Debbie Millman:
How does something come from nothing? How do creators actually create? These are the questions Adam Moss has long been asking. They also happen to be some of the questions that I try to investigate with every guest on every episode of this podcast. How did you become you and how did you make that? Adam Moss is the former editor of New York Magazine, and before that, he was the editor of the New York Times magazine. He has left an indelible mark on those magazines and on the many others he’s worked on. Adam Moss is also an artist. He came late to the fine arts and he’s a little reluctant to call himself an artist. We’re going to talk all about that and how he wrote and created his brand new book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. Adam Moss, welcome to Design Matters.

Adam Moss:
Thank you, Debbie. Glad to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, I understand you have really tiny handwriting.

Adam Moss:
Yes, I do. Do you want to see it?

Debbie Millman:
Was it always really tiny, or did that evolve from your work as an editor?

Adam Moss:
Oh no. It was always that way. I don’t know, can you really change your handwriting?

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. I look back at my handwriting when I was younger. It was much neater than it is now. Now I scribble more. But I’ve also noticed that my mother’s handwriting has never changed, ever. From the time I remember first seeing it till now.

Adam Moss:
I don’t think my handwriting has changed. My signature did after I spent a good deal of time trying to perfect it and make it look lovely.

Debbie Millman:
And why did you do that?

Adam Moss:
Because I’m vain and because I hoped one day that somebody would want my signature on something other than a check.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, an autograph maybe.

Adam Moss:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Brooklyn.

Adam Moss:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
But your family moved to Hewlett, Long Island when you were a little boy, when you were a junior in high school. I understand you were a bit of a theater geek.

Adam Moss:
Oh my God. Where did you get that information? Yes, but actually it was earlier.

Debbie Millman:
Even earlier.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, it was my geek-itude. Theater geek-itude was exhausted by the time I was a junior, largely because I didn’t really have the aptitude that I had fantasized having as a younger person. I was actually a pretty good actor when I was 11, and then I hit puberty and it really just all just vanished.

Debbie Millman:
Were you more of a dramatic actor or a musical actor?

Adam Moss:
I aspired to be a musical actor. I aspired to be at chorus boy, that’s what I wanted more than anything.

Debbie Millman:
The reason I was mentioning junior high was because I understand that when you were in junior high every year in your school, a student got to direct the annual play and you wanted that job. You wanted-

Adam Moss:
You have such excellent researchers. Yes, that is true.

Debbie Millman:
Because of your experience at the time and your passion for theater, you thought there was no one else even remotely qualified to get the job of director of this play. I’m wondering if you can share what happened next.

Adam Moss:
I did look around and I was an actor. Also, I had been in the school play over and over, and I had done a million parts. I must have played every part in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in camp. I loved it. Yeah, I thought it was just my turn and it wasn’t. There was one day when they were supposed to tell you whether you… There were three finalists and I was one of the finalists, and I invited two of my friends to be with me when I got the big phone call, and they did a very cruel thing, which is that they made the person who did get the job call the person who didn’t get the job. So I got that phone call from this lovely girl who did a great job to tell me that I had failed to get this job, which was crushing.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I can understand. I was also a theater geek in high school, and remember when I didn’t get parts that I so desperately wanted.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. But they gave me as a consolation prize, they were doing Fiddler on the Roof and they gave me, I was Motel that year. So that was fine. I got to sing Wonder of Wonder, Miracle of Miracles, and all was fine.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know if you’re going to want to talk about this and we can always edit it out, but I understand that when you didn’t get the part-

Adam Moss:
Oh. My mother ran into the principal’s office. Is that what you want to talk about?

Debbie Millman:
Not so much that part.

Adam Moss:
It was an amazing thing because my mother did not have a history of standing up for me this way.

Debbie Millman:
That’s why I was going to ask you about it.

Adam Moss:
But she was horrified and moved, I think, by my terrible sorrow. Yeah, went to the principal and said, “Why didn’t he get this job?” Or whatever you want to call it, this assignment. And the principal said, “He’s not a leader. He does not have the ability to get other people to rally around something,” which I don’t know if it was true at the time, but it certainly in retrospect was a very helpful thing to me, even though it was cruel and crushing because it spurred me to be the person he didn’t think I was.

Debbie Millman:
You have written about how you thought that maybe it was the beginning of your real ambition.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:39] always had a ambivalent feeling about ambition. I think I was always ambitious. In fact, the signs of my ambition are very, very clear if I do a retrospective look at my life. But I came of age in the 60s and ambition a dirty word, even though ambition just really took different forms. But the notion of ambition was somehow tied to capitalism, even though that was not at all what I wanted, but I was afraid of wanting something too much. So I struggled with that as a way to identify myself, and then at some point I had to concede that I was a very ambitious person.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to go too far into the future, but I do want to ask you this question about when you left New York Magazine because you stated that your plan for the future was to try living with less ambition.

Adam Moss:
That’s true, and I think I have succeeded. It took a little while to get used to that, but ambition is exhausting. I had just had it as a habit for so long and I was kind of wiped out. I did try for the first months after I left the job to try to live a life of simpler pleasures, not needing the dopamine of the things that ambition gets you. I started to paint and I started to paint just for myself, which was a kind of ambition, but also not a public ambition. Then it really wasn’t until I wrote this book and even this book that I wrote, I wrote it for myself. I did not write it in order for it to be a bestseller or something. I wrote it to just satisfy a curiosity that I had and actually a kind of obsession that I had that was not an ambitious obsession. It was more of a personal obsession. So I think that I do live with less ambition now and I’m happier for it.

Debbie Millman:
Your book is very much a deconstruction of how people are artists and how people make art, and it occurred to me when I was thinking about the role of ambition in your life, the role of ambition in my life. I was wondering if there was any type of common denominator that you began to understand in the artists that you spoke with about the role ambition plays in their lives?

Adam Moss:
I think ambition is very important in an artist’s life, particularly an artist of the kind that I talked to for this book, this dataset of 43 of them, because ambition is one of the things that fuels drive and that you need a kind of superhuman drive to accomplish what these people have accomplished, but also the creative life is just full of obstacles. There are just bits of self-sabotage, landmines everywhere you step and in order to persevere through them, you need fuel. And that fuel can be a lot of things. It could be outrage, it could be sorrow, it could be loneliness, but it is often propelled by ambition. Now, that’s not mean necessarily ambition to sell a million dollar painting, although that comes into it. It’s the ambition to make something, but then we can talk later even about that because it’s really more the ambition to make rather than the ambition to make something.

Debbie Millman:
The one thing that you said about that experience that I thought was really compelling was you telling yourself, “Fuck this, I am strong enough. I can do this.” And it made me wonder if the very seed of ambition is about proving something to oneself.

Adam Moss:
I think that’s absolutely true. Even if it’s the kind of ambition that requires validation, the reason you require that validation is that there’s something that’s missing in you and that you’re trying to fill.

Debbie Millman:
Going back to some of your-

Adam Moss:
Long Island?

Debbie Millman:
Origin story. Yes. As you were growing up, you discovered what you’ve described as your own piece of library paradise in the stacks of magazines at your local library where you perused old periodicals from World War II. That really surprised me. You described these as stimulants for your imagination. What interested you in that particular time period?

Adam Moss:
It was really just the availability of it, but also the magazines of the 40s are wonderful and the advertisements of the 40s are wonderful, and I would spend as much time perusing those as I would reading stories. But I suppose if I was going to be in a shrinks chair, it was also my parents’ era, so I was interested in the life that they lived. It’s a kind of just way to live history, to rediscover history, but also I got very entranced with the magazine form, which was complemented by a kind of simultaneous worship of the magazines that came through the mail slot in my house, and that I would read at other people’s houses.

My parents were charter subscribers of New York Magazine, which opened up the world of New York City, which was enormously appealing, especially considering how uncomfortable I was in the suburban life that they had put me in. So this was a kind of a exit door, exit door of the imagination, but it was an exit door. And also magazines in like 1966, ’67, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’71 were fabulous laboratories of storytelling experimentation, in addition to being very exciting because the times were very exciting. So the dual action of visiting magazines of history and visiting magazines of the present or then present, just really excited me. I was just into magazines as early as I can remember.

Debbie Millman:
Was it just magazines or was it also newspapers? Long Island Newsday was quite good in the 70s.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, I wasn’t actually into newspapers. In fact, later I would get a job through strange circumstances as a copy boy at the New York Times, a job that any person who aspires to be a newspaper reporter or editor… Well, no one aspires to be an editor, but reporter would love, and I was blasé about it. It was interesting. I found it interesting, but it wasn’t actually what I wanted to do because I didn’t find the newspaper itself as a form to be as compelling to me as what was going on in the more subjective and visually enthralling world of magazines.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you got the job as a copy boy or a copy… Copy-

Adam Moss:
Copy boy, that’s what it was called, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Under Strange Circumstances. And I’m wondering what those were because I couldn’t find out. I really searched for the way in which you entered the world of the New York Times. I know you went to Oberlin College, and I know you had an internship at The Village Voice, but I could not find out how you got to the New York Times.

Adam Moss:
Well, I’ll tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. Yay.

Adam Moss:
I graduated from college. I had worked at The Village Voice the summer before. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life though I was, as I say, very excited about the prospect of journalism. No more magazine journalism, the newspaper journalism. And my father has a friend, still alive, who was dating a Swedish woman, and that Swedish woman was very interested in marrying my father’s friend. And that Swedish woman, having never met me, vouched for me to her friend, her other Swedish friend who happened to be married to Sydney Gruson, who was the vice chairman of the New York Times. And so without inviting this call, I got a call one day from Sydney Gruson’s office and said, “He would like to meet you and would you come up and see him?” So I did, and I got stoned before I went, but that was-

Debbie Millman:
As one did at that time.

Adam Moss:
As one did at that time. But that was the kind of level of it didn’t matter to me really. He had two children, one child who went to Oberlin, and the other child who went to Harvard, and I had had a short stint at Harvard as well. He was very interested in the establishment, non-establishment, duality of his children’s experience, but also of my own life. We got along great, and I walked out of there with a job.

Debbie Millman:
Did the Swedish woman marry your father’s friend?

Adam Moss:
She did not.

Debbie Millman:
Oh.

Adam Moss:
Sad story.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Adam Moss:
But anyway, I did meet her at one point and she was a lovely person. And I’m very grateful to her for that, even though it was a bit of a surprise, but I should probably say… Do you know what a copy boy was? It’s a great old vestigial job. It was back before computers, of course. A newspaper had editors and writers, and when the copy had to go from editor to writer, the writer or the editor would raise their hand and yell, “Copy,” and you would run and grab the piece of paper and run to the other, the reporter or the editor, and run back and run back and run back and run back. It was a crazy fun job that just vanished like so many others.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it sounds like the ball boy or girl at a tennis.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. It’s similar. It’s similar, yeah. But during this time… So I worked there at night and I worked at Rolling Stone during the daytime because that was a magazine and they were starting a new magazine for college students. So I really, I had a life of working one job, then working another job and never sleeping and was wonderful time.

Debbie Millman:
You worked at Rolling Stone putting together a magazine called The Rolling Stone College Papers, and then from there I believe you were simultaneously at the New York Times, but then went on to Esquire–

Adam Moss:
That’s correct.

Debbie Millman:
To work on their annual college publication. But that magazine was killed the day after you arrived at Esquire?

Adam Moss:
I believe it was the day I arrived.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, the day of.

Adam Moss:
But in any case, it was too late. They had me. They had hired me as a pipsqueak editor, and it was a wonderful time to be at Esquire because Philip Moffitt and Chris Whittle, who had bought the place were somewhat insecure about their abilities to edit a big city magazine. They had come from Tennessee having done a very successful startup thing there, which gave them the money to buy Esquire. And they had brought back the great editors. One of, I talked about the New York Magazine, but one of the other, of course fantastic magazines of the 60s was Esquire, probably the best run of a magazine ever. That was really my dream job. So there I was, and they had brought back all these editors and the editors weren’t much interested in working, and they were very happy to have a young editor to do their jobs for them.

Debbie Millman:
So before you were 30 years old, you worked for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Esquire?

Adam Moss:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
What did you make of that trajectory?

Adam Moss:
I didn’t think about it. The only thing I realized was that I was the only one of my college friends working, and because you just didn’t do it in those days. You would go through Europe with a backpack or-

Debbie Millman:
Peace Corps.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, Peace Corps and work on a farm. And I had a very unusual career trajectory. And it never felt like it was any decision I made. It was just the way things happen. Of course, in retrospect, you see all the decisions you actually did make to make it happen, but it was not how I experienced it.

Debbie Millman:
In 1987, Leonard Stern, the owner of The Village Voice, was looking to start another and invited you among many others to pitch ideas. I read that Leonard didn’t have a strong sense of what he wanted to publish other than he wanted to create a magazine that was, in his words, less pinko. Allison Stern, Leonard Stern’s wife, was particularly interested in what you pitched, although it seemed when you were pitching that Leonard was not as interested. Can you talk about what you pitched and how you developed the original idea for the pitch?

Adam Moss:
At Esquire, I had been working on this other magazine, I think it was called Manhattan. It was-

Debbie Millman:
Manhattan. Yeah, Jay [inaudible 00:18:26].

Adam Moss:
It was nothing.

Debbie Millman:
I just have to interrupt you for a second.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It wasn’t nothing at the time.

Adam Moss:
Where it went was something, but my pitch, you asked me what my pitch was. My pitch was like… It was really… I thought there was a place in the market between The Village Voice and New York Magazine, and I had this half-assed idea of what that could be. And I had presented it to a consultant, a guy named Jack Berkowitz, great guy. And he told me my idea was terrible and that it would never make any money because he was looking at it from that perspective. But he was also the consultant on this project, and he had said to me, “Hey, just pitch it. They’re having a bake-off. Just pitch your idea.” And I pitched, and I really don’t think the idea had much merit at all. But I think my own eagerness was probably winning.
And yeah, it was 10 o’clock at night in skyscraper, in 50s I think, in Manhattan, and I pitched the thing, and there was utter silence. Allison had just injured the room. I think mine was the only idea that she’d heard, and I think she thought the whole thing seemed fun. Really out of shame because the silence was so awful, I went to the bathroom. This is the story you’re looking for, I’m sure. At the urinal, I was doing my business and Leonard came in to do his business and he said, “Yeah, we’ll do your magazine.”
And then I got a bunch of people together and hired, well, I think a bunch of children, which was all I could afford, and thank God for it because there was just a kind of youthful passion and somewhat organically Seven Days emerged, which was basically a function of our own naivete about what a magazine should feel like and look like. But it became this kind of conversational collage that reflected the week. It was different and probably fresh. We got a lot of incredible talent work for it. Yeah, it was all wonderful.

Debbie Millman:
It was a wonderful sliver of time in the world of magazines at that time.

Adam Moss:
You have to remember that that was a period when there was a lot of optimism [inaudible 00:21:03] magazines and there were starting up all over the place.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. New York Woman, Egg-

Adam Moss:
Spy.

Debbie Millman:
Spy, of course. I remember very vividly Seven Days, and not just Seven Days, but also this sense that Adam Moss had arrived. And he was now-

Adam Moss:
Oh, You’re nice.

Debbie Millman:
No, no. I don’t want to fawn. That’s not what I want to do. But because it was such an important moment in my life as well. Living in New York surrounded by magazines, I was working at a number of different magazines. Nowhere as near in the stratosphere is the ones that you were working on, but it was still a great, great passion. I had a friend that worked at Manhattan, inc. and a friend that worked at New York Woman and a friend that worked at Spy. So I was very immersed in this world. And for our listeners, when Seven Days came out, it really did change quite a lot of the way in which you thought about and considered a magazine. And it’s interesting you said that you think the entire history of Seven Days is the history of people who didn’t know any better doing all the things that their elders had dismissed, because most of the time it didn’t work. But it did work for a while.

Adam Moss:
I still believe that.

Debbie Millman:
I still that it did work for a while.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, and it worked. It was a kind of accidental explosion of naiveté that yes, somehow worked. And prefigured a lot of storytelling forms that would emerge later around the internet in particular. But that kind of conversational, very subjective, personal expression, filter of experience of news experience, but also personal experience that was related to exactly that moment in time, that was what animated the magazine. And yeah, I look back on it, some parts of it I cringe at, but for the most part I’m just as excited. But it’s very much of its time so that somebody might chance upon it in a library, just the way I did those magazines of the 40s. And they will instantly know what the world was like in 1989 in New York City for a certain demographic.

Debbie Millman:
Despite only lasting two years. Two weeks after the magazine closed, Seven Days won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, which is a highly competitive accolade. And this propelled you to begin working at the New York Times where you were brought in to quote, “Decalcify the place,” unquote. And you’ve said that in doing so at the time, you got a lot of grief. They didn’t want to be decalcified?

Adam Moss:
No, they certainly did not want. The rank and file did not. The rank and file, they were very invested in the establishment traditions of the New York Times. That’s why they worked there, and they were very important. But there were some leaders of the Times, Joe Lelyveld, the man who hired me in particular, who thought it needed some breaking down. Not entirely, didn’t want to change it. Tremendous reverence for the institution, but felt that it had some cobwebs. And so he assigned me this absolutely preposterous assignment, which is to go in there and make trouble. I was 30, and I learned very quickly to ignore my brief. Anyone who wanted to bend the place a little bit, I was there to help them do that. And there were some interesting projects. They were all pretty small.

But the one piece of the institution that I wanted to participate in, because it’s the only one that I had an idea about was the magazine. And the editor at the time was not interested in my being there for excellent reason. And eventually there was, this guy named Jack Rosenthal, and he asked me to come on first in this wrecker role, and then eventually as his partner, editorial director, and then I became editor of the magazine afterwards.

Debbie Millman:
How did you feel as a wrecker? Did you feel courageous at the time? Were you tentative nervous, ballsy?

Adam Moss:
Foolhardy. Naive. Naiveté is really, it’s a theme in my life. I think it maybe still is. I just didn’t realize how many traditions I was trampling on. But on the other hand, I also knew what I didn’t know. I was not particularly cocky. I was more like a child in a room of adults, and I acted like a child, and I played as a child, and that had benefits and that had a lot of problems. But I grew up fast there and they taught me a lot. And in fact, I feel very much formed by what I learned at the New York Times and very grateful for that education. I really became a journalist there. And before that, I was faking it.

Debbie Millman:
The magazine still has a lot of your imprint in it now, all these years later. It’s still very much influenced by how you reimagined it. Could be. It’s a magazine, it’s not an insert.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, I’d like to take full credit for that. But that was really… Like many of these things, that was really a confluence of a lot of things happening at once, largely economics. The Times was really making a national push into national distribution, but also a business model of national advertising. A lot of that advertising was magazine-like advertising. So there was a desire for the magazine to be a gatherer of that kind of advertising. And so there was a kind of… I don’t want to call it an open check because it really was not that large, but there was permission given to detach it from its history as a supplement and to turn it into a freestanding magazine that happened to be distributed in the New York Times and that had the New York Times DNA, which was a really interesting brief, and one that Jack and I worked on. And then later I worked on with the staff as the editor.

Debbie Millman:
You left the Times in the early aughts, but not after more accolades awards and increase in readership, a whole different way of really assessing the magazine. And you went on to New York Magazine as editor, and you were brought in again to remake it by then, owner Bruce Wasserstein. I read that you approached it as a kind of restoration project as opposed to a re-imagination, and you wanted to bring back some of the values of the original co-founders, Clay Felker and Milton Glaser while still pointing it to the future. What were the values you deemed most important to restore?

Adam Moss:
One of them was both Clay and Milton had a perspective that what the magazine was really about was not New York City, but a New York City way of looking at the world. And that there was a filter that could be applied to Washington, could be applied to Hollywood, could be applied overseas to London, other places, that it was really a magazine of the cosmopolitan world. New York Magazine inspired a lot of city magazines, but it actually never was a city magazine. And the owners of the magazine before Bruce took it over, very much remade it themselves in the mold of the magazines that were imitators of New York. So I was trying to go back to that original idea, which I thought was bigger and more interesting and more adventurous, and to remake the magazine in 2004 to feel like it was a magazine of 2004, but it had the values that animated its founding.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, we could do a whole series, a whole series on Design Matters about the relaunch of New York Magazine. But I do want to get to your glorious new book. Suffice it to say that since the redesign and relaunch in 2004, New York Magazine has won more national magazine awards than any other publication, including the award for General Excellence in 2006, ‘7, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016, as well as the Society of Publication Designers Award for 2013 Magazine of the Year. Most recently, the magazine won a George Polk Award in Magazine Reporting for the Bill Cosby rape investigation. And it’s also been awarded several Pulitzer prizes.

Adam Moss:
Many after I left, I just should say.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, but still-

Adam Moss:
But yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
So congratulations.

Adam Moss:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You not only re-imagined the print magazine, you also embraced the magazine killer called the internet and knew digital-only brands, five of which Vulture, the Cut, Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Grub Street are now considered heavyweights in modern online editorial. And New York Magazine is now as much of a digital company as it is a print company.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When so many editors couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt their publications to the digital world, what gave you the sense that this was going to be the game changer it ended up becoming?

Adam Moss:
It wasn’t that I thought it was a game changer, it was that I thought that it was interesting. And I had come from the New York Times just recently, which had… They were making a few mistakes, but basically they were getting it right about how to create a digital newspaper. And I found that very exciting. And there were several experiments, even at the very early NewYorkTimes.com that I did with the magazine that were exciting to me. I wanted to bring that spirit. I just wasn’t scared of it.

And also, the owners of New York Magazine were not scared of the internet for reasons that really, I’ve told this story too many times and it’s boring, but they were making money on their own digital site for arcane reasons, but they were. That became a business imperative too. I just keep saying this, not because I’m an economist, but you need the right conditions on the ground to do anything creative really. And in all these instances, the right conditions, the right economic conditions enabled the creative things that we were able to do.

But I was just crazy interested in it, and each experiment we did trying to build out a sort of satellite, not a satellite, but a constellation really of digital magazines, was interesting to me and interesting to my colleagues. It spurred us on to do more and more and more. We started with this thing called Grub Street, and then… [inaudible 00:31:54] food. And then we realized, “Okay, if these things were vertical as opposed to horizontal,” which is to say about one subject, “That could be wonderful. And maybe the voice should be the same voice as the print magazine, but sped up for digital purposes.”

And gave a lot of license to the early writers who helped create the voice. Grub Street became Intelligencer, which eventually became Vulture, on culture and entertainment. And Intelligencer went through several iterations, but eventually became a news site. And then The Cut, which was a kind of women’s magazine, but a very different kind of women’s magazine than it had ever been made before. And lo and behold, we had this fleet of magazines that were built for the internet and had the DNA of New York in them. And that proved to really work.

Debbie Millman:
In 2019 after 15 years of nonstop growth and innovation, you decided to leave New York Magazine. At that point, you had also somewhat secretly taken to painting. Did your new fine arts pursuit influence your departure?

Adam Moss:
No, I don’t think so. I had always loved the visual parts of magazine making, and I have a house in Cape Cod that used to be an art school just by coincidence. And there is just a feeling of being there that you can see the ladies with their bonnets painting en plein air on the dune. And I found that interesting. And then one summer I just decided to try to do a painting a day without any… I had no experience, I mean like zero experience doing this, and I just started to experiment, started painting at three and ended at five, whatever it was it was. And that was crazy fun to me. And then when I got back to New York, someone made a gift of giving me an art teacher, and that was the first time I got a teacher, but I was still working in New York at the time, and…

No, I left New York because I felt that I could only edit the magazine for myself and that I was no longer the reader. I had seen the ways in which an editor who didn’t have themselves as a compass could screw up a magazine and how it could become contagious. I just didn’t want to do that, so I had to get out of the way. So I left without any sense of what I’d want to do, except as you’ve mentioned before, to try to do something with less ambition. It was more like, “Okay, let’s see what happens” without any true sense.

