thirties, I first discovered the phrase or term codependency, and I started to think about how I had been subordinating my own needs, and not even realizing that I was doing that. Not even realizing that I had needs that were separate from what my parents’ needs were from me.

And I started to realize that I could be a certain way around him and not feel that that was who I was entirely. That when I’m with him, I’m there to be there as a support for him and as a comfort to him. But it’s okay for me to have these thoughts. And do you remember that scene earlier in the book where my sister is laughing about this awful shirt that my father had bought? You know like the way teenagers do? They go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought we would wear this. This is so ugly.”

And then I see my sister run to the phone and say, “Oh, hi daddy. Hi. I was just calling to say I love you.” And when I remember that it was such a revelatory moment in the sense that we would feel guilt if we would ever say anything negative about him. And as I got older, I realized it’s okay to express how difficult it is. Not just express it, Debbie, to acknowledge that it could be difficult to be his daughter and to express it to other people. And to act in certain ways when I was with him and not feel guilty for having thoughts when I wasn’t with him about how hard it was.

Debbie Millman:
Your father died at age 83 in a suburb of Kyoto, Japan in October of 2006. And at the beginning of The Critic’s Daughter, you write, “I lost my father for the first time when I was 10 years old. In the months and years that followed, I lost him over and over many times, and in many different ways. This book is my attempt to find him.” In writing this book, what did you find?

Priscilla Gilman:
So much. And I found my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see him from the front sitting in the audience, watching him on the stage. I was able to see him backstage, in his costumes, out of his costumes. In his many costumes with makeup on, without makeup on. Struggling and mighty, all of these contradictions, all of these different roles and selves that my father inhabited. From reading his work, and I read hundreds of articles, I couldn’t believe it.
And constantly discovering things, surprising things about my father. And I learned to find him, but also to realize that I’ll never completely find him in the sense of mastering him, or locating him, or pinning him down. He wouldn’t want it that way. Do you remember in the end, I talk about how there’s this beautiful article that my father wrote about Hamlet in the New York Times?

I think it was published in 1990, I believe Kevin Klein was doing a Hamlet. And so my father was writing about this and going back into the history of Hamlets. And he writes about how there are always things that are left behind. Hamlet is an eternally fertile prince. And I write about my father that way too. And I write about that dedication to Faith, Sex, Mystery that you read earlier, “My daughters, who will understand part of this now and the rest in time.”

Do I understand him completely? I would say no. He wouldn’t want me to understand him completely, because human beings, all of us exceed our ability to completely master them or know them. Faith, Sex, Mystery, my father valorized mystery. I want my father to forever remain mysterious to me, but mysterious in a beautiful and fertile way.

Debbie Millman:
At the very end of Faith, Sex, Mystery, he states, “Well, those readers who went through this book with goodwill and openness to me feel disappointed because I gave them nothing definitive. No calls to order, no models for behavior or moral resting place, and left them with the sight of me still peddling in midair. I finish the book and take my chances.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, right? Wow. Oh, my gosh. Now I really am teary. Debbie, wow. I had never connected that before.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That ending just made me shiver. And I thought, “Still peddling. Still peddling.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all, Debbie?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Priscilla, I know that in addition to writing books and your speaking engagements, and your newspaper columns, and all of the reviews that you write, all your teaching, I think you’ve taken a few steps back into performing. How does that feel? I know you did something with one of your sons. How does it feel to be back on the stage as an adult?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it was, now both of my children are singers, and my younger son is an actor, and my older son is a classical guitarist. And being their mom, I got to perform reading out loud to them, doing all the voices. And I sang with Benjamin, my older son, and we actually recorded a Christmas album to raise money for organizations that help support autistic teenagers and young adults. We gave all the proceeds, and that was incredibly, that was so much fun. That was in 2017.

And then a year after that, my younger son in his high school, they did a production of Shaina Taub, whose musical sucks. It’s coming to Broadway this spring. Shaina Taub did a musical version of As You Like It. And my son’s school opened the auditions to everybody in the community, alums, teachers, parents. I had to ask James, I was like, “James, is it okay if I audition?”

And he was a new student at the school in ninth grade, and he was like, “Mom, of course you have to.” And Benjamin actually came with me to the audition, Debbie, and accompanied me on the guitar. And I performed “Take Me Back to Manhattan” by Cole Porter in my audition from Anything Goes, which my father had seen me performing when I was in ninth grade. So it was this crazy full circle moment.
And my son and I, we understudied leads and we had little parts with little solos, and we performed at the Sheen Center downtown. It was so much fun. It was incredible. And I just loved it so much. And my book, the chronological part of my book, ends with that moment of being on the stage. And if you remember, I write about how in my college application to Yale, oh my gosh, the corniest, cheesiest essay, Debbie.

I don’t know why they let me in. But I wrote something about how my extracurricular was performing, and I wrote, “Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage. And I would say that the stage is also a world.” And the song in “As You Like It,” I’m standing on the stage and it’s all the world is a stage, like this song that takes that line. And I’m standing there and I’m like, “This is the end of my book.” I just signed the contract to write this book. So it was really a full circle moment. If anyone wants to cast me in their off, off Broadway shows, you know where to reach me, priscillagilman.com.

Debbie Millman:
“Hello, World!”, you now know. Priscilla, I have a few last questions for you tangentially related to your family. At first, how is criticism today different from the time your father was writing criticism?

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s different in ways that are better, and ways that are worse, I think. I think one thing that shocked me, Debbie, when I went back and looked at reviews of my father, and also reviews that he had written, is that friends used to review friends. So he has a rave in the New York Times from Anatole Broyard, one of his best friends. He has a rave from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of his best friends.

There’s less corruption in that way. Like with The Boston Globe, I’m a regular book critic for The Boston Globe. I have to sign a no conflict of interest agreement to write criticism. But I do miss, and I did a theater podcast with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli, they have a great podcast about theater. Peter was the theater critic for The Washington Post and Elisabeth writes for the New York Times. And they were saying they were shocked in going back and reading my father’s theater criticism how much more critical people could be back then.

I think there was a vituperativeness and a harshness, which I think could get taken too far, quite frankly. But what was great about that period was that the culture in general supported criticism and critics. You can’t make a living as a critic now. I can hardly afford to take the time to write a book review as opposed to teaching a class, or tutoring a student, or doing something where I’m actually able to support my family.

Unless you have a staff critic position, it’s virtually impossible. And newspapers and magazines are eliminating book editor and book critic positions. So that’s something that I wish we invested more and criticism is vital, I think, to a flourishing intellectual and artistic culture. And I would love to see, thank God Bookforum got saved, but there was that slew of bad news. I think the Los Angeles Times just laid off their book editor. The Boston Globe has made the book editor a part-time job.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s happening in music as well. They let go of their music editor, who is a friend of mine, and of course Pitchfork now.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. And dance criticism too. We need a vibrant culture of critics to support the arts. It’s so important. And criticism, I also would suggest, is an art.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a long question because it includes a bit of a quote. Your mom is a pioneer in publishing, and when asked about what you might know about the business that others don’t, you stated this.

“Just because someone got great reviews, was highly acclaimed, won awards and received prestigious honors, that didn’t mean their books sold well or that they weren’t struggling financially. I knew that authors who made gobs of money sometimes lacked confidence in the intellectual or artistic merit of their work. I knew that one bad review could sink a writer’s mood and damage his or her well-being for months. I knew about jealousies and feuds between ostensible friends and colleagues, and I knew how fragile success was. How little it took to sink a project, how life-changing one rave review could be.”

Priscilla Gilman:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
What advice would you give to anyone reading their reviews or wondering if their work will sell or be successful?

Priscilla Gilman:
I’m very much my father’s daughter, but I’m also very much my mother’s daughter. And my mother raised me to never pin your financial hopes on your writing. My mother tells every one of her writers, “You have to have a day job or a bunch of day jobs, or a lot of bows in your quiver.” Especially also if you really want to produce work that’s authentic and meaningful to you. You don’t want to write for the market. You don’t want to write in a way that’s going to necessarily set, and also we can’t predict that.
So I think that’s something that I would advise writers. A few people break through and they get to a point, like my mother had a bunch of them, like Tom Wolfe and Anne Rice. But it’s harder than ever today to do that. You used to be able to sell a magazine piece for $10,000.

It’s like the magazine, the diminishment of magazines. It’s terrible. Even in the 12 years since I’ve been a writer, just a writer, I only just recently started writing writer on forums, Debbie. But I could sell a magazine piece for $5,000. I could do this and do that. It’s so much harder now. So I think that’s really, you have to have other things to pay your rent or your mortgage.

The other thing I would say in terms of reviews is that, and I actually, you’ll remember I wrote my dissertation on criticism in the second half of the 18th century. In the early 19th century, I wrote about Jane Austen, romantic poetry, gothic novels and how these writers coped with this new power of reviewers and critics. I think I was preparing myself to be a professional writer by doing this. And so I talk about these different strategies like on the one hand, the people who frenetically revise their work and change in accordance with the reviews, but then it doesn’t work, it backfires.

And then on the other hand, the people who cultivate a, I read about this 18th century poet named William Cooper, who’s a fascinating character, and how he cultivates what he calls a indifference to criticism. And he does it by coming up with his readers that matter to him. We all need our trusted readers are what Milton called our fit audience, though few, even if it’s few, right? It’s the people that we really trust.

And I think particularly for memoir, people bring their own stuff to memoir when they review it. It was just crazy to me to see how people were projecting their own stuff on to, she doesn’t talk about this, so she must be that, or this isn’t mentioned, so this must be true. And you just have to understand you don’t control the way, it’s a life lesson.

We cannot, however much we work, to control how we’re going to be received. This is the lesson I’ve spent my life learning, Debbie. We can’t. We have to just put ourselves out there authentically, let the chips fall where they may. And the people who are your kindreds, to use Susan Cain’s term, will get you and they will understand.

And you certainly, from the moment you first messaged me about this book, I was like, “Debbie is reading this book in the spirit that it was written. She gets it. She understands. She’s seeing me truly.” Not everybody will, and you have to let those people go.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you can definitely count me part of your tribe.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, Debbie, I can. I know.

Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman, thank you, thank you for writing The Critic’s Daughter. Thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you so much for this wonderful podcast and for being such an incredible human being.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you for seeing me truly, and my father as well.

Debbie Millman:
To read more about the work of Priscilla Gilman, you can go to priscillagilman.com, and Gilman has only one L. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Priscilla Gilman appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
If it weren’t all true, Carrie Brownstein’s career would seem like fantasy fiction. She’s a celebrated musician first and foremost, but she’s also a comedian, a writer, a director, and an actor. In today’s interview, we’re going to talk about the band she co-founded, Sleater-Kinney, which has been called one of the greatest bands of all time. They just released their 11th album, Little Rope, but I’m also going to ask her about the now classic television series, Portlandia, which she co-wrote and starred in alongside Fred Armisen. Along the way, we’re going to talk about her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, and everything in between.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Carrie. I understand that you’ve described your look as akin to Mick Jagger in sweatpants.

Carrie Brownstein:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t remember saying that. But you know what’s weird? I’ve seen Mick Jagger in sweatpants. My only time ever meeting Mick Jagger he was in sweatpants, so maybe I somehow conflated those two things. When I saw him, maybe I thought, “That’s what I look like.”

Debbie Millman:
I actually think of myself as a little business casual, no matter if that’s appropriate or not. I’m business casual in my everyday life, but sometimes I’m also business casual on stage with my band, and I think this is when I should have not been dressing business casual. I look like I can go from stage to being a flight attendant on Delta right after the show.

Carrie Brownstein:
What made you attracted to the business casual look?

