Dani Shapiro, Best-Selling Author of "Hourglass" and "Slow Motion"
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[1:22]I am thrilled to be here today with Danny Shapiro.
[1:26]Danny Shapiro is a celebrated author who has written 9 books over the past 20 years.
[1:31]She has penned essays in Elle, the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Oprah magazine among many
[1:35]other publications.
[1:37]She also shares her gift by teaching writing workshops all over the world.
[1:40]She now lives in Connecticut with her husband and teenage son.
[1:43]So welcome today!
[1:46]So let's start back at the beginning with slow motion from 1998, which as I've told you
[1:50]already is one of my favorite memoirs of all time.
[1:53]Can you tell listeners what slow motion is about and then how you took all those life
[1:58]events and turned them into such a thing of beauty?
[2:01]Well, thank you.
[2:02]And it's wonderful to hear 20 years later that that was a book that resonated so much
[2:07]with you.
[2:09]So slow motion at its core is really about two stories that sort of braid together.
[2:16]And one is that when I was 23, my parents were in a devastating accident that ultimately
[2:23]killed my dad and badly injured my mom.
[2:26]And where I was in my life at that time was in a really sort of spiraling self-destructive
[2:34]place.
[2:35]I had dropped out of Sarah Lawrence.
[2:37]I was involved with a man that if you looked for like just the worst imaginable choice
[2:44]in a boyfriend on the planet, he might have, you know, fit the bill.
[2:48]He was much older.
[2:49]He was married.
[2:50]He was the stepfather at a very close friend of mine.
[2:54]He was quite powerful in New York of the 80s and I, despite attempts not to got sort
[3:04]of swept into a long and very destructive relationship with him and dropped out of college
[3:09]and was drinking heavily and doing my share of 80s narcotics and is cocaine and
[3:18]narcotic.
[3:19]I guess so whatever it is, that's what I was doing.
[3:23]Then my parents were in this accident and it was this tremendous wake-up call.
[3:28]I mean, instantly it was just, I describe it as before and after moment at the very beginning
[3:35]of the book.
[3:36]I received this phone call.
[3:37]I was at a spa in Southern California where all good 23-year-old college dropouts should
[3:43]be.
[3:44]And I got this call that my parents had been in this accident.
[3:46]And from that moment and two weeks later my dad died, I began to extricate myself from
[3:54]that destructive relationship and I woke up.
[3:58]You know, I sort of had two and I did and I wanted eventually, I mean, I became a writer.
[4:05]I think I always was a writer but didn't know you could be a writer and after, after
[4:12]my father's death and after I helped my mother literally get back on her feet.
[4:20]I went back to college, I finished college and I went to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence
[4:25]and I started writing a first novel which did come out and nobody should read.
[4:31]But it was sort of my attempt in fiction to grapple with some of this and I wasn't remotely
[4:35]ready to.
[4:36]And picturing the record.
[4:37]That was no.
[4:38]It was playing with fire and it was published in 1990.
[4:41]I was just like fresh out of graduate school.
[4:46]I sold it while I was still in graduate school.
[4:49]But it wasn't a book I was ready to write.
[4:51]It's actually very helpful to me as a teacher now to think about where the writer stands
[4:57]in relation to the work.
[4:59]I was too close, way too close to it.
[5:01]So I wrote this very autobiographical novel essentially so that I could write about that
[5:06]period of time.
[5:07]I've joked that if I set that novel in Sri Lanka there still would have been a car accident
[5:11]in short Hills, New Jersey.
[5:12]Like I had to write that but I wasn't, but I wasn't ready.
[5:17]So I wrote two more novels and then when I started to write slow motion it was from a
[5:22]place of feeling like I wanted to dig in and understand my own relationship to the story
[5:32]which was really the story of my life at that point which was how does the worst moment
[5:36]in your life become the transformative moment and wanting to explore that.
[5:43]So those two stories, the story of the tragedy of my dad's death and my parents and
[5:50]the extricating of myself that resulted in that that I don't know, I don't know what would
[5:55]have happened if my parents hadn't been in their car accident.
[5:58]I miss my father every day but I don't know what would have happened to me because I wasn't
[6:02]nothing was shocking me out of where I was and that did.
[6:07]I think I was so great about your book especially for me at that time because I was
[6:11]graduating from college when your book came out, finding yourself as you say in this
[6:16]way that was the last choice you ever would have wanted as a way to find yourself but
[6:21]throughout the book coming like hitting bottom and then pulling yourself out and showing
[6:26]the reader how you did that anyway, I just thought it was, well you know we don't choose
[6:30]what's going to wake us up and that certainly wouldn't have been my choice but I'm glad
[6:36]I woke up.
[6:37]I'm glad only because of the books that came out, although I'm sure no matter what
[6:43]you would have been an amazing writer, it's obviously in your DNA and in some motion you
[6:49]talked a lot about sort of struggling with substances as you're saying narcotics or whatever.
[6:54]Did this continue to play you at all throughout your career or were you able to put that
[6:59]aside?
[7:00]Yeah no I mean drugs certainly were just something I was completely done with which was
[7:06]easy.