But I did enjoy painting enough that I thought, “Maybe I should paint full time. And I had a problem, which is that I actually was kind of good at the beginning. My first six months, I would say painting, I was a much more successful painter than I ever was again.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I was looser, because I was naive. I didn’t know better. Really, it’s really, I can’t believe how thematically consistent this all is. And then as soon as I did know more, as soon as I took more classes and that kind of thing, my work started to just stiffen up and fall off a cliff. So that was deeply, deeply upsetting to me, and though I enjoyed it, it scared me.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I really wanted it and I didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t have any roadmap whatsoever to get there. I could acquire skills, but I was already, I think, aware that skills training wasn’t the problem. I did lack skills, but you can always get skills. I really felt that there was a way of thinking as an artist and a degree of courage and risk-taking that I did not have in solo activity. I’d had it in a group because the group is safe, and the group eggs you on and making something together in a group is really still the greatest thing in the world to me. But here I was alone and not making enough progress.

So that’s really when I realized that I just wanted to talk to people who were successful in making art. By art, I mean any kind of art. Novels and poems and visual art. And then I was afraid that they wouldn’t be truthful with me. They wouldn’t know how to be truthful with me because so much of the process of making art is secretive and people are afraid of jinxing the muse. So they develop a kind of set spiel, and that’s how they talk about their art, and it’s about the project and all of that stuff, but that’s not what I wanted to know. I really wanted to know how something is made and what goes through a person’s mind when they’re making it, and what goes through a person’s emotional makeup, what kind of person is successful at this?

So that’s when I devised this idea of concentrating on a single work from each of these people and asking them to trace the evolution in as many different layers as they could, both practically what they did, but also very much their kind of emotional journey. And then also part as a go to help them remember truthfully, and also just because I love this stuff, to accompany it with a gallery of the artifacts of the making of the thing, the notes and the sketches and the doodles that were their tools making the work. Then I looked at all that and I kind of had a book, or I had a structure of a book, or I knew what the book was.

Debbie Millman:
Before we talk about the book, I want to ask you another question about your own journey as a painter. Was it hard for you to suddenly not be good at something when you’d been so good at so many things for so long?

Adam Moss:
I think so. I had actually taken up piano earlier in my life, and in part because you have to listen to yourself play the piano, and I was really a bad piano player. I gave that up, and my thinking at the time was that I couldn’t tolerate not being good at something. It was just too painful to me. And I realized how many things over my life I had discarded that I wasn’t good at. I’m not good at most things. And because I’d had this one moment when I thought, “I maybe could paint,” it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t something I was just going to throw over.

And also because I really physically enjoyed making art, I enjoyed the physical sensation of it in a way that was new to me and was exciting to me. And so I didn’t want to give it up, but I think it was more vexing to me because in a kind of group… There’s a chapter in the book on David Simon where somebody observes that he needed the bounce, this great phrase, the bounce to make television, to make the wire, which is what we were talking about. And I recognized in that that was really how I had worked my whole life, is that I had thrived in the bounce. The ricochet between creative people was really… That was the environment in which I was successful, and here I was just by myself, and it was an environment that I was not being successful, and I was trying to capture the inner dialogue. I knew what the group dialogue sounded like, and here I was trying to capture the inner one.

Debbie Millman:
So the struggles to understand your own voice as an artist is what led you to… That was a driving force behind-

Adam Moss:
Yeah. My voice, how you endure through failure and frustration, a very, very big part of it. How you… Some simple things, really actually not at all simple things, but simple to describe, where to start, where to end. What gives you the faith that you can do this. These were all questions that were questions of temperament and personality. And so in some ways, I don’t really usually describe it this way, but I was trying to understand the artistic personality.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that first attracted me to this effort was the title, the Work of Art, which I think is one of the great book titles of all time, I have to say. This subtitle is How Something Comes from Nothing. But is it true that the original title of the book was Editing?

Adam Moss:
Yeah. Well, originally-

Debbie Millman:
It’s so different.

Adam Moss:
I know, it’s so different. Although the original idea of it was to try to claim for editing a much wider sense than we usually have for it. So I wanted to talk about editing as what I’m doing right now and choosing this word instead of that word or how we dress, or basically how we make artistic decisions, make decisions, and that was what the book was going to be, and it was going to be as applied to creative people and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Eventually that just became too limited because the editing, which is kind of this mid-zone, I think, between the imagining and the shaping, there’s a kind of judging aspect, which is similar to the function of editing. Editing just seemed too limited a term. But in some ways, the book is still about editing. It’s just not editing the way I think anybody thinks of what the word means.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, in many ways, editing is about choice-making.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
And this is a book about how you made choices to create this thing that you created.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly true. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you hate writing and that you think you’ve been a terrible writer for most of your life. How is that even remotely possible, Adam? I can’t even come up with the right kind of question to ask you about this.

Adam Moss:
Just think of it. If you’ve been an editor all your life, you have a very keen sensitivity to what is off, and that applies to your own work as well. I was super self-conscious, and I had this overly wound up editing scrutiny of my own work, and it got me nowhere. I had to really teach myself to write for the book, and that was a wonderful process actually. Although agonizing. I wrote the book really in a voice that was just completely not me. It was a voice that I just made up, is what I thought a book should sound like. It was really pretentious. And everything was an overreach. And then I-

Debbie Millman:
Did you decide that, or did an editor decide that?

Adam Moss:
No, I decided that it was just, I had this wrong-headed idea about what… “Okay, I’m an author now, how should I sound?” Terrible. A good enough editor recognized how bad it was, and then I went back and rewrote the whole book once I actually did find my voice. I think why I hated writing so much is because I just hated what I was writing.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote that you decided to create a book deliberately in a way that would be writer-proof.

Adam Moss:
Writer proof, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And that the writing would be the least important part.

Adam Moss:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But I don’t think that that is the result at all. I think that part of… Some of my favorite parts of the book are your musings and candor in looking at what you were looking at and coming to the decisions that you did. My favorite parts are the parts that you actually wrote,

Adam Moss:
And you know what? Those were all the parts that I added at the end. So at the beginning, it was very much the artist’s voices were the driving force of the book, and I had a conversation with a wonderful editor friend of mine named Susie [inaudible 00:43:57], I’ll give her a moment here. And she said, “Where are you in this book?” I had to reluctantly concede that she was right, and she had the idea that the footnotes were a particularly good way to impose myself on the book in a sort of Talmudic way. But I also rewrote into the book. At that point, the book opened up. It really became a different book and a much better one, I think.

Debbie Millman:
You were invited by Frank Rich, a writer from the New York Times and New York Magazine, and also an executive producer of the television program Veep to visit the show. And that became a real impetus for writing this book, and I’m wondering if you can talk about how that happened.

Adam Moss:
Sure. I went to the set of Veep and I sat with the writers who all sit in little director’s chairs behind David Mandel, who was the showrunner of the show at the time. And I watched them do a scene that probably didn’t last more than five minutes all afternoon or a good deal of the afternoon. And there was one joke in there that landed on a Jewish holiday, and Dave Mandel did not think it worked exactly. So he had summoned the group to come up with what are called alts, which was alternatives to the joke to calibrate the joke and fine-tune it and make it funnier. One after another that he just barked an alternative out. He changed, he just kept changing the holiday. It was like Hanukkah, and then it was like Purim and Simchat Torah.

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:45:32].

Adam Moss:
Simchat Torah because it’s the funniest. And Purim. And the group would laugh or they wouldn’t laugh. And finally he came up with the thing that he liked best. I can’t even remember what that was. He can’t even remember what that was. And I left just in awe of the kind of rigor that they brought to a joke that would be an absolute throwaway moment in a television show that nobody would notice. It was just like it’s wallpaper. I love that. I’ve always been a Calvinist. I’ve always been an admirer of work, and I’ve always really been an admirer of creative work. I walked out of there. It wasn’t at that moment that I decided to do the book, but it was one of the seeds that spurred the book on.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like so much about the book is how the process, so to speak, and I hate the word process-

Adam Moss:
Me too.

Debbie Millman:
But the magic of creating art is revealed, and so many times, because great works of art, whether they be great jokes or great puzzles or great sandcastles or great paintings or poems feel effortless. It takes so much work to get to that loose.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely. Effortless. So much effort to make the effortless, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And that example of trying out the different jokes… I also learned a lot. I had no idea that that’s how jokes-

Adam Moss:
Yeah, me neither.

Debbie Millman:
Can be constructed, that you try all these things out. It just seems like they’re so effortless that they’re just fully formed. And that’s not the case in the 43 case studies in this book. Just to give our listeners a sense of this opus, it features interviews, sketches, scripts, drawings, drafted pages in journals, song lyrics, story outlines, and all sorts of intriguing never-seen-before ideas in the making of some of the most preeminent artists of our time. They span genres and mediums. They include filmmakers, songwriters, painters, playwrights, composers, poets, chefs, a puzzle maker, a sandcastle maker, a cartoonist, a newspaper editor and designer, and even a radio pioneer. And you interview more than 40 people. You ask them to take you through the process of making one specific work and drawing on what you call process artifacts to chronicle their thinking. How much fun was this project?

Adam Moss:
Enormous fun. Two parts of it were really fun. The first part of it was the conversations with the artists themselves. I loved that. I am intrinsically a worshiper of creative people. I just really admire it. And so that I just love that and I learned so much. And then I also loved the physical construction of the book. I worked with-

Debbie Millman:
Like Hayman.

Adam Moss:
Luke Hayman and his colleagues at Pentagram, and he was very generous in letting me play with him and his colleagues to make a book that we both wanted to be a book that didn’t look or feel like other books. So I really enjoyed that part too. Now, we had talked earlier about the part that I didn’t like, which was sitting in a room and writing the damned book. I just found that to be agony.

Debbie Millman:
You write about Elizabeth Gilbert and how in her TED talk on the subject, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks about how in Ancient Greece and Rome people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons. And it reminds me of something Rick Rubin wrote in his book, The Creative Act. He stated that, “If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker.” And this isn’t because the other artists stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. And I’m wondering, speaking to so many people about the way in which they approach their work, do you feel that that muse is sort of out there for an artist through hard work and sitting in the chair every day will come to them, or is it something that they conjure? I really struggle with the idea about whether ideas come through the artist or from the artist.

Adam Moss:
It’s got to be both, don’t you think? That’s when it really works, is that if the artist brings what they have inside them to the table, or those that feel that it’s otherworldly, if they’re struck at that moment by some otherworldly inspiration. It must meet the moment. There’s really many, many instances in this book of work that I don’t think could have been made if it had been made at a different time. That’s true of historical circumstances or economic circumstances. But it’s also true of just the artist’s experience. The artist gets to a point where he or she can make the thing. And before that, it would’ve been impossible. Or a medium has changed. I mentioned David Simon. David Simon could not have made The Wire if HBO hadn’t existed. So there are all sorts of things that create opportunities and the opportunity meets the internal churning of the artist, and that’s when the greatness happens.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned earlier in our conversation that artists can sometimes be secretive about their process, and I’m wondering, is it really being secretive or is it being unaware and not necessarily being able to admit that?

Adam Moss:
I think both. I think that’s very true what you say. A lot of them are secretive, A lot of them are superstitious. There’s a tremendous amount of superstition involved with this because people fear that it’s fragile. Whatever their connection is to however they identify the muse, it’s tenuous and easily broken. And if they look at it too hard, the whole thing will just dissolve in front of them. So it took a certain kind of brave person or a foolhardy person, or just a really introspective kind of person to want to participate in this project. And there were a lot of people who said no, and it was a sorting of the sort of like, “This sounds interesting to me,” because to your point, I never think of this before, and now you’ve just made me interested in where these ideas come from. Tony Kushner, who’s a very introspective person, said, “As I’m writing something, if something good comes out, it’s like, where did that come from?” It is a question that they don’t necessarily know the answer to. So a lot of these artists felt that our conversations were akin to therapy.

Debbie Millman:
You write that in your view, there are three stages of making art. The first is imagining, and the final one is shaping, which are somewhat self-explanatory, but the one in the middle and the one most interesting to me is judging. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?

Adam Moss:
We’ve talked a lot about judging in this conversation, so that the judging is what someone else might call editing, it’s bringing intelligence to bear on part one, which is what has the imagination brought, which generally is a kind of big mess that happens if you think of a first draft of a story or you think of a first pass of a painting. It’s kind of just a this and that kind of jumble, but under there, somewhere there is something worth working on. And it’s not the latter part, the shaping, that’s as you said self-explanatory, I think that’s true, which is the technique, the whittling, et cetera. It’s really, what is this and what could it be? It’s more of a thinking process. It’s the engagement of the brain. It’s not necessarily a conscious engagement of the brain, but it is something that the brain is doing to try to make sense of what they have in front of them and what it might turn into.

Debbie Millman:
As I was thinking about this, it felt like this was the manifestation of an idea, and that to me seemed like the most interesting part of the work. The imagination part, you get the spark, you don’t. You get the idea, you don’t. But the making part is the most fun.

Adam Moss:
I think so. I think it’s the most important stage, and it’s a stage that no one gives a whole lot of thought to. Technique is fun and there’s all sorts of wonderful pleasures in making anything physically. But the really crucial moment is the evaluation and the strategy, which is what this middle part is about.

Debbie Millman:
Many artists in the book also talk about getting into a flow state, which I often compare to an athlete getting in the zone. That period you describe as one of utter absorption where all the distractions in life disappear. Time even seems to evaporate. Did any of the artists in the book have tips for igniting or expediting or extending that state?

Adam Moss:
No, unfortunately they did not, but they all, almost to a one, talked about it in terms of exaltation. It’s the reward. I thought of it very much akin to almost a hallucinogenic experience, and it has that same kind of body high to be in it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s magic. At the beginning of the Art of Work, you state that you’re a painter, but you feel ridiculous saying that.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You feel ridiculous saying that. After all these interviews and this deep examination of what it means to be an artist, do you still feel ridiculous?

Adam Moss:
I still don’t know that I would call myself a painter. I don’t feel ridiculous painting. There’s something that actually I heard on your podcast that was really very helpful to me, and it was Lynda Barry was on. And she talked about how nobody, when they get on a bicycle… Do you remember this? How nobody when they get on a bicycle thinks that they can win the Tour de France. They ride a bicycle because A, they’re trying to get somewhere, or B, they’re just trying to have a good time. And why do we think differently about art?

There was something at the end of this project about people’s insistence that the piece, the work, the physical object that they were making, whether it’s a book or a poem or a painting or joke, was not actually the most important thing to them. In fact, they were largely indifferent to it. They were proud of it. It was good. It was nice. It was the end. They weren’t dismissive of it typically, although sometimes they were. But they did feel that it was not the point. That the point was the, what I like to think of as the verb, was the making.

And once I got that, I had a different attitude about my painting. That sense of critical punishment I was inflicting on myself disappeared, and I felt the pleasures… Whether they were flow state pleasures or not, I felt the pleasures of the making, and that gave me delight. And now I actually really do love painting. I know it sounds pat, but it is true that it gave me back my love of painting. I’m painting obsessively again, but I’m not painting obsessively to make good stuff. It’d be nice if good stuff happened. I have no problem with that, and I am getting a little closer to maybe showing my painting-

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question. I know that the only two people that have… Well, I think… Did you show it to one interviewer?

Adam Moss:
Yeah. I let Ari Shapiro from NPR. He wanted a scene, and I understood that as a magazine editor. And I thought, “It’s radio. I can let you into this room and no one will ever see what you saw. So okay, you’ll see it. And you’re lovely, generous guy. And I’m sure you’ll think it was fine. But the audience won’t see it.” So I did let him in, yes.

Debbie Millman:
So he’s one of three. Your husband, your art teacher, and now-

Adam Moss:
Although someone else reminded me that they’re number four, because it’s someone that I had been sharing the studio with for a while and I kind of forgot that he worked within. When I wasn’t there, he worked within the world of my work.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope the world gets to see it at some point. My last question isn’t really a question. It’s really more of a quote. I want to quote something that you said. You were asked about finishing the book and being out in the world, and if you have a better understanding of the mystery of making art, and you said this, “I’ve gotten one part of the answer, which is that the work of art is the work. It’s the most banal observation, but that it’s not about the thing you make, it’s about the making. It took me three years to figure out that that was actually true.” And let me tell you, it has changed my life.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for making so much work that has mattered for so much of my life, my adult life, and thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Adam Moss:
Oh, thank you, Debbie. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Adam Moss’s latest book is titled The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
When Suleika Jaouad was a young woman, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. That career plan was upended by a cancer diagnosis when she was 22 years old. But in spite of being told she had only a 35% chance of survival, her creative spark didn’t diminish. They turned inward. Suleika wrote about surviving cancer in Life Interrupted, her Emmy Award-winning column and video series for the New York Times. She’s also written a New York Times bestselling memoir about the experience, titled Between Two Kingdoms. More recently, her cancer returned, and she had a second bone marrow transplant. That experience is chronicled in the multiple award-winning Netflix documentary American Symphony, which also features her husband, the celebrated musician, Jon Batiste, as he composed his first symphony for Carnegie Hall.

Suleika Jaouad, welcome to Design Matters.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. I’m so honored to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Suleika, I am so thrilled. I have an unusual question for you as my first question. I understand that you have an irrational fear of sharks, and I kind of want to know how any fear of sharks could be irrational.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I’m someone who, every time I go on vacation to a place where there is any body of water, I immediately Google the number of shark fatalities in that place.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Suleika Jaouad:
And it’s something I’ve had from the time I was little. It doesn’t matter if I’m in an ocean, or a lake, or a pond, I have a deep fear of what’s beneath the water, and what I can’t see.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I do too. I really, overall, have a somewhat irrational fear of the ocean. In that, I really like to be able to see my feet in the water. Something about being grounded, I guess.

Suleika Jaouad:
I love it.

Debbie Millman:
In any case. Like me, you were born in New York City, but you were constantly on the move in your early childhood. You moved from the East Village to the Adirondacks, followed by stints in France and Switzerland, and Tunisia. By the time you were 12, you had attended six different schools on three different continents. Why did your family move around so much?

Suleika Jaouad:
It’s an excellent question. One that I asked myself quite a bit, when I was little, because like a lot of little kids, all I wanted was to feel normal. Whatever that meant. My dad is originally from Tunisia, it’s where his entire family lives. It’s where, actually, my parents and my brother now live. My mom is Swiss, and they both immigrated to New York in the ’80s, and I think they were really trying to figure out what home meant for them. My dad was a complet professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and my mom was a painter.

And so, in those early years, I think they were shuttling between their respective homelands, and the home that we were trying to make for ourselves in upstate New York. And the truth is that shuttling has continued happening, so home was really an elusive concept for me as a kid. And it’s only pretty recently in my life that I’ve been someone with a fixed address, who doesn’t live out of a suitcase. And it certainly was a slightly destabilizing way of growing up, but I think it also forced me to become a chameleon. I was an expert new kid on the first day of school, and I look back on that experience and I think, for so many children of immigrants, especially when you speak one language at home and another at school. You become a kind of translator between your family and the world. And those skills, I think, have made me a writer. Those skills of observation, of customs, of idioms, of all kinds of things.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think it gives you a very particular kind of awareness, as you’re trying to make sense of how and where to fit in. And when you first came back to the United States and started kindergarten, you actually didn’t speak a word of English, and have said that the curse of the mixed child who grows up betwixt cultures and countries, creeds and customs, is too white, too brown, too exotically named and too ambiguously other to ever fully belong anywhere. And I understand that, at that time, you wanted to legally change your name from Suleika, which is your name in Arabic, to Ashley. Is that true, to Ashley?

Suleika Jaouad:
The coolest girl in my fourth grade class was named Ashley, and her nickname was Ashtray, which was-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, gosh.

Suleika Jaouad:
… even cooler to me. So not only did I want to legally change my name to Ashley, but I wanted my parents to call me Ashtray, which of course they refused, and rightfully so.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It reminds me of the character from Euphoria. Is the Arabic pronunciation that I attempted the correct way to say your name in Arabic?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, that’s right. So both my parents pronounce my names differently. Suleika, In Arabic. Suleika, in French, in English, or as my husband who’s from New Orleans says, “Suleika.” So there is always confusion around the pronunciation of my name, but I remember that first day of kindergarten so distinctly, the terror of being in a place where you don’t understand what people are saying, where people are laughing when you’re attempting to speak the language. And I think I had a self-consciousness around language, and around English specifically, from such an early age.

I’m still someone who, whenever I hear a turn of phrase or an idiom that I’ve never heard before, I immediately write it down and then proceed to try to use it as much as possible in every single conversation for the next couple of days, until I’ve mastered it. But I think that feeling of otherness really felt like an albatross. The tyranny of cafeteria lunchrooms, when you’re the kid showing up with couscous-

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good word, tyranny.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and tajine. And at that age, all I wanted was a Pop Tart, or very orange American mac and cheese. And I think at some point, by the time I turned 12 or 13, I realized that as much as I wanted to assimilate, as much as I would have loved to inhabit the Ashleys of the world, that just wasn’t going to be possible. And so, embracing that otherness, and I guess leaning into that difference, became my ammo.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that hustle is your family’s defining trait, and I’m wondering if you can share why you feel that way, or in what way?

Suleika Jaouad:
So my dad is someone who grew up in a family of 13 children, both of his parents never learned to read or write, and he is the only one of his siblings to have left Tunisia. And he worked all kinds of odd jobs while he was embarking on his studies, from a bell hopper at a seedy motel, to all sorts of things. And my mom, in particular, I think is someone who embodies that sense of hustle. When she first came to the East Village in the ’80s as a young aspiring artist, she was trying to figure out how to pay the bills. And so she started what she called the International Language School, and hired all of her friends as language tutors to wealthy business people uptown. And of course, this wasn’t an actual school, it was her landline and her apartment. And she would answer the phone and pretend to be a very official sounding secretary.

But I think that instinct to survive, to figure out how to make things work, to pivot as needed, and to adapt and move forward at all costs, was really a guiding tenet in our household. And we were firmly middle class and upstate New York, but there also wasn’t any sort of security blanket beneath us. So even when it came to college, I was fortunate to have the option of attending the school where my dad taught free of charge, but my parents made it very clear, “If you want to do something beyond this, that’s on you, you’re going to have to figure that out. You’re going to have to pay for your own way.”

And because nobody had helped usher their way, relative, especially to the way my dad grew up, we had immense privilege. We were living in the United States, and going to a good public school, and had access to education in a way that wasn’t so easy for him. And so there was always this sense that, given the leg up that we’d had, it was our responsibility to make something of that. To figure out who we were, and what we wanted to contribute to the world.

Debbie Millman:
You started piano lessons when you were four years old, at the urging of your parents, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that you chose music for yourself. And your music teacher at Lake Avenue Elementary School stood in front of the class with a dozen stringed instruments lined up at the front of the room, and asked you to choose your instrument. Tell us what you chose and why.

Suleika Jaouad:
So as well-intentioned as my mother was, she was very sort of stereotypically Swiss about her approach to my piano lesson. So I was forced to practice every single day. I studied the Suzuki method. I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it. And I remember that day in that fourth grade classroom so distinctly, because everyone was clamoring for the popular instruments. For the violins, for the cellos. And no one, with the exception of a couple of supernaturally tall boys, were interested in the double bass. And I immediately felt drawn to it, for two reasons. One, because I liked the fact that my teacher had told me that no other girl had expressed interest in playing it, and it seemed like its own kind of outlier in the orchestra, which was very much how I felt. But also because the mischievous part of me liked the idea of picking the instrument that would inconvenience my parents the most. And so, that’s what I did. And to my surprise, and I think to my parents’ surprise, I fell deep in love with the bass.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you gave your bass a name?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, Charlie Brown.

