Roxane Gay:
You can’t tell the story of third wave feminism, punk music, and the Riot Grrrl Movement without telling the story of Kathleen Hanna. Hanna was the lead singer of Bikini Kill and later the bands La Tigre and the Julie Ruin. Over the past 30 years, Hanna has made music and art. She has made necessary joyful, fierce, angry noise. Her feminism, her politics and her activism have deeply informed her music, and her music continues to inform the culture. Now, for the first time, she tells her own story in a new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Kathleen Hanna, welcome to Design Matters.

Kathleen Hanna:
I am very, very happy to be here.

Roxane Gay:
As am I. This is a really exciting day for me. In the prologue of Rebel Girl, you share that you didn’t want your memoir to be a list of all your traumas, and so you left a lot of that on the cutting floor. And as someone who often writes about trauma, that was really interesting to me because a lot of times when we talk about trauma, people assume that trauma is the only thing that defines our lives. And especially for women, that reduces us to suffering and nothing more. So I would love for you to talk a bit more about why you made that decision to leave some of that on the cutting room floor. And then how do you tell your story without some of those stories?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s a great question. The book was 600 pages because I wrote it in TextEdit. Yes, I am a first time author, so I wrote my book in TextEdit. And when my friend Ada Calhoun, who’s a fantastic editor and writer herself, put it into the correct format, she said, “Your book is not 325 pages like you thought. It’s over 600.” So with that in mind, we just had to cut a lot anyway. And I had already started thinking about how much trauma there was and how an audience could deal with it, even though I was really writing it without thinking of an audience. I just wrote it and made it for myself as something I felt I needed to do. But I also didn’t want to retraumatize other people. And a part of the process was me realizing that I always look at the negative.

And in kind of recovering these stories about my life that were less than stellar, I also had to go back in and find the joy. And in doing that, it not only balanced out the book, but it balanced out me as a person and gave me a new attitude towards gratitude. And so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cut too much because I wasn’t just raped once. I was raped many times. And there’s actually some rapes that are not even in the book. My whole joke was like, “I left an ass raped out. Come on. What more do you want from me?” But one of the things that I’ve been dealing with last week because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and I’m sure you know this from being on press junkets yourself, weird themes will come up where people will just in one day ask you the same question that you haven’t been asked.

For whatever reason, the question that was asked of me kept bringing up the cumulative effect of the massive amounts of sexual harassment that I had to contend with at venues all over the world for years and years and years up into Le Tigre where in the book I make it look a little sunnier of like, “Now we’re finally going to get a sound person and not have to deal with all this crap.” But we didn’t get a sound person until four years into the band. So I was still dealing with a sound man who threatened to stab me. And then when I go and I look for help from the people who work there, they’re like, “Oh, he’s a harmless weirdo.”

Roxane Gay:
There are a lot of supposedly harmless weirdos-

Kathleen Hanna:
Harmless weirdos.

Roxane Gay:
… in the world

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. Until they shoot up a classroom and say feminist against the wall.

Roxane Gay:
Correct.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. But dealing with stuff like that cumulatively ended up being its own massive trauma that I’m still wading through today. The fact of walking into each venue and having a different form of sexual harassment happen or just hatred of women or the angry feminist thing precedes you to the venue and men who feel threatened by it are then just, they’re already ready. They live in this town, so they’re ready for you. They’re ready to flip all the seats up in the women’s bathroom because they think it’s funny, which is not a big deal. But when it cumulatively is constantly happening-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
… plus, they won’t do sound for you because they think you don’t know how to hold a mic and you have to walk through the drawings of dicks and women being assaulted on the wall next to people’s band names and sit there while you’re waiting to go on stage and have bouncers threaten you, it’s like then you got to go on stage and pretend everything’s okay. And I do feel like that’s in the book, but recently I’ve been sort of like, “I wish I had a page that was just a list of the worst of the worst to give that feeling of being dehumanized, constantly treated like you’re not supposed to be there” that adds up.

Roxane Gay:
How do you, especially when you were younger, how do you each day find the strength, the energy, the armor to go back into another venue knowing that you’re going to bring with you the accumulation of all of these macro and microaggressions and that you’re going to get more and then you also have to perform and make music and entertain? How did you do that day after day and year after year?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, I just called to say I have no boundaries, you know?

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Kathleen Hanna:
I feel like self-care wasn’t a conversation. I felt like I’d been kind of tamped down until I was 17 and I left home and then I started writing stuff and making lyrics and poetry, and I all of a sudden came alive. That spirit of wanting to find the connection between my lyrics and my singing and other women was so strong. And I had a lot of workarounds. I told myself, “If people didn’t hate you, you wouldn’t be on the right path.” I did have these ways of seeing it didn’t have anything to do with me and reminding myself, “This has nothing to do with me.” And then it was the being on stage. I mean, I really would, as Valerie Salinas said, “Swim through a river of shit” just to be on stage performing. And seeing 16-year-old girls cry in the front row while they sing your lyrics, kind of an experience you don’t want to miss if you ever have the opportunity to do it.

Roxane Gay:
Sure. For sure. One of the things that struck me, especially early on in Rebel Girl, was your articulation that you finally get to tell your own story. And as someone who has been in the public eye for decades now, what does that power feel like to be able to articulate your own story instead of having other people do it for you, whether it’s fans or journalists or anything like that? And then how do you navigate other people telling your story and also thinking that they know the whole of your story?

Kathleen Hanna:
I think I’ll tackle that first one first. I have many policies in my head as if I’m a corporation. And one of my policies is I don’t speak to nonsense. So if my story is told wrong by somebody else, I’m not going to get pulled off the path I’m on to deal with it because it’s a time waster for me and I just don’t care enough. I feel like I learned very early on through some scrapes with public scrutiny in the press that there’s no point, there’s no justice. You know what I mean? You’re not going to get the justice through this mediated system of the press. You’re not ever going to be able to tell your story unmediated or your side of the story. So I just sort of don’t really care about when people tell a narrative about me that’s incorrect because sometimes it might hurt my feelings or something, and so I write about it in my journal and then I walk away. Because I think it’s important to give yourself space to vent about it to friends or-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely,

Kathleen Hanna:
… whatever, and not be like, “I have to be so thick-skinned that I don’t feel anything and I just don’t ever take it personally.” Because I do sometimes take it personally. And on a bad day where I’m feeling really insecure, I might even seek out bad things people say about me, which is a whole other can of worms, but that doesn’t mean I need to publicly speak back to it.

And then the second part is I really didn’t write this book to set the record straight in any way, shape or form. I wrote it because I had to. I wrote it because I did feel silenced, and so that’s a part of it. And it’s a really fine line between setting the record straight and telling your story if you’re somebody who’s been in the public eye, which I’m sure you relate to.

So I told it for myself without an audience in mind just because I needed to turn my life into some kind of narrative so I could wrap it in a bow and leave it. And I could say, if you want an explanation of how I was involved in Riot Grrrl, turn to page 176. It feels good to just say this stuff because you go through all this stuff and you know it’s like a really advanced form of lyric writing. In writing a song, I really learned that if there was somebody who was bullying me in a really particularly horrible way and I didn’t want to give them that tension, I didn’t want to turn around to the person doing spitballs at my head and give them the attention that they were trying to get. And with a lot of men, they do stuff because they want to see the look of humiliation and fear on women’s faces, and they get off on it. And so I don’t want to give them that.

So part of the thing that I would do is just write a fucking mean song about them. And then I get royalties on that song, “Fuck you. Thanks for the inspiration.” There’s something really powerful to me in that. And so there’s something really powerful for me in writing out my story. And I’m terrified to say this because women and all marginalized people supposedly only spew and rant, like everything’s autobiographical. But I did just write it all down and vomit on the page and all of that stuff for 600 pages, and then I went back first with a butcher knife and then with a scalpel, and I was really strategic about the way I edited it. And that felt like I’m taking these things that were once very painful and I’m making them into something cohesive.

Once I put it all out, I was able to look at it and look at myself as a character and really kind of grapple with, “Whoa, that was not okay. What happened in that situation or what I did in that situation was not okay.” And so I was able to look back at things as I was editing especially and grapple with my successes and failures.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. Writing a memoir is very humbling and very eye-opening in the ways that it encourages you to do that reckoning not only with yourself but with others. One of the stories that really struck me was, in college, how you shared how your peers just couldn’t seem to offer you and other women meaningful artistic critique while you were creating meaningful art. And at the core of that is really not being taken seriously, which women continue to deal with. So how did you learn how to take yourself seriously as an artist?

Kathleen Hanna:
I was really lucky that these weirdo photographer girls went to my school and I looked up to them and we started a group outside of school where we were sharing articles from High Performance Magazine. I found a bunch of stack of heresies in an old bookstore that I read. And so I was really getting support from written material that I was finding and from friends in real time who were having the same experiences. And once I found one person to say, “Hey, the way I’m being treated like in my visual art classes, this is what’s happening,” and then another woman said, “Oh, that’s happening to me too,” then it became, there’s eight of us. And then we started meeting, and then I got the support that I needed. And I really started realizing how much more there was for me outside of college than there kind of was within it. Although I’m so happy I got to go.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, of course, of course. And it is always interesting to realize what you can learn in the classroom and then of course what you can learn beyond the classroom.

I’ve been watching a lot of your performances over the past week. And particularly in the earlier ones, I was struck by the unapologetic anger that you brought to the stage. Women are often told that anger is unbecoming and that there’s just no place in proper womanhood for it, and yet you make space for anger in your work, which is incredibly refreshing. How did you come to embrace and celebrate anger, especially on stage where anger is sometimes being given to you from the audience and you just seem to give it right back?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, in a way, you answered the question for me. It’s like walking into a club and getting treated like crap, and then having guys yell, “Shut up” and take it off during the whole performance. How can I not get angry? I wasn’t making strategic artistic choices at that point in my life. I did kind of consider myself a feminist performance artist first and a singer second. And I did understand that I wasn’t performing rage, I was actually feeling rage. And that publicly feeling that rage was cathartic to other people.

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t know. I always go back to this story about when Arthur Ashe first saw John McEnroe play and John McEnroe was such a brat yelling back at the refs and calling them names. And Arthur Ashe, who was one of I guess the first really famous Black tennis players, didn’t have that ability because he had to walk into every room and be the ambassador and be kind and be generous. And in his book, he talked about how he saw John McEnroe just being a brat. I thought at that point in the book, it was going to be like, “And I felt bitter and I felt like I’d been robbed and I had to always hold my tongue and look at this white kid with all this privilege who’s doing this shit.” But no, he was attracted to McEnroe and wanted to coach him because he wanted to be close to that.

I always thought that was a really amazing thing. And I feel like… I mean, definitely I’m nowhere near an Arthur Ashe, but I always felt like it was really telling that it’s like to see someone, whoever, having rage when you so needed to express it can be cathartic and can be something that’s almost like you’re repelled by it, but also attracted to it.

Roxane Gay:
When you started seeing girls to the front at concerts, it was really revolutionary. And as someone who we’re very close in age, I remember how horrible concerts were for girls getting just shoved out of the front and getting harmed in ways that were sometimes intentional and sometimes not, but harm was done nonetheless. Did you know how revolutionary it was to create that space for girls to come to the front?

Kathleen Hanna:
I didn’t really think of it as revolutionary. I remember thinking like, “Punk wasn’t meeting up to my expectations.” I was like, “I came here because I wanted something that was different than the mainstream, and I wanted a place that was progressively political.” I wanted a place that was challenging classism, not in lazy ways like you have to charge $5 at every show, because that can exclude musicians who don’t have money and can’t afford to play $5 shows for their entire careers. But what I found was kind of more of the same. I was just like, “Well, we have to change things.”

And also I always thought a lot of the stuff that we did was really, I wouldn’t say banal, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I didn’t feel like it was very revolutionary at all. I felt like it was just totally normal. I was like, “Okay, there’s only four girls here and they’re all in the back and we’re playing music directed at women and they can’t see.” We want them to start bands, so we have bands to play with on tour because there’s not enough girl bands, though there were a lot of great ones at that time and before. So I’m standing there and I just think, “Oh, I’ll invite them to the front.” I didn’t write about it, an essay about it or anything like that. It was just like, “Hey, come up here.” And then it started to become a thing and

it worked.
People were so angry, men were so angry about it. I mean, we had to write pamphlets that we handed out that said, “This show is an experiment. If you’re a straight white male…” And we didn’t say cis back then, we would hand out these fires that were like, “Here’s why we’re doing this. Please let this experiment happen.” Because the violence would just erupt, and we were trying to do anything to keep more violence from happening.

I mean the anger, it was very intense, but it changed over time to be the more girls came up front and then the more violent the men in the crowd became, the more they became actually our security team because we didn’t have management security. We often had a roadie, but no tour manager, no sound person. We needed them. It wasn’t just this altruistic, “Let’s change the scene thing.” It was also like we would ask them to walk us out to the band after the show and they would protect us from guys who were trying to get up on stage.

I didn’t like putting other girls in that position, but it just is how it turned out. And then it became a schtick. Then it became me cosplay. It felt like cosplay. It was like I’m looking out and I’m seeing audiences that used to be 1% female or female identified, non-binary. I saw all of a sudden so many more people who weren’t straight white dudes at the shows taking up the front, and I didn’t need to say it anymore because we’d gotten bigger and more people were coming and more women were coming. And so it started to be like, “Well, you have to say it because that’s your thing.” And I was like, “I just believe everything should be kind of site specific.” And to sound like a corny MFA candidate, but I was like, “I’ll say that if it makes sense. But if it doesn’t make any sense, it can be dangerous in a crowd of now 500 to 1,000 people to try and get people to change this pact. To try and get people to move around the room can actually create safety problems.”

And so it wasn’t safe to say. And there were already, as I mentioned, a lot of women in the front, so I wouldn’t say it. And then sometimes people would get angry at me and I’m like, “I’m not going to cosplay this angry woman, trope, who always says the same thing.” And then now at the reunion, it’s taken on a whole new meaning.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah.

Roxane Gay:
Especially then, but also now, when you are a public person, when you have a persona that people think is you, they expect things, whether it’s to say girls to the front or to be angry or to do any of the things that you are known by. How do you resist that pressure to be what people want you to be and instead just be yourself? Or, do you?

Kathleen Hanna:
Ooh, that “Do you?” is really.-

Roxane Gay:
It’s so hard to do.

Kathleen Hanna:
… like a mystery novel. I was like, “Or do I?” I’m really lucky I have a really great support system of friends and I have a dog, and my dog doesn’t care if I just played a show or wrote a book. And so I don’t really see myself as iconic. How sick are you of hearing the word iconic? I mean, is it just me?

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s funny because my next question was how does it feel to be called a feminist icon? Some people would see it as a blessing, but it’s kind of a burden to have that label put on you when like you said, your dog doesn’t care. You’re just Kathleen to your dog.

Kathleen Hanna:
And to me, I’m still the girl who went on tour thinking everybody was going to be like, “Oh, yay!” They’re actually bringing really obvious feminism to the table of punk. “Yay!” And that’s not how it went. But I’m still that person inside. I’m still that optimistic. “Everyone’s going to love this,” and then they don’t. And then I’m disappointed and then I just make more art. I mean, I dealt with a lot of disappointment through my life. I mean, I’ve written phrases that were like, Our fan team was called Girl Power, and then we saw as now it’s written on t-shirts at Target, and the Spice Girls use it and all that stuff. But I was able to look at things and be like, “You know what? I’m an artist. I can just keep making stuff.”

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t care if it gets ripped off. I do get distressed by just branding in general. In the ’90s, before branding was kind of a concept that people were talking so much about, it was about hypocrisy and that word. My bandmate Toby came up with this phrase hypochrobrats, where she’s like, “We are hypocrites because we change and we grow and we’re brats. And we can be both.” I love the idea that just because you say that you’re politically progressive, or if you do that in your art in any way, what I have found in my life is that then it will become, “But you’re wearing leather shoes. But you did this.” And then it’ll become this whole thing where people are looking for a reason to tear you down, and so they’ll try to find the things that make you hypocritical to what they think your political viewpoint should be as a way to discredit you.

I just had to step away from that and be like, “I don’t care.” Because the most powerful thing I can do is be a three-dimensional person who changes publicly. The most powerful thing I can do is not stay on an indie label forever because that’s the expectation. Try being on a major label and then publicly talk about how I kind of hated it, it wasn’t my thing, and I really prefer to be on small indie labels and to work independently. But I had to try it to see. And if we get caught in some kind of brand mentality of like, “You’re outside your brand because you’re supposed to do this or do that,” it doesn’t allow us to change and grow. I want to do new things that I couldn’t just stay stuck in one sort of three paragraph thing that ends with “Girls kick ass.”

Roxane Gay:
In a lot of your concerts and in a lot of your work, you openly talked about sexual harassment and rape and the kinds of violence that women and non-binary people or really that everyone deals with, but particularly women. I know that that always encourages people to then share their own stories with you because you kind of open the door and you create this space of recognition. How did you handle and how do you handle carrying your own stories and then having to receive all of these stories from other people?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, for a long time I didn’t deal with my own story at all. I mean, really hard to admit, but I’m 55 years old and I’m still processing a lot of this stuff, partially because I prioritize the care of others over the care of myself, which is a familiar story to a lot of people.

At first, when I was touring with my band Viva Knievel, which was pre-Bikini Kill, I was working at a rape relief domestic violence shelter as a volunteer. And I had learned how to answer crisis phones and how to give resources to people, how to repeat kind of things back that women were saying and help them find their way to psychological and physical safety hopefully in the best case scenario.

So when I went on tour and there would just be two women at a show and I would talk about these forms of violence in between songs, they started coming up to me and saying, “I’ve never told anybody this.” And at first it was the biggest honor. I felt like a woman seeing me on stage and hearing me talk about something and then feeling safe enough to share their story with me felt like I was really honored that they trusted me and I was honored to be given access to their lives.

I would do all that I could to pass on resources and really try to get them to call a local rape relief or domestic violence shelter because that ended up being a huge thing that people were like, “I couldn’t call a place like that because it’s for people with more serious things than me.” And these are women who’ve been gang raped who are telling me someone else has a more serious story. Everybody else has a more serious story. Your pain doesn’t not exist because someone else has it worse. And not dealing with your own trauma isn’t going to make that person’s situation any better. Dealing with your trauma is going to give you the space that you can help other people. But anyways, sorry, I’m going off. First it was a-

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s an important thing.

Kathleen Hanna:
It was a total honor. And after seven years of it, it was no longer feeling like such an honor. It was feeling like a burden. And that’s not to say that I didn’t love every conversation that I had with women who came to our shows. It’s to say that it started taking its toll on my mental health. So in Le Tigre, I started pulling back. We put up a website that had resources not only having to do with sexual assault and domestic violence, but also coming out, kids who were coming out to their parents. I got so much mail in Bikini Kill, kids coming out to their parents and kicked out and feeling absolutely devastated and alone.
And so in Le Tigre, we also put up resources for queer kids. And it felt really great. It felt really great to say, “You know what? I started to say I can do this so that I’m not pretending it’s not happening. This isn’t a big part of our fan base and we can support our fan base without them getting personal one-on-one, face to face contact with me because I was exhausted and I wanted to spend more time on my art.” And that allowed us to have visuals and costumes and dance. Because I wasn’t so wrapped up in the stories of other people and trying to get them help all the time, I was able to protect myself emotionally and be a better performer.

Roxane Gay:
It seems like you’re able to reinvent yourself creatively and to try new things when one project sort of comes to an end and you just seem to be able to throw yourself into something else. How has this ability to reinvent challenged you as a songwriter and now even as a book writer, and how do you find the energy to stay creative?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s so hard.

Roxane Gay:
It is hard.

Kathleen Hanna:
Like, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been really fortunate in that I don’t want to give advice because my life is kind of a mess. But I’ve always searched for great collaborators and I’ve always chosen intellect and personality and humor over craft or formal ability in my collaborators. That has been really successful for me because I’ve worked with people who were learning something new together.

I love the beginning of a project. It’s like the butterflies of when you’re first in love. The thing I loved about punk was that anybody can do it, idea. Of course, it was frustrating when I found out anyone meant white guys could get up there and not know how to play their instruments, but if girls did it, it was like, “You guys better go back and take some lessons because you suck.” But I’ve always sort of loved messing with authenticity after being called fake, a fake band for so long, like, “You’re not a real band. You’re just getting attention because you’re women or because you hate men” or whatever.

Roxane Gay:
Okay.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah, fine. And then in Le Tigre, I got to challenge the notions of authenticity by not having a live drummer and using backup tracks and having costumes and goofy dances and being like, “I’m not going to be cool. I have no investment in cool. I want connection over cool.” And working with people who want connection over cool has given me the ability to sustain my art practice because it stays fun when you work with people like that.

The book was a bit harder. The book was more like, you know those little crème brûlée blowtorch things, like it’s like I had that going on my face all the time. I just felt so… You’ve written a memoir.

Roxane Gay:
I have.

Kathleen Hanna:
It can be like you get this creepy look on your face and you can’t talk to anybody. I just felt like I had to stop writing for large periods of time and take care of myself or try to. But yeah, I think that I’ve had sustainability and been able to change the medium because I love music and I really care about feminism and I care about changing the world and making the world a better place. And so mixing the stuff I care about with whatever medium I’m working in gives me the energy to continue because it’s not just empty formalist experiments, although I enjoy those as well.

Roxane Gay:
There’s something to be said for them. One of the things I read in an interview you did recently with Rolling Stone was when you talked about the writing process and navigating the isolation and of course having to deal with the fallibility of memory. How did you give yourself permission to have a fallible memory and understand the difference between truth and accuracy?

Kathleen Hanna:
Well, I was really lucky because Bikini Kill was touring while I wrote the book and Le Tigre as well, both bands got back together and reunited. And so during the process of writing, some of my breaks were to go on tour. And so I was able to talk to my bandmates about, “Hey, do you remember this happening?” And there were certain situations where bandmates would go, “It didn’t happen like that. It happened like this.” And to have two different people have two different stories, and then my story, it gave me a lot of courage because I was like, Sometimes I would be like, “Oh, okay, well that happened in Spain, so I’m going to mention it was in Spain.” But a lot of it was subjective. A lot of it was like, “Well, you saw it from that side of the stage and I saw it from this part of the stage” You know what I mean? We all saw it through our own different specific lenses. And I realized that as long as I wasn’t getting something entirely wrong, that it really was my opinion and my memory of what happened.

I did check large facts. I did check dates. I did do a lot of research to make sure that I wasn’t completely off. But finding that my bandmates remembered stuff I didn’t about certain situations, there were certain situations that I left out of the book where I actually took revenge on people, very small acts of revenge, but I wrote a note to someone who wronged me and was just like, “Let them have it” in red crayon. And I forgot that I even did that. And hearing that from my bandmates made me feel really satisfied because I didn’t remember that little mini act of speaking back to power. And so that was really helpful, but it was also like they didn’t care that I remembered it different. They weren’t mad or upset or we should all have the same experience of this. They were like, “Oh, well, that’s your opinion.” And us having different opinions actually made my opinion more powerful to me.

Roxane Gay:
What does writing allow that performance doesn’t?

Kathleen Hanna:
Wow. I will say this. The thing they have in common is that they’re both incredibly therapeutic for me personally. And in writing this book and in touring again, I’ve finally been able to say that out loud because the stereotype… I’ve been told my whole career, “What you do isn’t really art. It’s just therapy.” And when we live in opposition to stereotypes, I feel like I’m still relying on stereotypes to define myself. And so I’m just coming out and saying like… I don’t know if you know what EMDR is. It’s like this modality of a therapy that can help you kind of process memories and

put them in a place where it’s in your memory bank instead of your “it’s happening right now” bank. I’ve walked off-stage with Bikini Kill and with Le Tigre and felt like I just did EMDR. I felt like I left a bunch of really toxic crap on the stage. And I also felt like I left in a wake of joy.

I mean, the real difference to me is performance is so physical and I definitely am one of those above the neck thinkers that I stay in my head a lot and I don’t have the mind-body connection that of course I’m supposed to be striving for. I feel like I attain that to a tiny degree when I’m on stage and I’m able to dance and throw my body around and control where the air and my vocals are coming from in my body, which is a really interesting process of being kind of this human computer that I really enjoy the technical part of singing. And so there’s so much more physicality to being on stage.

The thing I love so much about writing is that I’m not being seen, physically seen. I like that I can just have a spaghetti stain on my shirt and my sweatpants and I can write anywhere. I don’t have to have an office. I don’t need a crew to do it. I don’t need a venue. I don’t need to drive somewhere far away. I don’t need to sit around for 12 hours to wait to write. I can do it whenever I want. I love that about it. I don’t like the isolation. I like the not being seen part, physically seen, and I like working alone and not having to do everything by committee, but my favorite part is actually when I hand it over to an editor and I start getting notes and it becomes collaborative because I just feel like by nature, I really enjoy the collaborative part. I like working with other people. I get lonely.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. As a writer, primarily, I love the alone part. That is great. I do also though love the collaboration because then I get to get out of my own head and out of this vacuum I’ve been in and get some real perspective. And I’m very fortunate to have an amazing editor and have always had really great editors to sort of keep me honest and to help me help myself, which I really appreciate because toward the end of writing a book, it can get very lonely and you’re just like, “Ugh, man, I don’t know what I just did. I just don’t know.”

The title of the memoir, Rebel Girl, has varied connotations, not only for you, but for your audience, I’m sure. How do you think about the idea of a rebel girl now versus when the song “Rebel Girl” first came out? And do you still see yourself as a rebel girl?

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t.

Roxane Gay:
That’s interesting.

Kathleen Hanna:
I had weird things about calling it Rebel Girl because I’m not a girl anymore. I had weird things about calling it that, because I feel like the word “rebel” has a lot of negative connotations. It was originally a Joe Hill song actually about a female labor organizer, which I love that history of it. But it has become very feminist bumper sticker. “My other broom is a rebel girl,” or whatever. But it was a good title. And it’s a song my friend, James, who just put out an amazing book called Black Punk Now that I always want to plug because it’s one of those things that’s not only just an amazing book, but an instant classic, I was having lunch with him and he’s like, “You really need to call it Rebel Girl.”

My editor had been pushing for that. Everybody was saying, “That’s what you should call it.” And I was really resisting it, and then I was like, “But I did write that song and it is kind of the most popular song I wrote.” And “Deceptacon” isn’t… That’s another the second most popular song I ever wrote. And “Deceptacon” is not a great book title. It’s just a good title. And it’s a cute picture on the front. And why not? But I addressed it in the book, my ambivalence about that title and how I feel sometimes more like a dirty napkin than a rebel girl, but Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, I laughed out loud when I read that line.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, good.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, no, I did because I thought, “Dirty Napkin. Actually, I would love to read a book called Dirty Napkin.”

Kathleen Hanna:
Maybe that’s part two, Rebel Girl Part II: Dirty Napkin.

Roxane Gay:
My last question is something I love to ask creative people. What do you like most about your work and how you do it?

Kathleen Hanna:
I really love the process of making stuff. I just like making stuff. I love making some instrumental music, putting it on my computer, and then just singing 20 different tracks of nonsense lyrics. Giving myself a week, coming back, and starting to listen and hear what is this song about. And that process of discovery and of being in the unknown place and not being so attached to language that I need it for survival, that I can let language be playful, I love it when that happens, when I become less attached to the direct meaning of words and more attached to the phrasing, the rhythm of them, and in singing the tone. That’s always a beautiful part of making work to me, is the way… All of my work has to do with language even when it’s visual. My relationship with language is the best part of my work, is to watch that relationship change and grow and sometimes be in a really bad place, and then we get together and we have a great relationship again. Those times are when it’s a song I want to sing over and over and over again.

Roxane Gay:
That’s awesome. And I always love hearing when people love the actual process of making and exploring and seeing what language can do. Kathleen Hanna, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Design Matters. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, such a pleasure to talk with you.

Roxane Gay:
Kathleen Hanna’s memoir is Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you so much for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Roxane Gay. Debbie Millman will be back and is looking forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
Does this sound familiar? “You’re too fat and too thin. Your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong too. Try something else. Forever this.”

Now, listeners, you might think that that’s from the recent movie, Barbie, but it’s actually a quote from Emily Nagoski’s 2015 New York Times bestselling book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. The book enabled people to have a deeper understanding of why and how we have sex and how to feel less critical of and dissatisfied with our bodies. Now she’s back with a brand new book titled Come Together: The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. And we are going to talk all about that today. Emily Nagoski, welcome to Design Matters.

Emily Nagoski:
Hello. It is thrilling to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you, thank you. Emily, tell us about Nagogles.

Emily Nagoski:
Nagogles is a puppet of me. I’m a 40-something white-haired lady with shortish blue hair and glasses, and so is my puppet. And when I was doing promotion for my podcast, the Come as You Are podcast, the production folks were like, “Would you be on TikTok?” And I was like, “No.” And they were like, “But TikTok.” And I was like, “I don’t know.” And my husband, who’s a genius, said, “How about a puppet of Emily?” And they went, “Yes.” And they made me a puppet of me. And I answer sex questions as the puppet, which brings a level of whimsy and gentle humor that helps to prevent people from feeling freaked out because we’re talking about sex.

Debbie Millman:
And did you have any hand in designing your puppet?

Emily Nagoski:
No. They literally just made a puppet, but apparently it was made by the same people who made the sexual molestation puppet from Kimmy Schmidt. It’s professional. The puppet has roots.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s amazing.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, you come from a family of artists. Your father is a photographer, your mother is a professional singer and pianist, your sister is a choral conductor, and your brother is an ethnomusicologist. And you’ve said that you were a black sheep with your science nerdiness. Were you ever tempted to become an artist or a musician?

Emily Nagoski:
My plan in high school and early into college was to be some sort of literature something or other; maybe an English teacher, maybe an English professor. But honestly, I decided to major in psychology because it was the thing I already had the most credits in.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, good planning there.

Emily Nagoski:
I was just being pragmatic. I was like, “I could finish my degree in three years if I choose this major.”

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back a little bit more to your childhood. And we’re going to get real deep real fast. And I hope that’s okay. And I think from reading you, you’re going to be okay with that. You’ve said that you were born and raised in a profoundly dysfunctional and neglectful family of origin where you had to hide.

Emily Nagoski:
You just went right there.

Debbie Millman:
I know. I’m sorry. I did say it in advance, though, and I usually don’t.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Just a giant black hole of the first 18 years of my life. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m sorry.

Emily Nagoski:
No, it’s fine.

Debbie Millman:
You were raised in a dysfunctional and neglectful family of origin where you had to hide away from all the other people in order to stay safe. Why is that? What was happening?

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, the key ingredient there is the alcoholic narcissistic father who was violent toward my mother and siblings, less so to Amelia and me being the youngest and girls, but it creates an atmosphere. And often, the rules in an alcoholic family are like you do not talk about what’s happening in the family, not even to the people who are there having it happen to them with you.

Also, it would turn out, not until 2021 did I know this, but in 1977 through 1995, I was living in this home while also being autistic. My sister and I were both diagnosed on the spectrum in 2021 in our mid-40s, which changes our understanding of what was going on. My experience was that I could very comfortably and easily escape my toxic home life.

And let me shout out to my mother who made it happen. Wow, it’s five minutes and I’m already crying. That’s cool. But my mom is a survivor. Her therapist called her an optimistic depressive or a depressed optimist. She worked hard to make that family exist and to get us through. Terrible environment; mom working as hard as she could to make it decent. And also just no parent is going to be capable of providing an adequate environment for the particular children that we were.

But I had this resource of being able to dwell in books. I would, over the summer, go to the library and literally just get a stack of books, lie on the couch and read 12 hours a day. There was a worn spot in the fabric on the arm of the couch from where my heels rested because I just laid there all day reading. I also worked for the family business in my dad’s photography business, but I could read and escape and be good at school and occasionally go to dance classes. And that was me being successful, even though I had no friends. It didn’t matter because I was good at school and I loved reading.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting how many people I’ve met that attribute reading to essentially saving their childhood.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh god, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And maybe even their lives.

Emily Nagoski:
And I was reading profoundly inappropriate, age-inappropriate stuff. Like I read the collected works of Nabokov when I was 13.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. How did Lolita impact you?

Emily Nagoski:
I am totally sure I did not understand it.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting, I learned in your most recent book how close physical abuse and neglect live in one’s psyche. And that was a real revelation. How were you neglected?

Emily Nagoski:
In a home where the father is violent, drunk, narcissistic, angry all the time, and I have a half sibling who was seven years older than Amelia and I are who was, I’m going to call it a little light sexual molestation when we were young.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, dear.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
No such thing.

Emily Nagoski:
There’s that. Our brother is just barely two years older than we are and was a terrible mess because he was not good at school. He got diagnosed with ADHD in the late ’80s, early ’90s, which is very early for people to be getting diagnosed with ADD, because he was clearly a genius and failing at school. Our half sibling got a lot of attention because they were behaving violently, Ian got a lot of attention because he was failing at school, and Amelia and I were fine; we could take care of ourselves. We were silent and friendless and deeply depressed at the age of 10, but we were doing fine at school. And we would cook our own meals and be in charge, so certainly it would never occur to us to ask for emotional help.

And on one occasion when I was 12, my teacher called my mom to be like, “Things are really bad for Emily at school.” I was very… No friends, because obviously I was a profound weirdo. And my mom tried. It was one of those we’re driving in the car to dance classes, so it’s really captive audience, so mom tries the parent move of having a serious conversation when you can’t escape. It’s really slick of her. And I just could not be opened. We knew not to ask for help. Even though help was being offered, I wouldn’t have known how to accept help.

Debbie Millman:
You also stated that you really weren’t paid much attention to unless you were performing and producing. And I’m wondering if you think that that’s sort of what turned you into an overachiever.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Every quarter, we got a report card. And if we got over a 3.0… Props to my parents for having reasonable academic expectations. 3.2 was really where they wanted it to be. If it was a 3.2, we were doing fine. And if we got a 3.2 or higher, that was report card day, we got to choose what we had for dinner. That was the only time we had takeout pizza. We were also, let me add, food stamps poor, no health insurance poor. The one winter when they hung up plastic sheeting in all the doorways and all of us lived in the room with the fireplace because they couldn’t afford to heat the house poor. Free lunch poor. The only time we got takeout pizza was when we ordered it because we got to choose what to eat. We were literally rewarded with food when we had good grades.

Debbie Millman:
Growing up, your family didn’t talk at all about sex and you never got the sex talk. Instead, there were medical textbooks and encyclopedias in the house and you learned about sex by reading them. Was your understanding of sex at that time clinical? And were you curious about any other aspect of sex or sexuality at that time?

Emily Nagoski:
Yes, I was curious about sex always. You probably heard the story of driving home from the library, and I must have seen the word vagina in a book because I asked my mom on the drive, “What’s a vagina?” And I don’t know what she said, but I remember she had this flash of embarrassment and shock and didn’t know what to do or say. When I got home, I looked it up in the medical encyclopedia, and I was like, “Oh, that’s what it is.” And my mom’s reaction taught me how to feel about it. Again, it’s just a very ordinary, mid-level sex negative American upbringing. A lot of people, a shocking number of people get explicit messages that they should feel ashamed of those parts of their bodies. And I didn’t get that, I just got, “I don’t know,” which is incredibly benign, relatively speaking. But I was reading a lot of romance novels at the library. I would either read them in the library or I would steal them because I felt embarrassed checking them out at the time. One of the first things I did when I got to college… I went to University of Delaware. Go Blue Hens. One of the first things I did was ride my bike to the library, find the sex section, sit down, and read The Height Report.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. How did you even know about The Height Report?

Emily Nagoski:
I didn’t. I went to the sex section and looked for the biggest book.

Debbie Millman:
That’s wonderful. I love that. You majored in psychology at the University of Delaware with minors in cognitive science and philosophy. And at that point, you thought you might be a clinical neuropsychologist working with people with traumatic brain injuries or who had suffered strokes. What changed?

Emily Nagoski:
I loved the brain stuff. You can tell I still love the brain stuff; it shows up in my work all the time. But at the same time that I was earning that degree, I was also volunteering as a peer sex educator. My first year as a peer sex educator, then a sexual violence prevention educator, and then I added on top of that a sexual violence crisis responder. And that work made me like who I am as a human being in a way that the intellectual stuff just never could. I could see the impact I was having on people right there in the moment, and the intellectual stuff couldn’t win against that feeling of being like, “I am making a difference right now in doing this work,” so that’s the path I chose.

My trainer as a sex educator, Annie Lomax, had a degree in counseling psychology. And I thought, I want to do what she does; I’m going to go get a degree in counseling psychology. Turns out that is not the degree that was for me necessarily. Halfway through it, I realized I do not have the magical something or other it takes to sit in a room with people and just be like, “Yeah, interesting. Tell me more about that. How did that make you feel?” I don’t have it. One of the things Amelia and I noticed later on is that I got a degree in counseling, she got a degree in choral conducting. A master’s degree in choral conducting, so we both got master’s degrees in how to feel feelings and listen.

Debbie Millman:
I found this quote of yours, and I think it describes your education perfectly because you also went on and got a PhD. You’ve deconstructed your entire education in the following way: Quote, “I have an undergrad degree in cognitive psychology because of course my first interest was in human cognition, not emotion or psychophysiology, a master’s in counseling because it took three years in a graduate program to teach me to listen and feel feelings, and a PhD in health behavior because it took three years in a grad program to teach me to understand how people make choices about their bodies.” Emily, my question is this: How did this all lead you to become a sex educator?

Emily Nagoski:
That was the origin. I was an undergraduate peer sex educator, and then I went to Indiana University. The reason I went to Indiana University, my boyfriend broke up with me as I was applying to grad schools. And I had only applied to two schools, and I only got into one of those schools, and it was Indiana University. I did not know at the time that that’s where the

Kinsey Institute was. But when I found out, it was like, “Oh, that’s great. I can go continue my training as a sex educator there.” And I lucked the fuck into a job at the Kinsey Institute running Ask Kinsey Now, which is the Q&A service that I ran in particular for the undergraduates at Indiana University. One of my first jobs when I got to Indiana was people would email the Kinsey Institute questions, I would go up to the Kinsey Institute library, which is a globally recognized resource and institution, look up the answers, and email them back.

Debbie Millman:
And did you love it?

Emily Nagoski:
I loved it. I loved everything about it. Every question was an opportunity for me to learn something and apply the skills that I had started developing in 1995 in terms of how to do the education piece of it. And I also somehow managed to get a clinical internship at the Kinsey Institute under Cindy Graham and John Bancroft. The rest of my life, I will be attempting to deserve the opportunities I got at Kinsey.

Debbie Millman:
The title of your thesis was An Agent-Based Model of Disease Diffusion in the Context of Heterogeneous Sexual Motivation. What does that mean exactly?

Emily Nagoski:
I always wanted to write a dissertation with an incomprehensible title, and I’m here to show you that dreams do come true. An agent-based model is a computer model where you set up a game essentially with thousands of agents, these creatures. And you give them personalities and you give them rules to follow. In this case, it was I gave them sexual personalities using the dual control model, which posits that every brain has a sexual accelerator and a sexual brake. People vary in the sensitivity of that accelerator and that brake, and so I would create a population that had some distribution of really sensitive accelerators or really sensitive brakes or really not sensitive either, and I would run it thousands of times dropping a disease into the system to see how the disease diffused through the population. An agent-based model of disease diffusion in the context of heterogeneous sexual motivation. Does that make sense?

Debbie Millman:
It does, it does. I learned in your most recent book that illness can impact intimacy in a very positive manner.

Emily Nagoski:
It can. I’m not going to say what a blessing it is to have an illness because it can whatever.

Debbie Millman:
No, of course not.

Emily Nagoski:
But also having a disability or an illness can necessitate the creation of a context that requires you to think differently about sexuality because the standard narrative doesn’t work for you explicitly. I’m here to say just the giveaway is it never worked for you and it doesn’t work for anyone. But once you have the disability or the illness, you know explicitly, oh, this set of rules is never going to work for me. I need to create a set of rules that are going to work given the body that I have.

Debbie Millman:
What is it about sex that has intrigued you so much over the course of your life and career?

Emily Nagoski:
I do not know. It is an innate… Like I said, I was reading romance novels when I was 10. I was reading The Height Report when I was 18. Nobody told me to go to the library and start reading sex science, I just spontaneously started doing it. It’s fascinating. In my doctoral program I was trying to figure out what on earth I was going to do with my life so I read a branding book, your personal brand. And I had to think through what am I here for? Why do I exist? What is this? And I realized that the thing that revs my engine is teaching specifically how to teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. It was reading a branding book that I figured out and the purpose in life. And I know not everybody has a clear sense of why they are here, but I do, which I consider a privilege and a gift.

Debbie Millman:
Do you happen to remember the name of that book?

Emily Nagoski:
I don’t. It was not a good book, actually. But even not good books can be really helpful.

Debbie Millman:
This might be too personal a question. And if it is, please just ignore it. Have you always liked sex?

Emily Nagoski:
I am absolutely a weirdo in terms of my sexual response because I conform with the culturally constructed aspirational ideal.

Debbie Millman:
What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?

Emily Nagoski:
I have experienced spontaneous desire, like I have craved sex out of the blue, I have become aroused easily. I have had orgasms from vaginal penetration. A lot of the things that I spend debunking in Come as You Are are things that I realized were myths when I read the science. And I was like, “Oh. My experience, which matched the cultural narrative, is not actually the typical norm. I’m the weirdo.” Yeah, it has always been comparatively easy for me until I got married and wrote a book about sex.

Debbie Millman:
Well, we are definitely going to get to that. I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about Come as You Are. You wrote this in Come as You Are: The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body, it could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts, but instead the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body. You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to. I am pissed on your behalf at the world for that lie, and I’m working to create a world that doesn’t lie to women about their bodies anymore.” Here’s my question, Emily: How and why were these lies perpetuated in the first place?

Emily Nagoski:
Once upon a time in what we now call the western world, let’s narrow it historically down to the British Isles, men owned the property and women and their children were part of the property that they owned. The men would go out and fight wars to protect the property and to gain more property, and women stayed home to raise the children who would inherit the property. Because a woman’s body was the property of her father and then her husband, she could not own property herself if she was married; it became the property of her husband. And because her value was in her ability to reproduce children who would care for the property and inherit the property so that he knew he was not sending his property to be inherited by somebody else’s child, her virginity mattered a lot. And the world saw a small fold of skin over the mouth of the vagina and decided that it was a marker of purity so that there could be some proof, some evidence that this person had never had their vagina penetrated before and therefore was not spoiled goods, essentially.

Over the next centuries, for one thing we have learned that people who have given birth can still have intact hymens, so it is absolutely not a marker of whether or not anything has ever been in a vagina. Two, the people who were property started to get a voice and started to be able to own their own property, and eventually in the 1970s get credit cards in their own names. And eventually in 1992, finally in every state in the United States, it was illegal to sexually assault your wife. It’s the patriarchy is what I’m saying. It’s capitalist, misogynist, cis hetero patriarchy is the source and origin of a lot of the lies.

There’s also like a big chunk of purity culture Christianity on top of it. The first plagues of Europe in the common era were all sexually transmitted. It was gonorrhea and syphilis. And it was really easy for the religious leaders who were required to be celibate to come to the conclusion that God was punishing people who had sex. And so there’s the other piece of it that’s like, oh, God punishes the people who have sex. In particular, God punishes the women who have sex because their bodies don’t even belong to them in the first place. The myths originate in the idea that a woman’s body is the property of the men who own her and God punishes us for having sex.

It wasn’t until about 1800 that the idea of women being less sexual than men emerged. Before that, the idea was that women were insatiable and had to be controlled in their sexuality. And then women began talking about their own sexual experiences and were like, “No, we don’t want the sex you are making us have.” It’s a pretty dark story.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a very dark story. And I think it’s important that we really understand where the threads of our current time are coming from, were first created.

Emily Nagoski:
And I haven’t even added on the slavery in America part and what race plays as the way we interpret women’s bodies in particular. It’s dark and bad.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote Come as You Are that society, people are raising women to be sexually dysfunctional.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
How so?

Emily Nagoski:
Sex is dangerous, dirty, and disgusting, and you should save it for someone you love. You should be absolutely pure, not even have sexual thoughts, totally chaste until the night of your wedding when you should be a sex pot, able to give 84 different kinds of blow jobs and have 74 different kinds of orgasms.

Given the nature of our sexual functioning is that there’s a sexual accelerator that notices all the sex related information and sends a turn on signal. And there’s also a sexual break that notices all the good reasons not to be turned on, all the potential threats. We are being taught that sex is sex related and sex is also a potential threat. That means your process of becoming aroused, which is this dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs, when you become sexually aroused, you are also activating all the ways you’ve been taught sex is dangerous and unsafe and dirty and disgusting and shameful. And if you try to drive a car with your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time, you might get where you want to go, but it will use a lot more gas and it will burn your engine. That’s the dysfunction is we are being taught that everything that is sex related is also a potential threat.

Debbie Millman:
The book really catapulted your research and your work into the zeitgeist in a really profound way. Your book became a New York Times bestseller, you’ve given several TED talks that are extremely popular. But something else happened to you during the time you were writing and promoting and touring Come as You Are; you and your husband stopped having sex.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah, for months at a time.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Emily Nagoski:
First, while I was writing it, when I finished the book, it got a little better. Then I went on book tour and it got a lot worse. What would happen is I would try to follow my own advice in Come as You Are, which is to make the most of responsive desire. You set up a time. You put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner’s skin, and your body goes, “Oh right, I like this. I really like this person. What a good idea this was.”

And instead, I would put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner’s skin, and I would cry and fall asleep. Even when I tried, I just couldn’t get there. Wherever there was, it was not a place I could go. And I was like, “Well, I need better information than I gave in my own book.” I did what any good sex nerd would do; I went to Google Scholar and I looked at the research on couples who successfully sustain a sexual connection over the long term. And what I found there was so contradictory of the mainstream cultural discourse about sex in long-term relationships that I wrote a book about it. And also, I found out what I needed to know in order to fix my own situation, which ultimately was the emotional floor plan. Which I don’t know if you want me to go all the way into the emotional floor plan right now.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, we’re going to go there. Yeah, give me a couple more questions and then we’ll go there for sure. I was wondering if your sudden turn off switch was ignited in the same way that people working in an ice cream store stop liking ice cream.

Emily Nagoski:
No. I wanted to want sex. It wasn’t like, “Ugh, please, no sex for me.” It was like, “I would really like.” I started writing in Come as You Are in 2012; we only got married in 2012. We were newlyweds when things got harder. One of the things that did happen is because I was beating myself up about it inevitably… Because I’m a quote, unquote, “expert.” I should be able to fix my own problems very easily. And it was not typical of my experience of sexuality that it would be like, what’s the matter? Does beating yourself up for something, does that activate the accelerator, do we think? Or does beating yourself up for something hit the brakes and make it even harder to want or like the sex that’s available to you in your relationship? Made it so much harder. That happened.

It ended up being the stress. I was so exhausted and anxious and working extremely hard in a very focused way. Sex is my special interest, my autistic special interest. And I can disappear into writing for 10 hours at a time. Rich would bring me food, and I would finish the day with the taste of food in my mouth and an empty plate next to me and not remember having received it. I can focus hard. And switching out of that focus to something else when I was so drained… I had just poured all of my energy into this day of writing; I had nothing left. And I did not know how to balance my energy output between my work and having energy left to be a person with this other person.

Debbie Millman:
How did Rich handle all of this?

Emily Nagoski:
Ideally, he’s a spectacular, wonderful, delight. The occasion when I cried and fell asleep, the first time I told that story, people were like, “He must have been so angry.” And I was like, “No. He was really sad for me.” He put a blanket over me and brought me tea for when I woke up. He was incredibly patient and kind and understanding. It was actually one of the struggles we had to overcome, that each of us was so competent at managing our own lives. We’d both been single for years and could live our lives autonomously. And especially when I was on the road, he was at home dealing with everything at home and I was on the road dealing with my work. And when I got home, it was so easy and comfortable and we’re both so competent that we could just stay in our own lanes. We made excellent roommates, and it required a deliberate shift to decide to rely on each other.

Debbie Millman:
And as you were investigating what was happening, did the two of you seek help? Did you go to a therapist together? Or were you navigating it independently or on your own?

Emily Nagoski:
The only professional intervention we did was we went to a Hold Me Tight workshop, which is Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy. It was a very hilarious experience. But it was two miles from our house; we could go home during the lunch breaks. We both did not enjoy the experience, but in the same way that that book that I did not enjoy helped me, this weekend workshop that we did not enjoy was revelatory and profound and a turning point.

They gave us this very simple deck of cards with conversation prompts or things you want to say to your partner, and there was this one moment when we were just sorting through the cards, what’s a thing I want to say? And he handed me a card that said, “I want to be on the same team.” Sorry.

Debbie Millman:
It’s okay.

Emily Nagoski:
You start with the childhood neglect and then you come to the moment when this dude I married turns out to be my ideal partner, this is what you get. I would say I’m really lucky, but I have had so many years of therapy, I earned him. When he handed me this card that was like, “I want us to be on the same team,” I felt like I knew what to do with that. I understood what that meant. That meant we are going to rely on each other. I’m going to ask for his help, and then I’m going to do the really hard part and accept it.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to write a book about the experience?

Emily Nagoski:
I was talking to my agent about the things I was learning and how it is so… The things I’m learning make the mainstream conversation about sex and long-term relationships irrelevant. I can’t believe there’s not a book about this. And Lindsay was like, “Emily, Emily.” That’s when I decided to write a book about it.

Debbie Millman:
Did you worry at all that revealing your own issues-

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… or sharing your own issues would undercut your expertise as a sex educator?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Absolutely, 100%. And it’s only because Lindsay Edgecombe, my literary agent who has been from the very beginning… I lucked out and got the perfect agent right out of the gate. When I told her, and I was like, “I worry that saying this in public, people would be like, ‘How can she be an expert when she struggled herself?'” Was like, “No. It is such a relief to know that even somebody who knows so much can still struggle in this way.

And let’s face it; I struggled in the face of not that many barriers. We are child-free by choice. We do not have that barrier in our lives. We are two adults in our 30s at the time. There was, quote, unquote, “no reason” why we should be struggling in that way. If it was difficult even for us, even for me… In particular, therapists and sex educators and people who are in training to be therapists and sex educators have pulled me aside and thanked me, and it was such a relief that I was willing to say out loud that, “Just because I do this doesn’t mean I’m a sex monster.”

Debbie Millman:
One thing I was surprised at learning from you in doing my research for our interview was that sex is not a drive. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. The language of biologists drives are motivational systems where your body notices there’s a problem. Hunger is a drive; there’s low energy. Thirst is a drive; there’s the balance of water and sodium and other things is off. Sleep is a drive. And so a little alert goes off, meep, beep. Something goes wrong. It pushes you out into the world to go fix the problem. And the consequence if you do not manage to fix the problem is you literally die. You die of hunger, you die of thirst, you die. You can die of sleep deprivation, you can die of loneliness. Connection is a drive, love is a drive. Sex is not one of those. Nothing bad happens to people’s bodies if they don’t have access to sex. There is no tissue damage. As Frank Beech said in the fifties, “There’s no tissue damage associated with lack of sex.” Instead, sex is an incentive motivation system. And I do not live in a fantasy world. I know that we’re not going to transition to all saying incentive motivation system instead of drive.

Debbie Millman:
Sex drive. Yeah.

Emily Nagoski:
But let’s understand that nothing bad happens to a person if they don’t get sex. Instead, sex as an incentive motivation system means instead of being pushed by an uncomfortable internal feeling to fix a problem, you are pulled by a pleasurable feeling to move towards some, “Ooh, what’s that?” Some object that is attractive to you. Ooh, ooh, what’s that?”

Curiosity is another incentive motivation system. It is just as organic and innate to our bodies, it is just as natural, it’s just nothing bad happens to you if you don’t get it. And we all intuitively understand that there are times in your life when you are less curious or less interested in trying new things. Like when you’re real stressed out, you just want to watch 30 Rock again for the 98th time because it’s your comfort watch or whatever it is for you. Rich was talking about 30 Rock yesterday, and so that is my example today. That’s all. It’s natural, it’s just not a drive.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked a bit about the dual control mechanism that exists in our brains that governs sexual response. And you talked about the two parts, the sexual excitation system or the accelerator. And the other part is the brake. And you write how some people have really sensitive accelerators and some people have really sensitive brakes. And then vice versa, some people have really not sensitive accelerators and have not sensitive brakes. And the way a person’s sexuality functions will differ depending on the sensitivity of their brakes and their accelerators. And what blew my mind was that these are personality traits. It seems to be more or less innate and inborn. Does that mean they’re genetic?

Emily Nagoski:
There does seem to be some genetic component, but there’s only a tiny, little bit of research. It’s not heritable the way something even as fungible as intelligence is heritable. There is some genetic component to it.

Debbie Millman:
Are they changeable, these traits? We don’t know?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
We don’t know. It’s so interesting. I think that should be your next book. How do you-

Emily Nagoski:
But there’s not really… Why change it?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I guess it’s true. Yeah, of course.

Emily Nagoski:
Because people can just vary, and everyone is normal. It’s a standard, normal distribution. Normal in the technical statistical sense of most of us are heaped up in the middle of sensitivity. And it’s only for a small proportion of people at the extreme ends on either side. And the two components, the brakes and accelerator, do not co-vary. You can have a really sensitive accelerator and an average brake, a really sensitive accelerator and a really sensitive brake, a really sensitive accelerator and a really not sensitive brake; they don’t vary together.

For most people, the challenge, if they face difficulties around their sexual functioning, it’s not because of a really sensitive brake or a really sensitive accelerator or really not sensitive of either, it’s because usually their context is just slamming on the brakes. And it’s by changing the context and freeing up the brake that you create change. And I wouldn’t even want to create a drug that gave people less sensitive brakes. Your brake is there for really good reasons. Evolutionarily speaking, if you’re being chased by a lion, that’s not a great time to be turned on. It makes sense that stress would hit your brake. I don’t want to brake the mechanism that is functioning correctly, I want to change the world that is screwing with your brain functioning correctly. It is the culture in particular that is making your brain function in a way that is not ideal for the way we want it to be.

Debbie Millman:
When people struggle with sexual desire, the question to not ask is, “Why don’t I want sex?” It’s really more about, “How do I create pleasure?” Is that right?

Emily Nagoski:
This is a question people ask a lot because the number one reason why couples seek sex therapy of any gender combination is because of a difference in desire. When it’s a heterosexual couple, it’s just as likely to be the man as the woman who has the lower desire, unlike what we often assume. And people are really worried about desire.

But let’s take two examples. Let’s take couple one where partner A says to the therapist, “I was really into sex before, but frankly, I’d be fine if we never had sex again.” And because it’s my story, so I’m going to give them Peggy Kleinplatz as their therapist. She’s a therapist and researcher in Ottawa, the head of the Optimal Sexual Experiences project. And Peggy being Peggy will say, “Well, tell me more about the sex you don’t want.” They will go on to describe sex that is intimate and loving and adventurous and connected. No, of course not. They describe sex that is dismal and disappointing. And Peggy being Peggy will say, “Well, I rather like sex, but if that’s the sex that we’re having, I wouldn’t want it either.” And then comes the gut punch question of, “What kind of sex is worth wanting?” And that’s the starting point. How can this couple figure out what shared pleasure looks like between them? What kind of sex is worth the time and energy that it takes to create? Instead of spending that time frankly watching Parks and Recreation, which is also fun.

Debbie Millman:
You write that humans are taught to be ashamed of pleasure. Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
It’s American work ethnic puritanism. There’s a cultural narrative that I think makes things way worse, but there is actually a neurological piece that is really interesting and I think plays a role. The cultural part of feeling ashamed of pleasure is that is a very old western white Christian tradition, right along with the gender binary and patriarchy.

Debbie Millman:
Yep. That word again.

Emily Nagoski:
That pleasure is a sin, pleasure is a sign that you are wasting your time and doing it wrong. I don’t know why leaders decided that pleasure was the wrong thing. It probably has to do with productivity and capitalism.

Debbie Millman:
What is the desire imperative?

Emily Nagoski:
These are very big questions.

Debbie Millman:
Sorry. I’m so curious about everything.

Emily Nagoski:
Why? Why do we not? The neurological piece, though, about why pleasure is so difficult for us, in 2010 there was a paper published by Charles Carver with the idea that pleasure is a signal maybe in our brains that we can stop paying attention to something. This problem has been solved; we can move on because our brains are problem-solving machines. They’re great at it and they are motivated to do it.

Desire is like, let me scratch this itch. Let me move toward this thing. It’s a kind of dissatisfaction with what’s happening right now and a need to change things. I need to change things. Pleasure is just like everything is delightful right now. This feels good. And, oh, I don’t need to pay attention to this anymore because everything is fine. I need to go focus on a problem so I can make sure things keep changing and getting better. I think people struggle to pay attention to pleasure because it really does take a concerted effort to train your brain to stay with pleasure.

That neurological component on top of the cultural shame around daring to waste your time reveling in delicious pleasure, I think those two things combined make it a hard sell, the idea of centering pleasure. The desire imperative is my name for this idea that it’s supposed to be. Here’s the story: At the beginning of a relationship, it’s hot and heavy, sparks a flying, spicy everything. And as time passes, that gradually goes away until all apparently of your hormones drift off and you’re left to hold hands on a beach at sunset or whatever, white curtains and a breeze, that kind of thing. And once you lose the spark, you have lost really the only thing worth having. And your choices are either to accept that sex is no longer for you or to fight to spice things up to keep the spark alive. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term do not talk about spark.

Debbie Millman:
What do they talk about?

Emily Nagoski:
They talk about pleasure. They like the sex that is available in their relationships and they collaborate actively to create pleasure, to make it easier to experience pleasure together, to explore new pleasures together. They talk about intimacy and authenticity and vulnerability, empathy. Empathy is the meta factor in great sex. Being able to be aware of your own internal experience and your partner’s internal experience at the same time, that is the source of great sex. It is not handcuffs or porn. If you like those, great. I’m not shooting them down, I’m just saying those are primarily tools to facilitate the authenticity and the vulnerability and the exploration and the empathy.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire.

Emily Nagoski:
Sure. Yeah, most of us grow up learning about spontaneous desire where you’re just walking down the street, you have a stray sexy thought, you see a stray sexy person, and just out of the blue you would like… “Ooh, ooh, sex, I would like to have some sex.” You go home to your certain special someone. You’re like, “I would like the sex. Would you like the sex?” And on some magical time? Both of you have the desire for sex simultaneously. You’re interested in the same kind of sex at the same time in the same way at the same level because life is easy like that, I guess.

Debbie Millman:
If only.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s absolutely 100% a normal way to experience desire. And if you experience sexual desire that way, you do not need to worry. You’re not broken. It is normal. And there’s another way of experiencing desire that researchers call responsive desire where instead of spontaneous, out of the blue… Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated Come as You Are, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom. You just want it.

Instead of it being spontaneous kaboom, it is like you have a date night, and so you get the childcare and you put the last of the laundry in the dryer and you tromp up the stairs and you put on the special socks and you trim your ear and nose hair, you put on the body glitter, you turn on the music, you get in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner’s skin, and your body goes, “All right, yeah. Oh, that’s a good idea.” That’s responsive desire. Or it could be you’re just sitting on the couch snuggling and your certain special someone starts touching you in a place and in a way. And your brain receives that stimulation is like, “Oh, that’s really nice,” and so you turn towards your partner and you do something back. And your brain receives that stimulation. Your brain goes, “That is really nice.” And your partner does something in return, and your brain receives that and goes, “You know what, though?” Kaboom. That’s responsive desire. It emerges in response to pleasure where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. And they are both a normal way to experience desire.

Debbie Millman:
Why is the idea of setting up a date night in order to have sex considered inferior to spontaneous sex?

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, gosh. Well, it isn’t by me. Let’s just be super clear about that.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a cultural judgmentalness to it.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. People are like, “Well, if we have to set up a time, if we have to plan, it’s not natural. My partner really doesn’t want me enough if they don’t just want me out of the blue.” I’ll be really honest with you. I’m busy. Aren’t you busy? If something is not in my calendar, it doesn’t happen. And I find that if my partner is willing to cordon off a chunk of calendar time where it’s protected and nothing is going to stop us from spending that time not doing any of the 80 million other things we could be doing… There’s so much other stuff we could be doing with that time. But no, it’s protected. It has got red velvet ropes around it. And that is just for us to get naked and roll around like puppies. That is the ultimate romantic I want you that a person can do for me, from my point of view.

If when you see it on the calendar, you’re like, “Okay. I know for sure it’s going to happen and I know that it’s there and I can fantasize about it and I know that when I know that when I show up, we are going to do something that I am going to enjoy, and I’m going to be like, ‘That was a good idea. We should totally do that again sometime.'” But if you schedule it and it looms in your week, if you are not sure that what’s going to happen in that time is something that you will enjoy, if you experience dread around it in particular, dread is the literal worst, scheduling is not for you. If you don’t like the sex you would be having, scheduling is not going to fix it. What you need to do is figure out how to enjoy pleasure. I would just like to point out how beautiful Thunder is.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually loving the fact that when you talked about rolling around as puppies, your doggy showed up. Your book features, I believe his name is Jaak Panksepp, Panksepp.