[7:07]In fact I have an 18-year-old son and when you write memoir you do end up with your kids
[7:15]knowing more about you than you might choose and so he and I have had very open conversations
[7:21]in which I told him to do as I say and not as I did but one of the things that I will
[7:25]say to him is don't swallow anything or smoke anything or put anything up your nose
[7:34]when you don't know what it is and I think back to the young woman who did that you
[7:39]know just did that and it's so inconceivable to me that that would be something that the
[7:47]person that I am and I actually think the person that I always was but was had a lot of
[7:52]layers of other other selves sort of like on top of her in a way and yeah so the answer
[7:59]is no I mean I still I didn't drink for years and then eventually I started drinking wine
[8:05]again and I do like it I probably like no no I'm not sure I get into it I just meant the
[8:10]big struggle I don't know I mean I'm judging but you know it's funny because people sometimes
[8:16]read slow motion and make the assumption that I'm in recovery because when you write
[8:21]multiple memoirs you know I mean life if we're fortunate is long and full and so and
[8:29]I have written multiple memoirs which is so surprising to me I thought I was only going
[8:34]to write fiction but I've continued to return to memoir and people will read readers
[8:40]of mine will read not necessarily in the order of the books that I've written but sometimes
[8:45]backwards and be sort of stunned by slow motion because the woman who wrote the later
[8:51]books doesn't seem it doesn't seem possible that she would have been that spiraling
[8:56]young woman but sometimes we are that spiraling young woman and then we grow up and then
[8:59]we become wiser and we become other things and we have these there's this beautiful phrase
[9:07]that I believe I quote in devotion it's a no actually it's an hourglass it's this English
[9:13]moral philosopher who describes the inner crowd you know all of the selves that like that comprise
[9:20]the inner crowd the crowd inside of us so it's like which one's going to find her voice
[9:26]for that or her strength or her will for that moment how does just going back to your
[9:32]mission of your son how does he feel with so much of your life and even with hourglass more
[9:37]of his life in addition exposed in this way one of the things it was really important
[9:44]to me and that I really think that I thought the day he was born I looked at him and
[9:51]I thought you did not ask to be born to a mother who's a writer how am I going to deal
[9:55]with this because I felt instantly changed I think the way that we feel
[10:00]changed my motherhood just instantly.
[10:02]I was now a mother, and it felt, and this was, I mean,
[10:06]I didn't, that I remember thinking.
[10:08]The rest of it, which was, I have been comfortable writing
[10:12]about my parents all my life.
[10:14]I've been comfortable writing about certain other people.
[10:16]I take care to try not to hurt anybody,
[10:19]but I've never felt like I didn't have a right.
[10:22]And now here is this baby who was entitled to his privacy.
[10:29]And I think what happened over time,
[10:31]because I did eventually, and I do write about him some,
[10:37]is that I sort of looked for my own set of rules about this,
[10:42]and chief among them was, I don't want him to ever be 30 years old
[10:49]and turning to me and saying, I wish you hadn't written about me,
[10:52]or I wish you hadn't written that particular thing about me.
[10:55]And so that's been my compass, very much, never,
[11:00]never won, even posting a photograph of him on Instagram.
[11:03]I checked with him first.
[11:06]And actually when our glass came out,
[11:11]my husband and I were away, and I knew that our son was reading it.
[11:17]I've given, I always give him the very first copy of the
[11:19]comes from the publisher, and then describe it to him.
[11:23]So I knew he was reading it, and he texted me,
[11:26]and he said, I'm reading your book.
[11:28]It's helping me fall asleep at night.
[11:31]And I was like, ha, ha, ha.
[11:35]And he can be a wise ass, but I wasn't sure what he meant,
[11:37]and I literally wrote back, ha, ha, and he wrote back,
[11:41]no, really, it feels like you and Dad are with me.
[11:44]And because he was, I think, the first time we had ever been,
[11:47]like, across an ocean from him, usually he was with us.
[11:51]So there was this, that was probably the best reaction
[11:55]that anybody had about our glass, but of his,
[11:58]because it felt like he recognized his parents and our life
[12:03]and our family on the page.
[12:05]And I really didn't want to embellish it or to,
[12:12]in any way, demean it, I wanted to try to capture it.
[12:16]And, and also regarding my son,
[12:21]when he was growing up and he was 13, 14 years old,
[12:25]he wasn't a reader.
[12:26]He completely wasn't a reader.
[12:27]And we would take him to writer's conferences
[12:30]all over the world.
[12:30]So he knew so many writers, amazing writers.
[12:35]And it never, it never just seemed to really sink in.
[12:38]He just was friends with these folks.
[12:41]And then when he turned about 15,
[12:43]he started, it just, the flip guts,
[12:46]a switch got flipped and he started reading.
[12:48]And then suddenly he had this feeling,
[12:50]he would text me and say, like Anthony Dora, for example.
[12:53]He's like, Tony's a genius.
[12:55]Yeah, yes he is.
[12:57]I just thought he was his great dad.
[12:59]And I could play football with her.
[13:00]Jim Shepard or, you know, just,
[13:03]he really started to fall in love with reading
[13:09]and writing and words.
[13:10]And it's certainly not something that we made happen
[13:14]or could possibly have forced.
[13:16]In fact, quite the opposite.