Debbie Millman:
And why is that? Is it, I was trying to imagine why it was Charlie Brown, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the round nature of the instrument, or the sort of wah-wah noise that the parents made, sort of as a way of being more defiant with your parents.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly. I think all of it, and it was a totally ridiculous sight. I was too small to carry this very large instrument, so my dad would have to shuttle it around for me. And in those early years, I would have to sit on a stool in order to reach all of the places on the base that I needed to reach. But I loved it, because it’s also the only instrument that you hug with your whole body when you play it, and you hear every note vibrating through your chest. And there was just this grounded feeling that I had, whenever I got the chance to play it.

Debbie Millman:
You went to band camp at 13. I sort of had this vision of it being like an episode of the TV show, Glee. I have no idea if that’s accurate or not. What was that like for you?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was far more awkward, I can tell you that than anything that might ever have appeared on Glee. So I was in the orchestra camp and I loved it. I had gotten a scholarship to attend, and I felt like this portal had suddenly opened onto a world of possibility. I’d never considered playing music seriously, but I remember feeling for the first time, the deep sense of satisfaction that comes when you’re building a muscle and you see it getting stronger.

Debbie Millman:
Isn’t that remarkable?

Suleika Jaouad:
And I could actually watch that incremental progress happening, in real time. And I decided, pretty much after that summer, that I was going to become a double bassist, and I wanted to play in the greatest orchestras in the world. And that was my big dream, at that age.

Debbie Millman:
And this is where you met your now husband, the Oscar and Grammy winning musician, Jon Batiste. What was that first meeting like?

Suleika Jaouad:
Correct. Jon was in the jazz camp. He was all braces and gangly limbs. And I don’t think he would mind me saying this, because it’s how he described himself at the age, but he was just sort of shockingly, gloriously awkward. And I remember, the first time I encountered him, I tried to speak to him. And he was so shy, that he barely said a word back. But what I remember most distinctly was the end of summer concert, where all of the parents are invited to come and to pick up their children. And Jon played so extraordinarily, so virtuostically, despite only having played the piano for a year or two at that point, that everyone in the auditorium leapt to their feet and gave him a standing ovation, which is not something that happens at end of summer band camp recitals. And I just remember thinking, “This is someone extraordinary and intriguing,” and that was that.

Debbie Millman:
No crushes?

Suleika Jaouad:
No crushes.

Debbie Millman:
No chemistry?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, I think, intrigue. The crush came later. The crush came about three years later.

Debbie Millman:
Now I understand, and I don’t know if this is correct or not, but I found in my research that he wrote his first song for you, at that time. Is that true?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, it’s not true. And it’s also a point of discussion between Jon and me, at this very moment. So what I remember, which is not what he remembers, is that he dedicated a song to one of the ballet dancers, because there was also a sort of parallel ballet camp. And there was mass giggling at the top of the auditorium. But he told me, recently, that it wasn’t him who dedicated the song because he was far more interested in video games and jazz, than he was in girls. And he would never have dared do anything so bold and forward, so I’m clear.

But what he did tell me as we were discussing all of this is that if the jazz musician dedicates a song to you, don’t get too excited about it, because they can improvise anything on the spot. It only counts if the dedicated song makes it onto an album.

Debbie Millman:
Ah. So, Butterfly counts.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 16, you won a scholarship to attend the pre-college program at Julliard School, in New York City. And for the next two years, every Saturday morning you got up at 4:00 AM so your dad could drive you the 45 minutes to Albany, to catch the Amtrak to the city. And after a long day of orchestra rehearsals, masterclasses, music theory, and auditions, you began to struggle with the schedule at school. And ended up striking a deal with your parents about the rest of your high school education, and I was wondering if you can share what that was?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, that experience, that pre-college, I think was one of those fork in the road moments that we all have, but that was a big one for me. I was really struggling at my high school in upstate New York. I was getting mixed up in the wrong crowd, I was rebelling. I was a terrible student. And at one of these end of summer band camps, I had the opportunity to play a bass solo, and someone in the audience approached my parents afterward, and invited me to come to New York City and to meet someone by the name of Homer Mensch who was the principal of the New York Philharmonic, and to bring it back to sharks, he famously played the opening sequence of the movie Jaws, on his bass, that duh-duh, duh-duh.

Debbie Millman:
Wow, that’s incredible.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. And it was extraordinary. I mean, it really changed my life. For the first time I was meeting kids who had a kind of ambition I’d only really read about in books, who had the discipline to spend seven, eight hours a day alone in a practice room. And who wanted everything, who wanted the world. And coming from a small town, I wasn’t used to being around people like that. I had this sense that I wanted to sort of thrust myself into the greater expanses of the world, but the how of that was completely unclear to me.

And so by the end of that first year, especially because of Homer Mensch and his mentorship and support, he really made me feel like I had the possibility of actually seeing this dream through. But with the commute, and with the number of hours that I needed to practice in order to keep up, it was becoming completely untenable. Because not only was I waking up at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, I was waking up at 4:00 AM every day of the week, to get in three hours of practice before I went to school, so that I’d have time to do three more hours when I got home.

And so the deal with my parents was that I could drop out of high school, but that I had to take at least two days of classes at Skidmore College, where my dad taught, and where I could attend for free. But the one thing that I look back on and marvel at is, they didn’t say to me, “You have to take pre-calculus,” or you have to take whatever the equivalent of your high school classes were. They gave me ultimate license to choose whatever I wanted. And so what I thought was my way of minimizing my schoolwork actually became the very opposite, because I was taking modern dance, I was taking a Women in Literature class, I was taking a class on Nabakov. I was reading all kinds of things that I hadn’t really had the opportunity to study in that way. And over the course of that year, I realized that while I loved music, there was so much more that I was hungry to learn about.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you loved the literature classes so much that you were taking, you started looking up English syllabi at different schools, and assigning them to yourself. I thought that that was sort of a wonderful example of how you assimilated your family hustle.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, totally. Actually, I remember it so distinctly. A few girls from my high school had gone to a very fancy boarding school nearby, and I desperately wanted to attend, because I had just watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Suleika Jaouad:
But all the girls show up on the first day of class, and they’ve already read the textbook, but not only are they smart, they’re fabulously cool and funny and fierce. And so, I wanted to inhabit a world like that, and that wasn’t a possibility for us. And so what I did was, I looked up the syllabus at that very same boarding school, and tried to teach it to myself.

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
I’ll just add that, you asked me about my crush on Jon. My very first day at Julliard, I was on the 1 train going to the campus, and I was with my friend Michelle. And we saw this young man who was behaving kind of strangely, and people were sort of looking at him. This young man was singing, and playing air piano, by himself. And I looked at him and I turned to my friend and I said, “I know that guy. That’s Jon Batiste from New Orleans. I went to band camp with him.” And then I said, out of nowhere in the way that 16 year olds do when they just run their mouths, I said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.” And then I completely forgot about it, only to discover that he was also a student at Julliard.

Debbie Millman:
I just want to let that sink in for a second. You applied to Princeton University where, you not only got in, you got a full scholarship. And while there, you played in the university orchestra, but you also applied to the creative writing program your freshman year. And were rejected. And you’ve said that you took that rejection particularly badly. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt a huge sense of being an imposter, when I went to Princeton. I remember when I was thinking about leaving Julliard, my teacher, Homer Mensch had died, and I had been reassigned to the only female bass teacher at Julliard, and I was so excited to finally get to study with a woman. But rather than the kind of mentorship I’d had with Homer, it was the very opposite of that. She was tougher on me than everyone else, and she could be quite cruel. And I remember coming back from a weekend with a friend, visiting her brother at Princeton, and saying to her, “I visited this school and I never even considered that I could go to a place like this, but I’m interested in applying.” And what she said to me was, “You should do that. You should go to Princeton. You’re pretty enough that you’ll marry a wealthy man by the time you’re 22, and that’s a far better career path for you.”

I felt such rage in that moment, and such humiliation. That was the thing that propelled me away from music, because I did not want to continue studying with her. And that left a kind of chip on my shoulder, that proved to be useful, in the sense that it lit a fire under me. So when I did get accepted, I felt equal parts excitement and terror. I remember watching every episode of Gossip Girl in preparation for what I imagined a school like Princeton to be. I also read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, but I had no sense of this world I was about to walk into. And so to receive that rejection first semester was confirmation of something that I feared, and hoped wasn’t true, and took to be true. And so after that, I would write for myself. I would write little fictional stories. I wrote obsessively in a journal, but I put the idea of pursuing writing seriously to the side.

And the irony is, there are a couple great writers from my same class who published beautiful books, and I’ve since learned that they too were rejected from the creative writing program. So I think, at that age, rejection can be devastating, it can be motivating for some. But I didn’t have the kind of confidence in myself, and my ability to look beyond that sort of outward validation, or outward confirmation of my failure.

Debbie Millman:
In your junior year, you came across a journalism class in the course catalog titled Writing About War, and it was being taught by the journalist Thanassis Cambanis. What gave you the strength or the courage to try again?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I was a near Eastern Studies and Gender Studies major, and I was studying Farsi, I was studying Arabic. I had spent every summer traveling to the Middle East, and traveling back home to Tunisia, and doing research. And so I felt not a sense of confidence in my ability to write, but I felt confident in my knowledge of this region and its complexities, enough to apply for this class. And I loved everything about it, from moment one. And writing about war is easier said than done from Princeton, New Jersey. But even that proved to be such a fascinating challenge.

Debbie Millman:
You traveled across North Africa and the Middle East to study women’s rights through narrative storytelling and oral history, and this led to your writing your senior thesis about the subject. I believe that one of the chapters was titled “Voices of the Voiceless,” and it detailed the under-reported stories of women in Tunisia, and it also included your grandmother. Your thesis won several awards, including a prestigious award called the Ferris Prize. Did that change your ambition to be a musician? Was that when you sort of had to decide, “Which direction am I going in?”

Suleika Jaouad:
I knew pretty much as soon as I left Julliard that I did not want to be part of the classical music world, even though I continued to play, and to love music. But it changed my sense of confidence. I had started school feeling so unsure of myself, and unsure of my own merit and right to inhabit this world, and there were so many things about that school that proved really challenging. I mean, if you’re on full financial aid, you have a work study. And the very first job I was assigned was serving fellow students in the dining hall. And I’m not above serving anyone, but there was such a clear sense of divide, even optically, because a lot of my fellow work study colleagues were fellow students of color.

And to sit there, and to serve the richer students, was just such a bizarre way of being put in your place. And there were so many examples of that, during my time there, but more than anything I just flourished in this environment, where there was so much to learn. There were so many extraordinary professors. There were unlimited research and travel grants available to me. And by the time I graduated, I knew not necessarily who I was, but what my potential might be. And so those awards, for me, meant something. Because I started out as a struggling student academically, and I had worked really hard to get to a place where I felt I had steady footing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written a lot about bridging the gap between what you found interesting, and what might actually be practical or possible, especially at that point in your life. Did that have any influence in what you were choosing to do, in terms of what your parents’ expectations might’ve been for you at the time?

Suleika Jaouad:
When I graduated college, I knew I wanted to be a war correspondent, but how to actually do that, how to get your foot in the door felt completely mysterious to me. And so in a strange version of my own coming of age rebellion, I decided to do the opposite of what my sort of artsy-fartsy parents had always done, and to get a job at a corporate international law firm. And the notion of 12 hour days, and wearing a power suit, was very intriguing and exciting to me. Although, that excitement was very short-lived once I actually started that job. But I think like a lot of people at that age, I had this sense of time, time to figure out who I was, time to bridge that gap between my reality and those daydreams. Time to do it all.

Debbie Millman:
You went to Paris, you rent an apartment, you started working as a paralegal in this law firm. But then, you developed a high fever, painful sores in your mouth, and wrote this in your journal. “Something is terribly wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but it feels like there is a deadly parasite growing in my body.” But it was worse than a parasite. And is it okay to share what happened next?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So after a year of feeling sick, of going to see various doctors, who would treat whatever ailment I showed up with without really assessing the full picture, I started to feel like I was unraveling. One doctor prescribed me an antidepressant, another after a week long hospital stay in Paris, where they ran every test they could think of except for a bone marrow biopsy, which they felt wasn’t necessary for someone of my age, released me with a diagnosis of burnout syndrome. And essentially told me that I needed better work life balance, and to take care of my mental health.

And so I felt this sort of cleaving happening inside me, where I knew something was wrong, but no one seemed to be taking me seriously, and people were telling me it was literally in my head. And I started to wonder if I was a hypochondriac. I started to wonder if I was going crazy, in some kind of way. And so in a sort of perverse way, after a year of this, I ended up in an emergency room and learned that my blood counts were so low that I needed to immediately get on a plane to fly home to upstate New York, otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to fly at all. I arrived to Paris in very high-heeled boots, and I left in a wheelchair.

And when I got my actual diagnosis, I felt relief. I had a very aggressive form of leukemia, a kind of blood cancer. And while that wasn’t welcome news, it was terrifying news, it was gutting news. I felt relief to be believed, to have an actual diagnosis that I could wrap my tongue around, and hopefully do something about.

Debbie Millman:
The doctors in the United States told you and your parents, point-blank, that you had about a 35% chance of long-term survival. So overnight you left your job, your apartment, your independence, and became patient number 5624. At one point, your doctors told your parents to hurry to the hospital, because they weren’t sure you were going to make it overnight. And in your memoir, you write this. “How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age 22? Do you break down in sobs? Do you faint, or scream?” What were you telling yourself about what was happening in that moment?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I remember feeling a kind of bifurcation, a sense that there was my life before, and now everything that would come after. And that the person I’d been, the dreams I’d had, were buried. I’d never experienced anything like that. I was at an age where most of my friends had never dealt with serious illness. But that being said, I also had a kind of helpful naivete about what it means to be very, very sick.

And so, when I entered the hospital that first summer, I packed all kinds of books, and I very cheerfully told my parents I was going to use this time to read through the rest of the Western Canon.

Debbie Millman:
And then War and Peace, when you were done with that.

Suleika Jaouad:
And War and Peace, which, of course I never read any of those books. And by the end of that summer I learned that not only was the chemotherapy I’d been doing not working for me, but that my leukemia had become much more aggressive. And at that point, my only option was a clinical trial that had not yet been proven to be safe, or even effective. And I think it was the first moment where it occurred to me that I might actually die, and imminently. And that the sense of infinite time to figure things out had been an illusion, an illusion that we all live with. I’m not special, because I got sick at 22. Our time here is short and fleeting, but to confront my mortality in that way, and at that age, was a sort of world shifting change for me. And I spent those next couple of months in a deep depression.

I remember closing the blinds on my hospital room window, which overlooked the park. And when I’d entered the hospital, I felt really excited about that. It seemed like a great asset. But looking out the window, seeing people going to work, seeing teenagers making out on park benches, all of that was a reminder of a life that I no longer could participate in. And I felt profoundly terrified, and profoundly stuck. And I think worse than the brutal side effects of the treatment, worse than the weeks and months spent in confinement in a hospital room, was the sense that I had spent my entire 22 years on the planet preparing for a life, without actually having lived it. But in those early months, it was hard to imagine what I could possibly do from the confines of my hospital room, from the confines of my bed. And I really struggled with that.

Debbie Millman:
It was there in the hospital that you wrote, “time stalked you like prey” and, go on to write that “there’s a tipping point, a special kind of claustrophobia, reserved for long hospitalizations, that sets in around week two of being locked in a room. Time starts to elongate, space falls apart, your desperation begins to border on madness.”

And so I guess somehow, in the face of all of this despair and suffering, as you’re facing some of the most difficult challenges of your life, you decide to start on two creative projects. A 100-day project wherein you and your family members all participate in undertaking one small creative act every day. You started journaling, which was really a return to a creative act you had started pretty much since you could first hold a pencil. Why journaling?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I had started and stopped enough projects in the hospital to know that I needed to set the bar very low for myself, otherwise it was going to result in further defeat. And so, I decided to return to the thing I’d always loved. And the reason I’d always loved it is because to me, the journal is such a sacred space. You don’t have to write beautifully, or even grammatically. You’re not doing it for anyone other than yourself. And you have this invitation to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self. And so that appealed to me, especially at a time where I was feeling so many things that I couldn’t say out loud.

And this is a thing that happens to a family when they get sick. Everyone is trying to put on a brave, stoic face for one another. And the byproduct of that is that everyone ends up siloed in their own private fears and anguish. And so having this place where I could write down all of the things that felt impossible to talk about. What it was like, falling in love while falling sick. The sense of being a burden that can accompany being a person who requires a significant amount of care. Sexual health and infertility caused by chemotherapy, the social awkwardness of being sick at an age where your friends are outplaying beer pong, or doing whatever else.

And in the course of keeping that journal, I felt both a kind of catharsis, but I also felt my excitement and my ambition come back to me. Because I realized, at some point during that hundred-day project that I was using my journal as a kind of reporter’s notebook. I was observing this new kingdom of the sick, this new hospital ecosystem, that once again, I was the new kid, and that I was having to figure out how to navigate. I was having to learn to speak medical-ese. I was befriending the fellow patients in the cancer unit. I was getting to know my nurses. I was learning about the body. And while it wasn’t war correspondence, it felt like a kind of reporting from the front lines of a very different sort of conflict zone.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote this about your biggest fear. “What scared me more than the transplant, more than the debilitating side effects that came with it, more than the possibility of death itself, was the thought of being remembered as someone else’s sad story of unmet potential.” Nevertheless, by the end of the 100 days, you realized as long as you were stuck in bed, your imagination would have to become the vessel that allowed you to travel. And though you couldn’t be a journalist in the way that you imagined after graduating, you were actually reporting from a war zone, in a different kind of conflict zone. You then went deeper and launched a blog called Secrets of Cancerhood.

Suleika Jaouad:
Oh God, so embarrassing.

Debbie Millman:
Not at all, not at all. And you stated-

Suleika Jaouad:
And I must, I’m very impressed by your research abilities.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. Thank you. And you stated, “Cancer isn’t something that makes you want to share. It’s something that makes you want to hide.” And this, Suleika, is sort of my big question for the whole interview. Did it scare you at all to be so candid and so direct? So raw, so real. You put it all out there.

Suleika Jaouad:
By the time I started that blog, I had spent almost an entire year in total isolation, shuttling between my childhood bedroom in upstate New York and the hospital. And the few friends I had told about my illness hadn’t… Not all of them, some were wonderful, but some of them hadn’t responded in the way that I’d hoped. And I think when they couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to show up, they stopped showing up at all. And so, I didn’t talk about what I was going through. On my Facebook profile, it still said that I lived in Paris, and people were still posting on my Facebook wall asking if they could crash on my couch.

But at some point that isolation became more painful than the risk of opening up. And I was preparing for a bone marrow transplant, which I knew I might not survive. And in the weeks leading up to that, I felt this force within me, to try to do some of the things that I had always wanted to do in whatever way I could, big or small. And the big one was writing. And while I always imagined myself as the kind of writer, who either through reporting or through fiction, would help other people tell their stories.

The story that was available to me, within my limitations, was my own. I remember my mom giving me a hardcover copy of Frida Kahlos’ diary, and pouring through it and feeling so deeply connected to her. Both because she had suffered a kind of life altering accident, at approximately the same age as my diagnosis, but because she had managed to find purpose in her pain. And that, for me, became a kind of guiding light. That the material that was available to me, even if it made people uncomfortable, even if it made people want to look away, had a power in it that I could tap.

Debbie Millman:
Your blog became immediately popular. And one of your journalism professors from Princeton shared it with an editor at the New York Times, and you were offered to write a piece about your experience. And in a moment of utter brazenness, you said you’d rather write a column, and in an effort to make it as accessible as possible, include video. That’s sort of the moment to me where it was like, “Ta-da!” Where did that courage come from? Where did you manifest that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, the funny thing is, I would never have dared be that brazen pre-diagnosis. I would’ve been thrilled for a fact checking position at any newspaper, let alone the New York Times. But I had lost so much, and I knew that within the next month, I might lose it all. And so it felt like there was very little left to lose. And for the first time in my life, I asked for exactly what I wanted, because nothing could be scarier than what I was already experiencing. And so, that’s what I did. And the fear came when the editor said yes, because suddenly I was like, “Oh crap, how do I actually pull this off?”

Debbie Millman:
Well, bent over your laptop, you wrote about how you traveled to where the silence was in your life. You wrote about your resulting infertility, and how no one warned you of that outcome. You wrote about learning to navigate our absurd US healthcare system. You wrote about guilt. You wrote about how we talk, or don’t talk, about dying. On March 29th, 2012, your column and the accompanying video series called Life Interrupted made its debut, and just a few days after that, you underwent your first bone marrow transplant.

And you said this about the experience. “The confluence of these impending milestones was dizzying, a dream and a nightmare dancing the tango.” Which seems to be a little bit of a pattern in your life, which is really cosmic and mystical and mysterious, in every possible way.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I feel like I’ve been the recipient of immense good fortune, and the recipient of immense misfortune, and often exactly at the same time. And that was a big one, for me. I was entering the most treacherous phase of my treatment, but at the same time, overnight upon launching the column and the video series, I went from being extraordinarily isolated to waking up the next morning to hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all around the world. People who were not necessarily sick, but having their own life interrupted experiences, be it losing their job, or going through a divorce, or grief, or some other kind of upheaval that had brought them to the floor.

And for the first time, too, I was hearing from people like me. I heard from a young man, a few doors down from me in the bone marrow transplant unit, who had my same type of leukemia. And just to know that there was another human, roughly my age, a few doors down, brought a sense of comfort and companionship that I hadn’t had in a long time. And one day when I was being wheeled out of my room to get a CT scan of my brain, I remember pausing in front of his door. And there was a little tiny window, and I wasn’t allowed to step inside because the germ risk was too high, but I knocked on the window. And he waved, and I waved.

And just that moment of connection, that realization that you are not the only person suffering or struggling in that particular way, that in fact all of us struggle, all of us have our hearts broken, all of us will confront our mortality at some point or another, suddenly made me feel less like a freak, and more like I was just part of the human condition and experience.

Debbie Millman:
Your work on Life Interrupted won a news and documentary Emmy Award, and after 1500 days, working to survive, 1500 days. You were discharged from the hospital on May 16th, 2014. And yet, when you finally emerged from your nearly four years of treatment, you learned that surviving is not the same thing as living. While you felt that it should have been a celebratory milestone, you wrote that you never felt more lost. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, we talk about the challenges of reentry with regards to veterans returning from war, but for whatever reason when it comes to surviving a traumatic experience like cancer, the expectation is that you’ll immediately and gratefully and joyously return to the world of the living. And I wanted that more than anything. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, but I was also reeling from those four years, I had been in survival mode for four years. And I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen if I did survive, what would happen after.

And it took me a long time to understand that I was grieving. I hadn’t had the time to grieve, I hadn’t had the privilege of having enough energy to even allow myself to fall apart. And I was grieving so many things. I was grieving my 20s. I was grieving a relationship, that hadn’t survived my cancer treatment. I was grieving my best friend, Melissa, who I’d met in treatment, and who had died only a few weeks earlier. And so as much as I wanted to be this happy, healthy,

26-year-old young woman that the people around me wanted me to be, I just couldn’t. And so, to my surprise and with a great deal of shame, I felt whatever scaffolding that had propped me up during those four years collapsed, and I just went inward.