Emily Nagoski:
Yep.

Debbie Millman:
His model of the seven primary process emotions. You write that there are at least three dominant models. Why did you pick this specific one?

Emily Nagoski:
It’s the only one that includes sex.

Debbie Millman:
Can you outline what the primary process emotions are?

Emily Nagoski:
Sure. I group them broadly into the pleasure favorable emotions and the pleasure adverse emotions. The pleasure adverse emotions are really simple. You know the fight or flight response? One of the primary process emotions is rage: fight. One of them is fear: flight. And then the third one is less recognizable, but for those who are aware of other trauma responses like fawn, flop, and freeze, there’s a space for that. It’s called panic grief. And it’s loneliness, isolation, despair. Obviously those are not spaces where your brain’s going to have access to pleasure. And neurologically, we know that when brains are stressed out, they’re likely to interpret almost any sensation as a potential threat, something to be avoided. Sensation just feels really irritating or painful.

And then there are the four pleasure favorable spaces. Lust is one of them. There’s also care, which for a lot of people, the experience of feeling really cared for, feeling like their needs are being met, they’re attended to, that cuddling on the couch in front of the fire, holding hands and kissing a little, that for a lot of people has a really direct connection to the lust space, which is where attraction, romance, courtship, and sex happen. Care is complicated, though. Care is huge in mammalian brains generally, but in human brains in particular.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
Because of a thing called the cephalopelvic disproportion. There are two characteristics of humans that makes humans really amazing. One is these great, big, giant brains, these cortexes that just cannot be stopped. But in order to have these brains, we have to have these really huge heads. And we walk upright. In order to walk upright, we need these little, narrow hips. The combination of a great big giant skull and a little, narrow hip makes childbirth really difficult for us. The cephalopelvic disproportion. Consequently, human beings are born when they are underbaked. We are pulled from the oven too soon. You know a baby elephant can walk within hours? How long does it take a baby human to start walking?

Debbie Millman:
Year and a half.

Emily Nagoski:
Actual literal years. Yeah. We are born way too early. Our skulls aren’t even closed. We can’t run away from a predator, we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t even thermoregulate independently. If you leave a baby on the ground, it will just freeze if it’s not eaten by a lion first, which it probably will be. They require constant attention by other people. Our babies are born much too young. They keep you up all night. You have to carry them everywhere that you go. They smell weird, they’re noisy. If they were not so fucking cute, we would leave them by the side of the road.

Evolution in its wisdom created a mechanism that we call the attachment mechanism where when somebody hands you a kid and says, “Here, this one’s yours. Keep it alive,” a thing happens. Christopher Hitchens of all people describes it as your heart beating in someone else’s body. Even if you don’t enjoy the experience, nothing will stop you from caring for the baby. That’s the attachment mechanism. And because our babies are so needy for so long, it is intensely powerful in humans. And it happens to be a system that got co-opted from parent offspring, love, to peer-to-peer love. That same mechanism is at work in the way we attach to our peers. We get into adult relationships, and for a lot of people, attachment is deeply involved in the way we connect with our certain special someones. It’s huge because our brains are so big is why. I don’t know if that was the answer you were looking for.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. No, it was better than what I was expecting.

Emily Nagoski:
The nature of humanity is to have profound, deep, un-irresistible love for each other. And if you are in that caretaking space where you are making sure everybody’s fed and making sure all the dishes got done and all the laundry got done, that is not a care space that is going to be really similar to the lust space. It’s a long journey to travel. We are only on the second pleasure favorable space, so I will move on. Care is complicated because it’s so big.

There’s two other pleasurable favorable spaces. One is the play space. Play is the universal mammalian motivational system of friendship. Play is any behavior we engage in for its own sake because everybody involved likes it and there is nothing at stake. There are so many things I would change about the sexual world if I could, but maybe the thing that would make the most immediate difference is if everybody tried on the idea that they could have sex with their partner and there is nothing at stake. Your relationship is not at stake, your identity is not at stake, whether or not you are being successful at your gender is not at stake, whether or not you’re a good person is not at stake. You’re just playing. You are engaging in behaviors that you like and you’re not going to lose anything.

Object play is one of the kinds of play. When little children engage in object play, you imagine a toddler splashing in the bath, they discover the water. And they start going, “What can I make this object do?” That’s object play. “What can I make it do?” And they splash, and they splash you and it’s hilarious. What if our partners’ bodies are object play? We look at their genitals, and we’re like, “What can I make this do?” And it’s not about performance, it’s not about expectations or doing it right or wrong or blowing anybody’s mind, it’s just about what’s fun? What feels good> what do you like? What do I like? Object play.

And the last of the pleasure favorable spaces as seeking, which is curiosity itself, exploration, adventure. I have friends who sold all their stuff and traveled around the world together, which sounds like a nightmare to me, but they loved it. And for them, the adventure of it was right next to their lust space. Made it really easy for them to get into a lusty state of mind. When I was in grad school, I dated other grad students, and we would talk about each other’s research, and that intellectual curiosity and exploration was basically a water slide directly from affective neuroscience into my lust space. And it took until 2021 for me to be diagnosed on the spectrum.

Debbie Millman:
How has that knowledge changed your work?

Emily Nagoski:
I am much more aware of the ways that I, as the author of the work, am not the target audience, that my experience is not the same as others people’s experience. And I have known that was true, but now I know why that’s true and a lot more about how it’s true. It has also helped me to make sure I include neurotype and neurodivergence as part of my conversation about diversity and the ways that we vary from each other and have to accommodate difference. It has also made me a much more skeptical reader of the science.

Debbie Millman:
You also added two bonus spaces to the seven primary process emotions, the thinking mind or what you also refer to as the office where you plan and reason, and the observational distance or the scenic viewpoint for noticing your own internal experience with non-judgment. Why did you add them? And what do they do in the plan?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. They’re there because they are really essential in understanding how and why things go wrong and how to fix it. A lot of people ask me about, “What do I do when my brain is just stuck in my to-do list and I can’t pay attention to pleasure because my brain is stuck in my thinking mind?” I had to include it a space people tell me they get stuck in and they don’t know how to get out. And they want to, and so I had to include it as you might be here. And if you are, yeah. That’s the part of the brain that is the reason our brains are so big and we have to be born so early is the part that can plan for the future and, “Hey, stop planning for the future and pay attention to the pleasure that’s happening now.”

And then observational distance is the solution space. It is your ability to take one step back from your experience and witness it in a neutral way. It was by going to observational distance that I figured out that when I cried and fell asleep, I was putting my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner’s skin, and instead of my brain interpreting that sensation is, oh, sexy times. Yay. My brain went, “Oh, I’m safe now.”

The second book I wrote I wrote with my sister. It’s called Burnout. The first chapter is about the stress response cycle. And one of the concrete specific evidence-based strategies for dealing with the stress response cycle is connection. Here’s my body touching my favorite person’s body and going, “Oh, I’m safe now. I can relax. I can complete the stress response cycle.” I was bouncing around in the fear space, it turned out. And when my body was like, “Oh, I’m safe. I could cry as my way to get out of that space.” And once I got out, I was just left with how physically exhausted I was, and so that was the nap and then generally the bath and the snack, and then I could get into the seeking space or the place space. When I could observe, oh, here’s the process, I am getting out of the fear space, I’m taking care of my body, and then I can get into a space that’s adjacent to lust. It’s literally four steps I have to go through when I’m in this stressed out state of mind in order for my brain to gain access to sexual arousal. Of course it’s not easy, and of course I need a damn plan.

Debbie Millman:
Your book helps readers develop a map of the different emotional states that exist in our brains and outlines just the way you described how to navigate those spaces to find ourselves in the vicinity of the erotic. And you think of these spaces as the rooms in your brain laid out in an emotional floor plan. Why a floor plan? And can anyone create their own floor plan?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. The floor plan is a metaphor to make Jaak Panksepp’s research, his framework accessible and usable so that you can have a conversation with other people about your internal state. I can say, “I’m in this space and you want me to get here, so here’s the path we have to walk.” The reason the floor plan is valuable is because it… Seven rooms. Even if it’s just the seven emotions, that’s a big space. It’s a complex space. You are not going to be able to get directly into every room from every other room. If I’m in this room, I have to go a long way to get to the place I want to be. If you want me to be here in the lust space, I’m going to need your help transitioning out of this space through this other one so that I can get there.

The floor plan. I’ve had a lot of beta readers on the book. Floor plan, there are some people whose imaginations are so not visual that it doesn’t work for them. They go with a spectrum of colors like it’s a chain series. Some people, it’s just feelings and they can sense that they transition in a certain way. Everyone’s imagination is different. I am not a particularly visual person, and yet the floor plan as a spatial metaphor ended up being the thing that allowed me to communicate and even understand for myself what I needed. And everyone’s floor plan’s going to be different. Let us not spend any time being like, “But I should be able to get directly from my fear space into my lust space. I wish I could just knock a wall…” I wish I could knock a wall down and just get right from my fear space to my lust space.

Debbie Millman:
Is that even possible, Emily?

Emily Nagoski:
No. And you don’t need to because in other contexts in our lives, we know how to get out of the fear space in our lives. We know what helps us; well, hopefully. And if you don’t know what helps you get out of stress, chapter one of Burnout. Don’t even have to read the whole thing, just read chapter one. It’s probably available for free on Amazon. You know how to get out of your rage space if you are even aware that you have a rage space because some people are raised to believe that they, “No, I just don’t get angry.” There are conversations to have about each of the spaces. You know how to get out of them, you can understand what puts you into each of these spaces, and you can know what it feels like when you are transitioning into and out of them.

Debbie Millman:
You suggest that people aim to go to the room next door to lust. Why is that?

Emily Nagoski:
Yes. The room next door to the room where it happened. Hamilton joke. Hooray, somebody laughed.

Debbie Millman:
Yay. Oh, of course.

Emily Nagoski:
Not everyone has any idea what I’m talking about when I do that.

Debbie Millman:
Really? That’s sad. That’s terrifying.

Emily Nagoski:
It’s an old reference now.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Aiming for the room.

Emily Nagoski:
The reason why is because of a thing called the… It’s literally called the ironic process. Dan Wagner is the original researcher here. The harder you try to do something directly, the more difficult it becomes. Don’t think about a white bear. I’m going to do something mean to your dog if you think about a white bear wearing a purple tutu with white polka dots on it. And if that bear is wearing roller skates, you watch out. That’s the ironic process. The harder you try to do something.

The same thing goes for sexual functioning, like I’m going to put a spotlight on your penis. Get an erection, get an erection, get an erection. What’s the matter with you? Get an erection, get an erection. If the harder you try to do something, the more pressure there is or demand, the more impossible it becomes because there’s competition between the part of you that’s trying to do it and the part of you that’s monitoring whether or not you’re doing it. Don’t aim right for the lust room, get to a room next door, something that’s close to lust that will make it easy to transition into the lust space.

Debbie Millman:
You discovered that one of the primary indicators of a satisfying, long-term sex life for most people is cuddling. That really surprised me.

Emily Nagoski:
Research averages things together, and so you end up getting middle of… The research on the funniest joke ever really just finds the most benign and offensive joke, the one that activates the least intense extremes of anything. And cuddling, I think, is that thing that it doesn’t do any harm; it does everybody some good. It is the most reliable predictor of sex and relationship satisfaction is cuddling for 10 minutes after sex. When I read that paper, my husband and I started doing it. And we’re like, “Oh, shit, this really works.” All it takes is a very slight intentional effort to stay together for a few extra minutes. It’s delightful.

Debbie Millman:
That really excited me because that’s one of my favorite things to do. It really is.

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. It’s not for everyone. Not everybody likes it. But-

Debbie Millman:
Well, I only like doing it with my favorite person and my dog. Can you share what some of the characteristics of partnerships that help sustain a strong sexual connection?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. This has been remarkably controversial; in particular the first one. The first characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term is they like each other. They have a friendship. They admire and trust each other.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that controversial?

Emily Nagoski:
Mostly it’s controversial among the straights. I’m real. I’m not going to lie. I’m worried about the straights. They have lower quality sex than other kinds of couples, and they have it more frequently, so it’s more sex that they don’t like. And apparently, there are people in heterosexual relationships who take seriously the… Genuinely, authentically, not ironically, genuinely they take seriously the idea that friendship and sexual attraction are antithetical to each other. Yeah, I don’t know either. This is one of the things I’ve discovered since the book came out. When I say, “You’ve got to be friends,” people are like, “That’s not sexy.” Are you kidding? All I want to do is fuck my friends. Friendship is the sexiest thing in the world. But yeah, you have to like each other. But really, what I’m proposing is radical insofar as I’m saying that liking each other is more important than wanting each other. There needs to be a basic attraction between you, but hot and heavy, can’t wait to put my tongue in your mouth matters less than like you and I make a great team, and we have a lot of fun when we get together. You like each other.

Characteristic number two, they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters, that sex contributes something unique and important to their connection, and so it is worth cordoning off space and time and energy to connect with each other in this really specific, very, let’s face it, silly way that we humans have of putting parts of our bodies inside parts of another person’s body and licking each other’s body parts. Why would we do that? Because we decide that it contributes something important, and so we look at our lives and decide which things matter less in our lives than that. That’s prioritizing sex.

And then the last characteristic is they notice that they have been following somebody else’s rules about who they are supposed to be as sexual people and what their sexual connection is supposed to be like, and they decide to stop doing that and instead really deeply investigate who they truly are as sexual people, who their partner truly is as a sexual person, which is maybe even more difficult, and who they truly are as a sexual relationship. And they create an authentic sexual connection that is true to them that makes it easy for both of them to access pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, I only have a few last questions for you today, although I really-

Emily Nagoski:
This has been like a fire drill.

Debbie Millman:
There’s so much more I want to ask you and talk to you about. I’m going to have to ask you to come back and do a part two with me. After all this work, after all this research and writing, how are things between you and your husband? Is your sex life more satisfying?

Emily Nagoski:
Yeah. Short answer, yes. Longer answer, did writing Come Together do the same thing to your sex life as writing Comes as You Are? Yeah, 100%. And it did it 10 years later, which means it did it in the context of perimenopause, which is not great and long COVID. I have basically insert chronic fatigue symptoms here. Yeah, I get to the end of writing the book and I’m exhausted and I’m sick and I’m perimenopausal, but I’ve got this book, this 100,000 word tome of how to fix the thing I just broke. And I have to say, we’ve been following our own advice and I think things are better than they have been in all the 13 years that we’ve been together.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s wonderful.

Emily Nagoski:
Because we laugh about it more.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a scene in the movie with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson about marriage where they’re having a very intense fight and she’s accusing him of sleeping with someone else, and he says, “I laughed with her, and that’s what you should be more worried about.” Laughing, playing.

Emily Nagoski:
That movie made me really sad.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve said many times that the most common question you’re asked is, “Am I normal?” This is a two parter. Why do people want to be normal? And what does it mean to be normal?

Emily Nagoski:
Those are both a really big, important questions. And I think I have to answer the second one first, what does it mean? Because if you ask a statistician what normal is, it is a measure of central tendency. It is the mean, median, or mode. And I don’t think when people ask, “Am I normal?” They’re not asking, “Am I within two standard deviations of the measure of central tendency?” I don’t think that’s what people mean. I think what they’re asking instead is, “Do I belong? Am I acceptable within the human community?” I think that’s what they mean when they say normal, because they’re also not asking, “Am I doing sex right?” Because you don’t read a 100,000 word book about sex in order just to be normal. If your partner says to you, “Hey, that sex was really normal,” you don’t feel awesome about that. I want to be the best lover my lover has ever had. I want to be amazing, not just, quote, unquote “just normal.” Normal isn’t even a high standard that we’re hoping to achieve, we just want to know that we are not outcasts as sexual people.

And all of us, everybody, the nature of human sexuality is inherently for us to vary from each other. A sexually reproducing species is successful because it produces variety and diversity. And for humans in particular, variety, diversity, adaptability, flexibility, responsiveness to changes in our context is what makes us so successful as a species. Variety is the point of being a sexually reproducing species. Yeah, you’re normal. And you’re going to be different from literally everyone else on earth.

I have an identical twin sister. Our sexualities are very different. We were raised in the same shitty household. Our sexualities are very different. We’re all going to be different from each other, and it’s really hard for us as humans because we’re… Also, the other thing about humans is we’re basically a herd species. Jonathan Haidt calls us 90% chimp, 10% bee. We’re a flock species like sheep. We’re a herd species. We want to be in the middle where we’re protected. And to be on the edges feels unsafe and can actually be unsafe. And we’re such a powerfully herd-oriented species that if we notice someone who it seems like association with them would make other people perceive us as though we belong on the outskirts, we will push that person away from us toward the outside. And so we will all try to pretend to be normal to move closer to the middle.

We are all worried about being safe within the human community in the same way that it takes deliberate effort to pay attention to pleasure, to value and center pleasure in your life because it’s good for your brain, because it’s good for your relationship, because it’s good for your life and the world. It takes deliberate effort to notice diversity, variety, difference and not freak out about it, and be like, “Oh, people are just different from each other.” I am different from literally everyone I know, and none of us is broken. None of us is doing it wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Emily, I have one last question for you. I understand that one of your favorite movies is Moana.

Emily Nagoski:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering if you can tell us why.

Emily Nagoski:
Have you seen Moana?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, of course. It’s a beautiful, beautiful movie.

Emily Nagoski:
Yes. It’s a Disney movie, therefore it’s problematic. We get that. And also, it is a Jungian metaphor for trauma healing. Moana is the Maori word for ocean. Moana is called by the ocean to cross the horizon, find the demigod, Maui, and restore the heart of Te Fiti. The heart of Te Fiti is a literal object. It’s a green, glowing stone with a swirl in the center of it. She does, Moana, crosses the horizon. She finds the demigod, Maui. In order to restore the heart of Te Fiti, she confronts her last worst enemy.
Now, in Jungian analysis of narrative, every part of the story is a part of the reader. Or if you’re interpreting your dream, everything in your dream is you. Moana is the Maori word for ocean. She is called by the ocean. She is called by herself. It’s not like they’re hiding it, it’s not like this is a deep analysis that I’m just imposing on this narrative, her name is Moana. She is called by the ocean.
She meets her last worst enemy, which of course is a part of herself. It is a lava monster named Te Ka that’s throwing balls of lava at her. And because Moana’s superpower is she sees below the surface, she notices the swirl at the heart on this chest of Te Ka, the lava monster, and so she says to the ocean, which is herself, “Let her come to me.” She turns toward the scariest, most difficult, uncomfortable part of herself, the most injured part of herself, the most wounded and therefore raging part of herself with wisdom and compassion and courage. And she says, “I have

crossed the horizon to find you. I know your name. They have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you.”

What is, they have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you, what could that possibly be other than like you were traumatized? They hurt you, and that is not who you are. Your trauma is not who you are. This is not who you are. You know who you are. And she puts her forehead against the lava monster’s forehead, and they breathe each other’s air. And she puts the stone at the heart of Te Ka, and the lava crumbles away and she turns into Te Fiti, the goddess of life and abundance. And I sit in the theater with tears dripping into my snack because when I look at Te Ka and throwing balls of lava, I go, “It, me.” And that is the difficult, dangerous, self-critical part of myself. And if I can turn toward that part of myself with that kind of courage and compassion and recognize that this has the potential to be actually the most powerful source of life and abundance and creativity inside me, save us Lin-Manuel Miranda, you’re our only hope. That is why Moana is my favorite movie is because it’s actually a metaphor for trauma healing.

Debbie Millman:
Emily Nagoski, you are extraordinary. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Emily Nagoski:
Thank you. It was really fun. I hope it was okay.

Debbie Millman:
It was wonderful. Emily Nagoski’s latest book is Come Together: The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. You can read more about her and sign up for her newsletter at emilynagoski.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
My first question is one I’ve been somewhat perplexed as I’ve been living in your life. Is it true that you’ve never tried coffee?

Amy Lin:
That is true. Never so much as a sip, which a lot of people do think is my most psychopathic quality.

Debbie Millman:
That’s what my next question was, and I believe you think or others think that it’s psychopathic.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I think they just think that you can’t possibly survive if you haven’t tasted coffee. And I will admit that the more people have pressed me, the more entrenched I get in this position to move through the world without it. But I do subsist on caffeine. I just drink green tea almost exclusively.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. You grew up in Calgary Canada where you’ve said that there are two seasons, winter and road construction and where it is so cold, your nose hairs freeze together even in May.

Amy Lin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You speak very fondly of your parents in Here After.

Amy Lin:
They’re here tonight actually. Yeah, this is my parents.

Debbie Millman:
Talk a little bit about your childhood. What was it like?

Amy Lin:
I think my parents adored me, but I was odd. I was an odd child.

Debbie Millman:
Was?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, you’re right. You know what? Am, I am an odd child and I think that’s because my parents always allowed me very much to be the person that I was. I even extremely young would insist upon choosing my own outfits. And I had these very long stories that I would tell as a young child and my parents were extremely patient with this because they really, and to this day, encouraged the narrative making that I’ve always done. Even as a kid, I would have this intense scrutiny of the world and I would watch it and I would narratize a lot as a child. I didn’t realize that people didn’t do this when I was a kid, but I would narrate my life to myself in the third person. “Amy is walking” or “Amy is doing this,” and I was always telling these stories. And part of that is because I’ve always felt, in some way, separate from the world and creating narrative was a way of not only understanding what was happening around me, but also of then finding a way to write myself into the story in a way that I could understand.

Debbie Millman:
And whether my parents understood this explicitly or not, they always understood that story making was essential to who I am. And they always encouraged it. I think I was maybe 10, but I got in my head that I wanted a dog and I was begging my parents, “Please, please, please. I’m the most responsible 10 year old in the world. Please, please, please.” And my parents, wisely, were like, “No, we have enough that’s going on.” And so I thought, “Well, I’m going to show them.” And so I got a stuffed dog and a leash and I thought, “I’m going to act like this dog is real. I’m going to create a story that it’s real.” And I dragged the dog around. It was filthy, covered in leaves and dirt. I would feed it water, I would introduce it to people like it was real. And I thought, “I’m going to shame my parents out of the weirdness of this child into getting me a real dog.”

Amy Lin:
Did it work?

Debbie Millman:
No. When people would talk to my mom and say, “Does she really think this dog is real?” My mom goes, “Amy, just a really rich inner life.” Unfazed and always so supportive of the narratives that I would write.

Amy Lin:
I love that. I think you should get a T-shirt that just says, “A rich inner life.”

Debbie Millman:
I don’t need a T-shirt, Debbie. It comes before me.

Debbie Millman:
So did you write stories about this dog?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I mean, I just treated it like it was 100% real. I felt that the oddness of that would compel my parents to substitute a real dog, which it did not.

Debbie Millman:
When did you start writing?

Amy Lin:
Young. I have diaries where my mom is telling me five years old, “Yeah, that makes sense to me.” I have these diaries and there’s pages where I write in very ungainly, childish script, painstaking descriptions of myself, “Amy Lin, six years old, brown eyes, hair that my mother cut with a bowl.” Really specific details.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a part of me, Amy, that wants to get your parents up on stage here to include them in this conversation because I’d really love to know what they thought of all of that.

Amy Lin:
Again, they were like, “We love this.” And so I think, in some ways, I can’t fathom who I thought was going to be reading my six year old diaries, but it was really essential to me again, and I think to mirror myself back to me. I don’t think it was for audience when I think about it. I think it was about trying to understand the person that I was. And writing has always been that as a way of accessing understanding.

Debbie Millman:
When you were a young girl, you used to have small anxiety attacks about the idea of eternal life.

Amy Lin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Amy Lin:
I was weird.

Debbie Millman:
And how do you feel about that now?

Amy Lin:
Well, I actually do think that I thought a lot more about death very young than maybe the average person did, which was not apparent to me truthfully, until Kurtis died, until I started talking to people about death, until I started processing my ambivalence towards living very publicly. When Kurtis died, I am an extremely private person, but I became a very private person with an extremely public pain. And something about that dissonance started causing me to realize that I had really been thinking about death and why people continue since I was very small. And part of that is because I was raised with this idea that when we die, we continue into eternal life. But for me as a child, I couldn’t comprehend this idea that we would want to continue. I didn’t fully understand that. What was so comforting about this idea that there was no end? In some ways, I think the idea of a boundary or the idea of an ending is what brings meaning. Do you know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Amy Lin:
And when Kurtis died, I understood both sides of the comfort that offers because as a child U just thought you’re going to keep going and going and going and going. And I would get caught in this expanding. I would literally feel it in my body, this expanding room of consciousness. And I just thought, “How can there never be an end?” And I was too young to understand that I was experiencing anxiety attacks essentially. And then Kurtis died and I started experiencing very serious panic attacks. And I said to my therapist, RJ, “I think I’ve been having panic attacks my whole life.” And he was like, “You just realized this now?” But that was really what connected it for me.

Debbie Millman:
You got your undergraduate degree in English literature and education. At that point, what did you want to do professionally?

Amy Lin:
I wanted to teach. I have always taught in some form. Probably since my early teens, I’ve been teaching students. I used to teach very, very small students learn how to swim. Then I did summer camps. And so I knew that I wanted to teach and I really love to teach. And I think if I wasn’t a writer, I would think that teaching was my calling. It’s just that writing calls me so much more so. I sat out to teach kids, particularly to teach kids how to write and also to teach children that they are not puny inadequate people, that they are in fact fully-fleshed people. Because that was something to me as a child that I did understand about myself, which is that I was very much moving through the world as my own person. And my parents encouraged that.

Debbie Millman:
In your mid-20’s you became a vegan, you dyed your hair blonde, only wore black, not that much has changed. At that point in your life, you’ve written that you couldn’t feel anything good and steadfastly believed that you were not lovable. Why?

Amy Lin:
I never got a dog. They teach you that you’re lovable.

Debbie Millman:
That’s true.

Amy Lin:
They do.

Debbie Millman:
That is absolutely 100% true.

Amy Lin:
They absolutely do.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Amy Lin:
That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I tried to say when I was 10. How can we trace the roots of our pain? I don’t know when I got it in my head. I just do and it still lives with me. And it’s something that Kurtis loving me as radically as he did was one of the most transformative things because I think when we allow people to love us, part of that work that we have to do when they love us is we must accept that they love us and we limit the love that we have with people if we refuse to change our conception of ourself, if we refuse to accept the ways in which they see us for good and the ways in which they forgive our flaws for better. If we resist that, then we limit how much love we can receive and we limit how much love we can give ourselves and others.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I found so interesting about your feeling of being unlovable was at the same time while your loneliness and unlovability had always dogged you, you also had a longing to meet somebody. And so I want to understand if you can share with me the dichotomy between your loneliness and your longing.

Amy Lin:
I think that people, and I include myself in this, that have felt lonely their whole lives, and I have in a lot of ways, are that way because they long. I think longing is so much behind loneliness, that that desire in some way to connect and that sense that there is something in you that wants to connect but maybe doesn’t know the language to do that or isn’t sure if it’s safe to do that or perhaps has tried to and learned that it isn’t safe to do that, only perpetuates more longing. And this constant need isolates you in a lot of ways.

Debbie Millman:
I think it’s about authority. I think they view you as an authority figure and therefore… You had a first date that went six hours?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, it was long.

Debbie Millman:
So was it love at first sight?

Amy Lin:
I mean, it was just that I talked so much and Kurtis was-

Debbie Millman:
Get comfortable.

Amy Lin:
…so kind, he just didn’t know how to escape, I think truthfully. But we did. I just talked and talked and Kurtis later, unknown to me, would write down every story I told him and there were many, but it just kept going. And I felt, and this is so key to why Kurtis and I were the way that we were, was I felt so at ease with Kurtis and it’s very hard for me to feel that way. And I felt immediately as if I did not have to project or live up to any idea that he might have had of me because I could tell that he didn’t have an idea of me and that I could be the person that I was and that there was a softness in the place that he offered me. And for whatever reason, he just stepped to me very tenderly. And it was an invitation.

Debbie Millman:
Your friends told you to play it cool, but you write how you have never known how to love something in moderation. You go on to say that when you were a child, if it was the winter holidays and you were playing board games, you would keep saying, “One more. Can we please play one more?” Until everyone around you would finally say, “No, no more.” If you were basking in the sun, you’d stay out until you were sick. If you were enjoying going over to a friend’s house, you’d want to go over every day. What did you make of this behavior?

Amy Lin:
I made of it a boundary, which was that I always created this narrative, of course, that I always wanted too much, that I asked too much, that I had too much. And so the need then was to limit myself. I needed to learn how to behave more like other people. I needed to feel a little bit less. I needed to ask a little bit less. I needed to learn the ways that people were moving through the world, which was less. And that all of that for me relaxed when I met Kurtis because there was no need to do that. There was no need to limit how much I was asking because it didn’t seem that I could ask too much. And that was what made that time so special.

Debbie Millman:
But it was hard for you. You write about how with Kurtis, no one had ever just wanted you before. He was the first person that you didn’t have to convince, but you don’t share this with him. You’re embarrassed by your own need and you state, you tried to hide its soft yearning with hard demands. And I know what that is, I know what that’s like. What did you do? What tests were you giving him?

Amy Lin:
I asked for things that no one can really promise anyone. I wanted to see around the corner of the universe. I wanted him to say, which he would say, “We’re going to be together for 50 years. I’m not going to leave. I’m going to be here always.” And I ask that a lot and in lots of different ways, often some loudly, some imperfectly, some softly, but I was always asking for that in some way. And Kurtis was always meaning that. That is the legacy of having loved someone who is as big as the sky. Their capacity for love, Kurtis’s capacity for care just continued.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting to me that you were curtailing your needs, curtailing your desires, your longing, but fell in love with somebody that was so unbounded with that love and joy. You tell Kurtis you’re a substitute teacher, not a writer. Why not both?

Amy Lin:
I didn’t see myself as a writer. I was a substitute teacher at the time. That’s what I was doing. It was before I got a full-time job teaching. I wasn’t writing in any particular way and I certainly didn’t see myself as a writer and it would never have occurred to me to say otherwise. One thing I will say about me is that most places I will show up as I am. And so to me I thought, “Well, I am substitute teaching.”

Debbie Millman:
You write about your engagement very beautifully. You write that the feeling that you had was perhaps the only moment in your life where you feel joy and excitement, so clear, so immediate and so intense that you’re not aware of anything else happening. And I believe that you had just gotten out of the shower and still had the towel around you when he was proposing. When did you realize it had fallen off?

Amy Lin:
When I was cold. There was a moment where I thought, “I’m really cold.” And then I realized that I was also naked. That was a moment that I just didn’t limit. And I think it was a moment truthfully that surprised me because I had no preconceptions of what it would be like. And because I had not expected it for myself and because I did not think it for myself and so I didn’t have any time to get in my own way. It really was, in so many ways, Kurtis’s moment that he had planned for me. And again, I think that’s what you do when you love somebody. You give them the things that they’re trying to give you and also to give themselves. And I really gave myself over to that moment and I stopped narratizing it and I just was in it, which is why a lot of it is lost to me, truthfully.

Debbie Millman:
You got married on a beach named Sugar on November 11th, 2018, but after you got married, you began to fear you might get divorced. Why?

Amy Lin:
Because I’m difficult to live with. That’s how I feel.

Debbie Millman:
No, I think it’s more than that. Don’t you all?

Amy Lin:
I also think anytime I really want something, I just think that for whatever reason it’s going to go away and that anything that we really want we can’t hold onto. Even as a child, I was like this. If I got a, let’s say a Sharpie set that I love, the metallic ones, the shiny ones, I would never use them. I would leave them in a drawer and I would think about all the things I was going to do with them, but I would never use them. And if my sister would come in and want to borrow them, I would, “No, those are for a special occasion.” And then they would dry up and I would just always hold onto them because I couldn’t bear the idea of things ending, especially if I loved them and especially if they were precious. And so when Kurtis and I got married, I just immediately started thinking about, “Well, something this good has to end. Of course it will end.”

Debbie Millman:
You struggle in the relationship as you realize that there are two yous simultaneously existing, the person he thought you to be and the person you knew yourself to be. And most of the time you wanted to try to be the woman he believed you were, but you were not really her. And it seemed to me, Amy, that he always loved you for exactly you and not someone he had constructed. Looking back on it now, do you still feel that he loved a version of you?

Amy Lin:
I think that Kurtis always loved people on their best days, and he got this idea of them on their absolute best day and decided that that was the fullness of who they were. And I think that’s a beautiful gift to give somebody to mirror back to them who they are, even on their worst days. But part of my understanding of love and my belief about love is that we have to hold the fullness of the people that we love. And the reality is we are yes, our best days, but we’re also our worst days. And that there is a part of me, which is where God keeps the knives. I’m the knife drawer sometimes, that’s just the reality. And that was something that Kurtis would refuse about me, that there were no knives and in his world, there were none. And I needed him to acknowledge that actually there were, and actually a lot of them lived with me.

Debbie Millman:
Well just maybe sharp edges.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, and that’s something that Kurtis would argue was, “Oh, well, yeah, okay, so sometimes there’s this, but it’s not that.” And I think I just needed him to see, but sometimes it is that. That’s the reality. And all of us, if we’re really honest with ourselves, have the ability to pull out a knife. That is the reality. And I know that about myself and I’m not blind to that. And I needed Kurtis after our years together, I just needed him to see that. I knew that he would love that. I already knew that, but I needed him to see it. And that’s a complex thing to ask somebody and difficult.

Debbie Millman:
On August 15th, 2020, your life changed in an instant. Kurtis was 32 years old, he went out to run a half marathon with your family and he collapsed mid marathon and died instantly as he hit the ground.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, before actually.

Debbie Millman:
Before he hit the ground. I’m really sorry, Amy.

Amy Lin:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
I called Amy before the podcast, which I never do because I was so concerned about how to talk about something so horrific and so tender. And so if there’s any questions that I ask you that you don’t want to answer, please just say, “Pass.” Kurtis’s heart stopped very suddenly. It’s considered an out of time death. That’s the phrase as it remains unexplained. And you were plunged into acute grief, you stopped eating, you stopped sleeping. You sent your therapist RJ a one line email telling him what happened, and he called you immediately. What did he say to you?

Amy Lin:
He said, “Do not grieve alone.”

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Amy Lin:
Because he knows me. Because I was already preparing to just go into the prairie and lie down and just become with the earth. It’s always been my way. I’m very private. I’ve always processed privately and I think he knew, my therapist is religious, he would say in a divine insight, I know that he would say that, that I was going to need help. And I don’t typically ask for help. And I think he knew that I was in clinical shock, but I think he knew if I’m going to get one thing in through the door, it needs to be don’t grieve alone, connect with other people.

And one thing that speaks to the trust that RJ and I have is that I really listened when RJ speaks. And that was a trust that was hard won. And he will say, because he said it to me before, he said, “I felt like you watched me for the first three years of our relationship. In all the sessions,” he said, “I thought not that you were there so much as you are watching me.” He felt observed. I don’t do that intentionally, but even as a child I would observe things and I realized that I did. I probably did observe him for that long to decide if when he spoke I was going to listen to what he had to say. And so when Kurtis died, we were past that. I already knew that when he spoke I was going to hear him.

Debbie Millman:
He told you that you couldn’t survive alone, but you told him that you didn’t want to, that you were looking for a place to die. You found a mountain called Nameless and a lake called Disappointment. What was his response to you telling him that?

Amy Lin:
He said, “Well, where did you find those places?” And I said, “Google Maps. I’m just Googling.” To which he just nodded. And that’s the great thing about RJ. It’s the great thing about having a trust bond with your therapist is there was no commentary there because he also knows certain points where there are no fly zones with me. And it was a no-notes time. And so he just wanted to know the provenance of those places. And we moved on.

Debbie Millman:
You read a lot of material about what it meant to be a widow and the ramifications. Statistically widowed are two and a half times more at risk of dying by suicide in the first year of widowhood. You also read that you’re 22% more likely than the married to die of other causes such as cerebral or cardiac events, cancer, car crashes. And while these illnesses and incidents may seem random, they’re not. And I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about why they’re not really random.

Amy Lin:
So obviously the suicide risk is because when we have out-of-time death, but really when anyone experiences traumatic death in this way, it causes you to ask questions that lots of people spend a lot of time avoiding. Why are we alive? Why should we continue? How much pain can someone hold? How much pain should you hold? How much pain do I want to hold? These are big questions that take you to the edge of the questions themselves. And when you get there, when you push the questions far back enough, then you are confronting a kind of mortality. And for a lot of people there is no one at the edge there. And you make a decision.

In terms of why the widowed are more likely to die, quite frankly has a lot to do with the fact that grief is not only an emotional trauma, it’s a physical trauma. And so we know that when people experience loss like this, the blood that goes to the front of the brain, which is doing communication, it’s doing memory, it’s doing impulse control, that blood gets diverted to the back of the brain which is doing survival. So it means when you are trying to remember the time that you should be at the doctor’s office, you are going to have more difficulty remembering that because you literally have less brain resources dedicated to memory. It means when you go to cross the street, you aren’t actually going to as accurately gauge whether that vehicle is traveling too quickly to stop because the part of your brain at the front that does risk assessment is offline. It’s not being served at this time.

And so the widowed, they tend to take more risks without realizing it because that part of their brain for a long time is not being physically served. And that’s actually what contributes to this data, which is that even unthinkingly, the widowed, they take more risks with their lives. And also because when someone dies, grief puts so much of what they call the stress chemicals into your body, it jacks them up so high and sometimes for 5-10 years, because acute grief is the first five years and then you enter chronic grief, but you have all of these chemicals, these stress chemicals in your body for at least five years and it’s suffice it to say, not great. That contributes to a lot of disease. It makes you literally vulnerable at a cellular level to more disease.

And so in so many ways, grief threatens your life from risk assessment to disease and then of course to having to confront the questions of why anyone should be here. And that’s all something I read in a haze after Kurtis died, which is shocking to realize and to understand, especially when you are very young. It’s very humbling to understand that so much of our bodies are deciding for us and we would love to participate in this idea that we are deciding. But at the end of the day, Kurtis decided nothing. His heart decided, his body decided. And something that trips me out about that because the body is the only given thing, the only thing that’s given to us. Everything else, all these systems of power and attachment and thought go behind things that we receive, but the body is made, the body is actually given and then the body takes. And there’s something about that reality, that dissonance that is unsettling to live in.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s amazing to me that it’s the reptilian part of the brain that also gets ignited with the cortisol when you go through a trauma-

Amy Lin:
Yes, absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
That also controls your eye blinking and your digestion and your metabolism, your adrenaline, and those are all things you can’t will to happen. You can’t say, “Okay, stomach start to digest now.”

Amy Lin:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
You are at the mercy of your own body. Speaking of which, two weeks before Kurtis died, you fell off a scooter and injured your knee. 10 days after Kurtis passed, you almost die from a series of blood clots in your legs. You also have pulmonary clots. Now most people presenting with deep vein thrombosis which is the technical name of what you had, are over 40 years old. Do you feel that the shock of Kurtis’s death ignited this event in your body?

Amy Lin:
Well, the answer that I have from the many physicians that have looked at my super clotting episode is that I’m unlucky to which I say, “Duh, obviously.” And so when I fell off the scooter and I injured my knee, they think that I had a trauma clot at the site. Okay, not great, but not necessarily life-threatening. But compound that with the fact that I have a pre-existing condition that’s almost impossible to diagnose, which is May-Therner. So there’s a pinch point where I had a clot so old that my body had already just compensated for that. So now we have two pinch points, both of which where there are clots. And then in between, it’s all fine until I stopped eating and I stopped drinking for so long, which of course we know will thicken the blood and all of this combined, they think created this super clotting event, which is to say there are a million ways I could have lived where it wouldn’t have happened to me, but that was the way things fell. And I think it’s just bad luck truly.

Debbie Millman:
You end up in the hospital. While there, you write how part of your brain was screaming, your life is at risk. One part of your brain was telling you to do what you could to live. And since it had been only 10 days between Kurtis’s dying and you nearly dying, you think if you go now, you can still find him. He might even be waiting for you. What other part was telling you to stop trying to live that was overcome by deciding to live.

Amy Lin:
It’s so odd to be in that space and my parents would know, they were there, I kept asking my dad, “Am I going to die?” Which again, I was in shock on so many levels, but to be, I think of my parents, to be the recipient of that kind of question is so awful. I think worse maybe even than being the asker of it. But I was really trying to understand that and I was trying to weigh if that was a good thing or if that was a bad thing. Because my whole life, I’m always trying to think my way through all my problems. That’s what I have. I’ve always been able to think my way through all of my problems. And that’s part of what is so humbling about grief is you actually cannot think your way through it. It’s so Leviathan, it’s so encompassing that eventually you will reach the end of how much you can think about it and then you have to start feeling about it. And that’s where the experience of grief starts to bifurcate you if you can’t accept that reality.

And so in the hospital, I was trying desperately to find a way to hold both pieces of that together, the feeling and the thinking, and to try to understand what I wanted to do. At the end of the day, I decided to continue because my parents were there. They were there in the hospital, which is amazing because it was in the middle of a pandemic and nobody was really allowed in the hospital. And that’s a testament to the kindness of the people who worked there, that they allowed my parents to be there, that I was not alone in this hospital in the middle of a global pandemic.

And as I’ve said before, I believe that our burden, if we are going to love people, is to accept their love when we don’t really want to. And I understood even then, even in the haze of trauma and shock that my parents wanted me to live and that if I loved them, I was going to try to do that. That that was the most important thing. And I’ve said this before, but that’s the best thing any of us can offer anyone is to witness them and to love them and to be there, to be present for them. And in so many ways, witness has saved my life. That was just the first instance of it in that particular moment.

Debbie Millman:
You began to see a grief counselor who told you that the fight or flight sensation that you were experiencing begins to ease around six months. But in month six through nine, emotions heighten and diversify and those months could end up feeling worse than the first months. So this information stated that normal acute grief lasts four to six months before beginning to lessen. But did the material explain what normal grief is?

Amy Lin:
I mean, I think it’s not a secret that I did not love my first grief therapist. And I did press that point, “Well, what’s normal grief? What’s acute grief? What’s chronic grief? What are the differences?” And she didn’t really have any answers for that. What she really was trying to communicate to me was that as bad as it was then, it’s going to get worse. That’s what she was trying to tell me, that the fullness of my emotional range was not yet back online. And she was, in her own way, trying to prepare me for what that would be like. But I wasn’t ready to receive that. And what’s more, I wanted some answers and she wouldn’t give them to me.

So the answer is still, I remain a little bit confused on what that is. And I think it is a point of misunderstanding in grief studies of confusion because I continue to ask people this question, “So normal grief, what is that?” And all grief therapists that I’ve spoken to will say, “Well, there of course, only grief is so unique to each person.” I’m like, “Well then why do we persist in using this term? What’s normal grief?” What I think they’re talking about, if I was to hazard a guess is they’re speaking about the biological stress in the brain. I think that there’s a massive chemical shift that starts to kick in around four to six months, that the reptilian part of your brain starts to think, “Okay, well we can’t be in this state forever.” And I think a physical change that starts to happen and I think that’s what they’re talking about. But then let’s not use the term grief because people think you’re talking about an emotional state. Grief is also physical, but people don’t understand that. So let’s talk about the physical in language that they understand.

Debbie Millman:
You asked your grief therapist if there was an amount of time, and I did that too. 20 years ago, I had a very sudden divorce and I was catatonic. And I remember asking my therapist at the time, “How long am I going to feel like this?” And she was like, “Probably around two years,” and I’m like, “Two years?”

Amy Lin:
I know. I know.

Debbie Millman:
And it was five. It ended up being five. But if she had told me five years then-

Amy Lin:
You would have just Kool-Aid manned your way through the wall.

Debbie Millman:
…I would’ve gone through bridge you were looking for.

Amy Lin:
100%

Debbie Millman:
So you gasped when she told you it might be three to five years. You then went into a specialized grief therapy, a grief therapy which you undertook at the Bob Glasgow Grief Center in Calgary, which is the only one of its kind in North America. There you learned, and this part was astonishing to me, you learned that the five stages of grief that we’re all taught about, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance were never meant to describe the experiences of the bereaved. Those stages arose out of a non evidenced based study that considered the emotional experiences of people diagnosed with terminal illness. So the five stages that we’re socialized with-

Amy Lin:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
…were meant for another kind of pain. I found this astonishing. I had to put down the book for a few minutes.

Amy Lin:
Listen, so did I, and if you read even more about it, the woman who headed that study has openly said, I think pretty much to anyone who will listen to her, “I never intended the five stages for the people who are bereaved. It was about studying people who were diagnosed with terminal illness. What did they process? How did they process it? Can we categorize the arc of their metabolizing of their experience? But somewhere along the way it got universally applied,” and there seems to be no universal footnote to that. I was just as gobsmacked as you were that those stages don’t apply.

And even a quick search on the internet will produce so many articles that tell you that they in fact do apply to you. So that’s confusing as well because if you’re not paying extremely close attention, you’ll just read the first thing that Google returns to you, which often is a website telling you that eventually you are going to do some yoga, wheel pose and you’re going to be in acceptance, which is so false and so harmful to people that are grieving. And it’s also very hard for people who are grieving to pay very close attention. How are they to know?

Debbie Millman:
One thing I really was so grateful for learning in your book is that grief is really considered chronic pain. And you ask a question, I want to ask you, how can grief be so universal and yet so widely misunderstood?

Amy Lin:
I think that art at its best asks questions until it reaches an unanswerable question. And often when I consider work, I will think about the questions that it asks me and think about if I ever get to a question that I don’t know how to answer. And so when I wrote that question, I wrote it because it was the question that when I pushed all the other questions, it was the one that I arrived at. And I think my answer to it would be that we have no language for the grief that we are all in and we have no particular vocabulary or grammar. And grief has its own grammar. That’s the thing. Grief is its own language. And so few of us have any models for it, and so few of us have any teachers of it.

And what’s more, all of us are carting around our really good intentions, which are that we don’t want people to be in pain. We want to make them feel better. And that’s a really good place, but it’s really dangerous for people who are grieving. And I think that’s how we get there when we don’t have a language for it. And what’s more, what we do have an overabundance of language for is how I can make you feel better, the happy clappy. And so everybody leans on that and what’s more, the thing that they don’t have words for, it’s very uncomfortable to go into that place. And when you don’t have any guides for it or any mirrors for it, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to go slashing into the forest by yourself.

Debbie Millman:
You deconstruct the question, “How are you doing?” And you talk about how you get particularly wrangled when people ask you how you are or assume you’re doing better because you were able to get out of bed or put on some makeup and you think that what it is that they’re really asking, and you create this list about how you could respond. Do they want honesty, assurance, platitudes to share their own story if you reciprocate as you feel you ought to access details that might not be welcomed by way of this inquiry? And you actually wonder if they’re actually asking about your grief or your physical ailing body or both. Why are people so afraid of grief in others? I can understand why we don’t want to have grief in ourselves, but why are people so closed off to being able to manage or handle or experience or witness other people’s grief

Amy Lin:
Because they’re not taught to do it. It’s so wild to assume that someone who’s likely never been told, it’s actually okay to sit with someone who’s in pain and not provide some kind of answer. It’s really rare person, and I have a couple of friends actually that are almost divinely possessed of this gift, which is the ability to sit with someone’s pain and feel no need to diagnose it or change it or make it any better and to just witness it. And so people do come by that honestly, but they are quite rare and it’s more likely that people want to move through it or make you feel better. And so they’re afraid of it because when you sit with someone who is in a lot of pain, it’s painful to you as well. And it’s really hard to see the people that we care about, to see them ail. And it’s so difficult to accept this dichotomy, which is the best thing you can do for someone who’s grieving is allow them to be in pain around you and that that is healing, that witness is healing.

And that’s very hard because you are to be in pain as well, and you have to confront what your capacity for pain is, what you are willing to do. And when you sit with someone in grief, you have to then also sit with your own pain, your own grief at their sadness. And that’s where I think it gets very sticky for people, whether they realize it or not, because they begin to look at how much pain they would like to be in and who really wants to do that? And then you start having to see how much water you want to carry for the people you love. That’s what makes people uncomfortable, especially once you go there. If you have grief that you haven’t processed, then you’re swimming in waters without a lifeguard on duty and that’s very scary. And on top of that, someone else is in the water with you.

Debbie Millman:
Another thing I learned from your book is that statistically most grievers will lose their support base at about a year, if not before, because the enduring state of sadness causes people to disconnect and other people can’t handle how sad you are and think you’re not getting any better. People report that year two is so much worse than year one because the support you had from friends and family often goes away. Life goes on for those people, but not for the griever. What would you tell anyone who has a friend or a family member that is grieving about how to engage with the griever?

Amy Lin:
I would tell them that I think people often disconnect because of what I just talked about, which is that they can’t witness that much pain. But I think there’s, again, this idea that we have to see everything and we need to be everything to that person. But I have friends that still to this day, they text me on the 15th and it has been so many 15th’s since, and they still do that. And after Kurtis died, they sent me a card and then they would text me on every 15th. And that’s what they’ve done for three and a half years, which is incredible and so steady and so manageable and so holding in so many ways.

So I would tell people, you don’t need to do these big things. You don’t need to hear everything. You don’t need to do hours of mutual support. You just need to do something that shows that you are witnessing and whatever that thing is, if you can continue to keep doing it, all the better. And I was told this often in grief therapy, which was start smaller. I have such an all-or-nothing approach to everything. And my grief therapists would say, “Just start smaller. Don’t start with you’re going to go for a half an hour run. What you’re talking about? You need a walker to get out of bed. Start with two minutes with the walker around the house.”

It’s the same when you support people in grief, start small, start with what you can offer. If it’s too vulnerable or too painful or too triggering to sit with someone for three hours, call them and speak for three minutes and then say, “Okay, well I’ll call you tomorrow.” Most people can do that, but because we talk so little about grief and we have so little language for it, people have this idea that somehow they need to be load-bearing for you all the time. Nobody can do that. No one could stand up to that.

Debbie Millman:
All of this that you’re experiencing is happening during the pandemic, so you’re also in isolation at that point. You’re therapist actually directs you to start writing about your grief. What did you think of that idea?

Amy Lin:
I thought that was stupid.

Debbie Millman:
But you did it anyway.

Amy Lin:
I did because I trust my therapist and he never pushes any points, but he pushed this one as hard as he has ever really pushed anything. And he said, “If you’re not going to tell people about it, then you need to write it down.” And I thought about it, and he was very insistent on this point. It was like, “Write this down or pick someone to call.” And I really didn’t want to call somebody. I did not want to speak to someone face-to-face, face. And so I said, “Okay, then I’ll write it.” And I started a Substack, which is a newsletter, and it was relatively unknown. It feels much more common to me now, but it was relatively unknown when I started and I made it public, which really concerned my therapist. He felt that it would open me up to commentary that he wasn’t sure I could manage.

But I was just so supremely convinced in my obscurity. I was just like, “Well, my mother is going to read this.” And I really wanted people to be able to opt in or opt out because grief is so all-encompassing. And I wanted people to be able to choose how much they saw or held. And one of the beautiful things about the Substack was that so many people chose to read it every week, which was shocking to me and not shocking to my therapist.

Debbie Millman:
You started the newsletter, the Substack titled At The Bottom of Everything on September 15th, another 15. Yet for the first year after Kurtis died, you were unable to read.

Amy Lin:
Years, multiple.

Debbie Millman:
Years?

Amy Lin:
Yeah, I would say almost three.

Debbie Millman:
You’re a writer. Your Instagram is Literary Amy, where you post photographs of the books that you’re reading and it’s like three a week. I mean, you stopped.

Amy Lin:
Entirely. Yeah, I would say in a knife fight between being a reader and a writer, I would choose reader, but by a very small margin and only if I had to. So to lose the ability to focus, and I really did lose the ability to read, was just another thing that I felt grief had robbed me of. And if you had asked me this question, even in December of last year, I would’ve told you that it just was never going to be returned to me. But sometime around mid-January of this year, I picked up a book and it wasn’t painful, which of course I immediately panicked that I was experiencing some sort of stroke or I just thought, “This is it for me. They’re giving me the final dinner before they take me out.” And I think it’s just a part of the physiology of my brain is starting to come a little bit back online, but it’s so odd to be without something that normally sustains you entirely.

Debbie Millman:
Did the writing help bring you back to the reading in any way?

Amy Lin:
No. The reading had to come back on its own time and in its own way. The writing was all about processing and reading for me is not so much about processing so much as it is about understanding. And I think maybe you need a kind of perspective to be able to read and a kind of empathy, certainly to be able to read.

Debbie Millman:
Well it makes you feel a lot.

Amy Lin:
Yes. And when you’re in grief and when you’re processing, so much of your empathy is self-focused. You’re trying to hold space for yourself, and I just don’t think I had those resources. But in writing, you’re trying to understand and when so much of your empathy is directed at trying to hold grace for yourself, that does serve writing because empathy will always open writing.

Debbie Millman:
Your new book, Here After evolved out of the writing that you were doing online. How did the book come to be?

Amy Lin:
Well, I lied to my agent. Came from a lie. She asked me about two years into the Substack, which I still write, and she said, “Well, do you think in all this writing you have a book?” And I knew that I didn’t, but I said I did because I feel this constant need to be the best student in class. And so I felt like I would be letting her down truthfully if I said no. And so then after that, I panicked and I went into the Substack and I copied all of the letters and I put them in a Word document and it came to 110,000 words. And I thought, “Oh, thank God. That’s a book length. Okay. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie.” I was like, “Okay, it’s going to be okay.” But then I started actually reading the letters. And the thing is, the Substack began as a project, which happens organically. That’s what projects do, they happen to you. But books are made and those are two very different things.

And so I realized I didn’t have a book, I had a project that was 110,000 words, and I thought, “Oh, well, this… I can’t have lied to my agent who I adore.” And I began to try to find my way into a book. And it really wasn’t until I started making these text boxes in Word, which are these small boundaries, and you can only fit so much text in them. And I made one for every page of which I had hundreds. And for every page I would put all of the text into the text box and I would read line by line. And if I didn’t feel that that line was something I had to keep, I deleted it and I would only keep these very small cubes. And once I did that for about three months, I began to see this very bright bone of grief, the essential part of my experience. And that was when I knew that I did have a book that I wasn’t in fact, making a book.

Debbie Millman:
The narrative arc of Here After is really beautiful. It doesn’t move through time in a linear way, and it’s all written in the present tense. What made you decide to structure it in that way?

Amy Lin:
A couple things. The present tense came, and it was a point of contention, not strong contention, but during the editing process that it was all in present tense. But the thing about grief is that for me, it completely shattered any sense of time. And when Kurtis died, what was technically past tense, wife, marriage, future, felt so much more real to me than what was present tense widow death, the unknown. And that’s emotionally true, but it’s also physically true. The brain has not yet caught up to the physical reality of what has happened. For the brain, the neurological under understanding of Kurtis, wife, marriage is still very real. The neural pathways are very active.

And so grief makes everything present tense because the past is more real than what’s happening. And then the way in which the narrative fragments and braids and leaps is because grief doesn’t answer to our narrative idea of time. It has no interest in that. And I was constantly seasicking between memory and reality, and I was coming in and out of these ideas of who I was and who I was not and what’s more, I didn’t want this idea in the book that Kurtis was over there and then I was over here. Kurtis remains so present to me, remains so clear in so many ways to me. And I return to him so frequently throughout my days. And I look for him so often where I go. And I wanted readers to do that, to have that experience in the book that you might turn the page and there Kurtis would be, and you hope it, because in my opinion, Kurtis is the brightest part of the book and you’re always sort of hoping that he’s on the next page.

And that’s what grief does. It takes you in and out. It takes you in and out of this hope that you’re never going to get an answer for. And I needed the structure to feel that way. It felt that it had to mirror that, and I wanted to mirror that to griever’s like, “No, you haven’t lost your mind. This sense of here and then there somewhere totally in between is actually in fact what’s happening to me too.” And I wanted the book to feel that way. And some people really love it, and some people, as I just recently read on Goodreads quote, “Really hate it.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, my wife, Roxane Gay, who’s a writer, always says to anybody that talks about Goodreads, “Do not read the reviews.” My last question, at the end of the book, you go on a writing retreat and you attempt to ride a bicycle, something that you were afraid to do given the number of times you’d fallen in the past. Kurtis loved riding a bike and you decide you’re going to try. What made you decide to try again?

Amy Lin:
Well, part of it was the pool could only be accessed by bike.

Debbie Millman:
So it was just a practical thing.

Amy Lin:
Yeah, so much of my courage really is a practical thing, which is that when I was at this writing retreat, upstate New York was in the middle of an absolutely punishing heat wave. And I, because I was new to the retreat, did not know as all the other residents did, that you have to ask for the studios with AC. So I didn’t ask for it. It’s a very old mansion where I was staying, and I got put in what was historically the servants quarters and there’s no AC and the windows are sealed because the bats fly in at night and I was sweltering and everybody who got on their bicycle and cycled to the pool returned looking remarkably refreshed. And I too wished to be refreshed because it was so hot.

And this is the beautiful thing about grieving and loving somebody is that when you live in it for a long time, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes you can access a tiny bit of their courage and their bravery and who they were. And I just thought, “Okay, one, I am so warm,” and my temperature regulation is very important to me. I do not like to get too warm. I don’t like to be too cold. I really want to be the perfect temperature all the time. And I just thought, “Okay, Kurtis wanted me to do this thing. It’s not far. He was always telling me that I could.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m writing this book, I’m going to be brave.” And that’s the funny thing about bravery is somebody tells you for long enough that you can be brave and there isn’t any soundtrack when you do it, you just one day you get up and you just do it. And so I did. I just got up and I thought, “I am so hot. And today is the day to be brave.”

Debbie Millman:
Amy Lin.

Amy Lin:
Thank you both so much. Got to go.

Debbie Millman:
Sometimes you can tell a lot about writers from the names of their books. Here are three titles by Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present, and The History of White People. Nell Irvin Painter is a distinguished award-winning historian, and she’s written a lot about the south in the 19th century and about race. She’s also a retired professor emerita from Princeton University. And by all rights, she could be resting comfortably on her laurels, but she is not because she is also an artist. The title of another of her books is Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. These two pursuits, history and art, come together beautifully in her brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, which is punctuated throughout by images of her paintings. Nell Irvin Painter, welcome to Design Matters.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you so much, Debbie. I’m glad to be here. I love the title of your podcast.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because design does matter.

Debbie Millman:
Yes it does. Yes it does. Now, your parents fell in love at first sight in the Houston College Library and got married when they were 19 years old. They were married for 72 years until your mom died at 91. You’ve said that this made it fated that you’d be a writer, and I’m wondering how the two were connected.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, my parents’ college was actually called Houston College for Negroes.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is very much Texas in that time. It was a jerry-built institution. They knew it. My mother had started at Prairie View. She was the youngest. Where her siblings went, but her father died and left her mother too impoverished. The next sibling, her older brother was at Howard to become a doctor, so he was the favorite son, and my mother, Dona, had to come home to Houston. My father’s family was not as educated as my mother’s family, but my father’s family did want him to go to college. So they met in Houston College for Negroes in the library. So I say I was fated to be a reader and having lived a long life, I took the next step into writing.

Debbie Millman:
What do you attribute to the success of a 72-year marriage?

Nell Irvin Painter:
People used to ask my father that. My father was a very beautiful man, very lovable, very charming with a bit of a wit. And he would say, “Eat shit.” And then my mother would say “No, no, no, no, no, no.”

Debbie Millman:
So I guess it was an older version of happy wife, happy life.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Something like that. Yeah. My father was the charming face of the marriage for decades. And my mother was very shy. Had a speech impediment for decades. Couldn’t talk on the phone until she started getting jobs that were commensurate with her education and her ability. She was a fantastic organizer. So when she retired at 65, she decided she wanted to do something different and she started writing books. And her second book is a memoir called, I Hope I Look That Good when I’m That Old, because that’s what people said to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me. So maybe I should write I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old part two.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll talk to you a little bit about that later on. One of your earliest memories is sitting on the floor with a gathering of your parents and their friends to listen to the presidential election results in 1948. Were your parents rooting for Truman?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. They were rooting for Wallace. I come from a good lefty family. I should also add that people like Coretta Scott … She was not yet married to Martin Luther Jr. She was also rooting for Wallace. And you didn’t have to be very far on the left because Wallace, in addition to running a progressive campaign … It was called the Progressive Party. It was also anti-segregation. And he campaigned in the south to desegregated audiences. So it was a very forward-looking campaign. I thank my parents for bringing me up on the left because it saved me from so many disappointments in my country. I didn’t expect things to change radically as say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Housing Act of 1968. I welcomed all those things, but I didn’t think they were going to be the end of the line.

