is an author, coach, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 75 million downloads that explores meaningful living. He is also a lovely, kind, compassionate human devoted to helping others. We share a passion for music and dogs, and a driving curiosity for how life works.

At twenty-four, Eric was living on the streets, addicted to heroin, weighing 100 pounds, and facing up to fifty years in prison. A counselor encouraged him to enter long-term treatment, and after first convincing himself he didn’t need it, he had a moment of clarity and went.

Thus began Eric’s long and often arduous and also joyful journey to get clean. And stay clean. What got him there? A series of small steps. Tiny decisions he made every day, every year. And still does.

Through research and his own lived experience, Eric developed protocols and strengthened positive habits that have helped him grow into a thriving, healthy, and sustainable life. Lucky for us, he gathered all of them plus mountains of wisdom and insight into his new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

Earlier this month, Eric wrote a thoughtful essay for Beyond about fighting vs. accepting aspects of our lives. A lot of you left comments and emailed me, letting me know how much it helped you in your own life. In case you missed it, here’s the link.

I so enjoyed speaking with Eric! I think you’ll also enjoy sharing in his vision of the world.

xJane

⭐️ Eric is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of How A Little Becomes A Lot! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “A LOT” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, April 27th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

You have this beautiful closing line to your book, “That little by little, we become who we are.” I really like your definition of “little by little”: low-resistance actions, done consistently over time, in the same direction. So I wondered if we could start there.

First, thank you for your compliment on the closing line. It’s great to hear another writer say that they thought it was good. That’s a great place to start because sometimes people hear little by little, and they think tiny. It doesn’t necessarily mean tiny. It means low-resistance actions. And low resistance is different for each of us.

For example, you might find writing to be a semi-pleasant activity. So for you to sit and write for two hours is fine. But when I started, the thought of writing for two hours would drive me to despair, so thirty minutes was low resistance for me. When we find something we’ll actually do, if we keep doing it, that’s consistently over time.

Then, in the same direction is important. Particularly in the world that I work in, which would be loosely called the self-improvement, self-help space. Because if you get on social media these days, you could find fifteen things to change about yourself in the first fifteen minutes. You should meditate more, you need to do morning pages, you should cold plunge, you need to sit in the sauna, you should be doing yoga, your fascia is too tight. We could just keep going.

The problem with that is we get very distracted—and so little by little in a lot of different directions does not become a lot. It’s actually a lot of scattered attempts that usually leave us feeling worse about ourselves, because we’re like, “I never finish anything that I start.” Or, “I tried that, but it didn’t work.”

You write about how repetition, which is part of the consistency, became spiritual for you.

I’m a recovering addict, and so I spent a lot of time in 12-step meetings. I mean a lot. Three meetings a day for a while. And they read the same stuff at the beginning of every meeting, again, and again, and again, to the point that I felt like I could barely take it. Repetition breeds boredom.

But then, much later, I became a serious Zen student, and I noticed that in that context, I was able to relate to repetition differently. My Zen teacher had me reading the same short amount of material, again and again and again. And every Zen meeting would open with the same readings. And yet, somehow, in this instance, I was able to let the repetition sink into me more deeply.

That may be a difference in my patience level from when I was a brand new recovering heroin addict and today. But now I find that I can listen to those things and reflect more deeply on what they mean. In that way, repetition can become spiritual, if we imbue the repetition with some sort of meaning.

Listening to you reminds me of how obsessive I can become about a song. I’ll play something twenty-seven times in a row! And I know how much music means to you. What role did music play in your life back when you were using, as you got clean, now? What impact has it had on your soul? Did it help you heal? Has it helped you stay sober? Did it ever draw you back to using?

My favorite art form is the song. When I turned eighteen, I decided to learn to play the guitar for the third time, and it finally took. I played in bands, and I had an identity in music, for a certain number of years there, as I descended into addiction, I could use it as an excuse, partially. Like, “I’m a musician.” That would justify my whole lifestyle. I’m not saying that music wasn’t incredibly valuable to me, it was. I wasn’t doing it for that reason, but I do think I used it as a shield.

When I got sober, a lot of the music that I listened to, I couldn’t listen to anymore. I was listening to music that would glorify the drug addict type of life, or the hedonism. So all of a sudden, a lot of that was immediately off-limits because it caused emotions that I did not like.

I hate that feeling of being torn in two, which is what addiction feels like. One part of me is screaming, “I have to do it!” The other part of me is screaming, “You can’t do it!”Anything that would even start to bring that feeling on, I was like, “No, thank you.” So I started to discover all kinds of new music, and I do think music was with me all through recovery.

I got sober and played in bands, which was really important for me, because I was afraid that was all gone. But I found sober musicians, and I had some of the best years of my life. I still play today. I don’t play in a band, but I play guitar most every day. I’m just so glad I know how to do it. It’s something I do simply for the enjoyment of doing it. I have no outcome associated with it at all anymore.

I’ve wrestled with depression a fair amount of my adult life, and one of the things I know is that music helps me. But there’s this curious thing that happens, because my depression shows up, at least at first, mainly as anhedonia, meaning an inability to take pleasure in anything. So if I go on, say, Spotify, if I’m in one of those moods, I don’t want to listen to any of it. That’s when I know something’s going on with me.

So I created a playlist of songs that I know help me when I’m in that space, and I’ve been adding to it for probably a decade now. All I have to do is go to the playlist and hit play, instead of trying to talk myself into thinking about what I want to listen to.

That’s amazing. What are one or two of your favorite songs that help the most?

Anything by an English musician, Frank Turner. Get Better is a great one that can immediately go on that list. Further Up, Further In by The Waterboys. Badlands by Bruce Springsteen.

At one point early in your recovery, you ask the universe a series of questions about why some people are able to make necessary changes toward health and others aren’t. And then in the 12-step programs, there’s “Let go and let God.” And now you’ve talked about Zen Buddhism. How do these all come together for you? What is your greater belief of what the fuck is going on?

I will caveat any greater belief with, I don’t have any idea what the fuck is going on. When I ask the universe, that’s more me just asking a question that has a great deal of meaning and mystery around it. When I got sober the first time in AA, God was what was on offer. God as you understand him, which is what it says in the Big Book. So I tried really hard to believe in the kind of God that the people around me believed in. There’s a God that came in and helped them get sober, and did things in the world.

I always struggled with it as an idea. I don’t know in the beginning if I got sober because of that belief, or in spite of that belief. I do know that a certain number of years into my recovery, my son was two and a half, and my wife came home one day and said, “I’m in love with someone else.” And it was someone who was in AA. My world crumbled. I didn’t drink right away, that was maybe three years later, but what I realized in that period was I did not have a spiritual life that made any sense to me.

So I went back out and drank, and when I came back, I was like, “Alright, I have to take this seriously. If I’m going to go to 12-step programs—because this is eighteen years ago, there wasn’t anything else—what is a higher power going to mean to me?”The third step says we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. What am I turning it over to?

There are a couple things I reflected on there. First is, “let go and let God.” What I realized for me was that I struggled with the “let go” part. If I let go and don’t believe somebody’s going to pick it up, it’s like dropping a baton. I’m supposed to hand this to somebody, and I don’t believe there’s anybody to hand it to. What I realized for me, it was the holding on that was making me sick. It was absolutely irrelevant whether anybody was going to pick up the baton. I just needed to let the baton go.

But the other thing that I came back to—and there’s a line in the AA Big Book about this that I didn’t even ever know was there—was this idea from Stephen Covey that you can live a principle-centered life. I came to believe that if I lived my life according to certain principles, I could handle whatever life brought me, and I could stay sober.

That’s beautiful.

I also did believe in the power of the group. I did believe that 12-step groups were a power greater than myself. They were a place I could go when I felt my own power wasn’t sufficient to keep me sober.

Now, as to how that ties together with my current belief system and Zen, I’ve had some experiences in Zen, the classic mystical experience, satori enlightenment-type thing, and a couple of them lasted for a while. What I saw to be true is that I was part of an unbroken reality that was all stitched together.

What does that mean to you?

We divide reality up into concepts: me, you, that light, the tree over there. That’s a valid view; it’s the one that helps us survive and get around. But there’s another view that doesn’t do any of that division. And when that division isn’t there, you suddenly find there’s a lot less to argue about. There’s a lot less to resist. It doesn’t really matter what happens to this individual me.

Another way I sometimes describe it is, imagine there’s a light shining. Somebody puts a piece of black cardboard in front of it and starts poking holes in it. And then where there’s a hole, the light goes through. I often think I’m just one of those holes.

There’s a light that’s shining through everything. The light that shines through me is the same light that shines through you and everyone else. And then that light takes on the shape of what we happen to be.

Are you viewing the light as benevolent? Or can it be harmful? I know you don’t believe in binary so is it an all light?

I think it’s an all-light. With my deep spiritual experiences, love is part of them. Whether that is imbued in the light, I don’t know. Or if when I see reality as it is, my only response is love, because I am everything, and everything is me in some way.

You have been on quite a journey—you were unhoused, addicted to heroin, weighed 100 pounds, had hep C, and headed for prison. You got clean, you relapsed, you got clean again, and now you’re here. If you feel comfortable, can you talk a little bit about your relationship with yourself these days?

My relationship with myself is a very benevolent one at this point in my life. I write about self-compassion in the book. And I write about it for two reasons. One is it’s really important if we’re in our ability, to make a change. Actually, it’s a great asset.

Secondly, it’s the biggest upgrade I’ve ever given myself besides, you know, stopping burning my life to the ground with mind-altering substances. It didn’t happen overnight; it’s happened over a number of years, but I am almost never mean to myself. That doesn’t mean that I don’t hold myself to account; it doesn’t mean that I can’t look at my behavior and go, “That wasn’t it,” or see where I’m falling short, or the way I want to be different. It’s just that I can do that with a certain amount of kindness.

So lovely. You write: “We tend to treat the ordinary moments of our lives as something we need to get through to get to the good stuff.” Then you go on to talk about how rushing is a mindset—and that we can change how we move through the day without changing our schedule. Can you talk more about this because I feel like most of us are doing exactly that.

One of my strongest traits is my ability to make things happen. However, it often takes over, and I end up always rushing to the next thing. You know, whatever is here, great, good, off the list, let’s go. Next, next, next, next. That is one that I have to work with a lot. I’m doing it with the book right now. I’m trying to slow down and go, “Look, this is amazing. Somebody sent you a picture of your book in the bookstore. Enjoy it, appreciate it!” But my mind is like, “Oh, that’s great, but I’ve still got 500 emails to send, so let’s move on.”

I relate!

I think we all have examples of rushing in our lives. There are days when you just feel frantic. And there are other days that there’s a lot going on, but there’s a certain peace, or a certain enjoyment, or a certain something that’s different. I look at those and think, “Well, the busyness doesn’t appear to be the only factor here. So, if that’s not the only factor, what else is going on?” And I do think it is rushing.

To me, it feels like this constant leaning too far forward. So, instead of leaning into go-go-go, can I sit back? I’m in a car that’s going. My life is structured to a certain degree that it has an engine to it. It doesn’t make my car go any faster when I’m leaning way forward with my head two inches from the windshield. I can sit back up and drop my shoulders, and try to keep going in a different way.

That’s a great image! So much is hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

For all intents and purposes, the amount of suffering in the world is infinite, and it always has been. Now, I may get exposed to more of it, I may see more of it, I may choose to seek more of it out, but I don’t think there’s any more of it than there’s ever been. That’s not to say that there aren’t incredibly difficult things happening. I truly mean none of us could process all the suffering that’s in the world, ever.

Part of it for me is that I try not to be so extreme in the way I describe everything. To acknowledge that there is an infinite amount of suffering, but there is an infinite amount of goodness and kindness also. I actually believe there’s much more of that. We just don’t recognize so much of it for what it is, because it seems so ordinary.

When we drive down the freeway, all of us mostly are following the rules and being respectful, and working together. But we don’t think that, because it’s just ordinary. We only focus on the one jackass, where everybody else is being kind of good.

I think joy and kindness are everywhere. So my job becomes, where do I find them? Music, for sure. Always music. Dogs, for sure. Always dogs. Nature, it’s always there. I love this time of year: the trees here in Columbus, we’ve actually got blooms, but about ten days ago, you could look at the tree and see buds and think, “it’s all about to come out of that little thing there.”

My friends are joyful. My partner is joyful. There’s so much good art, books, or TV series, or comedy.

I generally find joy easily if I look for it. It’s just a matter of choosing to look for it. Part of my life, I think, “Oh boy, there’s a lot of suffering.” That’s always kind of there to me. But I also try and then go, “Okay, and there’s this other part.” Both are true.

I’m not trying to be Pollyanna. It’s me saying, “Let me balance.” If all I’m seeing is the bad, then I’m not really seeing reality.

If you enjoyed this conversation with Eric, you might also enjoy this one with fellow Columbusite, :

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is a designer, author, podcaster, teacher, curator, and philanthropist—and she’s also an exceptional human. The underpinning of all her work is kindness.

In her podcast Design Matters, Debbie thoughtfully, often with humor, and always with breathtaking research and grace, walks her guests through key moments of their lives. Originally focused on interviews with her design heroes, Debbie broadened the scope to encompass the way we design the arc of our lives. No surprise it’s the longest running podcast in the world, consistently appearing on Best Podcast lists.

Debbie is also the author of eight books, including three collections of her beautiful interviews, two illustrated essays, and most recently Love Letter to a Garden which Debbie and I spoke about here.

Lately, Debbie has been writing pieces for Time Magazine and the New York Times about how to be a compassionate, engaged human in this increasingly troubled world. This one about Nike launching a new shoe to honor MLK Jr in the same shade of turquoise as the motel in which he was shot really got to me.

Debbie is also a board member of Joyful Heart, an organization founded by Mariska Hargitay which works to eradicate sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, image-based abuse, and the rape-kit backlog. They have already helped pass 130 bills in 46 states and the number of untested rape kits nationwide has decreased from 400,000 to 100,000.

Does this sound like a lot? It’s not even half of Debbie’s brilliance. She co-founded the first graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, led major branding initiatives for, amongst others, Hershey’s, Haagen-Dazs, Star Wars, and the No More campaign to end domestic violence, is the co-owner and Editorial Director of Print Magazine, and she and her wife, Roxane Gay, recently purchased the much beloved online literary magazine, The Rumpus. And there’s more! For Debbie’s full bio, click here.

Debbie lives between NYC and LA and shares her gorgeous homes (check out this New York Times spread on their LA home) with her wife Roxane, and their three furry babies: Max, Theo, and Lew.

It was a delight to speak with Debbie! I think you’ll enjoy it, too.

❤️❤️❤️ To celebrate the relaunch of the legendary The Rumpus, Debbie is generously gifting three subscriptions: one month, six months, and one year. If you’d like to be one of the lucky recipients, please add “RUMPUS” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, March 23rd and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! ❤️❤️❤️

Preparing for this, I listened to and read everything I could on you, and the thing I kept coming back to is how devoted you are to helping others. So I want to start there. Would you agree that this is a driving force in your life? And, if yes, can you talk about why it feels important to you?

I don’t know that it’s necessarily a conscious thing. I am fiercely loyal to the people that I love. Almost diabolically so. So it might be a way that my personality has filled itself out over the decades. It’s hard to say because I wouldn’t self-identify that way, so it’s not something that I’ve given a great deal of thought to. But it’s a really interesting and provocative question that I have to spend more time with.

You seem to often be helping people sort through things, or achieve things.

There are certain things that I do that propel others forward and that I really love being able to do. Whether it be giving voices to young people on Print Magazine. And certainly teaching. I do a lot of jurying. I often will say yes to being a jury for a competition mostly to be able to stay abreast of the trends that are happening, and get to see the best of the best. It’s a balance of wanting to help other people up a step, or two, or more. but also getting the benefit of knowing them and seeing their work.

I have students now that have been out in the world for ten or fifteen years that are successful, and making a difference, and doing really good work. That does make me happy in a way that very few other things do. I’m not claiming to have any responsibility for that success, but it’s wonderful to watch a trajectory like that. And see someone so young grow into themselves as an artist, or a writer, or both.

Do you tend to yourself in the same way you tend to others?

I haven’t been historically good at taking care of myself. That’s not uncommon with people who have had early childhood trauma. It’s certainly not selflessness or anything noble. It’s just avoiding facing myself in certain ways that make me feel too vulnerable. But, all that being said, that tends to work better when you’re younger and don’t have as many ailments or body breakdowns. When your hip is bothering you to a point where you can’t walk, you’re forced to do something about it if you want to keep walking, and that’s what happened to me.

That ended up jump-starting a whole new commitment to physical fitness, because I ended up getting very lucky with a physical therapist who was able to understand a lot of the issues that I brought to any kind of physical fitness. Not only did I have a full recovery for a hip replacement, but then that folded into a full-on practice of working out. I now do that with him two or three times a week, even when I’m in California, because I can do it online. If I’m here in New York, I do it in person at his studio, which happens to be across the street from my house. I very purposely picked somebody not for their personality, and not for their rating on Yelp, but literally the proximity to my house so that I would not be able to use, “it’s raining, it’s snowing,” as an excuse.

You’ve shared the ways that childhood sexual abuse has impacted you mentally and emotionally, but I’ve not heard you mention ways it might have physically impacted your body. When you’re mentioning your hip and other things happening now, are you connecting that back to the trauma, or are you thinking that’s just part of aging?

The hip is aging, and genetics. I’ve also spent my whole life walking on concrete. I hate taxis and Ubers and all of that. I have no issues with public transportation, I just prefer walking and having that time to think and observe.

But I’ve always been very cut off from my body, and so everything was cerebral and in my head. Anything from the neck down didn’t really exist, except maybe my hands. That was solely caused by the early childhood trauma. And inasmuch as all the therapy I’ve done saved my life emotionally, there was still this giant roadblock to my physical body. That started to change in my very early fifties, when I came out. Suddenly, my physical connection to others was much more in line with what I was imagining for myself. Up until that point, I’d lived more conventionally, and in a lot of fear and inner homophobia. It’s one thing to come out in the 2000s. But quite another thing to have come out when I first suspected that I might be gay, which was in the 70s and 80s, when you would suffer tremendous discrimination, and that scared me.

When you came out, and became friends with your body, did that connect you with ways that you might have been storing trauma in your body? Like, maybe you were having pains or stomach issues that you weren’t acknowledging.

I’ve had stomach issues since I was fifteen, at times, debilitating. I had all kinds of tests and exams as I was growing up into my twenties and thirties, and no doctor ever found anything. No one took me that seriously.

But back to your original question about self-care, it became increasingly important for me to face the fact that I had not at sixty-four years old, ever had a colonoscopy. And a lot of that was fear of the results, and fear of what would happen when I was put under anesthesia and not in control. The whole vulnerability of it. But because my stomach aches had been increasingly getting worse, I felt that it was time.

I got very lucky. I found a doctor who spent over an hour with me talking about my stomach issues and my body, and his feeling was that there was a good chance that I had a brain-gut dysfunction. So we’re doing a bunch of things to figure it all out. Thankfully, the colonoscopy and the endoscopy were normal. Taking the time to even way late, take care of myself has been a brand-new thing.

Everything you’re saying is so beautiful, Debbie! I just want to add, I share that fear of anesthesia!

I mean, Gisele Pelicot, and then Sarah Polley’s movie, Women Talking. So many things seem to happen when you’re out, and just being that vulnerable.

So with this coming out and getting to know your body better, you, in part, started addressing issues, and then I’m imagining also experiencing more pleasure.

Yes, and also finding a soulmate. That changed everything. Finding someone who opened up my heart in such a profound way, allowed so much else to happen. I didn’t meet Roxane until I was fifty-seven, so I was well on my way to considering the possibility that it might never happen. I’ve been with some people that were really magnificent and I truly adored, but the soulmate thing was elusive.

With Roxane, do you feel like your body knew she was safe. Or was it your mind, or both?

Both. Prior to Roxane, I joke that my love life was almost as if I were a taxicab driver. Somebody would hail me. They’d get in the taxi, I’d drive for a while, then they’d get tired and jump out. Sometimes somebody would be coming in one door as somebody else was leaving through the other. It was very haphazard. I mostly waited for people to choose me. I never really put myself out there. With Roxane, it was the opposite: I pursued her, politely.

If you feel comfortable, can you share what your relationship with your body is like these days?