[13:17]I think it took him so long to fall in love with reading
[13:19]because it was all around him all the time.
[13:22]But so I think that respect too, for a sense of
[13:27]what it is to try to capture something
[13:29]that's true between the pages of a book.
[13:34]I don't know that he wants to be a writer necessarily,
[13:37]but I think he has a real affinity for it
[13:41]and therefore respect for what we do.
[13:45]My husband and I, my husband's also a writer.
[13:47]So yeah, but then every once in a while,
[13:51]he'll meet someone.
[13:52]I've seen this happen, like he'll meet someone
[13:54]and that person who has read my work will say,
[13:57]oh, I thought you'd be so much younger.
[13:59]He's frozen in time at wherever someone has read about him.
[14:05]But I don't think at least as best as I can tell
[14:08]that he feels a sense of his privacy
[14:09]having been invaded in any way.
[14:12]I think that's one of the more challenging things
[14:14]as my own kids grow up is like,
[14:16]I wanna confide in my friends or other people
[14:19]about the things that I'm going through
[14:20]in relation to what my kids are going through,
[14:22]but I feel like, can't, like it's there.
[14:24]Some of these things are no their issues.
[14:26]These are people, like I'm not at liberty
[14:28]to just spread all these things and talk about them.
[14:31]So it's almost like, I don't know,
[14:34]like hiding not secrets, but it's like something that's come
[14:37]in between, I feel like ability to be close sometimes
[14:40]to other people because it's like my kid's stuff.
[14:42]I have to protect their privacy anyway.
[14:44]Right, right, tangent, sorry about that.
[14:49]So you teach seminars now all over the world.
[14:51]In fact, I almost went to you on the beginning ranch,
[14:53]but I would've had to change all my custody
[14:55]and not being worthy.
[14:56]How do you teach students to write like you do,
[14:59]which is so beautiful,
[15:00]and which part of what you do is a gift
[15:03]versus something that's learned or something
[15:05]that you can teach, which I know you've written about,
[15:07]but for people who don't have time to read it.
[15:11]Yeah, I just wrote about this recently
[15:15]and the thing that I sort of arrived at
[15:16]in terms of the gift part of it, which can't be taught,
[15:21]is that it's like having excellent pitches
[15:25]in musician or perfect pitch or an ear.
[15:30]There's, and it's different for every writer,
[15:33]but finding the truth and the truth of your voice
[15:40]and then at the same time the musicality
[15:43]or the lyricism or maybe it's not lyrical,
[15:46]maybe it's extremely hard hitting and journalistic
[15:50]and sort of take no prisoners or whatever it is,
[15:54]I think when a writer is writing at the height
[15:58]of her abilities, it has to do with having found that place,
[16:02]like the essential authentic place
[16:05]from which the work springs.
[16:07]As a teacher, I mean, I can certainly offer my students
[16:10]a lot of tools.
[16:11]There definitely is a whole big box full of tools
[16:14]in terms of craft, but the truly gifted writer
[16:19]never thinks about tools and that's a paradox, right?
[16:22]So a bunch of years ago I was invited
[16:24]to teach undergraduates and I hadn't taught
[16:26]undergraduates in a long time.
[16:29]And the night before, this was at Wesleyan, actually.
[16:31]And the night before I was about to start teaching,
[16:33]I panicked because I thought, how do I teach them craft?
[16:36]And I started like going online and down the down the line
[16:40]like manuals about voice and sense of place
[16:44]and building like point of view and character.
[16:47]And it was absurd, but it was like,
[16:49]I don't even know how to talk about this
[16:51]because I just do it.
[16:53]And sense it and almost in an animal way,
[16:59]sort of like feel my way through it.
[17:01]But the tool box still can be unpacked.
[17:05]And the other thing that is possibly more important
[17:10]than the tool box is courage.
[17:14]And it kind of, I think so many people embarking,
[17:20]the inner sensor just comes roaring to the surface.
[17:24]I write about this a lot in still writing.
[17:26]Like the sense of what is the voice in your head telling you?
[17:30]Is it saying this is stupid?
[17:33]Someone said, did it better?
[17:35]I have no right to write this.
[17:37]People are gonna laugh.
[17:39]I should really spend a lot of time doing research
[17:41]about this before I embark on it.
[17:43]Whatever the version is of it, shame,
[17:47]you know, self-loathing.
[17:48]I'm like, and the voice, that inner voice,
[17:51]which also keeps on shifting,
[17:53]never stays the same, something that a writer alone
[17:57]in her room loses sight of the fact
[18:01]that everybody who's alone in her room feels that,
[18:04]everybody, I think there's a kind of comparing
[18:10]one's own experience to the books on the shelves, right?
[18:16]And thinking, well, Alice Monroe didn't go through that
[18:19]when she wrote that perfect short story,
[18:21]or, you know, Laurie Moore didn't go through that
[18:24]when she wrote, who'll run the frog hospital or whatever.
[18:27]And it's not true.
[18:28]Every writer at the beginning of a new piece of work
[18:31]is completely lost.
[18:34]It feels impossible.
[18:36]And the only thing that makes it feel possible
[18:39]is day after day, week after week, month after month,
[18:41]year after year, grappling with it.