So I grew up with people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Du Bois and as I say in one of my Hers columns about living in Ghana in the ’60s. So I had an unusual background. And it’s one of the reasons that I very much appreciated Roxane’s stepping out and talking about society and culture and work in general. Because I do believe my background gave me that even though I was very conscious of the pressure only to talk about black stuff. So even now, The History of White People, which is my best-selling book, which I think is my best-known book, it gives people pause. They say, “How should we think about you?” And I say, “As a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Houston.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But your family’s roots reached back into Ascension, Baton Rouge and St. Landry Parishes, Louisiana, Lowcountry, South Carolina, around Charleston, Harris County, Texas. How did you all end up in Oakland, California?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, we were part of the Great Migration, and the easiest way to answer that is by train. My father’s family had moved from Harris County, Texas to the Bay Area in the ’20s. So they were already there. And actually when my parents came in 1942, they looked down on them as Southerners. This is the oldest story in the world of groups whose older migrants looked down on the more recent migrants. But at any rate, my father went first and got partially settled, got a job, and then my mother came. I was just an infant in arms.

Debbie Millman:
I think you were 10 weeks old when they moved.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I was 10 weeks old. Yeah. So these trains … This is 1942. The trains are full. And my mother with two children, my older sibling who tragically died as a young child and this baby in arms, and she said that a black soldier gave her his seat and he stood up all the way from Houston to Oakland.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Your older brother, Frank Jr., as you just mentioned, he died during a routine tonsillectomy.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve written how your parents poured all the love they had for one lost child into you. And the sense of safety you experienced through your childhood endowed you with resources that you recognize now as resilience. Why and how did that result in resilience?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because they were always there for me. They were always on my side. I never had any doubts. I was never subject to physical violence or emotional violence. And I remember at Stanford in the ’80s, I was at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, but at the time I was teaching myself women’s history and women’s studies, so I would hang out with women in gender studies at Stanford. And I was absolutely amazed to hear so many women talk about their mothers as impediments, their mothers as their enemies, my mother, myself, my mother in my way, my mother is the source of miseducation, and I always thought of my mother, my father as my safe harbors in a hostile world.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad is actually the person that first taught you how to draw.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
And what kind of things were you drawing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Horses.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why horses?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know why horses. But I know that that’s a thing that young girls draw. Something maybe eatable. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I was drawing houses with bad grass. I had trouble with grass.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I also drew paper dolls because I liked clothes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So did I. I loved paper dolls.

Nell Irvin Painter:
So these are just every day. I can’t say I did anything spectacular. But I do remember one time I was in class in elementary school and I drew a walnut. I don’t know why. It was a beautiful drawing of a walnut. And I wrote under it nuts to you Mr. So and so who was my teacher. I got in so much trouble over that.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Nell Irvin Painter:
As if I had threatened him with an AK-15 or something. But my teachers always complained that I talked too much. I was obviously a really smart kid who did my work, but also, I knew too much.

Debbie Millman:
You applied to Howard University and you were accepted, but at dinner one night with the distinguished Howard University sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, who was a friend of your dad’s, told you this. “Nell Irvin, you’re too smart and too dark to go to Howard.”

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Why? What happened? Why did he feel that way?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because it was true. Howard University … We’re talking 1960 now. So this is in the olden days. And in those days, Howard University, probably like many other black institutions, was a hotbed of colorism. And so if you look at my generation of educated men, black men, every single wife except my father married as light-skinned a woman as possible. The lighter skinned the better. And of course, this is the time when women in college were trivialized as only being in college to get married. So if you know about those assumptions, it makes good sense for me not to go to Howard. And I heard stories about Howard at that time, which were really … It was such cruelty. So I told this to a team who were filming me. This is when I still lived in Newark. I was in my studio in the Ironbound, and they came. I forget what we were talking about, but I told them about that. And so this is like … It was before Coronavirus, but it was in the twenty-teens, and they said, “Oh, that still holds and it holds for men as well.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So I’m glad I’m not young.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know how I would manage this world if I were any younger than I am truly. You ended up attending the University of California Berkeley, where you were active in the student government, in art circles. You illustrated two covers of the campus humor magazine. You also took a course in sculpture. And I understand you didn’t do particularly well in the class. Tell us about that. Tell us about that experience.

Nell Irvin Painter:
My father did not teach me about sculpture, so I had no way in to sculpture. And I didn’t do any work. I thought that if you were talented, it would just come out. And it was almost like that for me in my regular classes. I didn’t have to work terribly hard to get very good grades. I was an honor student throughout. But I didn’t have any handle for sculpture. I didn’t know sculpture. I didn’t watch sculpture. I didn’t know sculptors. So I made a really terrible project and I got a C. And I thought, “Well, that just proves I don’t have enough talent.” Now, how wrong can you be? I say now that talent is drawing you to something enough to do a lot of it and get good. It’s not so much a talent, but an inclination.

Debbie Millman:
At that point what did you want to do professionally?

Nell Irvin Painter:
What did I want to do professionally? I don’t think I knew. I don’t know. But I was under no pressure to make a decision. My parents were with me and taking care of me, so I didn’t feel like I had to decide.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated with an honors degree in anthropology?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I did. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
At that point, were you considering becoming an anthropologist or did you just know you were going to go on to get advanced degrees?

Nell Irvin Painter:
It wasn’t as hard as that because my parents had already moved to Ghana and I was going to join them, so I didn’t have to make any decisions at that time. I started graduate school in Ghana in African studies, and then there was the coup d’etat and the end of African socialism and Kwame Nkrumah’s pan africanism. And all the reasons that the Irvins had gone there in the first place. So we came home and I finished my master’s degree, still not exactly knowing what to do, at UCLA in African history. I had always liked history. My high school class was tested up the wazoo and I tested at the 99th percentile in interest in history and the 99th percentile in ability in history. But at that point, coming out of high school, the only history that I knew that was recognized as American history was just so Jim Crow. I knew that it was full of lies and I didn’t want to do it. So anthropology was the place to study other people besides white people. And I loved anthropology. So I got my MA in African history and I was actually admitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and that fell through. Well, it had to do with the then love of my life, which didn’t work out, thank heaven.

Debbie Millman:
Right. It’s always so heartbreaking when it’s happening and then after it’s like, what was I thinking?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That was not meant to be. Finally in ’69, my father said, “Okay. We are ready to pay for all the schooling you want, but only in the United States.” So that’s how I got to Harvard.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned being in Ghana with your parents. You wrote that the people of Ghana impressed you from the moment you stepped off the plane and that your experience there was one of the best things that ever happened to you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. And I still say a trillion years later that if I’m at all sane, it’s because I had those two years. Not only outside the United States, but also in a majority black country. And I have not been back. My father went back to Ghana with some friends and was very attracted to buying a house and staying there. But my father also was a real materialist. He said I couldn’t get clear title so he would not buy real estate in a place where his money would not be protected. But I did not go back. But I hear from people who are coming from Nigeria now or Ghana now, and it’s very different. Ghana is much more open to the world in ways that have made it, I think a little richer, but also mean that some of the bad things like anti-gay legislation and just reactionary stuff and even pressure for women to lighten their skin, all of these things have come with the opening since the ’60s, opening in the 21st century. So when I tell people that I was in Nigeria and Ghana in the 20th century, they look back and they say, “Oh, that was the good old days.”

Debbie Millman:
I understand when you were first there, you found being a member of the racial majority disorienting.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It was. Because even though I never lived in the South, thank heaven, I lived in a racist country in which race was the thing that bore down on me the most. And I used it in ways I didn’t realize until I got to Ghana to orient myself in humanity, in politics, even aesthetically. So when all that was withdrawn … In Ghana, everybody was black. The smart people were black, and the dumb people were black. And then the hardest of all was the mediocrities were black. Just everybody. So that didn’t work. So that in Ghana was where I first started really seeing issues of development and economics and the tensions in your ideals and the real world. So I learned so much there that I took into graduate school, and I took into my writing.

Debbie Millman:
When you were at Harvard, I believe that’s where you first met Nellie Y. McKay. Is that correct?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I know you had a deep friendship. You exchanged letters to each other for 30 years. You shared a friendship that sustained you both until her death in 2006. One thing that I thought was really interesting was how she helped you understand why despite your book … I believe your second or third book, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, winning the Black Caucus of the American Library Award. It wasn’t reviewed by the Women’s Review of Books. When she did that bit of sleuthing for you, what did she discover?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I couldn’t understand why this book … Even then in the ’90s, Sojourner Truth was known in women’s history and women’s studies, for heaven’s sakes. I was a recognized scholar. I was well-published. W.W. Norton published that book, so why not review it? So I asked Nellie, who was deeper in women’s studies, and she sleuthed around, and she found that … I think it was the editor told her that a couple of potential reviewers had trouble with the book. And I gather that trouble with the book was my insistence, which I’m doubling down on in a project to come, that Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman,” or, “Ain’t I a woman,” as I suppose it was southernized in the 20th century. Assuming that Sojourner Truth having been enslaved, she must have been a Southerner, which of course was wrong. The project I’m working on now is a series historical essays on Sojourner Truth called Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That. So it turns out that so many people, black women as well as white women, were, are invested in the slogan that a white woman journalist made up 12 years after Sojourner Truth spoke up in Akron, Ohio in 1851. People have told me, they say, “Why are you tearing down Sojourner Truth?” I said, “I’m not tearing down Sojourner Truth. I’m asking you to see more of her than a slogan.”

Debbie Millman:
And her arm bearing in a show of muscle. It was-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. A slogan from somebody else’s art. Frances Dana Gage produced a very dramatic story, which is much more dramatic than anything we have from Sojourner Truth. Because she didn’t read and write so everything we have quoting her comes from other people. And so she could serve this handy, sloganized purpose without knowing that Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker, that New York was a slave state, that there were other black women who were feminist and abolitionist. And some, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, were even more critical of white women as suffrage became a searing issue after the Civil War. So my point is that stopping with a slogan means that you miss out the richness of Sojourner Truth. She’s so much more.

Debbie Millman:
It really breaks my heart now that I know so much more about this story, that this is what she’s been known for, for almost entirely that refrain of a fake speech.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So we can keep the meaning, but we should jettison the slogan.

Debbie Millman:
After that book, you began to write more visually, and in 2006, you published Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. A narrative history whose illustrations are black fine art.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What inspired that evolution in your work?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth.

Debbie Millman:
And so during her lifetime, Sojourner Truth was rather astute about her own image. She commissioned photographs of herself when the technology was brand new.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
She sold cards with the slogan, I sell the shadow to support the substance.

Nell Irvin Painter:
To support the substance. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
How did that inspire you to take that step into more visual art?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, there are a couple of steps before that. So not having words from Sojourner Truth as a biographer, I had to try to find ways to understand her from her. So the answer was her photographs, which she controlled. So one of her favorite photographs, and my favorite photograph is Sojourner Truth sitting with her knitting on her lap. And one of the chapters, one of the essays in the new book is “Sojourner Truth Knitter.” I’m a knitter too. And the story of knitting and black women and white women in knitting, it’s very enjoyable for me as a knitter. So anyway, I got involved in Sojourner Truth visually. And that is what got me to art school. And by the time I got to art school, I was also very much involved with art history. And one of the teachers said … I remember this was at RISD, at the Rhode Island School of Design. Thinking that there was no black art before Basquiat.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, god.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And I thought, oh, boy. Because even when I was a kid, my father’s favorite artist was Elizabeth Catlett. And he actually went to Mexico and came back with an autographed print of hers. So I grew up with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. The modernists who were deeply invested actually in socialist realism you would say. But at any rate, I knew that the art was there. I didn’t know all the artists I finally found and included, but I knew the art was there and I also knew that black artists had said that they wanted to show the unsung beauty of black Americans, and that there were different versions of prominent people like Frederick Douglass, for instance. So in Creating Black Americans, you don’t get a picture that says, this is Frederick Douglass. You get more than one rendition. And I tell you who the artist is and what the artist said they wanted to show. And so of course, that changes over time. So art made my point about various ways of seeing and processing and representing historical figures. And the artist could put the passion in that I didn’t feel that I could as a scholarly historian. I wrote in a way that I wanted any reader, whether you agreed with me or not, to feel that you were reading solidly researched history. So the artist gave the other side.

Debbie Millman:
I really think that that book opened the door to so much of the recognition and popularity of black modern art today, which is some of the most popular art and certainly the most interesting art that’s happening.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good. Good.

Debbie Millman:
The impetus for your award-winning 2010 New York Times bestselling book, The History of White People–

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. It is not award-winning. The History of White People, it didn’t win anything.

Debbie Millman:
Nothing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That was such a hard book for people to deal with.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Nell Irvin Painter:
People would ask me as I was writing, “Are you writing it as a black person?” I would say, “I’m writing it as a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m glad it was a bestseller, but I’m just horrified at the idea that it didn’t win any awards. But in any case, it came from a question in your mind. And I’m wondering if you can share what the question was and what you discovered.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That’s how my book start. My Sojourner Truth book started with the tension between the verbal and the visual renditions of Sojourner Truth. It seemed that there was a tension there because as she was quoted, she was the black power, Sojourner Truth. But as she showed herself, she was a perfectly composed bourgeois. What’s going on here? So that’s the question that started Sojourner Truth. With The History of White People, it seems like Russia’s after its neighbors all the time. And at the turn of the 21st century Russia was after its neighbors in the Caucasus, which is also a long-standing pursuit. Russian imperialism has turned toward the South as well as toward the East. And so Russia had bombed the bejesus out of Grozny, which is the capital of Chechnya, which is the North Caucasus. And there was this really arresting photograph in the front page of the Times of bombed out Grozny. And I thought, well, that looks like Berlin in 1945. What is going on here?

I could find out what was going on there. I could read the paper. But then I thought, well, why are white Americans called in effect, Chechens? White Americans are called Caucasian. And how many Americans even know where the Caucasus exists, where they are? Who are the people? Nobody knew. And I asked a couple of my white friends, “Why are white people called Caucasians?” And they said, “Well, we don’t know. We thought we should know, so we never ask anybody.” And so it was this big mystery. So I delved in and tried to track it down, and I ended up for that part of the book in Germany.

Debbie Millman:
And what did you discover as the way it became socialized?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, this German story, Göttingen University there, the great anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had a collection of skulls. And he is one of the founders of what we consider race science. I still call it race science because it was the science of the times. This is the enlightenment which invented race for people. And so Blumenbach decided that there were five varieties of mankind, and he embodied each one in a skull because he had a big skull collection. And his prettiest skull was from a woman who had been raped to death in Moscow. A woman from the Caucasus, from Georgia, which is the Southern Caucasus. But it was a really pretty skull. It didn’t have dings. The teeth were good. She had never been pregnant, I assume. A very young woman. And in Blumenbach’s scheme, he put the varieties on horizontal. He didn’t rank them vertically. It was all horizontal. And it was physical aesthetics.
So the most beautiful variety was the Caucasian. At the ends were the Asian and the African. In between were the American and the Malay, which is South Sea Islands. So it was a ranking that had to do with beauty and also into a millennia-long slave trade from Ukraine, from the Caucasus into the Eastern Mediterranean. And that trade actually reached Venice and reached Italy, which was a slave society for probably for a millennia. Yeah. Certainly Greece. And the ideal of the beautiful young sexually vulnerable girl, woman is a long-standing ideal, which we recognize in the Odalisque.

Debbie Millman:
Now, this is probably a question that you get asked a lot. You might even hate it. But I do want to ask, as a species, humans are pretty barbaric.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
A lot of times.

Nell Irvin Painter:
A lot of times. Yeah.

Debbie

Millman:
More often than not, it feels.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Certainly one feels that now.

Debbie Millman:
I was on safari in Tanzania a couple of years ago and learned that the zebra don’t hunt prey. Zebras are vegetarians. And while they’re hunted, they do not hunt. Why as a species are we not more gentle with each other? Why do we seem almost genetically predisposed to want to harm or enslave or create rank as a species? Why is that something that is so deeply ingrained in who we are?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, obviously I have no answer to that. However, I would add that that’s not all there is to it. People are capable of kindness and solidarity. But I also notice … We spend a lot of time up in the Adirondacks, and I see animals there. I see wasps and things like that. And they go at each other with a ferocity that is really scary. And so we’re not the only ones in the world who are capable of cruelty. But I don’t have an answer of why that is. I do see in human history that I brushed up against in writing The History of White People, that the story of people is moving, is migrating. Can I use the F word here?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Go right ahead.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It’s walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck. So we’re always churning our DNA and also bumping up against each other, and that’s part of it. But the question you ask doesn’t just pertain to people whom groups define as others. People are capable of doing astonishing cruelty to people like their wives.

Debbie Millman:
Their children.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Their pets.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
From an evolutionary point of view, I just don’t understand why we just can’t be more like the zebra.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Well, there would be too many of us for one thing. There already are too many of us. So maybe balancing the women’s role as creator and the man’s role of keeping the population down. I don’t know. I do not know. And I don’t know of anybody who does know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I just think about this all the time now is I see what we’re doing to each other in the world. What we’ve always been doing, but right now, the amount of cruelty that we’re facing feels unsurmountable. But I’ll talk a little bit more about that later when we get to your most recent book, because you talk about it quite a lot.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I will say one thing here. That in order not to lose my mind, I do not spend time on stuff I can’t change. I try to focus on the state and local. And there are good things going on. I live in New Jersey. There are good things going on in the state and local here. And I give money to local causes and local nonprofits. So I try to keep my gaze focused below the national and international levels. A few weeks ago, I was in New Haven talking with the group who foster young people. Not foster literally, but ease their way into staying into K through 12 and then going on. And in the questions, one man said, “What can we do about all this book banning?” And he’s wringing his hands about stuff that was going on in the south, in Florida, in Texas and so forth. And I said, “We can’t do anything because those policies are made on the local level. If you want to change that policy, you have to run for school board in Florida.” So I would say find a better worry. Find a better worry.

Debbie Millman:
The publication of The History of White People marked a real watershed moment in your life. After the book was published, you decided, despite already having a PhD from Harvard University, you wanted to go back to school to get another bachelor’s degree.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But this time in fine art. What inspired that decision?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Two things. Sojourner Truth and that stay in the art history library had really reawakened my attraction to images and imagery. And the other thing was I just wanted to do it and I could. My husband takes care of me. I didn’t have to worry about … I had the money. And art school is, as you know, absurdly expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And the degree you come out with is not going to pay your rent. So luckily, I didn’t have to worry about my rent. And I wanted the degrees plural, because I wanted to be professional. I wanted to be professional in the way I was professional as a historian. That has not been totally smooth. But with I Just Keep Talking, you see where I got to in ways that I could put the two together. It took me 10 years to put my historical self together with my visual artist self. It was very bumpy. And even now, I cannot go from concentrating on writing to concentrating on drawing without a week or so of just changing gears.

Debbie Millman:
You got your BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. And though you originally didn’t know if you wanted to go to graduate school, you ultimately realized that you did. And you’ve written that this was because you wanted to work harder than the kids did. You wanted to be more intense than the kids were. And you thought graduate school would do that for you. Did it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. It did. It did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tell people, getting a PhD from Harvard in history was a piece of cake in comparison.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that now? How is that possible?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I guess the easiest way is to say that as a historian, I knew what the values and the standards were. In art I did it. So some of the art that I looked at when I was an undergraduate just looked like piles of stuff to me. I didn’t understand how you use visual archives as opposed to how you use historical archives. And I was too tight and too focused on what I call discursive meaning when I started. What I came to later on in graduate school was a real loosening up, and that was something I really had to do.

Debbie Millman:
You went to the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What did the students make of an African-American woman in her 60s alongside them in class?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I think nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That is not true of everyone. We were very small. We were 12. But a couple of them felt old because they were like 31, 32. But I was just this old lady and my bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing. And the thing that really summed it up, at the end of the school year, we were going to take our picture. So everybody assembled at the given time, and nothing happened, and nothing happened and people weren’t there. I am always on time. But I finally said, “Look, I have to take care of this thing in my studio. Call me when you’re ready to take the picture.” And as soon as I left, they took the picture.

Debbie Millman:
Despite all the accolades you got as an historian, you often got what you referred to as stinging criticisms that were one long tearing down in addition to this other utterly disrespectful behavior. One professor even told you that you would never be an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m assuming that that was a white cis heterosexual man. In any case, why did he say that to you, and how did you respond and how did you recover from that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. His name was Henry. He was a printmaking teacher. And this was my first semester at RISD and I was feeling my way. I was not an experienced printmaker by any means, but I tried hard. And he called me dogged, and it wasn’t like, “Oh, you are dogged. You are very hardworking.” No, it was, “You are dogged.” So I called him out on it. Because I knew teaching, and if you’re a good teacher, you don’t say things like that.

So I said, “Henry, that’s bullshit.” He said, “You may sell your work, you may have collectors, you may be in museums, you may have a gallery, but you will never be an artist.” And that stung. I would say-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, my god. Yeah.

Nell Irvin Painter:
What saved me was I had friends at Yale. They put me back together again.

Debbie Millman:
You did a fellowship there, didn’t you?

Nell Irvin Painter:
After I graduated from RISD. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You did a lot of research after that experience and discovered how many people have either been told that they’ll never be an artist or have known somebody who was told that they would never be an artist, whether it’s a fine artist or a poet or a playwright or any field in the arts. And you about this in relation to what you refer to as the talent mystique, the great man mystique and the genius mystique. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I can talk about that actually more easily through publishing. Because the publishing world right now, people are tearing their hair. Oh, it’s terrible. All this consolidation. And in the good old days, an editor could foster a writer, even though the writer was not selling out, and just wait until that writer flourished. And now there’s just, oh, it’s so terrible, the marketing. But at the same time, the early reviews came through. I got two really good, strong early reviews from Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly. And another list maker said, “These are the 45 best books by women of color this spring.” And I thought, “45? Wow. That’s fantastic.” So I wonder if my 45 best books by women of color is related to the good old days gone by when the good old days gone by were white male writers. In the 20th century, there was a tiny sliver of publications by white women. There was almost nothing well known by black women. The breakthrough was with Toni Morrison. And that is like in the 1980s. When I am with other black women writers and they talk about what made the difference from them, they talk about when they were girls and they read Toni Morrison. When I was a girl, there was no Toni Morrison.

Debbie Millman:
It’s astonishing how often I hear from artists, writers, designers, playwrights, musicians, how someone along the way in a position of power or authority told them that they couldn’t be who they ended up becoming and did it anyway. Whether that be doggedness or resilience or just desperation because you can’t do anything else. What do you think those teachers and professors make of your success now? Despite what that teacher said about even if you do this, and even if you do that, you would not be an artist. You are an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I am an artist.

Debbie Millman:
And a successful artist. What do you think they make of that now?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know what Henry makes of it. He was so pigheaded. He says, “I have to say what I know to be true.” So he probably still knows that to be true. But I had a teacher both at RISD and at Mason Gross, who would come into our RISD crits and say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint. There’s nothing on the walls that’s interesting.” And I was mortified. I believed her. I was so pathetic.

Debbie Millman:
Pathetic because you believed her, or pathetic because you felt at the time your work was bad?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I believed her. That’s the crucial thing about the arts, because there are no standards. And I finally decided that what counts as value in art? What is good art? It’s the market that decides. There are no freestanding standards of quality in the art world. So at any rate, she would say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint.” I thought, oh, woe is me. But years later, after I published Old in Art School and she recognized herself, she came up to me with great pleasure. She was so glad to see me. All right. Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you write in Old in Art School, which did win an award-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes. It did.

Debbie Millman:
That one I know for sure. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you write about the difference between objective criteria in history, but how art is virtually all subjective and state this. “What I really liked was stepping away from the tyranny of the archive and being able to move into visual fiction and make things up.” It seems-

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s my great pleasure in art.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It seems like at first it was terrifying, and then it became freeing. Would that be correct to say?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know if it was terrifying. It was challenging in that I knew that I needed to be better at it, but I also knew the way to be better at it was to do it. And if I were teaching in art school, I would say make the art only you can make and make a lot of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You say that that’s crucial for an artist. “Make your own art, make art only you could make and make a lot of it,” is one of my favorite quotes of yours.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It does seem unthinkable to me as a teacher in an art school … Although I teach branding, which is an art, but it’s not a fine art. I couldn’t imagine telling a student that what they were doing had no meaning or value. It just feels like that’s telling a person that they have no meaning or value. And it feels just epically unfair. You are now exhibiting your work all over the world. You’ve had numerous solo shows. You’ve been included in a long list of group shows. You’re a part of many public collections. So I just want to say congratulations to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
And thank you for showing up all those bigots and assholes. But I do want to talk to you about your brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. And you begin the book with a quote by Elizabeth Alexander from her book, The Trayvon Generation. You quote her and state, “Art and history are the indelibles.” Why that particular quote?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I have been such a long admirer of her as a poet and a writer. So she was my host in 2012 at Yale, for instance. So she moves easily back and forth between the visual and the verbal. That is what I wanted to capture. The strength of … She’s really well known now so if I say she said something, yeah, it must be true. And since my book does both the visual and the verbal, I wanted her imprimatur saying, yes, that’s what we need to do.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking features your artwork alongside your writing. And in the essay what 18th and 19th century intellectuals saw in the time of Trump, you state, “For a long time, I assumed that going to an art school and making art separated me from my former vocation as a historian.” But it seems now that you fully integrated both of your practices as an artist and as a historian. Do you feel as comfortable in one as another and in that center of the Venn diagram? Comfortably center in that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good question. And I’m more comfortable as a writer because I’m better known. When I go into art spaces, I feel viewed as just a little old black lady because people don’t know who I am. And even when I was a la-di-da historian, I could go to history meetings and if I wasn’t wearing my badge that had my name with Princeton on it, I was just a little old black lady. Part of my having to flop around and find a place was that my work is sometimes called illustration, which is a bad word. Illustration is inferior to painting. It’s inferior to fine art. And I felt bad about that for a long time. But in 2022, I was at PAFA, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to make another lithograph at Brodsky. And I fell in with a teacher of illustration, and he taught me about editorial illustration. And so I say, that’s what I do now. I do editorial illustrations.

Debbie Millman:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And as somebody who’s been in the commercial art world for a very long time, 40 plus years at this point, I can say that if anybody referred to me as an illustrator, I’d be really proud.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, really? Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Some of the greatest illustrators of our time, Christoph Niemann and Barry Blitt and Maira Kalman. She’s also both an illustrator and an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. She was one of our great inspirations.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that they’re making some of the best work in the world right now.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking is a collection of both formal and more informal writing, and it offers deep commentary on a variety of subjects from history to visual culture. I know you talk a bit about this in the coda, but can you tell us more about your methodology for assembling the collection and what you’re hoping readers will, no pun intended, draw most from it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I took probably three weeks or so at MacDowell just trying to assemble it because there’s much that’s left out. So there had to be relevance to now. So most of the pieces are 21st century pieces, though there are some older pieces that still ring true, like the one from the ’80s about affirmative action.

Debbie Millman:
Especially true now. Especially true.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Exactly. So they had to stand on their own, but also be related to the other things in the book. I depended on my social media people a lot. I would say I’m putting this together and I have essays on history, but I also have essays on southern history. And I started my historical careers as southern historian. So I know southern history, and I know it’s not the same as US history. So I said to my people … Then I was just on Facebook. How should I organize this? Should I put southern history in history? And some of the people said, “No, no, no, it’s separate. It’s different.” They finally ended up by saying, “Well, there should be a section called history, and then there should also be a section called Southern history.” And that’s how I finally did it. And then there was the question of the art, and some of the essays needed art that didn’t exist. So then at Yaddo, I made a lot of different drawings, not all of which got into the book. So I worked back and forth between the words and the images. I think being in art made a difference in the way I start writing, because I’m very likely now to start writing by hand, which I didn’t do before.

Debbie Millman:
Does it feel different?

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter:

It does. It feels slower. And a way to get into questions that were not in my mind, questions that may have no answers. Like your question about why are people so mean? It has no answer, but it’s a really good question.

Debbie Millman:
And I think it’s important to talk about it because I think we need to find the answer.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
In your introduction, you talk about W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of twoness. T-W-O-N-E-S-S. And how you experienced it differently. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your understanding and experience of that twoness.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sure. The quote from 1903 is about the Negro, and I grew up as the Negro capital N, of course. But it was not a bad word at all. It was the progressive word as opposed to colored. So when Du Bois wrote, it was about being the Negro in a situation in which you’re in the minority, and how does it feel to be a problem? But I didn’t know when I went to art school that my otherness would be as being old. And that made such a difference. So when people talk about black artists, and they mean black artists now in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, it’s very different. This summer. I’m going to be 82 years old. So I have been around for a long time, and a lot of the people who were young with me are dead or are not in good shape now.

So I have rather few book prizes because when I was the age of young and up-and-coming historians, book prizes were not being given to black women. And then by the time I get into the age when black women are getting prizes, they are going to younger artists and younger writers. So I look back at modernists like Margo Humphrey, for instance, a fantastic printmaker who never got her due because she was flourishing in the time before the country could see her greatness. So in a way, I am in that cohort, but I’m also in a younger cohort that looks at me if they don’t know who I am as just the old lady. It’s deadly enough to be an old lady of any sort, but to be an old black woman is to be the picture of impotence. Of someone who cannot do anything for you. But the great thing about living in Essex County, New Jersey, particularly living for many, many years in Newark, now we live at the next suburb, which is East Orange. In Newark there’s black power and there are lots of black people, including black women, including old black women who are powerful people. And they don’t get ignored or swept under the rug. But that has not been my experience through much of my life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope that changes certainly with this book, which it deserves to be acknowledged. I want to talk to you about a few more essays. In the 27-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you for your careful reading. I really appreciate this.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was an honor and a pleasure. It’s a fantastic book.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you. In the 2017 essay, “Long Division,” you write about the construction of race through the lens of the work and thinking of writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and the section on race as a determinant for the othering or belonging of people in American culture felt very pertinent to our current today cultural climate. And I’m curious, how do you see us handling this now in the wake of the possibility of a second Trump term?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I see lots of handling. At least two different kinds of handling. One is that we go deeper into Trumpiness. You can’t talk about diversity, you can’t talk about race. You can’t talk about history. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. And we are going to enforce this through the force of arms. That’s one way.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question, especially from the essay. It shouldn’t be this close, but there’s good news too.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Close, yes. But when you considered it in the last, what? Eight presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote. There are more of us than there are of them. We don’t often think of it that way, but it’s been happening. And I would say that even before Dobbs, even before the in vitro of cultivation, conception.

Debbie Millman:
Conception.

Nell Irvin Painter:
The Alabama IVF yeah. Which are going to already have been good for Democrats as women reject this kind of triage between women and fetuses. I also suspect that Trump is going to self-destruct. There’s just too much going on. And he’s been incoherent in so many ways. I don’t think that is going to end the devilment in our country, which antedate him. I don’t know if you can see behind me on this side on the wall, that’s American whiteness since Trump, which I made in 2020. And one of the pages says, weren’t you paying attention? Here’s George Wallace. Here’s Buchanan. Here are these people. And they have been telling you about white supremacy. Historians have been telling you about white supremacy. It is a longstanding ideology in this country. And so as I say, I don’t think Trump is going to make it, your next statement is, oh, I’m so relieved you’re optimistic. No. I am not optimistic. I have been black in the United States too long to be optimistic. I just don’t think that some of the worst is going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Does it worry you though that it’s the electoral college that elects the president as opposed to the many, many more Democrats there are in this country?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. Because as I said, I don’t worry about things I can’t change. If there is a movement … And it would have to come out of Congress, I would support that. I would give my money. I would support whatever Congress people or persons who are pushing for that. But I don’t see any reason to worry about things I can’t change.

Debbie Millman:
At the end of the book, you have a visual essay titled “I Knit Socks for Adrienne.” And you said that particular essay is the most personally declarative piece of art you have ever made. More personal even than your self-portraits.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
And is that because you come out as a public knitter?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely that. It’s absolutely that. I spoke to you a lot about being othered as an old woman, and I had held on to this fear that … I do knit in public. I

have knitted in public for a long time. I knitted in department meetings, I knit in history meetings. I do knit in public. But to present myself as a knitter, that was until that time, a step too far. And now that I’ve done it, I’m really happy because there are so many other women who are so happy that I am out as a knitter. And one of the things that will go into the Sojourner Truth book, the section on knitting, is also about respect for women’s work.

Debbie Millman:
And the craft that goes into so much of it.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
What does knitting give you as an art form that isn’t quite satisfied by your other visual practices?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, for one thing, I can knit while I listen to a book, I can knit on the train, I can knit on an airplane and I have something to show for it. Now, in terms of the visual satisfaction that is going to a yarn store. This is typical of knitters. I have more yarn than I could ever use in three more lifetimes. But the tactile sensation, the textures, the colors, and then the meditative work, all of that is profoundly satisfied in a way I think that feeds my reptilian brain rather than my history brain.

Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting. It’s so interesting about creators that like that tactile and how I have a craft closet filled with felt and all kinds of fabric and thousands of colored pencils. It’s that tactileness-

Nell Irvin Painter:
And you open the door and you see all those colors and it makes you happy.

Debbie Millman:
It makes me feel happy. Absolutely. Absolutely a dopamine rush. Now, you said that your next project is a new biography of Sojourner Truth. Will that also include your artwork?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. But I have two projects and then I’m going to retire. The first one is-

Debbie Millman:
Sure. Sure. Is what I say to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, really.

Debbie Millman:
But tell us about the project.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker And She Didn’t Say That. And so since I and then two other scholarly biographers have published the biographies you need to find out about her life now I can talk around her life. So Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker. The pivot there is the moment when she goes to court to get her son back who was trafficked. And she couldn’t have done that if she were say, in Harriet Jacobs’ North Carolina because the laws had no provision for preventing human trafficking. So Sojourner Truth as a New Yorker, I believe that she carries that sense of herself as a citizen into her public life that we know her and appreciate her for. So the Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker is already contracted with Penguin. The book that I will be thinking about in the fall is about my life as someone who has spent important times overseas and then making layers of experience and thinking about myself as a black American, as American as outside the United States. That book doesn’t really have a title, and it shouldn’t yet. And it also doesn’t have a contract, which it shouldn’t yet.

But that’s the Roxane Gay part of me in a way that says, what I am saying, me is something that will interest you. And that took a big step. Not because I’m a professor at Princeton. Not because I publish with an important press. Not because I’ve had all these books. But because of what I think and what I say will be of interest to you. That was a gigantic step. And I’m not just talking about black people or race in America. I’m saying you will be interested in what I say about whatever I say. That was so hard.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, thank you so much. You did such a beautiful reading of my book. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You can read more about all of Nell’s books and writing and artwork on her website. nellpainter.com, her brand new book is titled, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
David, I understand that you are planning to title the last book you ever write Basically Fine?

David Remnick:
No, I think I’m going to title it Home By 10.

Debbie Millman:
Well, tell us the story of Basically Fine.

David Remnick:
I have no idea what basically fine is.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was when you interviewed Kenzaburō Ōe and you sent the article to-

David Remnick:
Oh, my God. How do you remember these things? I’m going to confess to you, and this is going to be a problem for you. If I wasn’t married to the woman I married to, I would not remember any of my life. The nature-

Debbie Millman:
Fortunately, I know your wife.

David Remnick:
Yes. Anything before my wife, I have no idea. So we’ll struggle here for the next some minutes, but I’m not kidding around. Kenzaburō Ōe, like a lot of stories for journalists, is somebody that … Kenzaburō Ōe won the Nobel Prize, Japanese author, I think just died very recently. I was assigned to write a profile of Kenzaburō Ōe when I was a writer for The New Yorker and Tina Brown was the editor. I really struggled with this piece. His English was about, it’s better than my Japanese, but it was not great. I came home and I did not have what I like best in this world other than my friends and family and peace and love and understanding, which is a full notebook. A half-filled notebook is hell on Earth, and yet I wrote the piece anyway because that’s what one does. I went into my editor, Jeff Frank’s office, and I saw the note from Tina Brown and it said, “Jeff, I guess Remnick’s piece is basically fine.” Let me just say in the annals of editor reaction, basically fine sucks.

Debbie Millman:
You might not remember anything.

David Remnick:
It sucks really bad. I tried to put it out of my mind, but you thankfully now have reinserted it.

Debbie Millman:
Just to prepare you, that might be happening a few more times. You were born in New Jersey in what you-

David Remnick:
I was, deepest, darkest.

Debbie Millman:
No, I’m going to be bringing up a lot of things that you’ve said before.

David Remnick:
That’s all right.

Debbie Millman:
I need you to know right now that you can trust me that the sources are good. You’ve described your upbringing as an East Coast version of what is seen in the film, American Graffiti, marching bands, football teams, and very middle class in a blue collar Springsteenian way.

David Remnick:
That’s right. No ocean.

Debbie Millman:
You went to kindergarten in a yeshiva. That doesn’t feel particularly Springsteenian.

David Remnick:
Well, from where I come from it is. My parents sent me to a religious school for a year because I was large and impatient and I missed the cutoff date. Do they still have cutoff dates for kids? So I missed the cut-off date, so I was a little on the old side to be waiting yet another year. So they sent me to a yeshiva in Patterson, New Jersey and it was called Yavne. I had my mouth washed out with soap by Mrs. Wool.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

David Remnick:
She should rot in hell. I think I-

Debbie Millman:
Very yeshiva-like.

David Remnick:
By the way, not just any soap. You know that lava soap, which is combination soap and a stone?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

David Remnick:
It was that. I think I said a bad word of some kind like tuchus. That would get you to skip a grade now. Got my mouth washed out with soap.

Debbie Millman:
You were a newspaper junkie as a child and began reading The Village Voice at your neighborhood 7-Eleven.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
I didn’t even know 7-Eleven sold The Village Voice.

David Remnick:
Well, I didn’t, strictly speaking, buy it either. I would sit on the floor of the 7-Eleven and read it cover to cover and that’s what I thought I’d do with my life. I thought even as I got older, I think The Village Voice really had two big moments. When it was first invented, it was invented as a product of the ’60s, obviously. In fact, it’s a new book about … The Village Voice is said to be very, very good. I haven’t read it yet.

Debbie Millman:
It’s covered on today’s New Yorker website.

David Remnick:
I don’t read it. I hear The New Yorker website is excellent, and the magazine is said to be good too.

Debbie Millman:
It’s pretty good.

David Remnick:
Funny cartoons and whatnot. No photographs on the cover though.

Debbie Millman:
Caption contest.

David Remnick:
They have that too. I should subscribe.

Debbie Millman:
I’m really actually hoping you’re going to give me some tips.

David Remnick:
Unsubscribing? Oh, I’ve got a lot of tips on that.

Debbie Millman:
No, no, no, on how to get to the top three in the caption contest. That’s a bucket list item for me.

David Remnick:
Okay. Can I just digress from The Village Voice for a second? Occasionally, I’m invited to a fancy thing, and not very often and once in a while I’ll go because curiosity killed the cat. So I went to this thing and I was introduced to then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and he says, “Hello. Hello.” I was very polite, well brought up in New Jersey and whatnot. He said, “I’ve tried to win the cartoon caption contest dozens and dozens of times and I’ve never won.” Now prior to this conversation, I had had what my dearly departed mother would call a big drink. So I said, “Wait a minute, you’re the mayor of New York. You are the richest person in New York and you want to win the fucking caption contest too?” He just didn’t find this funny at all and he said, “Yes, yes.”

Debbie Millman:
We take it very seriously.

David Remnick:
I think he take himself very seriously. So anyway, I worshiped The Village Voice because it was … The New York Times is the weather and it was the establishment word and all that, and The Voice was this other thing and filled with writers who wrote about themselves. There were different spots in politics and there was feminism. What was that? There was all this stuff about race, although there were very few Black writers, God knows a condition not limited to just The Village Voice at that time. Even in North Jersey, you don’t feel like you’re sitting here in Williamsburg or Manhattan or whatever. It feels a million miles away. So to listen to WBAI or WNEW FM for music or the Caribbean station or this, that, and the other thing, radio is a big part of this imagining another life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you were a child insomniac and you’ve described yourself as an adolescent, no sleeper, all night listener, and eyes wide open, ceiling-staring dreamer.

David Remnick:
That wasn’t cocaine at work. It was just a sense of wanting to be elsewhere and knowing that there was this world across the river. Now, a person with a real imagination, someone like John Updike or name your favorite writer-

Debbie Millman:
Roxane Gay.

David Remnick:
Yeah, would certainly have had the imagination to know that Hillsdale, New Jersey had its own emotional depths and interests as Updike made of his Pennsylvania. I did not. I did not. New York City was where I wanted to be from the time I began going with my parents to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn and great grandmother in Coney Island and in Trump houses, by the way.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Are you still an insomniac?

David Remnick:
Pardon me?

Debbie Millman:
Are you still an insomniac?

David Remnick:
Oh, no. I sleep like a rock because I live here. Mission accomplished.

Debbie Millman:
You started writing for your high school newspaper-

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
… The Smoke Signal when you were 13. From what I understand, none of your classmates were interested in contributing to the paper.

David Remnick:
No.

Debbie Millman:
So you wrote and edited the entire paper by yourself. Is it true you made up different bylines so it wouldn’t seem as if you were writing it on your own?

David Remnick:
I still do. Are you a fan of Rachel Aviv?

Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.

David Remnick:
That’s me. She’s good, isn’t she? She’s really good.

Debbie Millman:
She’s my favorite.

David Remnick:
Patrick Radden Keefe? Me too. Me too.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you put this together yourself via old-school layout and paste-up techniques on your kitchen table. How was it printed? Was it mimeographed?

David Remnick:
Well, let me tell you how paper was. You printed it out and you cut it and used scissors and glue. It was a big [inaudible 00:09:20] It was a big deal and it was a terrible … First of all, beginning with the title. It was called The Smoke Signal because we were the Pascack Valley Indians. They aren’t anymore. I think they’re like the Warriors or something, and The Smoke Signal became the I don’t know what else, but that came-

Debbie Millman:
The Signal, right?

David Remnick:
… 30 years later, not The Signal. That would be the CIA newspaper. I didn’t do it completely by myself, but nobody was really terribly interested in this. That could have been the first signal that the newspaper business was in trouble.

Debbie Millman:
You also got a job for what you’ve described as, quote, “writing stupid little articles for one of the community giveaway papers-“

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
“… featuring information about school board meetings,” but you also described it, and I love this, as the most romantic thing ever.

David Remnick:
Well, I left my house and I asked people impertinent questions and they answered them. In other words, I think reporters discover this very early on or anybody that has a medium that they can put between themselves and the world, a canvas, a notebook. It’s a form of permission. It’s a form of permission, and to have that permission at a preposterously young age and to have what seemed like ancient important people like 40-year-old school board members answer your questions, it was very suggestive of something exhilarating.

Debbie Millman:
You also started to play guitar around that time.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
I believe your first instrument was something you called a gazinta guitar.

David Remnick:
A gazinta guitar would mean a bigger healthy guitar. No, I had a crap guitar, but remember, what was the guitar? The guitar was like a notebook. The guitar is a way to be a part of this thing that was happening that you wanted to be a part of. I wouldn’t have picked up a flute, well, unless you wanted to be Jethro Tull.

Debbie Millman:
I was going to say Ian Anderson.

David Remnick:
Yeah, Jethro and Ian Anderson, but I just desperately wanted to … Look, I grew up in very, in all seriousness, what struck me as a very dull, conventional, hemmed in environment with a mother who was quite ill, who had very serious MS, and how she managed to this day I don’t know, and a father who soon would be quite ill and not be able to work when he hit about in his 50s. There was a certain desire to be another, to enter the big world however deceptive that might be. That certainly was the animating spirit of everything I did.

I learned about that other world through various mediums. One of them was very early bumping into the obvious music, most particularly Bob Dylan, and then you’d listen to that and then that would throw you to reading Allen Ginsberg or, or, or, or, and it happens to a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of people in this room at a certain age, something sparks you, whether you read or listen or you have a friend that leads you in some way. So all these things were very important to me.

Debbie Millman:
How did your parents’ illnesses impact your ambition?

David Remnick:
Well, it suggested that at a very peculiar age early on, and I know I’m not alone in this and I’m far from in the global sense or even in the metropolitan sense, the most disadvantaged, but it suggested that the future would require me to help them. I was the older of two kids. My father struggled on for a while, but he was a dentist and he had very, very small dental practice. At a certain point when he was, I don’t know … I think he lied about it for years because he had a tremor in his hand. His wife is sick, he has two kids to support and he’s screwed in the conventional making-a-living sense. I think he lied about it for a while, but patients, I think you all know as dental patients, we all have an identity as dental patients, that a dentist who comes at you with a shaking hand is not a good prospect for future business. It’s like a bad Buster Keaton movie.

So by the time I came back from Moscow in my late 20s or 30, whatever I was, they were all in debt and things collapsed. Again, I’m not weeping about this except I think back at them and they were much younger than me and they were probably terrified, but in my egomaniacal teenage imagination, I knew that I had to make a living.

Debbie Millman:
How did that impact the choices that you were making about what you wanted to-

David Remnick:
I couldn’t be a novelist. I couldn’t say, “You know what? My parents are going to stake me a little bit and I’m going to move into a tiny apartment with a roommate. I’m going to be the next pick your favorite novelist.” ‘That was not … I needed a job.

Debbie Millman:
What gave the sense that journalism would be a more secure option?

David Remnick:
Let’s just let that sit in the rest of my-

Debbie Millman:
I love that people laugh at my jokes, but that wasn’t really a joke.

David Remnick:
Well, first of all, the journalism business, even though I didn’t know it at the time, was fat and happy in those days. I’m sensing that there are some people here in the audience who are in a state of, when they think about the journalism business or the podcasting business, what’s the word we now use constantly, precarity, which I think became a word three years ago, I’m not sure before.

Debbie Millman:
Along with unprecedented.

David Remnick:
Exactly. As somebody who now is ostensibly in charge of a lot of people, I’m thinking about this all the time. In other words, I’m 65 years old, but I’m working with a lot of people who are 27 and 34, and they want to have an exciting, interesting, engaged life. That’s why they got into journalism and didn’t go work for Goldman Sachs. It wasn’t for the dough. They deserve to make a living, but the whole business model has exploded.

Back to your question, I was so lucky that right out of college, having had internships at Newsday and the Washington Post, I stuck around at the Washington Post. There aint many Washington Posts left anymore. A lot of my friends went to the Miami Herald, which was this terrific, flawed but terrific place to learn and to write and maybe spend your whole career there. There’s barely a Miami Herald.

Debbie Millman:
Do you feel that choosing journalism over becoming a novelist or a poet, I know you also wrote poetry, was a compromise?

David Remnick:
That would’ve really filled the coffers for my parents. They collected elegies.

Debbie Millman:
You could really raise a family on that income. Do you feel like it was a compromise?

David Remnick:
I did at the time. The self-proclaiming of oneself as a novelist, just, first of all, there was no fiction around. It’s not as if I had written anything. I always hear all the time people who say, “I’ve always wanted to write. I want to write,” and I would never answer this way because there’s a certain cruelty in it but, “Then write.” If you’re going to do that, you will find a way. You have to find a way. There are all kinds of writer biographies about how people found a way. Graham Greene was a night copy editor at a newspaper, I presume not making a hell of a lot of money, but enough to eat and house himself. He got up early and he pushed himself and he wrote novels and got started and he was good at it. There is no law that at any given moment there are going to be the world is going to treat you the way you want to be treated. That’s the fact. I needed a job.

Debbie Millman:
You went to Princeton University, which you said getting in was a miracle.

David Remnick:
To this day, I don’t understand it. If I presented the SAT scores that I did have now, there’s no way, and the high school I went to, nobody went to these places. Again, I don’t get it. There must have been some mistake.

Debbie Millman:
You studied-

David Remnick:
I’m not kidding around. I really don’t, I don’t get it. I was top of my class. There were other people at the top of the class and I don’t get it.

Debbie Millman:
They never reached out to you and asked you to come back?

David Remnick:
You know what? I had some stupid nervous interview with a Thai and I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
You studied Russian and French, majored in comparative literature. Your parents thought that majoring in comparative literature was weird.

David Remnick:
My father asked me, “What are you comparing?”

Debbie Millman:
What are you comparing?

David Remnick:
Good question. Smart guy. I was comparing it to dentistry as it happens and Tolstoy won. Concerning how I made my life later in the Russia biz a bit, here were the grades that I got in Russian, C plus and D, and then I got out of the Russian business. What happened was I had had some in high school. The only interesting course that my high school offered was Russian. I think some-

Debbie Millman:
Really?

David Remnick:
I don’t know. We this wonderful man named Frank Falk. I don’t know how he washed up at this high school, but he was teaching Russian. I thought, “Wow, cool.” I took it for four years, and when I got out after four years, I could say those boys are crossing these bridges or something like that and that was it. So I thought third year at least, right? I took the test they sometimes give you, the aptitude test, and Veronika Dolinko said to me, she’s the teacher, she said, “David, I think you should start from beginning.” I said, “Well, surely. Second year then,” and she said, “It is your funeral,” and so it was, and so it was, but I started all over again years later.

Debbie Millman:
I actually minored in Russian literature in English translation.

David Remnick:
There you go.

Debbie Millman:
Just to avoid that whole scenario.

David Remnick:
That’s fine.

Debbie Millman:
While at Princeton, you joined the University Press Club, in 1979, you co-founded the student newspaper, the Nassau Weekly.

David Remnick:
Still exists.

Debbie Millman:
I know. It’s incredible.

David Remnick:
It is amazing.

Debbie Millman:
You also became a stringer for the New Brunswick Home News, the Asbury Park Press- … and interned at the Washington Post and Long Island News Day. Overachiever much?

David Remnick:
Yeah, I guess. I have one quality that I will fess to. I have what my grandparents would call zitsfleysh. I put in front of a task, I will complete it. If I have to write a long piece in three days, I won’t move from the chair. It might not be all that good, but I will complete it.

Debbie Millman:
How are you able to write that fast?

David Remnick:
I don’t know. It’s like … Again, I will fess up to that. The quality somebody else will have to fess up to, I don’t know. It’s like asking how does a seal know how to balance a ball on his or her nose. It’s just that that thing that I learned how to do. I think part of it is that I didn’t learn how to be a reporter by blogging at home, which is another generational thing, and I’ve nothing against that, different qualities come out of it, but I had this traditionalist training of covering police at night and having to do things very quickly. I was a sports reporter for two years at the Washington Post, and you would have to cover ball games at night and write an account of the game in 20 minutes. So you build muscles. Why does a dancer jump higher than we do? Because they spend all day long training. They just do training early on.

Debbie Millman:
You interned at the Washington Post and then stayed there after graduation until they told you to go away for a year.

David Remnick:
I did, and I taught in Japan knowing no Japanese at a Catholic university. So they had this Jewish kid from Jersey at a Jesuit school in Tokyo. The day I landed, the three priests greeted me and they said that I may not date any students. Of course, I’m a really good boy and I said, “Okay.” So I had a rather monastic Japanese existence and I read like a book or two a day. I couldn’t speak any language. I think they wanted me to stay for two years and I stayed six months and I traveled around all over Southeast Asia on $5 a day and all the hashish you could pocket and came back and started a job at the Washington Post for real.

Debbie Millman:
Well, actually, you made a stop in Paris.

David Remnick:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
Clad in a Leon Russell T-shirt and $9 Converse sneakers.

David Remnick:
Yeah, those were good.

Debbie Millman:
You made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the subway.

David Remnick:
It’s the earlier time, but yes, I was a busker. So next time you’re on the subway and somebody … I don’t know. What are the most common songs you hear on the subway being sung to you? Give the person a little dough because they need it, but I had a great time. It was really fun.

Debbie Millman:
You made enough money to survive doing the busking.

David Remnick:
Oh, if you stay in a hotel for $4 a night, it doesn’t take long to make that much money.

Debbie Millman:
You returned after you’re a year away where you worked at the Washington Post for the next 10 years. You worked with the legendary Ben Bradley who was the editor of the Post during that time, and you said that you and most-

David Remnick:
And legendary podcaster, Malcolm Gladwell as well.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, I’m going to mention that a little bit. You said that you and most of your young colleagues saw Bradley the way one might see a great orca in a fish tank.

David Remnick:
Right. So they had glass. It was the beginning of the glass office period. He was in his post-Watergate period, so he was already a celebrity and he was incredibly handsome in an old wasp way.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. Jason Robards.

David Remnick:
Oh, my. Jason Robards didn’t come close to looking as good as Ben Bradley and all the presidents men. I’m sorry. He got the voice. He got the great voice and the whole thing and the cursing in fluent French. He had it all going on, but he was also in this late mannerist period. His accomplishments, the big accomplishments were a little behind. He was coasting a little bit, I’d say. He was enjoying it. He was enjoying life, but I was terrified of this guy and I had almost no contact with him. Even when half the hierarchy of the Washington Post came to Moscow, when I was there to interview Mikhail Gorbachev, Bradley just stayed home. He wanted no part of it. I think the jet lag was too much.

Debbie Millman:
What was the biggest thing you learned from him?

David Remnick:
Fearlessness in an editor is essential. If we can be serious for a moment, and I’ve been at this for a while now, and The New Yorker is many things, I hope. I hope it’s funny. I hope it has literary depth, but one thing it has to do is put pressure on power. It has to ask hard questions. It has to not pander to its audience in any way. It has to do hard work, and that’s not always … You don’t always sleep well. We have a lot of safeguards. Beyond the talent and the efforts of the writers, we also have an extraordinary checking department of really devoted people going over every, not just spellings and when So-and-So was born, but really beating the hell out of these pieces to make sure they’re right, but they also have to be fair.

We live in a world that is unbelievably confusing and difficult and contentious and polarized and mysterious, and it’s a high order to get things right. Bradley is among those journalists who knew that like in life, you wake up every day and you make one mistake after another and you have to proceed fearlessly. Otherwise, you’re just not going to have any value to the reader of the greater world.

Debbie Millman:
Given the state of politics in the US right now and the potential futures that may unfold, how worried-

David Remnick:
Again.

Debbie Millman:
Again. How worried are you about the validity of the news being questioned?

David Remnick:
I think it should be questioned.

Debbie Millman:
Well, in terms of what-

David Remnick:
You mean us being questioned?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, us being questioned as fake news, the whole way in which the news has been in many ways seen as false, lies, untruths.

David Remnick:
I think there’s one thing that we need to, at this late date, recognize, concede and deal with is that it’s not so much that Donald Trump is a, because that’s what you’re talking about, not only, but part of it, that Donald Trump is not just an autocrat and a demagogue, he’s also very talented demagogue and very … I’m not sure how talented an autocrat he is, but certainly a talented demagogue that other people trying the same stunts, we’ve seen them in American history and they haven’t been as successful. Our history is filled with demagogues and would-be autocrats and worse, racists, misogynists, and so on, but his ability to lock in to a certain base, psychology and comedy and a sense of arousal at a visceral level is astonishingly effective, maybe not in this room, I’m assuming not in this room.

Debbie Millman:
I’m hoping.

David Remnick:
I’m assuming fairly unanimously, but in the greater world, it is an astonishing thing that you have a president of the United States you can object to whatever particular issue you might have, whether it’s the Middle East or economics or immigration, whatever it is, but to compare one to the other and know that they are in a tie is I think that’s another thing that’s very, very hard for our writers and our readers to make sense of and understand is, how this could possibly be? How it is that we live in the same country that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and, in fact, many of the same voters then voted to elect Donald Trump president? That is an astonishingly complicated piece of business to understand. I think that we do our best and fail all the time and then have to wake up and try again.

Debbie Millman:
You were in Russia during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years. You returned to the US in 1992. You wrote your first book, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. You received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the George Polk Award. After writing over 150 major stories on everything from the Soviet dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky to the Indianapolis 500, you left the Post to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and you were hired by then editor Tina Brown. This was not your first attempt to work there. Can you tell us about the queer letter you sent editor William Shawn when you were still in college?

David Remnick:
This was really ballsy. So William Shawn … The New Yorker was a very, from the outside at least, a very insular special institution. I should say the one advantage of being a dentist’s son is that dentists have waiting rooms and waiting rooms at least then were filled with magazines. On Saturdays after my father closed up shop, I’d go in and read all the magazines. One magazine that I was not especially interested in was The New Yorker. It seemed not for me. It seemed not of the ’70s. I was interested in Rolling Stone, which now seems like of another time.

Debbie Millman:
No. Then it was a Bible.

David Remnick:
The invention of the insight of Rolling Stone was that it discovered that the counterculture was the culture. That’s a profound insight. Think of everything else, what you will or Jann Wenner, whatever, but that was an insight. It was a business, but it was exciting, certainly to a 16-year-old imagination and sitting in New Jersey. So I wasn’t interested in The New Yorker. Then I got to college. I had this teacher, a writing teacher named John McPhee, who, by the way, wrote about stuff that didn’t innately excite me, geology. Then I got into it and it was magnificent. It was like discovering Renaissance painting or something. I just, “Oh, how did I miss this all my life?”

Also, he was a writer as a teacher. He wasn’t a scholar of literature. He was an actual practicing writer. This was enormously influential to me and exciting. That’s what I wanted to do. So The New Yorker became more enticing. I wrote a query letter to William Shawn, who was a gnomic, genius, odd, distant figure. It was like writing a letter to Buddha, and you expected about the same result.

Debbie Millman:
Dear Buddha.

David Remnick:
Dear Buddha. “Dear Mr. Shawn, I’d like to write a profile of this guy Tom Page, who was a squash champion, who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, first family of Dayton Ohio, weirdly rich but had a squash court in his backyard. When he broke his right arm, his strong arm, he played with his left arm and he beat everybody anyway. He took an enormous amount of drugs, and it turned out he’s also quite disturbed and died very young, but he seemed like the profile of a deeply eccentric, interesting person.” I got back the following letter, “Dear Mr. Remnick, Mr. wind covers racket sports for us.” I loved the Mr. Wind part.

Debbie Millman:
love the racket sports part.

David Remnick:
I’m like, “Who the fuck is Mr. Wind?” and then it says, “Sincerely yours, William Shawn,” and that I don’t have this letter kills me to this day. Mr. Wind turned out to be Herbert Warren Wind, who wrote very, very, very, very long pieces about golf tournaments. The structure of the piece would be we came to the first hole.

Debbie Millman:
Go on.

David Remnick:
There would be many columns, which brought us to the second hole, which was a dogleg left of 343 yards, par four. People ask me, “Why are the pieces in The new Yorker so long?” and I say, “You should have seen it back when.” We used to do four-part series on literally on grains. Of course, there were four part series that were brilliant, Janet Malcolm or whatever, McPhee, but there’s a sociology to this too. So why are Dostoevsky and Dickens’ novels so long? There’s so long because in the 19th century, literary magazines were middle-class entertainment and Crime and Punishment being published in the Bell [inaudible 00:34:20] or Dickens being published in Blackstones. This was entertainment for the ascending middle-class audience that was going to read a novel, and they were entertaining and they were episodic and they were realist, and they went on. There’s a sociology to the art question.

William Shawn’s, one of his biggest challenges as an editor, and all editors have peculiar challenges to the time, one of his biggest challenges is, “I need to have enough editorial matter to go next to the gazillion ads I am publishing.” I don’t have that problem. I have a different kind of business.

Debbie Millman:
Well, when you took over in 1998, the magazine had lost an estimated $170 million since the Newhouse family had bought it in 1985. This was not the only precarious time in its history. I believe you are in possession of a letter from co-founder Raoul Fleischmann to a colleague stating that they needed to shut the magazine down in May of 1925, just three months after the debut issue.

David Remnick:
That was before the word precarity was around, but there it was.

Debbie Millman:
It took three years, but the magazine has actually been profitable since 2001.

David Remnick:
Look, I will say this, our business changed a lot. The old style of all magazines was subscriptions were very cheap so that it would get in a lot of hands, and so advertisers would reach as many people as possible of a certain kind of audience depending on what the magazine was or newspaper or television network or whatever it might be. The nature of advertising has changed, and it’s completely and utterly dominated by Google and Facebook. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but something like 75% of the ad market is to that and the rest is scraps. The result has been, in addition to other factors like Craigslist and so on, has been the decimation of mid-level newspapers.

There’s really only a few exceptions to this and magazines, and it’s tragic. It’s tragic. Not that every publication that’s been lost or diminished is perfect, but the changed landscape is deeply, deeply, deeply worrying for all kinds of reasons that we can talk about. The only other alternative that I know of at the moment is subscriptions, the same thing that television’s discovered. Luckily enough, fairly early, we changed our emphasis and we basically said to you, readers of the New Yorker, without saying it, that, “I can’t give this away anymore. You have to pay more than a cup of coffee a week to have this extraordinary thing in your hands or on your phone or whoever you choose to read it.”

The New Yorker, in fact, gives you a great deal more per day, per week than when Mr. Shawn was editing it, but the subscription model, now that we’ve had a lot of success with it for a while, now the subscription model is facing challenges too because you’ve all had this discovery. You’ve all woken up and go, “Wait a minute, I have Netflix, I have Paramount+, I have …” and then there are even apps now to get rid of or shave down your subscriptions.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, which was the original cable system.