It’s much better than it’s ever been. I work out several times a week now. At the very beginning, it still happens occasionally, when I would do something that was hard for me—like, my first pull-up—I started to cry. Involuntarily. Not having that control in my body, I burst into tears. That would happen whenever I was struggling through a plank, or a certain number of sit-ups. It would be so hard for me. Not necessarily hard because the sit-up was hard or the plank was hard—more that my body was awakening in a lot of ways.

I wonder if in those moments your body was releasing some of the past trauma as this beautiful connection formed. They almost sound like tears of joy.

Yes, and relief.

I was so moved by the three pieces you wrote for Time Magazine. I feel like you’re combining your branding knowledge, your design knowledge, your knowledge of humanity, that big heart that I was talking about, your sense of justice and injustice, all of it is funneling into these in a way that I haven’t seen happen in your work in quite in this way.

Yes, I would say that’s absolutely correct, and I’m loving it so much.

The one about Nike launching a turquoise sneaker to “honor” MLK, in the same hue as the Lorriane Motel where he was shot really got to me.

It really could have been a one-line article: What the fuck were they thinking?

So true! You write, “This sneaker is not a tribute, rather, it is a symptom of how capitalism sanitizes and commodifies moral struggle. By collapsing Dr. King’s moral authority into a consumer product, Nike and Lebron James are missing the plot. At a moment when protest is criminalized and civil rights are under attack, turning justice into merchandise doesn’t honor history; it empties it of its meaning.” And later you add, “When Nike ties Dr. King’s assassination to a consumer product, it makes light of his sacrifice. This is not commemorating his life. It is commodifying his death.”

Can you speak to ways corporations might work in support of human rights rather than being part of what we’re fighting against?

Publicly traded companies have a very specific legal fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profit. So, doing anything that risks any kind of backlash or boycott is just too much for them to bear. You can see how fast, when corporations make a change or support a cause, that is used as a reason to abandon that brand. You saw that with Cracker Barrel. I mean, when was the last time anyone you knew went to a Cracker Barrel? Who cared about their logo? But it became this giant brouhaha over nothing because someone decided that taking the old guy out was somehow woke. As opposed to, if anything, ageist.

I can only think of one instance where a brand took a big risk in supporting a controversial political topic and came out on the other end looking good. Aside from Patagonia; Patagonia is the only brand that is always about standing up for what’s right and doing good. The only other time that I am aware of, and if anybody that’s reading this knows of others, I welcome to hear from them, is when Nike supported Colin Kaepernick.

Now, Nike has a lot of problems, but when they supported Colin Kaepernick, initially the response was one of outrage. Consumers were filming themselves running over their Nike sneakers with their cars, burning them in dumpsters, tearing them up with scissors. And what happened? Three or four months later, they posted their results and their stock price actually went up.

What that was showing us was that they were standing up for something that other people felt was important enough to put their money behind in acquiring more sneakers. But it was risky, because consumers might have responded otherwise.

How do you feel about being alive right now in these times that we’re in?

I feel very despairing. I feel like my marriage could be vulnerable because of the laws that have allowed for the federal recognition of marriage between gay people are in jeopardy. I don’t see enough of a pushback from Democrats. I don’t know that anybody really knows what it means to be a Democrat anymore. I have almost zero faith in the Supreme Court. I’m scared for the midterms, because I’m worried that if Trump and his cronies have stated that the election software is rigged then they could use that in their favor.

Do you feel like there’s a particular role that creatives and artists and writers and designers can be playing right now?

Well, we are all the messengers. And, yes, we do have a responsibility to stand up for what’s right. But when you can’t get the Supreme Court to stand up for what’s right and make a difference, I don’t know how much power art has. I don’t want to sound pessimistic. I’m just saying things as realistically as I can.

Are Max and the kitties helping you through?

Yes. I’m an animal person. For the last twenty-five or thirty years, I’ve had cats and dogs, and mostly at the same time. Theo and Lew, my kitties, have been with me seven years. They’re both grey tabbies. I was told they were brothers, but I don’t really know that they are. Other brothers that I’ve observed in friends’ houses have always been cuddlers and sleep intertwined. These guys don’t, and sometimes they brawl. Theo is a love muffin, and seven years in, Lew is becoming a lot more friendly and cuddly.

And then Max, our dog, we got five and a half years ago. One of my two dogs prior to Max, her name was Duff, was my soul dog. We fell in love at first sight. I think everyone should have the experience of having a soul dog. Roxane picked Max out—and Max is her soul dog. Roxane and Max are imprinted on each other.

You often speak of the importance of metabolizing our emotions. How is that actually done?

Humans are metabolizing machines. Our bodies metabolize our food, and temperature, and sleep, and so forth. If we’re hungry, we eat, and we might be full, and we’re like, “ugh, can’t eat another thing,” and then four hours later, we’re picking through the refrigerator.

We live on a planet that is full of metabolizing elements. We could put three glasses of water on a table, one boiling, one with ice, and one room temperature. Leave for a few hours, come back, and they’ll all have metabolized into the same temperature. People talk about how time heals all wounds. It’s not really time that’s doing it, it’s our brains that are metabolizing that grief, which some people can do better than others.

We metabolize love. That butterfly, fluttery feeling, as much as we’d like it to last forever, tends to, on average, last for about eighteen to twenty-four months, and then you settle into something much deeper.

What I’ve discovered is that one emotion that we can’t metabolize is regret. Because with regret, there’s no closure, there’s no, “okay, I got rejected from that, or I failed at that, or I did poorly in that, so now I’m going to move on and do something else.” It’s a constant fantasy of, “I wish that I had done that.” Then you play out the fantasy and all of the ways in which something, if you had pursued it, could have happened.

To be clear, you’re talking about literal brain chemistry.

Yes.

So, let’s say we have terrible heartache. Are we then doing some protocol to metabolize the heartache, or is the brain just going to metabolize it without us doing a thing?

That’s really the interesting thing about the way we metabolize anything in our bodies. We don’t will our bodies to blink. We don’t will our hearts to beat. We don’t will our lungs to inhale or exhale. These are all happening involuntarily, and I believe that the metabolization of these feelings happens involuntarily as well.

That’s very interesting! Your work with Joyful Heart is so beautiful. Can you share a bit about that?

I got involved more than ten years ago. Mariska [Hargitay] saw some work that I had done for No More [an organization dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence], she asked me if I’d be interested in doing work with Joyful Heart.

So I started working with them, redid their positioning and their identity, and then after that work was completed, Mariska invited me to be on the board. I was on the board, and then I was chair of the board for five years, which was amazing, and I loved it, but a lot of work. Now I’m on the board, but no longer the chair.

Those Survivor Story podcasts you did are extraordinary. Will there be more?

Yes, I just recorded the trailer for another three episodes.

Yay! I was so moved by the first woman you spoke with I googled her, and I was so sad to learn that she died. Have the Epstein files impacted your work at all?

When these situations become public and things are in the news, then we are often asked to comment. Our work right now is centering on ending the rape kit backlog, which we’ve done substantially. And working to reposition and then eradicate what we’re calling image-based abuse, which some people refer to as revenge porn, but that’s not what it is, it’s image-based abuse, and that is rampant. There are very few laws that protect people in this regard. We’re also working on several initiatives, that fall under our Heal the Healers efforts, which is about caring for the people that do help the people that are healing.

It’s such potent and needed work, Debbie. So much is hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

Being at home with Roxane and the furries. Being in my garden when I’m in LA. Walking around New York City when I’m here in New York. Being with my family.

If you enjoyed this interview with Debbie, you might also like this one with :

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was my first writing teacher, way-back-in-the-day at NYU. Brilliant, stylish, achingly cool, beyond-gifted writer with a dollop of mischief, she intimidated the hell out of me. Which is funny to me now that I’ve gotten to know her: she’s still brilliant (possibly more so), still with the coolest style, still ridiculously gifted—and she’s also gigantically kind and funny and thoughtful and wanting to help. In short, Darcey is a deeply lovely soul.

I’ve read everything Darcey has written, from fiction to memoir to personal essays. Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, an extraordinarily tender and singular deep dive into menopause, is one of my most treasured books. In fact, the moment I hit post on the list of my favorite nonfiction books, I realized with despair I’d left it off.

Darcey’s latest memoir, This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith (preorders help writers so much!), weaves together personal stories, research, and nearly one hundred interviews to examine the impact pain has on our bodies, spirits, minds, and souls. The daughter of a Lutheran minister, Darcey’s life was turned upside down when she ruptured a disc scooting over in bed to make room for her husband. With exquisite prose and insight, she guides us through ancient teachings on pain, pop culture’s take on it, Frida Kahlo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Kurt Cobain’s experiences with it, novels and memoirs and physicians’ archives on it, her own back surgery and healing, a revelatory trip to Lourdes—and so much more. This book is pain as suffering and pain as transformation.

In addition to her two memoirs, Darcey has written five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Review, Vogue, Spin, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Guardian. She was a Stegner Fellow and currently teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia University's School of the Arts. She lives in a wooden house in Brooklyn with her husband and cat.

Interesting Tidbit: When I first interviewed Liz Gilbert, I learned she writes all of her books to someone, and she wrote Eat, Pray, Love, one of the bestselling-ever memoirs, to Darcey!

Speaking with Darcey always lights me up. I think you’ll feel the same!

xJane

Your book is called This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith. And you write about how doors are a passage. Can you talk about what doors you went through with your pain and how it changed your relationship with yourself, your body, the world?

Maybe six years ago now, I herniated a disc. At that point, I was still wearing backpacks with ten or more books in them, so I think my spine got compressed. I went through about eight months of really, really terrible pain. It was at the height of the opioid crisis, so my pain wasn’t treated or medicated. A few times when I went to the ER, because it got so bad, they acted like I was a junkie who wanted pain meds.

In the morning, it was so painful to get up from sitting or lying that I would stand all day long at my kitchen counter or at my standing desk. I would work, I would watch movies, and then I would lie down at 9:30 and sleep. It was a tough time. But it was also fascinating. It slowed me down. I’m someone who’s always on the move, and I couldn’t be out and about the way that I usually am. It definitely isolated me. I remember being at a dinner party once, they were talking about risotto recipes and tarot cards, and I was like, “fuck this.” I felt alienated even in groups of friends.

I eventually got spine surgery, which was successful, so I was very lucky in that way. But I feel suspicious of those medical narratives where they say, “then I healed myself, and I was better.” I still have nerve damage in my right leg that bothers me. It’s nothing compared to what it was. But that year of pain made me understand that when I see people on the street who have mobility issues, it’s not just that they have mobility issues; they’re also in terrible pain. It opened up my empathy.

As to the door, Zola says, “the door on mystery has to remain open.” I thought, “my pain is really mysterious. No one knows exactly what it is, and I’m in a place that doesn’t have a lot of definition.” My title This Is the Door is based on the part of Macbeth where he’s about to kill the king, and one of the fools says something like, “this is the door, if you go through, your life has changed.” That is something that I did feel: once I had gone through the pain, I was a different person, and I was in a different place in my life.

How do you feel, if at all, it has changed your relationship with your body?

I’m 63. This happened six years ago, during menopause, which I also wrote a book about.

I was just thinking that!

I wrote about my body then and this came right on the heels of that. I have my various aches and pains now, as an older person. But the main thing I would say is that I prioritize my health: I eat crazy well, I exercise almost every day, I’m really on it.

I don’t consider myself old; I’m at the beginning of old age, but I’m starting to understand that my corporeal embodiment is not going to go on forever. That’s something that period of pain brought me closer to.

The last time we spoke, around the time of Flash Count Diary, you were getting steroid shots. You got two shots, they didn’t work. But you felt obligated to do the third because you felt responsible for the failure of the first two.

Well, my doctor acted like I was responsible for it. On steroids, you feel great for about six hours. But the pain comes back, as the numbing wears off. Steroid shots work for a small percentage of people that have back pain, but it’s kind of a racket. People are desperate for pain relief, and nobody wants to give opioids anymore, which is completely understandable. So there’s this idea that the steroid shot is going to be this cure-all, but for most of the people I talked to, it didn’t work. One guy told me that his doctor insisted that it had worked even though he was saying, “I’m in the same amount of pain I was in before.” That’s how much people don’t want to hear about pain, even the doctors don’t.

Connected with that, you write about how you have this shame of having an unhealthy, broken, painful body. I think a lot of people will relate to that, especially if you have chronic health issues. We feel shame we’re not healing the way we’re “supposed” to.

I definitely felt shame that I was broken. It’s like the idea of how a hurt rabbit pretends that it’s not hurt. It’s very common that animals will pretend that they’re not hurt or sick, because it’s dangerous to be seen as hurt. My guess is there’s something based on that: to be ill is a dangerous position to be in, because you’re so vulnerable.

I also think the culture doesn’t really like people to be sick. They prefer people to be doing great. There’re all these stories about the woman who comes back from her mastectomy, and the day after is playing tennis, and all this bullshit. The culture loves stories like that; they don’t want to hear about people suffering. In some ways, I don’t blame them. I had a really difficult mother that wanted to tell you about her suffering all the time, and it was tough. I think the way you talk about your pain, it might also be like talking about your sex life… you have to be careful in the way that you talk about your body to others.

Careful in what way?

I think in order to be heard, you can’t talk about your pain like you talk about going to the grocery store. Maybe somebody is very sympathetic, and you can lay it out for them, but in general you don’t want to be laying out every twitch in your body. That’s tough on people. I’m not saying that it’s okay that they feel that way. I’m just saying that they feel that way.

Did your pain change how you receive other people’s stories?

Totally. As a younger person, you hear older people talk about their aches and pains and you’re like, “oh my god, that’s so boring, let me out of here.” But now, I really like it. When I meet my friends, the first thing we do is go, “How is your tense neck? How is your diabetes?” We go through all that stuff. It seems to me very intimate. It doesn’t seem to me like something that’s depressing at all. It seems really human.

You write: “Pain always has meaning, not because it is good but because bodies always have meaning.” And later: “People are destroyed not by suffering but by suffering that is devoid of meaning. Meaning is bigger than a diagnosis or a cure.” What sort of meaning are you suggesting? And how do we find it?

When I was going through my back pain, people were saying that all pain is about is getting over it. There’s no intrinsic meaning in it. There’s nothing worthwhile to be learned from it. I don’t think that’s true. When people think about the more meaningful things in their lives, they’re often really painful things.

It’s both hard to express your pain and hard to hear people’s pain. That’s a given. But also the idea that people are afraid of it, that’s going to happen to them. So they want to push you and your problem outside of what humanity is.

What meaning do you find in your pain? I struggle with this with what I’ve lived through. I’ve definitely grown and changed a lot. But I don’t know if that’s the meaning of what I’ve experienced.

When I say meaning, I don’t mean “it means that God loves you!” or “it means we’re all going to die someday!” I mean it the way that the things that you do have meaning. For me, swimming in the ocean is very meaningful. I do open water swimming. So it’s more like that. I think about it as thick places in your life that have more meaning than other things. When I walk in the park, that feels meaningful to me, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it meant. It’s just a thicker place.

That’s beautiful and makes sense! You write of Jesus: “He makes people who are damaged feel healed not by curing them physically but by expanding the definition of what it means to be whole.” I love this! And you say that you can’t go back to your former sense of wholeness. What does wholeness and health look like to you?

I read this really great historical novel about all the people around Jesus. There was an incredible scene where Jesus goes around to heal the lepers, but he doesn’t really heal them. They still have all their things, but they feel healed. That was helpful to me, because it’s not that there’s actual healing…well, there is actual healing! But it’s healing the sense of self, healing the soul.

Since my back stuff, I feel sometimes like I’m barely keeping it together. But I also think that’s okay. I’m never going to go back to being thirty. I think that it’s kind of good; it’s like the Leonard Cohen song, the crack is how the light gets in. It makes me more empathetic to not feel invincible. I really don’t feel invincible anymore. I mean, I might occasionally feel a lot of strength from my reading and my intellectual life but as far as physically, I definitely am very aware of my frailty.

What do you do with that?

It definitely bothers me. But if someone said, “would you go back?” I would say, “no.” I sometimes will see these young people striding down the street, and they seem so arrogant to me. They can throw themselves down the ground and then jump back up, and I would not want to have that kind of arrogance about my body anymore. I want to be connected to the greater suffering of the world and understand my own position in that. To me, that’s very valuable. It’s extremely valuable as a writer, because writing is a lot about empathy, so having an expanded empathy for other people is important.

So is that a piece of how you view wholeness?

I feel the wholeness the most when I have an idea. Or when I’m writing well. Or even when I’m teaching well. I’ll feel a sense of, “wow, there’s a completeness here that’s really lovely.” So that is good. And then, I’m vulnerable. But I can be a complete person with no more bodily perfection. I don’t need to feel these certain things in these certain categories to feel like I’m okay.

Your answers are touching my heart so much.

Oh, I am so glad!

I have so much health trauma from things I still struggle with and also things I’ve healed from but am afraid will come back. You experienced that as well but it sounds like you’re largely in a better place.

Yes I had it both for my back, and then recently about my heart as well. For my back, it was so painful and so relentless that it took me about a year of working with my therapist to get over the fear of it coming back. My therapist said, “why don’t you get a pain management person in case it happens again?” So I talked to somebody and he told me what we would do if I had a relapse, the stages we would go in, and he gave his phone number. That was really helpful to me to have somebody in place in case it did happen again.

Then with my heart, I found out that I had heart disease, and I had basically two years of being scared, like every twinge in my heart, I’d be like, “holy shit, is this happening?” In the last six months or so, I’ve been able to move past that a little bit, too. Maybe some people don’t feel this way. I’m always confused. Do some people find out they have heart disease, and they’re like, “So what?” Or they had their surgery, and they’re like, “Fine!” But for me, there’s a haunting, and it takes a while to dispel. As I say in the book, my friend said to me after her breast cancer, “I have to live with the Death Star inside of me.” My heart’s a little bit like that.

You write that in this phase of your healing, rather than solitude, you need other bodies or the memory of bodies you’ve known. So beautiful! And you also write about pain as a vehicle to greater intimacy with your husband and creating a more empathetic community with those around you. The belief that pain connects us, particularly women.

As I was working on the book, I was talking to a lot of people who were in pain, which felt like a powerful experience; it was very intimate. Then I was thinking about my own pain. And that people tell you that pain is isolating. But is that really true? Like, I did feel isolated, but it was also my first experience of pain. I was a pain newbie. And I wondered if going forward there was a way that I could use the things that happen to me to be connected to people, not feel isolated from them.

When the pain was at its worst, I really got sick of myself. I was thinking about it all the time; I felt like that’s all there was to me, and that I was a weight to other people. I had a little cabin then upstate, and I went out there by myself, thinking, “I’ll be healed in the woods.” But I realize now there was a sense sometimes that would I want to live if the pain continued? I didn’t do anything, but I kind of wonder in going up there, if that was a step in some ways toward the final isolation. It was not a great move. I should have stayed in Brooklyn and had my friends come over.

Your father was a Lutheran minister, and you share some of your experiences of attending church as a child and praying. You write: “My body, as small and weak as it was, could be a conduit to the ultimate power source. The idea that religion comes not from a supernatural being in the sky but from people’s bodies thrills me.” There’s so much I loved in your book, but this really went deep into my heart.

People forget that people made religion. People made God. I’m not saying that there couldn’t be God; I like to keep the door open on mystery, but people are the ones that did that. People forget that the meaning of religion is the body, is your body, and the bodies around you.

I was thinking about this recently, because I went to Lourdes, which is how the book ends, and there’s a grotto and a spring—and then this huge Catholic church is built right on top of it. And this building, which is the most powerful symbol that the Catholic Church has, can’t crush out the power of the spring and the earth. The first thing we worshipped was groundwater. And then bathing our children, bathing ourselves, very meaningful. Honoring the dead, kneeling on the ground when we’re sad, these are things we’ve always done. Before Jesus was born, we did these things. And frankly, I think that when no one on Earth remembers what Christianity was, people will be doing these things. These are the bedrock of the rituals that we think are meaningful. And they’re real. They don’t come from a magic force in the sky. They come from the elements, and the Earth, and our feelings about those things.

You examine the lives of writers who struggled with pain: Frieda Kahlo, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche. You write: “Creativity itself is nurtured by suffering.” Images of the troubled artist, probably drinking too much, flashed through my head.