[18:44]I think I have a particular ability
[18:47]to really talk about that with students
[18:49]and empower them with the notion
[18:52]that what they're feeling is not only like typical
[18:57]and normal, but useful.
[18:59]That is actually useful for the artist
[19:02]to feel all that discomfort and to feel
[19:05]like she has absolutely no idea what she is doing.
[19:08]Excellent.
[19:09]That's great to hear.
[19:15]You mentioned earlier, you went back and forth
[19:17]between fiction and memoir.
[19:19]What's it like for you writing the two different mediums,
[19:22]I'm sure you talked about this all the time,
[19:23]but how does it feel to be like delving deep inside yourself
[19:27]and figuring out what to include, what not to include,
[19:29]versus crafting a story?
[19:31]Yeah.
[19:32]And even the structure, I've been hearing a lot about people
[19:36]in so much time thinking about the structure of their books
[19:39]and how important that is.
[19:40]Does it differ when you do memoir versus fiction?
[19:43]I think every book sort of announces its own structure
[19:45]at a certain point, but the feeling that I have
[19:48]when I'm working on a novel, and that said,
[19:50]it's been a while since I've been working on a novel,
[19:52]but the feeling that I have is the first feeling
[19:56]as a fiction writer is that it's all up for grabs, right?
[20:00]The entire universe is up for grabs.
[20:02]There's no parameters.
[20:04]And the writer begins to build a world that's
[20:08]an imaginary world.
[20:09]And then when something takes hold and that starts to feel real,
[20:13]it feels as real as the world that I'm walking down the street in.
[20:19]It feels like it's accompanying me.
[20:21]And like I'm sort of living a double life in a way.
[20:24]And there's this world that I can sidestep into.
[20:27]And it's the world that I've invented.
[20:29]And it is as real to me as the world that I live in.
[20:32]The landscape is real to me.
[20:35]I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
[20:36]I'm in my novel, Pictureing the rep, which was published forever ago.
[20:40]The main character is a psychoanalyst
[20:43]who lives in a brownstone on Riverside Drive.
[20:45]And whenever I pass that corner, I think about Solomon.
[20:49]And it's not the corner where the Yeshiva is
[20:52]in the corner where I've been down that block 1,000 times in my real life.
[20:58]But to me, Solomon occupies that territory still and always.
[21:02]And so it becomes real that way.
[21:04]And then eventually, the confines of that world become defined.
[21:09]So it's not all up for grabs.
[21:11]It becomes narrowed into what is the story,
[21:14]who are the characters, what is the landscape.
[21:19]And then memoir, it's not all up for grabs.
[21:22]It's not the whole universe.
[21:23]It's something about an experience that has been lived
[21:27]or an aspect of memory that is asking to be plumbed in some way.
[21:33]And so the feeling for me is of doing this deep, deep, deep inner dive.
[21:39]And going to this place inside of me that is very small and very compact.
[21:44]But when it expands, when I go there, it expands.
[21:49]Because if it expands at all the time, anyone who's doing this kind of work
[21:55]would have to be just put into a straight check
[22:00]because I couldn't live in that way all the time.
[22:02]And I thought a lot about this because people would ask me that.
[22:04]Because they would say, you write about some really dark and painful things,
[22:07]but you seem to have a relatively content life.
[22:10]How do you do that?
[22:11]And I really thought about it because I thought, how do I do that?
[22:15]And I think it's that when I'm there, I'm all in.
[22:19]And when I leave, I can come back up to, bob back up to the surface
[22:24]and put dinner on the table.
[22:27]It's impressive.
[22:28]I feel like it's almost like the difference between starting a construction
[22:32]project from scratch when you just have land fiction
[22:35]is whatever can be overwhelming.
[22:37]But renovation is one like a memoir, right?
[22:39]Because you have to work with something.
[22:41]Or I would say you're building a room, building like a one room.
[22:45]You know, is it the dining room?
[22:47]Is it the den?
[22:48]Is it the master bedroom?
[22:49]Is it a closet?
[22:51]You know, is it the basement?
[22:53]What's in the basement?
[22:54]You know, it's having written these multiple memoirs
[22:58]and surprising myself by doing so.
[22:59]The feeling is it's not that I think that my life is so interesting.
[23:03]I don't.
[23:04]It's that I have these questions that I want to explore.
[23:10]And I use my memory as a tool to explore them.
[23:14]So it's really a very specific.
[23:17]Hourglass was really about time and marriage.
[23:20]And devotion was really about a spiritual existential crisis.
[23:26]And asking myself the question, what do I believe?
[23:30]Do I believe anything?
[23:31]And what are the questions that I need to ask to discover that?
[23:38]And slow motion was more of a classic memoir
[23:41]in the sense of it was a story.
[23:44]It was over the course of a year.
[23:46]And I mean, it moved into the past and into the future.
[23:49]But essentially it began and it ended over the course of one year.
[23:53]And it was chronological.
[23:54]But so these are each in a way.
[23:58]You know, I have an elderly aunt who I'm very close to, who's 93.
[24:02]And she's a poet.
[24:04]I mean, she would blush if she heard me describe her that way,
[24:08]but she really is.