David Remnick:
Exactly. So we’re in a time of real flux, and editors spend a lot more time thinking about business than they probably, if they’re being honest with themselves, would like to. They want to be thinking about writing and graphic design and all kinds of things, but if you don’t have your eye on business, and this goes with public radio or look at what’s happening in the podcast business. We have The New Yorker Radio Hour with my colleague David Crass now. We have a terrific time doing this. We’re thinking about how to develop it, make it better all the time, but we also have to pay attention to economics. Otherwise, you wake up and something terrible has happened, and I’m determined.

We’re going to celebrate 100th anniversary next year, The New Yorker. I don’t want that to be an occasion for us to show off at a museum of ourselves. There’ll be some of that to be sure, but I want people in this room and their children to be reading The New Yorker that is a lot better than the one that we have now in the future. So I think about that kind of thing all the time.

Debbie Millman:
When you first made the announcement of your expansion into podcasts, you stated, “While I readily admit to the gall of it, we come to this project with a deep respect for the history and creative range of the medium.” Why did you feel it was galling to expand into the podcast world?

David Remnick:
Because it’s like … I’m not saying we’re Michael Jordan, but when Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls to go play baseball, that was, one could argue it was both galling and a little stupid and like, “Why are you doing that?”

Debbie Millman:
I think it was actually interesting.

David Remnick:
I once said, “Maybe I’ll write a novel.” He said, “Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane.” I don’t believe in necessarily staying in your lane, but there is that instinct toward, “Okay. You know how to do this. You know how to make hamburgers. Make hamburgers.” Sometimes places that expand and suddenly start serving something else fail. I just think it’s enormous fun, and I also think it reaches other people.

Debbie Millman:
Is there an underlying principle or philosophy that is guiding the continued expansion into podcast?

David Remnick:
That’d be good, and they have to make their own way. The latest one, two things have started of late. There’s a culture podcast with Alex Schwartz and Vincent Cunningham and Naomi Fry, which is extremely fun and funny and smart. We purchased a podcast that you probably know called In the Dark, and In the Dark was being run out of, I think, Minnesota Public Radio for a while, and they stayed in Minnesota. This is a reporting and narrative podcast, more like in the mode of serial, say, and it’s really hard to do, and they work a long time on their reporting. They’re working on their third season and they’ve been around for some years. These are serious reporters. I felt that they were kindred souls and so did the head of Condé Nast. So we don’t see them a hell of a lot.

There’s an editor at the new Yorker named Will Davidson who works with them, and Chris Bannon, who heads podcasts and audio in general. Condé Nast isn’t in deep contact with them, but they’re really ambitious. They’re shooting for the moon. They also had a mini season that took a New Yorker piece by Heidi Blake called The Runaway Princesses. I thought it was terrific.

Look, I just listened to a lot of audio. It’s always meant a lot to me, podcasts and radio, and I just thought it was an experiment worth trying. We’ve had failed experiments too. In video, we did a thing with Amazon that I think if we’re being honest, it was a noble failure. It wasn’t embarrassing, but it didn’t take off. It didn’t garner the attention. It didn’t quite work.

Debbie Millman:
How long do you give something before you make that decision?

David Remnick:
Well, sometimes economics will dictate that. Economics might tell you. Quite frankly, audio is less expensive to do, although In The Dark, because it’s so intensively reported, like serial, like any number of other things, that’s more expensive to do.

Debbie Millman:
In a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, you interviewed a meme mixologist. I’ve never heard that job title before.

David Remnick:
God knows I hadn’t either.

Debbie Millman:
Can you share what that actually is for the audience?

David Remnick:
No, I can’t, no. Have you ever had the feeling, and maybe you’re having it right now, that you were interviewing something and the producers have said, “We’re going to interview a meme mixologist,” and you say, “Okay, that that’s fine,” and you get through the interview as if in a haze, and at the end you say, “I really don’t know what that is.”

Debbie Millman:
Fair enough, but no, I’m not experiencing that, thankfully. The last thing I want to talk to you about is music. In your latest book, Holding the Note: Profiles and Popular Music, you state that there’s no one who has meant more to you than Bob Dylan. The passion first-

David Remnick:
I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Debbie Millman:
Anybody here?

David Remnick:
Okay. Well, older crowd perhaps.

Debbie Millman:
This passion was first ignited in 1966 when you first heard the song I Want You.

David Remnick:
That’s right. So weird experience. Again, I don’t remember much. Look, the story I’m about to tell you may be completely false in the sense that it was a novelist named Harold Brodke, and he wrote a novel called The Runaway Soul. The novel opens with his own birth and Harold claimed that he really remembered it, and it was important to him this self-mythologizing at some level because there’s no earthly way that he remembered his birth. I do think this is true. So I want to be honest because-

Debbie Millman:
Well, it could be a memory of a memory.

David Remnick:
Exactly. Because I’m a journalist, just when I read memoirs, I read them in this spirit, all of them, including Bob Dylan’s memoir, by the way.

Debbie Millman:
We’ll get to that in a minute.

David Remnick:
When I was seven, something like that, my mother got sick. She had the first serious attack of multiple sclerosis. My father and my brother at that time must have been four, my father was not able to go to the hospital. I guess I was past the limit. My father took me to the hospital and it was very scary seeing your mother in the hospital bed. Seeing your parents doing anything other than being in the kitchen is scary.

The primal scene, let’s not even think about that, but sick is really, that I really do remember. As I recall, I heard this … We played the radio. My father liked music too and he had good taste, R&B, jazz, classical. Someone was on the radio singing with a voice like this was not Paul Revere & the Raiders. This was not your average pop music. This was not Chad and Jeremy. This was, “The guilty undertaker sighs. The lonesome organ grinder cries,” and what the fuck was he singing about? I was seven years old and it was thrilling.

I was not yet at the age where I was allowed to buy albums. There was this store called E. J. Korvette, a department store, not a high-level one. It was out on, I don’t know, Route 17 or Route 4, somewhere in Jersey.

Debbie Millman:
Korvette with a K.

David Remnick:
There you go. I bought this album because kids can’t decide, that Beatles album or that. So I bought something called Best of ’66, always hedging my bets, and it was okay. Then there was that song. It was $1.99, I think, the album. So I bought other Bob Dylan albums going backwards. So that would’ve been the time of Blonde on Blonde and then Highway 61 Revisited and going backwards and backwards until he was nothing but an acoustic guitar and harmonica.

That was a revelatory thing at a very young. I knew what the Beatles were. Even in the minivan taking us to yeshiva, kids wore Beatles wigs with a yarmulke on top. It’s a great look. It’s a great look, but this was something completely mysterious. To this day, I think the last time I saw Bob Dylan was four months ago with one of my children who’s now 32. They’ve all, well, certainly, Alex Noah have gone with me any number of times. I don’t know whether they’re indulging me or not. I can never quite tell.

Debbie Millman:
In 2004, you were hoping to get an exclusive excerpt of his recently published memoir in The New Yorker. You almost had it in the bag.

David Remnick:
I got screwed with my pants on.

Debbie Millman:
Dylan wanted the cover. Dylan wanted the cover of The New Yorker.

David Remnick:
Let’s just say that Bob Dylan has remained unmoved by and unimpressed by my hero worship. It doesn’t keep him up nights. Apparently, I’m not alone. So what happened was I had heard that he was writing a memoir and that it was good and that it wasn’t like Tarantula, which is, I don’t know, a surrealist experiment. I was summoned. I said, “Well, send the manuscript to the publisher.” I said, “I can’t send the manuscript. It would be like sending the Dead Sea Scrolls to my apartment.” So I went to the Dylan office, I won’t even tell you where it is, but you have to press a button that says, I don’t know, AB Cube Carpets. It’s like a CIA thing. You go up there and it’s just Dylan everything, Dylan tote bags and Dylan albums and Dylan this and Dylan that. If I had gone when I was 16, my head would’ve exploded into a thousand pieces.

They sit me in a little room with a bare table and a manuscript and a glass of water. I sat there and read the book straight through, Chronicles, anyone, and it was terrific. I said to the publisher and the Dylan guy, nice people, “I’m in. Don’t call Rolling Stone. That’s not your audience anymore,” I don’t know, whatever bullshit I told them. I was trying to get it for The New Yorker. I’m a competitive person. We made an agreement and we made a handshake agreement, and it still pisses me off.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

David Remnick:
This many years ago, it looked like John Kerry was running for president. Half the people here weren’t born yet, and it really pisses me off this thing. It got to the summer and they call and they said, “Okay. We’re about to publish it,” and I said, “Great. 7,000 words, the New York bit in the beginning, we’re all set and we’ll try to figure out what to do about fact checking and copy editing. Bob doesn’t necessarily have to be completely involved,” and so on and so forth, whatever shit I was slinging. I just thought everything’s going to be great.

Then they said, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “Bob wants a cover? We have dogs on the cover or bowl of fruit or a joke or Barry Blitt making fun of whatever … We don’t do that. We don’t have photographs in the cover.” I thought I’d changed their mind, and there was a pause and they said, “Bob wants a cover.”

It was like talking to your parents at your worst, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “I can’t do it.” I said, “I’m sure we can find some way to work this out.” “Bob wants a cover,” and that was it. They went to Newsweek. By that time, Bob looked like Vincent Price with a little mustache and a cowboy hat. I thought, “They’re never going to put Bob Dylan on the cover. It’s the middle of a presidential race.”

Debbie Millman:
It’s election year.

David Remnick:
They put him on the cover and they ran this excerpt. Apparently, Bob Dylan survived the experience of not being published in The New Yorker. Then another thing happened. I saw that he had these paintings. He’s a painter. He also makes whiskey and iron gates, a man of parts.

Debbie Millman:
He’s got range.

David Remnick:
He’s got range. These paintings, some of them are kind of good. There was one, a painting of Katz’s Delicatessen, the pastrami capital of the world, and it’s pretty good, and it’s a good New Yorker cover. It’s a New York scene. I make an arrangement. We’re all set to go. Two weeks out, I get a phone call, “Bob doesn’t want to do it.” So I feel our relationship is not on an equal level somehow.

Debbie Millman:
You think?

David Remnick:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Malcolm Gladwell is here today to receive the 2024 Audio Van Gogh Award. You worked together at the Washington Post.

David Remnick:
Did I come in second? I’m just asking.

Debbie Millman:
Maybe next year. You worked together at the Washington Post, and he said this about you. “At the Washington Post, there was one day when David Remnick had three stories on the front page which I don’t think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.”

David Remnick:
Have I ever mentioned publicly how much I love Malcolm Gladwell? Look, that happened, the front page thing, because I was blessed. I was sent to Moscow at a time where American interest and what was going on was singular, and the news and the interest and the varied topics of what were going on every day were so fascinating and, thankfully, so fascinating to our readers at the Washington Post that I think it was the journalistic equivalent of holding out a bucket in a rainstorm and it just filled up with stories. I could go to my mailbox in the morning, my mailbox, and come up with a story just by reading my mail.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you could. I don’t know that-

David Remnick:
Any idiot could. No, no, no, I mean it. At that time, every single day in a newspaper, in a literary journal, something was being published that had never happened before. They’re publishing Anna Akhmatova or Solzhenitsyn or Nabokov or Orwell or, “Oh, my God, there’s the first report we’ve ever seen on the war in Afghanistan.” We forget, now that things are so dreadful in Russia and not only Russia, how dreadful they are, how incredibly promising it was to be alive in Moscow in 1989 or 1990 and, by the way, in the world.

Part of what shaped me is when I was a young reporter, the world was very promising, but it’s always filled with misery. We are half-conscious, crazy people doing the best we can and the worst we can all the time, but there was this moment of promise in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, in South America, democratic promise. I’m not saying heaven on earth, but promise.

For all kinds of reasons that we could spend many, many hours discussing, so much of this was squandered that it’s very hard not to view current times through that prison for somebody of my vintage. I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to go to my rest thinking that this country has given up on its democratic promise no matter how flawed we are even at our best or these other parts of the world. It wasn’t just the fact that I was 32 years old and you’re innately, although I don’t know that that’s the case now with people who are 32 years old, but there was some sense that the world could turn a corner for the better, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the idea that history could go backward so profoundly is instructive about the precarity of human arrangements and behavior and foolishness. That’s why I’m in this business not just because it’s so immensely fun and satisfying, but because I hope it helps somehow lead the other way.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what I can say is that with you at the helm of The New Yorker, it gives all of us hope that that’s possible.

David Remnick:
That’s immensely generous. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
David Remnick, thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Before her latest book, Lucy Sante had written, edited, or translated a shelf full of books, fiction and nonfiction, and a mountain of short pieces for magazines like The New York Review of Books. In 2021 at the age of 66, Lucy shared an announcement that she had joined the other team and was transitioning, and that her pronoun, thank you very much, was she. We should consider ourselves lucky for all of the above because she has written about the experience and her life, both wittily and magnificently in her new book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. Lucy Sante, welcome to Design Matters.

Lucy Sante:
Hello.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy, I understand you consider the 1942 book, American Thesaurus of Slang by Lester Berry and Melvin Van den Bark to be your Bible. I’m wondering what do you like most about that book?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it’s a thesaurus of slang. It’s not a dictionary, it’s a thesaurus, so things are grouped in categories, which is very useful for research. If you, say, are writing a crime novel set in 1938, you can imagine what the boss butcher at the slaughterhouse would be called by his men and stuff like this. But also for me, for just a writer, it’s this treasure chest of words and expressions. You dive into it and it opens all sorts of doors in your head.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of slang were Americans using back in 1942?

Lucy Sante:
There were slangs for all kinds of individual professions and settings and sociological groups of various sorts. You could see it in movies from the ’20s and ’30s, people spoke very fast. And the demonic, it was, well, you could write a book about the sociology of it, but it was at a point where people were becoming city slickers. They come in from the country, but they were refashioning themselves as sophisticates of a certain kind.

Newspapers. There were many newspapers, daily ones, and they all had columnists and they were all polishing up their verbal acts. So it was a period of particular verbal invention on the printed page as well as in the street.

Debbie Millman:
You said that the book helped you open the doors for language and that you used to use Finnegans Wake by James Joyce for that too. Ulysses is one of my all-time favorite books and has been so for most of my life, but I find Finnegans Wake impenetrable. How do you decipher it?

Lucy Sante:
Well, I had a brilliant college professor, Michael Wood, who’s now retired, but he writes for the London Review of Books and he gave a reading of a section of Finnegans Wake in an Irish voice because he’s like Anglo Irish or something, but he knew he could read it in the brogue and suddenly it became three dimensional. It popped into relief like just reading it off the page, never had. And so for a few years I was able to recreate that experience in my head when I opened to a random page and heard Michael reading it spectrally.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Verviers, Belgium. In your 2012 memoir, The Factory of Facts, you describe yourself as three quarters peasant. Why is that?

Lucy Sante:
My father’s family has been in the same town I was born in Verviers since at least the 13th century. I mean, we’re there in the very first census, so we don’t know how far back it goes before that. Very localized and a city, a city as far back as it was a Roman villa, but it was a city of some kind by the Middle Ages. My other three quarters, my mother’s side and my father’s mother’s side were all from people from the country, people from [inaudible 00:04:33] and my mother’s side and on my paternal grandmother’s side from Luxembourg, which is basically another state. And so they were farmers working the unforgiving land of the [inaudible 00:04:51] which is very stony and has a very short growing season, and they did that for hundreds and thousands of years.

Debbie Millman:
At the time your father worked in a foundry and have stated that your mother seemed to have two modes in one. She was tearfully, clingy, cloyingly affectionate, cooing, and caressing, and kissy-kiss. In the other, she was a rattlesnake. Do you think a lot of this stemmed from the stillborn daughter who proceeded you?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, it had a lot of causes. It had that stillbirth of my older sister one year and one month older than me whose names I inherited in inverted form, but that was only one component. It was also she was treated very badly by her own parents. She was the idiot of the family and she was profoundly destabilized by the move to the United States. Never really made her peace. Her social orbit was her cousins. They were in the country. Even moving to the city shattered her world and every remove after that broke it some more. So she was this compounded mass of pain from various sources.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned moving back and forth to Belgium, from Belgium to the US four times and started first grade without knowing a word of English. And you picked it up quickly and have written that your instruction was vivid. And I’m wondering in what way was your instruction vivid?

Lucy Sante:
Because I picked up so many words from seeing them on packaging, painted signs in storefronts, billboards, sides of trucks, all kinds of places as well as books and newspapers. But it was all around. I could still see the word delicatessen as it appeared on this shop front in Summit, New Jersey or the penguin decal in the glass door of the drugstore advertising cool cigarettes and noticing that they spell it with a K and it’s not normally how it’s spelled. All these kinds of things and they still live in my head.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I was also somewhat captivated by the cool cigarette packaging logo because I love the way that the O’s were entwined. It’s so interesting how these things.

Lucy Sante:
Those are deco.

Debbie Millman:
Exactly. It’s my fascination with things like that that give me the sense that that’s ultimately why I went into making logos for a living. You’ve written that you were pretty much the only immigrant kid around and that the other kids hated that you read books for fun and knew the answers in class. What kinds of books were you reading at that time?

Lucy Sante:
When I think back on it, especially having had a child myself and having to learn about American children’s literature, I had no guidance, so nobody told me about Charlotte’s Web. I didn’t know any of the classics and didn’t really know what to read. Read in fiction, that turned me off for the most part, and really that’s when I started reading history. There was a series called Landmark Books about American history. I read them all. Also, a neighbor did give me the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I read all of those. Did not read Tom Swift. The scientific boy wonder that did not appeal.

Debbie Millman:
You described yourself as an imaginative and fearful child who saw omens everywhere. What kinds of omens?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, golly. I mean, everything was portent. Everything could be like step on a crack, break your mother’s back, but often it had to do with life and death kind of stuff. It was all about my death, the end of the world. A lot to do with. I write in the book too about how I was completely filled with my parents’ wartime memories. The most traumatic stuff just imprinted itself on me. I did think that planes were going to drop bombs on the house. A shell had just missed my maternal grandparents’ apartment house, landed in the courtyard next door. So this stuff, even though I was born nine years after the end of the war, it still permeated my childhood.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 12, the principal of your school who was also a nun, scheduled a consultation for you with a psychologist. Why?

Lucy Sante:
Because I was in fights every day. I was obviously unhappy. I had no friends at all of any sort. For three years I was deeply alienated. She took pity on me.

Debbie Millman:
Did that help? What was a diagnosis made?

Lucy Sante:
No, I don’t know what happened. I will never know. Nothing. The shrink gave me all these tests then called in my parents. My parents were both furious by what they heard, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I wish I’d asked my father before he lapsed into dementia. My mother would never have told me.

Debbie Millman:
When you were very young, your mother searched your room on any pretext and read every bit of writing she found. What were you writing at that time?

Lucy Sante:
Well, I wasn’t.

Debbie Millman:
What was she looking for?

Lucy Sante:
She was looking for sin. She was looking for smut. She was looking for anything morally wrong because she thought that everything in the world was morally wrong. And Satan was nipping at my trouser cuffs. And she was going to find out the dirt on me. That’s why I did not write anything down. I did not. And I still don’t. This is carried over. Although, I don’t have that paranoia anymore, but I just never got the habits when never kept a diary, which I’m actually grateful for by the way.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Lucy Sante:
Because if you write memories down, your memory will be inherent in what you’ve written and you lose the actual memory. It just gets transferred. So my memories are still wild. I can still roam around in there. They’re not fixed.

Debbie Millman:
Now when you’re writing, when you’re actually… Because you write for a living, do you do drafts or do you sort of pull it all from your head into the writing in that first attempt?

Lucy Sante:
Yeah. I only do one draft, then I work it endlessly. For me, it has to… The thought happens on the page. I can’t do it in my head ahead of time. I may think like the sentence, but once I write it down, it’s not going to be the same as it happened in my head because I was just getting the thought and not the words, and the words are what really structures the thought and that can only happen on the page.

Debbie Millman:
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Lucy Sante:
I was in fourth grade. I was nine. So many things happened around age nine. I don’t know which came first, but I remember that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gibbs told me I had talent as a writer and I wrote a composition on, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I wrote about how I want to be a writer with a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson on the cover.

Debbie Millman:
Now I understand you also drew an underground comic for your school paper. Were you also interested in becoming an artist?

Lucy Sante:
Well, becoming a cartoonist, it’s almost a Belgian national profession. I mean, the golden age of cartooning was at its red hot peak when I was a child there. And everybody here knows Tintin or Tintin and Les Schtroumpfs otherwise known as the Smurfs. But there’s a whole lot more to the Belgium cartoon world. And kids aspire to be cartoonist the way American kids in my generation aspire to be rock and roll stars, and so I tried my hand at it. I wasn’t very good, but I had a strip called Neanderthal Man. He was a superhero.

Debbie Millman:
Around that time, you won a essay contest in your school for Arbor Day. What was that essay about?

Lucy Sante:
It was Arbor Day. It was an essay about why Arbor Day is great. They’re always really why I like trees. I like trees for many reasons.

Debbie Millman:
There was one winner from each of the schools in your town, and at the time you were the only boy when a photo of the five of you was published in the New Providence Dispatch, you appeared in the caption as Lucy Sante, not Luke Sante. How did that make you feel?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, very weird. Again, it’s pretty distant for me to capture the exact emotional pitch, but it was thrilling and embarrassing and my mother immediately scratched it out with ballpoint. But I mean it took up permanent residence in my head, that’s for damn sure.

Debbie Millman:
And I Heard Her Call My Name. You write that you can’t say with certainty when the idea that you might or should be a girl first took hold, but it was probably around age nine or 10. How did that manifest to you?

Lucy Sante:
How did it first start? I saw myself as a girl. I thought about looking like a girl. I thought my interests were pretty much a girl’s interests, although, well, they were like artistic, not very domestic, and I didn’t really know any girls. That was another component. So I had really nobody to measure myself against, but it crept in and very soon it was a very strong emotion that I immediately started at one at the same time indulging in and trying to suppress.

Debbie Millman:
At the time you thought you were the only person in the world who had ever wanted to change genders. You said at the time that you prayed for Jesus to turn you into a girl overnight in your sleep, but don’t remember whether Jesus proposed this or if you requested it and wrote, “There it was and it wouldn’t leave me alone. I trembled from both desperate wishfulness and naked fear.” What scared you most at that point?

Lucy Sante:
Oh gosh. Well, I was young enough to still believe in a certain kind of magic and thought that something dramatic like that could actually happen. And how would my life change? I was just entering the period that never stopped really of conflict with my parents, and this seemed like an additional point of conflict. So I was very wary of it. I desired it, but I also knew it was an impossibility except that I believed in magic. You see all the contradictions, right?

Yeah, I was very confused. I had no guidance of any sort and didn’t for many years afterward, even though a trickle of news items would come my way, and I realized, “No, I’m not the only one, but there are like 48 of us.” Something like that really.

Debbie Millman:
You were admitted to Regis High School when you were 14 on the basis of a written exam, which is a very prestigious private school. You’d never heard of it. A nun who taught you in eighth grade suggested it. You got in and commuted two hours from New Jersey to the Upper East Side in New York City and write that that experience being in Manhattan changed your life. How so?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it just took me out of the immediate constant supervision of my parents for about eight hours a day or more. I was in this big city and everything seemed available. I didn’t have any money, but I read all the underground newspapers. They only cost a quarter and things in general were so much cheaper. So I could go to the movies, I could buy books on this very, very small allowance I had. But I had a universe open to me. The only place that presented me with that much of a range of options previously was the library.

I went from the library to Manhattan, which is like hyper library, so it showed me the world outside. I must have started thinking of my family as a prison very early. I had already this fleeting vision of New York City as we were about to go back to Belgium the first time and didn’t know that we would ever be coming back. And already New York City had established its symbolic function in my mind because it was Halloween and something nobody has seen in 50 years. Just massive crowds of kids running in costume, running on chaperone through the streets.

So when I was admitted to high school and I started commuting and I’d leave the house at seven in the morning and not be back until six or seven in the evening, I had autonomy during those hours.

Debbie Millman:
There was a line in your book that really touched me. You said for the first time the jail door was briefly left ajar. Yep. You went on to get a full scholarship at Columbia University, and in your first year there you got into one of Kenneth Koch’s poetry classes, and you’ve written that you felt that he pinned poet’s wings on your lapel. It was the only class you always attended, fully prepared and not stoned, and its influence was such that the writing classes you later taught for 27 years were always modeled on it. Can you share how he taught you how to teach?

Lucy Sante:
I still don’t know how other people teach writing, right? I mean, I took poetry classes with Kenneth and with David Shapiro and I took a translation class, and those are the only writing classes I’ve ever taken. But in any event, I taught an assignment based class. It wasn’t workshops. Every week I’d assign a reading excerpt and then a writing assignment that would be related to that reading. My emphasis was on voice, on style, on rhythm, and these are very hard concepts to get across, especially to undergraduates, but I tried anyway. It was formalistic, but that’s just a means to an end. I strongly believe in taking a conceptual approach. I mean, my book is an example that it’s structured in a very particular way, which gives the voice room to move.

The fact that it’s a kind of formalistic device, it unleashes the emotions rather than restricts them. That all goes back to Kenneth. And so yeah, I attempted to convey these thoughts to students for all those years, graduate students at Columbia and the new school, and then for 24 years to undergraduates of Bard.

Debbie Millman:
You felt that he pinned poets wings on your lapel, but about a year or so later it dawned on you that you actually weren’t a poet. Why?

Lucy Sante:
Well, the second year I was in his prosody class and I realized that… And here’s the paradox. I’m vitally interested in rhythm in my writing, but I could not bring myself to care about prosody or about verse form like cutting off lines seems arbitrary. I just want to go. So I’m a prose writer.

Debbie Millman:
What did Kenneth think of your writing?

Lucy Sante:
Beats me. I mean, I went to a reading that he gave not long before his death. He’d already been very sick with cancer, but he had a brief burst of energy and he gave a little tour. I went to see him with Jim Jarmusch who’d also been a student of Kenneth’s and Kenneth saw Jim and was like, “Oh my God, you’re here.” Who are you? He didn’t remember me at all.

Debbie Millman:
After you left Columbia, you felt that writing was your only real talent, but you write that you had no idea what to do with it. Sometimes you wrote reviews, you intended to submit to The Village Voice, but then you’d lose your nerve. You got a job as a clerk at the Strand Bookstore. Within a couple of weeks you were promoted to head and sole employee of the paperback department. While you were there, you started a magazine called Stranded and published four issues. Who did you publish? How did you publish and what was the reaction to this zine, essentially? There wasn’t the word then, but that’s I think what it was.

Lucy Sante:
No, it’s exactly what it was. Well, we borrowed it from this venerable Brooklyn based magazine, which no longer exists called Hanging Loose, which gathered individual sets of pages from writers. In other words, you don’t just submit your poem, you submit 200 or 300 whatever copies of your poem, and then we collate. So there was no editing involved. Anybody who wanted to submit that many pages got in. And then I packaged them. It went for four issues.

It was mostly, but not exclusively Strand employees. Kathy Acker is in there. In fact, actually the fourth issue is highly sought after because Jean-Michel Basquiat has a contribution in there and he never worked at The Strand. So it was some very interesting stuff, all kinds of… There’s bad poetry. There’s interesting Xerox graphics.

People collecting the top 10 all time favorite record lists of everybody who worked at The Strand, stuff like that. All kinds of stuff. Oh, and also great long beefs. My argument with X.

Debbie Millman:
How did you first meet Jean-Michel Basquiat?

Lucy Sante:
I met him with some friends of mine and we can’t figure… Or they seem to think we met him at a party. I thought we met him at the Mud Club, somewhere around late ’78.

Debbie Millman:
I think I read in your book that a friend of yours he painted on the refrigerator door and she sold that and also I think… There are a couple of different things that he painted on friends of yours.

Lucy Sante:
Well, the bathroom door and a fresco in the bedroom, which she only had that taken out and sold about 10 years ago. They lived together. They were not a couple exactly, but they shared a residence and he left all kinds of stuff with her. She still has some really substantial amount of… Not there, they’re in storage, but that he just left there because he was a young man on the go.

I mean, he left behind artwork all over town. And actually some of it got tossed. Now, I remember this great and one friend’s apartment, there was this great accumulation of abstract expressionist sweatshirts he’d made with spray paint. And they were kind of chaotic and they eventually just got tossed.

Debbie Millman:
That breaks my heart. You got your first job at the New York Review of Books in the mail room. How did you get that job?

Lucy Sante:
I had a friend, Noah Shapiro, whose father was the business manager. I’d known Noah since freshman year of college, and I ran into him on the street and bingo, I had a job.

Debbie Millman:
After a year there, editor Barbara Epstein hired you as her assistant where you realized you were wildly ignorant of the world and its ways. And I understand you didn’t know how to make a reservation at a restaurant.

Lucy Sante:
I’d never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know that it existed. My parents never would’ve occurred to them to go to make a restaurant reservation. They probably didn’t know it existed either. And in general, the job involved being social in a way, just not entertaining with a glass in hand, but social in the sense of being connected with other people in ways that were completely unfamiliar to me. It was both the fact that I came from this working class immigrant family, but also that I was were suspicious and resentful of the entire adult world. And Barbara, bless her soul, understood this. She basically explained the adult world to me.

Debbie Millman:
What do you think Barbara saw in you at the time? She basically handpicked you out of the mail room-

Lucy Sante:
Yeah, she did.

Debbie Millman:
… into her life. What do you think she saw in you?

Lucy Sante:
I still don’t really know because I mean, did she read anything I’d written? I mean, I guess she probably just, she talked to Lizzie Hardwick whose house had been to a bunch of times with my friend, Darryl Pinckney, and I don’t know, liked the cut of my jib.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that Barbara Epstein gave you the most important gift you’ve ever gotten from anyone shy of life itself, the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. And I’m wondering how did she do that?

Lucy Sante:
It happened a little by little. It’s really hard to say at what moment it tipped over, but I went from… Well, I went from being as much of a wallflower on the page as I was in life feeling that I can’t review this book because I’m not an expert on every detail concerning it, that kind of thing, to realizing that, “Yeah, no, I have an angle. I mean, I read this book that gives me the right to have an opinion about it and proceed from there.” Not just books, but all kinds of situations that, “Yes, I was there. I’m a witness. I don’t need a graduate degree in the subject to express what I think.”

Debbie Millman:
So do you feel like she gave you some confidence to be a writer?

Lucy Sante:
Exactly, yeah. That’s the whole point. This confidence that I found very hard to come by otherwise given everything.

Debbie Millman:
You published your first professional piece of writing in the New York Review of Books in 1981 when you were 27. Do you remember what that essay was about?

Lucy Sante:
It was about Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis Presley, which I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and I was immediately struck by how false it was. I really believe in the lie detector functions of prose. All kinds of syntax, word use, whatever will tell you if this is genuine or not. I mean, it’s not foolproof obviously, but a rough sketch. And his book just wreaked of falsehood. There was nothing sincere about it. He’s whipping up this kind of tabloid fable to sell books and that’s it.

Albert Goldman was not nobody. He was pretty respected critic. He wrote a really good book about Lenny Bruce, but he hated the younger generation. That’s the thing about him. It’s like anybody who came in like post Beatles was trash because they weren’t following this kind of ’50s great man author kind of thing. He took his revenge first with the Elvis book and then with the John Lennon biography, which I also reviewed for the New York Review, which was in many ways even worse.

I don’t even know if those books were in print, but they were really pretty. They were hatchet jobs, more sophisticated hatchet jobs than you usually see, because he was not a dumb guy. Nevertheless, that’s all they were.

Debbie Millman:
What was the reaction to your criticism of these books in your writing?

Lucy Sante:
Well, Bob and Barbara accepted it. It was published. My friends were happy, and I never heard from anybody else.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever feel nervous about being critical of other writers in print?

Lucy Sante:
Not exactly. I mean, sometimes I was always worried about getting things wrong. That was my great terror, especially getting something big wrong, like the intended meaning of this phrase, whatever. So I was belt and suspenders when it came to stuff like that, but that’s the point. Barbara gave me this authority so that it didn’t matter. The fact that I was whatever young person and had no publications on my belt criticizing somebody much older with a whole library of volumes out, I could do it. I was allowed.

Debbie Millman:
You worked full-time at the New York Review, but left on your 30th birthday in 1984, and you wrote this about that time in your memoir. “Writing was a very unhip art in the ’70s, very uptown. My friends all became filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. And the ’80s were really hard for me because three of my friends, three pretty close friends almost simultaneously became world figures, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin. And I thought, I’m fucked. They did it, I didn’t. Bye. See you later.” Talk about that, if you can, a little bit about what that felt like and what that was like for you and how you dealt with it.

Lucy Sante:
The ’80s coming after the ’70s when everybody was beneath visibility, all my friends, it took years for the bands at CBGBs to be recorded. It’s hard to credit now how isolated we felt in Lower Manhattan at that point. We had our own little world, and the rest of the world was completely indifferent to us. But the ’80s people suddenly became rich and famous. It was crazy. Jean-Michel first and eventually Nan and Jim. And I was pretty close to all three of them.

I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t produced anything, but it really hurt because I felt like… And I mean in some ways I still feel like if you’re going to succeed, do it when you’re young because at my age it’s great having the success, but it’s not the same thing as when you’re young, when you can profit in all kinds of ways from this. All I can do is have a quiet satisfaction now, but when you’re young is when you’re tasting things. I don’t know, the world of the senses is open to you, and it didn’t happen to me and I thought, “Well, there goes my chances forever.” Because I also had no consciousness of existing past age 40 or whatever.

And the ’80s were people were treated into… Not their shelves. Well, some people were treated into their shelves, but it’s called class system established, so among the artists which had never existed. And some people were just up there on one shelf and there were various succeeding shelves, and I was maybe down here until I published a book. I was 37 by the time that happened. I’m still sad that I didn’t enjoy the high life of my peers back then, partly because at that point, one’s audience was one’s immediate contemporaries, one’s actual peers, and it felt very valuable to be valued by those people. It’s wonderful being valued by younger people now, but it’s not quite the same secret handshake thing that goes on among contemporaries.

Debbie Millman:
Despite all of your longing, as I would put it, maybe you’ve won a Whiting Award. You published your first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York in ’91. This was followed by Evidence, a volume of crime scene photographs in ’92. Your first memoir of The Factory of Facts in 1998, a super famous collection of essays titled Kill All Your Darlings in 2007, a collection of essays and occasional pieces, The Other Paris, which serves as a sort of bookend to Low Life in 2015.

You’re included in several other books by way of anthologies, introductions and so forth. You taught at Columbia University School of the Arts, the new school beginning in 1999 until your retirement at Bard in writing and the history of photography. So you’ve had a pretty amazing career. Maybe not as star-studded as you would’ve like, but I think anybody listening and viewing

this would think, “She’s pretty fucking cool.”

Lucy Sante:
Well, my greatest achievement is that I really only wrote about stuff I was actually passionate about. I mean, I did a lot of work for hire, but there’s very little that I would not embrace. I mean, not that my writing was always tip top, right? But I mean in terms of I never had to shed my soul in order to do my job.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote that during this time you were writing and you did a lot of work for magazines and newspapers like Interview, and Wigwag, and New York, and Spy, but throughout you felt like you were playing a character more worldly and sophisticated than you actually thought that you were. So you had to keep your real self tightly buttoned up. Is that why you avoided at that time writing more in the first person?

Lucy Sante:
Well, yeah, I was hiding. I mean, the gender thing was only a part of it, right? I was also hiding the fact that I was this nobody from nowhere, a dropout, and with no inherited educational status in my family. I really had a major case of imposter syndrome for so much of my life.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still?

Lucy Sante:
Now it’s shifted. The imposter syndrome is actually… Well, it’s termed dysphoria as opposed to gender dysphoria of the umbrella term. Having a bad attack of dysphoria means having this imposter syndrome is applied to gender presentation.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about yourself in the book about this time in the following way. It’s so beautifully written. I just want to read it out loud. You wrote, “I pretended to myself that what I was trying to conceal was my inferiority to the character I tried to create in writing and in life. I was boring, clumsy, nebbishy, unsexy, squirrely, pedantic, useless, feeble, no fun, eternally on the B or even the C list of even my best friends. To be sure this self-portrait was not strictly a byproduct of gender dysphoria, my parents’ class anxieties, the immigrant experience and the residue of a Catholic upbringing contributed as well.” Lucy, I felt like you could have been writing about me. I love this paragraph so much. I’m wondering if this sense of yourself was why you started your first memoir with a series of make believe versions of your early childhood.

Lucy Sante:
No, that’s not why. Why is because I saw this event that is the bankruptcy of the wool trade in Verviers and therefore the shuttering of my father’s foundry, which made equipment for these factories. I saw that as the pivotal moment of my life, and I want to explore how things might’ve gone had it not followed the path that it did take. So my versions are based on family fears and obsessions of one sort or another spun out by me.

Debbie Millman:
I loved the conceptual quality of providing those various fictional or semi-fictional possibilities for your early life. It felt very Eugene Ionesco in a lot of ways, and I loved it. I loved it. In retrospect, you’ve written that you were dodging self-depiction because you didn’t want to be seen because you didn’t know who you were. And I’d like to talk more about your beautiful new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. First, I’m wondering if you could read a passage about what happened on February 16th, 2021.

Lucy Sante:
On February 16th, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone just for a laugh. I’d had a new phone for a few months, and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape, or hairstyle, I was specifically and exclusively interested in the gender swap function. I fed in a mugshot style selfie and in return got something that didn’t displease me, a picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I’d seldom allowed myself such graphic self-depiction. Over the years, I’d occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman, but had always immediately destroyed the results, and yet I didn’t delete that cyber image. Instead, over the next week or so, I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed beginning at about age 12, snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman I could now see was a coherent phenomenon consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.

Debbie Millman:
Would this be when you say you’d cracked your egg?

Lucy Sante:
Yes. And by the way, people keep asking me how I came up with that phrase, but I didn’t. It’s common in trans world.

Debbie Millman:
I hadn’t heard that phrase before. What happened after you cracked your egg?

Lucy Sante:
The whole process of digging up these photographs and passing them through. It wasn’t a single moment. It transpired over about 10 days. And then I came out to my therapist and then to my partner, and then to my son. I wrote this letter that I sent to about 30 people who are my closest immediate friends.

Debbie Millman:
You write that you’re grateful to whatever force cracked your egg before it was too late that you were saved from drowning. Do you really think it was the FaceApp photos or do you think the FaceApp helped you manifest the courage you needed to take this next step in your life?

Lucy Sante:
The FaceApp photos were transforming. I mean, because I’d never seen what I looked like as a woman. It was like seeing a movie of my alternate life. It was very, very, very powerful. Furthermore, on the mechanical end, it took me long enough to round up all these photographs. It’s scattered all over my house that it broke, and I didn’t realize I had this. I had an internal time lock. I was terrified. After wanting so much to go to the other side, I was terrified of it happening, so I would guard against it. And I didn’t realize I had the system where if I thought about it, if I fantasized, et cetera, it could only be for an hour or two and then bang, it would stop. And that was a safeguard. And looking for these photographs just burst through that ceiling and that really opened the floodgates. So it was both seeing the photographs and the act of looking for them weirdly.

Debbie Millman:
Had you ever shared with anyone in your life prior to your egg cracking that you felt like you were a female?

Lucy Sante:
I came close all week once in my whole life, and that was when I had this wonderful therapist in the late ’80s named Paul Pavel who by the way was also Art Spiegelman’s therapist, and he appears as a character in Maus too. He was a great man, a wonderful person. And to him, I admitted that I tried out my mother’s clothes and we never quite got back to it because not long after I shared that memory with him, he died of a massive heart attack 20 minutes after

I left his office. It wasn’t that same day, but it was not long thereafter. I don’t know. I mean, if Pavel had lived, might I have come out 30 years older earlier than I did? It’s not entirely impossible.

Debbie Millman:
I didn’t come out until I was 50. I’m 62 now, so it’s only been 12 years, and it’s a very different life internally in terms of the amount of freedom that I feel to be who I am. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, even being lesbian was almost a ticket to a very different kind of life, and I already felt so othered that I didn’t want to be any more othered.

Lucy Sante:
Bingo.

Debbie Millman:
After you sent the letter to your friends and came out to your partner and your therapist, what made you almost send another letter to your friends taking it all back?

Lucy Sante:
Obviously, when I was a kid, it was a different story, but when I became an adult, there were main two major impediments to my acknowledging my trans nature. One of them was my ambition. The other was the fact that I am attracted to women romantically, sexually, exclusively. And I thought it would at worst discuss them and at best get me sympathetic hearing, but shut the door to romance forever. So I knew that my relationship which had gone on for 14 years with somebody who were still very, very close, but I knew the romantic part was gone and she would not have wanted to keep going down that road. So I was trying to talk myself. I was so loathed to lose her or in fact to lose the prospect of love that I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.

Debbie Millman:
Before you came out, you wrote that your absorption of transgender lore before the internet was a matter of seeing things out of the corner of your eye and mentally photographing them, filing them away in the vault marked X. Did remembering any of those images help you claim who you are as you came out? I also had a file that I hid the joy of lesbian sex became…. It was a book in my library that was backwards so you couldn’t see the spine, and it were these articles from The Village Voice that I’d read in 1980 about Ann Bannon books. Did you have an actual stash or was it all just mental?

Lucy Sante:
Oh, it was mental because nobody could find out this. It was deeply secret to everybody in my life. Did it help me actualize it? Well, it’s hard to say. Really it took me onto the internet before I even read about people who were specifically like me. I mean, I’d read about drag queens or I’d read about famous sex changes like Christine Jorgensen or something. But it did start giving me this panoramic view of the trans universe, which is much larger and much more various than almost anyone suspect. It did help me realize I wasn’t alone, except that being alone is so ingrained in me for other reasons already that I was reluctant to shed the aloneness in a way.

Debbie Millman:
Looking back on it now, you write how your secret poisoned your entire experience of life and that there was never a moment when you didn’t feel the acute shame of being you. Did you continue to have shame as you were coming out and has that shame abated at all?

Lucy Sante:
No. I mean, it’s funny, but when I started coming out, aside from the specific point of my letter and the two letters in the book, there’s the one letter I didn’t send and the one letter I did send. I was trying to put myself back in the clause in the second letter too, but I abandoned that idea within 10 days because I knew it was real. I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak, I knew this was real and that I had better get behind it. I better claim it. I had better walk proud. I had no choice. It wasn’t like it was a debate. I was proud. I was a little afraid of how it might be received or what people would think. And this remained unchanged to this day. This is who I am, and if you don’t like it that tough, it’s the truth. I am manifesting the truth.

Debbie Millman:
You are now who you’ve described as the person you feared most of your life and you stated that you genuinely like who you are and that you’re turning out better than you imagined or feared. But you also said that you’re unwittingly benefiting from a bad thing, the invisibility of older women. I wanted to tell you something. I read that line to Roxanne, my wife, and she said, “Lesbians and trans folks aren’t invisible to each other at any age.” And I realize-

Lucy Sante:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
… it’s right, right? I love that, and I really wanted to share that with you. You said you’re not only lucky to have had your egg crack at something close to the last minute. You’re also lucky to have survived your own repression. And for anybody that’s feeling their own repression, whether it be coming out as in any LGBTQ plus manner is there anything that you might say to them to help them face that repression?

Lucy Sante:
Well, it really helps if your identity is not entirely bound up. I had an ambition and while it did retard my coming out, it also acted as a counterweight to the fear because I had this thing I was doing. I had the author to present as a shield, so it really helps if you’re not doing this for a living, if you’ve got another identity with which to present the world.

Debbie Millman:
In your book, you quote your friend Daryl, who years ago declared that he was not a gay writer, but a writer who is gay. And you state you are a writer who is trans. How do you feel about your bylines pre-transition? I do see most of them now read Lucy Sante.

Lucy Sante:
Yeah. Somebody changed my Wikipedia entry within half an hour by coming out on Instagram and the New York Review of Books had changed its entire archive going back to 1981 within a couple of days. It’s cool. I mean, obviously, I lived as Luke for 66 years. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t there. I’m not like a younger person who is trying to erase the experience of schoolyard bullying. That hardly happened a decade or so beforehand. For me, I’m far away from all that stuff, so I don’t care that people know that I had this former name. I mean I don’t like looking at the pictures frankly. I’d rather if those went away, but the name and my standard joke is my dead name will never die. Not as long as we still have back inventory. Please buy those books even if we got the wrong name on them.

Debbie Millman:
You write about yourself pre-transition as a walking byline and are still very much aware of your pre-presentation self who you sometimes like to think of as your sad sack ex-husband. I laughed out loud at that line. Do you have affection for your sad sack ex-husband?

Lucy Sante:
Sometimes. I mean, I get impatient and I get retroactively embarrassed sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Lucy Sante:
Well, because he said and did dumb things that’s why. I’m not very patient with dumb things, you see. But in any event, I recognize this is… I had a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn over the course of my life, and I realized that no matter how much I would’ve liked to have been a rock star when I was 24 years old, it was never going to happen because I still had to build a self. And gender transition is only one part of that. There was so much unresolved, so much that was damaged by experience that I had to rectify so much that I was naive about that I had to learn. It was a big, huge process. Just the irony of it is when I was a kid, I remember I wanted to be a precocious child. I wanted to be a wonder. But actually I’m a very late bloomer. You might even say I’m only blooming now even though I’ve been at it for a really long time. Everybody’s rhythm is different.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I have one last question and then a request. You are now nearly 70. Towards the end of I Heard Her Call My Name, you state that transitioning is not an event, but a process and it will occupy the rest of your life as you go on changing. How do you envision Lucy Sante at 80?

Lucy Sante:
I don’t go there. I don’t think about the future. In fact, thinking about the future always freaks me out. And it goes back to that childhood superstition thing, so I’m not going there. Maybe I’ll be alive then, who knows? But probably not. I imagine the way the world is going in general.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope so. I hope you are. My last question is really more of a request. Would you read one last excerpt from I Heard Her Call My Name?

Lucy Sante:
You bet.

My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel the acute shame of being me even as I deny to myself that my secret had anything to do with it. I might feel proud of things I’d done, might even be able to summon the will to entertain ambitions and might describe such things to an idealized self. I sometimes try to make myself believe in, but eventually I was going to catch sight of myself in a mirror and that would destroy me for an hour or a day, or a week. I’ve been in therapy for 38 years, but because I was guarding my secret even in the therapist’s office, no diagnosis ever came close to identifying the cause of my malaise. At some point in the relatively recent past, I came upon a citation from the gnostic gospel of Thomas. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Debbie Millman:
One of the lines in your book that is now imprinted on my soul is this, and I wish it for everyone listening today, “When there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom.” Lucy Sante, thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself. Thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Lucy Sante:
Thank you so much, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy Sante’s book is I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. And you could read more about her at lucysante.com. That’s lucysante.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening .and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Priscilla Gilman:
I am haunted by my father. He has made me the thinker, writer, parent, human that I am. Brought me to my knees, led me into dangerous romantic entanglements. Buoyed me during times of crisis. Informed my reading and writing and parenting in ways I am only now realizing. I am both drawn to and wary of places, people, works of art that will touch that sore spot in me. Unleash that tide of sadness.

My father insisted that the highest form of love demands rigorous honesty. He never whitewashed, never tiptoed around, never equivocated or resorted to euphemism when giving his opinion, or rendering his judgments. Can I attain that level of truth telling and rigor in my own reflection on my father? Can I see him clearly, but with compassion? How can I be at once truthful and loyal, both to him and to my mother, who bitterly divorced him and remained hardened against him until his death?

Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman grew up in 1970s Manhattan in an apartment filled with dazzling literary luminaries. She adored her brilliant father, the writer, critic, and professor, Richard Gilman. When Priscilla was 10 years old, her mother, the renowned literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, decided to end their marriage. This was followed by a cascade of unexpected revelations that fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father and her family.

Her recent memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, is all about what it means to be the child of a demanding parent, and is a candid account of loss and grief, forgiveness, and love. Priscilla Gilman, welcome to Design Matters.

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie. Oh, thank you for that beautiful introduction. It is such a joy to be here. I’m so excited. Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Priscilla, in The Critic’s Daughter, you recount how when you were a little girl, you were read bedtime stories from your Aunt Anne, your Uncle Bern, and your Aunt Toni. Can you share a bit more about them and what made this storytelling so special?

Priscilla Gilman:
So Aunt Ann is Ann Beattie, still my mother’s client and dear friend. Uncle Bern, who is Bernard Malamud, who was one of my father’s closest friends and preceded my father as the President of PEN America actually. Bern handed it over to my father. And Aunt Toni, my mother’s client. My mother had worked with her when Toni was an editor, and then Toni gave her the bluest eye and she sold it, and it came out the year that I was born. And my mother was her agent for her first five books through Beloved. And Toni was a second mom to me, a godmother figure. We called her Aunt Toni.

All three of these characters, two of them sadly gone, one of them still on this earth, were magical tutelary spirits of my childhood. And it didn’t seem special to me, it just seemed like these were the people that walked through the apartment door, or came to the house in Connecticut, or we went to their houses. And they were just endless founts of fascinating tales and stories, and they loved me and my sister, Claire, dearly, and they would always indulge us when we asked for more.

Debbie Millman:
Other frequent visitors were Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jerzy Kosiński. And I understand that Jerzy Kosiński greeted your many stuffed animals with exclamations of delight, and I love that about him.

Priscilla Gilman:
He did. He did. Debbie, one of the things that I realized in going back and recalling all of this about my childhood and then researching a little bit more about who these luminaries actually were in the world, was realizing the discrepancy between a lot of these peoples’ public persona, and what they were like when they were with me and my sister.

And Jerzy Kosiński, he had a mad cap energy and I just remember feeling so happy that I could thrill him and bring a smile to his face. And Susan Sontag was always very kind and very approving of all the terrible drawings that I showed her that I had done. She was not at all the austere, rigorous critic that strode through the world at that time. To me, she was just this cool looking lady, who really liked to look at our drawings and gave us good feedback on them.

Debbie Millman:
I also understand that there was a time when another one of the visitors to the apartment, Martha Stewart, got into a heated debate with your mother. And you don’t actually talk about what the debate was about in your book, and I’m dying to know.

Priscilla Gilman:
No, that debate, I actually found that story in a memoir by Jill Robinson, the writer, and she was writing about, we all hung out in Weston and Westport Connecticut in the ’70s. My parents had a country house there and Martha catered my parents’ parties. And she used to sell her baked goods at this amazing market called Hay Day.

So that’s how I grew up, like this beautiful blonde woman who made incredible baked goods that my sister and I craved. And we were like, “Let’s go buy some of Martha’s baked goods.” I believe that particular debate was about the rising real estate prices in the area, and how much they were going to go up and when it was the right time to sell in Weston or Westport.

Debbie Millman:
I was hoping it would be something about sourdough starters or the…

Priscilla Gilman:
I know, I wish it had been. I wish it had been. My mother was actually surprisingly, Debbie, my mother is a really, really good cook. She doesn’t cook anymore, but in the ’70s when she was married to my dad, she would cook after coming home from ICM where she was the Senior Vice President of the Literary Division, representing everybody from Tom Wolfe, to Michael Crichton, and Anne Rice, all the people that you’ve already mentioned. But she cooked too. She really wanted to have it all and do it all. My poor mom, she exhausted herself though.

Debbie Millman:
Well, your dad, Richard Gilman, he was an author. He was a drama critic for The Nation, for Newsweek, and many other publications. He was the author of five books. He also wrote for the New York Times. He taught at Yale School of Drama for three decades. As you mentioned, he was the President of PEN America. And your mom, Liz Nesbit came to, I love this. She came to New York from a tiny town in Illinois. She got a job as an editorial apprentice at Lady’s Home Journal. Then a $75 a week job as the assistant to literary agent Sterling Lord.

She rose through the ranks to become a literary agent of epic proportions, as we’ve discussed. She’s actually considered one of the most successful literary agents in the world. You share many of the details and more in your memoir, The Critic’s Daughter, which was released last year and just came out in paperback. What made you decide to write this book?

Priscilla Gilman:
My literary agent, Tina Bennett, who was my close friend in Yale grad school, dropped out after a year, went to talk to my mom about working in publishing, and my mom and Mort Janklow hired her. She became a big agent. She’s a character in both of my memoirs. She’s one of my best friends as well as my agent. Had always wanted me to write a book about the intellectual milieu of the 1970s in New York City.

And she knew my father. Obviously she came to my wedding. She’s the agent in the book who reads my father’s writing about Japan and tries to help him. She was like, “You need to write about this generation of critics. You need to write about Stanley Kauffmann, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and Anatole Broyard,” all very close friends of my father’s, “And what criticism meant to them.”

And over time it evolved into something far more personal, as you know, Debbie, and became a book about the break-down of my parents’ marriage, the effects of their split on me, and my very charged, fraught, but deeply loving relationship with my father. And in that transition, there was a lot of fear involved in moving from a more, I wouldn’t say academic, but more intellectual take on this cohort, and making it a more raw, personal memoir.

But she helped me every step of the way encouraging me to do that. And I think having published a prior memoir about my experience parenting my son, who has later got an autism diagnosis in the book, we don’t use the word autism, because he didn’t have the diagnosis then. I was an academic. I got a PhD in English and American Literature. I was an English professor. I didn’t put myself into my work. I wrote objective analyses of literature.

So it was a big transition. But I think my father inspired me, Debbie, because my father wrote a very raw, personal memoir after having written books about modern drama, the word decadence. I love that book too, you should check that out. All about the word decadence. And for his fifth book, he wrote an incredibly honest, revelatory, vulnerable memoir.

And I think that doing that, he grew more as a man and finally came to terms with a lot of shame and guilt that he’d been carrying around. And met the love of his life six months after he published that book, and I don’t think that’s an accident. So he was my lodestar in making that transition and writing something that was so vulnerable.

Debbie Millman:
I believe you’re talking about your father’s memoir, Faith, Sex, Mystery. Is that correct?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Priscilla Gilman:
What a title, Debbie. What a title.

Debbie Millman:
Right. In that book, he starts with a quote from George Bernanos from his book, Diary of a Country Priest. And he states, “When writing about oneself, one should show no mercy.” How hard was it for you to show yourself no mercy as you were writing, or did you fly in the face of that advice?

Priscilla Gilman:
Wow, Debbie. What a fantastic question. I forgot about that Bernanos quote. Mercy is a big theme in my memoir. I extend mercy to my parents by the end of the book, and it’s one of the big themes of my book. How do I write honestly and not sugarcoat and be true to the spirit of my father as a rigorous, truth-telling critic, but yet I do want to show mercy and I do want to be forgiving.

So I think that perhaps I did revise my father’s ethos in my own memoir. And I believe by the end, my father in his own memoir demonstrates mercy towards himself too. Debbie, but in his memoir, he comes clean, to use his phrase, about his complicated sexual makeup. That’s part of the cascade of revelations you started out by saying that I receive when I’m 10 about my father. That he has what we would now call BDSM tendencies. He doesn’t refer to them that way in the book.

Debbie Millman:
No.

Priscilla Gilman:
He even calls them perversions in his own book.

Debbie Millman:
I know. And I wanted to say, you know what? I understand when this book came out, how that might’ve seemed that way.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But if this book came out now, people would be like, “Okay, cool.” It broke my heart…

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yes.

Debbie Millman:
… when I read that he considered these perversions, when he has so much shame about it. Which now would just mean he has some kinky fun in bed.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Debbie, Debbie, I could not agree with you more. I kept thinking to myself as I was working through this, we would call this so mild today, even if it was not mild, even if it was far over on the BDSM spectrum. If you’re a good person, you would accept him and you would embrace him and you would say, “This is who you are.” And there’s a million websites you can go and find willing adults who will happily do everything that you would like them to do with you, no shame. Right.

Debbie Millman:
I’d be like, “Who’s not into that now?”

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. Exactly, Debbie. And I kept thinking, and I say towards the end of my book, it broke my heart over and over and over again as I researched my father’s life and read his work, and thought about all this guilt and shame that he carried around. Not only about his sexuality, he was probably bisexual too. I find out later that he had had sex with men, that he had cheated in his marriages, because his wives didn’t want to do what he wanted them to do.

And he had all the shame also about converting to Catholicism from Judaism and not telling his parents, and struggling with writer’s block and depression. And I just wrote, “It broke my heart in that it felt on so many levels and in so many ways, like my father lived too soon.” And I wish every day that my father were still alive to give his blessing to our trans children, to people who have complicated sexual makeups and have shame about them.

And I think one of the greatest things, he smoked as a form of self-medication for depression. He died of lung cancer, and it just was so wrenching to me to realize all of these ways in which he contended with so much shame from his conservative parents. And I wanted to belatedly or posthumously, bestow a blessing on him and say, “Daddy, I do understand, and I accept you in all of your messy humanity, and all your contradictions, and all your complexity. And I wish that I had been able to say these things to you while you were alive.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, let’s talk about his dedication in the book, “For my daughters, Claire and Priscilla, who will understand some of this book now and the rest of it in time.” So he knew. He knew. He knew.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you. That makes me teary when you say that, but yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you described your father as a certain kind of New Yorker in the 1970s. Liberal, passionate, intellectual, clad in denim shirts, bell-bottomed jeans or corduroys with wild, curly hair. And then you go on to state that he loved classic New York deli food, pastrami, pickles, corned beef sandwiches, Chinese takeout. He shopped at Zabar’s and the local mom and pop stores in your Upper West Side neighborhood.

So Priscilla, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I grew up in the 1970s New York City as well. And though my father was a pharmacist who worked at City Drug adjacent to Carnegie Hall…

Priscilla Gilman:
What?

Debbie Millman:
… you could be describing my dad as well. And it was somewhat freaky because he wore the same. He was definitely a liberal Jew. I actually suspect now, and I’ve tried to find more information from my family, but have been unable to. But I suspect that he was bisexual as well. He was into Bette Midler and was going to the baths with his friend, Harvey. They lived together in Greenwich Village right across the street from Horatio Street. He was really, really into Broadway musicals. There were a lot of things, but who knows? Who knows? He’s no longer on this plane, so it’s hard to say. What did you and your dad like doing together back then in the ’70s?

Priscilla Gilman:
Essentially, we liked doing everything together. My dad wholeheartedly embraced every aspect of my sister’s and my childhood world. And I write in the book at one point, I say, “My father was the kindly priest/rabbi/whatever it might be, who presided over the cathedral space of my childhood.” And that’s a quote from Virginia Woolf. And he loved watching Sesame Street, Zoom, all of those classic people.

Debbie Millman:
Zoom.

Priscilla Gilman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom right. Loved it.

Debbie Millman:
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh. Every time the music would come on, he would come running from the other room to catch it. He loved reading Moreno and Morgan Freeman on that show too. He loved reading to us. He would read to us. My mother would have to say, “Dick, it’s time to stop.” Even when we were tired, he loved reading all the books that we loved. He loved taking us to Central Park and Riverside Park, and pushing us on those precarious metal swings, if you remember those, with no padding underneath them.

He loved romping around physically, throwing a football to me. He loved watching sports with me. My mother often joked that I was the son my father never had, because my older brother from my father’s first marriage was into art and music, but not at all into sports. My father converted me and I was a huge New York Giants fan, New York Mets fan with him. We followed-

Debbie Millman:
As was mine.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh my goodness.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yeah, they could have been brothers. It’s a little bit freaky. It’s a little bit freaky.

Priscilla Gilman:
I wonder if they knew each other, if they ever met?

Debbie Millman:
Richard Gilman, Martin Millman, what can I tell you?

Priscilla Gilman:
Martin Millman and Richard Gilman. You’re having fun up there wherever you are. Know right now you’re hanging out. I love this Debbie. I love this.

Debbie Millman:
Now, what kind of books was he reading you? Were they erudite books by Joan Didion, or were they the books of Dr. Seuss?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, they were absolutely Dr. Seuss, and they were absolutely not at all erudite. My dad was very into the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. And my school, I went to a school called Brearley, which is a girls school in the city that didn’t stock those books in the library, because they didn’t consider them literature. And my father was like, “That’s ridiculous. What Happened at Midnight is a great book,” and that was a Hardy Boys book. So it was high, low, and everything in between. It’s one of the things that my father bequeathed to me. And it’s funny because I was reading Roxane’s Opinions book and I watch The Bachelor. She is the high, low, and everything in between. She’s my kind of girl, my father’s kind of girl. So it was everything from The Wizard of Oz books he loved. He loved the A.A. Milne books, E.B. White, Dr. Seuss, and all those Richard Scarry books we would read. I’m looking, because I have a whole wall of children’s books behind me. The Babar books. Anything and everything, Debbie, anything that we were… Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the Edward Eager books. I was listening to Susan Cain’s interview with you, which was such a great interview, and she talked about loving Edward Eager. Edward Eager writes these wonderful magical children’s books that my father loved. But it was everything, anything that we liked, he invested in it.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad supported your mother in having a major career, and happily took on childcare duties and mostly worked from home. Did he ever resent it at the time, or was it wholehearted support?