Well, you shouldn’t force yourself into suffering. Clearly that whole idea of the bohemian suffering writer, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about that every life is going to have some pain and suffering. I mean, art can come out of joy, too. But really, I feel like it’s the metaphysical impulse that goes hand-in-hand with suffering and pain that creative work comes out of. I don’t think it’s that you need to suffer to work. I think life is going to have some suffering. That’s your job as the artist to communicate that.

When people suffer, they make art, and that helps other sufferers. I know in my own work, it’s those painful moments, I may not even be writing about them directly, but the emotion and the feeling of them, they’re like a hot coal that’s underneath the text.

I love that! So much is hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

Let’s see, well, I love Brooklyn. I really like the interactions you have with people on the street. I had to run to the grocery store and, on the way home, I helped a guy with a walker get over the ice. And then sometimes people help me. Or I have this crazy wolf hat and sometimes dogs will be like, “Are you a big dog?” Those little things give me joy. I actually heard that there was a scientific study that said that they used to think that long-term relationships made people the happiest. But now they are saying that these kind of communal relationships with strangers also lead to a lot of happiness, because it makes you feel a part of something bigger.

Then two years ago, right after my dad died, I started to do open water swimming in the ocean at Brighton Beach. It’s right on the Q train, so I can be from my house to the ocean in thirty minutes. I got myself a wetsuit and got trained and joined the open water swimmers. It’s always great, but July, August, September into October are the most beautiful swims. I get so high when I get in the water, because I’m like, “I’m in the ocean! I live in the city, and I’m in the ocean!”

Of course, my friends and my daughter and my husband. Also, literary culture. I really like literary culture in Brooklyn. I have so many students that I’m asked a lot to be in conversation with younger writers, and I enjoy that a lot. And then I’ve been trying to eat really well and make nice dinners. Since things have gotten pretty bad—I mean, I go out and protest—but I’ve also been a little bit more home-based, trying to soothe myself. I don’t cook every night, but a couple nights a week I’ll cook for my husband and myself.

My cat. I have the best cat in the world. Also writing. The time I’m at my desk is really a beautiful time for me. I’d say I write between two and six hours a day, depending on how hot the project is and whether I have a deadline. So that’s a constant place of joy for me, too.

NOTE: Darcey wrote this week’s and there’s an excerpt from her book on ! Both are wonderful!

If you enjoyed this interview with Darcey, you might also like this one with :

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Omar El Akkad’s writing is staggeringly, exquisitely beautiful. Like, makes-my-heart-swoon level. It is also staggeringly painful. He writes about war and cruelty and dishonesty and family and humans trying to help one another and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing and hope and losing hope and friendship and betrayal and trauma and tragedy and broken systems and colonialism and empathy and humanity and love.

His words have changed me.

His most recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is a Nonfiction Finalist for the National Book Award. In it, Omar, an award-winning journalist, examines the genocide in Gaza and the role of the West through the lens of his own life. Born in Egypt, Omar grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and later settled in Portland with his family. Once hopeful about the freedoms of the West (no books with blacked out words!), he soon came to recognize that these shiny promises for some, were built upon the broken dreams and bodies of others. One Day is a grappling with how to be a father, a husband, a friend, a writer, a citizen in a country that is causing harm to so many.

Omar’s first novel American War follows Sarat Chestnut from a curious, trusting, earnest little girl to a ruthless warrior shaped by lies, cruelty, and betrayal. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, follows another child, this time a refugee washed up on the shores of a small island, as he, too, seeks safety in an increasingly hostile world.

Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, the writing is tender and elegant. Omar manages to inspire hope, compassion, empathy, even joy, in face of seemingly insurmountable brutality.

I so enjoyed speaking with Omar. I think you will be as deeply moved by his words as was I.

xJane

⭐️ Omar is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “DAY” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, November 17th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the contiguous 48) ⭐️

Before an interview, I reread everything the author wrote to make sure it’s fresh in my mind. So I reread your three books back to back. Omar, on one hand, it’s the most astoundingly beautiful work. On the other hand, it almost broke me. There’s so much hope and light in your books. And there’s so much suffering. How do you carry all the rage, the sorrow, the heartache, the injustice? Are there practices you engage in not to lose your mind or your heart or break your health?

That’s a good question. I remind myself that for the entirety of my professional writing career, and this goes back to my decade as a journalist, as well as all my work as a novelist and now writer of nonfiction, I have essentially been a tourist in someone else’s misery. Whatever my powers of empathy, whatever my ability to sit with someone else’s pain, I still have the fundamental privilege of being able to get up and walk away.

Even with that privilege, it’s still a lot. Do you go running? Do you meditate? Are there practical things you do to keep yourself in balance?

I’m quite often happiest when I’m alone when something of consequence is happening. The only thing I really do for fun, per se, outside of reading, is rock climbing. The kind of rock climbing I do is the solitary version. It’s bouldering, where it’s just you on the wall. I find that I’m able to reset, or at the very least, channel my rage in a way that is much more concrete. You fall off the wall, you yell, maybe you punch the wall, and you go back to it. That’s much more manageable than the abstractions we’re talking about.

Do you feel some an obligation to witness and write about the sufferings in this world?

I do, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing. Because whenever I try to break down the reasons why I do, they’re not especially honorable.

First is the basic obligation of witness. Through forces that I had nothing to do with, I was born into a life where I am largely insulated from the worst of what is done in this world. On top of that, much of the worst that is done is paid for with my tax dollars. I wrote a book about the genocide in Gaza. I am paying for that genocide. Given that combination, the very least I can do if I still want to call myself a writer is bear witness.

Then there’s a more selfish reason, which is there’s a difficulty that comes from not doing it. Which is to say, towards the end of my life, when I am thinking back on how I behaved in this world, what I did, what I didn’t do, I want to be able to say at the very least that I did bear some kind of witness, that I did say something. I think that the internal reckoning with having said nothing will, in the long run, be a more intense pain than anything that comes with the alternative.

Do you ever feel, I don’t quite know the right word, guilty is coming to mind, that you’re not more in the thick of it? Listening to you, I’m thinking of my father who grew up in London during World War II. As a child, he was evacuated. That has haunted him his entire life. He feels like he should have been in London. He should have been bombed. Does this make sense to you?

Certainly there are times where something approximating what you’re talking about is very hard to set aside. That’s in part because I know that a lot of the people in the world subjected to the kind of horrors that much of my writing is concerned with look like me. They have names similar to mine. They have ethnicity like mine. They follow religions that I do. And my position of being relatively insulated from that is not due to some function of merit, rather just luck.

If I had been born in some other context, I would not be sitting here talking to you. I might be in a secret prison in Egypt, or looking for work, or I might not have made it to this age to begin with. It’s very hard to think of these things and not feel some sense of wholly fraudulent and self-centered shame.

Shame. Maybe that’s a better word?

Even that is worth dissecting because it implies that resistance to institutional evil is an obligation that can be individually delineated. But that’s not true. In a world that is anything but fully sociopathic, none of us should be walking around with a blueprint in our back pocket for how to, for example, best oppose a genocide. And so, a lot of us are just muddling through these moments that are much, much bigger than we are.

Whenever that feeling comes up, I try to remember that, first of all, it doesn’t really matter how I feel. And second, the only solution to whatever it is I feel is to find solidarity with others and to find a sense of community, because there’s no way I’m solving any of this stuff on my own.

Listening to you now, and in other interviews, and having read your books, you strike me as quite humble. You set yourself aside. Do you feel like you’re channeling something or that something’s moving through you when you write? You often say, “I don’t matter. What matters is that I’m doing my best to articulate what’s happening.”

When I’m working on any piece of writing, the place I’m trying to go is the place where something is happening and I don’t have control over it. There’s this thing John Cage said about how the artist, when they walk into their studio, walks in alongside everybody they’ve ever met: their critics, their fans, previous versions of themselves, you name it. But as you sit down and start to do the work, one by one, these people get up and leave. And if you’re very, very lucky, even you get up and leave.

I love that! Your latest book is, in part, about Gaza. What are your thoughts on what’s happening there at the moment? Both sides say they want the ceasefire. It seems precarious, at best.

My sense of the ceasefire is no different than my reaction to every previous quote unquote ceasefire in that it’s always the expectation of one side can violate the rules of the ceasefire with impunity. Anything that causes the scale and scope of suffering in Gaza to decrease is something to celebrate. But none of this changes the fundamental terms of the asymmetry. None of this changes the fundamentally colonialist nature of what’s happening. I think what we have been watching play out in Gaza for the last two years, and in Palestine for the last seventy-seven years, is no different than the trajectory of any other colonial endeavor.

Colonialism, like whatever stage of capitalism we currently live in, is insatiable by definition. It has no ceiling. It has no moment at which the system says, “Enough, I am satisfied.” So the non-existence of whoever gets in the way of that machine is always implied. We might be more horrified when the pace at which that non-existence is enforced seems faster than normal. But even the baseline normal, and that the baseline normal exists, is horrific in and of itself.

What I come back to is this notion that we as a species, if we don’t make a fundamental change to the way we live, are going to more ourselves to death. That this obsession with more and more and more is going to undo every last thread of convenience that we have convinced ourselves is betterment.

I try to get at this as often as I can because I live in a part of the world where every year my Amazon packages arrive faster and my internet gets a little faster. It’s very alluring to conflate that with life getting better. But it’s not getting better. Life is getting colder and more convenient. And the fuel that is making this machine move is a whole bunch of dead brown people on the other side of the planet.

What do you see as the connection between dead people in Gaza and getting your Amazon package faster?

Over the last two years, I’ve done a pretty good job of wrecking my relationship with literary organizations that I previously had very good relations with. A central reason why that is the case is because I’ve been agitating for those organizations to cut ties with sponsors who invest in weapons makers.

Over and over again, when I do this, the counter-argument comes in two forms. The first is that we’re doing nothing wrong. All money is covered in blood, and we simply take it from these corporations and hand it over to writers, and that’s a good thing, right? The other being, how is picking on our little organization going to put an end to genocide?

On a surface level, they’re both fairly compelling arguments. But if you follow the implication, you end up in a place of pure nihilism, because effectively the argument is that it can never get better than this, and all money is tainted so why bother trying to do anything?

One of the main ways in which I try to oppose what is happening in Gaza is trying not to do business with entities that I feel are directly profiting off this. If I were to follow that in any principled sense, I would shut down the computer that I’m talking to you on now. I’ve cancelled my Spotify account. I would have to stop using YouTube and Gmail. I’d have to stop using Microsoft. I would eventually have to take leave of the world as I know it in my privileged part of the world.

I’ve heard you say that you have hope about Palestine. Can you talk about hope? Are you a naturally hopeful person, or do you have to go through some step-by-step process to get yourself to that place?

I have no choice but to be. I always go back to this virtual event I was doing for a climate anthology. The final question that was asked was something like, “what does hope look like for you?” Everybody gave the sort of answers you’d expect, except the last guy, whose house had just burned down in the California wildfires. He said, “There is no hope. We’ve screwed things up too much. But we must behave as though there is.”

I think about that a lot, because left to my own devices, I’m very susceptible to a kind of cynicism that borders on nihilism. On top of that, I come from a long line of malfunctioning hearts. The men in my family don’t live very long. I have children now. When we talk about things like climate change, for example, I don’t have the privilege of simply assuming that the systems that I’ve come to take as normal will continue to exist, even if they teeter on the edge for the rest of my lifetime, and then some future generation can deal with it. That future generation is my children.

I come back to this notion of what insatiable systems ultimately do, which is that they become cannibalistic. They grind themselves up. Where I live in the United States, there has been this ongoing attempt to make life infinitely better for an infinitely smaller number of people. If you live in this country and you have billions of dollars, you have access to the best healthcare in the world, the best everything in the world, while at the same time, an increasingly larger number of people are forced to the other end of the spectrum, where they get nothing. That is unsustainable in any context.

This, in a perverse kind of way, is where my hope finds a lot of its fuel. This is no different in Palestine or in Sudan, where the UAE-backed militia is engaging in some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen in my life. This is no different in any fundamentally colonialist or insatiable endeavor. I have to believe that this growing number of human beings who are cast into the abyss eventually form a powerful enough force to overturn that system because the alternative is all of us being cast into that abyss until there’re two colonialists or two capitalists left, and one of them pushes the other of the edge of the cliff.

That wonderful sentence in American War just popped into my head about how the first thing they do is they erase your history. Do you feel like that’s happening right now in America, in Palestine, in the world?

It’s a vital component. I don’t think any of this machinery of empire can withstand an accurate accounting of history. It’s simply incompatible. History has to be a deeply malleable thing in the eyes of any empire both as a means of aggrandizing the empire’s own history and whitewashing its crimes, and also as a means of implying that whoever gets in the way of empire has no history, has no claim to civilization.

I grew up in Qatar. The background of that place eventually leads you to a Bedouin culture, which is a culture that has to survive under very very harsh conditions so our obligation to take care of one another is a central.

Last time I was in Qatar, which was exactly a year ago, we went camping in the desert. I was teaching at Georgetown there, and the American professor was driving, and we got stuck in the sand. We’re out in the middle of nowhere and the sun’s going down and panic is setting in. We see this Land Cruiser driving by and hail them down. A bunch of Qatari guys come over. As soon as I saw them, I knew we were going to be okay. They will never, ever leave us here. It’s unacceptable to them.

Sure enough, they called their friend to tow us out. He didn’t have the right chain. They sent the guy two hours back to get the right chain. While we’re waiting, they open the back of their truck, they pull out cushions, and they make a little majlis for us and they started serving tea. None of this was remotely surprising to me, because I know that this is a fundamental tenet of this culture. At the end, when they pulled us out, I was thanking the guy, and he shook his head, and he said, “it’s our duty.”

So beautiful.

When I go back home to the U.S, and watch a movie, and it has someone who looks like that in it, he’s going to have a bomb strapped to his chest. Overwhelmingly, that is who I am expected to believe these people are. That is an erasure of history, but nobody would call it that. They need to destroy that history—it’s not tangential, it’s not a side effect, it’s a fundamental load-bearing beam of empire, and it might be the most insidious one.

You write about how language is also important in harming others, even if it’s just laying the foundation for further harm. You start with how white Westerners living in another country often for economic reasons are “expats.” While non-white Westerners are labeled “aliens” or “illegals.” And build toward more complex examples. Is language also a piece of erasing histories?

Yes, it’s a fundamental part of the endeavor as well. It’s been going on for a very, very long time. For example, one of the terms used in the United States to describe the Civil War was “the late unpleasantness.” “Collateral damage” dates back to Vietnam. Any distance you can put between the conscience of a privileged population and the atrocities committed on its behalf is a natural lubricant that allows those atrocities to take place.

One of the reasons that I focus so intently on language is not only because it’s one of the more insidious means of doing this but also because this is what I do for a living, I work with language. Which is to say that I work with the intention of trying to make meaning. So when I see language used for the unmaking of meaning, it hits a nerve in a way that many of these other factors and currents don’t.

If we’re going to call ourselves writers, we have more than just an obligation to write, we have some obligation to stand in defense of language as a conduit for meaning rather than language as an antagonist to meaning.

You write a lot about severance in all three of your books. Can you talk about this? In particular, the ways that we have severed ourselves from nature.

There is a severance, particularly from something like nature, that is required under the dominant systems we live under. Severance from nature and severance from one another, which are intertwined. One of the reasons they’re intertwined is because they give us many of the same things: A sense of belonging. A sense of having a relationship with our lives that is more than transactional. A sense of what it means to be and to love. All of that is deeply, deeply vital to the human condition and, simultaneously, deeply inconvenient to these systems of endless taking. The more I find solace in the world around me, the more I find solace in the people around me, the less I’m sitting around scrolling through Amazon, looking for trinkets to fill that void—and that makes them deeply inconvenient to the system.

I don’t think it’s accidental that we live in a world where what in any healthy society would be considered our most prioritized connections are increasingly being made our least prioritized connections.

But I also think of a different kind of severance, which is the walking away from that system. Systems of power have a much easier time punishing us for active engagement than they do for negative engagement. They have a much harder time punishing us for what we don’t do, what we don’t buy, what we don’t engage with. That’s why so much of my writing is obsessed with this notion of dissecting the act of walking away.

You write in One Day, “What to do with someone who says, I will have to no part in this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent upon active participation.” And later you talk about dismantling it now and building another thing entirely. How? What does that look like?

The most frustrating thing is that the vast majority of the process is deeply, deeply imperfect and seemingly ineffectual because we tend to view this from an individual prism. I’m personally no longer going to Chevron gas stations. I have cut ties with the company who used to host my website because they’re on the boycott list. But I am not even a rounding error to any of those companies. So this sense of impotence is seemingly perpetual. But there’s something that’s happening, which is to say that whether I like it or not, I am joining a bigger community. I’m joining a movement, and in fact, that may be the most impactful thing I do—letting myself know that I’m not just one person throwing pebbles at a billion-dollar corporation.

So whenever I’m dejected about this act of moving away from one system as the first step towards building something else, and how monumentally huge a task that is, I have to keep reminding myself, I’m not working alone, that I’m part of a bigger initiative. No matter how difficult that will be, and how likely it is to fail, it’s my only way out. Because the alternative is adhering to the system in place and developing my muscles of obliviousness to make it so that I can continue to live this way while simultaneously destroying my conscience.

So much is hard right now. Where are you finding the joy?

A lot of joy has left life over the past two years. I’ve seen things that I can’t unsee. But I still derive immense joy from being with my children. I derive immense joy from watching entire generations, these are people half my age, who are finding community for the first time in their lives. Whenever I would talk to the folks who were part of these encampments at the universities, one of the things that would come up over and over again is this sense of finding solidarity, finding something that was more than a personal trajectory of ambition. I derive great joy from that.

But mostly it’s from being around people I love and recognizing what an astounding piece of good fortune it is to be able to spend time on this earth doing that. I remember reading this thing someone once wrote about their creative writing professor telling them that if they really, really thought deeply enough about the act of going to the supermarket and buying groceries, they would turn into a puddle. They would be overwhelmed by the grandeur of that.

As vicious as we so often are to one another, it’s an incredibly astounding thing to be in the world and to have this experience. I try to remind myself of that every now and then.

If you enjoyed this interview with Omar, you might also like this one with Lidia Yuknavitch:

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I was in Victoria Redel’s fiction workshop during my final semester of Columbia and she quickly became not only my favorite professor but one of my favorite people on the planet. She’s deliciously smart, kind, insightful, funny (really funny!), thoughtful (soooo thoughtful), and she inspired me to see and hear my writing in important new ways. On top of that, she’s a supersonically gifted writer.

So, of course, I greedily devoured Victoria’s latest book, I Am You. It’s a glorious queer period piece set in 17th century Amsterdam. Victoria conjures both the private and professional life of renowned painter Maria van Oosterwijck and her assistant, a talented painter in her own right, Gerta Pieters. Greta first appears in the Oosterwijck household, hair lopped off, as a seven-year-old boy servant because that’s what the family requires. But as a teenage Maria relentlessly paints Pieters at chores around the house, she uncovers Gerta’s secret and, years later, demands Greta accompanies her to Amsterdam as her maid and then her paint preparer and assistant. By turns intimate and competitive, together the two women take on the male-dominated, elitist art world of the Dutch Golden Age.

By training, Victoria is a poet and that exquisite precision and lush language spills over into her prose. It’s transportive. And each of her books unique to the last. She’s published four books of poetry and six works of fiction. Her first (gorgeous!) novel, Loverboy, was turned into a feature film by Kevin Bacon. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and O, amongst others. She’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts and is a professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York and Utah, where she’s taken up riding horses.

I always love speaking with Victoria, the way she sees the world fascinates me. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation, as well. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

xJane

⭐️ Victoria is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of I Am You! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “YOU” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, October 27th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the contiguous 48) ⭐️

Your novel is based on two women painters from the 1600s in Amsterdam about whom very little is known—so you conjured their stories. What drew you to these women?

This may actually harken back to when you were at Columbia, Jane. It was around 2000 and I went into a store on the Lower East Side called Kramer Pigments which was filled with beautiful jars of raw pigment. I walked out having signed up for a class in traditional paint making with the idea that I wanted to write a novel about paint and pigment. I wound up reading everything I could about paint, the paint trade, and eventually started writing. this It was going to be a novel called The Dye Merchant’s Daughter. I wrote about sixty pages. Here is why it connects to Columbia-- the magazine published what was going to be the first chapter. As much as I liked that chapter, I could not find the book, and I abandoned it.