[24:09]And she said to me once, my life is a museum.
[24:13]And I just, and she was talking about memory.
[24:15]Like I can wander into this room.
[24:17]I can wander into that gallery.
[24:19]And I thought it was so beautiful and such an incredible thing
[24:23]to be able to say as a non-agenerian.
[24:28]And it struck me as a very contented feeling
[24:32]and also probably a very true one, one to aspire to in a way.
[24:37]And I think that when I write memoirs,
[24:39]it's about looking at a particular aspect of life
[24:48]through this specificity and idiosyncrasy of my life.
[24:57]So would you write about a midlife marriage
[25:00]and expose things not, keep not,
[25:04]translate that exposes the wrong word.
[25:05]But when you share things about your marriage,
[25:08]how do you decide what you're going to put in
[25:11]and what you're not going to put in?
[25:12]Like, do you have an example of a scene
[25:14]that you debated putting in the book
[25:16]but decided for whatever reason not to?
[25:18]Mm-hmm.
[25:20]Well, first of all, I think that the art of memoir
[25:22]is always what to put in and what to leave out.
[25:25]Always, in writing about one's marriage
[25:28]that one hopes to stay in it.
[25:30]And it becomes a little more crucial.
[25:37]What came to mind when you asked that
[25:38]is that there were any number of times
[25:41]where I stopped at a certain moment where I thought,
[25:48]do I dare?
[25:49]I do I go there.
[25:51]And because my husband is my first reader
[25:54]and because we were, our process,
[25:59]my process has always been that I read
[26:00]to him at the end of the day.
[26:02]So it took me a while to understand
[26:05]that after I finished Hourglass
[26:06]and people were asking me that question.
[26:09]But I read to him every day when I was writing Hourglass
[26:13]the same way as I would if I were writing any other book.
[26:17]And the thing that came to me later was that
[26:19]we weren't sitting there like,
[26:20]now it's time to discuss our marriage
[26:22]at seven o'clock at night after the day is done.
[26:24]It was, now it's time for me to read you pages of my book
[26:29]and we're going to talk about it as a book.
[26:31]And my husband always has my back as a reader
[26:36]and he's going to push me to make it the best book
[26:39]that it can be.
[26:40]So there's even a moment in Hourglass
[26:41]where he turns to me and says,
[26:44]I think what you're working on is great
[26:47]and I'm an okay guy, but you're not being hard enough on me.
[26:51]And I remember, we were standing in the airport in Denver
[26:53]and we were about to each get on different planes
[26:55]and he said that to me and I thought,
[26:57]a, he's right, b, that's going into the book.
[27:00]And it's actually a moment in the book
[27:02]where I become a little bit harder on us,
[27:05]not just on him, but sort of holding our feet
[27:08]to the fire in some way as a couple.
[27:10]But there definitely, I'll give you an example.
[27:11]So I'm fairly far into the book
[27:16]because one of the things that I came to realize
[27:18]about us as a couple is that our tolerance for risk
[27:20]is very different.
[27:22]It's mine has grown over the years
[27:25]by virtue of having been with him for over two decades
[27:27]but it's different.
[27:29]He was a war correspondent.
[27:31]His tolerance for risk involves, you know,
[27:34]flat jackets and bullets and explosions
[27:37]and mine does not.
[27:40]And so there was an ice storm in Littlefield County,
[27:44]Connecticut where we live and we lost power
[27:46]and we needed to leave the house.
[27:48]And our son was young strapped into his baby seat in the back.
[27:53]And so we're like, skidding down this,
[27:55]just really like the governors on the radio saying,
[27:57]stay indoors and trees are uprooted
[28:01]and it's, you know, really catastrophic
[28:03]and we're heading to a friend's house where they have power.
[28:06]And my husband suddenly turns in a completely different
[28:10]direction from the friend's house.
[28:12]And I said, what are you doing?
[28:14]And he said, I just want to see what's going on.
[28:16]Like, no, turn around.
[28:19]And it was really like a how, not only how could you do this
[28:23]but how could you not understand how deeply I wouldn't
[28:26]want to do this?
[28:27]Right.
[28:27]So he turns around and he drops my son
[28:30]and me off at our friend's house
[28:32]and then, you know, we're all getting cozy by the fire
[28:35]and drinking hot chocolate and he goes back out
[28:37]into the wild and he comes back a while later.
[28:42]And the way that I had written it in the book was,
[28:44]you know, he comes back in and I write,
[28:47]his cheeks were ready and his eyes were bright.
[28:49]It's like a war zone out there, he said.
[28:52]And the scene didn't quite land
[28:53]and I kept on thinking, what am I not doing here?
[28:58]What am I not being honest about here?
[29:00]And finally, one day I was working on the scene
[29:03]and, you know, he comes back in and his cheeks are ready
[29:06]and his eyes were bright and I wrote the words,
[29:08]I hated him.
[29:10]And then it's like a war zone out there, he said.
[29:14]And I looked at that sentence, I deleted it.
[29:16]I wrote it again, I deleted again.
[29:18]I had like five times I did this.
[29:19]And then finally, I was just like, okay.
[29:23]And when I turned the book back into my editor,
[29:26]this was really late in the game.