Debbie Millman:
I think early on when I was playing with Sleater-Kinney… I grew up in the suburbs, and I think my idea of dressing up was to just look a little like, okay, you just put a blazer on or you put a button-up shirt on. So in my mind, I thought, “Well, I’m going on stage. Probably should wear a loafer.” It’s not how rock stars dress, or should.

Carrie Brownstein:
Any particular favorite designers?

Debbie Millman:
In the current era, I really like Stella McCartney. I like Rachel Comey. I like Proenza Schouler. But that’s not what I… Also, let’s just admit, I have a lot of J. Crew, too.

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, Jenna Lyons day was quite nice, her time there.

Debbie Millman:
She was nice, yeah. Right now I am wearing a J. Crew sweater and Everlane cord, so pretty basic. Pretty basic over here.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you grew up in mostly the suburbs. It was the suburbs of Seattle, mostly in Redmond, Washington. And you wrote in your memoir that Seattle was your beacon and your muse, but it was never really yours. I’m wondering if you can explain that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think because I was outside of the city and I never really came of age there, that’s… I had some formative experiences there, but I was always on the periphery. And when I finally found my voice and tried on the boldness and the brazenness that comes along with electric guitar and forming a band, I was in Olympia, Washington where I went to college. Seattle was something I sort of looked up to. I imagined that I would end up there eventually and I never did. It always just feels like the thing I thought I would be and something I thought I would be a part of and then never was. I feel sort of adjacent to it.

Debbie Millman:
In elementary school, you’ve described yourself as confident and popular. You were an early round draft pick for teams in gym class. I never was. You won the spelling bee. You attended every crucial waterpark birthday party and sleepover. You were active in music, sports, school plays, and was elected vice president. Would you say that at that time you were a bit of an overachiever?

Carrie Brownstein:
What a tool. God. That’s the kind of kid I would just loathe now and be like, “Ugh.” I was a little bit of an overachiever, I mean when you list it all like that. That’s not how I felt, but I think I was confident. I think I had, at the time… And this is sort of right before I lost all of that confidence. But yeah, I was a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. I mean, if I’m just listening to that list and feel exhausted by it, then yes, I was.

Debbie Millman:
But you had quite a range. I mean, you were sort of smart by winning this spelling bee, so that was one aspect of you, but you also were active in sports.

Carrie Brownstein:
I was an all-rounder. All-rounder. You could also call me a child dilettante, too.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, in what way?

Carrie Brownstein:
No, I think I just… Yeah, I think I connect. Even now, I connect with people via… I’m introverted, and I like activity-based hangouts. I ended up mostly being raised by my dad. But even when my mom was still around, we were kind of in the way that… And this is very essentialist, but in the way men like to hang out with each other through activities, that’s kind of how my sister and I were sort of ushered into our social lives. We sort of were mimicking our dad’s way of interacting, so it was my way of being around people because sort of one-on-one interactions were trickier for me, and sometimes still are, just because I get nervous and shy.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad took you to your first concert when you were in the fifth grade. Tell us about who you saw.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. Well, in 1985, Madonna was touring for her seminal album, Like a Virgin, so she was on the Virgin tour. She actually started that tour in Seattle. She played three nights at the Moore Theater, which is… Actually, it might be the Paramount, so someone can fact check that. Anyway, a really small theater, 2,000 capacity. Beastie Boys were opening. They were booed off stage, by the way. People hated those guys.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that in your memoir and was laughing out loud.

Carrie Brownstein:
People just thought, “What a bunch of brats up there.” I went to the first night, and it was incredible. I mean, there were costume change after costume change and all the hits. It was exhilarating,

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you dressed up as Madonna at that time.

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, my very young version of that. My parents were… They weren’t strict, but you can do a lace glove like Madonna, but you’re certainly not going to have a bra… I probably wasn’t even wearing a bra. What would we be showing? It was very chaste. It

was a truly virginal version.

Debbie Millman:
I believe that it was seeing that show, that first ignited the feeling that you would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines. Did you have a sense of what that feeling meant in regard to who you wanted to be or become?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it was actually a slightly later show. It was George Michael’s Faith tour.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay.

Carrie Brownstein:
Because I remember at that show my friend turned to me, and she basically said that she wanted to just make out with George Michael. She was just-

Debbie Millman:
It was slightly more-

Carrie Brownstein:
It was dirtier than that.

Debbie Millman:
… lascivious in the book.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, it was dirtier than that. What she wanted to do to George Michael was unholy. I mean, I was sort of surprised, taken aback because the way I was watching George Michael was thinking, “I don’t want to do something to him. I don’t want to be like a side piece or accessory. I want to be that. I want to be the person that’s on stage that is making people feel excited. I want to have people projecting their fantasies and imaginations onto me.”

Debbie Millman:
That was the moment where I thought, “Oh, I’m in a different place than my friend. The way that I’m experiencing this is not sort of witnessing. I want to participate in this not just as a fan.” I think that really sowed the seed for me wanting to perform.

Debbie Millman:
Though your first music lessons were on the piano, you gravitated to the guitar. And when you were 15 years old, you bought your first guitar, a Canadian-made solid-state amp with a cherry red Epiphone copy of a Stratocaster. It was the first big money purchase you made with your own money. How did you make that money?

Carrie Brownstein:
I worked at the Crossroads movie theater in Redmond. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I just saved up my money. By the way, big money, it was like a $300 guitar. That was a ton of money for me at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.

Carrie Brownstein:
But as far as guitars go, that’s not like a big ticket item, but it was a huge amount of money for me. And I just saved up. I started working that year, actually, at the movie theater. My weekends were pretty boring because I just went to the theater at 11:00 and I left at 7:00 and didn’t do much after, but it was a good lesson.

Debbie Millman:
I think my parents, rightly so, they were like, “Well, you’ve gone through these phases. You sort of have these pursuits that you get really excited about. You did tennis for a while. We got you…” They just were like, “If you’re really going to do this, maybe you’ll stick with it if you have more invested in it,” and they were right.

Debbie Millman:
You took guitar lessons from Jeremy Enigk, a music and part of the band Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jeremy and the band are often cited as pioneers in second wave emo. He taught you chords by way of playing “The Last Day of our Acquaintance” by Sinéad O’Connor, wherein you’d play along to the two-chords song, which I couldn’t believe that it was two chords, while Jeremy sang. Then, he’d get bored and play R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” or U2’s “New Year’s Day.” And you felt that even with just a few chords everything was in your grasp. At that point, did you think you wanted to be… Were you sure at that point, “I’m going to be a musician”?

Carrie Brownstein:
I wanted to be a musician in the moment. I was really raised to think that I have to go off to university, probably get a graduate degree, music seemed like a hobby and certainly a way of harnessing my emotions as a teenager, making myself heard and giving myself a voice when I just felt like I didn’t have the words or just sort of lacked coherency. I was excited to have that tool at my disposal and to have a way of expressing myself that involved volume and was naturally angsty, putting the guitar through a distortion pedal or turning the gain up on the amp. It seemed to match this rage and discomfort that I was feeling, or just confusion, the confusion of adolescence. But, I didn’t really think, “Well, this is what is going to sustain me for the next 30, 40 years.” I just thought, “This is great that I have this now. I can form a band and be around people and be part of this community.” Wasn’t thinking too much beyond that.

Debbie Millman:
While all of this was happening, your home life was becoming more and more unstable. Your mother had an eating disorder, and you’ve written that her illness permeated the landscape of your psyche, and you developed a kind of general anxiety and sense of unease. And this manifested in nightmares where you would wake up scared of a fire or that all of your hair was falling out. Did your parents understand what was happening to you at that point?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think so. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I definitely do, they had a lot going on. My mom was dealing with her own illness, physical and mental, and my father was trying to keep her feeling safe. Of course, he was worried about her and then basically take on the role of sole parent while my mom was hospitalized for a few months. I think they were concerned about my sister and I, but I don’t really think they had the wherewithal or the bandwidth to do much more than sort of make sure we were fed and off to school and getting our homework done. They had a lot going on.

Debbie Millman:
You were 14 when your mom left your family to seek a cure for her eating disorder. You wrote in your memoir that in doing so she left another form of sickness and longing behind. Did anyone explain to you what was happening? How did you experience her leaving?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, it was explained as, I guess, that they were splitting up. But what we really didn’t understand was that she was forging a path that, in her mind, necessitated leaving behind her role as at least a day-to-day mom, the quotidian tasks of motherhood and nurturing, that that was kind of going on the back burner. We didn’t really realize that until she was gone and there wasn’t any sort of structure for custody except that we were just with my dad. There was no arrangement like, “Well, you have to see your mom,” or, “She wants you guys around on these days.” It was just, “That’s it.”

I think it sort of took a second for us to realize we’d been left. For me, I was a little bit older than my sister, so I was able to use that irascibility that starts to take hold when you’re 14. You can be defiant and reject, like, “I’m going to leave you first.” You have a little bit more of that gumption. But yeah, the truth was that we’d been kind of left behind.

Debbie Millman:
When did she come back, and what was it like when she came back?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, she would pop in and out every once in a while. She was not too far away, but there just was no sort of formal routine for us seeing her. It was sporadic and really, really confusing.

Debbie Millman:
All through this time you were still playing music. And in your junior year of high school, you formed a band with a few other people called Born Naked. What kind of music were you playing?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, we were playing rudimentary punk music, for sure, three-chord punk songs. Our singer, Lex Bratty vocalist. It was fun. It sounded like the punk music coming out of Olympia would sound like. It was definitely minimalist and more about intent than the actual product, I think.

Debbie Millman:
At 16, you wrote a song called You Annoy Me. You’ve stated that you sometimes feel that you’ve been writing that same song ever since. I’m wondering if you can talk about why or how and what maybe some of the lyrics were. I couldn’t find it.

Carrie Brownstein:
The first line I think is, “The way you look really annoys me. The way you talk really bores me.” That’s the opening two lines there. I think that it feels like a perennial theme in that… My friends call me Carrie David after Larry David. I have this kind of constant dissatisfaction, glass is half full. I have to be kind of poked and prodded into optimism, I think. Of course now I have a little more self-awareness to realize if someone else is annoying me, it’s probably a projection. In what ways am I annoying myself? In what ways am I not measuring up? So yeah, self-awareness sets in. But I think that can be my default mode. And the older I get, I try to rest myself of that and take a deeper look at why I’m feeling dissatisfied, or disdainful, or grumpy.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel like you’ve been writing that same song ever since?

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, I can hear iterations of that song, not musically. Musically, I’ve progressed. But in a lot of the, especially early Sleater-Kinney songs, there’s a brattiness. There’s a get out of my way, leave me alone, I need to be by myself, this sort of lone wolf theme that keeps cropping up. But hopefully, I think maybe in the last couple years, there’s less you-annoy-me songs. Maybe more I annoy-myself songs

Debbie Millman:
At that time, Nirvana’s Smells like Teen Spirit came out. For you and your friends, Nirvana was a local band. I think you saw them play in your high school gymnasium. Is that true?

Carrie Brownstein:
College.

Debbie Millman:
College gymnasium.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. The first college I went to was a state school in Bellingham, Washington, which is a small town really close to the Canadian border in-

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful, beautiful town.

Carrie Brownstein:
It is beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful place.

Carrie Brownstein:
Very verdant. Anyway, Mudhoney, who was another Seattle grunge band on SubHub records at the time, were playing. It was very exciting. “Oh, Mudhoney’s coming to our college.” So, I got tickets, and I went in, and there was a surprise opener, and that opener was Nirvana, who had just released Nevermind earlier that year. I think they were really good friends with Mudhoney and said, “Hey, we’d like to come and do a secret show.” That’s a pretty special university show to watch. And they played all the hits, I mean, Smells like Teen Spirit. That album was probably already platinum at that time.

Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter, you started to become aware of the music scene in Olympia. You heard bands like Bikini Kill and Ratmobile and Heavens to Betsy. You’ve said that for the first time you heard your story being explained and sung to you, that you were being seen and recognized. I’m wondering how that music did that to you. What did it speak to you? What was it saying to you?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it took a certain female experience and centered it and was fearless, and unapologetic, and unsparing in the specificity and the detail and just not sidelining those stories. It spoke to pain, and longing, and specific narratives that I could really relate to and had anger and fury, and was unafraid to express that in music. I just thought, “Oh, this is really the first time.” I mean, I’ve been listening to punk, and indie, and alternative music, at least by then, for a couple years and certainly had related to it. But all of a sudden there was a blueprint, and I think I could see myself on the landscape for the first time. People need that, right? Anyone needs to be able to see themselves in order to do it and to make it and have an example. It gives you faith and gives you the ability to try. It’s helpful to have people come before you, for sure.

Debbie Millman:
You also wrote that it was crucial to finally recognize yourself in the world. What were you beginning to see?

Carrie Brownstein:
I felt like I just didn’t have a voice or a means of expressing myself. Punk music, and particularly the music coming out of Olympia, it just became this container, this world that I could set myself in. I think what I was seeing was someone who was worthwhile, someone who could find the words, especially if the way of conveying them was through music, that there was a way out. I think that’s what I recognized, was a way out from who I was, which was someone who was very insecure, and diffident, and lonely, I think.
So, I recognized community. I recognized collaboration in these fellow travelers, and I dove into it. They’re also just queerness. I just recognize all these facets of myself that were very nascent and not even that clear to me yet, but my world just opened up.

Debbie Millman:
You left Western Washington University in Bellingham and transferred down to Evergreen College in Olympia in order to be closer to that music scene. I understand. Though, that you first met Corin Tucker, the lead singer of Heavens to Betsy, in Bellingham. What was that first meeting like?

Carrie Brownstein:
Corin played in a band called Heavens to Betsy, which was a two-piece, very deconstructed, unconventional music, which a lot of the Olympia scene was. They were playing a show at this space called the Show Off Gallery. It was them, Mecca Normal, it was a very avant-garde two-piece from Vancouver, and Bikini Kill, who were probably the most well-known riot grrrl band of that era, and very well-known band today.

But, Bikini Kill canceled, so it was just these two other bands. I went in and watched Corin sing. I’d seen Heavens to Betsy before, before I’d gone to college, and I went up to her afterwards and told her I was a fan. I said, “I think I’m going to drop out of Western and transfer to the Evergreen State College, which was in Olympia.” She basically said, “Yeah, you should.” I mean, I sort of took that as permission from this person I’ve never even talked to before. She said, “Well, why don’t you give me your address? I can send you my fanzine or keep in touch?” I think I knew I was getting out of Western because she had basically ordained it, and I wrote down my dad’s address in this notebook for her.

She remembers me as being very… She said very nerdy and shy, and I think I was. But yeah, so I dropped out two weeks later and my dad was not happy. He just thought, “That’s it. You’ve ruined your life.” But I did apply to Evergreen and transfer, so I finished college.

Debbie Millman:
You described Corin’s guitar this way. It was handmade by her and her father, and you described it as a crude piece of machinery painted matte black and looked like a home appliance that had been melted down in a fire. She also played with the tiniest of amps, an orange Roland cube with one speaker, no pedals, and no tuner. You’ve written that the ugly parts were edged in disgrace and disgust. It bordered right on ugly the whole time. But you’ve written this in a way that makes it feel very beautiful and something you really liked. I’m wondering if you can talk to that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think feeling like the music that Corin was making, this grotesque grumbling sounds coming out of her guitar and the way her voice could sort of pin you to the wall, it was scrawling and screeching. It had moments of, I think, gracefulness to it as well. It just felt truthful, honestly. I just thought, “This is just real.” Not everything is pretty and beautiful, and female singers don’t just have to be folk singers that are a salve for people’s hurt. Another way to process hurt is to meet it, to scream back at it. And I loved that sort of beautiful ugliness of that music.

I think at the time I sort of felt like a distorted version of a person, and the music really matched that. It was kind of being splintered apart. In the moments where it came together, you just thought, “Aha! I can be both. I can acknowledge the parts of me that are broken, but also stand up, too.”

Debbie Millman:
You started your own punk band, Excuse 17, in 1993 with Becca Albee and be Curtis James and recorded two full length albums, a single, and you contributed to the Free to Fight compilation album. And you also started to tour the US as the opening act for Heavens to Betsy. What was it like to first start performing live?

Carrie Brownstein:
It was fun, and it was really scary. I mean, when you say performing live, one thing to remember is these were not traditional venues, so it’s not like I suddenly was on a big stage in a beautiful theater. I was in basements, some kind of ramshackle, jerry-rigged club or venue or space that had just opened up. Everything was a little bit derelict, so it was good that we started there because there was nothing real polished about us as a band or my sort of performance on stage.

But, it was really exciting being in those small decrepit spaces that didn’t live up to any fire code. It was wonderful and wondrous. And what I really remember about it was getting to see the US for the first time. I just had grown up in the Pacific Northwest. At this point, I’d never been to Europe. I’d only ever been to Vancouver, Canada. What I remember was just that comradery and meeting like-minded people in all these cities and just feeling less isolated. This is pre-internet. Just the only way you could reach people was to go there in terms of actually meeting them and getting to know them. You could have a pistol area relationships. But in terms of the face-to-face, you had to go to their town. It really was eye-opening in that way. Performing, I sort of got my sea legs a little bit as a performer.

I think the other thing people forget pre-internet is it’s a mystery what… You rehearse in a space, but you don’t necessarily understand. Even a club or some kind of fly-by-night venue, they still have a PA. They still have monitors, if you’re lucky. There’s a sound person. These are new things. You don’t watch a YouTube video. I didn’t go to a school of rock where you learn what all these things are. The tour was a full… It was just demystifying all these things that I really didn’t understand. When you get on stage, you need a monitor mix. That’s what you hear. The audience is hearing something through the PA speakers. But I was like, “Oh, what is that? How do I explain myself?” It was a real lesson in learning how to communicate and take these chances, but it was really scary, that first tour.

Debbie Millman:
In your memoir, you write about how you were anxious to pour your guts out, and many of your songs with the Excuse 17 are a sonic and lyrical purging, like a caged animal who upon release head straight to the recording studio. I’m wondering, given how you’ve mentioned that you were introverted and shy, where did this stage persona come from and what’d it feel like to have that persona on stage given your introversion?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think it fully came to be in Excuse 17, but there were shades of it. Again, punk is a great place to practice loudness. You are turned up in terms of your amps, and often you don’t have a great monitor mix, so you better be singing loud or literally screaming. In screaming, which I did a lot of Excuse 17, I just literally found my voice, literally was more in touch with my anger. Performance-wise though, I’ve seen video of myself back then, I’m not moving around very much. I still feel kind of stuck in place.
I had this little leg move I did. Not like Chuck Berry, but a little bit of a Buddy Holly, I guess, sort of my foot sort of moving back and forth. That was as bold as I got back then. But the music, it’s bigger than you. That’s, I think, is the first thing that really gives you license because you’re like, “Oh, this music can hold me. I have felt so unheld and just free floating in life for a long time, and now I have this sonic vessel that allows me a sturdiness and ballast.” Then, once you accept that, once you realize that, you can start taking steps forward, and I think I did. Excuse 17 was sort of the early iterations of that, but I didn’t really have a full stage persona yet, which I still don’t quite have, but I definitely… It’s very rudimentary compared to what came later.

Debbie Millman:
You don’t think you have a stage presence now?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no, presence, yes, but I wouldn’t say I have a persona where I sort of get on stage and fully transform. I think there’s always something of me that comes through. But I definitely have a stage presence, yes. I move around on stage in a way that I never would in real life. I don’t quite know where that comes from, except to say that, again, the music as a place that I understood as just having me. It has me. It’s not going to let me go. And this is a world that I’ve built, this with my cohorts and collaborators and with the audience is a steadiness that I’ve built.

Debbie Millman:
I would describe your stage presence almost like punk ballet. There’s something very balletic about it. How did you learn how to windmill, to do the windmill?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t know how I learned to do it. I don’t think I practiced it, but I realized I was able to do it. It’s interesting that you say balletic because I am coordinated, but I wouldn’t say I’m the most graceful person. But on stage, I’m able to sort of mimic a gracefulness that I think I don’t really in my day-to-day life.

But things like the windmill, it’s interesting, on stage, I just possess a fluidity that I just don’t have anywhere else. Something like the windmill, which I probably just auditioned one time on stage, without knowing whether… I mean, even Pete Townsend, I think, actually pierced his hand, like a whammy bar. It’s not the safest move. But luckily, yeah, I came back around and was able to strum the strings, and I just thought, “Oh, okay. I guess I can do that.” It wasn’t me auditioning that in my room or something. I just did it on stage. But, the stage just gives license for those kinds of things, including failure and error and a lot of things that could go wrong. But I think I like that. I’m willing to take those risks on stage, risks I would not take in real life.

Debbie Millman:
Now, Sleater-Kinney started as a side project with Corin, and you named the band after one of your practice venues. When did you decide this was it, you’re both leaving your other bands and starting your own band together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Probably around 1995. It’s a weird story because… We were in a very insular but vital artistic music community. In Olympia, there were a lot of bands. We were gleaning a lot of influence and inspiration from our friends, but it was also sort of suffocating in its smallness.

We actually went to Australia and sort of took ourselves to the other side of the world, and it just allowed us to see ourselves in a different way, to just dare to imagine ourselves existing outside of Olympia, bigger than Olympia, just let’s reinvent.

I think it was during that time that we decided we probably wouldn’t continue with our other bands, and that was tough. It’s been a long time now, and Corin and I have spoken recently about that wasn’t easy. I think our other bands felt a little betrayed by that, like, “Oh, you guys are just going to form this thing.” Then, it ended up being bigger than those other bands. I think, obviously, that’s difficult, too. But, we had this chemistry, Corin and I, that was undeniable. We were creating something very singular together, and I think we didn’t want to let that go.

Debbie Millman:
You said that when you started playing with her it felt like you’d met your musical match?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we just are really intuitive together. We can sort of finish each other’s musical sentences. I think because we are both self-taught, the way that our guitars interlocked and the way our vocals would play off each other, it just felt very different than anything else we’d done. To this day, there’s certain ways that I play that I can only play with Corin, and that always makes it more unique than something I’m doing with another collaborator. I really value that.

Debbie Millman:
As the band grew in popularity and stature, critical response, you began to grapple with issues that you said you’d face for years, the requirement that you were going to have to defend or analyze decisions like why you were an all-female band or why didn’t you have a bass player. You realized that those questions and talking about that experience had become part of the experience itself. Was that something that you resented or just figured it was part of the equation?

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s a good question. I did resent it sometimes. What it is is it’s an energy suck. We just wanted to talk about the music. I would just think have you ever asked a band of men, “Why are you an all-male band?” I know you’ve never asked that question, and I just thought, “Oh, all the time saving that those guys get to do. They don’t have to waste a single moment thinking about these other things and having to speak for everyone.” Just not being able to be seen as an individual or a specific entity, that was frustrating. I don’t know if I was resentful, but it was frustrating because we didn’t want to have to do that. We didn’t want to have to spend our time doing that.

Debbie Millman:
Years ago, I interviewed David Lee Roth, and I kind of wish now that I’d asked him, “So, why were you in an all-male band?”

Carrie Brownstein:
I wish you had. I wish you had.