Then in 2019, lived in Amsterdam for a little bit to use the astonishing library at the Rijksmuseum (Go there. Drum up a reason to use the library!). While I was there, I read Russell Shorto’s book, Amsterdam. and stumbled upon a sentence that essentially says, “much is not known about the painter Maria Oosterwijck.” I didn’t think much of it other than in the heralding of another forgotten women artists.

There are about seven details that are “known” about her life. One of them is that a servant, Gerta Pieters, was brought into Maria’s father’s family, and then became her paint preparer, her assistant, and they lived in her home workshop together for twenty years. Another claimed fact is that when Maria passed away, they were no longer living under the same roof or in the same city. I became interested because it raised many questions, starting with an essential question: what are these facts based on. Who created these “facts.

For example, it claimed that Maria van Oostervijck never married because she was so devout, and her devotion is proved by the religious iconography in her paintings…well, that struck me as ridiculous since all of the still-life painters and vanitas painters’ work is filled with religious iconography. It was as if it could only be imagined that a woman wouldn’t have married because she was devout.

As I went each day to write in the library, walking through the streets of Amsterdam, along the same canals that Maria and Gerta walked I became more and more curious. Who were these two women who were never married, who were these women painters, what was their life together? Suddenly, here, years later, was the paint book. It was Gerta’s story to tell.

I love that! What was the process like to conjure these lives of people who really did live knowing that you were undoubtedly getting at least some of it wrong?

I felt very free to invent and imagine these two artists into being. If Maria and Gerta could come back and talk to me, maybe I’ve gotten everything wrong. But maybe so did people who wrote the seven facts about them. I could have taken these two women and changed their names to other Dutch names. But I chose not to. I was interested in writing a novel about identity, transformation and the making of an artist’s life and consciousness. I chose to play with what is the nature of truth, and what is the nature of history. There are moments inside the book where Gerta nods to the idea that there will be a future in which the biography of Maria Oostervijck is known. That was winking on my part—because while her work was well sold in her time, she’s obscure now. In fact, the Rijksmuseum, when I was there in 2019, only had a painting of her, but not by her. It is only in 2025 that the Rijksmuseum now owns a painting by Maria Oostervijck. So, I felt total freedom.

That was how I actually wrote the question! Did you feel the weight of it, or was it freeing?

I felt the weight to get the sensory experience of Amsterdam correct. And thus, to get the sensory experience of what it was to be alive in a body correct. To put on the clothes that they wore, to eat the food in the manner that they ate their food. I wanted that as historically correct as I could manage. But the details and the events of their lives, I felt free. Because, finally, this is a novel about a relationship between two women and not an invented biography.

Did you ever feel like they were with you?

Yes. And I miss them now that I’m done writing the book. A good portion of my day was spent in the 1600s with these women, since the book is so tightly bound to them. Gerta’s in every scene; Maria’s not in every scene, but pretty close. I came to love them with all of their flagrant difficulties, with all of Maria’s entitlements and ambitions and, cruelties even.

Did you feel like they were guiding you? That they were sharing their story in some way?

That’s a great question. I am pausing because I don’t know the answer to that. In some way, the larger question of what it was to be a woman in the mid-1600s guided me. I wanted them to have full and complicated lives, as I believe women have had in every century. The more I went into the 1600s, the more I bumped up to what it is to be a woman in the 21st century with “modern” concerns. Without tipping too much, they encounter laws on homosexuality and abortion. Women were excluded from the painter’s Guild While there is no Guild currently, the question of how many prominent shows there are of women in any given year is something people currently track.

Among its many subjects, it’s a story of class. Gerta guided me. I’ve said already that it was instantly clear that she’d tell the story and have the primary agency. Gerta’s life changes most radically in the novel. It’s a story of a servant and, for want of a better word, a master. Or an assistant and a master. But it also asks what happens when those lines wobble or change. In the writing I needed to embody what it was to be a maid, to have that level of intimacy with another person’s body. And what is that intimacy? The lives they lived made me wonder about what are the lines of intimacy when you wash another person’s body, when you dress another person every single day, when you throw out their bodily waste, when you caretake them and their disability? And then being lovers seems like hardly a large leap to make.

It’s a beautifully intimate novel in so many ways. One of the intimacies is both these women’s relationship to painting. I think you’re still painting. I know you took it up many years ago.

I’m still painting--although that feels like the most ridiculous thing to say. I mostly screw around with paint a bit. I studied it in college and foolishly was an art major. Meaning foolishly I imagined a skill that I don’t think I have. But when I started to work on the novel, I tried to paint again, mostly, to have a chance to move my hand the way they did and have the physical relationship to paint and drawing.

That’s lovely. Gerta talks about painting as being a spiritual process. Does that resonate with you with painting or writing.

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As promised, here’s Part Two of my conversation with Liz Gilbert. It picks up exactly where we left off, so if you need a review of Part One or haven’t yet read it, you can check it out here.

Next week I’ll be sharing Craft Advice from Liz. It’s pretty spectacular!

I loved this talk with Liz. Let me know what you think in the comments!

xJane

I love when someone in the rooms says to you, “Are you still waiting for someone to change so you can be okay?” And later, you write, “I have finally learned I cannot be abandoned by anybody, I can only abandon myself.” I feel like that’s the key to health. When I woke up to the truth of that, I was in part terrified. It felt like a lot of weight to carry. But in part, I was so liberated, I was so excited, I felt so much lighter. I don't normally put myself into these interviews, but I saw myself in this book so much.

Well, you also have a deep personal connection to this story!

What are your experiences of that sort of awakening?

I saw my favorite teacher, Byron Katie, working with a woman in her fifties whose husband had left her for somebody else, and she was in a deep fugue state of betrayal and victimization and innocence. And a feeling of having been abandoned.

Katie, who doesn't fuck around, said, “Adults cannot be abandoned. Only children can be abandoned. Adults can only abandon themselves.”

I watched as she kept working with this woman, and this woman was gradually waking up to, “Oh my god, I betrayed me. This guy's been cheating on me for seven years and I've been doing his laundry. I've betrayed me by thinking that I'm powerless and can't take care of myself, and buying that story as a truth, and staying in a relationship where I wasn't being treated well because somebody else was paying the bills.”

I love that concept. Any time that I feel that somebody has abandoned me, it is 100% certain that I have abandoned me. And it is 100% certain that there's somebody inside of me, the original wounded child who was oftentimes abandoned and betrayed and neglected as a kid, who needs me to pick her up and say, “I have got you and I have an amends to make to you. I'm sorry I once again put you in somebody else’s hands, setting us up to experience this abandonment wound again.”

When I first came into the rooms of recovery, and I heard people talking about how, especially with love addiction and codependency, the solution is that you have to take complete responsibility for yourself, I was furious. I felt like having a tantrum. I was like, “I've been taking care of everybody, somebody take care of me.”

But the reality is that it's not anybody else's job to steward my soul through its journey in life. I was bequeathed this soul. I matched my body to this spirit. And I like to think that it was because something in the universe believed that I could accept that stewardship. Once I stopped having a tantrum and stopped going into fits of resentment about all the people who were supposed to take care of me who didn't, because every single person I have ever been with who I thought was going to take care of me, I ended up taking care of 100% of the time—the thing that is so distorted is I'm on record as being somebody who's very good at taking care of a human being, why do I refuse to take care of myself?—once I picked up that responsibility and made it my own, depression went away, and anxiety went away, and shame went away, and terror went away, and I can sleep through the night now, and I'm not on any medications. It's like, “Oh, all I had to do was take responsibility for myself, and all of this stuff would drop away and I would be alright. I thought I had to find somebody who was going do that for me.”

Standing up to your bully, which in that moment manifested as Rayya, and the profound realization that you are responsible for yourself feel part of the same piece. Does that feel true to you?

Yes. The great cosmic relationship with Rayya was that she, more than anyone, constantly said to me, “I will not rest until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance of your life.” What I find so remarkable about the emotional state that I'm in now, and my relationship with her now, is that I can't really feel her anymore as being present. She was so vividly present after she died. She died, but she didn't leave. She was really there, and I was really leaning on her, the same way that I always did. As I've gotten healthier and healthier and learned how to stand on my own two feet, I can't access that anymore. And I realized, “Oh, she literally said ‘I won't rest until I see you standing on your own two feet.’” I'm standing on my own two feet, she must finally be able to rest.

Oh, that's beautiful!

And now I want her to rest.

Rayya was a gifted musician with a glorious voice. In the weeks before she died, in a vision she experienced herself as music. And once she dies, you want her to become music. Do you feel her as music now. Is that rest for Rayya?

I went to a medium after she died, and through the medium, Rayya said, “I have become music.” Music was what she loved the most, and music was also what she abandoned the most whenever she looked for other things in the world to satisfy her. It’s like music was given to her as medicine, but she often didn't take that medicine. She went looking for other kinds of medicine instead, and they never did what music did for her. I think maybe she didn't quite have the security to believe that the music was enough to carry her through this journey, so she wanted more of other things. Maybe that's projecting. I was about to ask her, but I can't feel her, so I don't know. I’ve got to work this one out myself.

I did an ayahuasca journey after she died, where I saw her as music. I was struggling with something, and I kept asking for her advice, “tell me how to deal with this person.” I felt her come to me, and she said, “I could tell you what to do, or can I just show you what I am now?” And I was like, “Well, I kind of want you to tell me what to do. But I also kind of want to see what you are.” In the journey space, I said, “Yes, go ahead.” Then she arrived as this dancing teal-blue line of light that was rhythmic and moving, and that I understood to be the visualization of music, and that's what she had become.

I don't think I was bothering her at the time, but now I do feel that I might be. And I have been given guidance from my higher power to leave her alone and let her be music. It's the most healing thing in the universe that her soul could be. And I’ve got my own work to do.

I love that. You’re a sex and love addict and have done a lot of healing work around this. You have daily check-ins with you sponsor and attend regular meetings. Plus, all your at-home grounding and healing protocols. With my health challenges, much of my day is likewise devoted to healing. Is this ever exhausting for you? Does it verge on becoming another addiction?

It's not the worst thing to be addicted to. I've heard other people say that. An addiction is something that consumes your entire life and all your resources and makes you sick and cuts you off from the source of life itself. An addiction is a spiritual illness. I think it’s good to keep that definition in mind.

That’s helpful.

Read more

Anyone familiar with knows something about her potent, dreamlike love story with Rayya Elias. Back in 2000, Rayya, a cocaine and heroin addict in recovery, cuts Liz’s hair, over time a friendship grows, then Rayya’s life bottoms out and Liz suggests Rayya leave New York City and come live in the small magical converted church she’s bought in New Jersey, which Rayya does, Liz and Rayya become supersonic, go-everywhere-together (including Liz’s book tours in place of her husband) best friends, in 2016 Rayya’s diagnosed with incurable cancer, Liz owns up to being deeply in love with Rayya to which Rayya responds, “my beautiful baby, why did it take you so long to come to me?”, Liz leaves her husband and she and Rayya share a year and a half together, a year more than the doctors promised, and then Rayya dies.

All of that is beautifully and tenderly and devotedly rendered in Liz’s new memoir, All The Way To The River: Love, Loss, and Liberation. Their love, their playfulness, their messiness, their friendship, their passion, their vulnerability leaps off the page.

What’s also in the memoir, is that when the pain from Rayya’s cancer becomes unbearable, the doctors start her on morphine, despite Rayya’s history with opioid addiction. She’s dying, they think. She won’t relapse now.

“Let the dragon roll one more time,” Rayya says when she pops her first morphine pill. And roll it did. What follows is harrowing and brutal and, at times, hard to read. Liz lays herself bare with such candor in these pages. With Rayya’s blessing, she does the same with her beloved. She turns their relationship inside out with empathy, tenderness, and precision: it’s like watching a treasured timepiece be taken apart and reassembled. In the end, Liz recognizes she too is an addict, for her it’s sex and love, and codependency. After Rayya’s death, she starts on her own path of recovery, which continues today.

This book was especially meaningful for me as I knew Rayya back in the day. We met when I was nineteen; she was the best friend of my boyfriend-then-husband and our lives became inextricably tangled for decades. These were the years that Rayya was deep in her addiction; it was not an easy time and whilst Rayya and I tried to find peace with one another, we also fought a tremendous amount. After her gorgeous memoir, Harley Loco, was published we found one another again and did, at last, reach a place of tenderness and understanding. Life is full of surprises!

Once more, Liz and I got on such a roll it was impossible to fit all of Liz’s wisdom and humor and beauty in one post so I’ve split it into two. You’re reading Part I. Part II will post tomorrow.

Of course, I loved speaking with Liz. Her warmth radiates through every word. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

xJane

⭐️ Liz is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of All The Way To The River! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “RIVER” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, September 15th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

You captured Rayya so beautifully on the page. She was exactly the Rayya I knew, but for the first portion of the book, she’s in a happier, more vibrant time in her life. You gave me such a gift allowing me to spend time with her in this place.

Not a lot of people have read this book yet, and it's incredibly meaningful for me to hear somebody who knew Rayya before I knew Rayya, and who knew a Rayya that I had never met. During the time we were friends and then the sunny part of our love story, that Rayya was a myth: the unleashed, full junkie, enforcer, narcissist, all of it, I never saw that in her. But you did. You had to tussle with that, and wrestle against that being. And I ultimately did as well. This is not at all what I wanted to do, and I'm sure it wasn't what you wanted to do either. She was an incredible challenger.

But to hear that you recognized the person in the book as the person who you knew, is so touching to me. One of the things that made it take so long for me to write this book was a deep creative and spiritual doubt as to whether I could get Rayya described. She’s not a freaking simple person to describe, full of contradictions, full of extreme paradox. So it means a lot to me to hear you say, “Yes, that's Rayya. I recognize that person.”

Liz, like, really-really recognize her. I guess her soul, her essence, was unchanged and you captured that.

The first time we talked about my relationship with Rayya the conversation tilted toward the difficulties of Rayya, but there were difficulties to me, too. I was very controlling. I thought I could control my husband into not getting as far along the path as Rayya. So I don't think I was the easiest person for Rayya, because I was increasingly saying “no.”

You were doing what I was doing: you were trying to control an uncontrollable force.

Totally.

When you do that, when I do that, when any of us do that, it does not bring out the better angels of our nature. It doesn't go well for us and it doesn't go well for anybody else. It takes us far away from our true essential nature. That's what addiction does, too. It takes people from their true essential nature and brings us into these hell realms.

At the time, I did think I was having a good influence on my husband, because he didn't end up on the streets. He didn't end up shooting heroin. Et cetera. But I look back and realize that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

I have a feeling when we all meet up in the boardroom for the afterlife review, there's going to be nothing but laughter. One of the things that we're going be rolling on the floor laughing at is what we thought we were controlling, what we thought we were influencing, who we thought we were helping, who we thought we were saving; all this absolutely distorted, outsized, deeply-egoic-disguised-as-empathic sense of our own power over others in the world.

Yes!

Realizing: Oh, Lord, I literally was powerless over everybody. And I was burning this enormous amount of energy trying to flex some sort of power that I never ever had when I could have been doing so many other things: I could have been loving someone, I could have been creating something, I could have been sitting drinking tea looking at the wind move through the tree boughs. I could have been hanging out with an animal. I could have been cooking a meal.

Instead, I was taking a force I do not possess to try to influence a force that could not be controlled What a colossally ridiculous way to spend my life.

And colossally exhausting.

Yes! No wonder we're all so tired!

A pivotal moment in the story of you and Rayya comes when Rayya became your bully. There was a way you kind of were idolizing Rayya and then, for a stretch, Rayya became abusive. The person that you thought was your protector became the person that you had to protect yourself from. And stand up to.

I’ve had a parallel situation in my life, from god to bully, and after standing up to them fully, including being willing to walk away, I became a completely different person. I think that's true of you, yes?

Yes. The only language I would change in what you said was “you kind of idolized Rayya.” Like, I 100% idolized Rayya, and I completely made her into my higher power. It's an incredibly dangerous thing to do to yourself and to somebody else, to pedestalize them like that. When you make somebody into your god if they don't have enough wellness to say, “I'm absolutely not going to allow you to do this,” then they become your god.

Rayya allowed me to do it, because it was beneficial for her ego, and she liked it. She started off as a benevolent god, and then became a wrathful one. Then I had to find my real god. I had to find a higher power higher than Rayya within myself to take my power back that I had given away.

Another reason it took me so long to write this book, long for me, is that it took such a long time to figure out what happened. It’s like that F. Scott Fitzgerald line, “At first slowly, then quickly.” This is how I get into dysfunction: slowly and then quickly. Our love story built slowly, and then our dysfunction escalated quickly. And then she died. And I was like, “What just happened to my actual life? Two years ago, I was a happily married woman living an exemplary life; everything was well in my world—and the bottom just dropped out.”

Oftentimes, when we find ourselves saying things like, “the bottom fell out of my life,” or “there was no more ground underneath my feet,” there's such a passivity and a victimization that’s built into that language. If I had written the book about me and Rayya right after she died, it would have been that story: “I was a nice person, standing here innocently, being good, and then, for reasons I'll never know, the ground dropped out from underneath my feet, and I was in a void over a hell realm. How sad for me.”

I’m so glad I didn't write the book after she died. I'm so glad that I spent the years after she died in recovery doing a deep forensic dive over what was my role in the fact that the ground dropped out underneath my feet. And I would say that my primary contribution to that was making somebody into my god. I lost the ground under my feet long before she picked up cocaine. I always say I started using before she did. I started using my drug of turning somebody into a deity before she started using her drug of cocaine.

This book, as much as I am humanly capable of seeing truth, is my best effort to keep the focus on “What did you do, Liz? How did your insanity and your unhealed trauma and your ego cocreate this whole story?” That’s where my healing is. It's not going be in, “What did she do?”

In that moment when Rayya shifted from your best friend, your lover, your god, and is now your bully and you have to confront her, what fears and strengths did you take into that?

Read more

Anna Malaika Tubbs has written two of the most beautiful, potent, brilliant, lyrical, thoughtful, piercing, deeply researched, mind-heart-and-spirit-expanding, soul-nourishing books on what it’s like to live in the American patriarchy that I have ever read. I encourage every person reading this to dash out now and pick up copies!

Her first book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, delves deeply into the extraordinary lives of Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin. Heavy with racism, classism, misogyny, and outrageous abuse, it is also a story of tremendous celebration and hope. It quickly became a New York Times Bestseller.

Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us, Anna’s most recent book, explores the patriarchy with rigor, curiosity—and tenderness for all those who have been harmed by it. Examining what the Founding Fathers really had in mind when they crafted the Constitution, Anna is less about blame, more about presenting the facts clearly so we can get ourselves into a true democracy. She interweaves stories of her own life with extensive academic research. The writing is exquisite. The breadth and depth of insight into the makings of our country right through to our current circumstances is staggering. Once again, amidst the sorrow, horror, and injustice, there is tremendous celebration and hope. And this time, her book became an instant New York Times Bestseller.

Anna grew up around the world: Dubai, Mexico, Sweden, Estonia, Azerbaijan, and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, and The Guardian, amongst others.

She lives in California with her husband and three young children.

I think you will enjoy this conversation. Let me know what you think in the comments!

xJane

⭐️ Anna is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Erased! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “ERASED” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, August 25th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

For readers who aren’t yet familiar with your work can you define American Patriarchy?

Of course! I wanted to specify American patriarchy, because I know patriarchy exists across the world. But I do think that it shows up differently depending on who the founders of that nation were, the documents that rule our lives, and how we socialize with each other.

American patriarchy is all about what our Founding Fathers envisioned when they won the Revolutionary War: they wanted to maintain power in their own hands. So they define men in the Constitution as those who can vote, those who can own land, those who can represent themselves without anyone having to speak for them, as well as those who pass on their legacy and their status to their children. They define women as the ones whose role is to reproduce the power of men through children.

Based off that definition, we see in American patriarchy that there is this binary set up where men are given access to power, resources, control, and that women are simply supposed to listen to what they say and follow them; they don't get to have their own identity, and they don't get to participate politically in their nation.