[29:27]I mean, this was like the draft that was gonna be published.
[29:31]She called me up and she said,
[29:32]that is my favorite sentence in the whole book
[29:34]because it rang of honesty.
[29:37]But one of the lessons about it too though
[29:40]is like, now I can talk about that
[29:41]because of course it's ridiculous the idea
[29:44]that we don't sometimes hate the people that we're with.
[29:47]Of course we do.
[29:48]But in that moment, like what spouse doesn't hate,
[29:51]like flash of just like, oh my God.
[29:53]I just, I can't stand you right now, right?
[29:56]But it was this moment of just, I can't go there.
[30:00]And for a writer, I think for any creative person, anyone trying to create something,
[30:07]that feeling is, I mean, Gideon put it this way, but you know, that feeling is gold.
[30:13]That like, oh, this is too close to the bone, too scary, I can't.
[30:19]That's where you have to.
[30:24]You told me at the library lunch the other day that readers often feel like they know
[30:29]you really well after they've read all your memoirs.
[30:32]But in actuality, this is a view that has carefully crafted and selected, and it's not
[30:38]the whole you.
[30:39]What part of you would readers be surprised to unearth?
[30:44]That's a great question, thanks.
[30:48]I don't know that it's so much about like the facts of me.
[30:52]That's a really good question.
[30:59]I mean, I think in a lot of ways that my, well, the reason why I'm kind of stumbling
[31:07]is because I do share it, like I don't think readers would be surprised to find out that
[31:11]I am anxious sometimes, or that, yeah, that feeling of am I right about it a lot in devotion
[31:20]of like the other shoe, you know, the other shoe dropping.
[31:24]It's not so much even emotional truths of me, and certainly not facts about my life.
[31:31]I think it's more that it's very different to sit across a table from someone and get
[31:37]to know them than it is to read them on the page where everything has been so carefully
[31:45]crafted.
[31:47]I don't craft in a self-protective way, I craft in a way that has to do with making
[31:52]the book be the best book that it can possibly be.
[31:54]And if it belongs in the book, I don't worry so much about whether I'm exposing myself.
[31:59]But you know, when we moved to Connecticut from New York, I was getting to know new people
[32:04]for the first time.
[32:05]I was, you know, young mom, you know, mom friends, new friends in Litchfield County, just
[32:10]people.
[32:11]And I was noticing that nobody was asking me anything about myself.
[32:15]And it took me a while to figure out why.
[32:17]And it was because they thought they already knew.
[32:20]And simultaneously, people were telling me their deepest darkest secrets.
[32:25]And I kept thinking, why is this happening?
[32:27]Do I have some big, like, confess to me sign over my head?
[32:30]And those two things together, I came to realize they were telling me their secrets because
[32:35]they felt like they knew mine.
[32:37]I don't think it was conscious.
[32:38]I think it was completely sort of unconscious process that went on.
[32:42]And it's a very strange, you know, world of the memoirist in that way.
[32:49]It left me a little lonely because I felt like, but wait, you're not getting to know me.
[32:54]Don't mistake my books for the human interaction of becoming friends with somebody because
[33:02]that's really different.
[33:03]I think that's what I meant by that more than anything.
[33:05]That's funny.
[33:06]I wrote this essay about how sometimes after the kids go to bed, I find myself, you know,
[33:10]eating over the kitchen sink or, you know, whatever.
[33:13]And then I went into my sense school the next morning.
[33:16]And I had, like, all these people coming over and being like, oh my gosh, how you girls
[33:19]going to use it?
[33:20]Like, I had an entire, you know, Costco bucket of whatever last night.
[33:24]And I was like, okay, great, nice time chatting with you.
[33:29]But it is.
[33:30]I mean, I loved it.
[33:31]Don't get me wrong.
[33:32]It's odd and funny and interesting, but, you know, the poet Jane Kenyon describes
[33:36]writing the writing of a poem and the reading of a poem as the poet, like, reaching out
[33:39]to the reader, reaching a handout and saying me too, you know, me too, I've been there
[33:43]too.
[33:44]And that's what, that's what reading is and that's what writing is, I think.
[33:48]And it can certainly feel like, wait, whoa, how did you know that?
[33:50]Right, right.
[33:51]Yeah.
[33:52]Because, because the self that's writing is not the self that's doing drop off.
[33:56]Exactly.
[33:57]That's part of that inner crowd we were talking about, right?
[33:59]So the self that's doing drop off is like, wait a minute, what?
[34:02]Yeah.
[34:03]That's interesting.
[34:04]Do you find a difference in how you write now that you're in Litchville County versus
[34:08]in the city where you used to be?
[34:09]Do you feel the pace of your writing has changed with the pace of life out there or is
[34:13]it?
[34:14]I would say what's most different about it and now it's been a while, and I've written
[34:18]several books since, since we moved there, is that I have to make my day there.
[34:26]Like, I have to make the shape of my day.
[34:28]The day will not have any shape.
[34:31]Shape won't happen to my day unless I make it happen.
[34:34]And I remember really early on living up there and opening the door onto our porch and
[34:39]looking out into the meadow and just realizing that nothing was happening.
[34:42]You know, it's not opening your door and life is just, you know, just happening in every
[34:49]direction all around you.