Debbie Millman:
Me too. As you moved into the late aughts and early 2000s, the band continued to grow in fame, in stature. But you stated that to court fame, money, and press felt dirty and sweaty. It implied that you wanted to be accepted and loved by the mainstream, the same people who had rejected, taunted, and diminished you in high school. You wrote that it sounds silly now, but at the time, these categories seem finite, immutable, and significant. Has your relationship to fame changed over the years?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, I think it’s still something that I don’t really value as a category. I try to examine things more from a place of feeling gratitude, like, “Oh, I’m grateful for access to certain things. I’m grateful for certain privileges that come with success.” But in terms of what I value and who I want to be around, it has very little to do with fame or celebrity.
I find it a strange thing to sort of worship or put too much of a premium on. I just want to be around kind, smart, interesting people in all walks of life from all walks of life. I have a lot of hobbies that purposely sort of bring me around people who I would never meet through film, music, or television.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of hobbies?

Carrie Brownstein:
Dog agility. It’s interesting with dog agility because we all think of like, “Oh, what’s a diverse group of people? What’s an interesting intersection of people?” Well, you actually have to step out. Dog agility is very interesting. I mean, it is people… I just like, “Oh, I would never meet you.” This is not academia. This is not the arts. It’s wonderful. I love it.

Also, now I do a lot of pickleball, and I’m hanging out with a lot of older people and younger people. Anyway, I just love these kinds of hobbies or pursuits that really get me outside of a social group that I would normally be around and make genuine friends there and have a common interest that we form our friendship around. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, Sleater-Kinney… Or 2006, I’m sorry, Sleater-Kinney took a hiatus. It had been about 12 years and seven albums together. You took an indefinite hiatus. And speaking of dogs, you dove headfirst during the hiatus into volunteer work at the Oregon Humane Society, and you won the Oregon Humane Society Volunteer of the Year Award in 2006.

Carrie Brownstein:
I did, yes. I also worked at the time as a trainer at a private facility and got a job at the humane society as well. I was not just a volunteer. I also worked in their training department, and I was the assistant in a reactive rover class. Then in the other, at the private facility, I was an assistant in just more like basic obedience. I was all in with that. My social life was all… My best friend that year was a woman named Jean, who was probably 70 years old. We hung out all the time. We went on dog walks together. I stayed at her house on the coast and became friends with her son. I really dove into that world, and that was pretty much my main social group for at least a year.

Debbie Millman:
My first dogs, which I got back in 2000, after going through a particularly depressive experience, I think I credit them with opening my heart. My wife was never a dog person, but she knew when we met that I’d had a history with dogs. And both of my dogs, who were very close to each other, they were like soulmates, had passed away at 17 and 18-

Carrie Brownstein:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
… six months before we met. So, she knew that I had this giant hole in my heart for dogs. And despite not being a dog person, she got me a dog three years ago.

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s sweet.

Debbie Millman:
Now she is a dog person. She is even more of a dog person than I am. So, I do think that dogs can save and change our lives in the most profound ways.

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Did that job at that time help you get over some of the loss of Sleater-Kinney and the sadness that you were feeling about the band going on hiatus?

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely. For one, it just was a way of understanding, just broadening my comprehension about life and loss and giving me a task to do. I think dogs, or animals in general, their needs are very clear and they’re simple. You realize that humans aren’t that much different. Most of us want to be loved and protected. You start to see all these through lines, and it really is so clarifying, I think. It also just teaches you patience.

One of my volunteer jobs at the humane society was just cleaning out the cages. You see, obviously, the literal feces of these dogs, but you just sort of see this is just a temporary thing for most of them. They’re just living in this cage. There’s just so much humanity in here and there’s just… My only job is to just make sure for this moment that this dog has an okay life as we are stewarding them into the next phase. I just thought, “Well, that’s how it should be with everyone.”

Whenever I have an interaction with someone that’s finite, I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, it should be as pure as what I’m doing with these dogs. I don’t know what state someone else is in. My job is just to be kind and open and leave them feeling either the same or better than when we started this conversation. I think that clarity of purpose really helped me just have perspective on the band and also just appreciate what we had done, not just mourn the hiatus, but appreciate the journey we’ve been on.

Debbie Millman:
One thing that I’ve come to realize about dogs that I try to consider what it would be like as a person to be this way is just how unselfconscious they are.

Carrie Brownstein:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, Max, my dog, doesn’t really like when anybody’s looking at him when he poops. That’s probably it. Everything else he’s just completely okay as is, and I love that about him.

Carrie Brownstein:
I love that, too. Sorry, my dog is barking. There’s probably someone… Hold on. I do need to at least bring Banjo in here. Hold on.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. Absolutely.

Carrie Brownstein:
Banjo, buddy. Come here, monkey.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, you began working with Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armisen on a series of comedy sketches for the internet titled Thunderant. What first inspired you two to do that together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Fred and I met through music because he is a drummer and we’d been in the same circles for a while. He had just started on SNL, but was still… Like in the cast, but not one of the main stars of the show.

He reached out. He said he wanted to collaborate. I assumed he wanted to do music. He said, “Well, actually, I…” I think it was the year John Kerry was running for president, so it would’ve been 2004. He said, “I have to make this video for their campaign.” He’s like, “My idea is that you’re a host of a cable access show and you’re running it out of your basement, and I’ll play Saddam Hussein as like…” He’s like, “When I see pictures of him…” He’s like, “He looks like one of those aging rockers. He’s got this beard now, and he just looks like a Paul Weller.” I was like, “Okay.” So, I played Cyndi Overton and had the first interview with Saddam Hussein, who he did. He played with a British accent and had a guitar the whole time.

I don’t know if Fred ever turned that into the Kerry campaign. I can’t imagine that they would have used it. I mean, they’re not going to put Saddam Hussein in a campaign, a viral video ad. Anyway, that encouraged us to keep making videos. So, we would just get together every once in a while. The next thing we made, actually, was the feminist bookstore, which became a recurring sketch on Portlandia.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. One of my favorite.

Carrie Brownstein:
We really enjoyed it. Fred would fly out to Portland. Although, I think we did one in New York, too, where he was living… We would just make these videos and put them up online and send them to our friends, and it was really fun. We kind of developed a language and we built our own chemistry. We were just like, “Oh, we have this sensibility now. These are ideas. These aren’t just disparate sketches. We’re creating a world here.” So then we took it out as a pitch for a show.

Debbie Millman:
And you pitched it to Lorne Michaels. He proved it in 2011. Portlandia debuted on the IFC network, and it was an immediate success. I know

that when you were in high school you were, I believe, the star of one of your high school plays, but did you feel surprised by this sort of naturalness at which you could enter into this new world of acting and comedy?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. And I was absolutely surprised. I had terrible imposter syndrome. I felt like I’d snuck in through some kind of side or back door. What’s also amazing is that if this had been created in any other way, I think that someone would’ve said… I mean, Fred was working with Kristen Wiig, and Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph, these heavyweights, heavy, brilliant, brilliant comedic actors, and somehow Lorne… This is why he’s genius and he just has that acumen. He just thought, “No, this is… You guys are friends.” Not that Fred isn’t friends with those other people, but, “You guys have this specific way of being together that if we just sub out Carrie for someone else, it will change the nature of the show.” So, I felt very lucky, but I also felt like I had a lot to prove.

I remember when we were shooting the pilot, Fred and I had done every scene together, and then all of a sudden we were doing a shot. It was the Put a Bird on It sketch. It was just me, and our director, Jonathan Krisel, yelled, “Action,” and I just thought, “Oh my God. It’s just me. What am I going to do here?” I was really nervous.

I really credit Stacey Silverman, who is a wonderful writer. She had written for Colbert, and now she writes for a ton of comedy shows. She just had a lot of faith in me, especially as a writer. I think becoming more confident as a writer in terms of writing the sketches helped me become more confident as a performer. Fred was really helpful, too. But yeah, I was terrified.

Debbie Millman:
Your beloved feminist bookstore sketch, which you’ve just referenced, Women First, stars your characters Tony and Candace. This was one of the first of a range of characters that you and Fred played together where you were cross-dressing with Fred appearing as a woman. Later, you appeared as a man, most notably as Andy, the men’s rights activist, or Lance, husband to Fred playing your wife, Nina. You were so great as Andy. I wouldn’t have even known it was you, truly.

Carrie Brownstein:
That kind of gender expression is just really… It’s very freeing. It also grants you, I think, a little bit of an understanding, too. I was like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. This is a different headspace to get into for a little while.” I loved it. I missed that.

Debbie Millman:
Portlandia ran for eight seasons. The show received 22 Emmy nominations, won three, and in 2011 won the prestigious Peabody Award for its good-natured lampooning of hipster culture, which hits the mark whether or not you’re in on the joke. In 2015, Jerry Seinfeld stated that Portlandia was one of the best comedies of all time. And that very same year, Stereogum chief editor Tom Breihan stated that Sleater-Kinney was one of the greatest rock bands of the past two decades. Did you believe any of it?

Carrie Brownstein:
I feel like that stuff is so arbitrary and subjective, and of course it’s a lovely thing to hear, but you can’t really hang your hat on that. You have to take it with a grain of salt. Because if you put a lot of faith in that or give that kind of stuff too much power, you also have to give the negative feedback a lot of power, too. I think my role is to hopefully tune both those extremes out as much as I can, even though it’s flattering. It’s so arbitrary.

Debbie Millman:
2015 was a big year. The band reemerged with the launch of the album No Cities to Love. And your most recent album, Little Rope, was launched earlier this year. While you were making it, Corin was by the American Embassy in Italy that your mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while they were there on holiday. I’m so sorry, Carrie. I’m so sorry that this happened.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks. I appreciate that. I will just clarify that Corin just got a call that they were trying to get a hold of me. So, she didn’t actually have to deliver that news.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay. It was hard to read. I’m sorry I didn’t get that quite right.

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no. That’s totally fine. That’s totally fine.

Debbie Millman:
Most of the songs for Little Rope were already written by the time of the accident. Can you talk a little bit about how grief mitigated into the work, perhaps in ways you didn’t expect?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. That time was so awful and disorienting. It’s been good to contextualize all this because music for me was something that had existed for so long, and I knew how to write songs. I didn’t know how to grieve my mom. I sort of was able to transfer just some of that confusion into a choreography that I knew, which was songwriting and playing… It was even more simplistic than that, more reductive. I just literally played guitar. I hadn’t played that much guitar since I was in high school. I mean, obviously I’ve played guitar for many years now, but I don’t usually just sit around for eight hours a day. I just needed somewhere to put my hands to place myself in time and space and literally in a room. It was so comforting to put my hands on the neck of the guitar and feel my fingers move along the frets. It helped ground me. It became a ritual and just started to give shape to days that felt very foggy and misshapen.

The other thing was, I think when you lose someone, you lose the ability to do anything for them, and you sort of miss that ability to reach them, to connect with them. So, I transferred a lot of that caretaking, and nurturing, and tending to onto the album because I couldn’t tend to my mom.

I think more than the songs sort of being about grief, the sorrow just informed the way we approached the record, the way I approached it, and just the stakes felt very, very high. Just didn’t want to put anything out into the world that wasn’t fully formed, wasn’t intentional, didn’t have life to it.

Debbie Millman:
I read a review, and I thought this was a really, really apt line, “The songs feel despondent and treacherous at times, but at others they’re hopeful and gleaming.” I think it’s a really complicated, really beautiful album. What do you think Little Rope tells your audience about who the band is now?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it tells them that we’re a band willing to reckon with the present, that we’re not steeped or trapped in our own history except to bring it along with us. We’re not stuck there. We’re not sort of tricked or intoxicated

by nostalgia or sentimentality, but we’re willing to carry the weight of our history, and our failures, and our frailty along with us and transform it into something that exemplifies strength and that we have a willingness to keep going and persevere and to connect. That desire to connect and commune with an audience is ever present and ongoing, and that we’re uninterested in no longer telling our story, that we have, I guess, enough confidence and willingness to keep the chapters going, keep the narrative going. I think it just expresses a willingness and also a celebration at the same time. Not something that’s a burden, but something that’s a real joy.

Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you. In your memoir, which was published several years ago, you wrote that much of your intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw your way out of it. I’m wondering if that’s still the case.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think in some ways it is, but I don’t feel just wholly dissatisfied. It’s too cynical to be steeped in dissatisfaction. Also, there’s something whiny about that. I’m like, “Ugh, come on.” Dissatisfaction, what does that mean? That’s sort of your own making a little bit.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s a tough world out there, especially now.

Carrie Brownstein:
It’s a tough world, but it’s tougher for other people. I guess that’s how I feel. Sure, existentially, if you’re lucky, it’s just existential. If you’re less fortunate, those can be very real threats, corporeal threats.

So, yes. I mean, I’m not saying that I can’t be dissatisfied, but I guess what I’ll say is that I try to at least question what I’m dissatisfied about. But I also like to be a voice for those of us who are discontent, for those of us who are still clawing, and fighting, and wrestling, and thrashing about. Those are my people. Those are my people who just are restless by nature, and that restlessness can be born of many things, and I love that. I want life to feel urgent. I want art to feel urgent. I want people to leave everything on the stage, leave everything on the page, leave everything on the screen. Just put it out there.

I don’t know if it’s dissatisfaction, but it’s definitely a restlessness and a desire to keep wanting and to not settle, to just not look out and think this is okay. I will continue writing for myself and for other people who think this is not okay.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Carrie Brownstein, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thank you, Debbie. That was a wonderful interview.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Carrie Brownstein’s memoir is titled Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Her latest album with Sleater-Kinney is titled Little Rope. You can find out more about the band on their website, sleater-kinney.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Carrie Brownstein appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Announcer:
This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in June of 2018.

Aminatou Sow:
It is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. And so this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” And then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers, and they’re only quoting men.

Announcer:
From the Ted Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 14 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman talks with Aminatou Sow about her podcast and her career in tech.

Aminatou Sow:
I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. Being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots.

Debbie Millman:
Aminatou Sow doesn’t like when people tell her she can’t do something. After being told that women in technology don’t mix, she created an online meeting hub for women in technology. She also went to work at Google. She was born in Guinea and lived all over the world before settling in New York City. She was named one of Forbes Magazine‘s 30 Under 30 in Tech and KQED’s Women to Watch. Today I’m going to talk to her about her popular podcast she co-hosts Call Your Girlfriend and her life as a digital pioneer. Aminatou Sow, welcome to Design Matters.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh my gosh, thank you. Hello.

Debbie Millman:
Hello. Aminatou is the Guinea version of Amina prophet Mohammed’s mother. But from what I understand, every country has a spin on the name. So for example, in Senegal it’s Aminata. You’ve said that when you meet other people from West Africa, they want to call you Aminata and that drives you nuts. You’ve also stated that what people call you categorizes them in different places in your life. So in what way?

Aminatou Sow:
Aminatou is the Guinean version of my… It’s the [inaudible 00:03:47] version of my name, really. Aminatou, and for me, I don’t feel precious about nicknames or the ways that people call you. I think that in different phases in your life, people will call you different things. And so in my family, I’m firmly Ami. That is a thing that just my father, my brother, sister, grandmas, and that’s very-

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:04:12] sweet diminutive.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s where that’s from. I will never grow out of that name. And Amina was really, I think who I was when I moved to America. People said my name wrong a lot of times. And sometimes it annoys me, most times it doesn’t. I talk to a lot of other immigrant kids about this and I suspect that it’s true of even not it immigrant kids is that there is a way that you can reinvent yourself subtly. And for some people that is just like, please use my full name or they’ll use their middle name or whatever. And I think it’s looking back on it now, I think that it is just trying on different personalities. It’s like who can you be in the world? And so for me, professionally, I always write my name as Aminatou Sow. That’s the name my parents gave me. I’m proud of it, I love it. But most of my American friends call me Amina and it’s always a reminder of what phase of my life somebody met me in what they call me.

Debbie Millman:
And I understand your Starbucks name is Amanda.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yes. My Starbucks name is firmly Amanda. And the funniest thing about that is that I have a friend who is also an immigrant with a harder to pronounce name. And in college we met at a Starbucks and when they called out Amanda we’re like, “Wait, that’s my coffee.” So it made me very happy.

Debbie Millman:
Your family is from Guinea in Africa, and you’ve said that they were political refugees by the time you were born. So you grew up in Nigeria and Belgium. Your parents were diplomats.

Aminatou Sow:
I have been going back and trying to uncover a lot of my own family history because for as long as I have been a sentient, cogent person, we’ve always not lived where we are from. As much as my passport is from Guinea, I have never lived there. I don’t have a strong sense of that being home for me and politically it was never a place that was safe for us. I guess by the time my mom and my dad left for Nigeria, the political regime in place was not encouraging of people from our tribe. And so a lot of them had to find different opportunities in different places. And my dad lucked out and got this job in Lagos, Nigeria for this organization called The Economic Community of West African States.

It’s essentially the EU for African countries. So they do trading agreements and provides economic opportunities and gives people a place to live and a zone that they can all share. And that’s how my dad came to be an international civil servant. So it’s funny because there are many ways to be a diplomat and it’s just a status, but for a lot of people, they represent their country. And my dad got to work at this cool international organization his whole life. I always joke that he’s the only person I know that’s worked at one place his entire career and it makes no sense to me.

Debbie Millman:
That’s extraordinary. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Aminatou Sow:
He just retired and I was like this, “You worked here when you were 22 and you retired at 60 something. That’s wild.”

Debbie Millman:
Your mother was an engineer by trade. In fact, she was one of the first women to study at university in Guinea, but she was a stay-at-home mom. And in high school I read that you realized she was a genius and was actually smarter than your father and you didn’t understand why she was the one staying home.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, honestly, it made no sense to me. The way that my parent explained it to us was that in my dad’s job category, due to conflicts of interest, a lot of times the wives do not work. And I would say that that was mostly true for a lot of the kids my age at my dad’s job. But I think that a lot of it is also just very old school, African sexism. She could have worked in anything. And the fact that I didn’t know until I was in middle school that my mother was a math genius was something that was just, it blew my mind. I was having so many problems with equations, quadratic equations, couldn’t figure them out. My dad is an economist by trade and also very good at math, but terrible kind of at explaining. And so everything always ended in tears.

It was like the math teacher can’t explain this to me. My dad is very impatient and here’s my mom, the person who makes all of our meals and picks out our clothes and kind of never gets any glory in our household, is the person who’s like, “Well, here’s how this works.” And the same thing happened in physics later on and the same thing… It’s like every time I had a problem in stem, my mom was who would fix it. And I think about it to this day. She passed away over a decade ago now, but I still think about how there wasn’t a path for her and she never complained about it. But it still, I think about that all the time. I was like, “You are your math genius and you just took care of these idiot children your whole life.” Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And your father was, you’ve written about how your father was the only black man you knew who had a day job.

Aminatou Sow:
In the very European environments that we were in because the path for a lot of French-speaking West African kids is that you go to France, you go to one of the bigger schools in France, and then that’s how you distinguish yourself. And I looked at a lot of my family, my uncles, other people that we knew, and I was like, “My dad is one of the few people I know with an office job, and he doesn’t get that much respect.” And I don’t know how I metabolize this as a really young kid, but I remember being eight years old and thinking France probably not the best place for me, I was an ambitious kid and I can’t quite explain it.

I was very curious. I wanted things, but I looked at this thing that my parents held up as the path that I was supposed to take. And it was like, “Well, you all are doing everything and it does not seem to me you have all the things that you want.” We actually didn’t have a lot of money growing up and certainly not enough status. And it was interesting to be in predominantly white environments and still there was nothing aggressively bad about it, but just see, “Oh, there’s not a place for me here.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you’ve always been a feminist, but can’t pin the origins of that identity down to a single cathartic moment. And you’ve said that you think a lot of it was being a girl in a conservative Muslim family.

Aminatou Sow:
And to my parents’ credit, my parents did a lot of really brave things that made me who I am today, and they were the first in their families that married for love. They did not have an arranged marriage. We can talk about whether that was good or bad. I have my feelings about it, but in their generation, that was kind of a nutty thing to do. Just say like, “Hey, we don’t care what our parents think. We’re going to choose each other.” And it had really big consequences for them. Also, when they got married, I was the oldest in my family and my dad never treated me less than a lot of my other cousins. My mom is one of 21 and my dad is one of eight or nine, and a lot of eldest boys, they get all the glory and they get all the prizes.

My dad never treated me differently, and that’s the thing that I felt at a really young age. We still had to go to Arabic school to learn Quran because my family was Muslim. We still had to do the whole respect your elders, whatever. But he never told me, “You will not get to make decisions in this family.” Let me play sports. My parents also did not circumcise me or my sister, which was a huge… I did not understand how monumental that was until later in life. And they just in their own quiet ways, my parents, they were not wave makers. I wouldn’t call my dad a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that there is something, even for very conservative men when they look at their daughters and can think, “If you are my legacy, I want you to have better than I have.” And I think my dad was able to do that for me in ways that were really concrete.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you communicated with your father through knowledge seeking. Can you tell me more about what that means?

Aminatou Sow:
It’s funny, it’s like we are learning how to become pals now, so my dad’s telling me more about his life and we’re becoming friends, but that was not true when I was growing up, I was kind of terrified of my dad, but one of the things that he always did was that he made us into very curious kids. We watch the eight o’clock news all the time at dinnertime. We talked about current events.

Debbie Millman:
You were voracious media consumers from what I understand.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. He never cared about what your interpersonal relationships in school were. Nobody talked about boyfriends at the dinner table at my house, but it was very much like, “What do you think about the crisis in Burkina Faso? What is this flag?” And he would always grill you, and I think I internalized that a lot, but it was also the only vocabulary that we had for getting along. And so in the ways that things can be really tough with your family sometimes it’s like, “Okay, yeah, my dad and I do not have warm feelings for each other, but we are all caught up on the French crisis, so let’s talk about that and-

Debbie Millman:
Where does he live now?

Aminatou Sow:
He just moved back to Guinea. He just moved back from Brussels to Conakry in Guinea, and it’s the first time he’s lived there since the ’70s. So it’s just fascinating to watch him have this new phase of his life and we’re pals now. I’m like, “Okay.” I’m like, “How’s it going? How’s your wife doing?” Just all these questions that we could never ask each other. And I do think that, yes, I’m older, the tables have definitely turned, but at the same time he’s open to having that kind of relationship with me and I really appreciate it because I don’t come from a part of the world where a lot of kids get to have that kind of relationships with their parents.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you weren’t sure if marrying for love was a good or a bad thing.

Aminatou Sow:
Honestly, I think that I grew up really thinking that arranged marriage was very, very bad. I was like, “No, you have to be able to choose or whatever.” I think that it just depends on your cultural context. I’m like, “Probably will not work for me.” But I do think that there are parts of the world where if your families don’t get along, it has bigger consequences than just you and the person that you want to be with. And so it’s not for me, I do not think women should be forced into marrying people that they don’t want to marry. But if your family wants to set you up with someone and gives you a choice about, it’s like, “Hey, if you like this person,” that’s something that you should pursue.

I’m like, “Dating is hard.” If your parents want to get involved, my God, take it. It’s fascinating. It’s like I saw in my own parents’ marriage how a choice that was selfish in their culture really had lasting generational consequences. And I was like, “I wonder if they would’ve done it differently if they had known,” because they went through very tumultuous phase. But I think that by the end of my mom’s life, they had gotten to a point where they were like, “Oh, we like each other.” And I think that it literally took them 30 years. That’s fascinating.