The Founding Fathers clearly were not considering all the different people in our nation in these two groups they identified. They were ignoring men who were enslaved. They were ignoring their indigenous counterparts. They were ignoring anybody who was not binary. They were ignoring even poor white people. When we realize that most of us were not recognized as human beings by our initial social order that is gendered, but is also tied to whiteness and capitalism, then we arrive at what our patriarchy consists of.

You've said that the opposite of patriarchy isn't matriarchy. It's that we all have power. What does that look like?

When we define patriarchy in the way that I'm defining it, we're saying that one group of people has power over another group of people, or all other groups of people. In order to reverse that, you wouldn't say, “Oh, let's just put a different group of people in power.” We would instead say, “Each of us should have access to power in the sense of our voices should be heard, in the sense of we should each be treated as human beings in our nation, and especially a nation that represents itself as a democracy.” The definition of democracy is that power is vested in the people of that nation, and thus far the way our nation has operated has been less democracy, and more patriarchy.

The opposite of American patriarchy is the authentic version of American democracy. Where every person, regardless of demographic information, does have power. They can make decisions for their own bodies and their families. The way in which we see that show up on a national level—because I'm not advocating for complete disarray, and all of us just doing our own thing. Of course, there have to still be rules in place—is that every person's vote would count. You would see the removal of any barriers for people to be able to practice that part of being a citizen in our nation. And we would be thinking of what needs need to be met for people to be treated as human beings in our nation. Would they have access to healthy foods? Would they have access to diapers when babies are born? Would they have access to education? We don't have those things built in to our national system in ways that other nations do. We don't have a baseline that allows people to be treated with dignity. Instead, from the moment they're born, they're thrust into this social hierarchy where they're told, “you're less than” here.

That's sounds like an overhaul of everything. Let's say this really does happen. How long does it take?

I'm a very hopeful person. When I look at American history, we've actually had many moments that feel so unlikely, where everybody's saying, “We're not ready for that. There's no way that could happen.” And then it does. I want to advocate for more of us to approach this with that mentality of “It can just happen!”

We have to make some small shifts. When we recognize American patriarchy being something that is fabricated—It's not the natural order. It's not divine—then we all feel this sense of “Oh, we can create something else.”

In fact, there are many people throughout American history, and our contemporaries, who are choosing to live differently. We don't need it to happen on a national level before each of us can try to create those environments around us, whether that's within our own families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our cities. When we start to see our work, our calling, all of whatever makes us who we are, as part of this mission to create the antithesis of American patriarchy, it feels like you can start right away.

On a national level, how long do I think it would take something like this to happen? The thing is, the United States is so humongous that you do see it in certain cities, you see it in certain communities. When would it be for all of us? It depends on how many of us can be convinced that we have the power to change it. If more people saw our nation the way that I do, which is that it is changeable and we can build a new system just like the Founding Fathers built a system, then I think it could be done within five years. It could just be the policies that shift.

One perfect example is Stacey Abrams saying, “I will turn Georgia into a swing State, at the very least. I'm going to turn it blue.” Now we're at a point where we’re all waiting to see what Georgia does. That was one of those moments that seemed absolutely unreachable.

We're seeing moments like that in Texas right now where our President is aware that all of this could shift that easily. So he's going in and implementing rules so that it cannot shift. We have to have more people in office who feel like the Democrats in Texas do; they're very aware that it's all made up.

I agree! I have a novel out on submission about the unpopular peace movement in London during WWII and one of the characters is focused on just that: so much of our social order, from money to celebrity to who we allow power is completely made up.

It really is. I always talk about the example of Black women in the United States in times of slavery, where by law it was stated that they would not be able to keep their children, that their children were somebody else's property. If you're the person who's being told by law that you're not a human being, and your children—the most precious beings—are not human beings, you're immediately going to have a reaction. That it’s unfair. That it’s not true. That it’s made up. And I need to make up something else. I need to shift this nation to see things through my eyes. I need to make sure that my rights are being respected, and my children's rights are being respected. So you're constantly working towards that.

Had you told someone then, there's going to be a President who is a descendant of a slave, or our First Lady is going to be Black—people would have said, “That's not possible.” So we have to always operate with: This is possible. It is achievable. We've done it before. We can do it again.

Do you ever flag in your beliefs?

Not really. Mainly because of the women that I studied in my first book. I'm a student of history. I am a student of the present, but always rooted in those who came before us. The three mothers that I talk about in that book—Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little—were all born in the late 1890s or early 1900s, and two of them lived up until the late 1990s. What they witnessed throughout their lives were Jim Crow laws, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and many other things. It's hard for me to then say now, “We haven't made progress. We haven't built on what they were able to achieve and what their sons were able to achieve.” You have to always be placed within the history of it, because there's been many times where we could have given up.

You write quite a bit about intuition in both your books. It’s one of the many things patriarchy has done its best to diminish. Can you talk about the role it plays in your life? And how it can be used to dismantle patriarchy?

Absolutely. I am very in touch with my intuition. I do hear myself really well, and I always feel connected to a higher power, to God, to whatever form we believe that this creator shows up as. I feel like I’m being called to do the ideas that are put on my heart and on my mind. I always have felt that if I have something on my heart, it's for a reason, and there's something I'm supposed to do about that.

One of the worst feelings is if you knew in your heart something didn't feel right, you went against that, and then something happened. I have learned from that. I can say to myself, “I knew that wasn't going to be the right decision.” The more you can practice that and trust yourself, the stronger that voice becomes. I'm always trying to protect that as much as possible.

Do you hear a literal voice?

No, it's those moments where I feel the most alive. I have a really good idea and my heart is like, “Oh, you have to do that!” Then I physically can't rest until I do the thing. It's almost haunting me. The idea keeps showing up everywhere.

In your acknowledgments, you thank your ancestors and God. Do you feel comfortable sharing your belief system? If so, does it relate to your intuition?

That's such a good question, Jane, and it's one that I'm working through. I was raised to see all different kinds of religions. My parents, when we lived in different places, took us to mosques and to churches. They wanted us to choose for ourselves; to have the lay of the land and realize that a lot of people lived differently, believed differently.

When I was in high school, I started going to Catholic Mass with a friend of mine, and I was baptized and confirmed. Then I felt like maybe it’s Christianity more largely I’m drawn to. When my mom passed away two and a half years ago, I started to have so many more questions: “Where do I actually think she is?” When people would say to me, “She’s watching you,” I’d be like, “Is she? Or is she reincarnated somewhere? Is her energy always with me?” Because I am her; she birthed me.

I do believe in God, and I believe in the people who came before me. Do I think that they're always watching me? I'm not sure. But I do think that their energy is a part of me. On an almost daily basis, I say thank you to my Creator—I don’t think it’s a gendered being, I don’t think it’s a “him,” by any means—thank you to my ancestors, thank you to my mother, and thank you to my own body, mind, soul. Thank you to the lives that have traveled through me, my three children. Those feel like the divine feminine energies that make me who I am. So I feel connected to something larger, but I don’t think it fits into any particular religion per se. And it’s not passive; there's energy, there's some destiny to it.

That’s so beautiful. I could talk to you for an hour about this!

You're the only person who's ever asked me that. So, thank you.

Going back to the patriarchy, you write about how intuition is one of the things that the patriarchy has hidden. Why would they go after intution?

In order for patriarchy to survive, it relies on all of us to trust it more than we trust ourselves; to trust that the options that it’s offering us are the only options, even if something inside of us is saying something different.

We can think of that from the perspective of somebody who is trans, who knows “these categories don't fit who I am, maybe my being is larger than these two options that I'm being given.” The patriarchy can't have that. Because if we start to listen to ourselves more than what they're offering us, then we start to see it for what it is—which is a fabricated system; which is, maybe we wouldn't have all chosen to set up the nation this way. There were other things we could have decided.

The Founding Fathers were aware that there were other ways to live. A lot of people will say, “Oh, but that was just the time. This is what they did, because that was what they knew.” I disagree completely. They were well aware that other places and other people did things differently. They strategically killed those people and erased those belief systems. By putting children in boarding schools and telling them “you can no longer believe the thing that your ancestors have believed,” that's intentional. That's saying, “I recognize that is a possibility but it's not the one that we're going to choose.”

It's the same as Thomas Jefferson knowing that French women were emancipated, and saying directly, “we're not going to be like the French.” Clear acknowledgment that they could have chosen something differently.

Intuition is the thing that often tells us what is natural, what is divine, and if you listen to it, you're more often than not going to look at a patriarchal system and think it doesn't feel right. It’s going to show up in everything that we do, because from the moment we're born, we need to be trained to be people who don't listen to their intuition, especially in the US. You see it on a level that I did not see in a lot of the other places that I lived, and I think particularly about children.

In the US, we will say things like, “Get them on a schedule. Make sure that they're in their bassinet away from you. Independence is key.” These are the things we prioritize. If you're thinking of prioritizing intuition, which is how I mother, if my child cries, I hold them. I'm not looking at the clock, it doesn't matter what time it is. If my child's hungry, I nurse them. I'm not going say, “Well, my little app tells me that it's fifteen more minutes.” This child only knows intuition. We have been trained in the US—because of capitalism and capitalism is a tool of patriarchy—to prioritize the system. And we're telling our children to do that, too, even newborn babies.

I never thought of a schedule as being part of the patriarchy but when you present like that, it’s clear that it is.

We prioritize the thing that gives us worth. In the United States, it's productivity, it's work. Other nations look at us like, “why do you all care so much about your job?”

Truth. You write that patriarchy has also hidden creativity. What do you see as the role of writers and artists, and creativity in general in helping to dismantle the patriarchy?

Creativity is the beginning of so much else, because it’s our ability to see something that doesn't exist yet. We as writers, as storytellers, can help other people see that thing that we're able to envision and bring them into the work to make that reality. We are allowing people to analyze the world around them differently. Activists are incredibly creative. Parents are incredibly creative.

Of course it’s such an enemy of patriarchy, because patriarchy is a system that relies on us following a structure. When we are creative, we’re going to question, we're going to poke back, and we're going to say, “let's dream differently.”

Like so many, I’m in a near constant state of fury and grief about our country. Through your work, you’re deeply immersed in all this injustice and horror and sorrow. How do you care for yourself?

Such a good question. I think part of it is, the more you study the patriarchy, the more aware you are of how vulnerable it is, how little power it has. A lot of people ask me, “Are you afraid when you talk about these things that somebody will try to silence you?” And no, I don't feel afraid at all. I think maybe because I really am so deeply aware that it’s so made up.

I'm not trying to minimize the pain that American patriarchy causes. I'm not trying to minimize the damage that our current administration is causing. I just believe the path forward lies in this mentality of: we have to do something different. Then, every day, you have to show up differently than it wants you to. You have to be aware of why it so badly wants you to replicate it in all your interactions and all of your relationships, and how you see the world around you—to feel hopeless, to feel defeated, to feel we can't do anything, to feel like we just have to follow.

This is why I filled a book with examples of people who always lived differently, despite what was in their way. If I think about the three mothers in my first book, they still said, “My children are going to live, and they're going to thrive, and they're going to love. I'm going to teach them to be creative and to find joy in their lives,” despite all these sources saying that they don't get to do that.

And grief does teach you: How are you supposed to live life every day? Am I supposed to spend each of my days hopeless and sad and angry? No, I don't believe that.

I believe I'm supposed to find as much love and joy and creativity as possible. That doesn't mean avoiding the pain. It means confronting it straight on and saying, “Can I shift this for my kids? Can I shift this for people I don't even know? Is there some levity that me putting my words out there can bring to somebody else to see the patriarchy as manufactured and breakable and changeable? And that we all are so incredibly filled with power that this system is so afraid of us that it wants to make us feel defeated?”

In terms of actual practices: I go to yoga a lot. I do a lot of journaling, checking in, making sure that I’m processing everything that's happening, because there are also so many great things that happen.

Being with my kids as much as possible; their joy and the way that they see the world is so refreshing. More people need to spend time with children who are completely unaware of all of this ugliness in the world. That is such a blessing.

So much is hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

Definitely my kids. I find all my joy in them.

And I find joy in being aware. Whenever things feel really heavy, you're always going to see examples of people who are changing the way we're doing things. For instance, right now on a national level, our leadership feels horrible. But as a result of that, you're going to see incredible leaders popping up all over the nation. That's something really exciting to pay attention to and to get to know their stories and how they're translating these moments of desperation into, “I'm not going to stay here and let this happen.” We’re going to see some real cool history-makers. Resistance brings me a lot of hope and joy.

For instance, when President Donald Trump was sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, and you saw so many Los Angeles community members say, “We're going to stand together.” That's really hopeful. That's really beautiful. Obviously the whole thing is also horrible and so much pain came from him being here with the National Guard. At the same time, you have that evidence of people saying, “We're going to choose differently.” That makes me feel like I can keep going.

Intertwined hope and joy. I love that.

Yes. I feel like one can't really live without the other.

If you enjoyed this interview with Anna, you might also enjoy this one with Naomi Manaweera:

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changed my life. Back in 2014, deep in the throes of myriad terrifying symptoms from head and brain injury, I wrote about some of what I was living through. Up until that point, I’d only written fiction. But my life had been turned upside down and trusted friends thought it would help to get some of it on the page. So I did.

Jen was behind The Manifest-Station then, a glorious online magazine about being human that published so many authors I admired. To me, she was a rockstar. I nervously sent my first ever personal essay and was bowled over when Jen accepted it. We quickly became friends. A few months later, she published a second essay. After that, I started writing for O, The Oprah Magazine, The Sun Magazine, and many others. Without Jen’s support, I’m not sure any of that would have happened. She was also my very first interview for Beyond. So clearly she has a special, radiant place in my heart.

I’m not the only heart that has Jen deeply embedded in it. She’s touched—and helped—so many of us. She leads life-changing retreats in Italy and France (always with a scholarship for a woman who has lost a child) as well as various workshops around America and online. When Covid started, Jen fundraised well over $100,000 for people who were suddenly unable to put food on the table or pay the utilities.

Her bestselling memoir On Being Human uses humor, astounding honesty, and love to inspire the reader to wake up to life. Her new book Proof of Life deepens this journey, encouraging us to consider what we truly want our life to feel like — and to then move toward that. Anne Lamott wrote a blurb for it: “Jennifer Pastiloff’s writing never fails to amaze me, with its depth of honesty and wisdom, and that great sense of humor. I’m a huge fan.” Me, too!

Jen has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, Health Magazine, CBS News and more. She did a wonderful TED Talk. And she’s working her magic here on Substack with . She lives in Southern California with her son, the extraordinary Charlie Mel!

Enjoy!

xJane

⭐️ Jen is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Proof of Life! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “PROOF” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, July 21st and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

I want to start by talking about crying. I know for a long time you couldn’t. But it sounds like you are again! Yay! Can you share what it was like to lose that ability, why it was so important to you to get it back, and how you got it back?

I stopped crying when I was eight years old and my dad died. I thought I killed him. Which I didn’t. He told me I was being bad and making him not feel good. I said, “I hate you.” And he drops dead. Well, guess what? As an eight-year-old, I think it’s my fault. So my whole entire life I believed I’m bad. It hurts my heart now.

My dad was my best friend, my person. I wanted to die when he died. So what I did was, I said, “I don’t care.” I would chant, “Be strong.” It became a physiological response. Even now when I cry, my body starts to fight itself. I believed I was bypassing grief by being “strong.” It did work for a while—until it didn’t.

How did you get back your ability to cry?

I would purposely watch This Is Us, that’s why I have such a special thing for that show, the dad stuff, and that would make me cry. Or Terms of Endearment would make me cry. But with my own life, because after so many years of having this armor, and this “I will not feel”—I could not access my feelings. I felt I was dead inside. Which I wasn’t. Antidepressants allowed me access to more freedom in terms of not believing my bullshit stories as much. Not ruminating. Seeing a glimmer of possibility.

But I still couldn’t allow myself tenderness or intimacy, until my son turned eight. That was the first time I’ve ever seen myself with any softness. Ever. Ever. Ever. I was 49 when he turned eight. I was like, “Oh my God, that was me.” It’s like in my mind I was 40 when my dad died. I saw this little boy and the floodgates opened.

I’m really happy for you, Jen; I feel like it’s a sign of health—emotional and physical.

I agree. Because energy doesn’t die. Who did I think I was fooling? Myself? The universe? All that stuff I shoved back in, it was going to emerge or affect me my whole life until it found its way out.

Are you grinding your jaw any less now that you’re crying?

No, that’s funny you say that, because I have another tooth that’s broken. I constantly say to people, “let me be a cautionary tale of not expressing your grief. Let it out!”

I clenched my jaw when I was eight with “Be strong,” and I did not unclench. I see myself in videos and I’m incessantly clenching my jaw, and it breaks my heart. I have no idea I'm doing it. I've ruined my teeth and have migraines. The dental assistant, she's so sweet, she's like, “You just have to try to not stress before bed.” And bless her, I wish it was that simple.

That’s so hard, Jen. So much of your beautiful book is a celebration: of self, friendships, family, creativity, love, the world, adventure.

That really makes me happy! Growing up, because I was so serious, the thing I heard the most was: “You need to smile.” So hearing what you just said, it's hard for me to take it in. But I love that because I always say we're not set in stone.

You encourage us to “be willing to let go of the belief that life is something to be tolerated” and instead to consider “What am I not allowing myself to have?” I love this! But things are so hard right now it can be tricky to break out of the mindset of just getting by, just tolerating.

You're right. I was playing with the idea of calling this book You Get to Have This because that was a really profound thing for me. After I bought my house, I was happy and a voice said, “You don't get to be happy.” And I answered — “I know.” But the great thing was I caught myself, and I was like, “Oh, hell no, motherfucker, I do.”

I wrote on a sticky note, “I get to have this” as a reminder. “This” meaning happiness. Because my birthright is not stress — neither is yours. Or anyone reading this.

Life's always going to be hard. Is it nastier and uglier at the moment? Hell yes. It does feel like darkness is more prominent, which is why I love that you brought up the word “celebrate.” We need to do more of that. We need to double down on love and our I Got You People and showing up for each other. We have to consider “Now what?” Your “now what” is going to be different than the person next to you, than me. Your “now what” is, “I'm going to go marching in the street.” Someone else’s is, “I’m going to be kind to a stranger today.” Maybe that sounds like Pollyanna, but if we give in to “that's just the way it is,” we might as well throw in the towel.

Yes, it's shitty out there. Things are terrible. Un-fucking-thinkable things are happening. So it's like, “What can I do?”

You are responsible for so much. I didn’t realize you were the main breadwinner in your family. You have a child. You have your own very challenging health needs. You do so much to help people — including fundraising, often for strangers.

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I can’t remember when I first became aware of ’s remarkable writing on war but once I did, I devoured everything she wrote. My parents grew up on London during WWII and, in turn, I grew up with war in my blood. Karie’s level-headed presentation of the cost of war not only on the soldiers but also the spouses, who all too often become caregivers, the family, friends, and the country went straight into the marrow of my bones. She told the truth — with empathy and eyes-wide-open clarity and gentleness and thoroughness and a longing for all of this war madness to change.

Karie’s new memoir Alive Day is astoundingly beautiful. In it, Karie guides us through a childhood of abuse into a loving but complicated marriage to her grade-school sweetheart, Cleve, who joins the Marines and is soon enough deployed to Iraq. Within months, his Humvee is hit by an IED and Cleve is flown to Walter Reed with a serious leg injury. The doctors try to save it, putting Karie, barely in her twenties, in charge of some gruesome and grueling care but in the end, it needs to be amputated. Given pills for pain, Cleve quickly becomes addicted and Karie, realizing he’s also dulling PTSD, tries in vain to convince both doctors and loved ones he needs help. By twenty-four, Karie is a military widow.

Alive Day has garnered a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was selected for Book of the Month. Karie’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. She holds a BA in creative writing from the University of South Alabama and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Oregon State University. She lives in Alabama with her daughter.

It was such a pleasure to speak with Karie. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

xJane

⭐️ Karie is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Alive Day! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “ALIVE” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, May 19th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

Your book really drives home the fact that the majority of soldiers and their partners, who often end up as caregivers, are young: early twenties. You frequently refer to yourself and those around you as “just kids.” And you write: “I know now that Cleve’s death, and every casualty of any war is anticipated. Everything from widow stipends to prosthetic legs is part of a very large budget. And people like me and my husband—poor, uneducated, young—are chosen by recruiters who seek out the economically disadvantaged, knowing that those kids are more likely to enlist and stand on the front lines during wartime. Cleve and I were chosen, and we played our parts.” This is both heartbreaking and infuriating. Can you talk more about how it’s kids who are fighting our wars and kids who are acting as caretakers to the wounded soldiers who make it home and kids who are war widows and kids who are single parents?