[34:51]So that then requires a certain amount of conscious discernment.
[34:55]But I was always disciplined.
[34:57]And you know, actually I don't like that word because people often say to me, you must
[35:00]be really disciplined.
[35:02]I've always written the way that I've written because I feel so much better if I do.
[35:06]How is the way, what is the way you're right?
[35:09]Well, it's changed a little bit.
[35:10]But when I'm working on a book daily, earlier in my writing life, five days a week,
[35:17]weekends off, it was like I really had a kind of Monday through Friday before,
[35:23]before family life, before children, getting up in the morning, basically rolling out of bed,
[35:28]making myself a cup of coffee and getting to work.
[35:30]And not letting anything get between that sort of dreamy state and getting to work.
[35:36]Then I had a child and I had to sort of recalibrate how am I going to get up in the morning,
[35:44]be there for my son, make lunch, take him to school, and then get to work and be present for
[35:52]him, not be in this kind of like, whoa, my heads in the clouds, mommy's already working,
[35:57]didn't want to do that.
[35:58]And so I had to learn how to restart the day.
[36:01]A meditation practice has been enormously useful to me in that regard.
[36:07]But still I would need to start the day, like do drop off and then get to work,
[36:12]not do drop off and then go hiking with a bunch of moms and then get to work, or
[36:16]I've never been able to like work out in the morning as much as that means that often,
[36:21]it means I don't work out.
[36:22]If I work out in the morning, I'm already feeling too much like the day has gotten underway.
[36:28]A difference now is that I ride all the time.
[36:33]So if I'm in the middle of a book, it could be, and my son is a senior in high school.
[36:39]So I have the liberty to do that seven days a week.
[36:43]Or the only thing that remains the same is trying to start the day with it.
[36:48]I had friends earlier in my writing life who didn't understand why I couldn't meet for
[36:51]breakfast or why I couldn't have lunch and one friend in particular would always be like,
[36:55]you know, you're so rigid, you don't answer your phone.
[36:58]This particular person is a therapist, I'm not like saying like, you don't answer your phone,
[37:03]like you're in the middle of a session.
[37:04]I'm working and just needing to really protect that time and make it sacred.
[37:09]That's the thing that remains true all the way through, is that like it's hard enough to
[37:17]sit down and do the work, creating a sense of sacredness around it or of not
[37:25]and the internet is not our friend in this regard.
[37:27]So finding ways to shut down the outside world, you know, the, I could talk about this forever,
[37:33]but the, the instrument upon which a writer writes is also the portal to everything else.
[37:38]So, and you can still look like you're doing the same thing, you know, if you're meditating
[37:42]and you stop and you get up and you go down and stare into your refrigerator,
[37:45]you know, you've stopped meditating and you know, anyone observing you would know that too.
[37:49]If you're sitting in writing, all you need to do is like, click and you could be on net
[37:53]poor day, like buying a pair of boots, in which case, I mean, I'm not speaking of myself.
[37:58]No, no, of course not, you know, but even in the name of research, like clicking on something
[38:03]because you think you really need to know about that particular, you know, sofa that they're
[38:09]sitting on at that moment is like, no, you don't, that's what TKs are for and just staying
[38:14]in the discomfort. It's, it's a way in which the writing practice and a meditation practice
[38:19]are actually very similar. Like staying in the, you know what, I'm not comfortable and I
[38:24]really want to get up and my mind is racing, but I'm going to stay here anyway because these
[38:29]are like passing clouds in the sky. It's going to pass and I don't want to miss the thing that
[38:34]maybe I'm avoiding by going boot shopping at this moment. There's a, there's a, for your listeners
[38:41]who are writers, there's a, an app that I use that I've turned a lot of people on to call
[38:46]freedom. And do you know about this? I don't, no time. So it's an app, you just keep it on your
[38:52]desktop. And if you want to basically shut everything down, you click on it and it asks you how
[38:57]many minutes of freedom you would like or worse. Yeah, it's come to this. It's sad, sad, but true.
[39:02]It's like infinity freedom now. You know, right? The first time I ever did it, I thought, oh,
[39:07]three hours. And then do you know long three hours is without any interruption? Our brains have
[39:12]stopped being able, if they ever were able to, they've really stopped being able to do that because
[39:17]they toggle back and forth so much between different, you know, can't you cheat? Can't you like put
[39:22]a really freedom on that? Well, if you have yourself and then have your phone with you, then you're
[39:27]cheating. Yeah. But if you put your phone in the other room or you can also put your phone on
[39:30]freedom, what it does, I do it for myself, literally in half hour increments. And I do a half an
[39:38]hour. And it's amazing to me how quickly that half hour goes by and a little ding happens and it
[39:43]shows you your time is up. You can just re-up it. And I've done that, you know, I do that multiple
[39:48]of times often not then going and checking my email or feeling like I need to look at Instagram or
[39:54]find out what's going on in the world because all of that can be so enormously distracting.