Debbie Millman:
What made them brave enough to insist that you and your sister weren’t going to be circumcised or what is also called genitally mutilated?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. Honestly, they never told us. Knowing a little bit, what I know now about my family because I know that my mom, it happened to my mom and it definitely marked her a lot. And knowing the kind of person that she is, I can see, and she’s very stubborn, being like, this is something that will never happen to my daughters. She was able to convey that with my dad. They were very modern people for even their time. And I think that also the isolation of not being in the home environment-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]

Aminatou Sow:
… the isolation of not being in the home environment, that was really easy to conceal, because I do… It’s funny, I remember a conversation with my mom where we were going on vacation with a lot of other women from Guinea, and she said, “If anybody asks you if this terrible thing has happened to you,” and she didn’t even describe it, she’s like, “If they start telling awful stories about a thing that hurt or whatever, don’t tell them that it’s ever happened to you.” And at the time, I didn’t understand, and I’m like, “Oh, you were shaking the table. I like this.”

Debbie Millman:
And when your grandmothers, I read, were trying to set you up in an arranged marriage, the fact that you weren’t circumcised prevented that from being able to happen, is that right?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, I think it was mostly… The thing that stands out so much for me in that time period is that I’m one of the youngest people in my family now at this point, and I’m definitely the oldest, unmarried, and so I get the pressure all the time. Sometimes it’s funny, and then other times it’s not. There’s a side of the family that it’s actually not awesome from at all. But when it came to light that I was not circumcised, that was a point of concern, and it was like, “Well, let’s fix this. If we fix this, maybe you’ll find a man.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s preventing me from being in a relationship, thank you.”

But it was a way too where a choice that my parents made a long time ago, marrying for love, living overseas, now collides with the tradition of my family, it is very conservative. And my family tree, it goes back to seventh century West Africa, and it’s very Muslim, it’s very conservative, and I was like, “Yeah, if my parents hadn’t been those weird or rad people, that’s pressure I would’ve fallen to.”

Debbie Millman:
You went to boarding school in Jos, where you said it’s the only place in West Africa where you can grow strawberries and roses.

Aminatou Sow:
It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
And I understand you had to convince your parents to send you there. What made you want to go there so badly?

Aminatou Sow:
One, I really wanted to go to boarding school. I was like, “I’m in pursuit of better educational opportunities.” And there was this boarding school in France I really wanted to go to, but I also knew how my parents are, so I was like, “I have to make it seem like it’s their idea.” And so, my frame to them was, “Listen, here’s the life that I want for myself.” And I was definitely in the eighth grade, and I was like, “Here’s what I want to do in life.”

Debbie Millman:
And what was that?

Aminatou Sow:
And a lot of that for me was, I was like, “I just want a good job and I want to go to a good school.” Truly, there were no brand names attached. I was just like, “I want a different life, and here are a couple of ways that I can do that.” And I was like, “I think I want to live in America because it looks like there are Black people that do cool things.” I’m pretty sure I’d seen three episodes of The Cosbys, which is hilarious now, knowing everything you know about Bill Cosby, but it was one of those, “Oh, America seems like a place where Black people get to do magical things. Maybe this is what I want to do.” Or I was like, “Well, maybe I can live in France.” But I knew that I didn’t want to be home. And also, home life was a little tough, and I always had an independent streak. I’m like, “I’m 14 and I don’t want to live at home anymore, but I want to not live at home to go to school, not to run away.”

And so, I really wanted to go to the school in France, and my mom was kind of on board, and I think that at that 11th hour, she was like, “Wait, this girl is pulling a scam on me. That is too far away, can’t supervise her.”And she was like, “Listen, I’m all on board for you going to a school that you want to go to, but the south of France is a little too far for me.” So there was this American school in Jos that was four hours away, it was a very good school, it was run by missionaries. My parents were really on board. At first, I was like, “It’s kind of a religious school.” And my mom was like, “Christian people run good schools, it’s fine.” I had to take a test, I had to do an English immersion program that summer, because I went to French school my whole life, my entire life was in French, even though we lived in Nigeria, it was kind of shameful, I didn’t speak very good English.

Debbie Millman:
I understand you watched Daria and Friends religiously-

Aminatou Sow:
Religiously.

Debbie Millman:
… and repeated every word so you could get the accent just right.

Aminatou Sow:
I know, when I moved to America and everybody didn’t speak Chandler Bing, it was a huge disappointment to me. I was sold a fake [inaudible 00:20:20].

Debbie Millman:
You came to the US to go to the University of Texas at Austin.

Aminatou Sow:
Hook ’em Horns.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pick UT Austin?

Aminatou Sow:
Man, I applied to 24 schools, I was such a nerd. I’m pretty sure it was 24 schools, definitely over 20 schools. Got into every single one of them, except for one. And I applied to all these schools because I love having choices, but then I’m paralyzed by the choices, so I made my dad write a check for every single school, and I was like, “I’m going to pick at the last minute, but I need you to write all these checks now.” And he was like, “You better not cash all of this in at the same time.” And I remember it being April 1, or whatever the deadline was that you were supposed to send things, and just not… I was like, “I don’t know where I want to go, this is terrible.”

And so, I convinced my parents to let me take a year off, and I was like, “Oh, this seems like a chill European thing that you could do.” And they were not weirded out by it. And my family had just recently moved to Belgium, and because I’d been at boarding school, I saw that my siblings were getting a lot closer than me, I was definitely odd man out. And so, I was like, “

Okay, this can work.” Two months into being at home, I was like, “Oh, there’s a reason I left here when I was 14. I cannot handle this.” So I then went back to the drawing board, and I was like, “Oh, what’s the school that will let me come in the spring?” And UT was top of that list, but I also wanted that movie college experience.

Debbie Millman:
You said you wanted a fantasy movie college experience.

Aminatou Sow:
I did, I wanted to go to the big school. My graduating class was 29 people, I had always been in these tiny environments, classes with 13 people and 10 people, and I was like, “What is the biggest place I can go to and be a number?” Everything that people don’t want from a big school, that’s what I wanted.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like when you got to Texas? It’s Texas. What was it like?

Aminatou Sow:
It’s Texas, but it’s Austin. I’m really happy that Texas was my first America home, because I think that it’s weird and expansive like me. Texas is weird. It’s not the South, it’s not… I love it. But Austin specifically was great. I was like, “Oh, I get to go to a good school.” UT is fine, but Austin itself was amazing, that kept me happy. I made a lot of friends who didn’t go to UT, or didn’t go to college, or had non-traditional backgrounds, and that made me happy too.

My dad was very disappointed that I went to UT and not to Yale, which was his first choice, and for a long time, he was just not happy about it at all. He was like, “You’re not listening to me, you’re not going to make anything of your life, whatever.” Because status and brand, especially to immigrant parents, that stuff matters a lot, because those are also the only paths that they understand. And so, he was like, “Well, here you go, throwing your whole life away, going to the school by the Mexican border.” And I was like, “Sir…” He sounded like the Black Donald Trump at the time to me. I was like, “This is not cool.” But it all worked out.

Debbie Millman:
You studied government, specifically political science, Middle Eastern studies.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, two different majors.

Debbie Millman:
And economics.

Aminatou Sow:
Economics. Government, Middle Eastern studies and economics, because my hero growing up was Christiane Amanpour.

Debbie Millman:
Of course.

Aminatou Sow:
So I was like, “Well, she reports a lot from the Middle East. How do I get to be Christiane Amanpour?” Yeah, so I did all those things, and look at me now, I don’t use any one of them.

Debbie Millman:
What did you want to be at that point? Did you want to be a newscaster or a journalist?

Aminatou Sow:
I don’t think I wanted to be a journalist, but I definitely… I cared a lot about the Middle East, I thought I wanted to work with refugees. I was like, “I want to work in a refugee camp, I want to help solve the Middle East peace,” whatever. And also, I think it’s because my dad was a diplomat, I was like, “Government is a thing that we can have in common, and economics is a thing that we can have in common.” And it was fine, but I think it wasn’t until my junior year in college where I was like, “Oh, I’m not…” Liberal arts is great, but I’m not learning a skill here. I’m like, “I know how to read books and I know how to write papers.” But I made all these friends that were in design school and the art school and business school and were engineers, and I was like, “You can leave college with skills? This is weird.” And the recession was looming, so I was like, “Something bad is going to happen.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, you graduated in 2007 when the global recession began.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You went and lived with family in Belgium until you got an American visa, and seeking a government job, you moved to Washington D.C. where you didn’t know anyone and had no job prospects. You applied for dozens and dozens of jobs.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh my god, so many jobs.

Debbie Millman:
And finally got a job at a toy store to pay your rent. What was that like for you?

Aminatou Sow:
It was fine for me, but it’s so fascinating to live in a town like D.C. and not have a job that people think is important or valid. I’m really happy that I went through that phase of my life, because the one job that I did get offered while I was applying to all these things was this internship in John Kerry’s office. This woman called me and she was like, “Are you available to start tomorrow?” And through our conversation, it became very clear that she needed a diversity person, and she couldn’t say, “Are you black?” Or, “Are you from somewhere else?” But all of her questions were leading to that. But I was like, “I have no shame about this. Yeah, sure.”

And it was to be a press intern, so it was literally just making press clips. And I remember being like, “Okay, how much does this job pay?” And she was like, “It’s an internship on Capitol Hill, it pays nothing.” And I was like, “Okay, then I can’t take it because I support myself.” And I remember her just being very shocked talking to me and being like, “What is wrong with this 22-year-old? Everybody wants this job.” And that’s when it just dawned on me, I was like, “Oh, the reason all these jobs don’t pay a lot and have a lot of prestige is because people with rich families can afford to do that for them. This is how government works, this is how magazines work.” Just everything that I had my eye on, I could never figure out the economics of it, and so going to work at the toy store for me was a no-brainer. I was like, “My rent is $1,000 a month, I have zero money, and I need to pay my bills, I support myself, I come from not a wealthy family at all.” And it was great, I loved it.

Debbie Millman:
You then applied for asylum in the United States and got it. Can you talk about how that happened and why you had to do that?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. So after the toy store, I went to work at this think tank, and it was great. I was learning a lot of things, and I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m meant to do, policy work.” So when you go to school in the US, you get what’s called optional practical training for a year, it is a status that you can apply for.

Debbie Millman:
That’s OPT.

Aminatou Sow:
OPT. And for a year, you are eligible to work. And at the end of that year, either you figure out a different status, and for a lot of people, that is an H-1B visa. They’re very competitive, a lot of companies compete for them for their employees, so it used to be that literally Microsoft would scoop up all of the OPT, and then the rest of the people would just be left out hanging.

But also, when you’re a 22-year-old with an entry level job and you have to convince your job like, “Hey, at the end of the year, can you sponsor me for a visa?” And the process is very murky and opaque, they just don’t make it easy. And for tech companies, the payoff is like, “We’re getting skilled engineering labor, we’ll import that.” But for everybody else, they’re like, “Do I really need a comms assistant for this thing?” And it costs a lot of money, and a lot of people don’t understand it.

But here’s the other truth is that if you went to school in America like I did, you’re pretty much only qualified for American jobs. When I thought about moving home to Belgium, they were all like, “You probably need one more year of college.” The equivalencies are different. And then, to go back to family history, I never had a home. I have a passport, but I’ve never had a home. And I was like, “America is my home, this is where I’m making my life. I chose to go to school here, I live here, I have nowhere else to go.” And one of my only options at the time was to apply for asylum, and for FGM asylum, because it was-

Debbie Millman:
What does FGM stand for?

Aminatou Sow:
Female genital mutilation. Because then there’s all this other family stuff that’s happening at the same time. And I was really, really, really lucky that somebody who was an alumni from UT took on my case pro bono, I had all of this legal help, I spoke English. I was not the typical asylum applicant, basically. The fact that I could fill out the forms on my own was just, that’s something. The fact that I had all of this pro bono, tens of thousands of dollars worth of help for free, I was so aware of my own privilege.