I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t a cancer patient. I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been pre-diagnosis. My career, albeit what felt like a miraculous one, was anchored around the experience I was trying to move on from. And I was still physically struggling with the long-term side effects of my treatment. And so, more than anything, I desperately wanted to move on from all of that, only to of course realize that moving on is a myth. As much as we want to, we can’t stow away the most painful parts of our life, and skip over the hard work of healing and grieving. And that while moving on wasn’t going to be possible, I had to figure out a way to move forward with what had happened, and that became my work.

Debbie Millman:
You talk very eloquently about Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor wherein she writes, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well, and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

And Suleika, one of the things that you write about so beautifully in your book, is that space between the two kingdoms, which became the title of your subsequent 2021 memoir. Can you describe that space between, a little bit?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So on paper, I was better. I no longer had cancer, I was cured. But off paper, I couldn’t have felt further from being well. And so I was in this kind of liminal space, where I was no longer part of that hospital ecosystem. That cavalry of doctors and nurses and family that had surrounded me were no longer there. Yet, I couldn’t have felt further from relating to or being able to inhabit the kingdom of the well. So much so that in that first year, I remember missing the hospital, wishing I were back in treatment. Not because I wanted to have leukemia again, of course, but that was a world I understood.

That was a world I knew, I had built a home for myself within its confines, and it was the outside world that had become disorienting and terrifying to me.

And so, I began to look to the language of ritual, to these rites of passage that help us move from one place to another, that help ease that transition between no longer and not yet. And we have all kinds of rites of passage. We have funerals, and weddings, and baby showers. But I realized that for me, and at least at that time, there really wasn’t much in the way of survival. There wasn’t going to be any treatment protocols to help guide my way forward, and that I was going to essentially have to create my own. And so that’s what I decided to do, in my own kind of way.

Debbie Millman:
Your memoir Between Two Kingdoms is about not only your experience with cancer, but the aftermath, which includes this sort of between space. And then the 15,000-mile road trip you took to kind of find yourself again, through the people who wrote letters to you and people that you had met in this journey. As you wrote the book, you kept a Post-it note above your desk, and it stated, “If you want to write a good book, write about what you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write about what you don’t want to know about yourself.” How hard was that to do?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt slight terror, even just hearing you read that line from the Post-it note. It was extraordinarily challenging. I had read so many illness narratives that sort of mirrored the hero’s journey arc, where the final act was being cured, and people seemed to return from that experience better and braver and wiser for what they’d been through. And because of that, I think I had this expectation of what that would look like for me. And because of that, I also had an immense sense of shame, when my lived reality did not sync up with that. I felt like I was somehow doing healing wrong, or recovery wrong. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, and wanted to make the most of that.

And so in writing this book, I really more than anything, wanted to talk about aftermaths. About what is required of us when we survive, and that large gap between surviving and living. And I wanted to tell the truth of that reckoning. And it was interesting. My first drafts, I used to jokingly say, were full of lies.

They were full of aspirational lies of what I hoped that process of recovery might look like, but that just wasn’t the truth for me. And so, writing that book forced me to really excavate the truth beneath the truth, beneath the truth. And I struggled especially with part two of the book, with the road trip, with that chronicling of the recovery. And it took me a year of just banging my head against the desk to realize that the issue was I was writing about recovery in the past tense, and it wasn’t past tense for me. Recovery was and is an ongoing process.

And once I understood that I was allowed to change tenses midway through the book, which I did, and to write that part in the present tense, I felt like I was finally able to access the truth of it. Which is to say, that there wasn’t some neat, tidy bow at the end of that story. That road trip was the best decision I made in my 20s. It forced me to inhabit the world again, to figure out how to stand on my own two feet, to find out what was on the other side of my fear. But the lingering imprints of my illness, especially on my body, didn’t go away. I didn’t return from this road trip magically healed, somehow. And so, I wanted to figure out how to put into words what it to exist in that messy middle, where you’re neither well or unwell or happy or sad. But you’re existing in that chorus border.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I find so remarkable about your book is that you don’t have to have experienced a bout of cancer, to appreciate the will that you have to survive. And that survival could be against any type of injustice that’s endured by the body. And there’s so many ways that we are confronted by that now. And so, it is a book of hope for anyone that’s experienced any type of injustice to their body.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
While you were writing your book, COVID descended upon us, and you quarantined at your parents’ house. Jon joined you for this, because you had had now, a blossoming romance. He joined you with your family, and that’s when you first started on an online project you titled The Isolation Journals, wherein you invited some of the most inspiring authors, musicians, community leaders, unsung heroes you knew, to write a short essay and a journaling prompt. And on April 1st, 2020, you began sending it out as a free newsletter. And within a month, 100,000 people had joined you from all over the world.
So here in another instance of creating a whole community, and with beauty out of tragedy and longing, sort of the world tragedy, that effort is ongoing. Talk about what the Isolation Journals mean to you now, and the kind of work you’re doing with it.

Suleika Jaouad:
So my friend Liz says that whenever you’re deep in a project, inevitably another idea for a project appears, and she calls these other ideas her mistresses, and they’re doing the dance of the seven veils-

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and trying to beckon you over. So the Isolation Journals was that for me, I was in the final throes of finishing my book. I had no business doing anything other than that task, but I couldn’t help but feel that so much of the pandemic, especially those early days of quarantine, felt familiar to me. The isolation, the face masks, the sense of hypervigilance, the kind of creative workarounds that were needed in order for us to continue existing within these new constraints. And so I wanted to share this creative practice, and really it’s a spiritual practice for me, of journaling, that has helped me through all of my most difficult passages.

But I knew that I wanted there to be a connective piece, to try to mirror the experience that I had 10 years earlier in that hospital room when I launched the column, and opened my inbox to all of these messages. And so I invited this community, we called them the Isolation Journalers to, if they wanted, and there was no pressure whatsoever, to share some of the writing that they were doing. And it was extraordinary. It’s, I think the work I’m most proud of, because to share your most vulnerable self, I think is one of the most terrifying things that we can do. But so often, when we dare to be vulnerable, it creates a reverberation, where vulnerability begets vulnerability, begets vulnerability. And of course, we learn that we’re more alike than we are different.

And so to watch that happening in real time, to watch people sharing their stories of love and struggle and sickness and grief, at a moment in time where the entire world was between two kingdoms, was just breathtaking. And that project continues strong today, I never know what to call it, because newsletter doesn’t quite do it justice, even though that’s the form it’s delivered in.

Debbie Millman:
Your book Between Two Kingdoms came out on February 9th, 2021. Was an immediate bestseller. November of 2021, two things happened. Your husband Jon earned 11 Grammy nominations, the most of any artist that year. And you also learned that your cancer had returned. How were you able to manage this dichotomy?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was such a surreal gut punch. It was the thing I’d always feared. It was my biggest fear, for a decade. And the thing is that when the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. And so, for so many years, I’d been afraid of rebuilding my life, afraid of falling in love again, only to have everything collapse. But I’d done that. I had built a career for myself, a life for myself, a love for myself that I was so proud of, and I’d finally regained this sense of safety in my body. And to have a relapse of leukemia, a decade out from transplant, is so rare. There’s less than a 1% chance of it happening. And once again, overnight, our world changed. We packed up our house, we had to re-home our dogs, which I think was harder than even the news of the recurrence itself, and we basically moved back into the hospital ecosystem.

But again, great misfortune, great fortune. I felt like I was lucky to have been through this once before, because I thought a lot about how I’d want to do it differently. So with regards to Jon, that’s the kind of thing that could lead two people to split apart. When one person is on a meteoric ascent, and the other person is suddenly confined to a hospital bed. And one of the very first things I said to him was that I didn’t want him to press pause on his life and on his work. I have watched him work so hard and for so long, that I wouldn’t have felt good about him missing out on this huge moment. But also, I learned to be a caregiver can be as challenging as it is to be a patient, sometimes more so. And I wanted to protect our relationship.

And I had spent the last decade building a beautiful community of family, and chosen family. And I wanted to not just lean on Jon, but to do the hardest thing, I think for most of us, which is to ask for help and for support. And so I was really fortunate this time around to have my parents with me, to have my very closest friends, and to have Jon there. And we navigated it in our own strange way. We got married on the eve of my bone marrow transplant, which as Jon put, was a kind of act of defiance. A way of saying we had a plan, and while it may look very different, we’re going to keep moving forward with that plan. But also, I think for both of us, having our own creative practices was the thing that both kept us individually grounded, and allowed us to come together.

Debbie Millman:
The dichotomy, both the sublime and the sad, is documented in the stunning documentary American Symphony, which was released last year. And the film follows you both, as you’re going through your bone marrow transplant, and Jon is creating his first composition to be played at Carnegie Hall. Going to the Grammys for his 11 nominations, as you watch, while you’re in recovery. Once again, you’re skating between the sort of beauty, and despair. How did you get to such a level of trust with the director, Matt Heineman?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was an ongoing process. I mean, Matt was a friend of Jon’s, and a collaborator, so he was a known entity to us, which helped. But it was really challenging, and Matt was so willing to reimagine the contours of this story every day, every week. And we would have conversations all the time about where the boundaries were, and those would shift, depending on how I was feeling. But ultimately, we knew that we wanted to capture this, not because we had any idea of what the outcome would be. I didn’t know if I was going to survive long enough to see this film come together, but to document what it is to navigate those peaks and valleys in real time, not just individually, but especially as a unit, felt like a worthy exploration and project. And it really took a massive leap of faith for both of us, and for Matt included, because we did it without funding, without a distributor, or anything like that. And we wanted the freedom to figure out what this could be, without any sort of directives coming from the outside.

And so I think what helped was that it really was often just the three of us. And because my immune system was so compromised, it was just Matt holding the camera. It’s not like there was a giant film crew there. And so we really built a deep friendship, and went through so much together, in the course of that time. Although Jon jokes that he had to draw the line one day, because our safe space was the bathroom. We knew that if we went into the bathroom, the camera would not follow us. So we would take bathroom breaks, just to kind of get our heads together.

And one day Jon was taking a shower, and he saw the door crack open, and he saw the camera lens come through. And Jon went, “Hello?” And he said, “Don’t worry, I’m just filming you from the waist up.” And that’s when we were like, “Okay, we need to reassess where the lines are, here.”

Debbie Millman:
Suleika, you just celebrated the two year anniversary of your second bone marrow transplant, and joyfully you were able to join Jon at the recent Grammys, where he was once again nominated for a pile of awards. There’s something about this that feels incredibly full circle, and I read that lately, you’re forcing yourself to make more necessary optimism. And as a result, I understand that you’ve committed, in that necessary optimism, to write two more books. And I was wondering if you can tell us about those.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So unlike the first time, I don’t have, and I never will have, a clear end date in terms of my cancer treatment. I am in treatment indefinitely, for however long or short that may be. And so, in a way, it’s been wonderful because I am more present than I’ve ever been. And it makes that sort of big, bold daydreaming about the future, a scary exercise, because I don’t know if I’m going to get to exist in that future. But I know that I don’t want to be someone hemmed in by fear. And so I’ve had to force myself to make long-term plans, like a book, which as you know takes a very long time not only to ideate and write, but for it to come out into the world. And I’ve had to kind of find ways of planting a flag in the future, as an act of optimism, as a way of saying, “I will be here. I will see this through.”

Debbie Millman:
After the transplant. Your doctor advised you to live each day like it’s your last, but you embraced an alternative approach. And I’m wondering if you can share what that is.

Suleika Jaouad:
So it’s a thing people say a lot, that you need to live every day as if it’s your last, and of course they mean well. But it’s also a phrase that has always filled me with a sense of panic, the sense and the pressure of needing to make as much meaning out of every moment, which honestly is fine in the short term, but an exhausting way to live. And I’ve come to believe that if we were all to live every day as if it were our last, our planet would implode. We’d be emptying our bank accounts, and declaring bankruptcy, and we’d be cheating on our spouses and eating ice cream for every meal.

And so, rather than doing that, I needed to find a gentler way in. And so what I decided was that instead, I was going to try to live every day as if it were my first, to wake up with a sense of curiosity and playfulness and wonder, that a newborn baby might. And it’s shifted my whole mindset, when it comes to the idea of indefinite treatment. It’s removed the pressure, and rather than figuring out how I can get the most out of my life, it’s shifted me into a place of thinking about what I can give, what I can give to my beloveds around me. What I can give to my work, what I can give to my body, to nourish it in this moment. And it’s really helped me also feel the sense of permission to do absolutely nothing. To have unstructured time, to doodle, to nap, to take the pressure off of feeling like there needs to be a sizable output. I think it’s what’s really helping me, figuring out how to swim through this.

Debbie Millman:
I’m wondering if you would be willing to read a short excerpt from Between Two Kingdoms. It’s one of my favorite passages in the book, and I was wondering if you’d share that with our listeners?

Suleika Jaouad:
I would love to.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts, and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now, instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Catherine’s experience and her insights sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive, and yet here she is, surviving. ‘You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,’ she told me before bed. That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life sorrows than loving.”

Debbie Millman:
Suleika Jaouad, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a joy, and let me just go ahead and say it on the record, but my favorite interview ever. You are a wonder, and I’m so, so grateful to have gotten to have this conversation with you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. I’m going to cry.

Before we go, I do want to let people know that adding your name to the Bone Marrow Registry is quick and easy, and painless. You can sign up at jointhesymphony.org, and all it takes is a swab of Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a lifesaving cure.

Suleika Jaouad’s memoir is Between Two Kingdoms, and the Netflix documentary she’s featured in and executive produced is titled American Symphony. You can see lots more about Suleika on her website@suleikajaouad.com. That’s S-U-L-E-I-K-A-J-A-O-U-A-D.com. And that is also where you can sign up for receiving the Isolation Journals weekly newsletter.

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

Debbie Millman:
Okay, so you have a few bad habits. Maybe you bite your nails, maybe you drink too much, too often. Oh and cheese. Is there too much cheese in your life? I know there is in mine. And don’t get me started on flossing. And yet, it’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get a good habit going. Or is it?

James Clear thinks it’s doable, and he wrote a blockbuster best selling book about it titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. James Clear is a writer, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he’s here to tell us about his life, his career, and how we maybe can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. James Clear, welcome to Design Matters.

James Clear:
Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. And I think cheese is only a good habit. I can’t categorize that as bad. That sounds great.

Debbie Millman:
Well, we’re starting out in a very good place. James, I understand that you tend to geek out about ultra light travel bags. Why?

James Clear:
Yeah, I don’t know. In my twenties I had this urge where I really wanted to see the world and get out. I had never been abroad until I was 23 I think. Eventually after I graduated college, I got a passport and started wanting to travel. And I was really into photography at the time, and so I was doing a lot of landscape photography or street photography in different places.
I can remember one trip in particular where I landed in Morocco and I was in Marrakesh, and I was taking some pictures and hanging out and doing some stuff, and. Then a few days later I went to Casablanca and I got off the train. It was 4:00 or something or 3:00, and for some reason I wasn’t able to get to my hotel quickly and the sun was setting soon, and that’s the hour when the light is best for photos. And so I wanted to take pictures for the next couple hours before the sun was gone, but I didn’t have time to drop my bags off. And I was so happy that I had figured out how to travel with just one bag because it would’ve been a ridiculous scene for me to be carting around wheeling all this luggage around trying to take photos for a couple hours. So that was probably the trip where I was like, “It’s definitely worth the effort to try to figure out how to travel with just one bag.”

Debbie Millman:
Let’s go back in time a little. You were born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Your mom is a nurse. Your dad played professional baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals in the minor leagues, and still live in the same house you grew up in. You used to live in Ohio as well. Why Ohio?

James Clear:
I mean, the main answer I think is family. The main answer is the people I love live here. But I like Ohio too. I have pride in being from here. My parents’ house, which they do still live in. It’s about five minutes away from my grandparents’ house, so I spent a large portion of my childhood running around on my grandparents’ farm. They both live maybe 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. It’s a little more built up now than when I was growing up. I grew up, it was much more rural. Being outdoors, and running around the fields, and feeding the cows, that was all part of how I grew up, and I loved being outside there. I have a cabin in the woods now too that I love to go out to, and I have dreams of taking my grandkids out there the way that I spent time on my grandparents’ farm. I don’t know, it occupies a warm place in my heart and I’m proud to be from Hamilton, and proud to be from Ohio. And all of the people I love are still here, so I spend a lot of time here.

Debbie Millman:
Well, having cows then makes sense regarding your love of cheese.

James Clear:
That’s right. I didn’t think about that, but it started early.

Debbie Millman:
Now I know that every Sunday, you and your family and all of your cousins and extended family would go over to your grandparents’ house, and your grandmother would make dinner every Sunday for 18 people.

James Clear:
I know. She was a saint.

Debbie Millman:
What kinds of things would she make for 18 people? That’s like a Thanksgiving dinner every week.

James Clear:
It was a lot of spaghetti, a lot of pasta a lot of the time. Lasagna and spaghetti are the two that I remember the most. Every Sunday we would go to church in the morning and then we’d go over to my grandparents for breakfast. So my grandma would cook us breakfast. That was just my immediate family and my grandparents. That’s seven or eight people. Then we’d go home for four hours, and then at 3:00 we would come back to their house and then she would cook dinner for 18 people.

Debbie Millman:
You’re right, she’s a saint.

James Clear:
Yeah. And I say that jokingly because of all the work and everything that she did for us. She actually passed away recently. She passed away within the last year. And some of our extended family, some cousins of hers and stuff came down from Columbus for the funeral. And one of them said that he looked at his coworkers before he drove down that day and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.” But I think we all have people in our lives that we love to say things like that about, but she actually is the one person I know that when you said things like that at her funeral, you weren’t just being nice about it and kind of glossing over the tougher parts of her life. I truly don’t know if I ever heard her criticize someone, which is just an insane thing to be able to say about somebody. She’s almost too nice about it. It was one of those things where it was like truly if I didn’t have something nice to say, I just didn’t say anything at all. She was a special lady, and I’m fortunate to have had her in my life.

Debbie Millman:
James, I understand that when you were four years old, you saw a cowboy on TV and decided right then and there you wanted to have lasso and swing it. So you took a screwdriver and tied it to a piece of string, and swung it around your head in the backyard. This resulted in your cutting your eyelid and getting your first stitches.
And fast forward as you’re growing up, you were playing sports and they had a significant role in your life. You swam, you played basketball and football. But because you were always getting hit in football, you switched to baseball. And I was wondering, especially as we’ll go into what happened in high school while you were playing sports. I’m wondering, are you accident prone?

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being super reckless or anything, but I don’t know. I have a lot of experiences with stitches. Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanted to make a lasso and I thought, “I’ll tie a screwdriver on the string that’ll do the trick.” And my mom was in the kitchen and looked out the window and saw me just whirling this around my head. I was really lucky though, and actually that’s kind of a theme throughout many of the injuries that I had is that it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. I cut my eyelid but not my eye, and I ended up getting stitches on my eyelid and kind of sewing that back together.
And then later, I’ve had stitches all over the place. I cut my knee open diving on a broken swing set, and then of course I had my injuries in high school. I had a set of blinds fall in my head one time. I ended up getting 20 staples across my head for that. So I don’t know. I really don’t identify as someone who’s accident prone, but that probably sounds ridiculous to anybody listening to me list all these off right now.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s interesting because all of your accidents really have something to do with being sports-minded or athletic. I am actually accident prone, but I’m the kind of person that trips over nothing, falls over a step, bangs into a wall or a door. I mean all of my stitches, and I have a bunch are all self-inflicted wounds that I encountered by being clumsy.

James Clear:
I think the way that I would describe it for me is I’m very hard on things. My wife is constantly complaining about that. I’m banging doors, plopping onto couches, cracking frames of things. I’m always very hard on things. I don’t buy nice cars for myself because I know that I’m just going to-

Debbie Millman:
Same. Exactly.

James Clear:
I need something that I can be rough with. I guess I am that way with my body occasionally too.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I am the same way. My wife has a gorgeous car. I will not even try to drive it. I insisted on getting a Jeep.

James Clear:
Yeah, there you go. That seems right.

Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about what happened in high school, because I do think it is a really defining moment in how you became who you are. Like your dad, you wanted to play professional baseball on the last day of your sophomore year of high school while playing with your classmates. You were hit in the face right between the eyes with a flying baseball bat that slipped out of the hands of one of your team members and rotated through the air, sort of like a helicopter into your face.
The hit broke your nose and your ethmoid bone, which is the bone behind your nose, deep inside your skull. Shattered both your eye sockets. Cognitively. You didn’t know what year it was. You lost the ability to breathe, and you began to have seizures.
What happened next? I mean, and we’ll talk a lot about your book. You start your book with this chapter, which resulted in my sort of just not putting the book down till pretty much I finished. It is so riveting and so unexpected to start a book in this way.

James Clear:
Yeah, I guess that was a good call by my publisher. I don’t like writing about myself, so I pushed back multiple times and it’s like, “I just don’t think it needs to be about me.” I’d really prefer to just make it straightforward and about building better habits, but they ended up winning out and they were like, “This has to be in there.” So it seems like people found it interesting.
Yeah, it was a hard moment for me. I don’t know. It’s strange to think about in retrospect. It’s hard to fully parse the experience. I was obviously very out of it for a while. I ended up being put into a medically induced coma that night. I ended up waking back up the next day. And as you said, I had multiple facial fractures. I ended up back into surgery about a week later to get a lot of that fixed up, which interestingly that hurt more than the initial injury was the breaking of my nose, the resetting of a lot of the bones.
The big thing is the road to recovery was so long. I couldn’t drive a car for the next nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. All I really wanted to do was just get back, and play some baseball, and be a normal teenage kid. But it took a long time.
And I did not have any language for describing what I was going through at the time. I never would’ve said like, “I was just trying to get 1% better. I was just trying to find a way to improve.” But that was a time in my life when I had to practice the art of small changes or the art of little improvements, because that’s all I could really handle. I just had to find something to be positive about or some small improvement to focus on, and then wake up the next day and try to do it again. And eventually I was able to make my way back. It’s funny, thinking back on it now, I don’t remember being really in a bad mood about it. I remember being I don’t know, fairly positive or happy. And I think to your point earlier about what’s special about Ohio or what’s special about being here, it was the people that helped me do that. I mean, my grandpa was a very positive person. My parents are very positive people. And I think their influence was really dramatic and important during that time. And even though my physical progress was slow, mentally, I had a good attitude and I felt pretty good throughout the process. And it was a long road back, but I don’t look back on it begrudgingly.

Debbie Millman:
The hospital that you were flown to was the same hospital your sister went to for her cancer treatment after she was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years prior. And your parents met with the same priest they had met with back then as well. Was there ever a moment where you were in danger of losing your life?

James Clear:
So there was a period of time where I started to lose the ability to do basic functions. Swallowing, breathing. I had a couple seizures as I mentioned. And then at one point, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So I think that probably qualifies. They had to intubate me, and then they were pumping breaths into me by hand for a little bit because around that same time, I was being transferred to the helicopter. The helipad was across the street. So we were in this ridiculous situation where I obviously was told all this after the fact, I’m being wheeled across the street and we kind of are hitting bumps on the sidewalk. The intubation apparatus popped out, so they had to reattach that. And then were trying to get me on the helicopter at the same time. So I think the nurses and doctors did a great job managing the whole situation, but I was in a very unstable condition for a window of time there.

Debbie Millman:
You were placed in a coma as you mentioned. And when you woke up, you told one of the nurses that you had lost the ability to smell. She then recommended that you blow your nose. What happened after that?