[40:00]from there's this relatively new field of information and science and it's been
[40:05]studied that being interrupted by a single phone call will set you back 11
[40:12]minutes in terms of where your attention was that's a phone call that's one
[40:17]phone call and if you think of what we all do with our devices all the time it's
[40:21]like we're never recovering we're never we're never catching up and every
[40:25]writer friend of mine who I talk to about this is grappling with the
[40:30]same thing because it's just there on the instrument that you're writing on
[40:34]you know I was feeling stress I'm trying to write a book now and so far I've only
[40:38]been able to write when I'm on an airplane because I'm like oh no
[40:42]I was like you know what I was doing and I was like maybe I'll just make that
[40:45]my thing I'll just write the whole thing whenever we travel I'll just write it on
[40:48]planes and because I can't seem to get that you know at least with lots of
[40:52]kids I don't know I mean creating a bubble having schools call and I just
[40:56]feel like there's always something yeah it's very hard for you to put your
[40:59]phone away in that situation you know friend of mine a writer named
[41:02]Alexander Chi who just had a new book come out a couple years ago he tweeted
[41:08]something about wouldn't it be great for Amtrak to offer residencies to
[41:15]to writers and Amtrak did no yes and so I don't know if it's still ongoing I
[41:22]think I think it might be but a couple years ago it was like really a thing
[41:25]very well-masty still beyond going and very competitive at all the writer
[41:29]people applied for this basically fellowship to be able to get on board the
[41:34]train you know in New York and just ride the train like ride the train across
[41:38]the country doesn't that sound divine yeah I know you definitely got the
[41:41]toes you've got a lot done and and and that sense not only of not being
[41:46]interrupted but not being interruptible which is a which is a different I was at a
[41:51]writer's colony called Hedgebrook a women's only amazing writer's colony on
[41:56]the west coast in the Pacific Northwest last year or the year before and I
[42:01]remember sitting in my little cabin there and thinking I am uninterruptible
[42:06]no one there is no there's there's there's no internet here I mean there
[42:12]are an emergency somebody would know how to contact me but others in that you're
[42:16]like interrupted by the owl at the window that's pretty much it and that is a
[42:20]tremendous luxury for you know anyone who's a busy mom or working with them
[42:27]one job or you know whatever whatever the particular responsibilities of a
[42:33]life are there's always this sense of you know how long do I have I mean
[42:38]like writing in the you know in the corners and in the margins so planes
[42:42]trains colonies weekend away join didyanya's to check into hotels it's very
[42:50]romantic you know love that nice hotels too awesome you told me that you
[42:58]recently handed in your next book and you can really say anything other than
[43:02]you would uncover the family secret and now like what could this possibly be
[43:08]can you give us any more hands or any any any any more to that at all or when
[43:14]it's coming out any I can tell you the title which is inheritance and yeah
[43:20]it's it's challenging to figure out how to talk about this right now because it
[43:24]I did right after I finished hourglass I stumbled upon a really really massive
[43:30]family secret and one that changes a lot about actually changes everything
[43:38]about the way that I think of my life my childhood my ancestors and I can't
[43:47]really talk about it all that much more but it was something that I started
[43:52]working on and writing pretty much the instant that I made this discovery which
[43:56]was very accidental I wasn't like I know there's still another secret that I
[43:59]know come on there's got to be a book I really thought that I was done with
[44:05]memoir and that hourglass would probably be my last memoir and and looking to go
[44:11]back to fiction and then this like this just this huge kind of like wrecking ball
[44:18]came sort of sweeping in which I'm very grateful for the timing because if it
[44:21]happened a couple of months earlier I wouldn't have finished hourglass because
[44:25]it was it was of the nature of like sort of changes everything and so it's
[44:31]taught me also a tremendous amount and I really look forward to being able to
[44:35]talk about this at some point about the creative unconscious because when I
[44:42]look at all of my work from my very first novel through I would say up until
[44:48]hourglass because hourglass didn't have much to do with the family that I
[44:51]come from and it the family that I've made I can actually see that in a
[44:57]profoundly unconscious way this was something I knew it's all over my work and
[45:02]so it's one of those things that is both sort of stunning and liberating and so
[45:11]complex but it's and humbling because really you know especially when I talk
[45:17]to students who are writing fiction the idea that we're in any way in
[45:21]control of what we're writing you know I mean ultimately we are we can shape
[45:25]it but the the sense of what drives us like why do you write about what you
[45:31]write about why do I write about what I write about I have been writing about
[45:35]secrets within families for my whole entire career my novel family history was
[45:41]about a family secret my novel black and white was about a family secret why
[45:45]was I writing about family secrets and if you would said to me is there do you
[45:48]think there's a family secret that you don't know about it no no I think this
[45:51]just really interests me so yeah and I and I'm not exactly sure can off is
[45:59]publishing it and it will be out at some point early my guess is early next
[46:04]year early 2019 yeah we're doing things like book jackets now and
[46:10]yeah well I can't wait to read it thank you and thanks for that cliffhanger
[46:14]sorry thank you no it's awesome and thank you so much for all your time I feel
[46:19]like I could chat with you all day long but thank you so much for sharing
[46:25]everything okay thanks again for listening to this episode of mom's don't have
[46:30]time to read books don't forget to check out Babo Botanicals BABO Babo Botanicals
[46:36]dot com don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating if you enjoyed this
[46:40]five-star rating and a review would be amazing thank you bye