When you look at how the military is structured, and you look at officers, those are usually people who have an education, which means they're probably a little bit older. The kids who are fresh out of high school, who don't have any college under their belt, they don't really have any skill set for the labor force—they end up the grunts, they're the infantry, which means they're going to be the ones on the ground in the thick of it if we're at war. Obviously, there are people of all ages that end up wounded and dying. But when we were in the hospital, the vast majority of the people who were there were our age—and we were twenty and twenty-one.

It’s mind boggling to think the age of enlistment in the military is seventeen! What's the age when our brains are fully formed?

Twenty-four. The year I was widowed. I thought about that a lot when I was writing the book, too. Because as it was all happening, I had a lot of guilt about the way I was handling some of the things in real time. I had a lot of anger. I was depressed. Acting out at certain times, and not living up to my values, if you will. So I really beat myself up about it.

Later, when I was revisiting all this stuff, I was thinking I was so young. Most of that happened before my brain was fully developed. Then the year that supposedly it was happening—I buried my husband. And that’s so common.

There was no rule book. I really didn't have much of a support system in the form of family. So I was just winging it. Things were coming at me—I was like, “I'm going to do this, and we'll see if that works.”

I finally made peace with knowing I handled everything the best that I could.

One of the other things that struck me was the way it was almost mandated that your life fold completely into Cleve’s and into the demands put on you by the military, especially when Cleve came home injured. You had to set aside your dreams to take on this role of caregiver, which carries so so so much responsibility. You write: “I understand now that the military relies on young spouses like me as cheap—sometimes free—labor. Military brass knows what to say to make young women think their labor is their duty.”

At that time, they weren't paying caregivers anything. A nonprofit would give us checks every once in a while to fill that gap. Eventually the military—I want to say a few years after that—finally got with the program and decided they should be paying these women for their labor. But at the beginning, the caregivers were guinea pigs.

How did you cope with that? I don't think they gave you any training or anything, right? They didn't say, “this is how you care for your seriously injured husband.”

They handed me a pamphlet at one point about PTSD. A general like, “Look out for these things,” but it was under the context of his care. It wasn't talking about how it could affect me. Later in the book one of the nurses says, “Oh, you could have secondary PTSD.” Looking back I think I just had PTSD. But secondary PTSD is a thing. It’s caregiver burnout. A lot of caregivers do experience that. They weren’t talking about it beforehand.

I was being told this is my responsibility to take care of him, these are the things that we want you to do. I felt overwhelmed by it, it felt like failing. I had no understanding of what was going on with me mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. Now I have a much better understanding of things like PTSD, depression, anxiety, because I’ve done the research and had therapy. Back then it was just like, “there's something wrong with me. I should be stronger than this.” It’s a lot of whipping yourself.

Your body must have been in overdrive, because you were in a state of constant worry, constant hyper-vigilance. Were you sleeping? Were you able to rest? Were you able to calm and care for yourself? Or were you focused on Cleve all the time?

Because of the way I grew up, I was used to being in a hyper-vigilant state. So in some ways it was perfect for me, because I almost thrive on that high that you get when there's an emergency. I say thrive... it feels like I'm thriving, but it's really spending every ounce of energy at once and then feeling very exhausted later. But when there's an emergency, I'm like, “okay, this is what we need to do.” I go into action mode. So I was depending on that a lot.

I was depending on a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms, like overeating. I was drinking too much. I took Cleve’s pills every once in a while. And I poured myself into this idea that my purpose was to be his caregiver, and even if I burnt myself completely out doing it, it was worth it.

There was a point I was on sleeping pills because I was starting to have nightmares and staying up at night. Cleve had sleep apnea due to some of his injuries so he snored really loud and would wake up kicking the air with weird dreams. So I was not sleeping very well. And I was eating a lot of junk food. Smoking a lot of cigarettes.

Do you have different care mechanisms now?

I do. How good I am at practicing them depends on how things are going on in my life. Working out regularly is huge. Meditation can be huge, even though it’s difficult for me to get into that. When I do it daily, it’s almost miraculous how much of a change I see with my anxiety. Talk therapy.

I'm on medication now, which is something that I avoided for a long time. I didn’t start until my daughter was born. She’s four now. I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t truly better or healthy if I had to take meds. Like, I needed to figure it out some other way.

But I was a roller coaster. I would have a period of time where I was doing pretty well, and then I would get overwhelmed and fall back into those bad habits that I mentioned. Medication doesn’t solve everything. Having healthy practices in your daily life is also important. But it made me realize how high-strung I had been. I didn’t truly realize how bad my anxiety was until I took a med. I was like, “oh, this is really nice.”

You slowly discover you’re carrying your own trauma from things that pre-date your marriage but also the experiences of being married to first an active and then seriously injured soldier. You write, “I didn’t want people to think I was taking attention away from Cleve. He was the one who had gone to war. Anything I was going through, comparatively, felt silly. I wonder now what about my PTSD was “secondary.”” Can you talk about your journey toward understanding you were also dealing with trauma?

It took me way too long. Especially considering all the therapists I’d talked to along the way. I was thirty, maybe. When I was taking care of Cleve, I didn’t know much about mental illness. The whole time that I was taking care of my husband, I thought you had to have been at war in order to have PTSD. That was black and white in my mind back then.

When that nurse told me about secondary PTSD, that was the first time I’d ever heard that. It was the first time I’d considered that it could be affecting me too. I did feel very guilty about thinking about accepting that because it felt like I was taking away from what the focus should have been, which was taking care of the war-wounded hero

It was when I was getting a college education and taking sociology, psychology, and having conversations with other people who knew more than me, that I realized maybe I should do more research on this.

Then it hit me, like, I might have been traumatized at six. I’ve been carrying this a long time. After that, a lot of things started to click into place, and that’s when my journey to forgiving myself started. If the trauma for me started at six years old and no one ever told me how to deal with that, I always figured it out on my own, how could I blame myself?

Not to say that I don’t take responsibility for my actions, obviously I do. But I’m able to be a little softer with myself and not be hard on myself for the things that I did, that I don’t love.

Is there a formal practice you have for that?

Writing was huge. I know it’s cliché to talk about memoir and healing. But it is healing. For me anyway. Being able to look at myself in the past and think about that version of me in the form of a character in a book, it turned me into more of a separate being. I was able to look at what was going on a little more objectively, instead of feeling like it was all part of me.

At first, I was like, “I did that. It’s my fault.” But when I looked at myself as this younger person who’d experienced these things, I was like, “This is just a human being trying to figure it out, who went through a bunch of things that she didn’t know how to handle. That person deserves forgiveness.”

When Cleve came back, you got lots of physical medical support but there was nothing offered for mental health. Why do you think, the moment the soldiers are back, the military isn’t immediately providing mental health support for them and their spouses?

They’ve improved a lot over the last ten to fifteen years, especially in those areas like opioids, mental health care, taking PTSD seriously, taking traumatic brain injury seriously. It took people dying, and people talking about it in the news, and people getting angry for them to finally start addressing these things.

Early on, maybe they weren't fully aware. But then I'm like, “this isn't your first war, military.” I don't know how much credit I want to give them.

Do you think it would have made a difference when Cleve came back if there had been readily available mental health care support for the two of you?

Yes! If they were like, “Okay, you get a therapist. And you're going to be on pain meds for a long time so we need to have someone monitoring your usage.” If right out of the gate, I’d had some training to not take his outbursts so personally. I took everything personally, like it was my fault, and that weighed me down pretty quickly. And him, too.

Cleve becomes addicted to pain killers. Doctors told you it was unethical to take him off pain meds altogether. Yet he was clearly taking too many and showing myriad signs of addiction. You often had to fight against what Cleve and the doctors were telling you and listen to your own voice, a voice that had been shut down, that knew Cleve was addicted. What was the process like of learning to trust yourself and your knowings more deeply?

It is really hard, especially when you're dealing with a system like the military that's so big and powerful. They control everything from your paycheck to where you live. It's intimidating. If they're suggesting that one thing is the truth, and continuing to say that, then you start to question yourself. Especially at that age. I’d been around drugs some, but I didn't know what the difference was between addiction and someone who has an infected leg, or the difference between symptoms of addiction and PTSD. A lot of those symptoms are overlapping.

At that young age, being in such a powerful system with all of these people telling me that it's fine, even though my gut knew that something wasn't right, I did not have the self-confidence to assert my truth. I wanted to prove that I was a good caregiver, that I was doing my job well.

I would imagine, it must have been all men you were going up against.

Yes. A few female nurses. But even most of the nurses were men. I did not have any tools for that at all. I did mention my concerns during one of Cleve’s appointments, and was brushed off. I was like, “Okay, maybe I am overreacting.”

Then I would notice things him passing out and his cigarette singeing holes into his pants. And I'm like, “I don't think this is normal.” So I would mention it again, but it kept getting pushed to the side. And again, I didn't have the confidence to march in there and be like, “Fucking do something.”

I don't know how you held it together as much as you did. Because you moved so often growing up, it was difficult for you to form lasting friendships and you often felt alone. Based upon the friendships you depict in this book and your abundant acknowledgements, it seems that’s no longer the case. What role does friendship play in your life?

Huge, huge role in my healing process. When I was younger I thought that people didn't like me. In retrospect, I realize I didn't like myself very much, so I couldn't understand how someone would like me, and that affected the way I interacted with people. I was afraid to talk to people. I was afraid to be myself. I was awkward. I was angry. I was all these things that no one wants to be around.

If I’d not worried so much about whether people liked me, I would have had plenty of friends. I know that is because once I got older and went to college, I wasn't as worried about people liking me, and whether I was weird, and immediately I was like, “Oh, my gosh! People want to talk to me!” I was attracting people that understood me, that were similar to me, and it became almost easy. I think the key is, you have to like yourself.

At first you hate the men who hurt Cleve and want them dead. But over time, you find yourself wondering what their names are, if they have families, what their lives are like. And how many of their loved ones have been hurt or killed. What impact did this humanizing of the enemy have on how you see the world? And how you see yourself?

It's morphed over the years. Back then, I was ignorant about a lot of things, and if I saw something on the news, my parents watched Fox, I assumed it was fact. Certain people were called terrorists and were dehumanized. To me, it was, “they’re trying to kill us, and they're the bad guys.” And that's it.

I didn't really think it through until I had this wounded husband. Once I was in the hospital with Cleve, and getting a little older, and had way too much time to myself, I started thinking about it. And I was like, “there are two sides to this. People are dying over there too.” At the time I didn’t realize how many.

Even then, though, I was just starting to really consider our role in this war. [Karie tears up] Sorry, this actually makes me emotional. The older I get, the more upset I get about the effect it had on Iraq and the civilians there. There was a point where I was writing this book and was like, “I can’t write this anymore. Why does this point of view even matter when we caused that amount of suffering over there?” It’s taken a lot of therapy.

When Cleve was in the hospital, that’s when I started to do more research about who is fighting these wars for us. Who does war benefit? Why are we going to war? What’s the point of doing this? I realized that there are really rich people who make a lot of money off it and those people pay our politicians to make choices in their favor, including going to war. They send recruiters to poor communities like mine, where they know these kids don’t have other opportunities, or they send them to military bases because they know these kids are around the military already and are more likely to join. That’s the strategy behind it. I realized that it's worthy of talking about even if I'm still upset about our role.

I’m glad you are talking about it, Karie. So much is hard right now, where are you finding joy?

It's usually simple things. My boyfriend and I have this little reading club between us.

Oh, I love that.

It's almost always things like sci-fi, or not too serious. Doing that before bed every night is nice. Spending time with people who are important to me, especially ones where I don’t have to worry about looking a certain way, speaking a certain way, and I can totally be myself. Lots of laughing.

Getting outside. Today is beautiful. I had the door open and the air off, and let some sunshine and fresh air come in. And remembering that even when things are hard, there is always something beautiful out there that you could be focusing on. And it's okay to enjoy that, too.

⭐️⭐️Beyond is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. Thank you to everyone who’s joined this beautiful, growing community devoted to bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Beyond cannot exist without you! ⭐️⭐️

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Debbie Millman is a force of brilliance, wit, kindness, vision, creativity, humor, compassion, and, well, green thumbs. A native New Yorker, Debbie earnestly took up gardening in the nineties with a string of apartments scattered throughout the West Village and Chelsea. Things did not go well.

Then Debbie and fell in love and as the pandemic launched Debbie found herself spending extended time in Los Angeles with her soon-to-be-wife and her sunny, largely unplanted garden. Tentatively, Debbie sowed a few vegetables seeds and then a few more and then some flowers. Soon she had a thriving garden. So thriving, in fact, Roxane set about creating delicious recipes from the bounty.

From the abundance and the recipes grew Love Letter to a Garden that tells the journey of Debbie’s childhood in Brooklyn amongst the towering neighborhood trees right through to her current bicoastal gardens and all the wonder therein. And it’s illustrated with Debbie’s magical paintings and drawings based on a lifetime of photographs—a few of which are included below!

Debbie is the host of the fantastic Webby award-winning podcast Design Matters, one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world; Chair of the first-ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, the author of eight books, and currently a Harvard Business School Executive Fellow.

I fell in love with this book and was so happy to be able to chat with Debbie about her relationship to trees, plants, the land, and herself!

⭐️ Debbie is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Love Letter to a Garden! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “LOVE” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, May 5th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

I want to start with trees. They helped raise you. What’s your relationship like with trees these days?

Nobody's ever asked me that question before. I don't know that I would say that I have a relationship with trees, but I am mystified by them. All plants and trees are living beings. They might be living differently than we are, but they are living entities with a vast underground network of roots and relationships that they have with mushrooms and other trees. It's this living labyrinth that I’m endlessly fascinated by.

One of the things that I wonder about is if trees perceive time. There are evergreen trees and deciduous trees, and every year the deciduous trees come back to life. I understand that it's through sunlight and temperature and so forth. But the fact that it all happens at the same time, year after year after year.

And how much trees witness. I think about that quite a bit. Just the fact that they're there witnessing time, people, experiences. Decades, hundreds of years in some cases thousands of years, in others. That they know so much that we don't know that they know.

That gave me the chills when you said, “tree as witness.” I think that's very true. Do you talk to the trees as you're gardening?

No, I don't. In the book, I reference a dear friend named Maria, who taught me a lot about gardening. In front of her apartment building was a really beautiful tree. It overhung the building a little bit, and apparently there were some tenants that were afraid that the tree would blow over and into the building, so the owner had it cut down. I wept projectile tears about that tree, and could never again speak to those particular neighbors in Maria's building that instigated that murder.

That’s heartbreaking. I love the photo of your hands in the earth—or I think they're your hands.

They’re my hands. Roxane took that photograph.

Could talk about what that feels like? Prepping for this, I researched “why does dirt on your hands feel so good?” and discovered there’s bacteria in the earth that triggers a release of serotonin!

I had no idea, Jane.

I didn’t know that either. But it makes sense.

Most people wear gardening gloves, and I do too. But there gets a point in my gardening where they end up getting too dirty, and I take them off. I don’t know why I don’t go bare-handed more often, given how much I love the feeling.

There's something really strong about the soil, and about the ground and the earth. I remember quite a long time ago when I moved to my first apartment in Chelsea and I had a backyard that already had some very established rhododendrons, and somehow or another I managed to kill those too. I had to pull them out of the ground and I felt like I was fighting with nature! They didn’t want to go.

The sensation of the earth on your hands—does it have any kind of calming or invigorating impact on you?

The whole process of gardening has that effect. I don't know if I would deconstruct it in that way, but I do feel that pruning, deadheading and all of the maintenance is joyful to me.

And of course the bounty—the harvesting—which is really, really meaningful. Snipping some tomatoes from the vine, digging up some carrots or potatoes, picking the strawberries out of the patch and popping them into my mouth. That is truly glorious.

You might not be able to answer this with words—but can you describe why that's so meaningful. I know for me, it’s a body feeling.

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As promised, here’s Part II of the interview with Kiese Laymon.

Part II picks up exactly where Part I left off — so if you haven’t yet read Part I, you might want to do so now.

Next week, I’ll be sharing writing advice from Kiese. He’s a master storyteller, so his insight is, of course, brilliant.

Kiese helps me to see the world and my place in it with greater clarity — and with greater hope. I believe you’ll feel the same. Let me know what you think in the comments! ❤️

xJane

It’s so beautiful. I feel like we have more access to that kind of nonverbal communication than we allow ourselves. Do you experience it much in your daily life?

Absolutely, absolutely. With the way I was raised, the laugh does so much. In the book, there’s this one point where the country boys are laughing really hard at New York. And then the text says something like…

I can tell you exactly what the text says, because it's my next question! You write about laughter so much. In Heavy, you have that refrain of “We laughed, and laughed, and laughed until we didn't.” In this book you write, “We tried to make ourselves laugh because laughing was how we worried, how we consented to love, and how we said I’d like you to love me.” Is that the line you were thinking of?

Yes, that’s as true as I can be. Every now and then you write a line and you're like, “Yeah, that one, that’s true.” And that still is true.

Sometimes we just really want to laugh with people. We want our laughs to be affirmed. New York is attractive to the country boys; they want New York to like them, but they also want New York to feel liked. We don’t talk enough about that in humans. We don’t talk enough about that in young people. And we definitely don't talk about that enough in young Black people. And definitely young Black boys.

I wanted to write a book that explored those responsibly loving, nonverbal moments between people when you really want someone to know that you love them, and you really want that person to feel love. But there's no way in the fucking world you would ever say it—like, ever, ever.

So true! You write at the end, “On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in so much laughter. I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable from each other. That would be a lie. We absolutely contrasted. But the sights, tastes, and smells of our contrasts felt like safeness. Not safety. Safeness. And safeness sounded like love.” So potent! Can you speak to the safeness in contrasts?

Growing up, safety in the eighties and nineties was, “Come in early; come in when the streetlights come on; just say no to drugs.” Safety was understood by me as a young person, as finite: “This was safe, this was not safe.”

But the process of experiencing safeness, which to me is so rooted in a communal kind of love, and in the book is rooted in a communal kind of love that also was of the land, and of these Black women who are, among other things, grandmothers, is a process. I don’t know if it has a beginning or end, but I know these characters are caught in it, and in those moments, in that space of safeness, what's going on in the world in terms of empire, what's going on in that chicken plant, which is absolute terror, what’s going on with the way the environment is necessarily shriveling around these kids, it doesn’t matter. Because they’ve had safeness created for them, and they have stepped into it.

We all do that at different times of the day or the month or the year. I wanted to put pictures and words around that. Not this facile understanding of like, “That’s safety. And that’s not.” Okay, safeness exists out here, but are we encouraging enough opportunities for people, particularly vulnerable people, to feel it? Our obsession with accumulating and destroying makes safeness less likely for everyone. Even the motherfuckers who are pushing the button on destruction, there’s no way you can tell me emotively, intellectually, spiritually, those people are occupying safeness in a way that is healthy for them, either.

As a young person growing up in Mississippi, I’m out here watching it from my grandma’s porch, being like, “Man, this is the end of the world; fucking Donald Trump is destroying the world.” And that absolutely feels true. But I’m watching these little kids in these woods that were once blooming, and they’re shriveling. But they’re still finding ways to play games off in the woods. That’s with all this technology happening in their homes that I didn’t have access to.

I’m trying to remind myself that safeness is something that exists, that we are all worthy of. It doesn’t necessarily have to be created. It has to be accepted. I just wanted to show those kids accepting it without having the words.

What role do you feel like nature plays in that?

Everything. My students write these dystopic stories now. On the other side of that are these utopic stories. But in the middle, Foucault had this idea of heterotopic: these spaces that were neither utopic and neither dystopic. They were these spaces where mirrors were, and they were safe but unsafe. So you were looking at yourself, but also looking at a distortion of yourself. The pleasure gained in these heterotopic spaces was unlike anything you could get in a utopic space or anything you could feel in a dystopic space.