And even through that, whenever Republicans are like, “Just come here the right way.” I did everything, and it still took over two years, and the process sucks. Early on, somebody in the asylum office literally transposed my first and last name. That took a year to fix. The woman who interviewed me for intake was not clear on the law with students, so she referred me to a judge and then realized her mistake, but the process is not retroactive, so she’s like, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do.” That takes another year. Show up at court, they’ve forgotten to send my file, don’t get back on the docket for another year, get there… It’s just like Kafkaesque proportions.

And when you’re transferred to a judge, you’re technically pleading guilty to a couple of charges, so one of them is you’re pleading guilty that you’re not a US citizen, fair. You’re saying that you’re a citizen of another country, fair. I’m like, “I’m pleading to those two.” And the third one is that you’ve been in the country illegally for X number of days. And because this woman referred me without knowing what the law was for students, I was like, “I’ve never been here illegally. I was under status for OPT.” It’s a very gray area of the law. And so, the judge was like, “I don’t know what to do with you.” The government lawyer was very much like, “Just plead to these charges, it’s not a big deal.” And I was like, “Sarah, I watch a lot of law and order.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Aminatou Sow:
“I’m not pleading to something I didn’t do.” And here I am, with all of these lawyers who want to help me, and I’m like, “I’m doing everything right, and other people’s messing up is what is getting me here.” And at the end, when we finally resolved everything… And you’re supposed to stand a trial, show up at trial, it’s a very emotional day, and the government lawyer is like, “Actually, you are the kind of American we want here, you’re fine.” And then, the judge, who’s this very Republican judge, gives us elocution, it’s all very nice.

And I was irritated and sad more than anything, I was like, “This is actually really unnecessary. You wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, you wasted my time, it caused me a lot of pain.” It’s just a very inefficient process, and there’s no compassion for people who are immigrants. I was like, “I did everything right.” I cannot tell you how just humbling it is to be somebody who knows how to navigate America and go into one of these refugee offices to get fingerprinted or whatever, and look at the other people who are there-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

Aminatou Sow:
Offices to get fingerprinted or whatever and look at the other people who are there. A lot of them don’t speak English, they don’t have lawyers. The typical refugee, FGM refugee woman like me has children. She’s here. I was like, I don’t know what the right way is. I don’t know that not having compassion for people is something that we should be proud about in our immigration system because it’s broken even for the people who do it right.

Debbie Millman:
What do you think is the foundation of your resilience?

Aminatou Sow:
Man, I think about this all the time. I come from resilient women specifically. My mom was resilient, my grandmothers were resilient. I think that there is something about African women, whether it is the environment or it is just the life circumstances that you have, that if you make it to a certain age, you just get a different philosophy on life. I’m like, I come from a part of the world where if you make it to five, you’re probably going to have a longer life than most people.

My mom died when she was 49, even though we lived in Belgium. For our country, she’s still a statistic. Women in Guinea have a life expectancy average of about 50. I have seen some hard things, like hard things have happened to me, but I also think life is worth living and we’re very aware of that. So I don’t want to feed into some bullshit like African people are strong people narratives because I think a lot of times that’s how it gets misconstrued. Even in America, people think that black women specifically are just stronger, and that’s not true. It’s like we all have the same emotional reserves that everybody else has, but our lives can be more challenging. If you’re choosing to live, then you got to tap into that.

Debbie Millman:
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Let’s talk about some of your career successes. In 2011, you co-founded Tech LadyMafia with Erie Meyer, formerly of the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, and now with Code for America. The impetus was an article that you both read about the dearth of women in technology, which you both knew was false since you each worked in tech. How did that lead you to launching Tech LadyMafia?

Aminatou Sow:
Especially in 2011, 2010, we would get a lot of these articles and the headline was always the same. Only five women know how to use a calculator. Seven women know how to computer. The media just feeling very proud about the fact that they’re pointing out disparities. The statistics are absolutely true. They are true. There are not enough women in STEM. It’s not representative of the population we have, that it’s not even representative of the number of women who are studying STEM.

That’s the other thing. I’m like, everybody talks about this leaky pipeline. I’m like, where are these women? The thing is that for Erie, and I was like, this is not true in our lives. First of all, we know every woman in this town who computers. That’s one thing. Also, it is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. So this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” Then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers and they’re only quoting men.

So the impetus really was saying, okay, we don’t have any mentors. We don’t trust the system, but we trust each other and we all feel a little lonely in our silos. I am a big believer in this concept of horizontal mentorship and horizontal loyalty and that I did not come up with. Please do a Google and read more about it. A thing that is true is that if you look around horizontally, you look at your peers, you can put your resources together. That’s what we did with Tech LadyMafia. There was nothing revolutionary about it. It was literally an email listserv.

We’re like, we are going to share resources. We are going to share salary information. We are going to share information about jobs. We have a men’s auxiliary, they plan our picnic every year and they give us salary advice. I’m like, “What do I need a dude for in tech?” I was like, “Tell me how much money you make.” I’m not trying to figure out how much these other ladies are just being just as underpaid as me. I think that for all of its success, it’s actually very simple. It’s like if you don’t accept the mentality of scarcity and you don’t accept when you are a marginalized person or a minority, that anybody who looks like you in the workplace is your competition. This is Highlander and there can only be one of you. You’re actually going to get very far.

I’m like, these are messages that capitalism and patriarchy tell you over and over again. There’s only room for one of you. You’re supposed to compete with each other. While you’re competing for the scraps, other people are building wealth. They’re building the future, they’re doing amazing things. If you just look around and just say, actually, if we hunt in a pack, we are stronger, which I think is so true for women, you will get to where you’re trying to get to so much faster.

Debbie Millman:
Can you share some of your early guerrilla promotion tactics and how you grew Tech LadyMafia early on?

Aminatou Sow:
My favorite one that we did is we had these cards that said Join the Mafia, and we would leave them in the women’s bathrooms at tech conferences and tech offices and venture capital offices. Nothing made me happier than when somebody gave me one. They were like, “You have to join this group.” I was like, “Yes, thank you.” So a lot of our recruiting honestly was like that, informally. Also, everybody in the group is referred by somebody. So everybody knows someone because we’re very much like, if there are other women in your office or there are other women in your lives, or you go to a conference and there’s only two of you, find that person and bring them into the fold.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the brag section of Tech LadyMafia.

Aminatou Sow:
We ask people to tell us what they’re working on and what they’re proud of. I think a lot of women are really conditioned to be meek about their work and to… Even the word bragging has such a negative connotation. The truth is that if you actually look at a lot of studies about this, when men get together, they talk about work constantly. I’m like, this is why they’re always just like, they know where all the jobs are and they know where whatever is. When women get together, we’re just like, “How can I help you? How can I tend to you?” I think that we are deeply conditioned to feel shame about success around work.

Debbie Millman:
Why do you think that is?

Aminatou Sow:
I think that it’s a lot of things. That bragging is bad, and also you’re not supposed to take credit for your work. I think that that’s a thing that a lot of women struggle with. I truly don’t understand it because I’m like, well, if you’re doing the work and you’re doing it well, you should probably tell other people. Also, you can’t be what you can’t see. So part of starting the brag threads, for me it was one, I was like, I want to celebrate other people’s successes and also, I can’t celebrate what I don’t know about. So there is something really about just reclaiming the narrative of your own career. I’m like, if you’re good at your job, we should know about it. There’s nothing gross about talking about it.

Debbie Millman:
Has that brag section influenced how you think about or talk about your own achievements?

Aminatou Sow:
It has because it has challenged me a lot. I think that I’m somebody who has not had a traditional career path. It’s hard to feel part of a team sometimes. I think that when you’re sharing your accomplishments with your team, there’s a clear framework for how you can do that. You can frame it around the work and it’s part of teamwork. For me, I’m like, I work alone and I work in a silo. Sometimes I do feel that creeping in where I’m like, oh, I never… A friend challenged me about this recently. She’s like, “You never tell me when you win awards or when you do things,” or whatever.

Debbie Millman:
You even blushed when I talked about the Forbes 30 Under 30 when I introduced you.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s so embarrassing.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Aminatou Sow:
Well, listen, here’s my feeling about the Forbes 30 Under 30, thank you Forbes Magazine for that award. I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. I’m like, sure, being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots. You know what I mean? What is a 30-year-old going to teach you about the future of anything? Absolutely nothing at all. In doing this thing where we fetishize young people, we alienate a lot of older people, I think especially with women where there’s an age that you become really invisible at. I suspect that that’s around 40.

There is something about having more wisdom and having more work under your belt that will make you not feel like a fraud because young people constantly talk about imposter syndrome. It’s so in vogue for people in tech, especially women in tech, to talk about it. I actually think that imposter syndrome in small doses is good. I’m like, yeah, you don’t know anything.

Debbie Millman:
It certainly keeps people from being intolerable.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I’m like one, if you have imposter syndrome, it’s probably because you care about what you’re doing. It’s also because you’re trying not to be a fraud. I’m like, young people are frauds. We are all fraudulent. Just you put everything on social media, you’re just bragging about these accomplishments that are actually not concrete. I’m like, talk to me when you’ve had a failure. Talk to me when you’ve run a business into the ground, talk to me when you even have a resume that is five years… That is a thing.

So all of this to say, no shade to Forbes. I think they do a really important thing highlighting people, but I would be so much better served with who are the women executives over 50, who are people who have built a lifetime of making something. I think that we don’t talk about longevity in career. I think that that’s something that you talk about constantly. I loved your 99U talk last year because it was the first time that I had heard so much about your own path. I was like, wow, imagine starting a new thing in your 30s.

Debbie Millman:
Or 40s. Or 50s.

Aminatou Sow:
I know. The way that we talk about young people’s… I’m like, I don’t want to peak when I’m 28.

Debbie Millman:
I hear you.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s not the accomplishment I want to be known for.

Debbie Millman:
I hope I don’t peak until I’m in my late 70s.

Aminatou Sow:
I’ve always said that deep down inside, I feel 63. Even as an eight-year-old, I was like, 63 is the perfect number to me. This is the age I want to be, and I hope that I make it, and I hope that it’s a glorious time.

Debbie Millman:
It will be, Amina. I mean, there’s no question just sitting here and listening to you and looking at you while you’re talking. There’s no question in my mind.

Aminatou Sow:
You’re giving me chills. I got diagnosed with cancer at the end of last year and just in December, I didn’t think that I would be here now. There’s something very clarifying about illness too, where I’m like, okay, actually, all these values and things that I held onto, have now been tested for me, and I know my own bullshit. I know what is bullshit and I know what is true, and I hope that I can live up to my own values every day.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said this about your diagnosis. A lot of the language is about being a warrior or fighting and that actually, I think this is pretty bad because so many of the world’s messages to us are about strength all the time, and we’re always supposedly stronger than everyone, and we’re fighters and all these things. Sometimes that’s true, but we’re also human beings and we need all the help that we can get. Having cancer made that very, very real for me.

Aminatou Sow:
I tell my therapist all the time that the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me is getting cancer because I finally had to ask for help. I am very bad at asking for help. The thing about it too that’s fascinating, is that I’m always the first one to offer help wherever I’m at. I had to realize kind of how arrogant that is.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Aminatou Sow:
That you think that you can help people, but you cannot receive help. There’s something that puts all of your relationship at great imbalance when you do that. Getting cancer was, yeah, I was like, truly, I cannot do this by myself.

Debbie Millman:
Are you okay now?

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m so sorry that you had to go through this.