James Clear:
Yeah. I mean it seems like a decent idea. I was just like, “I can’t smell anything.” And she was like, “Well, you have all kinds of gunk and blood, and all sorts of stuff in there, so let’s clear your nasal cavity a little bit. So see if you can blow that out.” Which it didn’t hurt that bad even though my nose was broken. But when I blew, I forced air through the cracks in my shattered eye socket, and so then my left eye bulged out of the socket. It was halfway out. So the situation just became more complicated. I ended up having double vision for weeks. The doctors all had to confer to try to figure out what to do. They decided not to operate. They said they were pretty sure that the air was going to seep back out of the eye socket and my eye would gradually recede. And that did happen. It took about a month for it to go back to the normal position, but it did slowly make its way back.

Debbie Millman:
Pretty sure is not very confidence inducing.

James Clear:
Right. At the time, that probably didn’t feel as good as I was hoping, but we made it back. We made our way out. It was a really ridiculous 24 hour stretch.

Debbie Millman:
You said that after the injury, you were trying to regain some control over your life. What did that look like for you?

James Clear:
I think it all started with focusing on what you can control. So I mentioned physically, it was physical therapy sessions or whatever. Whatever exercise I was being asked to do. Can I do this well, can I try to give a good effort and do this successfully and have a good day today? So it started with a lot of that stuff. I had always enjoyed school and always taken pride in getting good grades and being a good student. It’s funny, as an entrepreneur now, a lot of my entrepreneurial friends really are anti school, or are down on school, or didn’t have a good experience. I feel like the opposite. It was kind of a game to me and I enjoyed trying to figure out how to play the game well. So I didn’t know if I have every indication that my intelligence is the same, but is it? Let’s see. And so I felt good about being able to study in the same way, or get a good grade on a test, or just make my way back there. I do think that helped me gain some confidence and feel like, “You know what? Maybe I can’t move the way I want yet, or maybe I still have a little bit of double vision or I can’t drive a car yet. But it seems like everything’s going to be okay. I’m thinking clearly, and I’ll get there eventually.” So I think study habits played a role in it. And then eventually, once I was able to start playing baseball again about a year later, then I started to focus more on the physical and the athletic part of it. And I was never as good as my dad, so I didn’t end up playing professionally or anything like that. But looking back on my career, I feel like I was able to fulfill my potential. And that was a pretty long arc. It took me probably a solid five or six years of continuous improvement and just getting a little bit better each year. I barely got to play high school baseball. I was coming off the bench my first year in college. My sophomore year, I ended up being a starter. My junior year I was all conference, my senior year I was an all American. So I just gradually kept making these little progressions. And that was very confidence inspiring. I had a coach who told me one time, a basketball coach that confidence is just displayed ability. And I felt like each year that went on, I was displaying my ability a little bit more and more. And I was gaining confidence in myself and feeling like, “Yeah, I have ever a reason the world to work really hard this off season or to show up again because I have proof of it.”

Debbie Millman:
I sort of see confidence as the successful repetition of any endeavor.

James Clear:
I like that, the successful repetition of any endeavor. It’s like that coach that told me that, that confidence is displayed ability is kind of like, “Yeah, if you want to feel confident about making free throws, go out there and practice.” And once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it. Successful repetition of it is going to breed confidence.
It is kind of this interesting thing. I think a lot of the time in life, we talk ourselves out of attempting things. We decide that, “I’m not ready yet. I just don’t feel confident in it. I feel like I need to learn more. I feel like I need to develop my skills.” But the confidence comes after the fact, not before. And you need the willingness to try, and then the confidence arises after the fact.

Debbie Millman:
How do you manage being back on the baseball field? For me, it would’ve been, I don’t know what it was for you. But that first day back on the field holding your mid up to catch a ball, were you afraid of getting hit again?

James Clear:
That’s interesting. Actually looking back, that’s a great question. Looking back, I had a couple advantages that I didn’t really think about. So the first is I actually got hurt in gym class, not in a game. So we were playing baseball, but it wasn’t an actual game. And secondly, I got hit by a bat, but I was a pitcher. So I didn’t have to pick up a bat and get in the batters box that often. I was just standing on the mound pitching. And so when I was playing the game, I was not in the same situation as when I was injured, which is an interesting thing looking back on it. And so I didn’t really have that very much. I didn’t have this fear of playing baseball. If anything, I was just excited to get back out there and get back to it.
I’m not the kind of person that worries very much. Maybe to my detriment sometimes, but I’m not that kind of mindset. I just was able to chalk it up to, “Listen, this is a freak accent.” And sometimes you get unlucky in life and unlucky that day. Yeah. And then you just got to move on.

Debbie Millman:
You got a full scholarship to go to Denison University where you majored in biomechanics. Why biomechanics? What were you imagining you were going to do professionally back then?

James Clear:
Oh man, I wasn’t imagining anything. The only thing I wanted to do in college was play baseball, but I liked school and I was a good student. And looking back, I was able to kind of hack the system to my benefit.
So I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have anybody to look to. I wasn’t thinking I’ll be an entrepreneur someday. And at that time, I didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurial or whatever. But when I went to college, I looked at all the majors that were there, and I was interested in some stuff. I was a science guy, so I was interested in biology and physics. I took some chemistry classes. I was kind of playing in that sphere anyway. And then my sophomore year I heard, I don’t even remember where, that you could design your own major. And I was like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
So I looked into it a little bit more. I just looked at the course catalog and I was like, “I like these physics classes, and I like these anatomy classes, and I like these biology classes. I’ve already taken a couple of these chemistry classes.” And then I just put it all out on the piece of paper and I was like, “What would my major like this be called?” And biomechanics was the closest thing that I could think of. And it applied pretty well. I pitched it to the Academic Affairs Council and they were like, “Yeah sure.”
So looking back, that’s a pretty entrepreneurial thing to do, to be like, “I don’t like any of the options that you have. I’ll make my own.” But I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur at that time. But it’s kind of cool to connect the dots looking backward and being like, “You were sort of always on this path. You like creating things, you like optimizing things. You like creating your own experience.”

Debbie Millman:
You then went on to Ohio State for your MBA. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the St. Gallen Symposium when you were there?

James Clear:
Yeah, so to the point that I just made a few minutes ago where I said all I really wanted to do was play baseball, but I liked school and I was good at school. I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do after at Denison. And my default answer was always I’ll go to med school. I thought about doing that and then I looked at a PhD program. I applied for a Fulbright Grant that I didn’t get. So that was kind of sitting there and I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go and get my MBA.” Not because I really knew anything about it. I had never had a real corporate job or anything. Just because everybody said, “Yeah, business knowledge. That’s important. You should know how that works. And then that’ll always be relevant.” I ended up getting a good scholarship, so it made the decision easy. But what I really needed was time to think. I needed two years to figure out what am I actually going to do next.
So I went there and I took the classes, and occasionally these opportunities would come across that they would email out to the class. And there was this one called the St. Gallen Symposium that was a conference that was in Switzerland. And as I had mentioned previously, I had never been abroad at that point. So I was like, “Man, this is an essay competition. And if you get selected, if your essay gets chosen, you get to go to Switzerland. Well, that sounds kind of cool.”
I did actually something that now I use this strategy all the time and or have used it all the time over the last 10 years building my business, which is basically looking at best practices and trying to figure out what parts of those transfer to your own skill set and experience. Or reverse engineering, I guess we could call it.
So the symposium had all the previous winners listed on the website and their essays. And so I downloaded all the essays from the previous 10 years and read them all. And I looked to see how many references did each one have, how long was each one. Was there any similarity in structure in the way that they made their argument? And I did actually end up finding some common themes that it appeared the selection committee liked.
And so when I wrote my article, I had that number of references, and I used that structure, and I wrote with that amount of length, and all of that. And anyway, long story short, the essay got selected. Ultimately, I actually ended up going two years. So the MBA program was a two year program. And I attended the first year. And then the second year, my essay ended up being selected as the winner. And the prize was $10,000. That was more money than I had ever made before. So I was getting ready to graduate, and suddenly I had $10,000 in the bank account. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try to give it a go and try to make my own thing.” Maybe I’ll try to start a business. So that was the money that I lived off of for the first probably six to eight months while I was trying to figure things out and start my own thing. And I really don’t know… at this point I’m kind of like man, I’m so wired this way. I probably would’ve ended up

an entrepreneur somehow. But I don’t know how it would’ve happened without that essay. I probably would’ve had to go get a regular job for a while and then figure out some exit plan.

Debbie Millman:
So when you started your own business, what was the business?

James Clear:
Well, my first ideas, my first attempts were really sad attempts at a business. The very first thing I took some of that $10,000 that I got paid. I think I spent 1,500 bucks on getting an iPhone app built. And it let you put… this is pre Instagram. This is a while ago. It let you put captions on photos and filters on photos and stuff. It didn’t have any kind of social media component or anything, but it was just like a photo editing app. It was pretty bad looking back on it. It wasn’t very well executed.
And I put it on the app store because I was hearing all these stories about people launching apps and making all this money. And I just thought, “If you build it, they will come.” And I built it and nobody came. And that was a good lesson for me. It was an expensive one because I had just burned through 15% of my cash. But I needed to learn that you need to have an audience. You need to have an ability to market, an ability to launch a product. I had no way of getting the word out. I didn’t know how to get in front of people. And so that experience forced me to go back to the drawing board and learn how do you get an audience? How would I get this in front of people’s eyeballs?
And I started reading more and more about email lists, and building an email list, and starting a blog, and all that. And I started to go down that path. As I did over the next year or two, I started some other websites, some of which were other bad business ideas. I bought puppypresent.com at one point.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good name.

James Clear:
The idea was that my girlfriend, now my wife, she loved puppies like many people. And I was like, “What if you could have breeders rent out time with their puppies and you could just buy it as a gift, maybe buy a puppy present?” And be like, “Hey, for your birthday, I got you two hours with these puppies. Let’s go play with them.” I thought it was a decent idea, but all the breeders I talked to hated it. They were like, “Wait, you just want to play with the dogs, but you don’t want to buy them?” And I was like, “Exactly.” So there were a lot of little hair brain things like that, that I tried that just never panned out. And it took about two years before I started to find my footing.
I was doing some web design gigs in the background to make money try. I had to pay the bills somehow while I was waiting to have a business that was actually spitting off some cash. Eventually, I found my way to writing what is now jamesclear.com. So I started in September of 2010 was when I did that iPhone app thing. And then November of 2012 was the first article on jamesclear.com.
That’s one of the biggest inflection points in my life was the choice to… you could look at it at different levels. The choice to become an entrepreneur, the choice to start jamesclear.com, the choice to start writing rather than, I don’t know, paying people to build iPhone apps. But setting out on the entrepreneurial path has been one of the biggest inflection points that I’ve had.
And it took a long time. It was a really slow burn. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about those first two years where I was struggling and didn’t even have a idea that was working well. And then there also wasn’t anything sexy about the first three years of jamesclear.com where it basically wasn’t making any money. But eventually I got a book deal and Atomic Habits came out, and now it’s great, but it took a long time. It was five years of struggle before anything really hit.

Debbie Millman:
And I remember when I first became aware of your writing and saw how hard you were working, I was very impressed with how dedicated you were and are. But especially before you were atomic, so to speak.

James Clear:
The habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.

Debbie Millman:
And what gave you this sense? Before you go one, I’m sorry to interrupt because this is my million dollar question for you. What gave you the sense that you could make a business by writing twice a week?

James Clear:
Well, I had a couple people who were proofs of concept. I didn’t know them, but I had a couple people that I looked at. So I was in grad school 2008 to 2010, just kind of stewing on these entrepreneurial ideas. There were the A-list bloggers around that time, two of them. One was Leo Babauta at Zen Habits who Leo’s still writing now. And he was a huge site at the time. And I was interested in habits. I hadn’t written anything about it yet. I just thought, “Hey, this site’s kind of cool. This is interesting, this guy’s making a living.” I think he had six kids and I was like, “Somehow he’s figuring this out and he’s writing about habits.” I was like, “I don’t have any kids. It’s just me. I barely have a bedroom. I can probably figure out how to do one sixth of this.” So Leo was definitely an early inspiration.
And then Chris Guillebeau was also writing. Chris is still doing his thing now too. He was an early inspiration too because I mentioned I was really into travel and photography and stuff. And Chris had this whole travel thing that he was really all about. But also, Chris was the one who was writing every Monday and Thursday. That was just kind of his cadence. Leo I think wrote even more frequently than that. I think he wrote three or four times a week or something.
But I actually can remember one article that Chris wrote, I don’t even remember the title of it or whatever, but I remember reading it. And I was in grad school and I thought, “Man, I feel like I could do this. I feel like I could write something that’s as good as that.” And so then I decided to try one, and it was way worse than what Chris had written.
And I had to be honest with myself and I was like, “This is much harder than I thought it was.” It was a really interesting lesson where I was like, “If it looks easy, they’re probably putting in a lot more work than you think.” And the better somebody is at their job, the easier it often looks. Anyway, I had to a little bit of humble pie there and sit back and be like, “Okay, I need to start giving a better effort.”
But when I settled on that Monday Thursday schedule, I did it partially because it felt like this is a cadence that I can actually stick to. This is something I could actually… I can’t do five days a week. I might not even be able to do three days a week, but I think I could do two.

Debbie Millman:
I know. People like Maria Popova, astonish me that she can do it every single day. Yeah,

James Clear:
It’s absurd. Her output, I saw somewhere on her site, she said she’s published, it was something, it seemed impossible. It was like 60 million words or something. I was like, “How is that even doable?”

Debbie Millman:
She’s a very dear friend of mine and I know she writes every single one of those letters.

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So I felt like I could stick to it, and I have a very high quality bar. And it was really hard for me to let myself be like, “I’ll just put it out even if I feel like it’s just okay.” I just couldn’t get myself to do it. So I thought, “Well, twice a week is enough that I could spend 20 hours on an article or even 30 hours on an article.” I often did that for the first year or two where I would say the average article was probably eight to 10 hours. And it was frequent that I would spend 15 to 20. The fastest I ever did one in was four or six hours, something like that. So it was consistent enough that I felt like it was going to add up and compound, but it was infrequent enough that I had the space to do what I felt like was good work.

Debbie Millman:
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block or not knowing what to write about?

James Clear:
So I had this moment where I was writing for a few years, and the site was growing, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. And for some reason that number kind of got in my head a little bit and I was like, “Okay, now a lot of people are paying attention. Now it has to be really good.” And so I went through this little phase where rather than just telling myself, “Hey, it’s going well. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Rather than doing that, I thought I need to be more perfect now. So I thought, “Okay, what I need to do is spend even more time writing. More time revising it, more time working it out, more trying time trying to craft a really great sentence.” Interestingly, the writing actually got worse, not better.
What I came to realize is that if I ever feel like I’m running low on ideas, what I need is not to write more. What I need is to read more. And it’s kind of like driving a car where you got to stop sometimes and fill the car up with gas. And the point of having a car is not to sit at the gas station all day, and just keep pumping gas into the tank, and never produce anything, or never go anywhere. But the point is also not to just drive until you run out of gas and then you’re stuck on the side of the road. And so you need this balance between the two. And reading is like filling up the tank for me, and writing is like going on an adventure. And they both feed each other, and I need both of them. And when I’m really on is usually when I’m reading something really great. It’s so good, I can barely make it through a page or two without taking a bazillion notes. And then I’m like, “I got to put this book down and just write about this right now.” And then the ideas take off on the page. So reading and writing are much more intertwined than I think I initially realized. And almost all of my good ideas are downstream from something great that I read.

Debbie Millman:
You said that everything you write about is mostly a reminder to yourself of what you should be doing. Was that how your specialty in understanding habits first came about?

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny to call it a specialty. I feel like my readers and I are peers, and I write about this stuff because I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with. It’s like, “Hey, have you procrastinated?” “Sure all the time.” “Do you start something and then you’re inconsistent?” “Yes, absolutely.” “Have you focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process?” “For sure.” I struggle with all that stuff like everybody else does. And so I wrote about it because it was relevant to my own life. I was interested in trying to figure it out a little bit more, and apply it, and I was just kind of curious about it. And so for that reason, because I was interested and because it excited me, I think the writing was better as a result.
Now, it’s probably worth noting that in those early years, that first year or so, I wrote about a lot of other stuff too. I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym, and the medical system in America, and all kinds of stuff. And the readers didn’t seem to care about those as much. And so I kind of followed my nose a little bit and I was like, “You know what? Every time I write about habits, or strategy, or making better choices, or being creative or productive, those are the topics that the audience also likes and that I like.” There’s a lot of other stuff that I like that people are like, “Well that’s great, but you can kind of keep it to yourself.” And so for those things I just kind of like, “Well, maybe I’ll journal about that and not publish it.” So I gradually kind of found my footing in my area of expertise or specialty as you say. And it was mostly just trial and error. But all the time, whatever I was writing about, I tried to make it something that I was excited about or that I was interested in personally.

Debbie Millman:
I think that’s what makes it so interesting. I work with a woman that helps me with my research. Her name is Emily [inaudible 00:34:10]. And she didn’t know about you before I started working on the show. And initially, she was surprised because she knows that I’m not somebody that is particularly interested in the self-help genre, so to speak. But as soon as she started researching you, as soon as she started reading your book, as soon as we started talking about the way in which you approach what you share, she completely understood why I was so intrigued and excited about talking with you.

James Clear:
That’s cool.

Debbie Millman:
You have a very unique way of sharing information with people. That also happens to be something that could be helpful. I have never in my life recommended what would be considered a self-help book to my wife. But I am insisting that she read Atomic Habits because I think she will benefit from it so much and-

James Clear:
I take no responsibility how this ends up. I hope that she enjoys it

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’ve already started sneaking in some of the techniques. I’m Trojan horsing it in, because she so needs it.

James Clear:
That’s good. That’s good. I think it’s important to be a practitioner of the ideas, and not just a writer of them or a theorizer of them. And I do think that if you’re forced to practice the ideas, if they’re things you actually use in your daily life, there’s going to be a better quality to the writing. And then also, you come to appreciate how difficult it is to make any kind of progress in the world, or to create something new, or to put this idea into practice.
I think because I have struggled with all of these common habit pitfalls like everybody else has had, I think I am in a better position to say something compelling about it because it’s like, “Yeah, I know what this is like.” I’ve struggled through all this too. It also gives me more confidence in the ideas if I can be like, “Yes, I’ve actually used them.” And I’m not saying it’s going to be a perfect fit for everybody and I don’t think it’s going to work in all scenarios, but I know that it worked in this scenario. So I feel better about sharing it.
My kind of approach now is that there is no one way to build better habits. There’s no single strategy to follow. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, “Hey, here’s a wrench, and here’s a hammer, and here’s a screwdriver.” And your job is to say, “You know what? I think for my life or for my situation, the wrench feels like the right fit, or the hammer might be better for this particular experience or this particular situation.”
And I think if I can do that well, if I can lay all the tools out and give everybody a full toolkit to work with, we’re all in a better position to make some of these changes. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy all the time or even that it’s going to work all the time. But I feel like I have a better appreciation for having a big suite of tools because I’ve had to practice it.

Debbie Millman:
Well, a lot of people agree. In 2018, you brought your book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones into the world. In the years since the book was published, you have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. You’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, I looked it up this week, for 154 weeks. 154 weeks listeners. Your book has been translated into over 50 languages. Your newsletter is sent out every week to more than 2 million subscribers. And you also travel all over the world with your super sleek bags giving inspiring speeches. Congratulations James.

James Clear:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. And I don’t think it’s reasonable for any author to expect those kind of outcomes. It just struck a chord, and I’ve been very fortunate. But yeah, I don’t really know what else to say other than I’m glad that people are finding it useful.
I think ultimately, the only way a book can grow that is if it’s word of mouth. It’s far outpaced my ability to sell it or to tell people about it. And what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night is people are finding this useful. It’s growing because people are telling other people about it. And the only reason they’re telling people about it is because they find it helpful themselves. And that certainly feels good. It feels gratifying. Habits have been written about for a long time. They’ve been around long before I was here, and people be writing about it long after I’m gone. And I am just adding a very small piece to the collective knowledge of humanity on the topic. I’m not really saying much that’s very new. My hope is just that maybe when you read it, you’re like, “I never quite heard it put that way before.” Or, “Maybe this gives me a little bit different line of attack than I had previously.” And perhaps that unlocks an opportunity for you that maybe wasn’t there before. And I’m really grateful to all the readers.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I’m only going to push back a little bit here James, because I do think what you’re writing about is new in that it’s your perspective. Which is doesn’t have any shame attached to it. There’s no berating. It’s just very straightforward, very relatable, and really, really helpful.
So let’s talk a little bit about habits. I have two fairly basic questions from my listeners that may have not read your book, maybe the two or three people out there in the world, or your website. So just two easy questions that I think will help frame the rest of my questions. First, what is a habit?

James Clear:
Well if you talk to an academic or a researcher, they’re going to say something like, “A habit is an automatic or mindless behavior that you do without even really thinking about it.” So brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues, you tap them together twice. Stuff that you don’t even really think about that much.
I think there’s another definition, another way to describe a habit, which is it’s a behavior that’s tied to a particular context. So you can never have a human outside of an environment, where you’re going to live your whole life in some type of environment. And your behaviors are often linked to that environment. So your couch at 7:00 PM is linked to the habit of watching Netflix, for example. Or your kitchen table at 7:00 AM is linked to the habit of drinking tea and journaling.
And I think that reveals something important about habits, which is the environment plays a pretty big role in how they’re shaped, in how they’re triggered, and so on. I think the strict academic answer is it’s a pretty mindless automatic routine or behavior. That’s not how we usually talk about it in daily conversation. If I were to ask you, “What are some habits you want to build?” You might say, “Writing every day or going to the gym four days a week.” And writing is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth might be, but I know what you mean when you say it. You mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual, and so on. So it kind of depends on how academic we want to get about the definition. But I think we could just say most of us know what we mean when we say a habit. We mean something I do regularly, something I do frequently, something I do consistently.

Debbie Millman:
So my second basic question is what do we get wrong about habits?

James Clear:
It’s a good question. I think different people get different things wrong. So I don’t know that there is one single answer. There are some common pitfalls that you see people fall into a lot. Like one common pitfall is biting off more than you can chew or starting too big. I mean, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me a bazillion times. You get excited. Especially if you’re an ambitious person, you start thinking about the changes you want to make and then you’re like, “Let me find the perfect workout program, and it’s an hour long, and you’re going to do it five days a week.” And instead, it might be more useful just to develop the habit of going to the gym for five minutes, four days a week. Just become the kind of person who masters the artist showing up. But we often resist that type of small action because it feels like, “Well, this isn’t enough to get me the results that I want.” So that’s probably not even worth it.
But there are levels to this whole thing. And if you can master the art of showing up, then you’re in a position to optimize, to improve, to advance. So that’s kind of a big part of my philosophy is make it easy to show up.
The other common maybe pitfall or mistake, the things that people get wrong about it. I think one thing that we get wrong is we don’t look at our bad habits enough. We don’t think about what they can teach us for building good habits. So let me give you an example.
Most behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s an ultimate outcome. For bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it’s tasty, it’s enjoyable. It’s only if you keep eating donuts for a year too, that you get unfavorable outcomes.
Or smoking is the classic bad habit example. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you reduce stress on the way home from work. So the immediate outcome might be favorable. It’s only the ultimate outcome five or 10 years later that’s unfavorable.
But, building bad habits is often pretty frictionless. It’s somewhat easy. The way that we all talk about building good habits where we’re like, “Oh man, I just need to get myself to go to the gym.” Nobody says that about eating donuts. Nobody says, “Oh man, if I could just get myself to eat more donuts.” We don’t talk about it that way. And I think there’s a lesson baked in there. Why is that? If we can start to look and maybe unravel our bad habits a little bit more, we notice they’re behaviors that are often really convenient. There are behaviors that are often immediately rewarding. There are behaviors that are often obvious and occupy space in our environments, in the rooms and buildings that we work in all the time. And you can copy and paste those lessons onto building good habits. You can try to find ways to make your good habits immediately rewarding. You can try to make them more visible in the environment. You can try to find ways to make those frictionless and convenient. And the more that you do those things, the more you’re kind of putting those same forces to work for you rather than against you.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by was just in my own environment and online, and in advertisements, maybe you hear things like, “Be healthy for 30 days and then,” or, “Do this thing for 21 days and then.” And you said the honest answer to how long it takes to build a habit is forever. And I’m wondering why you think it’s forever.