For me, when I think about that, I always think about the woods. That’s why a lot of shit happens in the woods. My grandmama’s garden was an extension of the woods for us. Because I was so short and so small, when you get up in that garden, you can’t see out. You can see beans. You can see sunflowers. You see corn. You can see tomatoes. You can see okra. But you can’t see out.

You could hear a railroad, or you could hear people going by on the road in a car. You could hear somebody on a porch. You could hear somebody walking, but for all intents and purposes it was a place of safeness for a lot of us. It was a place where a lot of kids were experimenting. So much of my shit is believing that we need to create more spaces so Black kids can experiment. If they fail at those experiments—whatever we deem failure—we need to make sure that we do not punish them. Period. We need to educate, not punish.

You’re so devoted to helping other people. Loved ones, as you’ve mentioned. But also fellow writers, in particular the upcoming generation. Why is that important to you?

That's such a great question in this conversation, because I believe that wherever we are in this world, we'd be better if people shared what they have with people who don't have it.

It was hard for me to get anything published partially because the industry didn't believe in my talent, and didn't believe that the people I was writing to would buy the books. Once I got writerly respect and access, I felt like you have to share that. It does come with a price. But that's what it's supposed to come with. If I'm reading four books this week and I’ve got to blurb them, that necessarily means I'm not writing my own stuff. But it also might mean that I'm learning a lot about the craft of whatever I'm doing.

At the end of the day, it's not about do you give to people to get something back. I just think like, if I got 250 pieces of cheese, I don’t really need that many cheeses. Know what I'm saying? I'm cool with having 200 pieces of cheese, and if everybody else out there wants some of the cheese I'm not going to sit on it. No, I'm going to give the cheese away. That's one of the ways we can get out of this mess. But capitalism makes it hard for people to want to share.

You keep referencing capitalism and accumulation but what about bigotry and racism and misogyny? Do you see that as a piece of what's happening? Or do you see it as all one?

Absolutely. 100%. But I can't see capitalism outside of the way that in this country, particularly Black people have had to work disproportionately hard for a smaller piece of what they work for. Black people have been disproportionately punished, disproportionately disciplined. All of the things the Americans say they want, Black people have a disproportionate lack of that shit.

Greed is built on the backs of the vulnerable, and in this country, the vulnerable tend to be, among other people, Black American people, indigenous and native folks, Mexican and Central American folks, Arab people, and Muslim people. It’s never like people are accumulating so much and it helps those groups of people.

The same thing with gender. In my lifetime, women tend to work a lot and hard, and often get a fraction of what I would get for doing the same work.

I've always talked about race and bigotry, but they're all tied together. I can't imagine a capitalism where Black people came out on top. Do you know what I'm saying? Can you imagine a capitalism where Black people are paid fairly? A capitalism where Black people are fairly compensated for centuries of unpaid labor? That would break capitalism. That's what one of the things that needs to happen, for sure.

I agree. Are you hopeful for these young kids coming up today into this world?

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I’m over the moon to share this interview with Kiese Laymon. To my mind, and heart, Kiese is the GOAT. I remember clearly when his staggeringly wondrous memoir Heavy was published (and later made the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list), I did something I rarely do: I wrote to tell him that although on the surface we appeared to have nothing in common, and in fact, were even opposite in many ways, I felt he was “writing my soul and my struggles onto the page.” He wrote back and said “I'm more certain than ever that the same ingredients are part of all of us. They're just shaped and distributed differently.”

I’ve since read everything Kiese has written, at least twice. The gentle, fierce wisdom held in his collection of essays, How To Slowly Kill Yourself And Others In America reoriented how I saw the world. As did his deeply-loving, deeply-funny, deeply-anti-racist novel, Long Division. I also follow him on social media, from which I’ve learned a fair amount about basketball, men’s and women’s, good writing, good music, and how to be decent, kind, insightful human causing the least amount of harm possible whilst also standing up to the wrongs in this world. His writing has appeared in countless magazines and anthologies. And Kiese co-hosts host Reckon True Stores alongside .

Kiese’s latest book, City Summer, Country Summer, is an illustrated children’s book pulled from the essay he originally wrote for the New York Times in 2020. In it, a group of young Black boys, some from New York City, some from various parts of Mississippi, meet up in the Mississippi woods, staying with grandmothers, and share their adventures, their fears, and their love without really saying a word. As with all of Kiese’s writing, I feel these worlds he calls up deep-deep in my bones. It’s an ancient wisdom he conjures. The wisdom of love: bright and alive, but weighted with the complications of being a human.

In addition to being one of my favorite writers, Kiese is one of my favorite humans. I was lucky enough to interview him in 2021 for LARB on Easter Day, no less. Both times we’ve spoken, the size of my heart has increased tenfold.

Kiese was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He currently lives in Texas and teaches creative writing at Rice University.

We got on such a roll talking that it was impossible to fit all that love and laughter and brilliance into one twenty minute interview, so I’ve split it into two. Part II will post tomorrow.

I hope you enjoy!

xJane

⭐️ Kiese is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of City Summer, Country Summer! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “SUMMER” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, April 21st and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

I wrote out about fifty million questions then realized all I wanted to talk to you about is love. I feel like everything you write — your fiction, your memoir, your essays, your social media posts, even when they're about basketball —everything's about love in one form or another. Does that ring true?

Absolutely. In that way, I'm a one-trick pony. I don’t even know what it would feel like to publish something else. I’m definitely always trying to explore the different shapes and colors and momentums and frequencies of love. That’s it.

That comes through! There're two phrases that you say variations of a lot. One is that we have to “love each other,” and the other is that we have to “love in the right way.” Could you talk a bit more about this, especially in light of everything that's happening in the world right now?

First of all, I’ll just say I don’t know what loving in the right way is. I know what loving in the right way feels like for me. I lost my grandmother about seven months ago, and she was someone who loved the land, loved human beings, and loved me responsibly, meaning that I never felt like she was trying to hurt me. I also felt like she loved me enough to show me that she was worthy of pleasure.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m writing this other book. My grandmother worked hard. She worked till her back damn near broke. She worked in the gardens, she worked in the kitchen, she worked in white people’s homes. But the thing about how my grandmother loved is that she allowed us when we were at home to scratch her head. She loved her family scratching her head. In her latter years, she had these huge knots in her shoulders from working in a chicken plant and being bent over and tense her whole life, she loved me massaging those.

She never was afraid of asking someone who loved her to come help her immediately feel better. That is also important when I think about responsible love, because I tend to often think about the “selfless” shit that my grandmother did, that’s the thing that makes it responsible. Every act that I’ve seen her do was not selfless, it was full of self-worth. She just never diminished anybody else’s self-worth.

My grandmother was the only person in my family who, if you were eating and she could tell you liked it, would say, “Oh, baby, you want some more?” That sounds so simple.I was talking to my friends about this the other day, and they were like, “So?” and I was like, “Oh, you grew up with people who offered you more food?” To me, that was so loving.

We can love people but not put the person's needs or wants on level with our own. I feel like my granny loved herself and loved the people around her enough to raise both loves up to the same level. I mean, she just died so I'm sure I'm being romantic. But that's what I feel.

I don’t think you’re being romantic. I know how much she meant to you. You’re so thoughtful in the way you see the world. Is your mind going all the time?

I can’t sleep, so maybe. Over the pandemic, like a lot of people, I was trying to find new rituals because some of our patterns got disrupted from the world dying. I started going to the dog park. I was in a place where gummies were legal, so I started taking gummies at the dog park. It was literally one of the few times ever in my life that I was like, “Oh shit, this is what it feels like to not obsess.” I was just watching those dogs.

I mean, I was probably just high, but it was the first time in my life I felt like my brain wasn’t trying to see what’s on the other side of something, or wasn’t trying to practice word patterns or silly stuff, or wasn’t wondering if I’d done right by somebody.

Do you think it was also the dogs?

Oh, absolutely the dogs!

I know you’re vegetarian but you never write about animals. Are there animals in your life?

No. We had a dog for like a week when I was a kid. We found him at Battlefield Park and took him home. Bad story — came home one day, my mama was like, “Benji ran away.” We went out looking, and we didn’t find Benji. On the way home, we saw a dog on the side of the road that looked like Benji that had been hit. My mother was like, “I’m not stopping. I’m not stopping.”

Ever since college, I move a lot, so I’ve never had the lifestyle for one. But after Heavy came out, I was really, really wanting one. That’s when I started going to dog parks. I was really in need of whatever kind of comfort caring for a cat or a little dog could bring, but I never went and got one.

Could you go out when we could finish this interview and adopt a cat or a dog?

No. I’m in Houston now. I haven’t gone to dog parks in Houston at all. Just trying to figure out where I am in the world. It’s so different than any place I’ve ever lived.

I could see you with a nice little doggy or kitty or two.

I can, too, as soon as I figure out where I want to settle down.

Circling back to how to love in the circumstances we're in now, with all this hatred and bigotry going on, what’s it like to continue this commitment to love? Does it take a toll on you, or is it a balm in some way?

That's a great question, Jane. This other book I'm writing, Good God is at its root about that. I think City Summer, Country Summer is, too, but I'm not taking the bruising part of it on directly in that book.

My grandmother used to have this word. She was saying “sensitive,” but it sounded like “sensive.” She always was like, “Key, you got to be careful because you were born sensive.” When I was a young person, I didn't know what the heck she was talking about, but the older I've gotten, I get it. I don't think sensitive people are necessarily nicer in the long run. I think some very sensitive people can explode and be terrible and abusive, both to themselves and the world.

But there was that point during the pandemic where it seemed like we had decided to be better people. Part of that was a lot of people were dying around us, which means we were killing a lot of people, and we were trying to live. There was a point where it felt like we had decided to be more loving and more caring and more committed to alleviating the burdens of people who had been burdened unfairly.

If you're a studier of the world, you know that that shit was going to have a backlash. But the titillation that comes with seeing that it actually is possible to be collectively better, even if it came at the expense of everyone dying, but we were better. Then people literally were like, “Fuck it. We got to choose capitalism over people. We got to choose greed. We got to choose consumption. We got to choose all that shit over people.”

That shit breaks my heart. I think writers like me like to believe... not that there's a place we can go back to that's better than where we are, but that there's a place that possibly we've never gone to that is a much more responsibly loving place. We have the capacity to do it, because we've all gone there. We've seen people go there. Then when you see people obviously choose to decimate powerless people, to put profit over human life, and to never have to talk about their relationships to love and tenderness and life and care, for a lot of us, that shit is very heartbreaking.

Does that ever make you want to stop your commitment to love?

I don't know how to. It sounds like I'm some crusader, but that's what I'm saying, I literally don't know how to. I was born caring about, like, the toys. Not just toy girls and toy boys, but if it was a ball and you kicked it too hard, I would always be worried that the ball was messed up. Similarly, if it was a wall or paint chip or acorn... I don't know, my whole life I was always just like, “is that shit okay?”

I can stop trying to make art out of it, but in terms of just living in the world, and sort of not giving a fuck, I don't know. My friends always be like, “You’ve got to trust everything's going to be how it's going be. You can't be worrying.”

Well, okay, I don't know how to do that.

I did the same thing with toys! I'm still like that with stuffed animals. If I see a dog toy on its face, I have to flip it over, because I’m afraid it will suffocate! Or if I give a child a stuffed animal as a present, I can't wrap it for the same reason.

Absolutely. 100%

I didn't know anyone else was like that! Meanwhile: Everything is so fucked up. Do you think we can love our way out of this?

I do. I mean, I think at the core has to be part of the tension. But I think we can. I feel so anti-intellectual and so anti-radical when I say that, but I do. We probably won’t, but I think we could.

Does that mean loving Donald Trump and loving Elon Musk and loving J.D. Vance?

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As promised, here’s Part II of the interview with the spectacularly wise and visionary Martha Beck.

It picks up exactly where we left off so if you need a review of Part I or haven’t yet read it, you can check it out here.

Next week, I’ll be sharing writing advice from Martha. She rarely gets asked craft questions, so I’m excited to share! It’s so good!

I was changed by this beautiful conversation with Martha. I think you will feel the same! Let me know what you think in the comments! ❤️

xJane

If you feel comfortable sharing, what is your relationship like with yourself these days? How good are you at being kind and gentle with yourself?

I'm better and better and better at it. For years, I meditated in the morning, and I was always trying to get to a clear mind, which is amazing. I’ve had psychedelic, wonderful experiences, but they will always tell you in meditation those just happen—don’t worry about it. That’s not the point. It's just like watching the fireworks. It's pretty, but so what?

But I shifted after I wrote this book so that I spend the same time, but instead of going to clear mind, I try to go to pure kindness. Just be like, “What can I do for you? How are you feeling today? Tell me more.” I’m constantly becoming the self that is watching the mind, but this time not with total expressionlessness, but with active kindness.

It's really powerful. It's the strongest magic I have ever known.

I love that. Is it contained to words and thoughts, or are there actions that you're taking?

I find that inner stillness is the doorway through which this really pure compassion can enter my whole sense of being. I used to say kind things like, “May you be well, may you be happy!” But in the last few months, it's been going to a place beyond language. It feels like I sink into a depth of something so loving, it doesn't feel like myself, but it doesn't feel separate from myself. It is so loving that to express it in language is like trying to fit the sky in a teacup. There is no way to describe the intensity of this kindness, this sweetness, and I run out of words.

I absolutely love that. You write about glimmers, which are an extension of creativity and the opposite of triggers.

Deb Dana had that brilliant insight and used the word “glimmer” that way. I just grabbed the ball from Deb and ran with it because it works so nicely.

A trigger is something associated with a negative experience that at a subconscious level causes the negative emotion of the original experience to replay in the nervous system. So if you see a red balloon, and then your car runs into someone, the next time you see a red balloon, you may freak out and not know why. A glimmer works on the same principle.

There are positive things that happen to us that are also associated with the stimuli we experienced around that time. Since fear is very attention-grabbing, the trigger can ambush us. Glimmers are much easier to ignore. So you have to set yourself to notice them. You can find them without moving wherever you are. I guarantee there are objects around you that have positive associations.

I have this pencil in front of me. I had just taken it out of its box and sharpened it with my special sharpener. It was given to me by my wife for Christmas, a little box of them, and they’re the best pencils ever. It reminds me of how she always knows what I want and looks for things to give me. We have three people in our relationship, and it reminds me how we're all always trying to do that with each other, and how we're going to be sitting by the fire together soon, and oh, my god, what a privilege that is! Pretty soon as I focus on this glimmer, I can barely breathe, I feel so grateful.

Beautiful. You talk to so many anxious and otherwise struggling people who are coming to you for help. How do you not absorb that energy?

It's so simple. It's just breath. The breath is connected to the deepest neural tissue. The brainstem is what keeps us breathing. It’s below any sort of lobes at all. The ability to regulate breath is very rare in the animal kingdom, and usually it's only animals that live in the water that have the ability to hold their breath. Some people think that humans were once aquatic apes because we can hold our breath.

That means that we are one of the few animal species on the planet who can control the breath to create a mood state instead of letting a mood state control our breath. So if I'm around somebody who’s anxious, I start to feel it in my body; I can feel where they've got it. I let them talk, and then I pay attention to my breath. I slow it way down, and I start to enjoy simply having free, clear breaths. Immediately that tells the brain there's nothing wrong here. You're fine. It's just like I'm watching a TV show: I see how this person is feeling so much intense emotion, and I’m fascinated by it. But I'm not there.

That's amazing. Connected with that, you write, “When we come home to ourselves, there is no difference between you and the rest of the world.” I love that. How do you experience that on a daily basis? Do you experience that on a daily basis?

Yes, more and more and more and more and more. There's something in physics called the hard problem, and it’s the problem of explaining what the hell consciousness is. Because nobody knows how the hell these physical bodies are animated by consciousness, or even what consciousness is.

One philosopher said, “consciousness is an illusion.” The problem with that is to have an illusion, you have to be conscious. So he's back to the problem of how are we conscious in the first place. There are some very well-known scientists and philosophers who are pantheists, who believe that everything is conscious: electrons, stars, this pencil here that I'm so fond of.

I believe that the universe is an artifact of consciousness, that consciousness is what creates the appearance of a physical universe. I read a lot of physics, and the more you read it, the more you start to feel that there is no difference. There’s no barrier.

There is an apparent barrier, but it feels to me like a video game being played by beings who are not separate from each other. But we're playing with a game that makes it seem like we're separate from each other because there's fun in that. And there’s adventure, and there's compassion, and there’s learning, and there’s growing. It's all about the joy of it. So when something bad happens in the game, I feel bad, but only in the game.

When somebody says, “Let’s go get lunch,” and we stop playing the game, then I realize everything's been fine all along. Walt Whitman wrote about this sense that life is a game, not our ultimate reality. He wrote, “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am…Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

I feel like I could take us on a huge tangent now with things that have happened with my brain that parallel what you’re describing. But I do want to talk about what’s happening in our world right now.

You write: “When European explorers encountered people with different values and lifestyles, they got right to enslaving, exploiting, or simply killing as many of these people as possible, grabbing all their stuff, including their bodies and their children. Anyone from the conquered cultures who survived had to adopt Western values to navigate their new world. To the left hemisphere, this just made sense. It was all Progress! Divine Right! Manifest Destiny!” And later you write: “But producing extreme wealth for a few people by terrifying almost everyone else isn’t natural law. It’s something we’ve made, following our left hemisphere’s most materialistic, frightened, and controlling tendencies.” Is this what’s happening in our country now? Has the left brain simply taken over with Trump and Musk and many of his supporters? Or is it more complicated than that?

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Dr. Martha Beck, PhD is the most fantastic combination of brilliance, kindness, humor, vision, curiosity, and wisdom — plus the mountains of lived experience necessary to shape all this into wildly accessible, compelling, and life-changing books, talks, podcasts, and more. If that seems like a lot to pack into an opening sentence that’s because Martha offers so much practical insight to the world!

For starters, she’s written eleven books — the most recent of which is Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. It picks up where her international bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick The Way of Integrity leaves off. We are in a worldwide epidemic of anxiety and whilst most of us think we need to fight our anxiety, Martha suggests that instead we need to love it. The best way to get ourselves out of an anxiety spiral? A creativity spiral! Much more fun!

Martha holds three Harvard degrees in social science, has two podcasts (Bewildered and The Gathering Room), is a much revered life coach, has written countless magazine articles, including two decades worth for O, The Oprah Magazine, is an inspiring public speaker, runs self-transformation retreats in South Africa and Costa Rica, and is a devoted mother, life partner, and all-round good egg.

My kitty Rudy Lu picked up on this in no time. The minute Martha appeared on my computer screen, he woke from a deep nap, stretched, and then proceeded to circle the room and yowl and circle and yowl, drawing closer and closer to the computer until he was right up against it. Confirming the good vibes coming off Martha are real!

We got on such a roll, we ended up with too much wonderfulness for one interview. So I’ve split it into two parts. The second part will run tomorrow.

I loved speaking with this wise, gentle, and visionary soul. I hope you enjoy reading it!

xJane

What’s your definition of health – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual?

The word “health” is related to the word “whole.” The last book I wrote was called The Way of Integrity. I didn't mean moral virtue. I meant the literal meaning of integrity, which is to be one thing, whole and undivided. My premise in that book and in life is that when you are whole your heart, your mind, your body, and your soul are all basically in agreement.

I have been really, really ill in my life, but healthy – because I was relaxed into the situation that was happening. I wasn’t deluding myself or fighting what was happening in the present moment. I was present. I was living the serenity prayer: Changing the things I could, accepting the things I couldn’t, and having the wisdom to know the difference.

To me, that’s healthy.

I’ve had it when I’ve been physically sick. I’ve had it when I’ve been depressed, I’ve had it when I’ve been anxious. But when I get into that state of alignment, the weird thing is, I get well. I get happy, and I get calm really quickly. So I come out of the negativity.

This is so interesting. You're saying you can be physically sick and still be healthy because of being in alignment?

Yes, I have at least three formally diagnosed, incurable, progressive autoimmune diseases. When I relax into making every choice in my life based on what feels resonant with what I believe at the deepest level, I have no symptoms to speak of. That is not supposed to happen with these diseases.

But even when I do get symptoms, I know that that’s just a sign that I’m out of alignment with a part of myself. It could be my body—I'm not getting enough rest, I’m meant to lie down and pay attention more. When I do, something comes into my mind that I hadn’t let myself be aware of.