Aminatou Sow:
I’m in full remission. Thank you. I’m in full remission, which means a lot, but also means so little. It just means that you have no evidence of disease. It could come back, it might come back. It’ll probably come back. Who knows? Also, I’m like, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. So cancer is scary, but life is generally scary. Yeah, it’s like asking for help from your friends was like, it really humbled me this year. Also seeing who in my life showed up and who I prioritize versus who has actually always been there in my life.

Also, just realizing like, okay, this is what it means to be in community. You put the time in, you put the love in, and then now it’s your turn to cash out the check. I have amazing, amazing friends, whether it was from having to ask for help with the shower or having to ask for meals to be made or for my house to be cleaned or all sorts of things that I thought would be the end of me if I asked for help. I was like, oh, actually, this is pretty amazing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that romantic relationships get a lot of ink, but nobody really talks about how much romance there is in being a friend.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Was that a motivation in starting your extraordinary podcast, Call Your Girlfriend with your friend Ann Friedman?

Aminatou Sow:
Yes. Oh my God, I am so in love with Ann Friedman. She is a wonderful human being, and doing a podcast is just another way to hang out with her and our awesome producer, Gina Delvac who thought up the show. So on one level, I’m like, yes, we get to make this very successful fun show every week, but I still just pinch myself that I get to work with these women every day.

I have worked with friends and I have lived with friends. All the things that people tell you not to do, they’re like, “Friends and work, that’s bad. Friend and living together, that’s bad. Friends and money, that’s bad.” I’m like, maybe that’s true for some people, but for me it has been the opposite because I’m like, actually, I don’t like people. So if I like you, it keeps me…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Aminatou Sow:
Because I’m like, actually I don’t like people, so if I like you, it keeps me honest and I have to show up and I do my best work. And it is not about the business, but it’s about the relationship and what you get to learn from them.

Debbie Millman:
Why don’t you like people?

Aminatou Sow:
I mean people are just a lot. Also, I think truly for me, this also goes back to my family. I was a very shy kid, painfully shy, like eat lunch in the library, shy. But my parents were schmoozers. They had a job where they had to be schmoozers and we had to have people over all the time, so I kind of had to get over it. And so I feel that my whole childhood was learning to be around people, which is so against my nature. And now that I’m like, well, I make my own money and it’s my own time, I get to go back to my introvert ways.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you perform not being shy really well.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Love that.

Aminatou Sow:
100%. It’s like the things that you think that you can’t do. I was like, take an improv class for them and just learn. I was like, all of life is a performance. You don’t have to like it, but you can do it and then you can go home and lay on the floor for the rest of the day.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said our use of social media is a lot like performance art.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, 100%. I’m always so shocked when people are unpleasant on social media. I’m like, are you kidding me? This is the one place where you can be your best person. And you make everybody fall in love with you and you don’t have to be a jerk. I was like, nobody here knows you. Be an asshole to your friends and family, those people know you. This is like be your best person here.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true you met Anne Friedman at a Gossip Girl viewing party in D.C.?

Aminatou Sow:
It always happens at prom. Yes. Our dear friend, [inaudible 00:49:45], who was a new friend to me at the time, and a friend of Anne’s, emailed a small group of people to come and watch Gossip Girl. I showed up in a homemade Chuck Hart’s Blair t-shirt that my college roommate Brittany had made for me. Thanks, Brittany. Still have the shirt.

In the ways that when you watch TV with people, you’re just like, okay, this is our thing. I like everyone, but I truly loved Anne. Everything she said was funny. The episode was 45 minutes. We left. And D.C. is so small, I remember leaving going out the door and just thinking like, oh, I bet you were walking in the same direction anyway because everybody lives in the same 10 block radius. And no, we went opposite ways. And I remember being really bummed out about it. I was like, “Ugh, how am I going to find this woman again? I guess I’ll look her up on Facebook.” And as soon as I got home, I already had a friend request from her.

Debbie Millman:
Oh wow.

Aminatou Sow:
And I was like, friends.

Debbie Millman:
The tagline for Call Your Girlfriend is a podcast for long distance besties, and you’ve described it as a freewheeling conversation modeled around a catch-up phone call you might have with a best friend. So similar to Tech Lady Mafia’s Origins, you launched it after being told by a man that women don’t make podcasts.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I mean remember being at this party maybe or thing and just this guy being like, “Yeah, women, they just don’t have the attention to detail for it and they’re just not good at making…”

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Aminatou Sow:
And I just looked at him, I was like, you’re such an idiot. If you can make a thing, of course I can do it. But also every person in public radio is a woman. You know what I mean? It’s like if you look at the ranks of who is making all of our radio, they’re all women who went to liberal arts colleges. So I’m like, What does this doofus know? And it turns out he knew nothing. I was like, Your podcast is not doing great, sir. And I’m like, I figured this out. That’s usually a big motivator for me when people say some people can’t. I was like short of flying a rocket. I think that most people can learn how to do everything pretty fast.

Debbie Millman:
Every one of your shows is themed. And some sample episode titles include class warfare, get swole, businesswoman special. How do you select the topics you want to explore?

Aminatou Sow:
So we keep a running Google doc called The Vagenda.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I want to talk to you about your word vigenius by the way.

Aminatou Sow:
Vigenius

Debbie Millman:
Is one of my favorite things I found about you.

Aminat

ou Sow:
We did not coin vigenius. Our friend Brandon in D.C. would say it all the time, and I think that’s also where the vagenda is from. You absorb all the words of your friends. But yeah, so we keep this running Google Doc, called the vagenda. And so Anna and I at this point in our friendship have lived longer apart than we have in the same city and we would in the classic way of millennials with jobs that they hate, we would Gchat all day and then be like, okay, “I’m going to call you later, but here all the things I want to talk about”. So we always had a list. The list has always been, that forum was not new for us because there’s a lot to cover. I’m like, sometimes you want to talk about Kanye, but also Paul Ryan is doing insane things in the house. We are ladies with vast interests.

Debbie Millman:
You have range.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You have more range than anyone I think I’ve ever met.

Aminatou Sow:
But I think most people have range. They just refuse to put them in the same category.

Debbie Millman:
Well the thing about your and Anne’s range is that you’re smart and you’re informed and you’re not just riffing on something that you’ve heard. You’re riffing on something that you think, and I love that.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s, I think, why the show was so important for us to do because I do think that there is this feeling that the things that young women care about are frivolous. And so when you think about, I don’t know, conversations about skincare or conversations about reality TV or the Kardashians, I was like, no, these are things that people experience, but also you can be a smart person and like all of these things, but also for women, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the political is personal and the personal is political. So a lot of times there’re vehicles for having talks about other things. And so we are an independently owned show. We’re like three ladies with a surprisingly profitable media company. So it’s fun.

Debbie Millman:
Now I read that you did make your financial forecast for 2017. Last year in 2017.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You didn’t make them this year for 2017.

Aminatou Sow:
We did. It’s the first time that the three of us sat down and we talked about our five-year goals together. We’re like, here’s what we want for the show, but also here’s what we want individually. Because I think that a thing that a lot of people don’t realize about our show is that it’s none of our primary jobs, and it could be, but we’re ladies who love side hustles. So I was like, the way that we stay in love with this baby is that it has to be a labor of love. But it was kind of the first time that we sat down and said, okay, here are the things I want to do. And for me, I was like, okay. I was like, “I want to host more things. I think I want to be a talk show host one day”. And I had never said that out loud. It felt good to have two other people say, “Okay, let’s help you get there” or think about the ways that we want to grow the show also. And it’s like I’ve never had a five-month plan and now I have a five-year plan and it is pretty exhilarating.

Debbie Millman:
In addition to Call Your Girlfriend last year, Wieden Kennedy launched On She Goes a travel platform for women of color. And you hosted season one of the podcast. What was that like for you?

Aminatou Sow:
It was pretty fun. I got to interview all of the women of color that I love about the ways that they travel. So everybody from Thao Win from Thao & the Get Down, stay Down-

Debbie Millman:
She’s amazing.

Aminatou Sow:
… And Roxanne Gay. And it was a very sweet show. I think that so many women actually have a sense of adventure. And also adventure doesn’t mean climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, for some of us it literally, it’s the thrill of walking into the business lounge of an airport. And in seeing ourselves more so being able to do that. And just unselfishly. Now I’m like, “Oh, I travel better. All these ladies gave me the tips in my life”. So it’s great.

Debbie Millman:
What other projects are you currently working on?

Aminatou Sow:
Well Anne and I are working on a book project, so we’ll be announcing that soon. What else am I working on? I was really lucky that when I got sick I was like, okay, I can’t work anymore. My entire life of hoarding money and being afraid of being poor again. My rainy day has finally come, so I’m going to cash out the rainy day fund. So I stopped working in January and I decided that in June is when I was going to figure out what I’m going to do, when I grow up. And so it’s felt really good to say no, but have a reason to say no to a lot of projects. When you’re little like, “Sorry, I have cancer. I can’t do this thing”. It’s quite exciting actually because nobody can guilt you about things. But I’m going to be hosting a couple of other podcasts this summer, some branded shows that I’m super, super excited about. And also just figuring it out. If you had told me even six months ago that I would not be working, because my identity is so tied up into being a productive person, and that I would be okay with it, I would’ve never believed you. And now I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, I have nothing to do except for figure myself out”. And it’s very fun.

Debbie Millman:
Has this change in the way you’re living your life impacted your need toward money in order to feel secure?

Aminatou Sow:
I’m still definitely a money hoarder because I was like, money just buys you freedom. That’s all it does. I was like, it doesn’t make you cooler than anybody. But I’m like, I walked away from a job at Google and they print money in the basement of that place and it is terrifying to leave. But if you leave and you’re like, oh, I know how to feed myself and I can pay my rent and I can afford the things that I want to do, everything is a little better. But I think that the thing that cancer did for me, honestly, is that I stopped hoarding other things. I use my nice dishes now every day. There’s no such thing as nice dishes in my household anymore. There are a couple of trips that I’ve always wanted to take and every year I go, Ugh, I need to save up more for it, or I need more time, or whatever.

Or I want to be at this phase of my life when I go on… I booked all of them and I’m like, I’m going. Because tomorrow’s not a guarantee. I’ve definitely become more vulnerable. I am doing a lot of things that I’m scared about, I’ve been scared of doing for a long time, and so far it’s paying out. I always ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen? And so far so good. It’s like the worst is maybe you’ll be humiliated a little. Maybe somebody will say no to you or maybe you’ll die. But guess what my mom always said, she was like, “You’re never going to get out this bitch alive”. So it’s all good.

Debbie Millman:
Aminatou, thank you so much for being on Design Matters today. Thank you for being such an important voice in our culture and thank you for being such an extraordinary inspiration.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you for having me, Debbie Millman. I listen to your show all the time, so this is like a fever dream for me.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a fever dream for me as well because ditto.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Aminatou Sow and her extraordinary work and her podcast at callyourgirlfriend.com. This is the 14th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
For more information about Design Matters or to subscribe to our newsletter, go to debbiemillman.com. If you love this podcast, please consider contributing to our new Drip Kickstarter community. Members Get early access to the podcast, transcripts of every interview, invitations to live interviews, Q&A sessions with guests, and a brand new annual magazine. You can learn more about this at d.rip/debbie-millman. That’s d.rip/debbie-millman. If you want others to know about this podcast, please write a review in the iTunes store and link to the podcast on Social Media. Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox Productions. The show is published exclusively by designobserver.com and recorded live at the School of Visual Arts, Masters in branding program in New York City. The editor in Chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Petit, and the Art Director is Emily Weiland. Generous support for Design Matters media is provided by wix.com.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:00:54]

The post Best of Design Matters: Aminatou Sow appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Oliver Jeffers:
This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures, really, truly. And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. And it’s a bombardment and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, artist and picture book author, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his career and about reframing humanity’s problems.