James Clear:
Well, what I’m trying to get at there is a habit is not a finish line to be crossed. It’s this lifestyle to be lived. And it’s not like, “Hey, just do this for 30 days and then you’ll be a healthy person.” Or, “Just do this for 60 days and then you will be productive.” You don’t have to worry about it anymore. What I’m really getting at when I say the true amount of time it takes to build a habit is forever is you are looking for a sustainable change. A non-threatening change. You’re looking to integrate it into your new lifestyle, kind of build this new normal. And then once you’ve stuck to it for a long time and it becomes part of your natural cadence of your day, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just like, “This is just part of my daily routine. This is something I can stick to.”
And that’s how habits really last. This idea that let me start the day off by doing this 21 day sprint and then I’ll be the kind of person I want to be. I think once you unpack it that way, almost everybody realizes, “Well, that’s not how it actually works.” But that is what we’re sold a lot of the time. That is what everyone’s telling us. And so I’m just kind of pushing back on that a little bit and trying to be like, “You don’t really need to make these radical changes all the time. What you really need is can we just figure out a way to live a good day today? All you got to do is live one good day. And can we find a pattern that is sustainable, that’s non-threatening, that you can integrate into your daily routine?” And then it can start to become something that this is just normal for me. It’s not like I’m not reaching so much. I’m not trying to be a totally different person.

Debbie Millman:
The part that I found to be most fascinating about your book was this deep-seated notion that our habits are how we embody a particular identity. And you encourage people interested in doing this type of work to start by asking themselves who is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the type of identity that you want to build? And that’s very intentional.

James Clear:
Yes. Yes, it is intentional. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external stuff they get us, All this stuff we’ve just been talking about, “Habits will help you get fit, or make more money, or be more productive, or reduce stress.” And it’s true habits can help you do those things, and that’s great. But the real reason that habits matter is that as you said, they help you embody a particular identity.
Every action that you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for I’m a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
And this is why I say the real goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. It’s to become a meditator. The real goal is not to run a half marathon, it’s to become a runner. Then these cases, I’m using labels. Reader, or runner, or meditator, or whatever. But it’s true for characteristics as well. “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start,” or, “I’m the type of person who shows up on time.”
And the more that you believe that aspect or that element of your story, the more you start to integrate that into your identity, the easier it becomes to stick to that behavior in the long run. I mean, in a sense, once it’s part of your story, once it’s like some aspect of yourself that you take pride in, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself be.
I mean, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. Or if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine and you follow it every day. And the aspects of our identity that we take pride in or that we kind of say, “Yeah, this is part of who I am.” We don’t have to motivate ourselves to do those behaviors in the same way that somebody who’s maybe just getting started does. It’s kind of like, “No, this is just part of what I do. This is part of how I show up.” And I think that’s ultimately where we’re really trying to get to.
It is a long process. I like that voting metaphor because each time you do a little habit, it’s like casting a vote on the pile. And you kind of build up this body of evidence. And no individual instance changes your belief about yourself or changes the story that you’re telling, but over time, you start to tip the scales in favor of that story.
And this is a little bit different than what you often hear people say. You’ll often hear something like, “Fake it till you make it.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. No, no. I say make it till you make it. Just make it till you make it.

James Clear:
Make it till you make it?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

James Clear:
That’s such a good creator phrase. Just make the blog post until you make it. Make the piece of art until you make it. Just make the thing. Just keep creating until it’s there.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

James Clear:
Fake it till you make it asks you to believe something positive about yourself, right? So it’s not ultimately that terrible, but it asks you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. There’s a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion. Your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you’re actually doing.
And behavior and beliefs are this two-way street. What you do, the actions you take each day, they influence what you think about yourself. And the mindset that you have, the beliefs that you carry, they influence the actions that you take. But my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to make it till you make it as you say, to start with one small action. To start with a little bit of evidence that, “Hey, in this moment, I was that kind of person.” And eventually, you have every reason in the world to believe that aspect of your story. So yes, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. And even if they’re small, I think that makes them particularly powerful.

Debbie Millman:
But we can also look at the opposite. And what you say about yourself often as you mentioned, will begin to determine who you are or who you become. One of the things that I was struck by, you write about how people can walk through life in a cognitive slumber. And I’m going to quote you here. “Blindly following the norms attached to their identity by stating things like, ‘I’m terrible with directions. I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering people’s names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.'” James, almost every one of those, except the, “I’m always late,” are actually designations that I thought you were describing me, and how I state my identity. And I read that. Yeah. I’m like, “James is looking deep into my soul and he is telling me that I don’t have to say these things about myself anymore if I don’t want to be them.” That’s what was so personal about my experience reading your book.

James Clear:
That’s funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to target you like that.

Debbie Millman:
No it’s okay.

James Clear:
It’s interesting though, these stories that we carry around. I didn’t think something like I have a sweet tooth. Before I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have thought anything about that. I love chocolate, I love caramel. Sure. But now I look at it and I’m like, “Each time you tell yourself that, you’re kind of reinforcing that identity.” And it becomes a little bit easier to do that thing the next time.
And I am not an extreme sort of personality in the sense I don’t think that means, “Hey, you should never eat chocolate or you’re never going to forget somebody’s name again,” or whatever. All that stuff’s going to happen. This is just life.
But I do think that it’s worth asking yourself questions given the reality of the situation without ignoring the facts and without ignoring the reality of what needs to be done, what’s the most empowering version of a story that I could tell myself? What’s the most useful version of a story that I could tell myself? Because if you’re not ignoring reality, there’s no sense in telling yourself a less useful version. There’s no sense in telling yourself the least empowering version. But we often do that.
I heard about this interesting exercise one time where I said take two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, you’re going to write the story of your last year or pick whatever timeframe you want your last 10 years. And the only rule for this little game is that you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t true. So it has to be factually true. But the first page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years. And you’re only going to write it in the least favorable way possible. And then the second page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years, and you’re going to write it in the most favorable way possible.
It’s interesting because you’re going to sit there with these two pieces of paper, and there are no lies on either page. Yet which version of these stories are we telling ourselves each day? If you’re not going to ignore reality, if you’re still going to say, “Hey listen, I’m still going to wrestle with the truth and I’ll still make sure that I do what I need to do.” I just can’t see any sense in telling yourself the story that’s on the first page. It doesn’t make any sense to do anything other than what’s going to make you feel useful, empowered, joyful, happy, fun, excited. Let’s tell the version of that story and still do the things we need to do. And sometimes life is hard and you still got to deal with it. But we don’t always do that. And I think we would probably be in a better place if we tried to do that each day.

Debbie Millman:
So I think a really important way of thinking about this then is that habits matter, not because they can get you better results, which they can do, but also because they can change your beliefs about who you are.

James Clear:
Yeah. I don’t think this is unique necessarily to habits. I’m not saying other experiences in life don’t matter or that a one-off event or something doesn’t make a difference. Those things do matter. It’s just that over time, your habits are the experiences that get repeated. So the weight of the story starts to shift in favor that just because of the frequency of them. And everything else starts to be like, “That just happened one time, this was a blip on the radar,” or whatever. And so I think they are unique in their long-term ability to shape identity. Because day after day, week after week, you’re getting these little bits of proof that, “Hey, this is part of my story.”

Debbie Millman:
One of the most viral aspects of your book is about how important it is to focus on building a system rather than trying to achieve a specific goal or an outcome. And you state that you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I’m wondering if we can just deconstruct that a little bit for my listeners. What do you mean by a system?

James Clear:
So your goal is your desired outcome. What is your system? Your system is the collection of habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. In many ways, our results in life are kind of like a lagging measure. Or at least to a large degree, they’re a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. We also badly want better results in life. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.

And there are many things in life that influence outcomes. I’m not saying habits are the only thing that matters. You’ve got luck and randomness, you have misfortune. All sorts of things can befall you. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So I think for all of those reasons, I encourage people to focus on building a system rather than worrying too much about a goal.

And I totally get why this is hard. Some of it I think is just a byproduct of the way that both major media and social media works. You’re only going to hear about something once it’s a result. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Lady eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only a story once, “Lady loses 100 pounds.” Or you’re never going to see people talking about on the news, “James Clear writes 500 words today.” It’s only a story once it’s like, “Atomic Habits is the best seller.” The outcomes of success are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. And I think that leads us to overvaluing results and maybe undervaluing the process of the system.

So all I’m trying to get at with this is a little bit of an encouragement to say, “Hey, goals are great and success is awesome. But let’s maybe put that on the shelf for a minute and spend most of our days focused on what collection of habits am I following? What system am I running?” And kind of adjust the gears of that machine a little bit, and start running a better system. And that’ll carry me to a different destination naturally.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about the brain and habits. You write that the primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future. And this happens in everything. I remember years ago, I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. And I had been very used to habitually walking into my bedroom in a certain way and going to my night table to find something. And suddenly in the days after rearranging the furniture, I found myself blindly walking in the wrong direction because my night table was no longer there. And it struck me how dependent we get on these habits that are unconscious, and how much that impacts the way we live our days. So how is our brain impacted by our reliance on our habits?

James Clear:
Well, it depends on how broad you want to get with this answer or how deep you want to go. Ultimately, every organism needs energy to survive. And anything that you can do to conserve energy or to be more efficient or effective is going to help in the survival of that species. And so your brain is looking to automate things. It’s looking to figure out solutions to future problems that it won’t have to think as much about. And if it doesn’t have to think about that. It can shift its attention and energy to something else. And so habits save you time. They save you effort, they save you energy. And at that very basic biological level, they help you survive. Now of course the environment our ancestors grew up in, it was very different than what we have today. So now we have this kind of paleolithic hardware, we’ve got this biology that is primed to build habits. But we live in a modern society where there’s all sorts of different ways to apply that brain and that kind of thinking. And so now we’re building habits on social media, and we’re building habits in corporate workplaces, and we’re building habits and saving for retirement. And our ancestors didn’t care about any of that stuff. But the machinery works just as well in those situations as it did before.

So ultimately, I think habits are, from a biological level, they’re like an energy saving process. But then in a more practical, modern way of thinking about it, they’re a time saving process. And they help you become more effective and efficient in that way because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to do.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting about this notion of the brain trying to hack these systems for us, a lot of it is done subconsciously. And when that happened in my bedroom with the night table, I began to wonder how many unconscious habits do I just obey? Because this is the way I’ve taught myself to view the world. And that’s why the shift in identity was so intriguing to me in using these hacks to begin to start to rework certain neural pathways in my brain that I might not even be aware is sabotaging my efforts.

James Clear:
That’s a fascinating question. And I think a lot of the habits that are unconscious, you wouldn’t want to have to spend any time thinking about. If you get up in the middle of the night and you just need to walk over to the bathroom,

well you don’t want to have to be thinking carefully about how do I turn to get out of bed, and how do I put one foot in front of the other? And where is the coffee table, and how do I walk around it? Am I going to stub my toe on the side of the bed? All of those non-conscious patterns that we have, they just help you operate through the world. And if you had to actually think about every little thing you were going to do throughout the day, you would never be able to do anything. It’d be hard to move even across the room.

But, there also are all these unconscious thought patterns that we have, these little identities that we carry around with us, these stories that we keep repeating, that maybe we don’t even know we’re telling ourselves or realize. And this is another thing that I say in the book, which is the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness. Because it’s really hard to change that story if you don’t realize you’re telling yourself it every time. And there are different strategies you can use for that. There’s some things in the book that are actual tactics like the habits scorecard or something like that where you write all your habits out and analyze them a little bit. That stuff can help.

I think also just a process of reflection and review. Whatever cadence makes sense for you, whatever that exact process looks like can be unique to you. But making time to think about how you’re spending your time and reflecting on whether that represents the values or the identity that you want to build. It’s really hard to self-assess stuff without giving yourself time to think. If you’re so busy that you don’t have any time to sit, and relax, and maybe stew on it a little bit, it’s hard to be self-aware of all those little subtle stories that we’re telling ourselves.

In my case, I have a period of reflection review at the end of each week. I do a really short one each Friday. That one’s mostly business related. It’s mostly looking at what did I produce, how much traffic, how many email subscribers, revenue expenses. It’s just a spot check for the business for the most part. But then I also have one at the end of each year where I do an annual review, and that’s much broader. That’s like how many nights did I stay away from home this year while traveling? Was that the right amount? Should that be up or down? Do I need more family time or less? How many workouts did I do this year? How many on average each month? What were my best lifts throughout the year? How many articles did I write? How many words did I produce this year? Is that what I want to do next year?

So you can get the idea. It’s customized to you and what you’re interested in. But just having those moments of reflection review, I think help make you more self-aware. And boy, it’s really hard to change behavior if you’re not aware of it. So that process is really important for shaping the habits that you want.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I love that you share those annual reviews with your readers. They’re not just for you. You share the good, the bad, and the changeable every year. And they’re really fun to read. And it’s been fun to see the trajectory since 2018 especially, when the book was published. Looking back on this last 10 year period, what is the biggest thing that you’ve changed about yourself after learning all you have about habits?

James Clear:
I’ll give you two. So I’ll give you what I think is something big that I have changed for myself, which I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something big. And then I’ll also give you one that hasn’t changed, which I think is also interesting.

So the thing that hasn’t changed is working out has been one of the core habits that my life has been built around for the last 10 years. And I genuinely mean this. I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have that one habit. I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to work out a bodybuilder or anything like that. You can decide what it is for you. But I do think we need some habit that we feel like grounds us, that we feel like is time for us that you can get away from everything. When I’m in the gym, that is the only hour of the day where I’m not always thinking about the business in the background, or thinking about what I need to do, or responsibilities or whatever. That’s the only time that I have where it’s truly just me.

There have been so many days over the last 10 years where I felt like, “Man, I really blew that day. Or we just didn’t get anything effective done. I haven’t made any progress. The book is still a mess.” But, at least I got a good workout in. So that one has kind of been an anchor point for me.

And then I do think something that I’ve grown with is caring less about what other people think and focusing more on, I guess we could just call it trusting myself more or trusting my instincts more. Some of this is going to be natural. You’re not going to have much to trust yourself on early in your creative career, because you haven’t produced much yet. And now I’ve produced a lot more. So I kind of have a better taste for what works and what doesn’t, or what’s good and what isn’t.

But I do look back and think. It’s kind of interesting. For the first two years that I published articles on jamesclear.com, I never shared any of them on Facebook because I didn’t want anybody who knew me to see it. I didn’t want it to color their thoughts about me. I was like, “Well what if they saw my stupid little blog and thought, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing that. I thought he was going to be doing something more impressive.'” Or, “I’m surprised he’s spending time on that. I wonder if he has a day job. Is this actually the thing that he’s doing is just writing here?”

I definitely was worried about the collective they and what they thought. And looking back now, I’m like it’s kind of silly because if you were to ask me any individual person, “You worried about what Sarah thinks?” I’d be like, “Well no, she probably isn’t judging me like that?” Or, “Are you worried about what Tony is going to say.” No, probably not. He would probably be cool about it. But collectively, I had this image of they will not be impressed by it, or they will not think it’s good enough. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. I’m sure I still fall into that pitfall, but I look back on it now and I hope that I’ve grown a little bit since then.

I think the one thing that helped me get through it, and it didn’t become an enormous roadblock, was that I let that fear or that worry, that concern be the gas pedal and not the brake for my work. So because I was worried about what people were going to think, what I told myself was not, “I shouldn’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “

I should just quit.” What I told myself was, “Now you really got to make sure it’s good.” Now it’s like, “Get to it. Let’s start working.” And I think that made me put a better effort in. And so the result ended up being great.

But I can just as easily imagine a scenario where I tell myself, “I don’t know what people would think. I’m going to look pretty foolish here. I’m going to feel kind of stupid.” So I’m just not going to attempt it. I really try to live this way in my life. I don’t think I always do it, but I try to not be my own roadblock. I try to let the world tell me no before I actually tell myself no.

And there’s not 1,000 ways to do anything in life, but there’s almost always more than one way. And it’s actually very rare that you run into a true hard roadblock where you’re like, “Hey, the world just says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t be persistent anymore. There’s no other way to try this. You have to give up.'” It’s actually very rare to get a full stop like that. There’s almost always something else you can do, some other line of attack to try, if you just have the courage to do it. And I think that’s something that’s changed for me is maybe hopefully, I have a little bit more of that creative courage now than I did before. But I’m glad that it didn’t stop me early on because I could easily imagine a scenario where that would be true.

Debbie Millman:
I think a lot of people are glad that didn’t stop you. My last question James. I read that you might be starting a podcast. Is that true?

James Clear:
The rumors cannot be confirmed or denied. I think it’d be cool. We have lots of episodes that we’re working on, and trying to feel out, and figure out. I don’t have a launch date for it. And as I am sure you can appreciate, as I said earlier in this conversation, when it looks easy for people, it is probably much more work than you were thinking. So I am learning that right now. It is much, much harder to produce something that you’re proud of than maybe you would think on the surface just listening. So I have a lot to learn, but I’m definitely thinking about it and we’re slowly working on it.

Debbie Millman:
Excellent. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much James, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

James Clear:
Of course. I appreciate the opportunity, and love any chance to talk to you. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. James Clear’s book is titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. You can find out more about James Clear and sign up for his weekly newsletter at jamesclear.com or atomichabits.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
As longtime listeners know, I do a lot of research for this podcast. I go deep on internet searches. I read, listen, and transcribe other interviews. I try and unearth forgotten early work. I don’t call my guests’ friends or parents or former teachers. But by the time I interview someone, I feel like I know their friends and parents and former teachers. Research is something I love most about creating this podcast almost as much as the actual interview.

This week, my guest made it a little bit easier for me. That’s because much of Isaac Fitzgerald’s life is already revealed in his New York Times bestselling book, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional. Here, we are privy to an extremely unusual origin story. There is poverty and privilege. There is a boatload of booze, a lot of drugs, and some porn. This is all shared with Isaac’s sure handed prose and unflinching self-awareness. Dirtbag, Massachusetts came out last year in hardcover, and the brand new paperback was just published. Isaac Fitzgerald, welcome to Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald):
Debbie, thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here. I’m such a big fan of the podcast and of you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Now, Isaac, is it true that you consider Terminator 2 to be one of the greatest action movies ever?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I’m going to correct you, greatest movies ever. I’m sorry. I love Terminator 2. It’s right up there for me with Casablanca. I think it is a perfect, perfect movie. But yes, in terms of action movie, it is amazing.

Debbie Millman:
Why do you feel that way?

Isaac Fitzgerald):
Okay. First off, Arnold Schwarzenegger is incredible. This is one of the things that I deeply, deeply believe. And the more that we learn about him as a human being, I think the more that that is revealed. If you look at the documentary Pumping Iron from way back-

Debbie Millman:
Way back,

Isaac Fitzgerald:
It’s so easy, right? I get it. You watch Conan, you watch the first Terminator, it’s very easy to be like, okay. He was just this big strong muscly man, and they threw him on to film. But no, he actually worked very, very hard to get into Hollywood in the first place.

Second off, many people told him he would never make it because of his accent. And third, he was incredibly smart. He’s a calculated individual. It’s one of my favorite things about Pumping Iron. Was he nice in that movie? Absolutely not. But he’s getting in the heads of his competitors, and you can tell he’s just so driven.

So to see him get such a large shot, in Terminator 1, of course incredible film, he is the villain. But to see him getting a shot at basically being the anti-hero of this film, I just thought it worked so well.

The second thing that I love, and I think it’s something that drew me to it as a kid, Eddie Furlong. First off, great haircut. That’s what I talk about in the book.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you mimicked his haircut, which was my next question.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And let’s get to that in a second. But I just want to say real quick, I think why it imprinted on me at such a young age, why I loved it so much. Of course, the action’s amazing. Sarah Connor is such a strong female lead. It’s incredible. But the thing that I really think I love about it is it’s about protecting a kid. And I think when you grow up in a home or you have a childhood where you maybe don’t feel protected, the fantasy of that movie is what if there was a giant robot, Arnold Schwarzenegger, there to protect you at all times? And who, child, adult, whoever doesn’t want that sometimes?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay. I get it. I totally get it.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about your haircut.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. Sorry, that’s the spiritual, but let’s talk about the aesthetics.

Debbie Millman:
Your hair. You mimicked Eddie Furlong’s hair in the movie. Eddie was the young boy that Arnold Schwarzenegger was protecting. And you did this, I believe when you were in grade school. So what about his hair was so alluring to you?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I just thought he looked so cool, and I wanted to emulate that. I think when you’re young, you see something on the screen and you think, “Maybe I could be that cool too.” And for me, what is hair except for this incredible thing that we get to change, or keep the same however we want to present. But all the time.

And as a young person who felt a little sad, I felt a little disconnected from pop culture. All my friends had been talking about this movie. At that time, I had yet to see it, and all of a sudden I’d seen a poster. I was like, “Maybe if I get this haircut, people will think that I’ve seen this movie that is apparently so cool that all my friends can’t stop talking about it.”

And I think that’s something I’ve been a little obsessed with my whole life, which is how I present. And when you’re poor, you maybe can’t buy new clothes. When you’re poor, you definitely can’t get the new shoes. But hair, even if it’s just your friends in their bathroom, was something you could make an attempt at to try and convey, “This is who I am, this is how I want to be seen by the world. I might not have Nike’s, I might not have the Reebok pumps. I might not have the right shirt, but I can do the right haircut.”

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I’ve written at length about how as I was growing up, we were also quite financially challenged. My mother was a seamstress, and so I learned how to sew at a very young age, and both she and I made my own clothes. But oh man, did I want a pair of Levi’s? Oh man, did I want a pair of Levi’s? It was the ’70s, and my mother offered to stitch a little red tag on the back of one of the pockets of the Modell’s dungarees, and I was like, “Mom, that would be worse. That would just be worse.”

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And it is. It’s that heartbreaking moment when you know your parents are trying their best to provide, and what a beautiful thought. And of course, I’m sure as you look back in that moment, it’s a loving memory. But when you’re a kid-

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, I felt so deprived.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. And you feel crushed in that moment, and that is really tough. You’re like, “If only I had enough money to buy the right clothes, then I could truly express myself.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it doesn’t work.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And that’s right. That’s what you find out later.

Debbie Millman:
Yep. Too bad, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody could just say, “You know, it’s not going to give you what you think.”

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
Well, in classic Design Matters interview style, I ordinarily start with a person’s origin story and then work up to their most current work. But today, I want to start our interview by talking about your recent memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts. And I found an interview with you on The Rumpus from 2011 wherein you stated, “I love memoirs, but I don’t think I have it in me. I don’t think I have the courage.” What changed and where did that courage come from?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I know you hear this all the time, but Debbie, you are incredible. Your research is incredible. I love this and I love that you’re bringing this up. This is absolutely the truth.