Priscilla Gilman:
It was absolute wholehearted support. He was so proud of my mother. He bragged about her all the time. He genuinely loved getting down on the floor and playing. We also had an amazing nanny, who we didn’t call her a nanny, we called her just Carrie. She was like my third parent who came in the morning and left at six o’clock at night. But on the weekends, it was just my dad. We didn’t have a babysitter on the weekends and he would say, “Lynn, you need to go do your reading.” He really, really supported her and was so incredibly admiring of her work ethic and everything that she had achieved.

Debbie Millman:
You were a seven-year-old tomboy who hated wearing dresses and having your hair combed. And in that stage, your dad told you that you might not be as pretty as some of the white pinafore-clad, blonde, wringly little girls in your Sunday School class, but you were something more important. What was that?

Priscilla Gilman:
He said, “It’s more important because you’re smart.” And he patted my head and said something about my brain and how beautiful he thought my brain was, and it just felt so wonderful. Debbie, I think in The Boston Globe review of my memoir, it was such a moving review, because the reviewer really responded to how my father empowered me as a little girl. To be an unabashed intellectual, to love learning, to be curious, to not care about what I looked like, to be really not interested in shopping. My sister would go shopping with my mom and my dad was like, “Let’s watch the Mets. Let’s watch the Giants. Let’s go outside and romp around.” And he just accepted me for who I was in a way that felt so affirming and just put me completely at ease.

Debbie Millman:
Did you at all get upset or feel slighted that he was telling you that you might not be as pretty as some of the other girls? That was what I took away from that line. I was like, “Hey, wait a minute. You want your dad to think you’re the prettiest girl in the world.”

Priscilla Gilman:
I know Debbie. I know. I think I really didn’t. I don’t know. He gave me this confidence because he wasn’t saying, you’re not pretty. He was just, I think the implication was you don’t look like those conventional little, and especially in the ’70s. Like having hair like your beautiful color, my hair was more of a dirty blonde and in between. And he just made me feel like you don’t have to be conventional. It was more that, that was the vibe. Like you don’t have to be the ideal of what a girl should look like in order to be pretty to me, and your brain is more important. And I really took that for what it was.

Debbie Millman:
You were also quite a performer. You got solos in music class at camp, in school performances, but you were always aware that while your dad was proud of you, and really both your parents, they did not want you to take that talent anywhere professionally. Both he and your mother agreed that you should not be given any voice lessons or encouraged as a child performer in any way. Why?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah. So my mother had wanted to be an actress. And she had gone to Northwestern for theater on a scholarship and changed her major from drama to the oral interpretation of literature, which prepared her very well to be an agent, I think ultimately. When she was horrified by how competitive the drama division was, and how these professors were cutting down the students in a very ruthless, mean way. And I think that scarred her, and she did not want her child to be vulnerable in that way. And I think my father in the ’70s, he was the Head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Department at the Yale School of Drama, but in the ’70s and ’60s, he also taught actors. So he taught Meryl Streep, he taught Henry Winkler, he taught David Alan Grier, who I’m still close to to this day. I adore him. And I think he just felt that the life of a performer was too vulnerable. Again, my parents didn’t want me to struggle. They didn’t want me to be subjected to this ruthless sizing up of my appearance or my talent. And they also believed in my intellect, and they always said, “We want you to get a PhD.” They didn’t say necessarily had to be in literature, Debbie, but they were like, “You need to do a PhD in something.” And I was a very dutiful little girl, and once I got to Yale, I stopped acting. So I was in some off Broadway things when I was a little girl, because these people came to my ballet school and they recruited us. They had auditions, which my parents didn’t know about, so then I was already cast, so they sort of accepted it. But they wouldn’t allow me to audition. I wanted to audition for Annie, they wouldn’t allow me to, and I just accepted it. And I was in a vocal jazz ensemble in high school, and I did lots of musical theater and straight theater, but it was always my hobby. It was never going to be my job. And I do think my parents were very well-intentioned, but as a parent, I would do it differently. If I had a child who had a talent and they loved doing it, I loved acting and singing, I would support them in that.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you have certainly with Ben.

Priscilla Gilman:
And I have, yeah. Yeah. And James, who actually sings opera at Yale now.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Well, speaking of siblings, when your little sister was born, I understand she cried all the time. You described her as a fussy, peevish, colicky baby. Your older brother called her the cranky old man. And when she got older, she sometimes made scenes, but you stated that you envied her lack of self-consciousness. Her insistence on advocating for herself and her ability to be herself without apology. Yet it was you who dreaded her setting your father off. So what would set him off? Why did he get set off? And why was it you that took on the responsibility of recalibrating him from those experiences of being set off?

Priscilla Gilman:
My father had a temper, and I would describe him as irritable. Again, I think it was a fluke of his temperament. And I think my sister had a temperament more similar to my father actually. You know how we’ll often say things set us off that remind us of ourselves. I think they were both a little bit cranky. They could get cranky if they were tired or they weren’t feeling good. So my sister would resist doing something that my father asked her to do, or she would be taking too long in a way that was annoying him. And then he would speak to her in an impatient voice and that would set her off. And it was just this drama where I was like, “Oh, gosh. Oh, no, I have to calm them down.” Now, in terms of my role as the peacemaker or the one who recalibrated him, I say in the book that I was blessed with this naturally optimistic, buoyant temperament. And it was legendary in my family and my grandmother, Carrie, my nanny, everybody would always talk about how I never cried when I was a baby, and I was just naturally very happy. And I think both of my parents saw that in me and they celebrated in me, but they also leaned into that. And from a very young age, I felt that my mother, if my father were in a bad mood, she’d be like, “Go in to your father.” And so it was almost like, and I would walk into the room and he would immediately seem calmer, look happier, his face would light up when I would come in. I just had a calming effect on him. I don’t know exactly why. But with my sister, I adore my sister, and she’s my best friend, Claire. She’s actually the curator at The Drawing Center.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I know. It’s incredible.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, my amazing sister. And I love them both so much, and it was extremely painful, because I felt like I had to mediate between the two of them. And I would see both of their points of view, and I would just try to lower the temperature in the room and get them to get along again, so that we could go off on our adventures, the three of us, and play and go to a movie, or do what we wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a lot of responsibility for a little girl. And your mom even told you that your father favored you over Claire, because you never fussed or fretted and never made trouble. And I can understand how a mom might think that that’s something a little girl should feel good about, but it also sets you up for having to continually do that in order to either stay in his good graces, or stay in your mom’s good graces. A really hard place to be. And I know that when your dad’s moods went black, so to speak, you write how he needed to be strenuously pulled back into good humor and regain his composure. And you stated that you sensed his needs with just extraordinary sensitivity and rushed to meet them. Did you feel like you had to do that at the time, or was it just something that was so ingrained in the dynamic of your behavior together that you almost involuntarily felt that you had to do that?

Priscilla Gilman:
I think it was more the latter, Debbie. I do. I think it was, I say in the book at one point, I use a theatrical metaphor, which I do throughout. I structure the book in terms of acts, and I talk about how I was cast in a role of being the one who placates him, and actually everyone in the family, and soothes ruffled feathers and brings everybody back into happiness. And I was cast in that role because it wasn’t a stretch. But no one can be that way all the time. But I think when I was a little girl, it was just it felt good to be that person. And I agree with you that when my mother said that to me, she didn’t say it in a monitory way, like, “You have to do this or he’s going to get angry with you.” She said it more as a way of affirming that I was doing a really good job with my father. And also, and I think it was a really good impulse on her part. She was telling me he doesn’t favor you because you’re better than Claire. He favors you because of the quirk of your temperament. It just matches or fits with his better than Claire’s does. We talk now about a fit, a poor fit, or a good fit between parents. And so I grew up not thinking I’m better than my sister in any way that he’s wanting me a little bit more than her. He adored my sister too, adored both of us as a unit, but when he was in a bad mood, I was better for him. But I think that it really took writing this book, going back into it, looking at pictures of myself as a little girl and over and over, my editor and my agent would say to me, “You need to acknowledge how much pressure this was.” Look at little Priscilla. You were 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. This wasn’t really okay for your parents to be putting this much pressure on you. And it was hard for me to acknowledge that and to say, “I would never do this to my children.” But at the same time, we all cast our children inadvertently in roles, and we have to work hard not to do that. And I never resented my parents. I was never angry at them for it. But as I worked on the book, part of the healing process for me was looking at a childhood that I had thought was halcyon and perfect, and oh, I had this incredible childhood with these wonderfully loving parents, and realized I was actually under a lot of pressure too. It was hard.

Debbie Millman:
It was so heartbreaking to read how you had to rescue your parents at that time in so many different ways. I wonder if there was ever a time where you felt you could just be yourself? Or in thinking about that question, would you even know what yourself needed or wanted at that time, because you were so carefully calibrating who you were to fit their needs?

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, I think I didn’t. I think I thought that’s who I am. That’s my value, that’s my identity. And it was close to who I was, but no one can be just that.

Debbie Millman:
Right. In October of 1980, when you were about 10 or so, your parents made the decision to separate. And you write how you sat on your yellow bedspread and wrote in your little Holly Hobbie Journal, “Please don’t let this happen. Please don’t let them get divorced. I’ll do anything if they just stay together.” So I have a couple of questions. First, do you still have that Holly Hobbie Journal?

Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t.

Debbie Millman:
I was hoping.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
I was just talking to another guest about journaling, and she didn’t have any journals as she was growing up, and she’s quite a prolific writer. And I thought, “Oh, that’s so too bad because it becomes evidence of a life in so many ways to have that record of how you felt at that time.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, you’re so right. And thankfully, I did still have it when I took the only creative writing class I’ve ever taken. During the year that I had dropped out of Yale, I took a class at Columbia, and I wrote a piece, a nonfiction piece, that incorporated the journal, and I had the journal at the time. So I had it transcribed in that piece, what I had written.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad took the separation very hard, and he didn’t want it. It was your mother’s decision. He told you that if it weren’t for you and your sister, Claire, he would kill himself. And that meant that your father’s survival was your responsibility. And you wrote that you would do anything and everything in your power, use every ounce of your energy and ingenuity and love to make sure he survived. How did you manage?

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s so interesting, I feel, and that was a moment that he blurted that out, and he was alone with me. My sister was not there when he said that, neither was my mother. And it was one of those moments that just changes your life forever. I realized in that instant how fragile my father was, which I had always sensed, but I never knew it to that extent. And I was determined from that moment on that I had to direct my attention, my efforts, every ounce of my energy, and I use the word ingenuity in the book, to making sure that he knew that he was wholly loved and supported by me. And that even when I was not with him, because I was not with him very much in the first couple of years after my parents split up, that’s what was one of the hardest aspects of it. I was going to write him notes, call him, every time I saw him shower him with love and affirmation. And as you were reading those lines, Debbie, it occurred to me that in a way, I’m still doing that work, because for six years I’ve worked on this book to ensure that he survives. Now it’s a more complicated version of survival, but I’m still doing it. I’m still attempting to keep him with me and to keep him in the world for other people to know.

Debbie Millman:
In the meantime, your mother made it clear to you and your sister that you weren’t supposed to think of this split as a bad thing. And in the ’70s, it was really quite unique for parents to be getting divorced. When my parents got divorced in 1969, people made fun of me in school, because nobody else knew of anybody getting divorced. And they would make fun of me and say, “It’s your fault your parents are getting divorced.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, my gosh.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s how uncommon it was. So your mother didn’t want you to think it was a bad thing. You didn’t cry, you didn’t complain, you didn’t express any sadness, so she wouldn’t worry about you. And at 10 years old, you became the mini adult of your entire family.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t want her to worry about me. And you’ll remember that the only time that I cried was when we had to give our dog away. We had gotten this puppy.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t even, this story kills me.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know. And I went in the linen closet and I buried myself in the bedding, and I cried because I had watched the dog running after our car after we brought her back to the breeder, and it just absolutely killed me. I could cry for the dog, but I couldn’t cry for my father, and I did not want my mother to feel guilty. I knew that my mother had needed to do this. I did not blame her. I saw how much happier she was out of the marriage. Nonetheless, I look back on that and I think, “My goodness, I had no one to talk to about this.” Claire didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk to my grandparents or Carrie, because I thought that they might judge my mom because they were all religious Christians and I thought they would think divorce was a terrible thing. I didn’t talk about it with my friends, none of my friends. One of my friends had divorced parents, and I write in the book that Becky Royfee, Katie Royfee’s sister, was one of my best friends, and their parents had been married a bunch of times before. So I felt they were still together, but at least they had been divorced. They had gone through this. And when I was with Becky, I could feel at ease a bit, didn’t feel like I had the Scarlet D on me.

Debbie Millman:
So you were propping up your dad and pretending in front of your mom, and hence Priscilla Gilman overachiever is born.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You overachieved in school. Your A’s quickly became addictive. And while that might’ve been great for the future Priscilla, at the time, is it was what you felt you needed in order to win both your parents’ love. I can’t imagine that that must’ve been anything, but exhausting.

Priscilla Gilman:
It was so exhausting, Debbie. I look back now and I realize I started having all of these physical symptoms when I was in high school. Getting all these sinus infections, and my mother would send me to the endless doctors. And I know now that it was my body rebelling and saying… I had not worked. I had not been a hard worker in school. I’d been like this creative madcap doing theater, doing well in English, but hating math and science and not caring, to I have to get A’s in every single class and get in early to Yale. And I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in my early twenties. Now, was it actually clinical chronic fatigue syndrome, or was it…

Debbie Millman:
Depression.

Priscilla Gilman:
… my adrenals were shot and it was depression. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated high school, you went on to Yale University majoring in English. But you wrote that you never felt as happy, free and as expansive as when you were performing. Nevertheless, your parents remained adamant that you should not study drama in college or take any steps toward becoming a professional singer or actress. Did you ever feel like you could defy their wishes and do it anyway?

Priscilla Gilman:
I don’t even think it would occur to me to think of it in terms of defying their wishes. It was so ingrained in me that my parents knew best, that my parents were looking out for me. That once I started getting the A’s, it was like then we had added on to my parents, my teachers, my professors, this whole chorus of parental figures that were like, “You must make good on your intellect and you must get a PhD in English.” Now you remember that I dropped out of school at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. And that was a big step for me to say, “I’m exhausted. I’m sick. I need to come home. I need to get out of my head.” And I worked as an aerobics teacher.

Debbie Millman:
I know. I know. I have this whole list of jobs you did.

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was so much fun. I loved it. And that was the closest I came to being a performer. And I actually taught David Rockwell aerobics.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good to know.

Priscilla Gilman:
I know he’s been on your show.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to ask him about that.

Priscilla Gilman:
He used to come to our studio. I taught Mary Tyler Moore. I taught a lot of big winks. It was so much fun. I loved it. And I did go into therapy and I did become healthier, and I did get some perspective, but then once I was back in college, it was the lure of the A’s. And I think the other thing to say about it is that the only thing that I ever heard my parents discuss in mutually happy and they sounded like they were getting along and they were close, was when I would overhear them talking about, “Oh, Priscilla is so brilliant. Oh, isn’t it incredible how well she’s doing?” And, “Oh, she’s got to get the PhD, and we’re so proud of her.” And so it was a way not only of making them happy individually, but also of bringing them together and creating a unity. Because their split had been so acrimonious, it took them seven or eight years to get divorced. They were fighting over money. They were arguing in a vituperative way, and they were hardly ever in the same room. And this was something that they both wanted and that they could bond over.

Debbie Millman:
Did you really want to get a PhD in English Literature, or did you do it without even thinking that you had a choice?

Priscilla Gilman:
I think I did want to do it in the sense that I love teaching. And my first teaching job, I was a camp counselor, a theater counselor when I was in high school, and then I was an aerobics teacher. And I still think that everything that I needed to learn about teaching, I learned being an aerobics teacher. And you need a warm-up, you need an arc of your class, then you have a cool down. I still do that when I teach literature. So I really, really wanted to teach. I love teaching. I am passionate about literature. I would be transported in my literature classes. So those two aspects of it, I really did want. What I didn’t like about academia, and I think I didn’t know this. I think I went into graduate school with my idealism intact because of course, my father didn’t even have a BA, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

Priscilla Gilman:
So he had ended up at the Yale School of Drama, and I think that was another thing. My parents were living vicariously through me. They both wanted to have advanced degrees. My mother’s parents didn’t graduate from college. My mother had a degree in a theater-ish degree. They were like, “Oh, our daughter has all these amazing opportunities, and she even got a PhD from Yale.” And then I was hired as a professor in my fifth year. I love teaching the students, but I hated the pettiness of academia, the politics, the publisher parish mentality. The, you must interrogate literature rather than be passionate about it. I’m an enthusiast. You could tell other Zoomers who are, right, I’m an enthusiast. And I didn’t like having to tamp down my enthusiasm and be just this objective, analytical thinker. I wanted to bring emotion and I wanted to bring subjective experience to teaching and writing about literature.

Debbie Millman:
In the book you write that you became increasingly bothered by what you described as the cutthroat environment of academia, its petty politics, its infection by the worst kinds of hazy, theorizing, and irrelevant pompous or inane arguments.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So after two years as an Assistant Professor at Yale and four years as an Assistant Professor at Vassar, you decided to leave academia. How hard was that? How hard a decision was that for you to make?

Priscilla Gilman:
Debbie, it was a really hard decision, and there were a number of false starts. So I actually, in 2001, on September 10th, 2001, I sent an email to the Yale English Department resigning my position. And I had decided at that point to join my mother’s literary agency. I had a two-year-old child, Benjamin. And the next day I woke up and it was September 11th. And my ex-husband, my husband at the time, said, “We’re not going to New York. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to bring a child into the city.” Vassar headhunted me and offered me a job, and offered my ex-husband, who was in the PhD program with me at Yale, a halftime position. And I thought, “You know what, this was meant to be.” So I went back in and I went to Vassar. And I said, “Maybe at Vassar it’ll be less cutthroat, it’ll be easier.” And then I found Benjamin was diagnosed with a host of special needs. I had another child, and I thought, “I cannot produce an academic book on this rigid timeline of six years and you’re out. I need to prioritize my children.” And so I wanted to move back to the city and have a wider circle of support, and be in a place where Benjamin could go to a special school. And so I joined my mother’s literary agency, and I worked as an agent for five years until The Anti-Romantic Child was published. And then I just went freelance as a teacher, and a book critic, and a speaker and all of that. But it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. And I’m very fortunate that I’m still able to teach literature. I lead book groups. I teach for Yale Alumni College, and I teach writing. And I don’t have to grade papers or write dry, hazy articles infected with hazy theorizing, Debbie. So it all worked out in the end, but it was very hard.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you talk about ending your career as an academic, ultimately representing your shedding the identity others had wanted for you.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you came to realize that you’d taken on the role of academic in large part to please your parents, then your professors, and ultimately your then husband, now ex-husband.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
How did that decision begin to change the dynamics in those relationships?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it’s such a good question, Debbie. Some of my professors applauded me. And David Bromwich was one of my dissertation advisors, and he was so proud of me and said, “This is wonderful. You’re going to be able to do so much more in the world.” Other professors were furious at me, didn’t speak to me for a while. Said, “We’ve invested in you and we’ve pushed you for these. You’ve gotten these two top jobs and now you’re just walking away.” And they were angry at me. And it was such a maturing experience for me, learning how to say, “Okay. Accept the different reactions that I would get.” Now, my father was very ill already. By the time I joined my mother’s agency, my father was in essentially a waking coma. So he never knew that, and I was terrified that he was going to think, “Oh, my gosh, is this choosing my mother over him?” He was so proud of me when I got the jobs at Yale and at Vassar. But I think the other thing, Debbie, about my father is that when you read those lines from my book, it was so funny. I was like, “Is that me or my dad?” Because my dad would often say that even though he had a sense of insecurity, that he wasn’t Dr. Gilman, he was just Richard Gilman, and he didn’t have an advanced degree. He also felt that being an outsider helped his work, and that he wasn’t inhibited, and he didn’t have to footnote constantly, and he could just write and he could write for a broader audience. And I know that he would’ve found a lot of the constrictions and constraints of academia that I was being subject to. He would’ve found them intolerable. And so in a way, if I went into academia in part to please him, I also left it in part because of what he had taught me. And I do feel that he would be proud of me for doing that.

Debbie Millman:
It seems as if you had a much healthier, you had a whole slew of healthier years with your dad after he got remarried and moved to Japan to be with his new wife.

Priscilla Gilman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
When he was diagnosed with cancer, you wrote that you found yourself not wanting to be anything, but a source of sustenance. So you dismissed your sadness as unworthy of consideration. And I’m wondering if you could read another short excerpt from your book about how you felt at that time?

Priscilla Gilman:
Sure. So this is at a part in the book where my father is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer that has metastasized to the brain. And he is overcome suddenly saying, “I haven’t written my life’s work,” and, “I can’t die yet.” And I’m shocked in a way, because I had thought that he was in a much healthier and happier place. And that he had done a lot of growing and that the insecurity that had plagued him for so much of his life was gone, and then it all resurfaced. So I write, “What could ever fill the hole inside him?What would ever assuage his fear that he didn’t measure up, hadn’t accomplished enough, was inferior, lacking, incomplete? He had three devoted children and a remarkable wife who adored him. Shouldn’t he use his remaining days to love and be loved? But even as he frustrated me, even as I saw his meager self-worth, even as I increasingly understood how different I was becoming from him, that he was caught up in ego and marks of accomplishment even as I was moving away from them. I never let on to him that I found his outlook not just sad, but troubling.

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s such an interesting defining moment in the book, because it’s clear that you’ve created some boundaries. Even though you were still trying to buoy him in some ways, you were also like, “You know what, this is as far as I’ll take this.”

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And how did those new boundaries impact the way you wanted to work, and teach, and write? It seems like you’re still doing all three, but on very different terms, entirely different terms.

Priscilla Gilman:
And in a way still performing, because teaching is a kind of performing. I’m still reinventing it every day, but I think I just, and my sister and my brother were huge sources of comfort. And we would increasingly just share with each other how our father was frustrating us. We would talk more openly amongst the three of us about like, “Oh my gosh, when he said this, oh, I just wanted to scream.”
And so I was able to vent it more. And I was in therapy and I was able to talk more about. I think it was in my early thirties, I first discovered the phrase or term codependency, and I started to think about how I had been subordinating my own needs, and not even realizing that I was doing that. Not even realizing that I had needs that were separate from what my parents’ needs were from me.

And I started to realize that I could be a certain way around him and not feel that that was who I was entirely. That when I’m with him, I’m there to be there as a support for him and as a comfort to him. But it’s okay for me to have these thoughts. And do you remember that scene earlier in the book where my sister is laughing about this awful shirt that my father had bought? You know like the way teenagers do? They go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought we would wear this. This is so ugly.”

And then I see my sister run to the phone and say, “Oh, hi daddy. Hi. I was just calling to say I love you.” And when I remember that it was such a revelatory moment in the sense that we would feel guilt if we would ever say anything negative about him. And as I got older, I realized it’s okay to express how difficult it is. Not just express it, Debbie, to acknowledge that it could be difficult to be his daughter and to express it to other people. And to act in certain ways when I was with him and not feel guilty for having thoughts when I wasn’t with him about how hard it was.

Debbie Millman:
Your father died at age 83 in a suburb of Kyoto, Japan in October of 2006. And at the beginning of The Critic’s Daughter, you write, “I lost my father for the first time when I was 10 years old. In the months and years that followed, I lost him over and over many times, and in many different ways. This book is my attempt to find him.” In writing this book, what did you find?

Priscilla Gilman:
So much. And I found my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see my father, Debbie, in the round. I was able to see him from the front sitting in the audience, watching him on the stage. I was able to see him backstage, in his costumes, out of his costumes. In his many costumes with makeup on, without makeup on. Struggling and mighty, all of these contradictions, all of these different roles and selves that my father inhabited. From reading his work, and I read hundreds of articles, I couldn’t believe it.
And constantly discovering things, surprising things about my father. And I learned to find him, but also to realize that I’ll never completely find him in the sense of mastering him, or locating him, or pinning him down. He wouldn’t want it that way. Do you remember in the end, I talk about how there’s this beautiful article that my father wrote about Hamlet in the New York Times?

I think it was published in 1990, I believe Kevin Klein was doing a Hamlet. And so my father was writing about this and going back into the history of Hamlets. And he writes about how there are always things that are left behind. Hamlet is an eternally fertile prince. And I write about my father that way too. And I write about that dedication to Faith, Sex, Mystery that you read earlier, “My daughters, who will understand part of this now and the rest in time.”

Do I understand him completely? I would say no. He wouldn’t want me to understand him completely, because human beings, all of us exceed our ability to completely master them or know them. Faith, Sex, Mystery, my father valorized mystery. I want my father to forever remain mysterious to me, but mysterious in a beautiful and fertile way.

Debbie Millman:
At the very end of Faith, Sex, Mystery, he states, “Well, those readers who went through this book with goodwill and openness to me feel disappointed because I gave them nothing definitive. No calls to order, no models for behavior or moral resting place, and left them with the sight of me still peddling in midair. I finish the book and take my chances.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, right? Wow. Oh, my gosh. Now I really am teary. Debbie, wow. I had never connected that before.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That ending just made me shiver. And I thought, “Still peddling. Still peddling.”

Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all, Debbie?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Priscilla Gilman:
Aren’t we all?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Priscilla, I know that in addition to writing books and your speaking engagements, and your newspaper columns, and all of the reviews that you write, all your teaching, I think you’ve taken a few steps back into performing. How does that feel? I know you did something with one of your sons. How does it feel to be back on the stage as an adult?

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, it was, now both of my children are singers, and my younger son is an actor, and my older son is a classical guitarist. And being their mom, I got to perform reading out loud to them, doing all the voices. And I sang with Benjamin, my older son, and we actually recorded a Christmas album to raise money for organizations that help support autistic teenagers and young adults. We gave all the proceeds, and that was incredibly, that was so much fun. That was in 2017.

And then a year after that, my younger son in his high school, they did a production of Shaina Taub, whose musical sucks. It’s coming to Broadway this spring. Shaina Taub did a musical version of As You Like It. And my son’s school opened the auditions to everybody in the community, alums, teachers, parents. I had to ask James, I was like, “James, is it okay if I audition?”

And he was a new student at the school in ninth grade, and he was like, “Mom, of course you have to.” And Benjamin actually came with me to the audition, Debbie, and accompanied me on the guitar. And I performed “Take Me Back to Manhattan” by Cole Porter in my audition from Anything Goes, which my father had seen me performing when I was in ninth grade. So it was this crazy full circle moment.
And my son and I, we understudied leads and we had little parts with little solos, and we performed at the Sheen Center downtown. It was so much fun. It was incredible. And I just loved it so much. And my book, the chronological part of my book, ends with that moment of being on the stage. And if you remember, I write about how in my college application to Yale, oh my gosh, the corniest, cheesiest essay, Debbie.

I don’t know why they let me in. But I wrote something about how my extracurricular was performing, and I wrote, “Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage. And I would say that the stage is also a world.” And the song in “As You Like It,” I’m standing on the stage and it’s all the world is a stage, like this song that takes that line. And I’m standing there and I’m like, “This is the end of my book.” I just signed the contract to write this book. So it was really a full circle moment. If anyone wants to cast me in their off, off Broadway shows, you know where to reach me, priscillagilman.com.

Debbie Millman:
“Hello, World!”, you now know. Priscilla, I have a few last questions for you tangentially related to your family. At first, how is criticism today different from the time your father was writing criticism?

Priscilla Gilman:
It’s different in ways that are better, and ways that are worse, I think. I think one thing that shocked me, Debbie, when I went back and looked at reviews of my father, and also reviews that he had written, is that friends used to review friends. So he has a rave in the New York Times from Anatole Broyard, one of his best friends. He has a rave from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of his best friends.

There’s less corruption in that way. Like with The Boston Globe, I’m a regular book critic for The Boston Globe. I have to sign a no conflict of interest agreement to write criticism. But I do miss, and I did a theater podcast with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli, they have a great podcast about theater. Peter was the theater critic for The Washington Post and Elisabeth writes for the New York Times. And they were saying they were shocked in going back and reading my father’s theater criticism how much more critical people could be back then.

I think there was a vituperativeness and a harshness, which I think could get taken too far, quite frankly. But what was great about that period was that the culture in general supported criticism and critics. You can’t make a living as a critic now. I can hardly afford to take the time to write a book review as opposed to teaching a class, or tutoring a student, or doing something where I’m actually able to support my family.

Unless you have a staff critic position, it’s virtually impossible. And newspapers and magazines are eliminating book editor and book critic positions. So that’s something that I wish we invested more and criticism is vital, I think, to a flourishing intellectual and artistic culture. And I would love to see, thank God Bookforum got saved, but there was that slew of bad news. I think the Los Angeles Times just laid off their book editor. The Boston Globe has made the book editor a part-time job.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s happening in music as well. They let go of their music editor, who is a friend of mine, and of course Pitchfork now.

Priscilla Gilman:
Exactly. And dance criticism too. We need a vibrant culture of critics to support the arts. It’s so important. And criticism, I also would suggest, is an art.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a long question because it includes a bit of a quote. Your mom is a pioneer in publishing, and when asked about what you might know about the business that others don’t, you stated this.

“Just because someone got great reviews, was highly acclaimed, won awards and received prestigious honors, that didn’t mean their books sold well or that they weren’t struggling financially. I knew that authors who made gobs of money sometimes lacked confidence in the intellectual or artistic merit of their work. I knew that one bad review could sink a writer’s mood and damage his or her well-being for months. I knew about jealousies and feuds between ostensible friends and colleagues, and I knew how fragile success was. How little it took to sink a project, how life-changing one rave review could be.”

Priscilla Gilman:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
What advice would you give to anyone reading their reviews or wondering if their work will sell or be successful?

Priscilla Gilman:
I’m very much my father’s daughter, but I’m also very much my mother’s daughter. And my mother raised me to never pin your financial hopes on your writing. My mother tells every one of her writers, “You have to have a day job or a bunch of day jobs, or a lot of bows in your quiver.” Especially also if you really want to produce work that’s authentic and meaningful to you. You don’t want to write for the market. You don’t want to write in a way that’s going to necessarily set, and also we can’t predict that.
So I think that’s something that I would advise writers. A few people break through and they get to a point, like my mother had a bunch of them, like Tom Wolfe and Anne Rice. But it’s harder than ever today to do that. You used to be able to sell a magazine piece for $10,000.

It’s like the magazine, the diminishment of magazines. It’s terrible. Even in the 12 years since I’ve been a writer, just a writer, I only just recently started writing writer on forums, Debbie. But I could sell a magazine piece for $5,000. I could do this and do that. It’s so much harder now. So I think that’s really, you have to have other things to pay your rent or your mortgage.

The other thing I would say in terms of reviews is that, and I actually, you’ll remember I wrote my dissertation on criticism in the second half of the 18th century. In the early 19th century, I wrote about Jane Austen, romantic poetry, gothic novels and how these writers coped with this new power of reviewers and critics. I think I was preparing myself to be a professional writer by doing this. And so I talk about these different strategies like on the one hand, the people who frenetically revise their work and change in accordance with the reviews, but then it doesn’t work, it backfires.

And then on the other hand, the people who cultivate a, I read about this 18th century poet named William Cooper, who’s a fascinating character, and how he cultivates what he calls a indifference to criticism. And he does it by coming up with his readers that matter to him. We all need our trusted readers are what Milton called our fit audience, though few, even if it’s few, right? It’s the people that we really trust.

And I think particularly for memoir, people bring their own stuff to memoir when they review it. It was just crazy to me to see how people were projecting their own stuff on to, she doesn’t talk about this, so she must be that, or this isn’t mentioned, so this must be true. And you just have to understand you don’t control the way, it’s a life lesson.

We cannot, however much we work, to control how we’re going to be received. This is the lesson I’ve spent my life learning, Debbie. We can’t. We have to just put ourselves out there authentically, let the chips fall where they may. And the people who are your kindreds, to use Susan Cain’s term, will get you and they will understand.

And you certainly, from the moment you first messaged me about this book, I was like, “Debbie is reading this book in the spirit that it was written. She gets it. She understands. She’s seeing me truly.” Not everybody will, and you have to let those people go.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you can definitely count me part of your tribe.

Priscilla Gilman:
Oh, Debbie, I can. I know.

Debbie Millman:
Priscilla Gilman, thank you, thank you for writing The Critic’s Daughter. Thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you so much for this wonderful podcast and for being such an incredible human being.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you.

Priscilla Gilman:
Thank you for seeing me truly, and my father as well.

Debbie Millman:
To read more about the work of Priscilla Gilman, you can go to priscillagilman.com, and Gilman has only one L. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
If it weren’t all true, Carrie Brownstein’s career would seem like fantasy fiction. She’s a celebrated musician first and foremost, but she’s also a comedian, a writer, a director, and an actor. In today’s interview, we’re going to talk about the band she co-founded, Sleater-Kinney, which has been called one of the greatest bands of all time. They just released their 11th album, Little Rope, but I’m also going to ask her about the now classic television series, Portlandia, which she co-wrote and starred in alongside Fred Armisen. Along the way, we’re going to talk about her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, and everything in between.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Carrie. I understand that you’ve described your look as akin to Mick Jagger in sweatpants.

Carrie Brownstein:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t remember saying that. But you know what’s weird? I’ve seen Mick Jagger in sweatpants. My only time ever meeting Mick Jagger he was in sweatpants, so maybe I somehow conflated those two things. When I saw him, maybe I thought, “That’s what I look like.”

Debbie Millman:
I actually think of myself as a little business casual, no matter if that’s appropriate or not. I’m business casual in my everyday life, but sometimes I’m also business casual on stage with my band, and I think this is when I should have not been dressing business casual. I look like I can go from stage to being a flight attendant on Delta right after the show.

Carrie Brownstein:
What made you attracted to the business casual look?

Debbie Millman:
I think early on when I was playing with Sleater-Kinney… I grew up in the suburbs, and I think my idea of dressing up was to just look a little like, okay, you just put a blazer on or you put a button-up shirt on. So in my mind, I thought, “Well, I’m going on stage. Probably should wear a loafer.” It’s not how rock stars dress, or should.

Carrie Brownstein:
Any particular favorite designers?

Debbie Millman:
In the current era, I really like Stella McCartney. I like Rachel Comey. I like Proenza Schouler. But that’s not what I… Also, let’s just admit, I have a lot of J. Crew, too.

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, Jenna Lyons day was quite nice, her time there.

Debbie Millman:
She was nice, yeah. Right now I am wearing a J. Crew sweater and Everlane cord, so pretty basic. Pretty basic over here.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you grew up in mostly the suburbs. It was the suburbs of Seattle, mostly in Redmond, Washington. And you wrote in your memoir that Seattle was your beacon and your muse, but it was never really yours. I’m wondering if you can explain that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think because I was outside of the city and I never really came of age there, that’s… I had some formative experiences there, but I was always on the periphery. And when I finally found my voice and tried on the boldness and the brazenness that comes along with electric guitar and forming a band, I was in Olympia, Washington where I went to college. Seattle was something I sort of looked up to. I imagined that I would end up there eventually and I never did. It always just feels like the thing I thought I would be and something I thought I would be a part of and then never was. I feel sort of adjacent to it.

Debbie Millman:
In elementary school, you’ve described yourself as confident and popular. You were an early round draft pick for teams in gym class. I never was. You won the spelling bee. You attended every crucial waterpark birthday party and sleepover. You were active in music, sports, school plays, and was elected vice president. Would you say that at that time you were a bit of an overachiever?

Carrie Brownstein:
What a tool. God. That’s the kind of kid I would just loathe now and be like, “Ugh.” I was a little bit of an overachiever, I mean when you list it all like that. That’s not how I felt, but I think I was confident. I think I had, at the time… And this is sort of right before I lost all of that confidence. But yeah, I was a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. I mean, if I’m just listening to that list and feel exhausted by it, then yes, I was.

Debbie Millman:
But you had quite a range. I mean, you were sort of smart by winning this spelling bee, so that was one aspect of you, but you also were active in sports.

Carrie Brownstein:
I was an all-rounder. All-rounder. You could also call me a child dilettante, too.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, in what way?

Carrie Brownstein:
No, I think I just… Yeah, I think I connect. Even now, I connect with people via… I’m introverted, and I like activity-based hangouts. I ended up mostly being raised by my dad. But even when my mom was still around, we were kind of in the way that… And this is very essentialist, but in the way men like to hang out with each other through activities, that’s kind of how my sister and I were sort of ushered into our social lives. We sort of were mimicking our dad’s way of interacting, so it was my way of being around people because sort of one-on-one interactions were trickier for me, and sometimes still are, just because I get nervous and shy.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad took you to your first concert when you were in the fifth grade. Tell us about who you saw.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. Well, in 1985, Madonna was touring for her seminal album, Like a Virgin, so she was on the Virgin tour. She actually started that tour in Seattle. She played three nights at the Moore Theater, which is… Actually, it might be the Paramount, so someone can fact check that. Anyway, a really small theater, 2,000 capacity. Beastie Boys were opening. They were booed off stage, by the way. People hated those guys.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that in your memoir and was laughing out loud.

Carrie Brownstein:
People just thought, “What a bunch of brats up there.” I went to the first night, and it was incredible. I mean, there were costume change after costume change and all the hits. It was exhilarating,

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you dressed up as Madonna at that time.

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, my very young version of that. My parents were… They weren’t strict, but you can do a lace glove like Madonna, but you’re certainly not going to have a bra… I probably wasn’t even wearing a bra. What would we be showing? It was very chaste. It

was a truly virginal version.

Debbie Millman:
I believe that it was seeing that show, that first ignited the feeling that you would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines. Did you have a sense of what that feeling meant in regard to who you wanted to be or become?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it was actually a slightly later show. It was George Michael’s Faith tour.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay.

Carrie Brownstein:
Because I remember at that show my friend turned to me, and she basically said that she wanted to just make out with George Michael. She was just-

Debbie Millman:
It was slightly more-

Carrie Brownstein:
It was dirtier than that.

Debbie Millman:
… lascivious in the book.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, it was dirtier than that. What she wanted to do to George Michael was unholy. I mean, I was sort of surprised, taken aback because the way I was watching George Michael was thinking, “I don’t want to do something to him. I don’t want to be like a side piece or accessory. I want to be that. I want to be the person that’s on stage that is making people feel excited. I want to have people projecting their fantasies and imaginations onto me.”

Debbie Millman:
That was the moment where I thought, “Oh, I’m in a different place than my friend. The way that I’m experiencing this is not sort of witnessing. I want to participate in this not just as a fan.” I think that really sowed the seed for me wanting to perform.

Debbie Millman:
Though your first music lessons were on the piano, you gravitated to the guitar. And when you were 15 years old, you bought your first guitar, a Canadian-made solid-state amp with a cherry red Epiphone copy of a Stratocaster. It was the first big money purchase you made with your own money. How did you make that money?

Carrie Brownstein:
I worked at the Crossroads movie theater in Redmond. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I just saved up my money. By the way, big money, it was like a $300 guitar. That was a ton of money for me at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.

Carrie Brownstein:
But as far as guitars go, that’s not like a big ticket item, but it was a huge amount of money for me. And I just saved up. I started working that year, actually, at the movie theater. My weekends were pretty boring because I just went to the theater at 11:00 and I left at 7:00 and didn’t do much after, but it was a good lesson.

Debbie Millman:
I think my parents, rightly so, they were like, “Well, you’ve gone through these phases. You sort of have these pursuits that you get really excited about. You did tennis for a while. We got you…” They just were like, “If you’re really going to do this, maybe you’ll stick with it if you have more invested in it,” and they were right.

Debbie Millman:
You took guitar lessons from Jeremy Enigk, a music and part of the band Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jeremy and the band are often cited as pioneers in second wave emo. He taught you chords by way of playing “The Last Day of our Acquaintance” by Sinéad O’Connor, wherein you’d play along to the two-chords song, which I couldn’t believe that it was two chords, while Jeremy sang. Then, he’d get bored and play R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” or U2’s “New Year’s Day.” And you felt that even with just a few chords everything was in your grasp. At that point, did you think you wanted to be… Were you sure at that point, “I’m going to be a musician”?

Carrie Brownstein:
I wanted to be a musician in the moment. I was really raised to think that I have to go off to university, probably get a graduate degree, music seemed like a hobby and certainly a way of harnessing my emotions as a teenager, making myself heard and giving myself a voice when I just felt like I didn’t have the words or just sort of lacked coherency. I was excited to have that tool at my disposal and to have a way of expressing myself that involved volume and was naturally angsty, putting the guitar through a distortion pedal or turning the gain up on the amp. It seemed to match this rage and discomfort that I was feeling, or just confusion, the confusion of adolescence. But, I didn’t really think, “Well, this is what is going to sustain me for the next 30, 40 years.” I just thought, “This is great that I have this now. I can form a band and be around people and be part of this community.” Wasn’t thinking too much beyond that.

Debbie Millman:
While all of this was happening, your home life was becoming more and more unstable. Your mother had an eating disorder, and you’ve written that her illness permeated the landscape of your psyche, and you developed a kind of general anxiety and sense of unease. And this manifested in nightmares where you would wake up scared of a fire or that all of your hair was falling out. Did your parents understand what was happening to you at that point?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think so. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I definitely do, they had a lot going on. My mom was dealing with her own illness, physical and mental, and my father was trying to keep her feeling safe. Of course, he was worried about her and then basically take on the role of sole parent while my mom was hospitalized for a few months. I think they were concerned about my sister and I, but I don’t really think they had the wherewithal or the bandwidth to do much more than sort of make sure we were fed and off to school and getting our homework done. They had a lot going on.

Debbie Millman:
You were 14 when your mom left your family to seek a cure for her eating disorder. You wrote in your memoir that in doing so she left another form of sickness and longing behind. Did anyone explain to you what was happening? How did you experience her leaving?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, it was explained as, I guess, that they were splitting up. But what we really didn’t understand was that she was forging a path that, in her mind, necessitated leaving behind her role as at least a day-to-day mom, the quotidian tasks of motherhood and nurturing, that that was kind of going on the back burner. We didn’t really realize that until she was gone and there wasn’t any sort of structure for custody except that we were just with my dad. There was no arrangement like, “Well, you have to see your mom,” or, “She wants you guys around on these days.” It was just, “That’s it.”

I think it sort of took a second for us to realize we’d been left. For me, I was a little bit older than my sister, so I was able to use that irascibility that starts to take hold when you’re 14. You can be defiant and reject, like, “I’m going to leave you first.” You have a little bit more of that gumption. But yeah, the truth was that we’d been kind of left behind.

Debbie Millman:
When did she come back, and what was it like when she came back?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, she would pop in and out every once in a while. She was not too far away, but there just was no sort of formal routine for us seeing her. It was sporadic and really, really confusing.

Debbie Millman:
All through this time you were still playing music. And in your junior year of high school, you formed a band with a few other people called Born Naked. What kind of music were you playing?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, we were playing rudimentary punk music, for sure, three-chord punk songs. Our singer, Lex Bratty vocalist. It was fun. It sounded like the punk music coming out of Olympia would sound like. It was definitely minimalist and more about intent than the actual product, I think.

Debbie Millman:
At 16, you wrote a song called You Annoy Me. You’ve stated that you sometimes feel that you’ve been writing that same song ever since. I’m wondering if you can talk about why or how and what maybe some of the lyrics were. I couldn’t find it.

Carrie Brownstein:
The first line I think is, “The way you look really annoys me. The way you talk really bores me.” That’s the opening two lines there. I think that it feels like a perennial theme in that… My friends call me Carrie David after Larry David. I have this kind of constant dissatisfaction, glass is half full. I have to be kind of poked and prodded into optimism, I think. Of course now I have a little more self-awareness to realize if someone else is annoying me, it’s probably a projection. In what ways am I annoying myself? In what ways am I not measuring up? So yeah, self-awareness sets in. But I think that can be my default mode. And the older I get, I try to rest myself of that and take a deeper look at why I’m feeling dissatisfied, or disdainful, or grumpy.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel like you’ve been writing that same song ever since?

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, I can hear iterations of that song, not musically. Musically, I’ve progressed. But in a lot of the, especially early Sleater-Kinney songs, there’s a brattiness. There’s a get out of my way, leave me alone, I need to be by myself, this sort of lone wolf theme that keeps cropping up. But hopefully, I think maybe in the last couple years, there’s less you-annoy-me songs. Maybe more I annoy-myself songs

Debbie Millman:
At that time, Nirvana’s Smells like Teen Spirit came out. For you and your friends, Nirvana was a local band. I think you saw them play in your high school gymnasium. Is that true?

Carrie Brownstein:
College.

Debbie Millman:
College gymnasium.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. The first college I went to was a state school in Bellingham, Washington, which is a small town really close to the Canadian border in-

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful, beautiful town.

Carrie Brownstein:
It is beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful place.

Carrie Brownstein:
Very verdant. Anyway, Mudhoney, who was another Seattle grunge band on SubHub records at the time, were playing. It was very exciting. “Oh, Mudhoney’s coming to our college.” So, I got tickets, and I went in, and there was a surprise opener, and that opener was Nirvana, who had just released Nevermind earlier that year. I think they were really good friends with Mudhoney and said, “Hey, we’d like to come and do a secret show.” That’s a pretty special university show to watch. And they played all the hits, I mean, Smells like Teen Spirit. That album was probably already platinum at that time.

Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter, you started to become aware of the music scene in Olympia. You heard bands like Bikini Kill and Ratmobile and Heavens to Betsy. You’ve said that for the first time you heard your story being explained and sung to you, that you were being seen and recognized. I’m wondering how that music did that to you. What did it speak to you? What was it saying to you?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it took a certain female experience and centered it and was fearless, and unapologetic, and unsparing in the specificity and the detail and just not sidelining those stories. It spoke to pain, and longing, and specific narratives that I could really relate to and had anger and fury, and was unafraid to express that in music. I just thought, “Oh, this is really the first time.” I mean, I’ve been listening to punk, and indie, and alternative music, at least by then, for a couple years and certainly had related to it. But all of a sudden there was a blueprint, and I think I could see myself on the landscape for the first time. People need that, right? Anyone needs to be able to see themselves in order to do it and to make it and have an example. It gives you faith and gives you the ability to try. It’s helpful to have people come before you, for sure.

Debbie Millman:
You also wrote that it was crucial to finally recognize yourself in the world. What were you beginning to see?

Carrie Brownstein:
I felt like I just didn’t have a voice or a means of expressing myself. Punk music, and particularly the music coming out of Olympia, it just became this container, this world that I could set myself in. I think what I was seeing was someone who was worthwhile, someone who could find the words, especially if the way of conveying them was through music, that there was a way out. I think that’s what I recognized, was a way out from who I was, which was someone who was very insecure, and diffident, and lonely, I think.
So, I recognized community. I recognized collaboration in these fellow travelers, and I dove into it. They’re also just queerness. I just recognize all these facets of myself that were very nascent and not even that clear to me yet, but my world just opened up.

Debbie Millman:
You left Western Washington University in Bellingham and transferred down to Evergreen College in Olympia in order to be closer to that music scene. I understand. Though, that you first met Corin Tucker, the lead singer of Heavens to Betsy, in Bellingham. What was that first meeting like?

Carrie Brownstein:
Corin played in a band called Heavens to Betsy, which was a two-piece, very deconstructed, unconventional music, which a lot of the Olympia scene was. They were playing a show at this space called the Show Off Gallery. It was them, Mecca Normal, it was a very avant-garde two-piece from Vancouver, and Bikini Kill, who were probably the most well-known riot grrrl band of that era, and very well-known band today.

But, Bikini Kill canceled, so it was just these two other bands. I went in and watched Corin sing. I’d seen Heavens to Betsy before, before I’d gone to college, and I went up to her afterwards and told her I was a fan. I said, “I think I’m going to drop out of Western and transfer to the Evergreen State College, which was in Olympia.” She basically said, “Yeah, you should.” I mean, I sort of took that as permission from this person I’ve never even talked to before. She said, “Well, why don’t you give me your address? I can send you my fanzine or keep in touch?” I think I knew I was getting out of Western because she had basically ordained it, and I wrote down my dad’s address in this notebook for her.

She remembers me as being very… She said very nerdy and shy, and I think I was. But yeah, so I dropped out two weeks later and my dad was not happy. He just thought, “That’s it. You’ve ruined your life.” But I did apply to Evergreen and transfer, so I finished college.

Debbie Millman:
You described Corin’s guitar this way. It was handmade by her and her father, and you described it as a crude piece of machinery painted matte black and looked like a home appliance that had been melted down in a fire. She also played with the tiniest of amps, an orange Roland cube with one speaker, no pedals, and no tuner. You’ve written that the ugly parts were edged in disgrace and disgust. It bordered right on ugly the whole time. But you’ve written this in a way that makes it feel very beautiful and something you really liked. I’m wondering if you can talk to that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think feeling like the music that Corin was making, this grotesque grumbling sounds coming out of her guitar and the way her voice could sort of pin you to the wall, it was scrawling and screeching. It had moments of, I think, gracefulness to it as well. It just felt truthful, honestly. I just thought, “This is just real.” Not everything is pretty and beautiful, and female singers don’t just have to be folk singers that are a salve for people’s hurt. Another way to process hurt is to meet it, to scream back at it. And I loved that sort of beautiful ugliness of that music.

I think at the time I sort of felt like a distorted version of a person, and the music really matched that. It was kind of being splintered apart. In the moments where it came together, you just thought, “Aha! I can be both. I can acknowledge the parts of me that are broken, but also stand up, too.”

Debbie Millman:
You started your own punk band, Excuse 17, in 1993 with Becca Albee and be Curtis James and recorded two full length albums, a single, and you contributed to the Free to Fight compilation album. And you also started to tour the US as the opening act for Heavens to Betsy. What was it like to first start performing live?

Carrie Brownstein:
It was fun, and it was really scary. I mean, when you say performing live, one thing to remember is these were not traditional venues, so it’s not like I suddenly was on a big stage in a beautiful theater. I was in basements, some kind of ramshackle, jerry-rigged club or venue or space that had just opened up. Everything was a little bit derelict, so it was good that we started there because there was nothing real polished about us as a band or my sort of performance on stage.

But, it was really exciting being in those small decrepit spaces that didn’t live up to any fire code. It was wonderful and wondrous. And what I really remember about it was getting to see the US for the first time. I just had grown up in the Pacific Northwest. At this point, I’d never been to Europe. I’d only ever been to Vancouver, Canada. What I remember was just that comradery and meeting like-minded people in all these cities and just feeling less isolated. This is pre-internet. Just the only way you could reach people was to go there in terms of actually meeting them and getting to know them. You could have a pistol area relationships. But in terms of the face-to-face, you had to go to their town. It really was eye-opening in that way. Performing, I sort of got my sea legs a little bit as a performer.

I think the other thing people forget pre-internet is it’s a mystery what… You rehearse in a space, but you don’t necessarily understand. Even a club or some kind of fly-by-night venue, they still have a PA. They still have monitors, if you’re lucky. There’s a sound person. These are new things. You don’t watch a YouTube video. I didn’t go to a school of rock where you learn what all these things are. The tour was a full… It was just demystifying all these things that I really didn’t understand. When you get on stage, you need a monitor mix. That’s what you hear. The audience is hearing something through the PA speakers. But I was like, “Oh, what is that? How do I explain myself?” It was a real lesson in learning how to communicate and take these chances, but it was really scary, that first tour.

Debbie Millman:
In your memoir, you write about how you were anxious to pour your guts out, and many of your songs with the Excuse 17 are a sonic and lyrical purging, like a caged animal who upon release head straight to the recording studio. I’m wondering, given how you’ve mentioned that you were introverted and shy, where did this stage persona come from and what’d it feel like to have that persona on stage given your introversion?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think it fully came to be in Excuse 17, but there were shades of it. Again, punk is a great place to practice loudness. You are turned up in terms of your amps, and often you don’t have a great monitor mix, so you better be singing loud or literally screaming. In screaming, which I did a lot of Excuse 17, I just literally found my voice, literally was more in touch with my anger. Performance-wise though, I’ve seen video of myself back then, I’m not moving around very much. I still feel kind of stuck in place.
I had this little leg move I did. Not like Chuck Berry, but a little bit of a Buddy Holly, I guess, sort of my foot sort of moving back and forth. That was as bold as I got back then. But the music, it’s bigger than you. That’s, I think, is the first thing that really gives you license because you’re like, “Oh, this music can hold me. I have felt so unheld and just free floating in life for a long time, and now I have this sonic vessel that allows me a sturdiness and ballast.” Then, once you accept that, once you realize that, you can start taking steps forward, and I think I did. Excuse 17 was sort of the early iterations of that, but I didn’t really have a full stage persona yet, which I still don’t quite have, but I definitely… It’s very rudimentary compared to what came later.

Debbie Millman:
You don’t think you have a stage presence now?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no, presence, yes, but I wouldn’t say I have a persona where I sort of get on stage and fully transform. I think there’s always something of me that comes through. But I definitely have a stage presence, yes. I move around on stage in a way that I never would in real life. I don’t quite know where that comes from, except to say that, again, the music as a place that I understood as just having me. It has me. It’s not going to let me go. And this is a world that I’ve built, this with my cohorts and collaborators and with the audience is a steadiness that I’ve built.

Debbie Millman:
I would describe your stage presence almost like punk ballet. There’s something very balletic about it. How did you learn how to windmill, to do the windmill?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t know how I learned to do it. I don’t think I practiced it, but I realized I was able to do it. It’s interesting that you say balletic because I am coordinated, but I wouldn’t say I’m the most graceful person. But on stage, I’m able to sort of mimic a gracefulness that I think I don’t really in my day-to-day life.

But things like the windmill, it’s interesting, on stage, I just possess a fluidity that I just don’t have anywhere else. Something like the windmill, which I probably just auditioned one time on stage, without knowing whether… I mean, even Pete Townsend, I think, actually pierced his hand, like a whammy bar. It’s not the safest move. But luckily, yeah, I came back around and was able to strum the strings, and I just thought, “Oh, okay. I guess I can do that.” It wasn’t me auditioning that in my room or something. I just did it on stage. But, the stage just gives license for those kinds of things, including failure and error and a lot of things that could go wrong. But I think I like that. I’m willing to take those risks on stage, risks I would not take in real life.

Debbie Millman:
Now, Sleater-Kinney started as a side project with Corin, and you named the band after one of your practice venues. When did you decide this was it, you’re both leaving your other bands and starting your own band together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Probably around 1995. It’s a weird story because… We were in a very insular but vital artistic music community. In Olympia, there were a lot of bands. We were gleaning a lot of influence and inspiration from our friends, but it was also sort of suffocating in its smallness.

We actually went to Australia and sort of took ourselves to the other side of the world, and it just allowed us to see ourselves in a different way, to just dare to imagine ourselves existing outside of Olympia, bigger than Olympia, just let’s reinvent.

I think it was during that time that we decided we probably wouldn’t continue with our other bands, and that was tough. It’s been a long time now, and Corin and I have spoken recently about that wasn’t easy. I think our other bands felt a little betrayed by that, like, “Oh, you guys are just going to form this thing.” Then, it ended up being bigger than those other bands. I think, obviously, that’s difficult, too. But, we had this chemistry, Corin and I, that was undeniable. We were creating something very singular together, and I think we didn’t want to let that go.

Debbie Millman:
You said that when you started playing with her it felt like you’d met your musical match?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we just are really intuitive together. We can sort of finish each other’s musical sentences. I think because we are both self-taught, the way that our guitars interlocked and the way our vocals would play off each other, it just felt very different than anything else we’d done. To this day, there’s certain ways that I play that I can only play with Corin, and that always makes it more unique than something I’m doing with another collaborator. I really value that.

Debbie Millman:
As the band grew in popularity and stature, critical response, you began to grapple with issues that you said you’d face for years, the requirement that you were going to have to defend or analyze decisions like why you were an all-female band or why didn’t you have a bass player. You realized that those questions and talking about that experience had become part of the experience itself. Was that something that you resented or just figured it was part of the equation?

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s a good question. I did resent it sometimes. What it is is it’s an energy suck. We just wanted to talk about the music. I would just think have you ever asked a band of men, “Why are you an all-male band?” I know you’ve never asked that question, and I just thought, “Oh, all the time saving that those guys get to do. They don’t have to waste a single moment thinking about these other things and having to speak for everyone.” Just not being able to be seen as an individual or a specific entity, that was frustrating. I don’t know if I was resentful, but it was frustrating because we didn’t want to have to do that. We didn’t want to have to spend our time doing that.

Debbie Millman:
Years ago, I interviewed David Lee Roth, and I kind of wish now that I’d asked him, “So, why were you in an all-male band?”

Carrie Brownstein:
I wish you had. I wish you had.

Debbie Millman:
Me too. As you moved into the late aughts and early 2000s, the band continued to grow in fame, in stature. But you stated that to court fame, money, and press felt dirty and sweaty. It implied that you wanted to be accepted and loved by the mainstream, the same people who had rejected, taunted, and diminished you in high school. You wrote that it sounds silly now, but at the time, these categories seem finite, immutable, and significant. Has your relationship to fame changed over the years?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, I think it’s still something that I don’t really value as a category. I try to examine things more from a place of feeling gratitude, like, “Oh, I’m grateful for access to certain things. I’m grateful for certain privileges that come with success.” But in terms of what I value and who I want to be around, it has very little to do with fame or celebrity.
I find it a strange thing to sort of worship or put too much of a premium on. I just want to be around kind, smart, interesting people in all walks of life from all walks of life. I have a lot of hobbies that purposely sort of bring me around people who I would never meet through film, music, or television.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of hobbies?

Carrie Brownstein:
Dog agility. It’s interesting with dog agility because we all think of like, “Oh, what’s a diverse group of people? What’s an interesting intersection of people?” Well, you actually have to step out. Dog agility is very interesting. I mean, it is people… I just like, “Oh, I would never meet you.” This is not academia. This is not the arts. It’s wonderful. I love it.

Also, now I do a lot of pickleball, and I’m hanging out with a lot of older people and younger people. Anyway, I just love these kinds of hobbies or pursuits that really get me outside of a social group that I would normally be around and make genuine friends there and have a common interest that we form our friendship around. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, Sleater-Kinney… Or 2006, I’m sorry, Sleater-Kinney took a hiatus. It had been about 12 years and seven albums together. You took an indefinite hiatus. And speaking of dogs, you dove headfirst during the hiatus into volunteer work at the Oregon Humane Society, and you won the Oregon Humane Society Volunteer of the Year Award in 2006.

Carrie Brownstein:
I did, yes. I also worked at the time as a trainer at a private facility and got a job at the humane society as well. I was not just a volunteer. I also worked in their training department, and I was the assistant in a reactive rover class. Then in the other, at the private facility, I was an assistant in just more like basic obedience. I was all in with that. My social life was all… My best friend that year was a woman named Jean, who was probably 70 years old. We hung out all the time. We went on dog walks together. I stayed at her house on the coast and became friends with her son. I really dove into that world, and that was pretty much my main social group for at least a year.

Debbie Millman:
My first dogs, which I got back in 2000, after going through a particularly depressive experience, I think I credit them with opening my heart. My wife was never a dog person, but she knew when we met that I’d had a history with dogs. And both of my dogs, who were very close to each other, they were like soulmates, had passed away at 17 and 18-

Carrie Brownstein:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
… six months before we met. So, she knew that I had this giant hole in my heart for dogs. And despite not being a dog person, she got me a dog three years ago.

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s sweet.

Debbie Millman:
Now she is a dog person. She is even more of a dog person than I am. So, I do think that dogs can save and change our lives in the most profound ways.

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Did that job at that time help you get over some of the loss of Sleater-Kinney and the sadness that you were feeling about the band going on hiatus?

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely. For one, it just was a way of understanding, just broadening my comprehension about life and loss and giving me a task to do. I think dogs, or animals in general, their needs are very clear and they’re simple. You realize that humans aren’t that much different. Most of us want to be loved and protected. You start to see all these through lines, and it really is so clarifying, I think. It also just teaches you patience.

One of my volunteer jobs at the humane society was just cleaning out the cages. You see, obviously, the literal feces of these dogs, but you just sort of see this is just a temporary thing for most of them. They’re just living in this cage. There’s just so much humanity in here and there’s just… My only job is to just make sure for this moment that this dog has an okay life as we are stewarding them into the next phase. I just thought, “Well, that’s how it should be with everyone.”

Whenever I have an interaction with someone that’s finite, I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, it should be as pure as what I’m doing with these dogs. I don’t know what state someone else is in. My job is just to be kind and open and leave them feeling either the same or better than when we started this conversation. I think that clarity of purpose really helped me just have perspective on the band and also just appreciate what we had done, not just mourn the hiatus, but appreciate the journey we’ve been on.

Debbie Millman:
One thing that I’ve come to realize about dogs that I try to consider what it would be like as a person to be this way is just how unselfconscious they are.

Carrie Brownstein:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, Max, my dog, doesn’t really like when anybody’s looking at him when he poops. That’s probably it. Everything else he’s just completely okay as is, and I love that about him.