I think you can tell I have a version of the world that is highly teleological. In other words, nothing is meaningless to me. So I think when you're sick, it's a way that your wonderful, incredible system has of getting your attention so that you can bring yourself into an understanding of something you need to understand. I don’t think any suffering is useless.

Symptoms often resolve when you get the underlying message, but not always. And we're all going to die, so it's not like we're supposed to be healing ourselves of everything. It’s just that we don’t need to suffer psychologically, even if we’re suffering physically. But we do need to know what's true for us, and it's the search for what's true that I think is guided sometimes by symptoms that are unpleasant.

I’ve never felt more mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy than I do now. But whilst my physical health has improved, I still struggle with it. I spend so much time going, “Am I thinking the wrong thoughts? Am I believing the wrong beliefs?” That’s not healthy for me, either.

Play with the thought that you might have been given what, in traditional cultures all over the world, is called a Shaman sickness. That’s what anthropologists call it. It’s the healer, mystic, psychologist, naturalist of the tribe who happens to have this call toward healing and is therefore given the gift of an illness that makes it impossible to take life for granted or to stop paying attention to what's real and true for us. You can only tolerate so much when you've got physical illness, so you have to find your integrity and stay in it to be happy while you've got symptoms.

You become much better than other people at finding happiness, because you have to do it just to tolerate the pain; they don’t have to do it, or they can do it with a drink, or whatever.

Can people in that position still get physically healthy?

Oh, absolutely! Read Dying to Be Myself by Anita Morjani.

I read that! Such an extraordinary story.

I’ve met her, and she’s a lovely person. She was about as sick as you can get, and she came out of a literal death spiral. She was just a skeleton with tumors, and in nine days she was cancer free.

I remember how she wrote about hearing conversations in rooms down the hall whilst she was in a coma. You’ve been on quite a healing journey with your body. When you were younger, you struggled with autoimmune diseases, fibro, heaps of pain, and your organs were deteriorating. You also have vaginal scarring from sexual abuse. How did living through all of these physical challenges shape the way you see the world and what you see as your place in it?

The whole thing I just told you about Shaman sicknesses—I did not know that when I got sick, and I wasn’t looking for it as I sought a way to tolerate my illness. But when I did run across that concept, it felt resonant with me. So I learned to treat my body as an incredibly sophisticated barometer to help me find the particular path through life that was my optimal path.

I think there are infinite paths we can take, but to take an optimal path means that when I make a choice that's right for me, I feel my body relaxing. I feel my symptoms disappearing. But if I’m not true to myself, I feel a symptom start to come on, though it’s nothing that knocks me down anymore.

When I talk to groups of people, I’ll say to them, “Are you physically comfortable right now?” And they’ll say, “Yes, yes,” and I say, “But if you were at home, would you be in this position?” And they’re like, “No.” And I say, “Why not?” And they gradually figure out it’s because they’re not that comfortable. I say, “So, okay, you didn’t know that you weren’t comfortable when I asked you this, even though your body knew you weren’t comfortable.”

The mismatch between thought and body sensation is very strongly reinforced in our culture. You are not supposed to be connected to your body according to our culture. When I say this to doctors, they’ll say, “We don’t want to do that airy-fairy woo-woo new age stuff.” I’m talking about their physical bodies, the single most empirical thing about them.

In our culture, you’re not supposed to live in your body. What the hell is that? It’s nonsense. It’s insanity. My illness, which had me pretty much bed bound for twelve years, really reinforced to me that that is nonsense. I don’t care what the culture says. They can say it to me all day long. I know it’s not true. Our bodies are there to help guide us in every way. And if we listen to them, they will be very kind to us.

What do you do to care for your body? Are there certain foods you eat? Exercise? Supplements?

Sleep. And sleep. And sleep. And sleep. Sleep is the magical elixir.

There’s no coincidence in our culture of denying the body, and also being “the city that never sleeps,” and making doctors do 72-hour shifts, and using sleep deprivation as a mark of honor in companies. You know, “I haven’t been sleeping because I’ve been working so hard.” It’s ridiculous, it’s unhealthy, it’s unwise. It’s metaphorically fractal to us destroying our own planet. It’s nonsense, and I won’t do it.

How much do you sleep a night?

When I’m well-rested, which is usually—I sleep eight hours. I learned to sleep from a group of three medical women in Canada, who run a practice called Sleep Works. They taught me simple things like wearing amber-colored glasses when the sun goes down, so that electric light doesn’t overstimulate my circadian rhythm.

When they started working with me, I’d had insomnia for forty years. They said, “Well, you really only need about eight hours a night.” And I was like, “Not me, honey, I need twelve.” And they’re like, “That’s because you’re chronically sleep deprived. When you start sleeping every night, you’ll find it’s about eight,” and I was like, “You don’t know anything.”

Then they started doing these little things with light and with temperature. I slept twelve to fifteen hours a night for two or three months. Then I went to eight hours, regular as clockwork.

Are you able to just go to bed and sleep? Or do you need to use something like melatonin or follow a ritual?

I have to do my routine very scrupulously or my body gets off-key so fast. I use light. I use temperature. I use a bright light in the morning. I have to get a lot of exercise, which for a long time, I couldn't do. It's funny, now that you're mentioning it, my mind and my day revolve around taking care of this body.

Same. Do you ever get concerned you might slip back on any of these things? Like, I have sleep trauma.

Oh, yes. Of all the things that have happened to me, and I've had a few, the biggest trauma is around insomnia. It’s horrible! People die of it.

If you have a night where you go off, do you get scared that you're going to slip back into a bad cycle again?

No, because it's happened so many times, and then I've re-established the rhythm. So my trauma is level going down, down, down. You have to go to the place of the anxiety and have it end differently over and over and over to heal a trauma. I've done that with sleep now.

I did get long-term insomnia; it came back at the beginning of the pandemic. Because I was hiding my own anxiety from myself. I barely slept for two weeks, and I was begging my doctor for sleeping pills, and she wouldn't give them to me.

Then I started doing a different kind of meditation where it was all about letting my muscles relax. It was very physical. I would go into the muscles, let them relax, and I learned to sleep again. That was a bad scare, but that's, touch wood, the last one I've had.

You have so many people who look to you for guidance on a variety of things. Does that ever feel like pressure to always be healthy and capable and grounded, more so than the rest of us?

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Lidia Yuknavitch is one of my favorite people to interview because she’s astoundingly brilliant with an enormous imagination so her mind reaches into corners of the universe most of us didn’t even know were there. She loves animals in that full-throttle sort of way a child might, she loves the whole planet that way. She’s kind and funny and generous and will talk about anything with such tender openness my heart swells. She wants all of us to thrive.

Lidia is also one of my most difficult interviews because when I speak with her, I want to ask her about everything and I do mean everything—love, grief, frogs, rage, sex, 265-foot cranes, trauma, swimming, disability, hope, art, death, politics, violence, trees, painting, monsters, healing, addiction, kindness, community, surviving all that this world throws our way. This is because she writes about everything. And I do mean everything. A scene might appear to be about Lidia’s profound love of swimming but it’s really about loss, empowerment, helping one another heal, and the interconnectedness of the world. And so I must whittle my 5,724 questions down to a more manageable amount. Not easy.

Especially not easy for Lidia’s latest book Reading The Waves. With clarity, electric insight, and gentle curiosity, Lidia examines the stories she’s told herself about her life and the ways these stories have impacted her relationship with herself, with others, and with her body. Using the gifts of storytelling, she explores what happens to these stories if she moves to a different viewing location. Does the hold they have on her body and her spirit loosen?

Lidia is the award-winning author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, which Kristen Stewart has adapted into film, Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and The Misfit's Manifesto, based on her TED Talk, On The Beauty of Being a Misfit, which garnered 4.5 million views. She is the founder of the glorious literary arts organization Corporeal Writing.

If you’re interested in reading more, I’ve lifted the paywall on my first interview with Lidia for Beyond. And I’ve included the link to our interview for Longreads.

Enjoy!

xJane

I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I want to start with a question about trees and animals and dirt and water – all of whom you thank in your acknowledgements! And in your final chapter you write, “Your family of origin is only one kind of origin. Your ancestors track back to trees, water, minerals, space, otherness.” Can you talk about your relationship with these elements and with nature in general?

I don’t think of it as, “Oh, I have a neato relationship to nature.” I think of it more like, “I’m getting closer to understanding how non-human existence is something we are intimately related to.” As a kid, coming from an abusive household, I spent a lot of time in our backyard and in this vacant lot across the street that had big evergreens in it. I was drawn to talking to actual trees and dirt and water, it comforted me and it helped me in a chaotic childhood situation.

What I wrote about in Reading the Waves as an adult is different than that. That was a kind of kid intuitive magic to go to non-humans for help. At this point in my life, I’m beginning to let myself learn that my human existence is this tiny, tiny piece.

It's interesting you said when you were a kid that you were talking to the trees because you write in this book and elsewhere, that as an adult you’re still talking to the water and the trees and the rocks and the seals. What does talking to these beings look and feel like to you? Are you speaking your words out loud? Are you hearing their responses? Or is it some kind of vibrational experience in your body?

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Cynthia Weiner and I have been friends for over three decades. We met in New York City just after I’d gotten divorced through Cynthia’s best friend, Emily, who was my new also-recently-divorced pal. We were all writers, and had all lived through some hard stuff. But, dang, did we have fun together — as well as help one another through, well, anything and everything that came up in those days.

Cynthia wrote one of my favorite ever short stories, Aftertaste — I might be able to recite it by heart. Her beautiful work has also appeared in Ploughshares and Epiphany and been awarded a Pushcart. And she’s the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. She’s also such a tremendously kind, brilliant, loving, insightful, playful, and loyal human. It was an extra special treat to interview her.

Her debut novel, A Gorgeous Excitement, is astoundingly good. Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review. Town and Country included it on their 36 Must Read Books of Winter 2025 list. The story is inspired by Robert Chambers’ murder of Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986 (aka the “Preppy Murder”), a murder that deeply impacted Cynthia’s life since she grew up on the Upper East Side and even casually knew Chambers.

Nina Jacobs, a smart, witty, curious, young Jewish woman is hoping to lose her virginity in the summer before leaving for college. She pins her hopes on Upper East Side heartthrob Gardner Reed who does indeed bestow much coveted attention on her. She also makes a new best friend, Stephanie, who helps free up Nina’s rigid view of herself whilst introducing her to New York City’s club life and the sweet rush of cocaine (something Freud called “a gorgeous excitement,”). Throughout it all, Nina struggles to help her mother with her increasingly spiraling mental health.

The writing is crisp and taut, no unnecessary words, yet breathlessly elegant with some of the most beautiful metaphors and vivid descriptions of New York in the unbridled wildness of the eighties I’ve ever read. I’m always bowled over by Cynthia’s gorgeous prose but she’s outdone herself here!

Cynthia lives in the Hudson Valley with her kitties, Clover and Violet.

⭐️ Cynthia is graciously gifting three readers an autographed copy of A Gorgeous Excitement! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “GORGEOUS” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, January 27th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. Shipping is limited to the United States. ⭐️

This story holds so much, but at its heart there are three main journeys. The first is friendship. The way friendships can shift and change and endure and thrive. I know you have many long-term friendships in your life. Can you talk about what friendship means to you and why you centered it in this book?

I've always loved stories about friendships between girls. Girls who meet at that time when they fall in love with each other, particularly when you're fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and probably a little older too. I wanted Nina to have a friend who was not in her usual circle of friends, somebody from outside who saw her in a different light; when you're in high school with the same people for years and years, no one's in that new discovery of friendship. But when you make a new friend at that age, it's thrilling.

Friendships can be like a romance. Nina and Stephanie’s definitely has that love affair quality to it.

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and I first bonded over Bruce Springsteen. She’d posted about memoir recommendations in a private women writer’s group on social media and I’d suggested Springsteen’s, which had really moved me: I find him to be a kind, wise, and deeply decent human. It turns out Nana-Ama did, too. And it further turned out that Nana-Ama is a kind, wise, and deeply decent human herself. She’s also gigantically funny, thoughtful, generous, and a wildly gifted writer. We quickly became friends. So this interview was extra special for me.

Evidence of Nana-Ama being a wildly gifted writer is her gorgeous and groundbreaking memoir Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression. A single mother in her twenties, Nana-Ama struggled with clinical depression long before understanding what was happening in her body and mind, let alone finding help. With graceful precision, she takes us on her journey away from the myth that Black women are strong and therefore don’t suffer and toward a deeper, more tender knowing of herself. The 25th Anniversary Edition was published this year with a foreword by Andrew Solomon and a beautiful afterword by Nana-Ama.

A native of Ghana, Nana-Ama has also edited four anthologies: Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women; Shaking the Tree: New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women; The Black Body; and, Accra Noir. She also writes the beautiful Substack newsletter Danquah Rising.

Nana-Ama lives in Southern California with a grapefruit tree in her back garden, the fruit of which she delivers to friends’ homes every Christmas!

You can read Nana-Ama’s answers to the Beyond Questionnaire here.

⭐️ Nana-Ama is generously gifting four readers an autographed copy of Willow Weep For Me! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “WILLOW” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, November 18th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. Shipping is limited to the United States. ⭐️

What does being mentally healthy look like to you? Has your understanding of it shifted over the decades?

For me, the first thing is rest. Which I think so few of us do, even those of us that don't have a mental health issue. Though it's debatable who doesn't and who does—but that's another conversation. We're always on, on, on! And the word that everyone says is, "Busy.” During the pandemic was when it dawned on me how we just don't rest. People would say to me in the middle of lockdown, "Oh, yeah, I'm really busy." And I thought, “Doing what? What are you so busy doing?” Then I realized it's this addiction to doing and not being. We're always over-scheduling, overburdening ourselves.

Rest gives you the ability to see things clearly so you make better decisions for yourself in terms of whether to say yes or no to something. If you say, “I'm going to sleep on that.” And then you actually do sleep, you're in a better place to make better decisions.

Along with rest goes eating properly, drinking water, moving your body. I find that when I start doing those things together, it creates a better ecosystem in my whole body including in my mind. People think, “What does your mental health have to do with your nutritional health?” A lot. Scientists are learning that your gut, your microbiome, has a lot to do with mental health.

Also sunshine, getting up and getting outside, earthing or grounding, not wearing shoes all the time, having your feet be exposed to the minerals in the ground. Little things that I think a lot of us did naturally as children.

When you talk about rest, do you mean sleep, or are you also talking about just stopping during the day — maybe reading a book or sitting under a tree?

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’s writing addresses so many of the issues that make life harder than it already is: poverty, misogyny, classism, abuse, and trauma; lack of support for education, mental and physical health, basic food and shelter, and child care. Her writing is clean, clear, and razor-focused. She is unapologetically telling the truth of her life. And the truth of Stephanie’s life is representative of the lives of millions and millions of other Americans.

Maid, Stephanie’s first memoir, chronicled her escape from an emotionally and verbally abusive relationship with her eldest daughter’s father to cleaning houses for rich people to dreaming of attending college. With clarity and compassion, Stephanie revealed that being poor in America takes a tremendous amount time and energy, not only the hours of hard labor but the constant battle to prove you qualify for public aid. It hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. And Netflix soon snatched it up for a mini series staring Margaret Qualley. It became their highest watched series and The Domestic Violence Hotline received more calls that month than any other in their history.

Class, Stephanie’s second memoir, was published in 2023. It picks up with Stephanie moving to Montana and attending college. But rather than life improving, it becomes harder than ever. Between the labyrinth of university requirements, bigoted professors, mounting student loans, child support battles, and SNAP recertification, Stephanie often went hungry. Throughout it all, Stephanie remains true to her desire to write. Lucky for us!

Stephanie lives in Missoula, Montana with her two daughters, two dogs, and a horse. She’s working on her third book, The Privilege To Feel and writes the newsletter of the same name.

In one way or another I feel like all your writing is about taking care of each other. Ways that it’s happening. Ways that it’s not happening. The importance of kindness and generosity and empathy. What do you see as our responsibility to one another from the individual level right up to governmental level?

The responsibility lies in recognizing the invisible cushions that we have underneath ourselves that other people don't have. And to recognize our own inner judgments and preconceived notions about someone before we even get to the point where we're thinking that we should help them. Because it's very easy to talk ourselves out of that. With people in poverty in particular, there's a lot of blame put on them, that they are somehow responsible for or even chose their situation.

I struggled with feeling like I should help everyone when I became successful and had money. I gave so much of it away to nonprofits and friends. I felt like I had to do that. I was just talking about this with my therapist—not necessarily survivor’s guilt, but that it’s so uncomfortable for me to have something, knowing that someone else does not. So I tried to even it up. I was helping way too much to the point where I was in trouble financially.

You write about resilience. Due to my health struggles, this is something people say about me all the time, and you got it a lot, too. You write: “resilience as a virtue is assigned, especially to marginalized groups, when systemic structures have created countless invisible barriers to living what the privileged consider a normal life. Every time I wanted to cry from the crushing hopelessness that life seemed to bring, something inside me hissed, You must not allow yourself to fall apart. At first I thought this signified bravery on my part…then I started to realize that I had no choice in the matter: I didn’t have the privilege to feel.”

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I was thirty when I read Pam Houston’s first book Cowboys Are My Weakness, but I remember that time vividly: Pam was young, she was a woman, and it was a collection of short stories. On what planet, especially in 1992, was that ever a recipe for success. But these stories were electric. Pam wrote about nature and women doing things they didn’t normally get to do (high water rafting, for one) and great sex and bad relationships and finding joy. It was exciting! Cowboys was named A New York Times Notable Book and became a bestseller. For all the young women writers back then, Pam’s words changed us.

Over the decades, Pam’s writing has only become more glorious. And her passions for animals, the natural world, and civil rights stronger, more vibrant, and more vocal. Her memoir Deep Creek is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. Her essays about her relationship with her 140 acre ranch 9,000 feet above sea level in Colorado as well as with all the animals, domestic and wild, who share the land with her, her losses, her loves, her hard work to protect endangered lands and animals at home and around the world is breathtaking—and glitters with hope.

When I learned Pam had a new book coming out about abortion, Without Exception, I jumped at the chance to speak with her—but a part of me was sad that animals and the earth would become questions I would need to sideline. I’m delighted to report I was wrong. Pam beautifully weaves together women’s bodies, the earth, the animals, and so much more. It’s a gorgeous book, with much to teach us.

Pam has also written Waltzing The Cat, A Little More About Me, Sight Hound, Contents May Have Shifted, and Air Mail. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a professor of English at UC Davis. She’s also co-founded the non-profit Writing by Writers.

It was such a delight and honor to speak with Pam!

⭐️ Pam is graciously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Without Exception! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “Exception” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, September 23rd and notified by Substack Direct Chat. Shipping is limited to the United States. ⭐️

Here’s Pam reading one of the many, many gorgeous chapters from Without Exception. It, of course, includes animals.

You have such a profound and intimate relationship with animals, both domestic and wild. Could you talk about what you see as the relationship between humans and animals?

One of the ways we went wrong as human beings was creating this hierarchy where we’re at the top of the food chain, and animals don’t have sentience. One great thing happening now is all these studies proving that animals do have sentience. There was a headline from The Guardian a couple of weeks ago saying that horses plan things in advance, and I thought, "Well, any 14-year-old horse girl could have told you that!" But still, if science has to back up what many of us know intuitively to start treating animals better and with more dignity, great.

For me, what I’ve learned from animals is almost limitless. I’ve learned how to love, how to die, and how to be with the dying.

My passion lately is Icelandic horses. They give me a full-on spiritual experience. They’re a protected breed—no other horses have been allowed in Iceland since about 841. These horses have been bred for qualities like strength, loyalty, and good sense. They help you stay out of trouble if you let them. They also live wild in giant herds, so when you ride them, you can’t just sit like a sack of potatoes and take pictures. If you try to sneak your phone out of your pocket for some gorgeous scenery, one ear will come back as if to say, "Hey, I thought we were in this together."

We ride with a giant herd of loose horses. If things go awry, if the herd breaks out, we’re in a swamp, a thunderstorm, or coming down a steep mountain, they need and give support. It’s a constant communication. That kind of cross-species communication has always thrilled me. I’ve had it with dogs and horses. I've had it occasionally with a very wild animal. Even once with an octopus that wrapped around my ankle. I believe that kind of communication has everything to teach me about being human, alive, present, moral, and fair.

Can you describe how the communication happens?

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