In 2011, I’m sure I was saying this back in 2008, 2006. I would go to a party or I would meet somebody, and I would tell them about my childhood. And people would have whatever emotional reaction they have to it. Surprise, sympathy. Every once in a while though, somebody would say… Especially as I started to hang out with more and more artists, more and more writers, “Hey, have you thought about trying to tell this story?” And that’s what I always said. I love memoir, but I don’t think I have it in me to share my story, to write my story.

What changed? One was I learned how to write via craft. And it wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I started to recognize wait, maybe writing is something you can improve at. Maybe writing is something that you can practice. Maybe if you do it over and over and over again, maybe if you read the people that you love, you can kind of just learn through osmosis a little bit, just surround yourself with the type of writing that you love. Maybe you can figure out a way to tell your own story. That was first.

But second, I think much more importantly was I learned that my story was maybe a valid one to tell, because that’s what I think I’m really saying in that moment. When somebody would ask me, “Hey, would you ever tell that story?” “No, no, no, no, no, no.” What that really meant was I didn’t think my story was important enough. Why would anybody care about the story that I have to tell? There are so many different stories out there in the world. And something I loved from a very early age was interviewing other people, and highlighting, spotlighting, turning the spotlight on other people’s stories. It’s something I loved to do from a very early age.

It wasn’t until I was maybe in my thirties that I started to realize that’s because I desperately wanted to tell my story. That’s what I couldn’t admit to myself. That’s what I’m not saying in that 2011 interview. The right answer to that is I’m dying to tell it, but I don’t think it’s important enough. I don’t know how to.

And it wasn’t until I watched many, many people, Roxane Gay is a great example. Bad Feminist is a loadstar for me and many other friends, people that I have in my life that I’m lucky enough to call friends or say that I love. I watch as they create their stories, I watch as they put their stories into the world, and I slowly start to realize maybe there’s a chance I could figure out how to do it.

Debbie Millman:
In that same interview, you said that you write like you tell stories, with a lot of bullshit. But I didn’t get the sense while reading your book, there was an iota of bullshit in it. There was no bullshit. It’s no bullshit. It’s a confessional, a no bullshit confessional.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Well, I think again in 2011, and now we’re talking over a decade ago, which is wild. Again, you’ve read this, I haven’t thought of this interview probably in forever, if ever. It’s so interesting to see the way that my shields are up, and that’s the best way to describe it.

Debbie Millman:
I love that. Yeah.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I’m saying, “Little old me, I’m not worthy of telling my story. Little old me, even when I tell my stories, even when I do write, don’t worry. It’s just bullshit.” The phrase I love is Irish storytelling, which of course I come from a long history of people who if the fish was this big, maybe it was a little bigger when they tell the story again. And that’s a long tradition.

But I think that was also my own way of muddying the waters and not having the strength or bravery to put myself front and center yet. And what changed in the last decade is I realized, wait a second. There is a way to tell these stories. Maybe these stories could be of use to other people. And it’s actually in the scraping away of the bullshit that I’m going to find the stories that I want to tell. And this book, it’s a short read. It’s what I love about it. I wanted to write a book that 14 year old me could stuff in their back pocket and read.

Debbie Millman:
I know. That’s why I really love that we’re talking about the paperback.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah, the paper… Yeah, exactly. This book was always supposed to be a paperback. God bless you, Bloomsbury. God bless independent bookstores. I understand more money is made off hardcovers, but I have always wanted a paperback. And so I wrote it short, but how does it get to be that way? Well, no, I wrote a lot of bullshit on the page, and then it’s about scraping that away to get to the diamond center of the story.

Debbie Millman:
You start the book with a line you knew from a young age you wanted to use someday, assuming that you know it by heart. And I was wondering if you can share it with us.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Absolutely. “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” And that’s it. That line-

Debbie Millman):
It’s like right up there with, “Baby shoes, never used.”

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Listen, first lines have always been an obsession of mine. “Call me Ishmael.” First lines and last words. Those are the things that I’m somewhat obsessed with. And I knew from a very early age that in that sentence, I had something special. And even before I could allow myself to think about writing my own story, which you can tell, 2011, I wasn’t even close to being able to admit that I wanted to tell my own story. I knew just in personal interactions, it was this beautiful line, because it was part a joke, part the truth. But most important, part deflection. I could say it, the person would kind of laugh, and then I could move on and turn the attention back to them. So I knew I had this great line in it.

What happens with the book is that what happens when I don’t turn that attention to the other person and then just actually write the rest of the story after that sentence.

Debbie Millman:
You describe your parents as smart, itchy, unsteady, people both in their thirties when they met, confused and lonely and searching for some kind of salvation. But they wanted to find it the hard way. Why the hard way?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
The truth about my parents, and there’s many truths about my parents, but the truth about my parents is that they had it. They had a good life. Both of them. Maybe a little different income, maybe this that. There’s a little trouble there. But they had a family, they had love, they had security.

Debbie Millman:
They each had children with their previous spouse.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
They each had a child. It was, for lack of better word, it’s basically the American dream of that time period. They had it. So when I say the hard way, I’m almost saying it in a complimentary style. Because instead of settling for that, which clearly wasn’t satisfying them, instead of just saying, “Hey, this is the life I’m going to live. I’m going to just keep doing it.” They decided to take big risks and make, let’s be honest, messy, messy choices, and messy mistakes. But I think it was in hopes that life could be more fulfilling and life could be happier.

And that’s incredible in a way. It’s something that I actually deeply admire about them. It’s not to say it’s not complicated, but I think they chose the hard road. They could have lived a less happy life, but more stable. And they decided to roll the dice again, and it was hard and a difficult path. But I’m impressed by that.

Debbie Millman:
You were the accidental byproduct of the sin, so to speak, between two devoutly Catholic divinity students. And you state that this was your mother’s panic fling, one final push against the life that was expected of her before she settled down. Now, from everything I’ve read about your mother, this affair seems so out of character to her.

Isaac Fitzgerald :
And that’s what I think makes it so daring. No offense to my pops, love you dad.

Debbie Millman:
Wasn’t out of character for him.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Love you, dad. You’re great. But it was pretty in character for you. But for her, I think that’s what made it such an incredible reach, and something that I think she then struggled with for the rest of her life, which you see. I think she has always struggled with the decisions that she made around this time in her life, and figuring out how to come to peace with that, and who can’t relate to that?

Debbie Millman:
Was he ready for the consequences of their affair? And it’s a two part question. A, was he ready for the consequences of the affair? And B, I assume she was madly in love with him.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
So this is what I can say. The story as I know it is that my mother had actually called it off. She had said, “Hey, we can’t do this anymore.” I think my father had been in that situation before, and he said, “No problem, but what if we took one last trip to the White Mountains?”

Debbie Millman:
It’s always that one last trip.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That one last trip.

Debbie Millman:
It’s always the one last trip.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Always that one last trip. And that’s what they-

Debbie Millman:
Condoms.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And that’s what they would do. They would go to the White Mountains, they would tell their spouses that there was a divinity school trip that there wasn’t, and they would go.

And the way it’s been told to me is they were then out of touch. My mother then realizes she’s pregnant. She has a choice. She has a few choices.

Debbie Millman:
She has a few choices.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
She has a few choices. She can tell her husband it’s his. She can have an abortion. She can figure out one of the other million choices that come after that. I now know, I didn’t know this when I was writing the book, is that she and my father get back in touch. And he really was pushing for her not to get that abortion, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know. And it’s kind of beautiful, kind of fascinating. I do think she loved him very much, and I think he loved her.

What I don’t think I knew even when I wrote this book was that in a way, they were coming together to try and actually love me. These are the things that happen that you get told after you write a memoir. But I do think they realized they were in a tough spot, and the only way out was through.

Debbie Millman:
Once you were born, their wreaked havoc on their lives. They blew up their lives. You and your parents were unhoused. You lived in the Haley House, which was considered a homeless shelter in South Boston, but you loved it there.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
On paper, I’m growing up unhoused. On paper, I’m living in shelters. On paper, I’m experiencing something not many other children are experiencing. I loved it. I was surrounded by other human beings. I was so inquisitive.

I was so chipper, annoyingly chipper I’m sure. There are certain people in the shelter, I’m sure that were like, “Keep that kid away from me.” But I loved being surrounded by so many people in such a strong, caring community.

So on paper, they eventually get out of that situation and they go live in the woods. That should be, now it should be the fun childhood part, but that’s when things actually took a turn for the worst. My warmest memories as a child is living in inner city Boston in the ’80s when things were very rough, surrounded by people who had rough backgrounds, but who really loved me. And I so appreciate that.

Debbie Millman:
You and your mother moved to a town called, Athol, Massachusetts when you were eight years old. Your dad stayed in South Boston for work supposedly. You’ve written how everyone else in the state called it Rat Hole, Massachusetts or A-hole, Massachusetts. Athol also happened to have the highest teenage pregnancy rate per capita. How did you and your mother moving to the country impact your relationship with both of them? I mean, she really thought she was doing the right thing by you, I assume.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
No, that’s right. This is the thing that you see as an adult. You see how your parents were actually trying to make decisions to improve your life. But as you’re experiencing them when you’re young, you don’t understand that. And the shock of the change, and especially if you feel like you’ve gone from a happy place to a sad place, can feel overwhelming.

This is something I think about a lot. When you’re a kid, your world is your home. Also, maybe school secondary. That’s it. Those are the spaces that you occupy and those are the places that are most important to you. If an adult comes home and they’re angry, that anger fills your whole world.

Now when you’re an adult, maybe your boss was a jerk. Maybe you got cut off on the way home. Maybe X, Y, or Z, the bills aren’t being paid. There’s a million reasons why you’re feeling anxiety, why you’re feeling stressed out, why you’re feeling mad or angry. You don’t even realize that you’re feeling this small child’s whole world with that anger.

A few years can pass, and you’re having a rough patch. A few years pass, and you’re like, “Ooh, that was tough. But hey, things are getting better now.” Because when you’re older, a few years is not that long of the amount of time. When you’re eight and your mother or father both have hit a four-year rough patch, that’s half your life. That’s all that you know.

So I understand now that my mom was trying to do her best. I had been mugged, at gunpoint. Somebody had been shot on our front steps. Our neighborhood was rough. The living situation we were in was rough. She was doing her best to get me out of there with the low amount of means that she had, and this was the option. To move out there. Her parents were from that area. There was a farm, there’s a house. We can go there. I can see that now.

But when I was a kid, all I knew was that there was this place that I liked. I loved the people, I loved the community. Now it was me and my mom, and my mom was getting very sad. Of course, because she’s wrestling with this decision, which to her eight years ago is a pretty recent decision actually. But to me, I’m like, “Why is she so sad about something that happened so long ago?”

Debbie Millman:
Was she sad that your dad was now living back in South Boston while she was trying to raise you in a house next to your grandparents, in a place that she thought would be more bucolic?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. No, I mean, listen. I think her sadness was very complex and I think there’s mental health stuff there, which I struggle with as well. But if I was to take a shot in the dark, I think she dreamed of a bigger life. And is there misbehavior on my father’s part? Absolutely. Her parents, again, also coming from rough backgrounds, so their stuff… There’s no fault to be laid at anybody’s feet, but they were definitely tough on her.

She wanted to live a bigger life, and here she was back where she grew up, in that same area where she always thought she was going to get away from. And she’s raising a kid next to these parents who are rather judgmental. There are other complex reasons why she was sad. But I think at that moment in her life, the question for her was, “How did I end up back here?”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It seems as if at this point in your life, your parents really lost themselves. They lost their center. Your father began to have affairs. He drank too much. He was physically abusive to you. This is going to be rough to say out loud. Your mother confessed she had considered aborting you and shared that information with you in a car ride, told you that you might’ve been better off dead. I mean, you were eight years old when she told you this.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman::
I don’t even understand how that could possibly be something you’d ever recover from.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. I mean the most human answer I have is I don’t know if I have yet, but I think I’m working on it. I think that’s the work of living. But no, I want to sit there for a second. It’s okay. I will say in that moment, I don’t fully comprehend what I’m hearing.

Debbie Millman:
Did you even know what an abortion was?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I did. I think because of Catholicism, I understood what she was saying. And I understood that she was sad. And so I knew when she said maybe it would’ve been for the best. I know that she’s sharing in that moment that we’re all in a tough spot, and I think she’s questioning her decision. I got that.

But when you’re young, I don’t think you totally have an idea of what death is yet. I understood what, but I don’t think I fully grasped what she was saying. I mean, it wounded me. I want to be clear about that. It did wound me, but I don’t think I realized how hard I was being wounded in that moment.

What I really remember from that moment is how unhappy she was in recognizing that. Not fully understanding what was being said, but truly fully understanding that my mother was unhappy.

And then I think there’s a second realization, which is, “She shouldn’t be saying this to me.” I knew that. I didn’t fully comprehend what it was, but I knew that she shouldn’t be saying it to me, because there should have been another adult. There was somebody else, a friend, a parent who was maybe more sympathetic, a partner who was maybe there, who she should have been able to share that with. But that’s when I realized how alone she and I truly were.

So many years of my life have been spent being angry at that moment. I think now, I can recognize how sad that moment must have been for her, and how truly alone somebody has to feel to say that to an eight-year-old. It wasn’t coming from a vicious place. She didn’t mean to wound me. I think she wanted very much not to be. But I think she felt so isolated and so alone in that moment.

And I internalized that in a real way. It’s been something I still struggle with, absolutely self-esteem. But also, I don’t know if we want to chalk this up to be an Irish, optimistic, that same chipper kid that was running around the homeless shelter, but there was a part of me that it made my life feel special. It made me realize that there was a risk taken to bring me into this world, and that two people might’ve been making mistakes left, right, and center and constantly, but there had been another option for them too.

And it almost made me feel like there’s the saying, and I’m not trying to be glib or trite, but everything after that felt like icing. My life was mine to do what I wanted to do with it. That’s how I came to think about that moment.

Not in that moment when I was eight. But not long after, probably around 12, when I started taking more and more risks, I started to realize, “Hey, I might be in extra innings already.” There’s a weird freeness to that feeling.

And yeah, it’s tough. Obviously you shouldn’t say that to an eight-year-old. It was a defining moment in my life. But I’d be lying if I said it was all hardship on my end. It was very sad, very wounding, but in a way it was also freeing.

Debbie Millman:
It does get worse though, Isaac. I mean your mother becomes suicidal. She made a couple of serious attempts on her own life. You write how she talked about wanting to die so much, that you not only got used to it, you started thinking about it too, and rigged a wooden board by your bed, which could have killed you. Can you explain to our listeners what that was?

Isaac Fitzgerald :
Yeah. So basically when I hit my teen years, I start to have a lot of issues. There’s a lot of violence, there’s a lot of anger. A lot of bad things happened, but then we didn’t talk about them.

So my mom would attempt a suicide. I would witness it, we would handle it, but no one ever, then said, “Hey, that was a lot. We should probably talk about this.” It was a very New England, okay, onto the next thing. So I think I had so many emotions inside of me that I didn’t know what to do with. So I find drinking. I find drugs at a very early age.

But I’m also very aware of suicide, and you go back to what I was told when I was eight. I’ve been grappling now for four years, which again, when you’re 12, is a third of your life, with do I deserve to exist or not?

And so I made a contraption. We had so many knives in my house. We’re very outdoorsy. We love to camp. I still do. And so we had a lot of knives, and I got a bunch of them together, and I basically made this contraption that I would pull out from underneath my bed. And the knives were all sticking up, because sometimes I’d roll out of bed. And in my mind, suicide was a sin. But this wouldn’t be. This would be, I’m kind of giving God an option to give me an out.

And so I didn’t do it every night, but it was under my bed at all times, and I would bring it out, and I would set it up on the times when I was probably feeling sadness, and I did that probably throughout my entire middle school years. Which again, two years, if we really wanted to get into the math of it, probably not a ton of times. But when you’re a kid, it doesn’t change the fact that that’s where I was at mentally, and with no one to talk to about it.

Debbie Millman:
Did anyone care for you at that time?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s a complicated question, because truly, I want to say this. I had a roof over my head. Sometimes, I was cooking the meals, but I had meals. I do think they cared. Was I neglected with massive amounts of time alone? 100%. I’m not here to pretend that that’s not true. I was on my own constantly.

But part of that was because they had to work whatever jobs they could get, and that meant they weren’t around a lot more, because they had to pay those bills. So alone, yes. Cared for, in its own way, I do believe I was. But at that point is when I start to make decisions that start to put myself in danger on my own.

Debbie Millman:
It does seem as if one of the things that helped you and comforted you was reading, and you write how your parents’ faith in literature was as strong as their faith in Catholicism, maybe stronger. And even before you learned how to read, you learned how to respect books as a second religion. Your apartment was bare except for milk crates overflowing with novels, and plays, and history books, and collections of Shakespeare. Your dad read you The Hobbit when you were five. He gave you On the Road when you were 11. He also gave you books by Charles Bukowski and Ken Kesey, books you refer to as the classics for making sure your kid turns into an upstanding citizen. You’ve said that you came to know each other through books. It seems like you came to know yourself in a lot of ways through reading and writing.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. Books mattered to my parents. I wanted to matter to my parents. So of course, I started to care about books too. And it’s not hard to look at my entire life and realize how I put books at the burning hot center of my entire existence. But it was also a gift they gave to me. This is a perfect example, he said, “Was anyone caring about you at that time?” I was very alone, but even before my dad moved out of the city, he recorded himself reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, because he knew how much I’d loved The Hobbit when he read it to me. And he used to send me out the tapes. I mean, perfect person? Absolutely not, but that’s an effort. You can’t-

Debbie Millman:
We’ll give them a point then. We’ll give him a point.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s making an effort right there. Right? And so they believed in education, and they believed in literature. And I think they believed in making sense of oneself through seeing what else was out there in the world, and that is something that I picked up from them.

I love this quote from this play. It’s called The History Boys, and it’s a British play. And I’m not going to be able to do it verbatim, because I’m not that good of an actor, but the gist of the quote is a professor’s talking to students, and he says, “The best things about literature, about books, is you’re reading them. And you can come across a phrase or an expression of a feeling, or perhaps a deep hidden desire. And you see it there on the page. You think you are the only person that’s had that thought ever, or only had that experience in your entire life. You see it on the page. It’s like a hand comes out and grasps your own, and you feel less alone in the world.”

I know my parents believe in that power. I know they gave me that power. I’m sure we’ll get into it at some point, their reaction to the book, but I can just share right now. My father, when he reads it, writes me a letter. One of the things he said was, “Well, you can’t say we didn’t give you things to write about.” Which again, I mean, but it’s Irish. It’s very Irish, it’s very, and I do think they themselves had this ambition of living a life worthy of being put down on paper. And in their own way, I think they very much did. And I think in a weird way, they wanted that for me.

Debbie Millman:
Even with the early drinking, your teachers, your librarians all recognized how smart you were and encouraged you to apply to Cushing Academy, which was a private school. I assume you had excellent grades in order to do that. You got in. You’ve stated the school took a giant gamble not only in accepting you, but in giving you a full scholarship. Why was it such a gamble?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I mean, one, it was only 40 minutes from where I was from. Friends could come and pick me up in their trucks. There was a chance that I was going to be not a very good student. Again, my parents instill in me this understanding that if you just show up… Because you’re absolutely right. I can just be immodest for a second. I tested well. I always got good grades. No matter how much trouble I was getting in, I never skipped school. I would always show up, because I knew in some way, the better grades I got, the less people would be on my back. That was always my thinking is, “Don’t draw attention to yourself. You can have more freedom to be a fuckup in a way, if you’re not raising all of these flags.” But when I get to this boarding school, I remember being like, “Okay, I really have to get it together now.”

Debbie Millman:
But you didn’t really, and that’s when you started snorting Adderall, and Ritalin, and partaking in other legal and illegal substances.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And that’s what I’m saying is I remember being like, “This is going to be different.” And then I got there, and that’s when I realized a huge thing, which is, “Rich kids are fuckups too.” Because that’s what happened. In that first year, I went in with such a large chip on my shoulder. But I remember being like, “They’re giving me this scholarship. This feels like a big risk. I got to show up.” And as I go through that year, one, I realize rich kids just have better drugs, sometimes often more neglectful parents. And it’s a great awakening for me, because I had not really traveled outside of the state of Massachusetts at that point. All of a sudden, I’m meeting people from all around the world. Again, I’m back in the system that I was in the Catholic worker. All of a sudden, I’m surrounded by people with all these diverse backgrounds, all these different ways of living. I get to learn from them. I’m so excited. My mind is engaged in that way, because I’m no longer lonely in the woods. I’m now surrounded by people once again. But in my head I was like, “Oh yeah, but they’re jerks. They’re rich.” I had this real class chip on my shoulder.

And it was through my first year that I started to realize, wait a second, don’t get me wrong. Some of these kids are massive dickheads. But some of them are incredibly kind and incredibly caring. And that’s when I started going home and seeing friends from my hometown, and recognizing some of those people are still people I love to this day and I’m very much in touch with them.

But all of a sudden realizing, “Wait a second, some of them are also huge assholes,” and definitely wouldn’t like maybe some of my new friends from other parts of the world. And what does that mean? If for a long time, I think I really believed in… There was almost a saintliness to being poor. And I start to realize class is actually this more complicated thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I learned how to code switch. I’m one way when I’m home. I’m one way when I’m at Cushing. But I started to bridge this idea of understanding that knowing people from not my background could be really good and interesting people, widen my world in this new and incredible way. And what more do you want in an education than that? So they took a risk on me for sure, but I’m so glad they did.

Debbie Millman:
You loved bars from the first moment you drank in one. I think you were 14, but you’d been drinking since you were 12. You, as I mentioned, were experimenting with all sorts of drugs and substances. How did you not die? How did you not get addicted?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I want to be clear, I’m not going to say I didn’t get addicted.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. I used a lot. I do think, and this is the first time I’ve really thought about this and tried to connect these things, but there’s something about that same mentality that I just mentioned about showing up to school. Fuck off all you want. Screw up all you want, but get your work in. Show up to class. You’re not going to get in as much trouble. I had run ins with the police. I would take cars for joy rides.

Debbie Millman:
You are really lucky you didn’t end up in jail.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
No, I know. I know. And I have many friends who did. But the joy rides is a great example. I want to be very clear, not condoning this behavior, but I would bring the car back.

And this is what I’m talking about. I have always been a big drinker. That is going to be an ongoing struggle in my life. I’m lucky in that I do not do drugs the way that I used to. But when I did, I always had these weird bumpers. “Okay, so-and-so brought this to this. Oh, hey, we’re going to go get”… “You know what guys? Good luck. I think I’m going to call it a night.” Call it self-preservation, but I don’t think that’s right because I think I was interested in self-destructive behavior at that time. I just think I had that same mentality of like, “Okay, go to class. It won’t raise red flags.” Couple day bender, go for it, man. Have fun. It starts to become a weak? No, you got to get out of there. I think I’ve always been good at setting up little responsibilities for myself to make sure that I didn’t completely go off the deep end.

It’s tough, because drugs are really fun. And when you have low self-esteem and low sense of self-worth, a lot of those drugs in a way give you that same feeling of that hand grasping that book. You feel either less alone or cocooned from a world that causes you pain. But I think I knew at that point I at least wanted to live, and so I didn’t follow the path all the way down. I always returned the car.

Debbie Millman:
And you got good grades. You got good enough grades to get a full scholarship to George Washington University.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
You studied politics. What were you thinking that you would do at that point professionally?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Again, it’s a long history of librarians and teachers showing up for me and being like, “Hey man, maybe you can do something a little bit more. Maybe you can dream a little bit bigger.” And that happens to me throughout my life. But they were like, “What about college? What do you want to do?” And all I knew was that people liked when I talked, and people were like, “Well, that’s politicians. Maybe lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, politician. So go study political science.”