Carrie Brownstein:
I love that, too. Sorry, my dog is barking. There’s probably someone… Hold on. I do need to at least bring Banjo in here. Hold on.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. Absolutely.

Carrie Brownstein:
Banjo, buddy. Come here, monkey.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, you began working with Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armisen on a series of comedy sketches for the internet titled Thunderant. What first inspired you two to do that together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Fred and I met through music because he is a drummer and we’d been in the same circles for a while. He had just started on SNL, but was still… Like in the cast, but not one of the main stars of the show.

He reached out. He said he wanted to collaborate. I assumed he wanted to do music. He said, “Well, actually, I…” I think it was the year John Kerry was running for president, so it would’ve been 2004. He said, “I have to make this video for their campaign.” He’s like, “My idea is that you’re a host of a cable access show and you’re running it out of your basement, and I’ll play Saddam Hussein as like…” He’s like, “When I see pictures of him…” He’s like, “He looks like one of those aging rockers. He’s got this beard now, and he just looks like a Paul Weller.” I was like, “Okay.” So, I played Cyndi Overton and had the first interview with Saddam Hussein, who he did. He played with a British accent and had a guitar the whole time.

I don’t know if Fred ever turned that into the Kerry campaign. I can’t imagine that they would have used it. I mean, they’re not going to put Saddam Hussein in a campaign, a viral video ad. Anyway, that encouraged us to keep making videos. So, we would just get together every once in a while. The next thing we made, actually, was the feminist bookstore, which became a recurring sketch on Portlandia.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. One of my favorite.

Carrie Brownstein:
We really enjoyed it. Fred would fly out to Portland. Although, I think we did one in New York, too, where he was living… We would just make these videos and put them up online and send them to our friends, and it was really fun. We kind of developed a language and we built our own chemistry. We were just like, “Oh, we have this sensibility now. These are ideas. These aren’t just disparate sketches. We’re creating a world here.” So then we took it out as a pitch for a show.

Debbie Millman:
And you pitched it to Lorne Michaels. He proved it in 2011. Portlandia debuted on the IFC network, and it was an immediate success. I know

that when you were in high school you were, I believe, the star of one of your high school plays, but did you feel surprised by this sort of naturalness at which you could enter into this new world of acting and comedy?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. And I was absolutely surprised. I had terrible imposter syndrome. I felt like I’d snuck in through some kind of side or back door. What’s also amazing is that if this had been created in any other way, I think that someone would’ve said… I mean, Fred was working with Kristen Wiig, and Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph, these heavyweights, heavy, brilliant, brilliant comedic actors, and somehow Lorne… This is why he’s genius and he just has that acumen. He just thought, “No, this is… You guys are friends.” Not that Fred isn’t friends with those other people, but, “You guys have this specific way of being together that if we just sub out Carrie for someone else, it will change the nature of the show.” So, I felt very lucky, but I also felt like I had a lot to prove.

I remember when we were shooting the pilot, Fred and I had done every scene together, and then all of a sudden we were doing a shot. It was the Put a Bird on It sketch. It was just me, and our director, Jonathan Krisel, yelled, “Action,” and I just thought, “Oh my God. It’s just me. What am I going to do here?” I was really nervous.

I really credit Stacey Silverman, who is a wonderful writer. She had written for Colbert, and now she writes for a ton of comedy shows. She just had a lot of faith in me, especially as a writer. I think becoming more confident as a writer in terms of writing the sketches helped me become more confident as a performer. Fred was really helpful, too. But yeah, I was terrified.

Debbie Millman:
Your beloved feminist bookstore sketch, which you’ve just referenced, Women First, stars your characters Tony and Candace. This was one of the first of a range of characters that you and Fred played together where you were cross-dressing with Fred appearing as a woman. Later, you appeared as a man, most notably as Andy, the men’s rights activist, or Lance, husband to Fred playing your wife, Nina. You were so great as Andy. I wouldn’t have even known it was you, truly.

Carrie Brownstein:
That kind of gender expression is just really… It’s very freeing. It also grants you, I think, a little bit of an understanding, too. I was like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. This is a different headspace to get into for a little while.” I loved it. I missed that.

Debbie Millman:
Portlandia ran for eight seasons. The show received 22 Emmy nominations, won three, and in 2011 won the prestigious Peabody Award for its good-natured lampooning of hipster culture, which hits the mark whether or not you’re in on the joke. In 2015, Jerry Seinfeld stated that Portlandia was one of the best comedies of all time. And that very same year, Stereogum chief editor Tom Breihan stated that Sleater-Kinney was one of the greatest rock bands of the past two decades. Did you believe any of it?

Carrie Brownstein:
I feel like that stuff is so arbitrary and subjective, and of course it’s a lovely thing to hear, but you can’t really hang your hat on that. You have to take it with a grain of salt. Because if you put a lot of faith in that or give that kind of stuff too much power, you also have to give the negative feedback a lot of power, too. I think my role is to hopefully tune both those extremes out as much as I can, even though it’s flattering. It’s so arbitrary.

Debbie Millman:
2015 was a big year. The band reemerged with the launch of the album No Cities to Love. And your most recent album, Little Rope, was launched earlier this year. While you were making it, Corin was by the American Embassy in Italy that your mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while they were there on holiday. I’m so sorry, Carrie. I’m so sorry that this happened.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks. I appreciate that. I will just clarify that Corin just got a call that they were trying to get a hold of me. So, she didn’t actually have to deliver that news.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay. It was hard to read. I’m sorry I didn’t get that quite right.

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no. That’s totally fine. That’s totally fine.

Debbie Millman:
Most of the songs for Little Rope were already written by the time of the accident. Can you talk a little bit about how grief mitigated into the work, perhaps in ways you didn’t expect?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. That time was so awful and disorienting. It’s been good to contextualize all this because music for me was something that had existed for so long, and I knew how to write songs. I didn’t know how to grieve my mom. I sort of was able to transfer just some of that confusion into a choreography that I knew, which was songwriting and playing… It was even more simplistic than that, more reductive. I just literally played guitar. I hadn’t played that much guitar since I was in high school. I mean, obviously I’ve played guitar for many years now, but I don’t usually just sit around for eight hours a day. I just needed somewhere to put my hands to place myself in time and space and literally in a room. It was so comforting to put my hands on the neck of the guitar and feel my fingers move along the frets. It helped ground me. It became a ritual and just started to give shape to days that felt very foggy and misshapen.

The other thing was, I think when you lose someone, you lose the ability to do anything for them, and you sort of miss that ability to reach them, to connect with them. So, I transferred a lot of that caretaking, and nurturing, and tending to onto the album because I couldn’t tend to my mom.

I think more than the songs sort of being about grief, the sorrow just informed the way we approached the record, the way I approached it, and just the stakes felt very, very high. Just didn’t want to put anything out into the world that wasn’t fully formed, wasn’t intentional, didn’t have life to it.

Debbie Millman:
I read a review, and I thought this was a really, really apt line, “The songs feel despondent and treacherous at times, but at others they’re hopeful and gleaming.” I think it’s a really complicated, really beautiful album. What do you think Little Rope tells your audience about who the band is now?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it tells them that we’re a band willing to reckon with the present, that we’re not steeped or trapped in our own history except to bring it along with us. We’re not stuck there. We’re not sort of tricked or intoxicated

by nostalgia or sentimentality, but we’re willing to carry the weight of our history, and our failures, and our frailty along with us and transform it into something that exemplifies strength and that we have a willingness to keep going and persevere and to connect. That desire to connect and commune with an audience is ever present and ongoing, and that we’re uninterested in no longer telling our story, that we have, I guess, enough confidence and willingness to keep the chapters going, keep the narrative going. I think it just expresses a willingness and also a celebration at the same time. Not something that’s a burden, but something that’s a real joy.

Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you. In your memoir, which was published several years ago, you wrote that much of your intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw your way out of it. I’m wondering if that’s still the case.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think in some ways it is, but I don’t feel just wholly dissatisfied. It’s too cynical to be steeped in dissatisfaction. Also, there’s something whiny about that. I’m like, “Ugh, come on.” Dissatisfaction, what does that mean? That’s sort of your own making a little bit.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s a tough world out there, especially now.

Carrie Brownstein:
It’s a tough world, but it’s tougher for other people. I guess that’s how I feel. Sure, existentially, if you’re lucky, it’s just existential. If you’re less fortunate, those can be very real threats, corporeal threats.

So, yes. I mean, I’m not saying that I can’t be dissatisfied, but I guess what I’ll say is that I try to at least question what I’m dissatisfied about. But I also like to be a voice for those of us who are discontent, for those of us who are still clawing, and fighting, and wrestling, and thrashing about. Those are my people. Those are my people who just are restless by nature, and that restlessness can be born of many things, and I love that. I want life to feel urgent. I want art to feel urgent. I want people to leave everything on the stage, leave everything on the page, leave everything on the screen. Just put it out there.

I don’t know if it’s dissatisfaction, but it’s definitely a restlessness and a desire to keep wanting and to not settle, to just not look out and think this is okay. I will continue writing for myself and for other people who think this is not okay.

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

Carrie Brownstein:
Thank you, Debbie. That was a wonderful interview.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Carrie Brownstein’s memoir is titled Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Her latest album with Sleater-Kinney is titled Little Rope. You can find out more about the band on their website, sleater-kinney.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in June of 2018.

Aminatou Sow:
It is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. And so this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” And then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers, and they’re only quoting men.

Announcer:
From the Ted Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 14 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman talks with Aminatou Sow about her podcast and her career in tech.

Aminatou Sow:
I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. Being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots.

Debbie Millman:
Aminatou Sow doesn’t like when people tell her she can’t do something. After being told that women in technology don’t mix, she created an online meeting hub for women in technology. She also went to work at Google. She was born in Guinea and lived all over the world before settling in New York City. She was named one of Forbes Magazine‘s 30 Under 30 in Tech and KQED’s Women to Watch. Today I’m going to talk to her about her popular podcast she co-hosts Call Your Girlfriend and her life as a digital pioneer. Aminatou Sow, welcome to Design Matters.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh my gosh, thank you. Hello.

Debbie Millman:
Hello. Aminatou is the Guinea version of Amina prophet Mohammed’s mother. But from what I understand, every country has a spin on the name. So for example, in Senegal it’s Aminata. You’ve said that when you meet other people from West Africa, they want to call you Aminata and that drives you nuts. You’ve also stated that what people call you categorizes them in different places in your life. So in what way?

Aminatou Sow:
Aminatou is the Guinean version of my… It’s the [inaudible 00:03:47] version of my name, really. Aminatou, and for me, I don’t feel precious about nicknames or the ways that people call you. I think that in different phases in your life, people will call you different things. And so in my family, I’m firmly Ami. That is a thing that just my father, my brother, sister, grandmas, and that’s very-

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:04:12] sweet diminutive.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s where that’s from. I will never grow out of that name. And Amina was really, I think who I was when I moved to America. People said my name wrong a lot of times. And sometimes it annoys me, most times it doesn’t. I talk to a lot of other immigrant kids about this and I suspect that it’s true of even not it immigrant kids is that there is a way that you can reinvent yourself subtly. And for some people that is just like, please use my full name or they’ll use their middle name or whatever. And I think it’s looking back on it now, I think that it is just trying on different personalities. It’s like who can you be in the world? And so for me, professionally, I always write my name as Aminatou Sow. That’s the name my parents gave me. I’m proud of it, I love it. But most of my American friends call me Amina and it’s always a reminder of what phase of my life somebody met me in what they call me.

Debbie Millman:
And I understand your Starbucks name is Amanda.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yes. My Starbucks name is firmly Amanda. And the funniest thing about that is that I have a friend who is also an immigrant with a harder to pronounce name. And in college we met at a Starbucks and when they called out Amanda we’re like, “Wait, that’s my coffee.” So it made me very happy.

Debbie Millman:
Your family is from Guinea in Africa, and you’ve said that they were political refugees by the time you were born. So you grew up in Nigeria and Belgium. Your parents were diplomats.

Aminatou Sow:
I have been going back and trying to uncover a lot of my own family history because for as long as I have been a sentient, cogent person, we’ve always not lived where we are from. As much as my passport is from Guinea, I have never lived there. I don’t have a strong sense of that being home for me and politically it was never a place that was safe for us. I guess by the time my mom and my dad left for Nigeria, the political regime in place was not encouraging of people from our tribe. And so a lot of them had to find different opportunities in different places. And my dad lucked out and got this job in Lagos, Nigeria for this organization called The Economic Community of West African States.

It’s essentially the EU for African countries. So they do trading agreements and provides economic opportunities and gives people a place to live and a zone that they can all share. And that’s how my dad came to be an international civil servant. So it’s funny because there are many ways to be a diplomat and it’s just a status, but for a lot of people, they represent their country. And my dad got to work at this cool international organization his whole life. I always joke that he’s the only person I know that’s worked at one place his entire career and it makes no sense to me.

Debbie Millman:
That’s extraordinary. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Aminatou Sow:
He just retired and I was like this, “You worked here when you were 22 and you retired at 60 something. That’s wild.”

Debbie Millman:
Your mother was an engineer by trade. In fact, she was one of the first women to study at university in Guinea, but she was a stay-at-home mom. And in high school I read that you realized she was a genius and was actually smarter than your father and you didn’t understand why she was the one staying home.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, honestly, it made no sense to me. The way that my parent explained it to us was that in my dad’s job category, due to conflicts of interest, a lot of times the wives do not work. And I would say that that was mostly true for a lot of the kids my age at my dad’s job. But I think that a lot of it is also just very old school, African sexism. She could have worked in anything. And the fact that I didn’t know until I was in middle school that my mother was a math genius was something that was just, it blew my mind. I was having so many problems with equations, quadratic equations, couldn’t figure them out. My dad is an economist by trade and also very good at math, but terrible kind of at explaining. And so everything always ended in tears.

It was like the math teacher can’t explain this to me. My dad is very impatient and here’s my mom, the person who makes all of our meals and picks out our clothes and kind of never gets any glory in our household, is the person who’s like, “Well, here’s how this works.” And the same thing happened in physics later on and the same thing… It’s like every time I had a problem in stem, my mom was who would fix it. And I think about it to this day. She passed away over a decade ago now, but I still think about how there wasn’t a path for her and she never complained about it. But it still, I think about that all the time. I was like, “You are your math genius and you just took care of these idiot children your whole life.” Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And your father was, you’ve written about how your father was the only black man you knew who had a day job.

Aminatou Sow:
In the very European environments that we were in because the path for a lot of French-speaking West African kids is that you go to France, you go to one of the bigger schools in France, and then that’s how you distinguish yourself. And I looked at a lot of my family, my uncles, other people that we knew, and I was like, “My dad is one of the few people I know with an office job, and he doesn’t get that much respect.” And I don’t know how I metabolize this as a really young kid, but I remember being eight years old and thinking France probably not the best place for me, I was an ambitious kid and I can’t quite explain it.

I was very curious. I wanted things, but I looked at this thing that my parents held up as the path that I was supposed to take. And it was like, “Well, you all are doing everything and it does not seem to me you have all the things that you want.” We actually didn’t have a lot of money growing up and certainly not enough status. And it was interesting to be in predominantly white environments and still there was nothing aggressively bad about it, but just see, “Oh, there’s not a place for me here.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you’ve always been a feminist, but can’t pin the origins of that identity down to a single cathartic moment. And you’ve said that you think a lot of it was being a girl in a conservative Muslim family.

Aminatou Sow:
And to my parents’ credit, my parents did a lot of really brave things that made me who I am today, and they were the first in their families that married for love. They did not have an arranged marriage. We can talk about whether that was good or bad. I have my feelings about it, but in their generation, that was kind of a nutty thing to do. Just say like, “Hey, we don’t care what our parents think. We’re going to choose each other.” And it had really big consequences for them. Also, when they got married, I was the oldest in my family and my dad never treated me less than a lot of my other cousins. My mom is one of 21 and my dad is one of eight or nine, and a lot of eldest boys, they get all the glory and they get all the prizes.

My dad never treated me differently, and that’s the thing that I felt at a really young age. We still had to go to Arabic school to learn Quran because my family was Muslim. We still had to do the whole respect your elders, whatever. But he never told me, “You will not get to make decisions in this family.” Let me play sports. My parents also did not circumcise me or my sister, which was a huge… I did not understand how monumental that was until later in life. And they just in their own quiet ways, my parents, they were not wave makers. I wouldn’t call my dad a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that there is something, even for very conservative men when they look at their daughters and can think, “If you are my legacy, I want you to have better than I have.” And I think my dad was able to do that for me in ways that were really concrete.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you communicated with your father through knowledge seeking. Can you tell me more about what that means?

Aminatou Sow:
It’s funny, it’s like we are learning how to become pals now, so my dad’s telling me more about his life and we’re becoming friends, but that was not true when I was growing up, I was kind of terrified of my dad, but one of the things that he always did was that he made us into very curious kids. We watch the eight o’clock news all the time at dinnertime. We talked about current events.

Debbie Millman:
You were voracious media consumers from what I understand.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. He never cared about what your interpersonal relationships in school were. Nobody talked about boyfriends at the dinner table at my house, but it was very much like, “What do you think about the crisis in Burkina Faso? What is this flag?” And he would always grill you, and I think I internalized that a lot, but it was also the only vocabulary that we had for getting along. And so in the ways that things can be really tough with your family sometimes it’s like, “Okay, yeah, my dad and I do not have warm feelings for each other, but we are all caught up on the French crisis, so let’s talk about that and-

Debbie Millman:
Where does he live now?

Aminatou Sow:
He just moved back to Guinea. He just moved back from Brussels to Conakry in Guinea, and it’s the first time he’s lived there since the ’70s. So it’s just fascinating to watch him have this new phase of his life and we’re pals now. I’m like, “Okay.” I’m like, “How’s it going? How’s your wife doing?” Just all these questions that we could never ask each other. And I do think that, yes, I’m older, the tables have definitely turned, but at the same time he’s open to having that kind of relationship with me and I really appreciate it because I don’t come from a part of the world where a lot of kids get to have that kind of relationships with their parents.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you weren’t sure if marrying for love was a good or a bad thing.

Aminatou Sow:
Honestly, I think that I grew up really thinking that arranged marriage was very, very bad. I was like, “No, you have to be able to choose or whatever.” I think that it just depends on your cultural context. I’m like, “Probably will not work for me.” But I do think that there are parts of the world where if your families don’t get along, it has bigger consequences than just you and the person that you want to be with. And so it’s not for me, I do not think women should be forced into marrying people that they don’t want to marry. But if your family wants to set you up with someone and gives you a choice about, it’s like, “Hey, if you like this person,” that’s something that you should pursue.

I’m like, “Dating is hard.” If your parents want to get involved, my God, take it. It’s fascinating. It’s like I saw in my own parents’ marriage how a choice that was selfish in their culture really had lasting generational consequences. And I was like, “I wonder if they would’ve done it differently if they had known,” because they went through very tumultuous phase. But I think that by the end of my mom’s life, they had gotten to a point where they were like, “Oh, we like each other.” And I think that it literally took them 30 years. That’s fascinating.

Debbie Millman:
What made them brave enough to insist that you and your sister weren’t going to be circumcised or what is also called genitally mutilated?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. Honestly, they never told us. Knowing a little bit, what I know now about my family because I know that my mom, it happened to my mom and it definitely marked her a lot. And knowing the kind of person that she is, I can see, and she’s very stubborn, being like, this is something that will never happen to my daughters. She was able to convey that with my dad. They were very modern people for even their time. And I think that also the isolation of not being in the home environment-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]

Aminatou Sow:
… the isolation of not being in the home environment, that was really easy to conceal, because I do… It’s funny, I remember a conversation with my mom where we were going on vacation with a lot of other women from Guinea, and she said, “If anybody asks you if this terrible thing has happened to you,” and she didn’t even describe it, she’s like, “If they start telling awful stories about a thing that hurt or whatever, don’t tell them that it’s ever happened to you.” And at the time, I didn’t understand, and I’m like, “Oh, you were shaking the table. I like this.”

Debbie Millman:
And when your grandmothers, I read, were trying to set you up in an arranged marriage, the fact that you weren’t circumcised prevented that from being able to happen, is that right?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, I think it was mostly… The thing that stands out so much for me in that time period is that I’m one of the youngest people in my family now at this point, and I’m definitely the oldest, unmarried, and so I get the pressure all the time. Sometimes it’s funny, and then other times it’s not. There’s a side of the family that it’s actually not awesome from at all. But when it came to light that I was not circumcised, that was a point of concern, and it was like, “Well, let’s fix this. If we fix this, maybe you’ll find a man.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s preventing me from being in a relationship, thank you.”

But it was a way too where a choice that my parents made a long time ago, marrying for love, living overseas, now collides with the tradition of my family, it is very conservative. And my family tree, it goes back to seventh century West Africa, and it’s very Muslim, it’s very conservative, and I was like, “Yeah, if my parents hadn’t been those weird or rad people, that’s pressure I would’ve fallen to.”

Debbie Millman:
You went to boarding school in Jos, where you said it’s the only place in West Africa where you can grow strawberries and roses.

Aminatou Sow:
It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
And I understand you had to convince your parents to send you there. What made you want to go there so badly?

Aminatou Sow:
One, I really wanted to go to boarding school. I was like, “I’m in pursuit of better educational opportunities.” And there was this boarding school in France I really wanted to go to, but I also knew how my parents are, so I was like, “I have to make it seem like it’s their idea.” And so, my frame to them was, “Listen, here’s the life that I want for myself.” And I was definitely in the eighth grade, and I was like, “Here’s what I want to do in life.”

Debbie Millman:
And what was that?

Aminatou Sow:
And a lot of that for me was, I was like, “I just want a good job and I want to go to a good school.” Truly, there were no brand names attached. I was just like, “I want a different life, and here are a couple of ways that I can do that.” And I was like, “I think I want to live in America because it looks like there are Black people that do cool things.” I’m pretty sure I’d seen three episodes of The Cosbys, which is hilarious now, knowing everything you know about Bill Cosby, but it was one of those, “Oh, America seems like a place where Black people get to do magical things. Maybe this is what I want to do.” Or I was like, “Well, maybe I can live in France.” But I knew that I didn’t want to be home. And also, home life was a little tough, and I always had an independent streak. I’m like, “I’m 14 and I don’t want to live at home anymore, but I want to not live at home to go to school, not to run away.”

And so, I really wanted to go to the school in France, and my mom was kind of on board, and I think that at that 11th hour, she was like, “Wait, this girl is pulling a scam on me. That is too far away, can’t supervise her.”And she was like, “Listen, I’m all on board for you going to a school that you want to go to, but the south of France is a little too far for me.” So there was this American school in Jos that was four hours away, it was a very good school, it was run by missionaries. My parents were really on board. At first, I was like, “It’s kind of a religious school.” And my mom was like, “Christian people run good schools, it’s fine.” I had to take a test, I had to do an English immersion program that summer, because I went to French school my whole life, my entire life was in French, even though we lived in Nigeria, it was kind of shameful, I didn’t speak very good English.

Debbie Millman:
I understand you watched Daria and Friends religiously-

Aminatou Sow:
Religiously.

Debbie Millman:
… and repeated every word so you could get the accent just right.

Aminatou Sow:
I know, when I moved to America and everybody didn’t speak Chandler Bing, it was a huge disappointment to me. I was sold a fake [inaudible 00:20:20].

Debbie Millman:
You came to the US to go to the University of Texas at Austin.

Aminatou Sow:
Hook ’em Horns.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pick UT Austin?

Aminatou Sow:
Man, I applied to 24 schools, I was such a nerd. I’m pretty sure it was 24 schools, definitely over 20 schools. Got into every single one of them, except for one. And I applied to all these schools because I love having choices, but then I’m paralyzed by the choices, so I made my dad write a check for every single school, and I was like, “I’m going to pick at the last minute, but I need you to write all these checks now.” And he was like, “You better not cash all of this in at the same time.” And I remember it being April 1, or whatever the deadline was that you were supposed to send things, and just not… I was like, “I don’t know where I want to go, this is terrible.”

And so, I convinced my parents to let me take a year off, and I was like, “Oh, this seems like a chill European thing that you could do.” And they were not weirded out by it. And my family had just recently moved to Belgium, and because I’d been at boarding school, I saw that my siblings were getting a lot closer than me, I was definitely odd man out. And so, I was like, “

Okay, this can work.” Two months into being at home, I was like, “Oh, there’s a reason I left here when I was 14. I cannot handle this.” So I then went back to the drawing board, and I was like, “Oh, what’s the school that will let me come in the spring?” And UT was top of that list, but I also wanted that movie college experience.

Debbie Millman:
You said you wanted a fantasy movie college experience.

Aminatou Sow:
I did, I wanted to go to the big school. My graduating class was 29 people, I had always been in these tiny environments, classes with 13 people and 10 people, and I was like, “What is the biggest place I can go to and be a number?” Everything that people don’t want from a big school, that’s what I wanted.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like when you got to Texas? It’s Texas. What was it like?

Aminatou Sow:
It’s Texas, but it’s Austin. I’m really happy that Texas was my first America home, because I think that it’s weird and expansive like me. Texas is weird. It’s not the South, it’s not… I love it. But Austin specifically was great. I was like, “Oh, I get to go to a good school.” UT is fine, but Austin itself was amazing, that kept me happy. I made a lot of friends who didn’t go to UT, or didn’t go to college, or had non-traditional backgrounds, and that made me happy too.

My dad was very disappointed that I went to UT and not to Yale, which was his first choice, and for a long time, he was just not happy about it at all. He was like, “You’re not listening to me, you’re not going to make anything of your life, whatever.” Because status and brand, especially to immigrant parents, that stuff matters a lot, because those are also the only paths that they understand. And so, he was like, “Well, here you go, throwing your whole life away, going to the school by the Mexican border.” And I was like, “Sir…” He sounded like the Black Donald Trump at the time to me. I was like, “This is not cool.” But it all worked out.

Debbie Millman:
You studied government, specifically political science, Middle Eastern studies.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, two different majors.

Debbie Millman:
And economics.

Aminatou Sow:
Economics. Government, Middle Eastern studies and economics, because my hero growing up was Christiane Amanpour.

Debbie Millman:
Of course.

Aminatou Sow:
So I was like, “Well, she reports a lot from the Middle East. How do I get to be Christiane Amanpour?” Yeah, so I did all those things, and look at me now, I don’t use any one of them.

Debbie Millman:
What did you want to be at that point? Did you want to be a newscaster or a journalist?

Aminatou Sow:
I don’t think I wanted to be a journalist, but I definitely… I cared a lot about the Middle East, I thought I wanted to work with refugees. I was like, “I want to work in a refugee camp, I want to help solve the Middle East peace,” whatever. And also, I think it’s because my dad was a diplomat, I was like, “Government is a thing that we can have in common, and economics is a thing that we can have in common.” And it was fine, but I think it wasn’t until my junior year in college where I was like, “Oh, I’m not…” Liberal arts is great, but I’m not learning a skill here. I’m like, “I know how to read books and I know how to write papers.” But I made all these friends that were in design school and the art school and business school and were engineers, and I was like, “You can leave college with skills? This is weird.” And the recession was looming, so I was like, “Something bad is going to happen.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, you graduated in 2007 when the global recession began.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You went and lived with family in Belgium until you got an American visa, and seeking a government job, you moved to Washington D.C. where you didn’t know anyone and had no job prospects. You applied for dozens and dozens of jobs.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh my god, so many jobs.

Debbie Millman:
And finally got a job at a toy store to pay your rent. What was that like for you?

Aminatou Sow:
It was fine for me, but it’s so fascinating to live in a town like D.C. and not have a job that people think is important or valid. I’m really happy that I went through that phase of my life, because the one job that I did get offered while I was applying to all these things was this internship in John Kerry’s office. This woman called me and she was like, “Are you available to start tomorrow?” And through our conversation, it became very clear that she needed a diversity person, and she couldn’t say, “Are you black?” Or, “Are you from somewhere else?” But all of her questions were leading to that. But I was like, “I have no shame about this. Yeah, sure.”

And it was to be a press intern, so it was literally just making press clips. And I remember being like, “Okay, how much does this job pay?” And she was like, “It’s an internship on Capitol Hill, it pays nothing.” And I was like, “Okay, then I can’t take it because I support myself.” And I remember her just being very shocked talking to me and being like, “What is wrong with this 22-year-old? Everybody wants this job.” And that’s when it just dawned on me, I was like, “Oh, the reason all these jobs don’t pay a lot and have a lot of prestige is because people with rich families can afford to do that for them. This is how government works, this is how magazines work.” Just everything that I had my eye on, I could never figure out the economics of it, and so going to work at the toy store for me was a no-brainer. I was like, “My rent is $1,000 a month, I have zero money, and I need to pay my bills, I support myself, I come from not a wealthy family at all.” And it was great, I loved it.

Debbie Millman:
You then applied for asylum in the United States and got it. Can you talk about how that happened and why you had to do that?

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. So after the toy store, I went to work at this think tank, and it was great. I was learning a lot of things, and I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m meant to do, policy work.” So when you go to school in the US, you get what’s called optional practical training for a year, it is a status that you can apply for.

Debbie Millman:
That’s OPT.

Aminatou Sow:
OPT. And for a year, you are eligible to work. And at the end of that year, either you figure out a different status, and for a lot of people, that is an H-1B visa. They’re very competitive, a lot of companies compete for them for their employees, so it used to be that literally Microsoft would scoop up all of the OPT, and then the rest of the people would just be left out hanging.

But also, when you’re a 22-year-old with an entry level job and you have to convince your job like, “Hey, at the end of the year, can you sponsor me for a visa?” And the process is very murky and opaque, they just don’t make it easy. And for tech companies, the payoff is like, “We’re getting skilled engineering labor, we’ll import that.” But for everybody else, they’re like, “Do I really need a comms assistant for this thing?” And it costs a lot of money, and a lot of people don’t understand it.

But here’s the other truth is that if you went to school in America like I did, you’re pretty much only qualified for American jobs. When I thought about moving home to Belgium, they were all like, “You probably need one more year of college.” The equivalencies are different. And then, to go back to family history, I never had a home. I have a passport, but I’ve never had a home. And I was like, “America is my home, this is where I’m making my life. I chose to go to school here, I live here, I have nowhere else to go.” And one of my only options at the time was to apply for asylum, and for FGM asylum, because it was-

Debbie Millman:
What does FGM stand for?

Aminatou Sow:
Female genital mutilation. Because then there’s all this other family stuff that’s happening at the same time. And I was really, really, really lucky that somebody who was an alumni from UT took on my case pro bono, I had all of this legal help, I spoke English. I was not the typical asylum applicant, basically. The fact that I could fill out the forms on my own was just, that’s something. The fact that I had all of this pro bono, tens of thousands of dollars worth of help for free, I was so aware of my own privilege.

And even through that, whenever Republicans are like, “Just come here the right way.” I did everything, and it still took over two years, and the process sucks. Early on, somebody in the asylum office literally transposed my first and last name. That took a year to fix. The woman who interviewed me for intake was not clear on the law with students, so she referred me to a judge and then realized her mistake, but the process is not retroactive, so she’s like, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do.” That takes another year. Show up at court, they’ve forgotten to send my file, don’t get back on the docket for another year, get there… It’s just like Kafkaesque proportions.

And when you’re transferred to a judge, you’re technically pleading guilty to a couple of charges, so one of them is you’re pleading guilty that you’re not a US citizen, fair. You’re saying that you’re a citizen of another country, fair. I’m like, “I’m pleading to those two.” And the third one is that you’ve been in the country illegally for X number of days. And because this woman referred me without knowing what the law was for students, I was like, “I’ve never been here illegally. I was under status for OPT.” It’s a very gray area of the law. And so, the judge was like, “I don’t know what to do with you.” The government lawyer was very much like, “Just plead to these charges, it’s not a big deal.” And I was like, “Sarah, I watch a lot of law and order.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Aminatou Sow:
“I’m not pleading to something I didn’t do.” And here I am, with all of these lawyers who want to help me, and I’m like, “I’m doing everything right, and other people’s messing up is what is getting me here.” And at the end, when we finally resolved everything… And you’re supposed to stand a trial, show up at trial, it’s a very emotional day, and the government lawyer is like, “Actually, you are the kind of American we want here, you’re fine.” And then, the judge, who’s this very Republican judge, gives us elocution, it’s all very nice.

And I was irritated and sad more than anything, I was like, “This is actually really unnecessary. You wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, you wasted my time, it caused me a lot of pain.” It’s just a very inefficient process, and there’s no compassion for people who are immigrants. I was like, “I did everything right.” I cannot tell you how just humbling it is to be somebody who knows how to navigate America and go into one of these refugee offices to get fingerprinted or whatever, and look at the other people who are there-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

Aminatou Sow:
Offices to get fingerprinted or whatever and look at the other people who are there. A lot of them don’t speak English, they don’t have lawyers. The typical refugee, FGM refugee woman like me has children. She’s here. I was like, I don’t know what the right way is. I don’t know that not having compassion for people is something that we should be proud about in our immigration system because it’s broken even for the people who do it right.

Debbie Millman:
What do you think is the foundation of your resilience?

Aminatou Sow:
Man, I think about this all the time. I come from resilient women specifically. My mom was resilient, my grandmothers were resilient. I think that there is something about African women, whether it is the environment or it is just the life circumstances that you have, that if you make it to a certain age, you just get a different philosophy on life. I’m like, I come from a part of the world where if you make it to five, you’re probably going to have a longer life than most people.

My mom died when she was 49, even though we lived in Belgium. For our country, she’s still a statistic. Women in Guinea have a life expectancy average of about 50. I have seen some hard things, like hard things have happened to me, but I also think life is worth living and we’re very aware of that. So I don’t want to feed into some bullshit like African people are strong people narratives because I think a lot of times that’s how it gets misconstrued. Even in America, people think that black women specifically are just stronger, and that’s not true. It’s like we all have the same emotional reserves that everybody else has, but our lives can be more challenging. If you’re choosing to live, then you got to tap into that.

Debbie Millman:
I love art. I love looking at art, collecting art, and showing it off in my home. Framebridge helps me affordably custom frame all my art. Framebridge has a curated selection of frame styles and design experts to make it fun and easy to choose the perfect frame for every piece. Their pricing is fair and transparent and is based upon the size of your piece so you know exactly what you’ll pay up front.

Ordering online is simple and convenient. You can choose to upload a digital photo for them to print and frame, or you can mail your piece with a secure prepaid packaging provided by Framebridge. If you prefer to buy your frames in person, you can. Framebridge has stores in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Chicago, and Atlanta. Visit a store and you can get one-on-one expert design advice and see their collection of frame styles in person. Visit Framebridge.com or a retail store to custom frame just about anything.

Let’s talk about some of your career successes. In 2011, you co-founded Tech LadyMafia with Erie Meyer, formerly of the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, and now with Code for America. The impetus was an article that you both read about the dearth of women in technology, which you both knew was false since you each worked in tech. How did that lead you to launching Tech LadyMafia?

Aminatou Sow:
Especially in 2011, 2010, we would get a lot of these articles and the headline was always the same. Only five women know how to use a calculator. Seven women know how to computer. The media just feeling very proud about the fact that they’re pointing out disparities. The statistics are absolutely true. They are true. There are not enough women in STEM. It’s not representative of the population we have, that it’s not even representative of the number of women who are studying STEM.

That’s the other thing. I’m like, everybody talks about this leaky pipeline. I’m like, where are these women? The thing is that for Erie, and I was like, this is not true in our lives. First of all, we know every woman in this town who computers. That’s one thing. Also, it is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. So this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” Then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers and they’re only quoting men.

So the impetus really was saying, okay, we don’t have any mentors. We don’t trust the system, but we trust each other and we all feel a little lonely in our silos. I am a big believer in this concept of horizontal mentorship and horizontal loyalty and that I did not come up with. Please do a Google and read more about it. A thing that is true is that if you look around horizontally, you look at your peers, you can put your resources together. That’s what we did with Tech LadyMafia. There was nothing revolutionary about it. It was literally an email listserv.

We’re like, we are going to share resources. We are going to share salary information. We are going to share information about jobs. We have a men’s auxiliary, they plan our picnic every year and they give us salary advice. I’m like, “What do I need a dude for in tech?” I was like, “Tell me how much money you make.” I’m not trying to figure out how much these other ladies are just being just as underpaid as me. I think that for all of its success, it’s actually very simple. It’s like if you don’t accept the mentality of scarcity and you don’t accept when you are a marginalized person or a minority, that anybody who looks like you in the workplace is your competition. This is Highlander and there can only be one of you. You’re actually going to get very far.

I’m like, these are messages that capitalism and patriarchy tell you over and over again. There’s only room for one of you. You’re supposed to compete with each other. While you’re competing for the scraps, other people are building wealth. They’re building the future, they’re doing amazing things. If you just look around and just say, actually, if we hunt in a pack, we are stronger, which I think is so true for women, you will get to where you’re trying to get to so much faster.

Debbie Millman:
Can you share some of your early guerrilla promotion tactics and how you grew Tech LadyMafia early on?

Aminatou Sow:
My favorite one that we did is we had these cards that said Join the Mafia, and we would leave them in the women’s bathrooms at tech conferences and tech offices and venture capital offices. Nothing made me happier than when somebody gave me one. They were like, “You have to join this group.” I was like, “Yes, thank you.” So a lot of our recruiting honestly was like that, informally. Also, everybody in the group is referred by somebody. So everybody knows someone because we’re very much like, if there are other women in your office or there are other women in your lives, or you go to a conference and there’s only two of you, find that person and bring them into the fold.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the brag section of Tech LadyMafia.

Aminatou Sow:
We ask people to tell us what they’re working on and what they’re proud of. I think a lot of women are really conditioned to be meek about their work and to… Even the word bragging has such a negative connotation. The truth is that if you actually look at a lot of studies about this, when men get together, they talk about work constantly. I’m like, this is why they’re always just like, they know where all the jobs are and they know where whatever is. When women get together, we’re just like, “How can I help you? How can I tend to you?” I think that we are deeply conditioned to feel shame about success around work.

Debbie Millman:
Why do you think that is?

Aminatou Sow:
I think that it’s a lot of things. That bragging is bad, and also you’re not supposed to take credit for your work. I think that that’s a thing that a lot of women struggle with. I truly don’t understand it because I’m like, well, if you’re doing the work and you’re doing it well, you should probably tell other people. Also, you can’t be what you can’t see. So part of starting the brag threads, for me it was one, I was like, I want to celebrate other people’s successes and also, I can’t celebrate what I don’t know about. So there is something really about just reclaiming the narrative of your own career. I’m like, if you’re good at your job, we should know about it. There’s nothing gross about talking about it.

Debbie Millman:
Has that brag section influenced how you think about or talk about your own achievements?

Aminatou Sow:
It has because it has challenged me a lot. I think that I’m somebody who has not had a traditional career path. It’s hard to feel part of a team sometimes. I think that when you’re sharing your accomplishments with your team, there’s a clear framework for how you can do that. You can frame it around the work and it’s part of teamwork. For me, I’m like, I work alone and I work in a silo. Sometimes I do feel that creeping in where I’m like, oh, I never… A friend challenged me about this recently. She’s like, “You never tell me when you win awards or when you do things,” or whatever.

Debbie Millman:
You even blushed when I talked about the Forbes 30 Under 30 when I introduced you.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s so embarrassing.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Aminatou Sow:
Well, listen, here’s my feeling about the Forbes 30 Under 30, thank you Forbes Magazine for that award. I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. I’m like, sure, being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots. You know what I mean? What is a 30-year-old going to teach you about the future of anything? Absolutely nothing at all. In doing this thing where we fetishize young people, we alienate a lot of older people, I think especially with women where there’s an age that you become really invisible at. I suspect that that’s around 40.

There is something about having more wisdom and having more work under your belt that will make you not feel like a fraud because young people constantly talk about imposter syndrome. It’s so in vogue for people in tech, especially women in tech, to talk about it. I actually think that imposter syndrome in small doses is good. I’m like, yeah, you don’t know anything.

Debbie Millman:
It certainly keeps people from being intolerable.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I’m like one, if you have imposter syndrome, it’s probably because you care about what you’re doing. It’s also because you’re trying not to be a fraud. I’m like, young people are frauds. We are all fraudulent. Just you put everything on social media, you’re just bragging about these accomplishments that are actually not concrete. I’m like, talk to me when you’ve had a failure. Talk to me when you’ve run a business into the ground, talk to me when you even have a resume that is five years… That is a thing.

So all of this to say, no shade to Forbes. I think they do a really important thing highlighting people, but I would be so much better served with who are the women executives over 50, who are people who have built a lifetime of making something. I think that we don’t talk about longevity in career. I think that that’s something that you talk about constantly. I loved your 99U talk last year because it was the first time that I had heard so much about your own path. I was like, wow, imagine starting a new thing in your 30s.

Debbie Millman:
Or 40s. Or 50s.

Aminatou Sow:
I know. The way that we talk about young people’s… I’m like, I don’t want to peak when I’m 28.

Debbie Millman:
I hear you.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s not the accomplishment I want to be known for.

Debbie Millman:
I hope I don’t peak until I’m in my late 70s.

Aminatou Sow:
I’ve always said that deep down inside, I feel 63. Even as an eight-year-old, I was like, 63 is the perfect number to me. This is the age I want to be, and I hope that I make it, and I hope that it’s a glorious time.

Debbie Millman:
It will be, Amina. I mean, there’s no question just sitting here and listening to you and looking at you while you’re talking. There’s no question in my mind.

Aminatou Sow:
You’re giving me chills. I got diagnosed with cancer at the end of last year and just in December, I didn’t think that I would be here now. There’s something very clarifying about illness too, where I’m like, okay, actually, all these values and things that I held onto, have now been tested for me, and I know my own bullshit. I know what is bullshit and I know what is true, and I hope that I can live up to my own values every day.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said this about your diagnosis. A lot of the language is about being a warrior or fighting and that actually, I think this is pretty bad because so many of the world’s messages to us are about strength all the time, and we’re always supposedly stronger than everyone, and we’re fighters and all these things. Sometimes that’s true, but we’re also human beings and we need all the help that we can get. Having cancer made that very, very real for me.

Aminatou Sow:
I tell my therapist all the time that the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me is getting cancer because I finally had to ask for help. I am very bad at asking for help. The thing about it too that’s fascinating, is that I’m always the first one to offer help wherever I’m at. I had to realize kind of how arrogant that is.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Aminatou Sow:
That you think that you can help people, but you cannot receive help. There’s something that puts all of your relationship at great imbalance when you do that. Getting cancer was, yeah, I was like, truly, I cannot do this by myself.

Debbie Millman:
Are you okay now?

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m so sorry that you had to go through this.

Aminatou Sow:
I’m in full remission. Thank you. I’m in full remission, which means a lot, but also means so little. It just means that you have no evidence of disease. It could come back, it might come back. It’ll probably come back. Who knows? Also, I’m like, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. So cancer is scary, but life is generally scary. Yeah, it’s like asking for help from your friends was like, it really humbled me this year. Also seeing who in my life showed up and who I prioritize versus who has actually always been there in my life.

Also, just realizing like, okay, this is what it means to be in community. You put the time in, you put the love in, and then now it’s your turn to cash out the check. I have amazing, amazing friends, whether it was from having to ask for help with the shower or having to ask for meals to be made or for my house to be cleaned or all sorts of things that I thought would be the end of me if I asked for help. I was like, oh, actually, this is pretty amazing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that romantic relationships get a lot of ink, but nobody really talks about how much romance there is in being a friend.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Was that a motivation in starting your extraordinary podcast, Call Your Girlfriend with your friend Ann Friedman?

Aminatou Sow:
Yes. Oh my God, I am so in love with Ann Friedman. She is a wonderful human being, and doing a podcast is just another way to hang out with her and our awesome producer, Gina Delvac who thought up the show. So on one level, I’m like, yes, we get to make this very successful fun show every week, but I still just pinch myself that I get to work with these women every day.

I have worked with friends and I have lived with friends. All the things that people tell you not to do, they’re like, “Friends and work, that’s bad. Friend and living together, that’s bad. Friends and money, that’s bad.” I’m like, maybe that’s true for some people, but for me it has been the opposite because I’m like, actually, I don’t like people. So if I like you, it keeps me…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Aminatou Sow:
Because I’m like, actually I don’t like people, so if I like you, it keeps me honest and I have to show up and I do my best work. And it is not about the business, but it’s about the relationship and what you get to learn from them.

Debbie Millman:
Why don’t you like people?

Aminatou Sow:
I mean people are just a lot. Also, I think truly for me, this also goes back to my family. I was a very shy kid, painfully shy, like eat lunch in the library, shy. But my parents were schmoozers. They had a job where they had to be schmoozers and we had to have people over all the time, so I kind of had to get over it. And so I feel that my whole childhood was learning to be around people, which is so against my nature. And now that I’m like, well, I make my own money and it’s my own time, I get to go back to my introvert ways.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you perform not being shy really well.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Love that.

Aminatou Sow:
100%. It’s like the things that you think that you can’t do. I was like, take an improv class for them and just learn. I was like, all of life is a performance. You don’t have to like it, but you can do it and then you can go home and lay on the floor for the rest of the day.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said our use of social media is a lot like performance art.

Aminatou Sow:
Oh, 100%. I’m always so shocked when people are unpleasant on social media. I’m like, are you kidding me? This is the one place where you can be your best person. And you make everybody fall in love with you and you don’t have to be a jerk. I was like, nobody here knows you. Be an asshole to your friends and family, those people know you. This is like be your best person here.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true you met Anne Friedman at a Gossip Girl viewing party in D.C.?

Aminatou Sow:
It always happens at prom. Yes. Our dear friend, [inaudible 00:49:45], who was a new friend to me at the time, and a friend of Anne’s, emailed a small group of people to come and watch Gossip Girl. I showed up in a homemade Chuck Hart’s Blair t-shirt that my college roommate Brittany had made for me. Thanks, Brittany. Still have the shirt.

In the ways that when you watch TV with people, you’re just like, okay, this is our thing. I like everyone, but I truly loved Anne. Everything she said was funny. The episode was 45 minutes. We left. And D.C. is so small, I remember leaving going out the door and just thinking like, oh, I bet you were walking in the same direction anyway because everybody lives in the same 10 block radius. And no, we went opposite ways. And I remember being really bummed out about it. I was like, “Ugh, how am I going to find this woman again? I guess I’ll look her up on Facebook.” And as soon as I got home, I already had a friend request from her.

Debbie Millman:
Oh wow.

Aminatou Sow:
And I was like, friends.

Debbie Millman:
The tagline for Call Your Girlfriend is a podcast for long distance besties, and you’ve described it as a freewheeling conversation modeled around a catch-up phone call you might have with a best friend. So similar to Tech Lady Mafia’s Origins, you launched it after being told by a man that women don’t make podcasts.

Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I mean remember being at this party maybe or thing and just this guy being like, “Yeah, women, they just don’t have the attention to detail for it and they’re just not good at making…”

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Aminatou Sow:
And I just looked at him, I was like, you’re such an idiot. If you can make a thing, of course I can do it. But also every person in public radio is a woman. You know what I mean? It’s like if you look at the ranks of who is making all of our radio, they’re all women who went to liberal arts colleges. So I’m like, What does this doofus know? And it turns out he knew nothing. I was like, Your podcast is not doing great, sir. And I’m like, I figured this out. That’s usually a big motivator for me when people say some people can’t. I was like short of flying a rocket. I think that most people can learn how to do everything pretty fast.

Debbie Millman:
Every one of your shows is themed. And some sample episode titles include class warfare, get swole, businesswoman special. How do you select the topics you want to explore?

Aminatou Sow:
So we keep a running Google doc called The Vagenda.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I want to talk to you about your word vigenius by the way.

Aminatou Sow:
Vigenius

Debbie Millman:
Is one of my favorite things I found about you.

Aminat

ou Sow:
We did not coin vigenius. Our friend Brandon in D.C. would say it all the time, and I think that’s also where the vagenda is from. You absorb all the words of your friends. But yeah, so we keep this running Google Doc, called the vagenda. And so Anna and I at this point in our friendship have lived longer apart than we have in the same city and we would in the classic way of millennials with jobs that they hate, we would Gchat all day and then be like, okay, “I’m going to call you later, but here all the things I want to talk about”. So we always had a list. The list has always been, that forum was not new for us because there’s a lot to cover. I’m like, sometimes you want to talk about Kanye, but also Paul Ryan is doing insane things in the house. We are ladies with vast interests.

Debbie Millman:
You have range.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You have more range than anyone I think I’ve ever met.

Aminatou Sow:
But I think most people have range. They just refuse to put them in the same category.

Debbie Millman:
Well the thing about your and Anne’s range is that you’re smart and you’re informed and you’re not just riffing on something that you’ve heard. You’re riffing on something that you think, and I love that.

Aminatou Sow:
That’s, I think, why the show was so important for us to do because I do think that there is this feeling that the things that young women care about are frivolous. And so when you think about, I don’t know, conversations about skincare or conversations about reality TV or the Kardashians, I was like, no, these are things that people experience, but also you can be a smart person and like all of these things, but also for women, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the political is personal and the personal is political. So a lot of times there’re vehicles for having talks about other things. And so we are an independently owned show. We’re like three ladies with a surprisingly profitable media company. So it’s fun.

Debbie Millman:
Now I read that you did make your financial forecast for 2017. Last year in 2017.

Aminatou Sow:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You didn’t make them this year for 2017.

Aminatou Sow:
We did. It’s the first time that the three of us sat down and we talked about our five-year goals together. We’re like, here’s what we want for the show, but also here’s what we want individually. Because I think that a thing that a lot of people don’t realize about our show is that it’s none of our primary jobs, and it could be, but we’re ladies who love side hustles. So I was like, the way that we stay in love with this baby is that it has to be a labor of love. But it was kind of the first time that we sat down and said, okay, here are the things I want to do. And for me, I was like, okay. I was like, “I want to host more things. I think I want to be a talk show host one day”. And I had never said that out loud. It felt good to have two other people say, “Okay, let’s help you get there” or think about the ways that we want to grow the show also. And it’s like I’ve never had a five-month plan and now I have a five-year plan and it is pretty exhilarating.

Debbie Millman:
In addition to Call Your Girlfriend last year, Wieden Kennedy launched On She Goes a travel platform for women of color. And you hosted season one of the podcast. What was that like for you?

Aminatou Sow:
It was pretty fun. I got to interview all of the women of color that I love about the ways that they travel. So everybody from Thao Win from Thao & the Get Down, stay Down-

Debbie Millman:
She’s amazing.

Aminatou Sow:
… And Roxanne Gay. And it was a very sweet show. I think that so many women actually have a sense of adventure. And also adventure doesn’t mean climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, for some of us it literally, it’s the thrill of walking into the business lounge of an airport. And in seeing ourselves more so being able to do that. And just unselfishly. Now I’m like, “Oh, I travel better. All these ladies gave me the tips in my life”. So it’s great.

Debbie Millman:
What other projects are you currently working on?

Aminatou Sow:
Well Anne and I are working on a book project, so we’ll be announcing that soon. What else am I working on? I was really lucky that when I got sick I was like, okay, I can’t work anymore. My entire life of hoarding money and being afraid of being poor again. My rainy day has finally come, so I’m going to cash out the rainy day fund. So I stopped working in January and I decided that in June is when I was going to figure out what I’m going to do, when I grow up. And so it’s felt really good to say no, but have a reason to say no to a lot of projects. When you’re little like, “Sorry, I have cancer. I can’t do this thing”. It’s quite exciting actually because nobody can guilt you about things. But I’m going to be hosting a couple of other podcasts this summer, some branded shows that I’m super, super excited about. And also just figuring it out. If you had told me even six months ago that I would not be working, because my identity is so tied up into being a productive person, and that I would be okay with it, I would’ve never believed you. And now I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, I have nothing to do except for figure myself out”. And it’s very fun.

Debbie Millman:
Has this change in the way you’re living your life impacted your need toward money in order to feel secure?

Aminatou Sow:
I’m still definitely a money hoarder because I was like, money just buys you freedom. That’s all it does. I was like, it doesn’t make you cooler than anybody. But I’m like, I walked away from a job at Google and they print money in the basement of that place and it is terrifying to leave. But if you leave and you’re like, oh, I know how to feed myself and I can pay my rent and I can afford the things that I want to do, everything is a little better. But I think that the thing that cancer did for me, honestly, is that I stopped hoarding other things. I use my nice dishes now every day. There’s no such thing as nice dishes in my household anymore. There are a couple of trips that I’ve always wanted to take and every year I go, Ugh, I need to save up more for it, or I need more time, or whatever.

Or I want to be at this phase of my life when I go on… I booked all of them and I’m like, I’m going. Because tomorrow’s not a guarantee. I’ve definitely become more vulnerable. I am doing a lot of things that I’m scared about, I’ve been scared of doing for a long time, and so far it’s paying out. I always ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen? And so far so good. It’s like the worst is maybe you’ll be humiliated a little. Maybe somebody will say no to you or maybe you’ll die. But guess what my mom always said, she was like, “You’re never going to get out this bitch alive”. So it’s all good.

Debbie Millman:
Aminatou, thank you so much for being on Design Matters today. Thank you for being such an important voice in our culture and thank you for being such an extraordinary inspiration.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you for having me, Debbie Millman. I listen to your show all the time, so this is like a fever dream for me.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a fever dream for me as well because ditto.

Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Aminatou Sow and her extraordinary work and her podcast at callyourgirlfriend.com. This is the 14th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
For more information about Design Matters or to subscribe to our newsletter, go to debbiemillman.com. If you love this podcast, please consider contributing to our new Drip Kickstarter community. Members Get early access to the podcast, transcripts of every interview, invitations to live interviews, Q&A sessions with guests, and a brand new annual magazine. You can learn more about this at d.rip/debbie-millman. That’s d.rip/debbie-millman. If you want others to know about this podcast, please write a review in the iTunes store and link to the podcast on Social Media. Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox Productions. The show is published exclusively by designobserver.com and recorded live at the School of Visual Arts, Masters in branding program in New York City. The editor in Chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Petit, and the Art Director is Emily Weiland. Generous support for Design Matters media is provided by wix.com.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:00:54]

Oliver Jeffers:
This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures, really, truly. And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. And it’s a bombardment and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, artist and picture book author, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his career and about reframing humanity’s problems.

Oliver Jeffers:
We prioritize being right over wrong, but if we replace the words right and wrong with better and worse, it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers came on the podcast eight years ago in 2015 to talk about his work as an illustrator, artist, designer, and author. We had a lot to talk about back then, and we have a lot more to talk about now because Oliver Jeffers has been busy. He has written and illustrated several more New York Times bestselling books for children. Helped make an animated film based on his work, which won an Emmy Award, and has had exhibits of his artwork all infused with his particular brand of contagious optimism. His latest effort is his first illustrated book for readers of all ages. It’s called Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. He joins me today to talk about that and so much more. Oliver Jeffers, welcome back to Design Matters.

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie. I can’t believe it’s been eight years.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t either.

Oliver Jeffers:
It’s just gone by in the blink of an eye.

Debbie Millman:
And I love how our friendship has evolved in that time too. When I first interviewed you, I barely knew you at all. I was so nervous. I’m still a little nervous, but now I’m a lot more comfortable.

Oliver Jeffers:
We know each other well and I am also prepared for how thoroughly you do your research.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you. Before we talk about some of the newer things that you’ve been doing, because there’s so much to talk about, my first question is one I’ve asked you before, but I love your answer and I love hearing more and more every time you tell me. You learned to draw by looking at John Singer Sargent’s ears in his paintings.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I learned to paint by-

Debbie Millman:
To paint. Yes. There is a difference between drawing and painting. I should be clear.

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I learned to draw by copying the comic book strip Asterix.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And even now thinking back on it, it might well be why there’s still bendy legs and arms. None of my characters seem to have elbows or knees. And then looking back, showing them to my son now, it was like, oh yeah. So I would just copy them and then figure out just the way in which I drew a line differed slightly from the way that he drew line and that I enjoyed it. But the painting thing, I didn’t really have any formal training as a painter, and I considered myself, I’m going to be a painter and was making paintings and then figured out I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I think a big part of art is just getting in and experimenting with materials to see what they can do for you.

But the way that he figuratively paints an ear, when you’re up close, it looks like it’s three simple gestures done in a burst of energy. But when you step back, it looks like a human ear. It looks like it’s alive. And I couldn’t really figure out how he did that. And it just was painting the idea of life rather than making it look like a photograph in every single tiny gesture. And years later, I learned that, yeah, he did do it in three or four strokes, but what you look at might’ve been the 50th or 60th attempt at doing so, which made me feel a little better.

Debbie Millman:
Have you figured out how he was able to achieve that type of realistic accuracy with so few strokes?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think he just was a very adept observer. He knew his materials and he could see color in pretty beautifully and unique ways. To be honest, no, I never figured it out. The man had a wonderful skillset and it just seemed to come from him naturally.

Debbie Millman:
It first occurred to you that there was power in art when you were nine years old. You were asked to step out of class to make a set for the school play. What kind of power did that give you?

Oliver Jeffers:
It gave me, I think, a bit of purpose and a bit of value. The power being that I can use art as an excuse to not do other things, partly, but then no two human beings are exactly alike. And a lot of the Western education system is teaching everybody exactly the same things. And I do believe it’s changing somewhat now, but when I went to school, it was like everybody had to do geography and English and mathematics and science and some of those things some people are good at and some of them they weren’t. And I wasn’t a great student and whenever the art came along and that had a practical application in the real world, that was that this is maybe something that I can do because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.

Debbie Millman:
How did you know you were good at it?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because they asked me to step out of geography class to help design the set of the school play. And I think back then I knew that I had an ability to be able to make something that looked like something I wanted it to and for it to be visually satisfying, even just to me.

Debbie Millman:
How did your understanding of power in and with art evolve after that experience?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, after that experience … That was in primary school. And in secondary school, I went to school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. And back then … What year did I start secondary school? It would’ve been 1990 maybe. The education system in Northern Ireland was divided. It was segregated between Catholics and Protestants. And the school that my parents sent me to was one of the first integrated schools where both Catholics and Protestants went together. And because not a lot of people were on board with that, the numbers were very low and to qualify for basic funding from the government, they had to take in all the kids that were kicked out of all the other schools, including all the rough schools.
So some of the toughest roughest kids in Belfast were going to this school. None of them cared about education. There was a lot of violence. And I recognized that art had currency because some of these kids were coming to me to ask me to draw their favorite band on their school bag or make a design underneath their skateboard. And then I sort of fell under, not their protection, but they’re like, “Oh, he’s okay. Leave him alone.” But it was something I had to offer to my peers, and it really helped me through school because my parents were encouraging me to be an artist. I was not mocked for it in a school where everybody was being mocked for having an interest in anything. And as I say, it was something that I enjoyed and it gave me value.

Debbie Millman:
Did being around rough kids force you to be rough, or were you able to have some sort of boundaries around who you were and what you needed to be?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never had any interest in violence or roughness, but it did teach me a way to be able to speak in a way that I think somebody else will understand. So I could adapt and I could hold different ideas in my head at the same time and I learned to be able to say and show something in one way that these kids would get it or saying something in another way that these adults would get it. And so yeah, that duality really started to seep into my work back then.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think it’s still there?

Oliver Jeffers:
The duality is absolutely still there. Again, growing up in Northern Ireland, we used to joke that we were bilingual because we could speak both Catholic and Protestant. You knew how to pass the test by going through a certain area or a certain neighborhood. But even the visual language of duality is something I recognize came from back there. Like there’s a graphic nature using typography that definitely came from the loyalist militant murals that were peppered everywhere. And then there’s a whimsy and a narrative, folky charm that came from the Catholic murals that were everywhere around. So yes, the dualities … I think nothing is ever directly simple in one single thing and I could see the truth in that at an early age.

Debbie Millman:
You just mentioned your parents were encouraging of your art talent. There are a lot of creative people in your family. One uncle is a documentary filmmaker, another uncle organized festivals and wrote poetry and painted murals in Belfast. Did that give you a sense from an early age that being an artist was a viable career for you?

Oliver Jeffers:
Not really, because neither of them were particularly successful when I was young. But my mom and dad were both quite enlightened, and my dad was a teacher for years, and he always thought that the way the education system was set up there was fundamentally wrong. He always said that the two most difficult things a human being learns to do is how to walk and how to talk. And yet when you get into school, the first thing you’re told is to sit down and shut up.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love that.

Oliver Jeffers:
He always told us that remembering a lot of facts doesn’t prove intelligence. It just proves you’ve got a good memory. And the sheer sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity and imagination. He could see that I was interested in something and so we were encouraged. Me and my older brother both went to art college. And when I met my wife who studied engineering, I was the first person she’d ever met who didn’t have a proper job. And I didn’t quite realize the rarity of that until I was a bit older.