So somebody just told that to me and I just stuck with it. And I did. I went to school for four years. I maintained my scholarship. I did well. I worked many different jobs, because that’s what they don’t tell you about a scholarship is they’re like, “Congrats. We’ll pay for the school and we’ll pay for the food. No walking around money.” And when you’re in a boarding school, that’s one thing. But when you’re at a college, it’s another. And so I had to work the whole way through, and I graduate and I start working for a guy. This is not in the book, but it’s in another essay. I worked for a guy, his name’s Patrick Murphy.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. He was elected to Congress in 2006.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s right. Blue wave. Hell of an American, youngest Democrat on the hill, Iraq War vet. I love him very much. But after that I was like… Basically, I just got out and I started doing the work that I studied. I realized, “I’ve wasted a college degree. I don’t want to do this at all.”

Debbie Millman:
You hated it.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I hated it. That’s exactly right.

Debbie Millman:
Well, then you then followed a girl to San Francisco. Aside from the girl, what was your plan at that time?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I mean, this is where we get into a real free floating time.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. Is that what inspired you to begin working with the Free Burma Rangers?

Isaac Fitzgerald:):
Well, I think this is another fun moment to share a story that’s not in the book. I moved to San Francisco. As you said, I move out there for a girl. I think she was very surprised when I showed up. I think we talked a lot on the phone, and there’d been a lot of sweet nothings, and there’d been a lot of, “Yeah, come out to San Francisco.” And then I was like, “I’m here.” She’s like, “Whoa, okay. Holy smokes.” She’s living in a place with many different roommates, not many bedrooms. So she’s trying to get me out of the house and she says, “Look, there’s this place, I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s on Valencia Street. There’s a sign. It says storytelling and bookmaking workshop. Why don’t you go down there?” And so I go down there.

Debbie Millman:
That’s 826, right?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
826 Valencia. I didn’t know anything about it.

Debbie Millman:
I love that you went in there blind.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I went in there completely blind, and I walk in, and it’s very clear that they’re having an open house. And I’m like, “For people who are interested in learning how to make books.” I have read my entire life.

But up until that moment, I was not very aware of a contemporary writing scene, and I definitely didn’t realize that being an author was a way you could still make a living. I’ve grown up with books, mostly old books. Nothing about, “Oh, hey, this is a job option for you.”

And so I sit down. Quickly becomes apparent that this is a volunteer organization that is looking to get adult volunteers to work with kids. I’m 23 years old. I’ve written a kid’s book now. I love kids now, but at the time I was like, “I’m not interested.” But I knew it’d be rude. Again, this gets back to that same self… I was never that much of a jerk. I was like, “I can’t just walk out.”

Debbie Millman:
Right. I remember you writing about you didn’t want to be rude.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah, exactly. So I didn’t want to be rude. So I sat there and I looked around and I raised my hand when it came time for questions, because I asked, “Hey, what’s this?” And it’s all these different pieces of paper that are framed on the wall, and they’re covered in markings. They’re typed up, but they’re covered in markings. I said, “What are those?” And they said, “Each of those pages is a piece of a manuscript. A manuscript that eventually became a book. But we do that here because we’re a writing organization for kids. Writing is a very lonely ark, but we want them to realize either their teachers, or their parents, or volunteer here, or eventually if they become a writer or an editor can give them feedback. They don’t have to take all of it, but it can help improve their story.”

And it was the first time in my life that somebody had talked about writing as craft. Up until then, I thought you either had it or you didn’t. You lived in a white tower, and you just wrote perfect prose, and that’s how you’re a writer. That was the first time that I realized, “Wait, maybe I can take these stories.” I wasn’t ready to write my own memoir, but I was like, “Maybe I can write something that is of use to other people eventually.”

And that’s the gift that moving to San Francisco gave to me. That was the first place. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I do end up working with the Free Burma Rangers, Zeitgeist, The Armory. We can talk all about that. But 826 Valencia was where I found a community of writers. And in that moment I thought, “Maybe I could do that.”

Debbie Millman:
How long after you had that experience did it take for you to become the director of publicity at McSweeney’s, which is Dave Eggers’ publishing empire? 826 is the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students with their writing skills. Started by Dave Eggers and his wife.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Seven years.

Debbie Millman:
Seven years, wow.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I’m really excited. This is another… Just know that I got a job at 826 Valencia. Eventually, I volunteered for six months. I became an intern. I was working at Buca di Beppo to pay the bills. I got a job as an executive assistant to the executive director of 826 Valencia. Wonderful woman, Ninive Calegari. She’s incredible. I was probably the world’s worst executive assistant. I was 23 years old. I was very bad at scheduling. I was very bad at everything.

Debbie Millman:
It’s kind of what you need to be able to be good at when you’re an executive assistant.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
So God bless Ninive. She very gently let me go, but I remained connected to the organization. So I was in that world for a very long time, and it wasn’t until I was 30 that I ended up working for McSweeney’s. Did a better job the second time around.

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back to your working with the Free Burma Rangers, because I think that was a big transformative experience in how you thought about yourself. And for those that might not be aware, the Free Burma Rangers self-describe as a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement, working to bring help, hope, and love to people in Burma.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
They also illegally smuggle medical supplies over international borders, into conflict zones to assist with medical aid for people who are being attacked by the Burmese Junta. How dangerous was this for you?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
It was dangerous for me, but not nearly as dangerous it was for the people that we were trying to help. And not nearly as dangerous for me as it was for the volunteers who worked to make that organization run. I have a lot of respect for Dave Eubank, and his family, and the people that make that organization work.

Debbie Millman:
Your life was in danger several times in that experience. What provoked you to want to do this?

Isaac Fitzgerald :
I think it has to do with that exact same kid who is pulling those knives out from underneath his bed. I knew I wasn’t going to take my own life, but I do believe I was obsessed with putting my own life in danger. I think that came from a lack of self-respect for myself, a lack of self-love for myself, and the knowledge that I was empty in a certain way.

But maybe, and this is where we get into the almost optimistic side of myself, maybe I can turn that emptiness into something that could help others. And that’s what appealed to me about the Free Burma Rangers. I could go over there and put myself in danger, and maybe it could help somebody else.

Debbie Millman:
Before you left the US to do the work, you wrote that you had to figure out how not to want to die. Did the experience change how you felt about your life?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah, I think the experience helped me value my life.

Debbie Millman:
You write this in your memoir, you say, “I know that for the rest of my life, I will, from time to time, think that the world would be better off without me. But it’s happening less as I get older. I will always be trying to stop wondering what exactly I’m good for, to instead make peace with the fact that I deserve to be alive. And from that, more calm and steady place will be better able to wrestle with what I can do for myself and others without needing the crutch of certainty.” Has publishing your memoir helped you with that?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yes. The memoir has helped me have a better relationship with my parents, but it’s also helped me have a better relationship with myself. I think in diving into these stories, and finding value in them in a way helped me find value in myself. This isn’t something I expected. I want to be clear about that. It was in no way a goal. But as I move through the world now, I’m feeling myself having a lighter ease.

And again, to that same point, it doesn’t mean it’s all the time. But right now, this book, part of the art of it, part of the doing it, part of the writing it was sitting down and looking at things that I realized I couldn’t look directly at for years and years and years. And there was some real relief and some real self-realizations that came from actually sitting down and looking directly at these moments and these memories.

Debbie Millman:
After leaving Burma, you returned to San Francisco and got a job you had coveted for some time working at the legendary bar Zeitgeist, which you describe as a metal bar, meets dive bar, meets German beer garden aesthetic. Why was that job so important to you?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I loved Zeitgeist, from the second that I set foot in it. I could not have told you why at the time. But now looking back, it is so clear for me to draw a direct line from the Haley House in the south end of Boston, that shelter for the unhoused, to Zeitgeist, which was a wonderful loud bar where people from all walks of life could feel at home, could feel safe. And then above that bar, there were two floors of SEO housing.

So it was truly a community unto itself. And of course, in the moment, I didn’t realize that. But looking back and through therapy, it becomes so clear to me what I loved about that place was it reminded me of the last time I truly felt loved and safe, which was before I was the age of eight.

Debbie Millman:
You said this about working at Zeitgeist. “The bar could give me everything I wanted all in one spot. A place to drink, talk, laugh, grieve, think. A place that comforted me with the old and familiar, and exhilarated me with the fresh and strange. A place I worshiped and worshiped at.” And then you go on to write, “When you live a small life, it’s important to have small dreams. Working at Zeitgeist was mine.” Did you really think that your life was small? Do you still?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
No.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, good.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
No. Debbie’s like, “I’m going to give this man a hug.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, no. I relate to a lot of… I’m a lot older than you, but I had that same period of life from eight to 12, which I call the black years. And so I know what that does to a person. I really understand wanting more. I understand wanting to feel like you matter, hence Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald::
And wanting to feel loved, and wanting to feel something new, and wanting to get away from this place where you feel so worthless.

Debbie Millman:
But it felt like that was such a big dream, and I was so happy when you get your job there. I mean, you wanted it so badly. And even your first experience there, you’re practically thrown out by the bartender who you offended by accident, trying to impress him. So it felt like it was a big dream, and it felt like that fueled more big dreams somehow.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
No, and I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it. But I think at that point… So truly, I lived on the same block as the bar. So at that point, I think… And again, I’ve never talked about this, Debbie, but you’re doing such a good job of drawing these things out of me and having me think about them in real time. And I really think this is right.

Just taking a crack at it here, but I loved the shelter. I felt so isolated and alone in the woods. Then I go to boarding school, more community, college more community. Then I move across the country. I hadn’t traveled much. All of a sudden a big move.

I think I was seeking out that kind of small structure, again, the second I got there, because it all felt so big. Boarding school for me was great, because there were rules that I broke, of course. But there was a small room that I lived in. There was a routine. I think I was looking for a return to that smallness. And so I lived on the same block. There was a bar that made me feel at home. I wanted that job so much.

I mean, that’s why, some people when they’re in their twenties, they’re moving to Hollywood, they’re going to take a crack at acting. They’re moving to New York. Even San Francisco, I was drawn to 826 for different reasons. I was drawn to Zeitgeist because I was like, “This feels safe, and this feels like a place where I can just be for a little while.” And in its own way to come around to what you’re saying, I think that was a big dream for me.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And it was like an intimate dream. A dream of intimacy.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
There you go. Exactly, a dream of intimacy where I could just exist and try to actually figure out who I was.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve mentioned The Armory a few times. The Armory was a building where pornography was shot. Kink.com was born there. And let’s talk about your experience working at kink.com and working in the porn business.

You were an actor. You came to the experience with quite a lot of body issues. How did you manage through the anxiety to be able to perform sexually on camera for other people to see?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I have had body image issues my whole life. I still struggle with them. I think many of us do. It is what it is to be human. And this is one of these beautiful juxtapositions in my life that I’m actually… Again, in the moment I didn’t quite realize. But looking back, I’m so fond of. Because as a kid, I always felt like I was too big. I move out to San Francisco, I’m still feeling that way. There’s one photo in the entire book, though. You can see how rail thin skinny I am.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, ribs showing.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Yeah. But yet, I still had this fascination and obsession with the fact that I was too big, that I was not attractive. So how does one come from that mentality to not long after that being on camera in pornography?

And this is the most Mr. Rogers answer about a porn question you are ever going to get, but it comes back again to that community. Through the literary community that I was hanging out with in San Francisco, I began to meet sex workers. I began to meet porn workers. San Francisco’s only seven miles by seven miles. It’s a wild, wonderful city filled with artists, filled with dreamers. And I was working, one, at a bar that was truly one block away from The Armory, so a lot of these performers were coming to that bar. Also, other people, Quentin Tarantino. Many people used to come to this bar. And so that was amazing to be kind of brushing up against that.

And then also through the literary scene, a lot of these sex workers were writers, were visual artists, had their life of expression that was not just through pornography. And so these became my friends. And they were loving, encouraging people.

And so that’s what happened. I began spending time with these people. And eventually they were like, “Hey, no pressure. But if you’re interested, here’s what the job’s like. Here’s what the money would be. If you want to swing by, you could maybe,” I mean, as you know from reading the book, it was more of a, “Hey, somebody didn’t show up. We could use you in this scene.” But it didn’t change the fact that through those connections and through those friendships, I was made to be put at ease.

And the camera, instead of being voyeuristic towards me, started to make me feel, “Oh, hey, this is the job place where no one is judging me for taking off my shirt.” Obviously I’m fulfilling some type of duty here and I’m getting paid for it. So in a way, that whole situation made me feel more at ease with myself. It made me feel wanted. It made me feel like I was helping out in a way. And instead of actually being ashamed of myself, for the first time, I’m not going to say that I loved myself, but I was able to say, “Hey, I’m obviously adding value here.”

Debbie Millman:
Were you self-conscious about having sex as a performance?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
So the first time-

Debbie Millman:
You were very naive in that first time.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I write about it in the book very, and I was in a van. And yes, I was more self-conscious of everything that was happening. But I would say the next time… So I go and I get tested, because that’s what you have to do-

Debbie Millman:
For STDs.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Exactly. And I show up to perform. And as somebody that had consumed a lot of porn, you have certain ways. But the real thing is you show up and they’re like, there’s pizza, and everyone’s hanging out in a robe, and there’s a lot of laughing and joking, and then kind of an, “Okay, here we go.” But then there’s a nice… It’s not just like, go. They made a really nice, safe feeling space, and you would kind of ease into it.

And so I knew the director, I knew the person working the camera. I trusted these people. And so I don’t remember feeling self-conscious. Or if I did, I knew that I could ask to take a break. That was the power of that first moment in the van. I’m watching this giant hulking man over the woman, and it turns out the woman is the director. She can say stop at any moment. And then of course, I’m not going to give away too much of the book, but he reveals things about himself that are wild-

Debbie Millman:
Which was wonderful. So well written.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
That moment was such a wonderful moment for me. And so now, when I’m in that, I knew that if at any moment I felt uncomfortable, I could say something and everything would stop. And that gave me a sense of control that I wasn’t used to in my life.

And what felt amazing is that I knew everyone else in that scene felt that way too. Everyone had control to make it stop. And so that, I want to just be clear, almost rarely, rarely happened. Because I think we did all feel so safe with one another.

Debbie Millman:
Why did you stop?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I was just in my twenties. I wish I could tell you there was this big moment, or maybe I was dating somebody who all of a sudden was very uncomfortable with it, and they drew a line in the sand. But that’s not what happened. I kept doing it. We were all hanging out. Another opportunity came up. That opportunity took me away. All of a sudden, I was working more and more. It’s this website, this culture magazine called The Rumpus. And all of a sudden, I just didn’t have as much time to… You get a couple of asks and then eventually I’m like, “Oh wait, maybe I don’t do this anymore.”

And this is true of Free Burma Rangers too. Not to equate these two extremely… One’s a Christian organization, one’s a porn company. But with both of them, I think there was a part of me that always thought I would come back, but I never did. I kept moving forward.

Debbie Millman:
When you were working at The Rumpus, you helped sculpt and sharpen pieces by authors including Cheryl Strayed, and Saeed Jones, and my wife Roxane Gay. And you’ve been described as having an innate, almost indescribable ability to know what reads well on the page. How did you hone that?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Where did you get that quote?

Debbie Millman:
Well, I don’t have footnotes at the moment, but I can send you a link.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Okay, okay. That’s incredibly kind. So I do have what I call progressive views on grammar. I didn’t go to school for any of this stuff. I cannot tell you a comma splice. I am not perfect at that. I don’t know the terminology. But what I do know is if you read something out loud, you can tell if it hits your ear right or if it hits your ear wrong. And so that is what I brought to The Rumpus.

And I want to be very clear, when I say I helped, sharpen is a perfect word for it. I was not making… I was working with such talented people. They were such good writers. They were turning in such beautiful, heartfelt, well-written pieces. But I could always read it out loud, and I would always either write an email back or maybe get on the phone and it would always just be, “Hey, this one sentence, I don’t know if it’s doing exactly what you want it to do.”

And that’s what gave me that… I didn’t go to school for writing, but that’s when I learned I could do that to other people’s work. Maybe I could do it to my own. So that’s how I write now. I create a giant pile of words and sentences, and then I just read it out loud over, and over, and over again until all of it hits my ear right.

Debbie Millman:
You moved back to New York and began working at BuzzFeed. You became the site’s first editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-hosted BuzzFeed News‘ morning show AM To DM, with again, the great Saeed Jones. Did you really come back for the job or did you come back for your family?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I mean, a real fun answer is Saeed left San Francisco. He actually lived out there for a year. We’d started this new friendship, and we said this very heartfelt goodbye. And then six months later, I was living in New York. So there’s one way to look at it in which I came to New York for Saeed Jones, because I love him so much.

The job was of course what made me think I could afford it and gave me the opportunity. But 100%, the actual answer is I had been estranged from my family for almost 10 years, but my brother and his wife were having a kid. My sister was very soon to have a kid with her husband. I had turned 30, and I realized that I was already going to be the weird uncle. I’m always going to be the weird uncle. I didn’t want to be the weird uncle who lived 3,000 miles away.

And I also think at that point, having gotten through my twenties, I was able to understand the difficulties that my parents had suffered themselves in a new light. And so I was drawn back to the East Coast to say, “Let’s give this another shot.”

I loved California. I loved the West Coast. But I wanted to give my family a chance, and that was the real reason I came back east.

Debbie Millman:
During Covid, you started to leave your apartment in Brooklyn just to walk. You began to explore New York City, and realized that you’d taken the city for granted a little bit. Eventually, your walk stretched to two a day in the morning and the evening. You then set up an ambitious goal of walking 20,000 steps per day. It’s like 10 miles. What provoked you to do this?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
As we’ve been talking about, sometimes you look back on a time in your life and you can see it for what it is. That was a break in my mental health.

I was going through it, but I loved it. And that’s the truth. I immediately saw health benefits. I just want to quote this wonderful writer who I love Garnette. He talks about moving through the world at a human pace. And for him, he’s always very careful to say, “It doesn’t just have to be walking. There’s many different ways to move through the world at a human pace.” But for me, it very much was, I discovered it through walking. Leaving your phone in your pocket, not having earbuds, moving through the world at a human pace.

And I found so much comfort in exploring New York City, and just putting one foot in front of the other, in finding a life that wasn’t obsessed with everything going on in the world, especially during that time. But just focusing on where I am in the moment, and walking does that for me. I think we are all built to move through the world at a human pace. And I think when we get caught up in many different aspects of the world now, it’s so easy to get disconnected from that.

So I started walking 20,000 steps a day. I wrote about it for The Guardian, and that’s when I saw the biggest reaction to anything I’d ever written in my entire, entire life.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And you realize that so many people are interested in just figuring out this simple way of being, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.

Debbie Millman:
So this success of the article sort of went viral, inspired you to launch a weekly newsletter titled Walk It Off. What do you write about?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
So I love to interview people. I love to basically take a friend for a walk, an artist that I respect. But to be honest, I’m actually hoping to reach out to other different folks working in other different industries. And I find the conversation that comes from a walk is so freewheeling and so intimate to be walking with somebody, and then just quietly record the conversation. And then I’ll take it home and I’ll transcribe it. So some people are like, “It should be a podcast.” It’s like, no, I really love then kind of taking what was said and putting it almost on a pedestal, shining it. That same with sharpening it, the way you were talking about my editing. It’s my way of finding exactly the gems in this conversation, and then I present them to the reader, and I love doing it.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a great newsletter. I love getting it.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You recently got another book deal, this time from Knopf. The book is titled American Dionysus, and this is the description I gleaned from Publishers Marketplace. I tried to get more information out from Roxane, but she said, “Just ask Isaac yourself.” So this is the description. “The author walks in the literal footsteps of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, and speaks with the communities of people he meets along the way as he seeks to better understand American legends, both explicit and implicit, and dares to imagine more expansive possibilities for community, faith, and our shared sense of home.” So where you’ve been walking?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Well, so I’m going to share this with you. I haven’t shared anybody, but you know I care about first lines.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
And so the first line of this book is, “I’ve been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to.” And it opens with me hiding from, basically they’re called bulls, but security guards at a train station, because I’d been walking along these train tracks. What I do throughout the book is I try to walk where John Chapman himself walked, which he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and he makes his way through Western Pennsylvania all around Ohio, and eventually ends up in Fort Wayne, Indiana near where he dies. I love Johnny Appleseed so much for so many different reasons, and I could go on and on and on about them, but-

Debbie Millman:
Well, we’ll get you back on the show for that book too. But tell us a few.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I’ll try to be quick. What you need to know about him is one, he was a missionary of a very interesting form of Christianity at that time called Swedenborgianism, which was this almost philosopher madman from Scandinavia. And so he gets really into his belief, and his faith, and not harming creatures. That’s one of his number one things. So he will never ride a horse. He loves all animals. There’s a real St. Francis vibe to him. So I love that about him.

I also love that he’s an American legend. Most people, when I say Johnny Appleseed, they say, “Like Paul Bunion? He’s not a real guy.” But he was. He was a real guy who was born during the Revolutionary War. His father was a minute man, like a soldier. So there’s that Massachusetts background that I’m grounded to.

But the thing that I really love about him, his spirituality of course, but it’s more that he was a bit of a madman. He’s planting these trees. The legend of him, he’s just throwing seeds willy-nilly. No, it takes a lot to start an apple orchard.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my gosh, yes.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
So he would start them, but then he’d leave. When he planted those apple seeds, at one point, he has paperwork. He loses half of Ohio. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested in money, even though he’s acquiring all this land. He doesn’t own a home. He lives off of the kindness of strangers, even though he doesn’t really need to. He sleeps in the woods.

And then the last thing that really sealed the deal for me was when you’re raised in Massachusetts especially, you get educated about him. “It’s apple pies for the settlers, for apple tarts, or all these different, it’s food.” It wasn’t.

Michael Pollan talks about this in his wonderful book, Botany of Desire. It was for apple cider and apple jack. It was alcohol. So he’s kind of this wandering boozy American saint. But I knew I’m not Ron Chernow. I’m not going to be able to write the biography on this guy. In fact, a guy named Means did a great job in 2012. But what I can do is I can walk where he walked, and talk to the people that live there now, and try and combine this wrestling that I’m having with my faith and this idea of what makes an American legend.

And then the middle part, which I love, is my mom reads Dirtbag. My mom reads the book, and she’s very loving, and beautiful kind response. But one of the things she said was, “Where are all the canoe trips? We camped a lot. Where’s chapter three, the fun camping bits?”

And well, that’s going to be in this book now. It’s about how my parents were such outdoorsy people, and at the time, I really kind of shrunk away from it. But as I come into middle age myself, I find myself drawn to the exact same things they were.

Debbie Millman:
I cannot wait to read it. When will it be out?

Isaac Fitzgerald:
I’ve got to write it first. No, no, no, no. We have a deadline, and the hope is fall of 2025. I spent this entire year in Ohio, in Indiana. I rafted the Allegheny. I’ve walked through far too many miles of highway than I’d care to admit. But I spent this whole year out in the world doing it, and now I’m going to go put it all on paper.

Debbie Millman:
We can’t wait to read it. Isaac Fitzgerald, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Isaac Fitzgerald:
Debbie, thank you so much for having me. It was an honor.

Debbie Millman:
Isaac Fitzgerald’s book Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional is now out in paperback. To read more about Isaac, you can go to isaacfitzgerald.net and sign up for his popular wonderful newsletter Walk It Off. You can also catch him on the Today Show talking about books.

This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.