Debbie Millman:
You said that everything in your life changed as an artist when you learned to stop copying others and listened to the way your hands wanted to draw and paint. I find that so interesting given the very first thing we talked about was how you were copying the comics. How did your hands want to draw and paint?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I think whenever anybody is seriously considering being an artist, you go through that phase of being inspired and imitating as a way to find what it is that you’re capable of doing. But at a certain point, you have to progress beyond that and find your own voice, really. So when people have asked, how did you find your style, I realize that you don’t really find your style, your style finds you. You just get out of the way of that. You know the way you would say sometimes, oh, that person can’t draw a straight line as a way to say that they’re not very good at drawing? Nobody can draw a straight line.

Debbie Millman:
Agnes Martin.

Oliver Jeffers:
Okay, apart from Agnes Martin. Is that true?

Debbie Millman:
Uh-huh.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Apparently she did-

Oliver Jeffers:
How long?

Debbie Millman:
All of her drawings, all of her grids she did by hand.

Oliver Jeffers:
What?

Debbie Millman:
I don’t even understand how that’s humanly possible so maybe it’s not really true.

Oliver Jeffers:
But I don’t think that takes away from the point. Most human beings’ attempt to draw a straight line is never perfect, but all those wiggles and bumps in that attempt, that is your style. That is the way your hand likes to move and how to draw. And yes, at a certain point you realize that no piece of art ever ends up the way that you think it will. And what’s important is to react to what you’re making as you go along rather than keep trying to change it so that it fits this preconceived notion of what it’s going to be. So to react to the real world. But at around that time when I was in art college, the reason that I wanted to make art was brought into question and I think it was that epiphany that changed the way that I was doing it, where yes, I was in the process of finding my style, but I was also always looking for validation externally. For the teacher to say I had done a good job or for other people to think I was cool and like me.

And at one point I put my hand up, this is an art college in foundation year and had a great art professor painter called Dennis McBride, and I’ve put my hand up trying to get him to talk about my work. And he just turned around and he says, “Oliver, you’re like a child always looking for sweets. Who do you make art for?” And it really hit home because I was stunned that he’d called me out like that. But as I thought about it into the evening, I was like, “I don’t know if I like the answer.” Because I was making art so that other people would think I was good or cool or for validation. But then I was like, “Well, why am I making art?” And I learned that I have to make art that I want to make and that the validation that I seek is my own.

Because when you think about it, if you try to picture somebody’s face is like, who’s approval is it that I need? Probably can’t really come up with anyone. And so my work shifted around then and I began really truly making art for myself. And that was hammered home in my final year of college when my mum, who had been sick for my whole life, she passed away. And at that moment, I was old enough to understand the magnitude of it, but young enough to still be malleable to have not fully become the person that I was to become. And suddenly everything fell away. All the things that I thought were important and all the issues that I thought were important and other people’s opinions just dropped away, and I could just suddenly see quite clearly what was important. And I, from that moment on, began striving towards that.

Debbie Millman:
You got your degree in college and in art school in visual communication, and did that initially in an effort to find a job, but realized in college-

Oliver Jeffers:
That I’m unemployable.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you decided that you never wanted to actually work for anybody because you didn’t like being told what to do.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I think you learned that when you were working in a bookshop in college.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. I worked at a bookstore chain in Northern Ireland, and it worked well for me for a while because I could do the shop windows. And so I was doing these displays, and then the occasion time that I was put on the floor and was sort of being ordered around, it just didn’t sit well for me. I think more than once in the couple of years that I was there when somebody asked for something, I would say, “Oh, no, sorry, it’s my first day. I don’t know. Ask somebody else.” But that was actually the last job I ever had. Because I was coming into my last year of university, and the word from head office came down that they were going to uniform the window so they didn’t get to bespoke them, each person. And so I lost that little gig that I had of going into work and actually just making these installations in these windows. And then I think I lost all interest in gainful employment at that point.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pursue a book deal with How to Catch a Star back in 2004? Talk about how that all ended up happening. Because in looking at the trajectory of your life from your origin story to that moment in 2004 when you got a book deal based on a book you had worked on in college, it seems as if this was effortlessly meant to be, and I know that it wasn’t. So talk about the details that led you to that defining moment in your life at that point.

Oliver Jeffers:
I took a year off of art college in between my third year and my final year and in that moment I was making paintings because I thought, I’m going to go off and I’m going to be a painter. And some of the concepts I was playing around with were playing with these impossibilities but mildly believable impossibilities rather than fantasy. And this one moment happened where I started painting or concepting a painting that was of somebody doing something that was physically impossible, which was trying to catch a star. And then I started making other paintings of other attempts to do that. And when I got back to college, I was thinking about the style in which I was doing it, and I started harking back to some of the simpler illustration styles that I’d been inspired by when I was a kid reading books. And at a certain moment, the penny just dropped.

And I’d been talking to a friend who had mentioned picture books and was suggesting that my skill set might lend itself to that. And I was sort of playing about with this concept, but rather than as a series of paintings, as a book. And it did, it kind of happened quite naturally that first time. I fell into it. And for college, I decided how close can I get to a finished book? And what ended up being the final product of that when I graduated, I thought this is as good as if not better than anything else I see in the bookshops out there. Now, the late ’90s, early 2000s was not a great time for a picture books. It was, I think a pretty bland period. So the competition was quite low. So I sent off my concept to publishers expecting months and months and months of, have you read it yet? Can I speak to somebody? But I did my research and I put together a little package that was really well considered. Because whoever says you never judge a book by its cover is … That’s wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Hasn’t been in the book business ever.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or in any business. Because we all do it every day in myriad ways. And I got a phone call, I think two days after sending an note from two different publishers, one in the USA and one in the UK, saying they wanted to publish this work. At that point, I realized that the book that I’d made in my final year was in water color, and I’d never used water color before. Why I chose water color, still don’t really know. But I was like, I think I can do a better job of that. So I did re-illustrate it, and then learned as I was going and the book published. They wanted to do a two-book deal so they asked me, “Do you have other books up your sleeve?” And I said, “Yeah, of course.” And I had no notion whatsoever. So the second book that I made was probably the hardest book I’ve ever had to make because I was making it from the start knowing it was going to be a book rather than falling into it.

Debbie Millman:
I know that you were particularly influenced in something that Maurice Sendak said about how he approached creating books for children, and he said, “You cannot write for children. They’re too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.” And so you started your career making picture books without really having any sense of how to make a picture book. You weren’t studying picture books, you weren’t involved in the production of picture books. What drew you to that form?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think the book in its simplicity is just the perfect vehicle for this relationship between words and pictures telling a story. And I went back and looked at some of the books that I enjoyed and seeing some of them was like, there’s real life concepts here, but they’re distilled down into such a pure form that they have to really know what they’re saying. And then this idea of reducing things back to simplicity was something that really appealed to me. But just what is the fewest amount of words you can use and what is the sparsest artwork you can use that conveys fully the emotion and the structure of the story? It just drew me, and I did have a knack for it that I don’t particularly know where it came from. But yeah, I think the one thing that Maurice Sendak said that I really gravitated towards was, “I don’t write books for children. I write books and somebody says they’re for children.”

And I don’t exactly do market research when I’m making a book. It’s not like I think, oh, I wonder what type of stories kids want to hear and then make towards that. I just really make books that I find satisfying and just going through the motions of the narrative arc is like, does this work? Does this not? And if I can make it work for me, and both me as an adult, but also the me as a child that I have just a tale memory of, that works for me.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that when artists combine image and words, it forms something that could be more powerful than just seeing the same content in a sentence or a paragraph or separately as a piece of art. And you said that people read images in a different way than they read words. So I’m wondering if in addition to talking about the specific form of a picture book, if you can talk a little bit about what happens in art or literature when words and image are combined in some way.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, when words and image are combined in a book, you can use the words to contradict the images, or you can use them to say almost nothing, but they are a different ingredient rather than repeating themselves. And so really truly the only full coming together of the notion happens inside the head of whoever’s reading the book. And in that way, they then become a co-creator. So they’ve got an access point, they feel a sense of ownership, and they can project themselves into that. But we learn how to read pictures. We learn how to read faces and rooms way before we learn how to read words. It becomes, I think, much more intuitive. We’re visual people. And there’s only one way really to read a sentence, which is in a linear way, but with reading an art, it’s more cyclical. We do tend to have a flow of sweeping from left to right generally, but you can play with that in a non-obvious way by having the left-hand side image sparse, and then the right-hand side busy with some sort of focal point. And so there’s an ability to be able to play with the tone, the space, and the emotion of an image that then combined with words creates this subtle flow that you don’t even notice is happening.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your style a little bit. You talked about at the top of the show how you copied the comic and realized that your characters didn’t have any elbows and didn’t have any knees. They were very round rather than linear. But you are able to draw or paint almost anything realistically in great detail. So you have this sweeping capability. What made you decide to work in a way that is more fast, that’s more … I mean, I’m struggling to find the word because it isn’t really simplistic.

Oliver Jeffers:
Minimal.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a certain sense of ease to it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I could have made some of those paintings with a very realistic figure of a boy and very realistic background, but then I’m filling in all the detail and the reader doesn’t get the opportunity to do that. And what I didn’t intend, but have learned since is because the drawings were so simple, kids thought that they could make that, and they would, but also because the geography was so vague and just suggestive, and what is the fewest ingredients you need to put this so you have a sense that it’s on land and it’s a rough time of day, but no more. That everywhere I would go on book tour in those early days, the kids would think that the books were set where they were from. And that’s what happens when you do make it simple and you do leave out as many details as possible so that people can apply their own sense of self and their own story to it.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you normally find that the faster you draw something, the more charming it is because the more human it is.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. At that point, you’re drawing how that image feels rather than truly trying to depict the reality of it. And it happens every time, which is, I would always revert back to some of the early sketches. Well, I have a sense of how this page will look, and I’ll just sketch it out quickly, and then I try to do it much more detailed and I trip myself up with it loses that personality and it becomes tight, and that tightness is cold and it’s off-putting.

Debbie Millman:
And it’s so interesting how you can always tell when something is tight.

Oliver Jeffers:
You can. Overworked, overthought.

Debbie Millman:
Tortured. I call it tortured. And when I’m drawing anything, even if it’s just words that I’m drawing, I have to go through that torture phase before I get to the ease. And that’s some of the most torturous experiences that I go through these days. How do you get to that other side? How do you learn or how do you know when you’re drawing charm?

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh. I think does it convey the emotion that I think it needs to convey in a simple way and then mix in with that a quality of line. Does the drawing look good? And you could do something a couple of different times. Yeah, that one works slightly better. I think it’s intuition. I think, as I say, we all understand body language. We all understand somebody else’s facial expressions and the way that they’re sitting and the way that they’re moving, and we understand momentum in art. And it’s when it can do those things with just a couple of lines, there’s just a charm that comes with that. But how do you recognize that? I don’t know. Does it work? Yes. Move on.

Debbie Millman:
Well, not to belabor this … Because I am. I’m torturing with these questions because I’m so curious about them. You are able to convey charm in a letter form, and you’re able to convey charm in a shadow.

Oliver Jeffers:
I didn’t realize that I was able to do that, but my writing is my writing. I moved from a studio in West Belfast to a very tiny studio in New York, and there was not enough room to lay out the way that I had previously worked and so I was forced to contain, and I would put things away and put things in drawers so there was open space, and I would label those drawers, and I like the way my handwriting looked, and so I would just take a little more time and do it. And through the sketchbooks, I always loved that combination of words and pictures as a way to even make notes for myself. And the way that a word in a painting can change the meaning of the painting, not only the meaning, but also the visual aesthetic of it, because that becomes a focal anchor, a design anchor.

Say it’s all sort of abstract and sweeping or large, and it’s devoid of a focal point. You put a word in there, that word becomes that visual focal point, let alone the meaning. And so over time, I’ve enjoyed the way that my handwriting looks and would label things. People seem to be drawn to it, and then never being able to find the right type font that really quite worked for all my books and trying to learn how I could actually put my own writing into my books. Over time, it just became part of my visual language. And when I’m doing a very large book signing line, people always say, “Oh, your wrist must be hurting.” They say this often enough. I was like, “It’s my shoulder.” It’s because you draw from your shoulder, not from your wrist. And I suppose that then doesn’t really change the signal between your body and your brain if you’re working at scale or if you’re working small.

Debbie Millman:
Fascinating. I didn’t know that it comes from the shoulder.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I don’t know if it does for everybody, but for me it does.

Debbie Millman:
Since you were last on the show, you’ve worked on some extraordinary projects with a variety of clients, including now having a list of books that goes about 20 deep. In The Guardian many years ago, you stated that you define your work into three categories. The books you make, the paintings you do, and other. And I’m wondering if you still organize it that way.

Oliver Jeffers:
No. The books I make, the paintings I do, and other. I mean, maybe. There was a big separation for a long time. The books were over here, and the books were about storytelling, publishing. Almost joyous distraction in a way, entertainment. And then the art was about question asking and a totally different style that was open-ended and much more … I suppose I was trying to be highbrow, but there didn’t need to be any kind of a conclusion to those. And over the last 10 years, they’ve started to become closer together. Now, one of the reasons that I really leaned into figurative painting is because when I graduated from art college, got my book published and started becoming known as the picture book person, I would be sending my work off to galleries and they’d be interested until they realized like, oh, you’re the same person who does these illustrated kids books, and they would lose interest.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because I think back then illustrated kids books were not seen as sexy or fashionable, and there was this sort of ego and pompousness about the art world, which has changed massively in these last 20 years. But the illustration was sort of looked down upon, and especially picture books were looked down upon. As I say, it has changed. And the art world itself is less defined by you can only do one thing. So I deliberately kept them apart in one sense because I didn’t want to confuse people, but in another sense, the publishing contract did come very easily. And so I possibly maybe took that for granted a little bit.

And then because I couldn’t break through into this fine art thing, I valued it a lot more because despite that lesson of wanting external validation, clearly I was still seemingly, I need to be in this world.
So a lot of the time now, the concepts that I’ll come up with will manifest in multiple ways, including a book and including a project and they overlap massively. I have a difficult time defining the boundaries between them anymore. Other than that sometimes with a book, the final piece of art is the physical object that you hold in your hand. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the piece of paper looks like that the art is made on or the ingredients that are needed to get there. That’s really one of the only differences that there is no one single thing.

Debbie Millman:
A couple of years ago when that categorization was more in effect, one of the first projects that you became globally known for was the work that you did for U2, and with U2. The band U2. And is it true that you met Bono, the front man of U2, because his wife was reading your books to their kids?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never heard that.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I read that in some of my research. I thought that was so cool.

Oliver Jeffers:
That’s possible. I met him actually in a bar. A friend of mine worked with them, and I was trying to get them to move to another bar, and we were there and were like, “No, no. We got to wait for my boss to come.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then the next thing, Bono comes in and sits down. He was like, “That’s Bono.” And so we’re talking and we just get into conversing about art. And he asked me what I did, and I says, “Well, I write and illustrate picture books.” And when I’ve said that before to people, they kind of go, “Oh, cool.” Don’t really know what else to say. But he said, “Wow, what a responsibility.” And I was like, “Whoa. How so?” And he goes, “Well, you’re a human being’s first counterpoint of their cultural world.”

And I just thought that was a very astute way of looking at it. We did get talking. I sent him an art book that I’d made at that point, and then he had asked me to start doing some small collaborations. Firstly, to be part of a workshop that he was doing at Ted’s. Because I was also at Ted that year doing the handwriting for it, which led to me making a film about the charity One.org, which then led to just working on a lyric video and a music video. I worked with my friend Mac Primo on those. And then just bit by bit, they just kept getting bigger and bigger because I think they liked what I did, and they valued my opinion and right up to the point where it meant working with Es Devlin on the Songs of Innocence and Experience doing these drawings that was recreating the youth that they had growing up in Dublin.

Debbie Millman:
And also the relationship that Bono had with his mother, Iris.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with a band of the stature of U2 that I’m sure have very specific ideas about what they like and what they don’t like, and how did your own taste and your own desires to create something in line with your aesthetic choices, how did they merge?

Oliver Jeffers:
Beautifully. And one of the reasons that I kept working with them is that they treated me as a collaborator rather than a gun for hire. They were coming to me because they liked what I did, they liked the way that I thought, and they handled that with respect. So it was never a case of, oh, no, make that more U2 or make that more rock and roll, or whatever it was. There were conversations about, is this the best way to do this? Can we emphasize this point a bit more? But generally, it was very respectful and yeah, as I say, treated as an equal and as a peer and a collaborator rather than we’re paying you, do what we tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever have creative differences?

Oliver Jeffers:
No, not really, actually. Because they were concentrating on the music, and I think that’s one of the reasons that they work so well, is that they hire people whose work they respect and they trust in that.

Debbie Millman:
You are very much an artist in and of your own right. You write and illustrate your own books, you create your own art. Every once in a while, you do illustrate books that aren’t authored by you, and are longer than picture books.

One in particular that I wanted to talk to you about was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne. If you can talk a little bit about the subject of the book and your approach in doing this work, because it is really, in looking at the larger high altitude view of your work, it’s very different in its tone.

Oliver Jeffers:
It is. Until that point in my picture book career, there had been a likeness to everything. There was some poignancy, yes there, but there was a lightness to it. And the fine art that I was doing, the painting that I was doing, that was an exercise to explore some of the deeper and docker issues and themes that I was thinking about.

I know John Boyne. We met on the book fair circuit, can’t actually remember where, but we became friendly, and I had read that book and had a very, very powerful reaction to it.

And he was saying that it was the tenth anniversary edition coming up, and we just got talking and it was like, “Has that ever been illustrated?” And he said, no, he was actually, would I be interested in doing it?
And at that point, the film had just come out, and we both agreed that I should not watch the film, just because, if you watch the film and then you read the book, you can’t help but picture whoever the casting director has casted.

So I didn’t watch the film, and I just went through it, and was just thinking, again, trying to employ some of those visual language vocabulary techniques I’ve used, saying something with the barest amount of information, and keeping the colors very, very minimal. So there’s only charcoal ink, pencil drawings, so basically black and white, with a very few spots of red, and a very few spots of blue, kind of a sky blue.
And I tried to remove as much information, so oftentimes, when it’s Bruno, who’s the kid … Basically, the story is, I think he’s a 10-year-old boy whose father is a Nazi officer, who is asked to then run Auschwitz. And this becomes clear in his misunderstanding of the world, as he’s moved to the house next to the camp, and he sees the people behind the fence.

And then, because nobody explains to him what’s going on, so he makes up his own version, to the best of his understanding. And he sees a small boy, as he’s walking around the fence, and they become friends and they talk about what life is like in either way, and they decide to let’s find out.

So Bruno tries to sneak in, and I’m not going to ruin the ending of the book for anybody who hasn’t read it, but for example, whenever it’s the picture depicting whenever Hitler comes to the house with his famous actress, girlfriend, wife, whose name I-

Debbie Millman:
Eva Braun.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yes. I depicted Hitler just with a square in the middle of his face, which was his mustache. And I depicted Eva Braun with just the red lips of the lipstick. And then, I depicted, I can’t remember the name of the young officer who becomes very violent, just always with this shadow under his cap, and then, these piercing blue eyes, sort of that idea of the Aryan purity, and these explosions of color every once in awhile, just to be able to show the emotion of the story, and as simple but beautiful as a way as possible.

Debbie Millman:
What did working on that book do to your spirit?

Oliver Jeffers:
I had to do a lot of research for it, to understand what Auschwitz looked like. Now I studied World War II in history at A level, so I knew my way around that period of history, and I’ve seen the images, but then, really looking at the images, because you have to draw them.

I think I made a post at the time, just saying, that things like this are important to remember, so that we don’t repeat them. There was a heaviness, that kind of permeated over me, the entire time that I was working in that book. And I think possibly, at that time, I was working on Stuck. And I needed that lightness to balance that darkness.

Debbie Millman:
If you look at this overarching, again, narrative arc of your work, so much of it, even when discussing difficult things, discussing climate change, deciding the future, talking about the future of humanity and illustrating the future of humanity, the work is very light and hopeful.

This was one case in your work, where I felt that it was very dark, and that was startling to me. And I was wondering what that might have done to your psyche, while you were working on it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And actually, at that point, I think I was beginning the experimentation with the dip paintings, and I thought that there was going to be a darkness in that, because that whole project is about exploring death.

Debbie Millman:
And memory, what we do and don’t remember.

Oliver Jeffers:
And memory, and how the two are related, and how the idea of knowing that life is finite, how that changes how you project yourself into a completely unknown future. It ultimately became more of a project about memory and storytelling, and the vulnerability of memory, than anything else. So that the people that I would paint these portraits of, they were all linked by the experience of having witnessed death firsthand, and in different ways.

Sometimes, it would have been somebody had lost a parent, or sometimes a partner. One of them was an EMT driver who would discover dead bodies. One of them actually was a government assassin, who had killed in cold blood, and seeing what the similarities were with that proximity to death.

The paintings themselves are beautiful. And there’s this, I think, a deep hope that kind of permeates from it. But doing some of those interviews was heavy.

Debbie Millman:
For somebody that hasn’t seen your drip paintings, how do you describe them?

Oliver Jeffers:
They would be typically portraiture painting, like oil painting, in a frame. But the entire bottom three-quarters is a solid color, because I would have painted these portraits, and then I would submerge them into a lot of paint, to permanently obscure the majority of them.

And I would do it in front of a small audience, and no photographs would ever exist of the entirety of the painting. The future of that legacy would exist only in the minds of the people who were there.
So I would ask them afterwards what they remember seeing, and then I would ask them months, sometimes years later, about what they still remember seeing, and just how much changes

Debbie Millman:
Having witnessed one, and it was the drip painting of John Maeda, because I knew the experience of watching the painting being dipped would require my remembering certain things. I became hyper aware of the buttons on his shirt, the color of the shirt, the expression on his face, and so forth. But all these years later, the only things I remember are those things that I just mentioned.

Oliver Jeffers:
It changes the way you look at something.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s all I remember. I couldn’t tell you if you had specific questions about other things.

Oliver Jeffers:
What way was he facing?

Debbie Millman:
I couldn’t tell you, but I could tell you about the button. I can tell you about the button, and that’s about it. So it’s interesting what we deem memorable in the moment.

I was trying to stuff my head with facts about it, so that I could remember more. And in fact, I think I’ve remembered less.

Oliver Jeffers:
Because you were trying to remember?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. It’s been such an interesting experience doing those. One of the sitters I was painting … People ask me, do I have an emotional experience, when I’m doing them? And the answer is yes, but in a different way than everybody else is.

I’m having an emotional experience, because of the collective, I suppose, mood, the collective emotion in the room. But I’m also worried that I’m not going to kick a can of paint over, remember what I have to say, the technicalities of it.

And when I was painting one of the sitters in the studio, and that’s a strange experience, if you’ve ever had your portrait painted, and especially as somebody who’s painting the portrait, you stare at somebody for an uncomfortably long time, but you’re not looking at them. You’re looking at some small, again, detail.

So I was with this sitter, and I kind of did a little laugh, and he goes, “What was that about?” And I was like, “Oh, well, I suppose I’ve just finished painting your ear. It’s probably the best ear I’ll ever paint.” And then, I thought, “Oh, well …”

Debbie Millman:
John Singer Sargent be damned.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, yeah. And then, I thought, “Oh, well it’ll be gone soon.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Oliver Jeffers:
And I’ll go through the emotion of it while making the painting.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that your career as an artist has been fighting against the portraiture, the sort of deep detail and finesse that’s required in portraiture, that you’re so good at, and yet, really have in many ways rejected?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Have we talked about this?

Debbie Millman:
No.

Oliver Jeffers:
Every time I start a new painting, or go into a direction of a body of work, I was, “I’m going to be loose this time. I want to be big, and I want to be loose.” And I invariably keep getting back to being tighter at that scale. And I somehow can’t find the freedom and energy that happens intuitively, with the book art, on a large scale painting.

There’s just something there where I keep having to … I don’t know. I’m learning how to trust myself, and it’s still something that I strive towards. So one of the pieces of advice that I give myself is, “Just use a bigger brush.”

Debbie Millman:
Ooh, interesting. So interesting, because in the video you did for you too, I was actually marveling at how well your handwriting worked in a large scale, when you were writing on walls of buildings, and in walls at your studio. And I was wondering how that felt to you.

Oliver Jeffers:
The handwriting has never been an issue at scale. When I write big on a painting, or on a wall, it still looks the same as I do when I write small, but it’s always the image making. I use acrylic sometimes, I use oil sometimes, and with both of them, they have their pros and their cons.

With acrylic at a small scale, there’s an immediacy and a charm to that. But when you apply that large, just something in my head, I can never get the colors quite right, or it dries too fast. And then, with oil paint, it’s almost the opposite problem.

So I think everybody is learning, always, as they grow and they develop, and figuring out both what their body is capable of, what their head is capable of, but also what the materials are capable of.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting to be so close to watching your trajectory as an artist.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a real privilege.

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
There were two projects I want to talk to you about, before we get to your current book. In your film, Here We Are, the protagonist is a precocious seven-year-old who, over the course of a day, learns about the wonders of the planet from his parents, and a mysterious exhibit, aptly named, The Museum of Everything.

And you said this. “Here We Are, of all my books, seems the most relevant for the world’s current reality, as it began as a sort of comedic routine in pointing out the obvious. But slowly, it dawned on me, the importance of re-remembering the basic principles of what it is to be alive on this earth, and appreciate it right now.” So I’m wondering, what motivated that re-remembering?

Oliver Jeffers:
The book Here We Are is the first book I’ve ever made that’s not a story, it’s a set of observations. It’s quite literally coming home from the hospital, with a two-day-old baby, and figuring out, what do we do now, figuring out how to introduce him to the world. As somebody who’s an over talker and oversharer, I just began narrating everything I saw around me, thinking it was really funny.

It was like, “Welcome home, son. This is your front door to the apartment that you live in, the apartment is one house in a bigger building. Buildings are these things that we make.” And really, just entertaining myself by pointing out all the things that he could see. And around that time, the world was angrier and scared than usual.

Now, maybe I was seeing it from the different perspective of being a parent for the first time, so suddenly aware of the world that he’s walking into, and that I’m responsible, really and truly for the first time, for somebody other than myself.

But in 2015, when he was born, that was when the Brexit vote was happening in the UK, and that was very divisive. And it was the first year that Trump was beginning to run for election here. Everything seemed polarized, and there was a lot of anger and blame and division, and the consensus was that everything is falling, sliding backwards somehow.

As I was explaining the world to him, I wanted to change the way in which I was explaining it. I didn’t feel that it was going to be, even though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I was like, “I want to tell you the good things before we get to this. There’s night and there’s day. This is the only place in the universe where people live. There are people, and people come in all shape, sizes and colors, and we may all look different, act different and sound different, but don’t be fooled, we’re all people.”

And just the simple truths, that I’m sort of trying to remind him of the beauty of what it is to be alive, here and now.

As I was writing him this letter, it occurred to me that maybe other people would benefit from re-remembering these things that I was re-remembering. So it became the book, Here We Are, which is this, it’s almost a guidebook for new arrivals on Earth.

Debbie Millman:
Or for re-remembering what is important.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or for re-remembering. The editor at the time joked, he said, “This is a book for new people, new parents, and misplaced adults.”

Debbie Millman:
How did you translate that to a film?

Oliver Jeffers:
Actually, with difficulty. Because, so Apple TV wanted to do an adaptation of it, as a half hour short. Because there’s no story in the book, they were saying, “that this is going to be an educational film, if we just stick with this list of observations.” So we were looking for a way in, we were looking for a narrative.
Philip Hunt, who was the director at Studio AKA, heard me give the anecdote of giving my son the tour of the apartment, and then, the, “Wow, he really knows nothing.” And then, that changing to, “He really knows nothing. We’re going to have to teach him everything.” And that became a bit of the idea of the story.

But the theme and the emotional heart of the story came from this idea of the book trying to point to a true north for people who felt lost. So in the endpapers of the book, there is that, “This is how you find your way home. This is north.”

They decided, “That’s what we can make the arc of the film about. Let’s take this, not as a baby, but age him seven years, and have it be this one day, where it’s about this idea of truly understanding the magnitude of everything, feeling lost by it, but using that as an opportunity to bring it back to a simple core truth.”

Debbie Millman:
And a way forward.

Oliver Jeffers:
And a way forward, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Which, I think, is the common denominator between both the book and the film. The film is narrated by Meryl Streep, and includes the voices of Chris O’Dowd, Ruth Negga, Jacob Tremblay. What was it like to see and hear your ideas come to life in this way?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, bizarre. I was secretly hoping I’d be cast. No, I’m joking. Chris O’Dowd was my idea, and whenever he said yes, I was like that, “It’s perfect.” He’s just got that right amount of charm and humor.

Of course, Meryl Streep as Mother Earth, it was pretty perfect. That was a beautiful moment. It was, of course, supposed to get a big premiere in California, but that happened right in the middle of-

Debbie Millman:
COVID.

Oliver Jeffers:
COVID, so that got pulled.

Debbie Millman:
But you did win an Emmy, so you’re on your way to an EGOT. The last project before we talk about your current book is the poster you worked on with Darren Aronofsky for his film, The Whale.
I’d love to talk to you about that, and get an understanding about how that came to be. The poster that you made was quite different than the film that was used in mass production, far more beautiful, far more subtle. Just was wondering about your approach to doing that project.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, that came from a conversation with Darren. Darren kindly agreed to come over to Belfast speak at this festival I was putting around this giant sculpture project of Earth’s place in the solar system, and talking about using the microcosm, as a way to look at the microcosm.

He spoke brilliantly, and we were hanging out, and I was showing him around Belfast, and he was saying about this new project, and we talked about the idea of doing a piece of art for it, and we talked about the film, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was like, “I think I have an idea, right off the bat.”

I sketched it out, and it was like, “I love this.” The premise of the film is a girl who’s reconnecting with her father, who is close in the last week of his life, and he’s obese, and I can’t remember, like 600 pounds, when they can’t really leave his apartment, but there’s this sort of sad story about them trying to reconnect. And it’s called The Whale.

Now, of course, the whale is not a reference to him. But it’s more of a reference to Moby Dick, which is a story that he keeps reading over and over and over again.

And I had just this immediate flash of a concept, which is paint the surface of the sea, and then, below the sea, you see this sofa with this whale sitting in it, that’s got human legs, on a breathing machine, and then, this girl in a scuba outfit who is there, but distant. It’s like, she’s come from one world into his world, but there’s still this distance between them.

Debbie Millman:
But she’s also trying to communicate with him, to try to find a way in. How was the work utilized in the making of the film, and in the promotion.

Oliver Jeffers:
It was used as promotion afterwards. It was a limited edition print that went out. Actually, when I got to see the film for the first time at the premier, so not before, and that really, then, the penny sort of dropped about what the film was about. It was like, “Wow, this is kind of even more apt, than not.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I saw a very early screening. And I can tell you, that when I first saw your poster, I was astounded, how you could see into the film, without even having seen the film?

Oliver Jeffers:
But maybe that was, rather than having seen the film, I talked to Darren. So we didn’t talk about the film, per se, but we talked about the idea and the themes and the emotions of the film. Almost without that excess information, it allowed me to see what I wasn’t supposed to do.

Debbie Millman:
You just published your brand new book, Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. I have one big question for you about this.

Oliver, you’ve sold over 15 million children’s books. What made you decide to write one targeted to people of all ages?

Oliver Jeffers:
I never set off to do anything, thinking, “Here’s who this is for,” and I’m doing this, because I think, as I say, “people will like it, and this is going to hit the current trend or market or anything.”

It’s the second book that I’ve made that’s not a story, it’s a list of observations. Though, in thinking now about it, those observations started 45 years ago. They really had started to take root over the last 15 years, when I moved from Northern Ireland to New York, and then, since moving back from New York to Northern Ireland, where I’m part-time based now, that’s when I started actively trying to take these patterns that I could see that were rippling out in society in many ways, and look at them from a long enough lens view, to make sense of them somehow.

So a lot of the work that I do is about perspective. It’s about taking a step back, and looking at something from far away, or back through time, rather than just the microcosm of this moment in this time.

So the Our Place in Space sculpture project that I was referencing a second ago, it was about human conflict where it, in Northern Ireland, we have been at that conflict culturally, less violently over the last few years. But the Belfast that I grew up in was a very violent place, and it was very divided between an us-them mentality between Catholics and Protestants.

And then, moving to New York, and trying to explain to well-educated people that, “No, actually, I’m not from Ireland, it’s Northern Ireland, which is a different country,” and people really not knowing or understanding, and truth that I learned, was not really caring, either.

It just made me look back at home in a different way, and it just seemed like a tragic, poignant waste of time and energy, all of this, what was all consuming, in terms of identity. When I was making Here We Are, a big part of that book was if you’re giving a human being a tour of our planet, you start off with location.

So I started looking at Earth’s place in space, and I was reading about how astronauts speak about looking at Earth from a distance, and came across the overview effect. I could see that the way I was describing Northern Ireland, from the distance of New York, was not unlike the way that astronauts were describing looking at the earth from the Moon, where there’s some of those famous quotes like, “It makes you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, and drag him a quarter of a million miles away, and say, ‘Look at that.'”

This idea of the separation, of these manmade borders, these lines, these stories that we’ve constructed, that really keep each other apart, it just seems like not the best use of our time. When I then moved back to Northern Ireland from here, I was quite really shocked, watching the 2020 election campaign, and how even more brutal it was becoming, and could suddenly see, because I was in Belfast at that point, that it felt like the USA was where Northern Ireland was in the 1970s, where one group’s identity was defined by the existence of somebody else, by the existence of a perceived enemy.

That really got me thinking about, “Well, why do people think like that? In Northern Ireland, why do we do what we do? What is it people actually truly want?” And asking those questions, “What is it that people truly want,” why do we go against our own best interest, time and time again? And at that point, it was impossible to have a conversation about US politics that was not just explosively conflictual. And.
I’ve been all around the USA on book tours, and I’ve met all sorts of people, and I’ve sort of joked, that I was like, “I’ve never really met anybody who wants to be an asshole.” There’s just people who double down on a misunderstanding that happened about how they have been perceived. And it was like, “Can I ask a question, in a sincere enough way, that people will answer it in a non-defensive way?”

So I put up the social media post, saying, “Calling all Republicans, can you please,” because I know many Republicans that who, have basically I believe the same set of values that I do, “Why is this becoming so polarized? Please explain to me the world that you want, without mentioning anything you don’t want.”
Because, in these conversations, people just tend to go towards what they don’t want, in a negative sense. We all begin with this sense of defensiveness and negativity. So it’s preemptive, that when somebody speaks to you from the other perspective, that it’s an attack. How could you mitigate that, and have a genuine conversation?

So, when trying to really truly understand, I asked people on the other side of the political spectrum to me, to describe the word that they do want, rather than the word they don’t. And the discourse that happened afterwards proved, I think, my gut intuition that we’re all just so busy trying to be understood, that we forget to try and understand.

And it led to the creation of the poem at the end of Begin Again. And then, in taking that into consideration about, a lot of the issues that draw most people’s time and attention are actually massive distractions away from what we should be worrying about, which is making sure that life can continue to survive on this planet. So, streaming all of these different thoughts and experiences that I’ve had, and observations that I’ve made about the stories that people tell themselves, led to Begin Again.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how one of the goals in creating Begin Again was to create a single narrative about who we are, in an effort to collaborate and address the many crises we are facing. Do you think it’s possible to have a single narrative about who we are now?

Oliver Jeffers:
To answer that question, think about the way people say that New York City is, it’s a great melting pot. That’s not true. Because that would imply homogenization, that everybody’s the same. New York is a giant salad. It’s made up of all different ingredients, but it works together, somehow.

That’s more what I mean about this. It’s almost the same set of goals, morals, and values of what we’re being driven towards. Now, the way in which I think a lot of this has happened, is that things have just accelerated so massively, so quickly, that we can’t really keep up with things anymore. This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures really, truly.

And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. It’s a bombardment, and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

And because we’re coming out of this period of, I suppose, consumerism, where it’s all just about, “Stuff will make you happy.” We’re learning now, and we see now, that stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s actually other people that make you happy.

And that can, I think, be one of the stories that we can all rally around, is then, the things that people do want, what came out of that social media post, which sort of ended up in the poem, was that it’s all human beings want safety. They want community, they want dignity, and they want purpose. And everything else is just leveraged towards that.

Those should be accomplishable, that should be accomplishable. I think we can all agree that we want life on Earth to continue, and to exist, and that is the single story that we should get behind, instead of where we are now.

And this is the one thing that I learned about in Northern Ireland, trying to apply why people do go against their own best interests is, we have somehow got to a point where being right is the most important thing. We prioritize being right over wrong more than anything else.

But if we replace the words “right” and “wrong” in any conflict or debate with “better” and “worse,” it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen. And it’s not, then, about ego or self, or the past, or justifying the past. It’s about, “Well, what do we do now? How do we make this better?”

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like most about Begin Again is the notion that, in order for us to really truly survive and thrive, is to become part of the same powerful plot. What do you envision that powerful plot being?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I envision that powerful plot being, so we started off as villages, and then we grew to towns, and then to cities, and then nations. And maybe the next natural progression is land.

I have multiple passports, which I probably shouldn’t advertise. People ask me where I’m from, and it was like, the easiest answer was, “I’m a citizen of planet Earth, man.”

And that is, again, sort of easy and idealistic to say. But that one, same powerful plot, I think, is the awareness that we feel better, when we know we matter and we fit in. So it’s a return to the sense of community.

A little anecdote I’ve been telling about the real snap of that, the inception of the moment of Begin Again is, when I was back in Northern Ireland, right before lockdown hit there, but you could see it was coming. I got talking to this old lady waiting to cross the road, with a couple of big bags of shopping, and I asked her, “Oh, you’re getting ready for the lockdown?” And she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do you think it’s going to last for a long time?” She said, “You know, I think it is. Because for awhile, I thought this was going to remind me of the war,” she said. She was around during World War II, and Belfast was heavily bombed in World War II, because we made all the planes and the ships for the British Army.

She goes, “I thought this was going to remind me of back in the war, but it’s not. Because back then, we all tried to see how we could help. But look around, everybody’s just trying to see what they can get away with.”

How do we return back to that sense of, “How can I help?” Or as Nicole Stott, the astronaut says, “How can we go from being passengers on this spaceship earth to being its only crew?”

Debbie Millman:
What do you see as the difference between being a passenger and part of the crew?

Oliver Jeffers:
“What’s in it for me?” Versus, “How can I help? I have a job to do here,” versus, “I’m here to tick. This is all from my convenience.”

Debbie Millman:
So what can everyone do to make everything better for everyone else?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think we have to remember the importance of community.

Debbie Millman:
You conclude the book with a beautiful piece of poetry, and I’m wondering if you can share that with us today.

Oliver Jeffers:
I will happily share that, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And give us maybe a little bit of backstory, as to how you arrived at this part of the book.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, it was in the deep question asking of a lot of people, everywhere I went, what they actually wanted, how they felt now, versus how they wanted to fail. This real sense of understanding is that we are all collectively chasing the wrong things.

We’re using the wrong measuring stick to value success. And in remembering that we as animals are actually much more simple creatures than we give ourselves credit for. So it’s called The Heart of It.

When you dig deep enough, by asking the why behind the why enough times, you come to a truth at the heart of it. That all people, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what they believe, just want the same things. A den, a pack, position, and direction.

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

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers’ latest book is Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. You can find out about all the other things he’s been up to on his website, oliverjeffers.com.
This is the eighteenth year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.
I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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

Debbie Millman:
Country folk, pop, blues, Americana. Call it what you will, and you still won’t capture the moving, memorable music of Rosanne Cash. One of the country’s preeminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Rosanne is also an author of four books, including the best-selling memoir, Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. She’s one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. And in 2021, Rosanne was the first female composer to receive the McDowell Medal awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She joins me today to talk about her music, her writing, her 45-year career and the 30th anniversary re-release of her album, The Wheel. Rosanne Cash, welcome to Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Hi Debbie. Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Rosanne, is it true that at one point growing up you had a pet monkey?

Rosanne Cash:
I didn’t have a pet monkey and my mother did, and I don’t know what she was thinking and it still creeps me out that she did.

Debbie Millman:
So it was yours by proxy then?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, no, not even. I kept my distance. That is the first time anyone has ever asked me that question, so kudos.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You were born in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you and your three sisters moved to Encino, California after your parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Havenhurst Avenue when you were three years old. Do you have any memory of what that house was like?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, we bought Johnny Carson’s house. My mother always told this story, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, that Mrs. Carson left a pie in the oven. It’s possible.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Rosanne Cash:
Possibly true. I do remember the house. I remember one day coming into the living room and seeing a film crew in our house. There was this show called Here’s Hollywood, and they had come to interview my dad, my mom, and at home, come see how he lives at home, and I remember how much I resented having this television crew in our house and thus began a lifelong suspicion of journalists.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s not where I thought you were going to go with that.

Rosanne Cash:
The press company accepted.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I know it also made you skeptical of fame and the lack of privacy that it really caused your family, especially your mother.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, that’s true, and that’s really the takeaway from that story about the television crew is that I just hated the intrusion. I hated opening our private life and so did my mother. My mother was incredibly private and I had no illusions about fame that I knew it wasn’t glamorous, that it didn’t make you happy, that it didn’t fulfill all your needs as a human being, and it was bone crushing work. I saw my dad beyond exhausted. And yeah, so I’ve always had a very real understanding of what fame means and how destructive it could be.

Debbie Millman:
In your beautiful memoir, Composed, you described your earliest memory and you wrote this, “My earliest memory, perhaps the earliest possible flawed template for my life dates to when I was around two years old, we were visiting my mother’s parents in San Antonio and my grandfather, Tom, the bespeckled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, ‘Look at the birds Rosanne,’ and I thought to myself with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture, ‘Oh, am I supposed to pretend to be excited? I’m supposed to act like a child.’ And so I did. I squealed the obligingly feigned alarm at the gathering birds and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually a compelling need to please people can be deadly.” That paragraph says so much about who you were, who you are. Have you gotten better with the compulsion to be a people pleaser?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yeah. That’s one of the beauties of age, isn’t it? You just don’t give a what people think of you at some point. There’s an urgency that goes along with aging that you have more to say, less time to say it and trying to please people by your work or the way you live or the way you speak or who you are, how you look, what shoes you wear, what songs you sing, that all of that is distraction from the real work and the truth of being that you have little time left to live and be, and I am aware of that every day now. It moves me to tears to think about it, the sense of urgency that overcomes me sometimes. Bob Dylan said it about performing that people-pleasing was death for an artist. You get outside yourself, you get self-conscious. You try to moderate or twist or define or truncate who you are and what you do, and then the world doesn’t have you.

Debbie Millman:
I was really struck in your early years how much you needed to be the adult. One of the things that really struck me was the creation of imaginary friends that you… A lot of children have imaginary friends. I had one named Goonie, but she was a little girl like me, and I insisted that she have a table setting at the kitchen table and so forth, but yours were adults, which is really, really unusual and I’m wondering if you can talk about what kind of imaginary adult friends you made at the time.

Rosanne Cash:
I’ve wondered about that too why my imaginary friends were adults, and I’ve talked about this with various therapists over the years, and I think it’s because there was a lot of chaos in my life and in my parents’ marriage and my dad on the road and using drugs, and my mother just beside herself with fear and grief and worry and anxiety and anger, and I did a really smart thing. I created adults who were perfect, who saw who I was and loved me as I was and were protective. One of them I still have with me.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
I still talk to her once in a while.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to not ask you about her only because I know that you’ve been reticent about talking to them at all, talking about them at all rather.

Rosanne Cash:
I have. I have. I don’t tell people their names. I don’t like talking about them.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I totally respect that. You ended up at that time needing to be more of an adult in your family. You were the person your three sisters turned to in times of trouble, ultimately became the child who had to pretend not to be a child. So much so that you began to hate the very word child. And I also was struck by the fact that you never cried, a fact at the time that you took great pride in. How did you manage through this time?

Rosanne Cash:
So my mom was not fully present. My mom had some really wonderful qualities. I learned discipline from her, her domestic skills and arts were so refined and beautiful, president of her garden club, dozens and dozens of close friends. But during that time when I was young and my dad was on the road and their marriage was falling apart, my mom was out of her mind, out of her body and often literally hysterical. And I had three younger sisters and I took it upon myself to be an adult. And if my mom was taking up all the emotional space, there wasn’t much room for me to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
I think that that’s maybe a common thing for children who have a parent who’s off the rails. And my other parent was, at that time was a drug addict and he was gone a lot. So my family is well known, but it’s not that different from other families who the addiction is the hub of the wheel.

Debbie Millman:
Did you know your dad was a drug addict at that time? You were so young.

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, no, no. People didn’t talk to children about that. I don’t even think my mother understood it. There just wasn’t the consciousness about it as there is today.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read another short excerpt from another book that you wrote, your book, Bodies of Water, and you say this about your childhood. “The summer I turned 11, I felt too big for my body, too small for my heart, confused by the secrets and fears that permeated the very atoms of the air inside my home, and far too old from my age.” You go on to write, “When I was 11, I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn’t come true, I stopped talking to people who didn’t listen. I lost hope and retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself, my own particular jewels under lock and key.”

Rosanne Cash:
I forgot I wrote that.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by in reading that was the notion that your strange self needed to be protected. And in some ways that gave me a lot of hope in thinking about who you became, that you didn’t disappear that person, you just hid her under lock and key.

Rosanne Cash:
Definitely. And she’s the one who’s the artist and needs protection. And as I felt safer as I grew older then she’s the source of creativity.

Debbie Millman:
I love that you referred to this strange part of yourself as jewels.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, yeah. I had this image of myself, that strange little self in, she had a secret cave and in the cave where all the records she wanted and all the books and access to all of these wonderful things, and it was private and I could lock myself away and nobody could say a thing to me. Sometimes I still wish I had that space to go to. Well, I do in my mind, because that’s only place it ever was.

Debbie Millman:
I’m glad you protected it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 12 years old, your parents split up and your dad moved to Tennessee. You and the rest of the family moved to Ventura to a house you’ve described as a sixties fantasy come to life. And you said that that, with that move, someone opened up all the windows and let the air and light inside your life. For most children, young people, divorce is really quite traumatic. It seemed like that began a part of your life that actually improved.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it did. We had been living on the top of this mountain top alone, no children around, nothing around except dry brush canyons and rattlesnakes, and it was very solitary. It was the worst part of my mom’s life and the worst part of her craziness. And I think the divorce, I remember thinking maybe now both of them can be happy. It was a relief. It’s like, somewhere I knew this was not going to work and they had destinies elsewhere separate from each other. And so moving to near the ocean, which the ocean is like a religion to me, so moving near the ocean, my dad cleans up. They both have new partners. I was then on the verge of being a teenager and was discovering so much music and poetry and books, all of those things I love so much. So yeah, it was like the light came in. It was fantastic.

Debbie Millman:
You went to high school at St. Bonaventure in Ventura and wore your Catholic uniform very short, which I love you, and a small group of classmates who were a little left of center called yourselves, the Anarchy Society. And at that point you thought you’d become a poet. What kind of poetry were you writing?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, Debbie so bad. Just beyond, it should be burned in a bonfire with rituals so that nothing ever comes back from it. It was just terrible. But at one point, this is so odd, but I got a letter from this woman a few years ago and she said, “I was your babysitter when your mom went out of town and you were in your young teens.” And she said, “And you asked me, how do you put poems to music?” And I thought to myself, why in the hell would I ask a random babysitter when I had a great songwriter as a parent? But I remember I read a lot of poetry then, I wrote poetry, and then in my late teens I learned to play guitar and I started putting it together.

Debbie Millman:
At the time you also considered becoming an archaeologist or going to medical school, and I know you’ve had a lifelong interest in science and physics, but what compelled you to think about archaeology or medicine?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I love science. I love thinking about what neurons do and the plasticity of the brain and all of that, and I love history so much, and I thought, Oh God, it would be so great to live in a kibbutz and dig up ancient artifacts. And I actually took a summer course in anthropology at the local college, and I’m still really interested in history and science. It’s source of great curiosity and actually quantum physics as well now. The poetry in theoretical physics is so beautiful, dark matter, the event horizon, mutual attraction.

Debbie Millman:
Quantum entanglement.

Rosanne Cash:
Entanglement. Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about dreams. Over the course of your life you’ve had a number of significant dreams that you’ve written about. You also shared that Carl Jung had stated that a person might have five big dreams in their lives, and that dreams that provoke a shift in real consciousness. And I believe your first one occurred when you were 13 where you were playing cards with your mother and your grandmother in a small house. You were old in the dream and aware that your life was nearly over. Can you talk about that dream and how it impacted you and your thinking about yourself at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
It was so profound to me, an experience that it seems reductive to even call it a dream, but I was asleep and this vision came that I was old as you said, and that I was at the end of my life and I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother, and we were just mechanically putting the cards down on the table, and I realized that I had done that my whole life, just putting the cards down one after the other, and we weren’t really speaking. There was no connection, just playing the cards. And I woke up in a sweat and it frightened me so badly and I realized that you had to make a choice to be awake in your life. And that kind of inertia and lack of awareness could creep upon you without you knowing it.
And I made this vow to myself in the bed as I woke up, I said, I will never be a card player. And I’ve referred to that dream in myself, thought of it so many times over the decades, and I even started once writing a story called “The Card Players” about it. Yeah, it’s been a guiding light that dream. If Carl Jung is right and you have five big dreams, that was my first one.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your second one in a little bit, but how many of those five do you think you’ve had?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I know of two others, so maybe I’ve had three. Have you had any?

Debbie Millman:
Well, ever since I read that, I’ve been thinking about it and I had one dream when I was in fifth grade as my life was falling apart, as my parents had gotten divorced, my mother got remarried and married a criminal and a bit of a monster, and I had this dream that I was looking out my back bedroom window and saw a pool party and knew that I was invited and was worried that I was late, and I went to the pool and I jumped in and everybody was saying, don’t cross that line, which was one of the buoys that you see in a pool or in a lake, and I wanted to. I went under the line and started drowning. At that moment in my dream, I was back in my room and the walls were cracking. I felt like I was being strangled to death by the water in this whirlpool. I don’t think I’ve ever told this dream to anybody by the way.

Rosanne Cash:
Really? But it stayed with you your entire life since-

Debbie Millman:
It stayed with me my entire life and in the very, very, very first diary that I ever wrote, I wrote about it that I’d had this dream, and that’s also why I am able to remember it, I think pretty accurately. I’m not remembering a memory of it. I’m remembering what I wrote about it at the time, which was vivid, and I think I was aware in that dream of my life about to fall apart. Up until that point, it was difficult but not unbearable, and for the next four years it became unbearable, and I think that was my higher self preparing me, I think, without my younger self then knowing it.

Rosanne Cash:
I would definitely call that a big dream.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. But I don’t know that I’ve had, and I’ve really been thinking about it because it’s come up in so much of your work that I’ve read, I’ve been thinking, what are the other big dreams? I think most of my other dreams are more conscious and more aspirational than psychological.

Rosanne Cash:
And organizing your experiences. Yeah. Another big dream I had is that I dreamed about my husband before I met him.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
That one I don’t know about. Tell me.

Rosanne Cash:
I was sitting with him at the bottom of the ocean and I felt this profound, pure love. I looked at him at the bottom of the ocean where we were sitting together, and it was this overwhelming feeling that I had never experienced before of complete connection with another human being and how pure that love was. And I could see his eyes and his hair and it was him. I woke up and I thought, I want to feel like that in my life. And then it wasn’t long after that I met him. And it hit me the second I saw him, that’s the man who was in my dream. And then I thought, my life is going to get so complicated.

Debbie Millman:
And it did. It did. I want to go to that-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh God.

Debbie Millman:
… that part, but I do want to talk a little bit more about your origin story because the day after you graduated high school, your father took you on tour with him, and that’s when you learned how to play guitar. You learned from your stepmother, June Carter Cash. You learned from her sister Helen, from Mother Mabel Carter, as well as Carl Perkins, all of whom you were on the road with your father at the time with. Did learning to play music come as easily to you as writing poetry?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, for my skillset, yes. I’m not a great guitarist, a great technical musician, but it did feel incredibly natural to learn those, particularly those Appalachian ballads, the first songs I learned to play on guitar, it just made sense to me. I could see the shape of the chord changes. So that part came naturally to me. Now, I’m not a natural musician like my husband and my son are, who can hear very sophisticated chord voicings and chord progressions, and who have really advanced facility on a lot of different instruments. I don’t have that. I’m jealous of it, but the part that I do have is very natural.

Debbie Millman:
It was at that time in your life that you discovered your passion for songwriting, that you’ve talked about remaining undiminished to this day and led you into your life as a writer and a singer and into really your family’s vocation. Did you struggle at that time with the idea of following in the footsteps of your family?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And having to measure up.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I didn’t want to be in the shadow. I didn’t want to invite comparisons. I didn’t want the life. I knew what the life was like. I didn’t need that much attention. I was a shy person. I thought I would write songs purely for other people, and I was deeply passionate about that and about that career path. But I wrote songs, made demos of the songs, and I was in Germany at Christmas party with my friend who worked at Ariola Records, and she played it, my tape for the head of the label, and they wanted to sign me to make an album. And I was staying with her and I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. And she finally dragged me to a doctor and she said, “What’s wrong with her?” And he said, he talks to me for a while and he said, “She’s depressed.”

I was, I was trying to make a decision, did I want to do this in my life? I knew if I made an album, I knew everything that came with it. Then you toured, you had a public life, you had to figure out how to keep your private life safe, all of that. And then I decided to do it. I decided to make the record. That’s not to say that my life as a performer has been from by default because I did choose it, but it was not an easy choice.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do it?

Rosanne Cash:
Maybe the connection. I wanted to feel my songs connect with people. I knew there was something about my voice that was good. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it, but I knew that the tonal quality of it was pleasing and that there may be something I could do with that. But then I spent years feeling like performing was about being judged, that you went on stage so people could pick you apart and judge you. And then I came to understand that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
I interviewed a designer named Bob Gill, very, very famous designer, very famous in the sixties and the seventies especially. And after I interviewed him, I went and saw him speak somewhere and the audience wasn’t quite laughing at his jokes and he said, “What are you? An audience or a jury?”

Rosanne Cash:
Well, good.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you wrote your first good song in 1978. You were 20 years old and you were in, I think the same friend who sent your music to Ariola, Renata Damm’s apartment in Germany, and it was titled, “This Has Happened Before,” and you’ve said this about the song. “It was a young woman’s song, tentative and too self-referential, too navel-gazing, but not to an extreme that would make you squirm. It’s well constructed, painstaking even, and I could hear the hard work in it. I was very proud when I finished that song, and it was the first time I felt like a real songwriter.” And this is a question that I ask almost every songwriter that I’ve ever interviewed. Can you talk about what happens to you when you’re writing a song? Where does a song come from?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, God. A song comes from a mystery. There’s a mystery about songwriting that if you could pin it down and say what it was, then it wouldn’t be songwriting anymore. It comes from some creative source that’s undefinable like all creative work, I think, and to tap into that and get the thrill of that energy of being inside it and having it inside of you, that’s the ultimate. I’m sure you know it in your own work too. It’s like you know when it’s jagged and troubling and then you know when suddenly it opens up and that you feel this rush of it being right, everything’s moving as it should. And writing a song, sometimes in the beginning I’ll have that burst of inspiration and I see the full potential of the song, even though I haven’t written it yet. Then I start working and then it’s drudgery. It’s like painstaking, as you said, finding the right line, finding the right word, the chord progression, turning that line over in your hand like Natalie Goldberg said, “Turning it over in your hand like a rock until it’s smooth.”

Then all of the doubt and self-annihilation, like, why am I doing this? This is shit. What made me think I could become a songwriter, Bob Dylan, why should I bother Bob Dylan at all? And if you can just put that aside, the internal critic long enough that you can then get home with the song, get to the end of it and complete and then edit. And there are some songs that the thrill of it all opening up has been longer than the drudgery part and others where the reverse was true.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how your friend in songwriting mentor, John Stewart, told you that we’re all just radios hoping to pick up each other’s signals and have stated that you’ve spent your whole life trying to clear the static. How do you do that?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, boy. It’s a daily process, isn’t it? I know what frees me up, solitude, the ocean, going to look at visual art, talking with someone I really respect, who’s also an artist, going to a new place, nature. Yeah. There are a lot of things that clear the static.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album came about because your friend gave your songs to a record company in Germany. And I love that despite having a parent who was one of the most famous singer-songwriters in the world, you were recommended to your first record label by a friend in Munich.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I also read that you wanted to change your name because you didn’t want to be associated or think that your success or any success that came was because of any family favor.

Rosanne Cash:
I did think about changing my name to Rosanne Rivers, which is my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and I just mentioned that to my dad that I was thinking about changing my name and he didn’t say anything. And then when I made my first album under my own name, he said, “I’m so glad you did that.” It would’ve hurt him. And he’s told me that, that he would’ve been hurt by that. And I see why now. I’m proud of my legacy. There’s no reason to deny it, but as a young person in her early twenties, I was just floundering. How do I carve something out for myself?

Debbie Millman:
Well, while you were making your first record, a record producer named Bernie Von Ficht had wanted you to record a song called “Lucky,” and despite his plea, you refused. He went on to give it to another artist who ended up having an enormous hit with it. And you’ve said that you wouldn’t have recorded the song even if you had known it would sell triple platinum because you knew you’d have to sing it for the rest of your life.

Rosanne Cash:
It’s so true.

Debbie Millman:
Were you always that certain of what you wanted to record?

Rosanne Cash:
Oddly-

Debbie Millman:
But where did that strength come from?

Rosanne Cash:
I don’t know, but oddly, yes. From a really young age, I had this right or wrong, this powerful sense of what song was right for me, and I betrayed myself a couple of times when someone twisted my arm, but not that often. I don’t know where it came because early on that would’ve just been pure hubris because I didn’t know anything yet except I knew that. I don’t know how I knew it. Maybe it was because of everything I listened to from early childhood on. Maybe it was just I was always a very determined, ambitious person. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
How were you managing the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, performing for the public and balancing that with your distaste for fame and attention?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I had a lot of anxiety, so much anxiety and trying to learn how to balance it, wanting to keep my private life and working really hard to do that. Learning how to work with a band, I was a neophyte, was trying to figure it out, and I didn’t have much confidence as a performer. I was developing a lot of confidence as a songwriter, but not so much as a performer.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album was only distributed in Europe and is now a collector’s item?

Rosanne Cash:
I hope not.

Debbie Millman:
It is going for quite a lot of money on eBay. When you came back to the US, your album Seven Year Ache was a huge hit and the song itself reached number one in the country charts the week of your 25th birthday even crossed over into the pop charts where it reached number 22. Two more number one singles followed from it, “Blue Moon with Heartache,” and “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train.” Now, despite the recognition and the accolades, you said that during that entire period, you felt a constant slow burn of panic.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I did.

Debbie Millman:
What was your family thinking at this time? What did your mother and father think about what you were doing and your stepmother? And were they helping you manage through that panic? Did you share that with them?

Rosanne Cash:
No, I didn’t share it with them. I’ve not been good about that through my life of asking for help. I wish I had actually, my dad could have helped me more. Well, I had a baby at 24, and then this big record at 25, it got to number one on my 25 birthday, and I was just terrified. I was panicked as a new mother. I was panicked that I was becoming famous, and yet Debbie, there was something so, I don’t want to say preordained because that sounds very grand, but it seemed like, Oh yeah, this was always going to happen. This is what was meant to happen. Deal with it.

Debbie Millman:
By the time you released the album Rhythm and Romance in 1985, you were sure you were never going to set foot in a recording studio again.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I had a miserable experience making that album.

Debbie Millman:
Is that your least favorite album?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, probably because it was so hard making it, and it was right in a period in the eighties where we just overused all kinds of layered sounds, synthesizer sounds. It’s probably coming back and being trendy now. Everybody loves what’s going on in the eighties, but it was three producers. I made it in New York, LA and Nashville. I started on April 16th of one year, and it finished on April 15th of the following year. There was an executive producer I didn’t get along with, and we literally had yelling fights in the studio. It was just painful all the way around, and at the end of it, I said, “I’m never making another record.” And then I started getting notices from my record label, from the lawyers that I was in breach of contract that I owed them an album, I owed them an album. It kept coming, and I would just tear up the letters and throw them away.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering what changed your mind.

Rosanne Cash:
Rodney Crowell changed my mind.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Your first husband, producer of many of your early albums. One thing that I read as you were beginning to record King’s Record Shop, your next album, was that you read an interview with Linda Ronstadt wherein she stated that in committing to artistic growth, you had to refine your skills to support your instincts.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that made such a deep impression on you that you clipped the article to save it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Did that impact how you were approaching King’s Record Shop?

Rosanne Cash:
It did. Yeah. I put that in my wallet. I cut it out and put it in my wallet, and I thought, anything that’s fraudulent up to this point, any way I’ve been a dilettante, any way I’ve just been posting or being cavalier about my work, it has to stop now. I kept that in the forefront, and I remember it being hard. It was like, now you know if you’re on your phone and there’s something really interesting about somebody’s talking to you and trying to get your attention and you keep pulling away and looking at the person who’s talking to you, but going back to your phone, which is an awful thing to do, by the way, that’s what it felt like when I was trying to pull myself into a deeper relationship with my own work.

Debbie Millman:
And yet King’s Record Shop had four number one singles, which was a first for a woman in the industry.

Rosanne Cash:
Yep, it was.

Debbie Millman:
Did that success come with any pressure to continue doing the same kind of work? The opposite of what Linda Ronstadt was recommending?

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely. The guys at the label, they see that and they’re like, okay, go do that again. It was enormously successful.

Debbie Millman:
Especially if this was the contracted record.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, just go do that again. Deliver it to us. So I had a lot of leverage with them, and I was starting to write some very dark songs. It was right at the beginning of when my marriage was falling apart, but I had a lot of leverage because of the success of King’s Record Shop. So I went to the label and I said, I want to produce the next record myself, and I want a lot of money. And they said okay to both. So I got a lot of money. I went in the studio with these dark little songs, hired the band, hired a great engineer, Roger Nichols, recorded it analog, and everybody was going digital at that point, but we recorded analog, and I made this album that I thought was the truest reflection of who I was up to that point, and the label didn’t want it.

Debbie Millman:
I know, I’ve listened to it so many times in prep for this interview as well as listening to it when it first came out.

Rosanne Cash:
Interiors.

Debbie Millman:
Interiors, yes. And it’s so interesting. So many people talked about it as your divorce record, but you weren’t divorced yet, so it was this, as you would put it, postcard to the future. I see it as a departure record-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… and a conduit to a new way of making music. That felt like almost like the necessary stop to clear everything out to then begin again.

Rosanne Cash:
You’re absolutely right. It was a turnstile. It was a-

Debbie Millman:
Turnstile, yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
… and it was a reset, and it was the culmination of pulling my face away from the phone, to use that metaphor again. It was like, okay, I’ve committed to this deeper relationship to refining my skills so I can support these instincts, as Linda said.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the album, despite the record executive’s response, the album was nominated for a Grammy.

Rosanne Cash:
It was.

Debbie Millman:
You Lost to John Prine, so basically you didn’t lose.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s so true. In fact, I would’ve been embarrassed if I had won against John Prine.

Debbie Millman:
How do you view that work now? Because at the time, you thought it was your best work to date. The record company didn’t think so. They didn’t support it, so it didn’t sell as well because it wasn’t supported, not because it wasn’t very good. Obviously it was nominated for a Grammy. How do you view that work now all these years later?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I should say I was signed to the country division of Columbia then, and it was nominated in the folk category, so the wider industry got it. They knew it wasn’t a country record. And the country division of my label knew it wasn’t a country record, which is why they didn’t want to do anything with it. But people outside of that got it, and then they put it in the right category for the Grammys. So how do I view it now? I view it as the moment my life changed. I view it as the moment that I recommitted and some of the songs are a little navel-gazing. I wish I had sung certain things better. I wish I had arranged it. I wish I had been a more deft producer. All of those things, you can look back at your work and go, Oh, I could have done that better, but it’s an accurate reflection of the moment, except for one thing.

Debbie Millman:
What?

Rosanne Cash:
There’s one song on that record that makes me cringe, and it wasn’t my fault. Well, it was my fault because I let it on the record, but when I finished the album, I played it for Rodney who hadn’t heard it in the studio at all, and he loved it, and he said, “But it’s not finished. You need one more song. You need something that’s really up tempo. This is a really dark ballad kind of record.” I was devastated when he said that, and he says, “No, come on. Just try write this song with me.” And so we wrote this song called “Real Woman,” and I was not interested, not attached to this song, but I thought, well, maybe he knows something I don’t know.

So I just almost divorced myself from the recording of that one song. I did my part, he was going to put some guitars on his overdub. I went shopping like, okay, do it. I’ll come back and listen later. And I came back in and he played it, the overdubs for me and what he had done, and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think it sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial,” but I put it on the record Debbie. That’s my fault, but I can’t listen to it now.

Debbie Millman:
If you re-release it, you can take it out.

Rosanne Cash:
I will. But I told that story, I wrote about that in my memoir, and after Rodney read my memoir, he goes, “Oh man, I really cringed when I read that chapter.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I thought you were very nice to him in the memoir.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I was.

Debbie Millman:
What is it like to weather the whims of an audience, and how much does that impact how you feel about what you do?

Rosanne Cash:
There are certain ways it does impact me. The letters I get when people say, this song got me through a really hard time, Black Cadillac got me through losing someone, or Interiors was my divorce record. I listened to it through a really painful time. That means something to me. I don’t take that lightly. That’s an honor if you can help someone vicariously in that way. I got really also, this is funny, I got really discouraged a few years ago. What is the point? Why am I doing this? I’m at the point of irrelevancy and I said something on Twitter, I’m sequencing my album, but I wonder what the point is. Nobody listens to albums in sequence anymore because you stream and it random play or whatever it’s called.

I said, nobody cares about that. And I got instantly back a couple hundred tweets. I care, I care, I care. Take your time. Sequence it like you want it done. That’s the way I want to listen to it, the way the artist hears the sequence. And I was floored, and I think that there’s a core audience that I have that has stayed with me through thick and thin, through the bad records, through the good records, through the bad shows and the good shows, and they let me know they’re devoted and I’m devoted to them. Like I said, it’s energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about trying to perform or performing for the 6% of the audience who are poets.

Rosanne Cash:
Only on a bad night.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, only on a bad night, because I was like, that seems like a really low percentage of the people that would be coming to see Rosanne Cash. I would imagine that they’re all poets at heart.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I took that line from my friend and mentor, John Stewart, who’s sadly no longer with us, but he said, because I called him up after I had a bad show, and I was lying in bed after the show just filled with anxiety like, Oh, God, what I did, dah, dah, dah. And I called him up next day and just vented, just terrible. And he said, “So you had a bad gig. What do you want me to do? Realign the planets? Sing to the 6% who are poets.” And that’s on a bad night when people are on their phones and aren’t listening. But the other times I can feel it when 94% are connecting with me.

Debbie Millman:
I think this is around the time you had another of your significant dreams about an old man named Art.

Rosanne Cash:
That was around the time of King’s Record Shop when we were talking about deepening the relationship. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe that… Well, can you tell the dream? I think it would be better if you should.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. I dreamed that I was at a party, and at this time I should say I had cut out Linda Ronstadt’s interview and put it in my purse. So sometime after that, I dreamed I was at a party and Linda was sitting talking to a man named Art, a little old man, and they were deep in conversation and they were sitting on a bench, and I went up and I sat next to Linda and I tried to join the conversation and Art looked at me very coldly, and he said, “We don’t respect dilettantes,” and he turned away and continued his conversation with Linda. Oh my God. I woke up just devastated. I knew what it meant.

Debbie Millman:
I would love for you to tell me what it meant.

Rosanne Cash:
That I was, as I said before, that there was moments of just coasting, of just casually touching the work instead of really going deep into it, being distracted and just showing up for the bare minimum or this is all an inside game, you realize. I don’t know that other people would see that or know that, but as an inside game, it was real. And the larger idea of art was telling me that I better start showing up or I was cut out of the party, out of the conversation.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was a good dream to have, as difficult as it was, it ended up propelling you to move to where you really wanted to live, which was Manhattan. You moved to Morton Street in Greenwich Village, one of the greatest streets on the planet, just a few steps from Matt Umanov Guitars. It’s really interesting, your moth talk. You talked about how New York at that time was kicking your ass until the real you showed up. And I love that New York does that. New York kicks your ass until you really show up.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
How did it do that for you? How was it doing it for you at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it was complicated by the fact that I was going through a divorce when I first moved to New York in 1991, I was confused. I was in love with John Leventhal, but we weren’t together. I was writing songs that were just gut-wrenching from the depths, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and I didn’t have good friends in the city yet, although I had been to the city many times that I knew people, I didn’t have a deep network that could support me.

All of the little things like the construction guys would yell at you, and the homeless guy who threw a rock at my head and getting lost, and part of the story I told in the moths about getting on the subway, it was when we used tokens on the subways, not a metro card. Getting on the subway with a token in my pocket and realizing that I had left my wallet at home and that it was my last token, and getting out of the subway into a downpour, like a monsoon and having no money to buy an umbrella or get back on the subway or get a taxi and just standing there going, what-

Debbie Millman:
Now what?

Rosanne Cash:
Now what? So yeah, it kicks your ass.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, but you have to tell the best part that you get a phone call.

Rosanne Cash:
Okay. The best part. I wasn’t going to tell that. So I had my five pound nineties phone with me. You remember those old phones?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
And at that moment, the phone rings and I stepped under an awning and answered the phone, and I miserably said Hello, and his voice said, “Rosanne, this is Al Gore.” And I said, “Mr. Vice President, so nice to hear from you.” And he said, “I’m over at the Regency,” or wherever he was. He said, “Can you come over? I want to talk to you about this new environmental initiative I’m doing, and I’d want a concert attached to it, and I wanted to talk to you about that,” because I had done a couple of things like that for him before. And I thought really quickly, and I thought, I can’t walk there. I’ll be a drowned rat by the time I get there. I have no money to get over there. So I made some excuse to not go meet the vice president to help save the planet.

Debbie Millman:
I am glad that you ultimately did meet and continue to work together.

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
But there’s something so wonderfully human about that story. It allows me to forgive myself for so many things.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
I just need you to know that.

Rosanne Cash:
I’m so glad. I suffered for you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Rosanne, most of your albums since the album after Interiors, which was The Wheel, Rules of Travel, the multi Grammy Award-winning The River and The Thread feature you writing almost all or co-writing with your husband, as you’ve mentioned, the Grammy Award-winning musician and producer, John Leventhal. I’m wondering how do you feel your writing has evolved since Kings [Record Shop]?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I think that I don’t overuse nature metaphors like I used to. I think that I am not as navel-gazing, that I’ve turned outward, that I’m not as subsumed in the intricacies of romance all the time, although that’s still very interesting to me. But that there are wider subject matters out in the world that I’m interested in writing about as well, and that I’m more willing to take on difficult topics and not care how they’re received.

Debbie Millman:
In many ways, I see your work evolving very similarly, the way Joni Mitchell’s work has evolved, where the writing is so much more sophisticated. There are poems that could stand on their own, there are poems set to music, and they tackle deep human experiences, sometimes including love, but certainly not entirely.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I am incredibly honored to be compared to Joni in any way, I revere her. But yeah, the song that comes to mind right now is a song I wrote two years ago called “The Killing Fields.”

Debbie Millman:
I love that song. That song is magnificent.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. And it’s not on any album, but I wrote it during the Black Lives Matter protests about lynchings in Arkansas.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Rosanne Cash:
I knew that’s not going to be on Top 40 radio, but it was essential that I write it, and I’m incredibly proud of that song. And I saw how it should be laid out before I wrote it, and I saw that it should be in the tradition of a narrative ballad, so it was like building the structure and foundation of a house before I could fill in the verses.

Debbie Millman:
After the success of The River and The Thread, you won, I think three Grammys for that album. Folks were telling you that you had to make another record just like it. Hadn’t they learned already that wasn’t the path you were going to take? But how hard is it to move away from what you know is successful?

Rosanne Cash:
It’s not hard for me. I still have that same youthful hubris of going, but I know what’s right for me. After The River and The Thread, which I love that record, I’m proud of that record, but after that, there was so much happening. It was the Me Too movement. It was Donald Trump getting elected. I’m the mother of five children. It was tearing me apart, and my daughter said to me after Trump got elected, she said, “I feel like I don’t matter,” and that just killed me. It just struck me at the core. And all of this swirling around, I thought, I have to write. I want to make a record that’s addressing these things, that’s about feminine experience, capital F, the betrayals, the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss, all of it. And so that’s what I set out to do.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, in addition to weathering the ups and downs of the music industry, you’ve also had to weather some difficult health issues. You lost your voice for two and a half years due to polyps. Several years ago you had brain surgery. The technical term for the procedure you had was, I’m going to try to do this, a decompression craniectomy and laminectomy for Chiari one syringomyelia.

Rosanne Cash:
Chiari one.

Debbie Millman:
Was I even close?

Rosanne Cash:
Pretty close.

Debbie Millman:
That resulted in you getting 19 staples-

Rosanne Cash:
In the back of my head.

Debbie Millman:
… the back of your head.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. That was fun.

Debbie Millman:
So two and a half years of polyps and then at least a year’s recovery from your brain surgery, how were you able to manage a life without music during those times or a life with different kinds of music?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, a life without singing, really, that was an eye-opener. When I had the polyps at first, I thought, well, it’s not going to make that much difference to me, because I think of myself as a writer first and a songwriter and losing my voice, it’s not going to matter. I was devastated. I had no idea how central to my self-image my voice was. So losing it. That was painful and hard. But I did develop this cottage industry of writing prose, and I kept getting commissions to write essays for different magazines. So that was-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, New York Times was a wonderful piece.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. Everything from Martha Stewart Living to the Times, Rolling Stones. So it was a little doorway that has panned out very well for me. And the brain surgery, it took a couple years to recover from that. That was really hard. And I’m recovering from knee replacement surgery right now, which is really difficult. But at bottom, I’m an optimist and I think of myself as a healthy person, and I don’t like leading with disease and injury. I don’t like that to be part of my-

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I was actually even struggling to decide whether or not to include it, but I felt like it showed so much about your resilience and your stamina, and then when I saw that you said that at a various forms of personal catastrophe comes art if you’re lucky. I thought, okay, that’s an optimistic way of looking at these really hard things.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I think being an optimist is the number one responsibility in parenthood because you can’t steal a child’s future by being pessimistic. You can be pessimistic about your own life, but man, keep it to yourself. Don’t pass it on to your kids, because they have everything ahead of them. And luckily, I’m naturally very optimistic, and I think my kids they take that on.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, the last thing I want to talk with you about is the brand new re-release of your album, The Wheel. It has been remastered as an expanded edition to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary. Congratulations on that.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like revisiting these recordings?

Rosanne Cash:
I should first say that I got the master back from Sony after 30 years. It was in my contract.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was in your contract. I was going to ask you if you had to buy them back.

Rosanne Cash:
No, it was in my contract. There was a 30 year reversion, so I got it back, and I didn’t expect to feel the way I felt when I got it back. I didn’t expect that ownership of my master recording after all these years would be an almost spiritual experience. There’s just something about it. It’s mine. So John and I decided to form a record label to remaster it and re-release it. It was never released on vinyl the first time because in ’93 you weren’t pressing vinyl.

Debbie Millman:
CDs. Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
So it’s on vinyl the first time. We’re doing a double vinyl thing where the other record is a live recording I did in 1993, and I rewrote new liner notes for it. It’s a beautiful package and everything. To revisit it, I don’t like looking back generally, I really don’t, because I go back with two critical, an ear, go, I should have sung that better. Oh, I sound like such a baby. Why didn’t I change that line? But owning it gave me this window to looking at it differently, which is that it was an incredibly important time in my life. It was the first record that John and I made together. First songs we wrote together. We developed a partnership in both music and in life that has lasted all these 30 years. We fell in love while making that record, and it started a whole legacy for me. So I love the record for what it is. It’s an accurate reflection of that time, and I feel really proud about putting it out again 30 years later.

Debbie Millman:
RumbleStrip is the name of your record company. Are you going to re-release any other of your acquired masters?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, they’ll start falling like dominoes. I’m going to start getting a lot of them back, because some were 30, some were 35 years. And yeah, I am going to re-master and release some of the old ones. I don’t know which ones yet.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, I want to end the show today with another short excerpt from your memoir. You state, “I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself, but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.” Rosanne Cash, thank you for putting your mind to it. Thank you for making so much art and music and writing that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a wonderful experience to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne Cash’s latest album is the 30th anniversary re-release and remastering of her extraordinary album, The Wheel. You can read more about her body of work and her new record label at Rosannecash.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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.

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

Stella Bugbee:
Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Stella Bugbee:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Why there?

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

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

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
Sixth grade.

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

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
All the shoe stores, yeah.

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

Stella Bugbee:
Sounds good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
Oh no, it was Vuitton.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Vuitton.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So interesting.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Poetry Cafe. Yeah.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s quite a moment.

Debbie Millman:
Did you do slams?

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

Debbie Millman:
What kind of poetry were you writing?

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
Oh, really?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Grace Mirabella Vogue or Diana Vreeland?

Stella Bugbee:
No, Anna Vogue.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Anna Vogue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
So, it was working in design.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Drive, ambition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
It’s a dream team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Do you still feel that way?

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

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you want more.

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

Debbie Millman:
Same, same.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
No, absolutely.

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
What have you held onto?

Debbie Millman:
The desire to do it.

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

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Absolutely.

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
That’s good.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Ms. Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Remember New York Woman?

Stella Bugbee:
New York Woman.

Debbie Millman:
Woman. Yeah.

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

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

Stella Bugbee:
I love fashion.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I’ve loved in quite a lot of your fashion coverage over the years is how you sort of democratize some of what we think about when we think about fashion, and also the range and the way that you put things together. But I really loved how obsessed you were for a little while there with Birkenstocks, and this was before Birkenstocks were back being Birkenstocks. And I’ve loved that you embrace both high and low at the same time. And it’s not just a matter of, “Here, we’re going to go high. Here, we’re going to go low.” You can match this up however way you want to, as long as you feel good and comfortable in whatever you’re doing.

Stella Bugbee:
I mean, I think one of the things that we were told… The magazines that I absorbed and loved so much that were so aspirational and exclusionary as a child didn’t always allow you to hold the complexity of the high and the low, of wanting to both talk about fashion and politics, of wanting to be able to indulge in something expensive, but also wear unique… Those complexities, those dichotomies, those contradictions are of life. It’s what everybody has inside of them.
And I think I was really interested in just letting all those things exist together. And I think that that’s when fashion becomes meaningful to people. One of the reasons why I cover the red carpet and what I think is interesting about, let’s say a red carpet event, is that’s where most people see the highest fashion come alive. It’s where they understand a gown. It’s not on a runway, and it’s not in their closet. It’s on their favorite star, whatever, movie star, musician, reality TV star, whomever it is.
And that’s a very fun space. I mean, it’s not stupid. It’s very fun. It’s very important that we think about the ways in which those intersections happen. So, I was very interested in collapsing some of the hierarchy around what was good and what was bad, what was high, what was low, what was accessible, what was off limits, and to whom. That’s really important.

Debbie Millman:
Is there a difference in covering a Met Gala versus going as a guest to the Met Gala?

Stella Bugbee:
Oh, sure, definitely.

Debbie Millman:
In what way?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, I’ve never been a guest at the Met Gala, to be clear. I mean, I think the most interesting thing for me about working at The New York Times is really thinking about those differences. What is the difference between covering? What is the objectivity that you bring as a reporter or an editor at The Times? How does that change your relationship to power, to the people in the room? How do you hold those people accountable when they’re not being honest? How do you-

Debbie Millman:
How do you? How do you do that?

Stella Bugbee:
By keeping yourself not a guest at the Met Gala. You have to be a little bit outside of that, and that’s the price that you have to pay. You get to sit in the room and enjoy some of those spoils, however you have objectivity.

Debbie Millman:
You see what’s really going on.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s a real… that kind of dynamic. Once you’re a guest at the table, you can’t be a journalist.

Debbie Millman:
How do you decide what you want to cover?

Stella Bugbee:
At The Times, the way the Style section works is sort of broken down roughly. We have a fashion team, we have a generalist team, so there’s news, there’s just stuff that’s happening. We got to cover this. It’s happening. And we try to set ambitious targets for that in terms of like, “Well, who’s interesting? Who do we think is pulling all the levers? Let’s go after that person in terms of let’s get a story about them. Let’s introduce them to a reader.”
And then there’s just like, “What is the reader interested in and what do we think is going to light their minds on fire? What do we think they’re going to share in their friend group chats?” That’s a big thought that’s always in my mind. And I don’t know, there’s also just a certain intangible instinct, and you never really know, but you just sort of develop over time, especially if you’re really looking at patterns over time of internet traffic. I mean, we have so much information available to us, and that’s the thing.
It’s like, “Well, you have to really read the tea leaves.” You start to think, “Well, why did that story do really well and not that one? And what’s the learning from that?” And not let that affect what you’re assigning too much, right? You have to think about what you think is interesting, what’s moving the conversation forward. And that’s the sensibility. That’s an intangible thing, actually.

Debbie Millman:
Before any publication went online, you didn’t know what people were necessarily interested in most. Yes, “Can this marriage be saved?” From Ladies Home Journal and so forth. But now, you know how many people are actually reading every single article that they’re reading and the direction that they’re going and so forth.
And in some ways, when you’re going through the paper, I still get the Sunday paper, you go through and there’s a lot of opportunity for discovery because you’re just seeing things as they pass by on the page. When you’re online, you tend to look for things like, “Thursday night into Friday morning, Modern Love will be up.” Social cues. You know when to find things, and you don’t have as much opportunity to discover unless you’re being fed, “You might also like this.” Which you have to then to decide whether or not you think it’s worth clicking. How much do stats actually matter to you? And I’m not talking about The Times. I’m just talking about you and your taste and what you believe should be published.

Stella Bugbee:
They don’t matter to me. I’m looking at them, I’m curious to see them, but I’m not going to not do a story that I believe in based on that at all. We came out of a decade, those of us who worked online, where a lot of decisions were made based on that, and I’m not sure that that was to the benefit of the content, always. And luckily, The Times really doesn’t dictate what we do in that way, which is really helpful. But I’ve developed certain instincts. I have a sense of, I think what’s going to be interesting to people and is there tension in the story? Is it a widely known subject matter? We just did a story about Barnes & Noble.

Debbie Millman:
I love that story and I love the images. It was so great to see all the different Barnes & Noble styles.

Stella Bugbee:
Well, that’s a design story, right? A total branding and design story. And several people on my team were very surprised at how big of a hit it was. But I knew it was going to be because I think there’s this huge interest in that brand, an innate interest in Barnes & Noble, why it’s not succeeding. I think actually people want it to succeed. So, what were they doing? And they’re doing something really weird, actually.
And I kind of thought, “That one will probably be a hit,” and you just develop instinct for what you think people will want to read. And I’m certainly not always right, by any means, but that’s kind of the way I use that information that I get every week, and actually every day, is just a sense of people really are interested in things that they already have emotional investment in. You write about Victoria’s Secret, people are going to read it. They’re curious about that brand, regardless of what you say about it. So, there’s certain topics that you sort of recognize will be interesting.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that, “Runway show going requires stamina.” Is that because of the pace?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, there are people who just love going to fashion shows, and I think they’re really interesting, especially if that’s your beat and that’s what you cover. But the grind of going to maybe 50 in a row, especially if you’re a visual person, you have to pace yourself. It’s a lot of images, if you’re thinking about it that way. I mean, sure, experiencing that just on Instagram when I’m not, let’s say I’m not in… I didn’t go to Milan or something. I’m experiencing it as a reader and as a viewer, it’s a lot to watch other people experience it. Imagine being there. It’s a lot of images.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel about your own fashion when you’re watching shows or in the midst of the fashionistas?

Stella Bugbee:
Probably like most people, I have a fraught relationship with fashion. If we’re talking about what I wish I could have versus what I have. But this season, I tried a different approach, which was while I was walking around and going to shows, I started keeping a list on my phone of reminders of things that I actually like so that I wouldn’t lose sight of my own desires and my own taste, just to remind myself, “You know what? You really like this and you really like this.” And this is a hard-won, decades-long project to develop what you actually like. Don’t be too swayed just because everything is shiny.
And that’s a different approach than I’ve taken in the past, and I think that that’s been healthier. Because otherwise, you can get very wrapped up, very quickly, in kind of the dizzying aspect of all of this new, beautiful luxury, very distorted reality, which most people… I don’t think most people change their fashion every six months.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s just that in technology that have that sort of forced obsolescence embedded in it, which is so hard to manage emotionally because you want to sort of be stylish or in style or have the latest, greatest whatever. But that’s a lot of pressure, it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of consumption.

Stella Bugbee:
I mean, the real hardcore fashion is for the very young, who change their fashion all the time and are trying to figure out who they are and are using style as a tool to do that, or the very wealthy, who can afford to do that. For the vast majority of us…

Debbie Millman:
And the very skinny.

Stella Bugbee:
Yes, the body that can handle that kind of change and can afford to handle that kind of change. The vast majority of us will buy a coat in 1990. I’m looking at you. I know-

Debbie Millman:
Oopsie.

Stella Bugbee:
I know you still have a coat that I admire from 1990, and keep it, right? And so how do you bridge that continuity of self year over year? That’s not something that you can sustain changing all the time, most of us. So, then you have to develop your own personal taste, which I think gets back to my goal for all of us, which is cultivate your own taste, have confidence in what you like, make your list, “This is what I actually like,” so that you’re not feeling swayed all the time or insufficient because you can’t participate for whatever reason: money, age, body, any of those reasons. It helps to have a strong foundation and understand what you actually like. And then I think you should just totally lean into that. No trends, nothing. Find yourself and enjoy yourself with fashion. That’s my main goal in life.

Debbie Millman:
Just have fun with it?

Stella Bugbee:
Is to divorce it of its power over our minds and to gain some control over that and say, “I really love this.” I love it the way I love this couch that I bought 25 years ago, and I keep recovering this couch. Well, you know what? I love this coat I bought in 1990 and I’m going to keep wearing it. I think that that’s really important, both for the Earth, for our minds, and for some semblance of control over that industry.

Debbie Millman:
You said that we can’t fix how anybody feels about their body, but we can disabuse people of the idea that certain styles are only for certain people. Do you think that designers are really paying more attention to that now?

Stella Bugbee:
There was a moment where I think we saw this little window open up and it seemed like that was going to be a priority. I’ve actually seen incredible backsliding in the last couple of years. This season was abysmal for body inclusivity. You’ll have one or two people in each show. And some brands are doing great, I should say that. But then I think with the introduction of Ozempic, it’s like everybody just gave up. I don’t know. I mean, it felt very-

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:57:29] that way.

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, it felt like market changed all of a sudden. And fashion is cyclical, and it’s not that deep, as we would like it to be. So, some of these changes that were kind of promising and exciting, we’ll see if they stick.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you had a lot of ability to help reframe the way people think about style and beauty and size at The Cut. Do you feel you’re able to do that at The Times as well?

Stella Bugbee:
The Times project is super different.

Debbie Millman:
In what way?

Stella Bugbee:
Well, it’s not a luxury sales project. We’re not making fashion shoots. We’re not really telling people what to buy so much. I mean, there’s Wirecutter, but we’re not a luxury fashion magazine. We’re a news organization. We’re part of a news organization. I don’t see my role as sorting through and telling people what to purchase. Even our critic, Vanessa Friedman, she’s not doing that. We’re not doing that. We’re taking what’s happening and we’re explaining it to people, but we’re not saying, “Here’s the 10 greatest coats you can buy right now.” That is not part of the project. So, it’s really different, and I don’t really even see that as part of my job as much as it is to document what’s happening in fashion right now.

Debbie Millman:
Right. As we’ve been talking, I realized what it was that I loved so much about your leadership at The Cut, which was I never came away from reading The Cut feeling bad about myself. And I’m not really in the same position when I’m reading The Times because it is more journalistic and it’s not as whimsical, I guess. But I hope that your voice can come through those pages as you continue to work there.

Stella Bugbee:
Well, I would certainly hope that you would never read the Style section and feel worse for wanting to know about any of that information. That’s important. And to treat the subject matter seriously, I think that’s a big important characteristic of the Style section is that we take it as seriously as anybody takes anything that they do there. But we also still have a lot of fun.

I wouldn’t want anyone to come away reading one of our stories, feeling worse about themselves or bad for wanting to know about it. And I think a lot of what we do actually is give people permission to enjoy the stuff that we’re covering. And within the context of The New York Times, that’s pretty important because there’s a lot of very serious, gut-wrenching stuff that happens in the sections other than mine. And that’s okay to then turn to us and enjoy yourself over here. I think it’s really important to say, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Come on over here and enjoy yourself.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So, this is my last question. You’ve had a long, illustrious, circuitous career, but you’ve also had some painful, harder times, and you’ve written about how when you look back, it looks like it was intentional, but you’re old enough now to admit that that was not the case. It seems like it was premeditated, but it was all accidents the whole time.
I think that’s really helpful for people to hear as they’re navigating their own ambition and their own career paths. It seemed like at the time, you had no idea whether you would recover from the various obstacles in your path. How do you think you were able to overcome those obstacles and what has it taught you about control?

Stella Bugbee:
Yeah, I have said that I felt like it was an accident, but actually one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last couple of years is that I looked at all these things as opportunities. So, they felt accidental or they felt like unexpected, is maybe a better word, but I was always able to look at each opportunity or each experience and say, “Well, this will complete a little puzzle piece that I’m missing. I don’t know about fashion, not really, not at the level that Raul Martinez knows about it. What can I get by working with Raul Martinez? That’s the highest level, he’s really good at it. What will I learn from this man?”
And it wasn’t necessarily clear to me what I would do with that, but I knew that it would give me this critical piece of knowledge and a way of looking at the world. And the same for Adam, and the same for Drew Hodges. I saw these people and these opportunities not necessarily in a connected way that was obvious at the time, but that they each offered opportunity for growth and to complete a sort of thing I was lacking.
And so I think that’s how, in retrospect, it makes more sense to me. It’s like, “Well…” And I would hope that that’s still the case. I still sort of think of that. I look at these incredible colleagues that I have and these people at The Times who’ve worked there for 35 years and who just know so much. And I think like, “Well, what does it feel like to put myself next to the people in this room and what can I learn from them?” That’s how it’s made sense.
It’s less that, “Oh, it’s all been accidental and oops, here I landed here.” It’s more that if you see an opportunity or if you are given any opportunity, find the little core inside there that’s going to give you the most knowledge that you can then take and apply to something else, or try to find the thing within any experience that completes a missing part of your education.

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

Stella Bugbee:
Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Stella Bugbee:
It’s been a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
To see more about what’s Stella does, all you need to do is read the Style section of The New York Times. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Anything stump you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Nebraska.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celeste Ng:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
And then an astronaut.

Celeste Ng:
Yes.

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

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

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

Celeste Ng:
Really?

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

Celeste Ng:
Wow.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Monetize it right from the beginning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Swedish Fish?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
It’s stunning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celeste Ng:
I did not know that.

Roxane Gay:
Yes.

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

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

Celeste Ng:
Oh my God.

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

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

Roxane Gay:
Oh my God.

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

Roxane Gay:
Yes.

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
It’s too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
Good job past you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
What poem? Can you share that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
You can say anything on the podcast.

Celeste Ng:
I can.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah.

Celeste Ng:
So I’m allowed to swear.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Three New York Times bestsellers.

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
And they get punished for it.

Celeste Ng:
And she finds that very satisfying.

Debbie Millman:
I do too.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
All 10 seasons and the movies.

Roxane Gay:
So good.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Because she’s a famous writer.

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

Roxane Gay:
I know. Cabot Cove.

Celeste Ng:
Yeah. Don’t live there.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
Okay.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
That’s a callback.

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

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

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

Roxane Gay:
Excellent.

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

Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly is radically optimistic about the future. What about climate change, you might ask? Well, Kevin Kelly thinks that new technologies can foster a more favorable trajectory. What about artificial intelligence? He says, “It will usher in a new era of services and products and occupations.” In short, Kevin Kelly is betting on humanity and our extraordinary ability to adapt and innovate. Kevin Kelly is also a person who thinks a lot about the future. Almost 30 years ago, he helped co-found and was the executive editor of Wired Magazine where he currently holds the title of senior maverick. His many books include The New York Times bestseller, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. His most recent is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.

He’s here today to talk about his life, his career, his new book and why he’s so optimistic when so many of us are busy pulling our hair out. Kevin Kelly, welcome to Design Matters.

Kevin Kelly:
Oh my gosh, it’s such a delight to be here. Thank you so much and what a wonderful introduction. I feel like I don’t deserve it, but I am so glad to be chatting with you finally.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely, me too. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Kevin, in your brand new book, Excellent Advice for Living, you state that a balcony or a porch needs to be at least six feet deep or it won’t be used. How did you figure this out?

Kevin Kelly:
I was told this by Christopher Alexander, which is one of his patterns in his pattern language. And once I understood that and learned it, I checked that many times in my own experiences traveling around the world and it was absolutely true. I felt very confident to say, “This is the way.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I want you to know that several years ago I decided to build a balcony off of my bedroom in a brownstone that I own. Now, doing that meant that I might be in some way inhibiting some of the sunlight coming in on the floor below. I didn’t want to make it so wide that it might inhibit any sunlight from coming in. And so I can tell you well beyond anecdotally, because my porch, my balcony is not at least six feet deep, we never use it.

Kevin Kelly:
Never use it, right? Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
We never use it. So when I saw that, I thought, “Oh my God, I wish I had known that earlier,” because I actually think that the way that the sun comes in, the angle that it comes in through the windows, it would not have been in any way …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… impeded by a slightly longer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… patio or balcony, so there you have it.

Kevin Kelly:
Design matters.

Debbie Millman:
If only I could take my own advice. Kevin, you were born in Pennsylvania in 1952 and I read that it just so happens that this was the first year that the word technology appeared in the president’s State of the Union Address. When did you realize that?

Kevin Kelly:
I was doing research. I didn’t realize it growing up. I actually didn’t really have much of an interest in technology growing up, but when I was researching a book called What Technology Wants, I was really curious about where the concept of technology even arrived because the ancients didn’t talk about it and it was like, “When did we started to become aware of it?” And it was actually a fairly recent word that was rediscovered, so to speak, in the 1800s, but never really entered into the vernacular until my lifetime basically. And that’s when people started to talk about it or understand its significance.

Of course, now, it’s the main event in many ways, but that’s been a journey where when I was growing up people talked about the future and it was glorious, but they didn’t even talk about technology. They talked about flying cars, they talked about laser guidance, but they didn’t have this idea that it was a class of something, that it was a category like technology. That’s actually pretty recent.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I really wanted to understand the context in which the word was used in the State of the Union Address, what was that about, so I went back and I looked. It was President Truman. He actually says the word technical, but he says it several times. And in speaking about our potential, he states, “Our technical missionaries are out there. We need more of them. We need more funds to speed their efforts because there is nothing of greater importance in all our foreign policy. There is nothing that shows more clearly what we stand for and what we want to achieve.”

And then he goes on to say, “Our task will not be easy, but if we go at it with a will, we can look forward to steady progress. On our side are all the great resources of freedom, the ideals of religion and democracy, the aspiration of people for a better life and the industrial and technical power of a free civilization.”

Kevin Kelly:
Wow, there you go. I could not have said that better. I think he summarizes my own sentiments about the future and progress. It’s interesting that he mentions progress because that’s not a word that you hear very often these days. And It’s amazing to me that we still need to make a case for progress that you have to convince people that progress is real. In 2023, is that really something that we need to do? Because for me, part of my own journey is understanding the reality of progress, that progress is real and that came partly from a lot of time in the developing world in places like Asia as it was coming of age and seeing firsthand that, “Oh my gosh, progress is definitely real.”

Debbie Millman:
Now you mentioned as you were growing up, you really didn’t have much of an interest in technology. Your father worked in systems analysis for Time Magazine and I read that, in 1965, he took you to a computer show, but you said that you were totally bored by what you saw …

Kevin Kelly:
Oh my God.

Debbie Millman:
… and considered it pollution. And so-

Kevin Kelly:
It was … Yeah, they’re just cabinets and there was no screens, right? They’re just cabinets like refrigerators with tapes that were moving. And the output, the total output was a typewriter typing lines on sheets of paper and that was it. It was like … I’d read science fiction and I knew what computers were and these were not computers. So it was like, “No, I’m not. I have no affinity for these things and no interest in them,” and they were also very huge. They were room size and bigger and not very smart in that way. And they were literally hardly any smarter than your calculator. And it’s like, “No, I think there’s more interesting things in the world than computers.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how, when you were in high school, you don’t recall having a lot of ideas and stated that there were a lot of other kids in your school that you were very impressed with because they seemed to know what they thought. They were very glib and articulate. How would you describe yourself at that time?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, I have a bit of advice in my book that being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points and I’m describing myself because I was a kid that sat in the first row and asked questions the entire time and was very enthusiastic about learning and material. However, the moment I left the classroom that was done. That was over. I hardly did any homework. I did the minimal amount of homework. I was like, “No, I’m present in class and that’s what you get and then the rest of the time is my time.” So I was enthusiastic and interested and curious and that kind of curiosity is also worth a lot in terms of today’s world and that became my job as professionally curious.

Debbie Millman:
I actually think that’s one of the most important attributes to have in life, just to be curious and open-minded.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. I have another bit of advice, which is, if at all, you want to be curious about things that You’re not interested in.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I spent many decades actually, and it’s embarrassing to say this, especially to you, but I think it’s important for people to hear that most of the time up until, because I’m 62 now, I would say up until I was about 40, if I didn’t know of something, I assumed it wasn’t important. How arrogant, right? How ridiculously arrogant. And if I hadn’t heard of it, I just assumed it wasn’t important enough for me to have known. Oh, so humiliating.

Kevin Kelly:
So I’m the other way around. Now if I haven’t heard of it, I’m incredibly curious about. It’s like, “How have I not heard about that?” And I have found that one of the best remedies for this kind of curious of things you’re not interested in is YouTube. So I’ll see some weird thing recommended to me that I have no idea It’s like, “Well, if they’re recommending it, there must be some kind of a following. There must be some momentum there. Let me see what it is.” And there’ll be entire worlds connected to it and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, and now I’m interested in this. I had no idea and now I have an idea,” and that’s very, very powerful.

Debbie Millman:
It’s really amazing how much you can learn from YouTube. It is astonishing. Whenever my wife needs to fix something in the house, rather than call someone, now she goes to YouTube, she gets the directions and does it herself because there are directions to do everything.

Kevin Kelly:
Everything

Debbie Millman:
On everything, everything.

Kevin Kelly:
The combination of YouTube plus Amazon is the solution to life, right? It’s like you get on YouTube, they’ll say, “You’ll need this weird little kind of bolt to do something. Okay, well, here’s the Amazon. You’ll order it there tomorrow and you fix it and it’s like magic.”

Debbie Millman:
So after high school, you were trying to decide whether to go to art school or to MIT and you ended up going to the University of Rhode Island, but dropped out after one year and you’ve said that your one big regret in life is that you even went for one year.

Kevin Kelly:
It’s true. It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
Was it that bad?

Kevin Kelly:
It was. First of all, I shouldn’t have gone to the University of Rhode Island, but here’s the thing, is, again, this is 1969-1970, I applied to colleges having never set foot on any college whatsoever. I was just looking at a book, taking things. I’d never visited a college even for any reason. I knew nothing about the ones I’m really applying to. University of Rhode Island was a little tiny state school where most of the students were commuting and I was out of state and it was grade 13. It was literally like high school, but grade 13. And it was like, “I just need to do something. I can’t sit in a classroom anymore. I need to make something. I need to do something.”

Had there been a gap year, had there been internships, I’d probably have finished, but I needed to do something and so I dropped out and I did stuff and that was the only option I had at that time.

Debbie Millman:
You first became the resident photographer at a photography workshop in Millerton, New York and what inspired you to pursue photography and to work as a photographer?

Kevin Kelly:
I had two parts of my brain. I was a complete science geek and then I love science and I took every single science and math class that our college prep high school offered. So I doubled up in physics, biology, physical sciences, geology and all the mathematics, calculus, algebra, geometry and all that kind of stuff, but I also took every single art course and I loved art and drawing and painting and making art. And I discovered photography basically in my junior year of high school and photography was this combination of both of those. Because at that time, the only way you could do photography was to do the chemical processing yourself. You had to know chemistry to some extent. You had to know optics. It was a very technical art, but it was also art at the same time.

So photography for me was this nice melding, this nice convergence of my interest in science and art. And this was at a time when having a camera, owning a camera was very unusual. I saved some money to buy a used camera. I learned how to do photography by going to the library and getting books. It was just at the beginning when photography was coming of age and the single lens reflex was starting to happen. And so I got involved in this thing and I wanted to learn more and I read about this place in Millerton, New York where you were residents and I went there and I did photography all day every day and I learned a huge amount and that was my university.

Debbie Millman:
You then spent seven years as an independent photographer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in the remotest parts of Asia. You lived on $2,500 a year. You traveled with a Nikkormat Camera and a bag filled with Kodachrome film through Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. And I read that before you left, you called the National Geographic Magazine photo editor whose number you found in a phone book and asked if they needed any photographs. What did he say?

Kevin Kelly:
I remember his name Bruce McElfresh and I was maybe 20 years old and I called him up and I said, this was my first trip, “I’m going to Taiwan and Japan. Do you need any photographs?” And he says, “Well, that’s not how it works here, but when you return, show me your work.” That was amazing. That was amazing. So I did that. I went down, took a train. When I returned, my parents lived in New Jersey and I went to show my work and he was kind of, “Hmm, that’s interesting. Keep going. Show me more work next time,” and I did. And on the second time, they, being National Geographic, was interested in some of the pictures I had taken in the Himalayas and they were considering them for one of the stories.
They, in the end, didn’t use it, but what I understood and was true, was had I kept going back, had I kept doing it, had I do it a third time, I would’ve eventually had gotten some assignment. But along the way, I changed my mind about wanting to be a professional photographer because I, by that time, had started to meet some of them and I decided that I didn’t want that job. I wanted to do that as a passion on my own terms and what I wanted to photograph and I didn’t actually really want to photograph what other people wanted to be photographed.

Debbie Millman:
During that first trip, you shot over 36,000 slides.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
You were taking about two rolls of film, which is 70 pictures a day.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that when you tell people that, they’re absolutely gobsmacked, astounded and incredulous because they didn’t understand how you could take 70 pictures a day. And this was at a time in our culture before everybody had a camera and you’ve written about how in order to take a photo, and this I, of course, remember as well, you had to previsualize what a photograph was going to look like before you shot it. And back then, did you have any sense of how much the discipline of photography was going to evolve?

Kevin Kelly:
No, I did not. So not only did I was shooting two rolls a day, which again was considered insane at the time … My family, we had a Brownie camera and my parents would do one 24-exposure roll a year. So you’d develop at the end of the year and there’d be some pictures from the 4th of July and Halloween and a birthday party and that was for the year. And the idea of two rolls a day was considered some degree of madness and-

Debbie Millman:
It was expensive.

Kevin Kelly:
It was expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Really expensive.

Kevin Kelly:
That’s the whole point. It was equivalent of like $5 today for each time you hit the shutter. And as a kid with no money, that was a lot of money. And so you had to previsualize because there was also no screen, so you don’t even know if you’re capturing and all the other adjustments like the exposure, shutter speeds were all set by hand, by manual. So you have to get it exactly right and get it focused and you don’t know if you’ve got it right until a year later when I was developing the film. And so that previsualization, which is also a term that Ansel Adams used about pre-imagining the image to the point where you see what it would look like on a paper, you imagine the whole scene in all its complexity onto the paper. That was something that I became good at.

It was something that I think is lost often now with the screens, but I had no idea that digital photography would come along. That would seem completely science fiction, and again, I wasn’t really thinking about the future that much when I was 22.

Debbie Millman:
How has the evolution of photographic technology changed the way you take photos?

Kevin Kelly:
That’s a great question and I’ve been asking that at a higher level, not just me, but how does it change how everybody takes photos. And this is in the perspective of the AI coming in. One of the things I’ve noticed is that because photography has become ubiquitous and cheap that we take more trivial things. We take more of the things that are ephemeral and passing and not as monumental, don’t have to be heroic. They’re a little bit more like the Lee Friedlander thing of serendipitous. They’re much more whimsical in general, the photography that people post say. So there’s a little bit more of a … What’s the word? They’re easier. They’re more relaxed. That’s the word I want. It’s a more relaxed photography now than before in general. And people are willing to be riskier frankly. There’s a far more risk-taking and trying things in photography now that doing so doesn’t cost anything.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that we can’t influence the direction of technologies, but we can influence the character. How do you think we’ve done that in the discipline of photography?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I mean, if I had seen where we’re going 50 years ago saying, “Well, photography is going to become something that everybody carries around some kind of camera with them at all times. Each exposure would be free,” the question would be like, “Well, who owns the pictures?” And you could imagine several different versions of this. You could imagine under a different political system where we had a different attitude about copyright and the recent Supreme Court decision with Andy Warhol and the photographer.

Debbie Millman:
Lynn Goldsmith, yeah.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So we could have had a different system where there was much more lax copyright ideas and people could reuse or work upon other people’s photograph without having to ask permission and that would have made a different character to photography where it was much more like you take, it’s immediately in the common and anybody can work with it. And you could imagine other versions or even harsher, where maybe to even view a photograph, you needed permission, okay?

Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Kelly:
And so you limited who could see your work. That would also have changed photography. That’s the case of changing the character of a system in which that technology operates.

Debbie Millman:
As an aside, I worked in the Empire State Building for 12 years, and at one point, the artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister came to photograph something on the Empire State Building. And the Empire State Building forbid him …

Kevin Kelly:
Yes, right.

Debbie Millman:
… to do that because the Empire State Building is copyrighted.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly.

Debbie Millman:
And so you can’t take a photo of the Empire State Building and use it for any commercial purpose.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
But you mentioned, you just said something that I discovered in researching your work that really, really intrigued me and it was the idea of technological inevitability. And in reading your books and many articles, I came across this about the way in which technology has evolved. And you state, “When looking at the order of technologies on different continents in prehistory when there wasn’t really much influence between the continents, they actually follow roughly the same sequence. You’ll have the domestication of dogs before pottery. You’ll have the mention of sewing after pottery. There is a natural sequence which suggests that there is a certain inevitability to technologies. Once you have the previous ones, the next ones are going to happen. And I would say once you invent electricity and copper wires and switches, you’re going to invent the telephone. And once you have the telephone, you’re going to invent the internet.” So the internet was inevitable.

Kevin Kelly:
The internet was inevitable, but the character of the internet was not inevitable. This goes back to our former conversations. We still have a choice about who owns the internet, who runs it. Is it national, international? Is it run by one country or not? Is it open or closed? Those are all things that we have a choice about and they make a huge difference. But the fact that the internet arrived, it’s going to arrive on probably any planet. Where they discover electricity and wiring, they’re going to have an internet, but the character of the internet is going to be different than ours because of those social dimensions that we get to choose about.

And I fast forward this into saying AI, AI is coming. Making minds is something that evolution wanted to do many, many times. It reinvented minds in many different lines of development that were all separate from each other. So minds and artificial minds are inevitable, but the character of those, the quality that we really choose about how it’s run, who has access to it, how much does it cost, is it open or closed, these are all things that we do have decisions and choices about and they make a big difference to us.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that in addition to the internet being inevitable, it is a mutation of technology?

Kevin Kelly:
So I wrote a book, What Technology Wants, and the short answer about what it wants is that it wants the same things that evolution wants, meaning I use the word want not consciously, but the way that a plant wants the light, it leans to the light. So these are-

Debbie Millman:
What technology seeks.

Kevin Kelly:
These are urges, tendencies. So the tendency of technologies are the same tendencies we see in evolution because it is, in fact, an extension of evolution, as evolution accelerated. And so when we look at it that way, where it’s going is towards increasing possibilities, increasing forms. So I say that the evolution of technology follows the same thing, the evolution of life, and it’s aimed in the same directions in which are towards greater complexity, greater specialization, greater mutualism. And so technology will become more complex and technology also becomes more specialized.

And so my prediction would be that, in AI, we’re going to see increasing numbers of specialized AIs to do different things, whether it’s images or language or music or equations or math proofs, that there’ll be increasing specialized versions of them just like we have specialized cameras and that there’ll be more mutualism, meaning that a lot of technology comes to depend on other technologies or may only be used by other technologies, meaning that there’ll be things that we’ll invent that the humans won’t even use like they’ll be invented for other technologies to use. That’s mutualism where they are embedded in the system itself.

And so my view is that those are the inevitable things and they’re not at the species level. So I would say, in evolution, any planet in the galaxy that had a gravity like Earth’s and an atmosphere like Earth, that evolution will have quadrupeds. That’s inevitable because that’s just a physically elegant solution, four legs, very, very stable. But a zebra is not inevitable. That species is completely stochastic, completely random. So species are never predictable or inevitable, but the larger blueprint is. So the internet is, but a website is not inevitable. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone, in particular, is not necessarily inevitable. And so we can say certain AIs are going to be inevitable, but ChatGPT-4 is not necessarily inevitable.

Debbie Millman:
I had my own little epiphany as I was thinking about this inevitability and the way in which the order of technologies on different continents …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… in prehistory all were sort of on the same timetable. And in many ways, while this might seem trivial, I’ve spent most of my career in branding and I believe that the discipline of branding was also inevitable and that you have the same kind of trajectory, if you think about brands beyond consumerism. First, you get religious symbols …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in different continents all around the same time. So you have the symbols in the Middle East, you have the symbols in Brazil or in South America. You have symbols that popped up all around the same time. About 10,000 years ago, all of a sudden humans started to create a symbol to signify their relationship with this higher power. Higher power had nothing to do with it.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
We created those. And then over time, again, we had no way of knowing what was happening on these different continents. We get flags, family crests …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… brand marks of ownership on animals. And then before you know it, Coca-Cola is in every country in the world.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
But I’ve always wondered what triggered those first religious symbols in so many places at the same time with no one else knowing about it.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great question and It’s a great image too of the first person to make a symbol on rock and to say, not just me, but all of us here that this represents us or what we believe, that’s an incredible step.

Debbie Millman:
Right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yes. It’s an incredible step. It’s a kind of an abstraction, which is really very, very powerful, but yeah, that would be interesting if maybe some of the earliest cave drawings were actually branding exercises.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think they were. I would contend that they are because we were creating an organized system of being able to perceive reality that was a shared reality.

Kevin Kelly:
So maybe the wonderful ochre handprints or maybe those are the brand of view, the brand of me, the brand of humans.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, so the notion that most inventions and innovations are co-invented in multiple times simultaneously and independently is one of the properties of something that you call the technium and I was wondering if you could define technium for our listeners.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. So we talked earlier at the very beginning about technologies, plural, that we have a microphone and we’ve got a camera and we’ve got cars and even materials, Teflon, Kevlar. We understand these to be technologies, although it’s broader, because in fact, technologies would include things like a calendar and timekeeping. These are technologies too. But if we think of these as independent little things and in our own lives, our life is a witness to a parade of new technologies as they’re invented. But in fact, the reality is much more complicated because these new things that are being invented rely on other technologies to make them or even to input them like they’re eating them, they’re consuming them.

And so we have really something that’s much more like a rainforest of different technologies that are interdependent, codependent on each other. You can’t do farming today without computers and satellites and telephones and logistics and you can’t do those logistics unless you have food for the workers. And so there is a complete ecosystem of these technologies that are codependent on each other. And the important idea about this ecosystem, which I call the technium, is that the technium itself, the forest itself has certain biases, certain tendencies that the individual components don’t have, that the tendencies are not found in the individual components. It’s a little bit like a beehive, which I was a beekeeper and so the bees live only six weeks, but the hive can have a memory of years.

So there are attributes of the hive that you can’t find in individual bees no matter how hard you look. That’s because systems have behaviors themselves. All systems have certain antics and biases and tendencies. And so I’m saying we have a system of technologies called the technium that’s not just culture, it isn’t Earth. It’s actually active, it’s an agent, it’s doing things and it has certain tendencies and urges and recurring patterns that are not found in the individual technologies that make up and all the technologies together make up this technium. And so the question that I ask is, what are some of those behaviors of the technium at large? And that’s what I get the question, what does technology want?

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the technium is an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. How so?

Kevin Kelly:
I would say in my definition of things that are created by minds, which is what technology is that that would include the dams that beaver make, the nests that birds make, the homes that termites make because they are being created from their neurons. Their neurons are measuring the honeycomb. Their brains are assembling the nest. This way of looking at technology is something that behaves in the same way as evolution does. So you can map the genealogy of different inventions and showing how they mutate. There’s a little mutation which is picked up and it becomes more common. And that is then the origin of the next one. There’s like offspring in children.

So it’s behaving almost identical to biological evolution with one big caveat, which is that, unlike biology, it’s very, very, very rare for anything to go extinct in the technium, but otherwise, the behavior of this as it progresses through time is very, very similar to biology and we see bits of the technium in the sense of things being made from the mind already occurring in the animal kingdom. And so for me, we can view technology as origins that’s not human made, that actually the origins are actually at the Big Bang. It’s the same origins of the beginning of our universe and life of these self-organizing systems. And so the mathematics of the energy component of technology follows the same kind of laws that evolution does. So whenever we can measure about evolution, we can apply to the technium and see that it’s also very similar.

Debbie Millman:
So if you think about birds making nests or beavers creating their dams, there isn’t a manual that they get.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
When they are creating them, it’s very much instinctual. So they have an ability to be instinctively creative.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And-

Kevin Kelly:
There actually is a little bit more leeway. While a lot of it is intuitive, instinctive, but we know from birdsong and stuff, they actually can learn and change. So it’s not 100% reflexive. There are elements of individual creativity even in those acts.

Debbie Millman:
And so it makes me wonder and I’m just formulating this as we speak, so it might not be quite as eloquent as I want it to be, but if we, as humans, have an ability to be creative and that’s something that many people think that all humans are born with, the whole notion of folks like Rick Rubin or Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity coming through us, the best creativity coming through us, not bias, I’m wondering if there’s some correlation there with this innate instinctiveness in creating the best possible art or invention.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I think there is. And I think one of the things that AI has shown us is that creativity rather than being a high-order rarefied quality is actually very primitive. It’s actually elemental. It’s so elemental that we can actually make machines do it. Rather than it being something that is layered on top of consciousness and awareness, it actually precedes all those and that it’s actually so elemental and fundamental that we’re capable of programming it into machines and so that machines can be creative, certainly with that lowercase creativity of doing something novel. Maybe not through the breakthroughs yet, but certainly at the lowercase. And I think animals have shown that they are capable of having a lowercase creativity in certain cases.

So that to me says that yes, this is elemental foundational level of creativity is something that’s very fundamental to all living systems and that’s what living systems that try to learn and adapt. You could say that that’s one variety of creativity. And I think what we’re seeing is that is something that’s portable, that’s something that we can move and it’s not just the province of … Humans don’t own it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk quite a bit about AI, but I also want for our listeners to be able to understand something that you just mentioned which is called Uppercase Creativity or lowercase creativity. So I’m going to read very specifically something that Kevin has said so that folks understand. “Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is this stunning field-changing, world-altering rearrangement of that major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, discovery of DNA, Picasso’s Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.” And we’ll come back to the AI conversation momentarily because there’s a bunch of other things that I want to talk to you before that.

So we were talking a little bit about … You mentioned the Big Bang. That’s a door I can’t help but go through. So you’ve written that at the core of the origin of life and its ongoing billion-year metabolism is its ability to replicate and copy information accurately and life copies itself to live, copies to grow, copies to evolve. Life wants to copy. So my question, especially given your earlier experiences in Jerusalem … You know where I’m going?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… do you believe in God? And if so, how does that connect to the notion of evolution on this planet?

Kevin Kelly:
Sure, sure. So I do believe in God, and if listeners want to bear with some of my personal theology, it goes like this. It seems to me there’s only two major possibilities when we think about where did all this, the universe and everything in it, which is quite big as we look out into the telescopes with web and beyond, where did they come from? And so the general two answers are, well, it has always been. It somehow self-created itself. The universe has always been. Or the second one, it was that it began by itself in some weird way. Why? Who knows? And then there’s the other story which is, well, God made it. And then you say, “Well, where did God come from?” Well, he’s always been or always self-made. And all I can say is none of those are satisfactory, but I find the God version to be a lot more interesting and entertaining.

So I prefer the God explanation and my explanation of God is that God was a self-created being, the only self-created thing. And in order to understand itself, it manifests itself as the universe in order to understand what it is. And evolution is the way in which this unfolds, it’s God discovering itself by making things with freewill like itself. And we are made in the image in the sense that we are now in the process of discovering who we are and we’re going to make other things like robots in order to understand what we are. We’ll give these other beings some degree of freewill just as we have freewill to understand ourselves. And so this is replicating process.

And so for me, the godhood is a kind of all-encompassing being that’s served perfect, but becoming more perfect, which again logically doesn’t make any sense. What does that even mean, where if you are infinite and becoming more infinite? But the idea is that it’s not static. It is a process that itself is becoming more God-like by having a universe, by understanding itself it’s a way of looking at itself. So that’s my short version of the theology. I don’t expect anybody else to believe it, but that’s my view.

Debbie Millman:
You’re a Christian?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You had a religious epiphany …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… in Jerusalem in the 1970s. Can you just share a bit of a high-altitude explanation of what happened?

Kevin Kelly:
I don’t know if I can explain it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Kevin Kelly:
But I can tell you the short … There’s a couple versions of it. By the way, the first time I told the story about it was on This American Life and I don’t think I’ve been able to tell it as well since. The short version is that I was working in Iran during the Khomeini revolution, got kicked out, went to Jerusalem to photograph Easter and had a conversion experience in Easter where I really believed that Jesus was the cosmic Jesus. Cosmic Jesus, again, taking that view of the godhood and understanding that, when you have a freewill, we’re going to discover this ourselves when we make robots that have free wills, is that, when a robot that you made decides to do harm, the question is, what are the consequences? Should the robot absorb it? Does the maker of the robot have any degree of capability? And how do we satisfy the need for justice while still also be loving?

And for me the answer is that the godhood, the creator takes on the penalty itself. It absorbs the penalty in part in order to relieve the being with freewill from eternal guilt and the burden of having to suffer the consequences of doing harm. And so for me, that’s the cosmic Jesus and that-

Debbie Millman:
So that everybody is forgiven?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. And so that set me off on a course of an assignment that I believe I got, which was to try and live as if I was going to die in six months. And that set me off on a different course where I graduated from photographing and traveling and I was trying to prepare for this short time of no regrets and trying to deal with things to be ready. And what I didn’t understand at the time, but did later on, was this was providing me with a rebirth experience where I actually went through the whole thing and then didn’t die, but was reborn in a very, very visceral, tangible way that I could not have believed.

And so what was interesting about having six months to live was that I could only do that by denying a future. So every day, I was giving up the future. I was not thinking about … I wasn’t taking photographs because what’s the point? You’re not going to be there in six months. And that restricting of the future was another lesson, because when it came out of it on the other side, I realized that having a future was one of the most human things that was really necessary for our own humanity, was to have something in the front of us and that, if you take that away, you take away a lot of humanity.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s really the only thing that differentiates us from other species, is our ability to imagine …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… a scenario or a future.

Kevin Kelly:
And so I began much more interested in thinking about the future after that.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting because you had this sense that you were going to die and it does seem like that six months was a death of sorts and that you were rebirthed in a new way …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… thinking about time in an entirely new way. Did you have a sense that this was more a metaphysical death or did you believe that it was going to be a physical death and that you might get hit by a car or be involved in some …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… accident and no longer exist?

Kevin Kelly:
I was taking it very literally that I was preparing for the complete death where I would go to sleep that night and not wake up. That was the assignment to me, was to prepare in every way as if this was a complete physical reality. So I was acting as much as I could to be responsible in taking that seriously in every respect. So when I went to bed that night, I was prepared to physically die.

Debbie Millman:
Initially, you thought that, with six months to live, you would climb Mount Everest or go scuba diving or get in a speedboat and see how fast you could go.

Kevin Kelly:
Right. That would be the natural inclination to live life to the fullest, but in fact, I surprised myself because I wanted to see my parents and my brothers and sisters and do ordinary things. Yeah, that was a surprise to me.

Debbie Millman:
You found the ordinary quite exotic when you went back.

Kevin Kelly:
Yes, and that’s I think part of the marvel of life, is finding the extraordinary and the ordinary and finding the ordinary and the extraordinary and I think that was a gift.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about what you did when you were back home with your parents. You said that you helped around the house, you cut shrubs, you worked on a deck, you moved furniture, you washed dishes. Were you bored doing those things or were you feeling very fulfilled by doing those things?

Kevin Kelly:
I was a little bored, because after three months, I got on a bicycle and rode across the US to visit my brothers …

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
… and sisters. So no, I get bored pretty easily.

Debbie Millman:
You returned home again on October 31st from a 5,000-…

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… mile trek on your bicycle to visit your siblings. Nobody knew this entire time that you were in a race against the clock, so to speak …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and that you were expecting to die on November 1st, but you didn’t die. Did that surprise you when you woke up on November 1st? Did you think like Groundhog Day or did you-

Kevin Kelly:
No, no, that’s what I was saying, I literally felt like I was being born. When I was opening up my eyes, the experience from the visceral, from my whole body was a gift like being born. Because as I was opening my eyes and coming to, I realized that I had a future again, that I had everything. And so it was, yes, a surprise in that sense. It was … I mean, surprise is not the exact word. It was a gratitude, it was an appreciation. It was like, if you were conscious and you were born, what would that feeling be? How would you describe that? If you were, instead of being born as a baby, you were born as an adult, there would be an exhilaration that you would feel and that’s what I felt.

Debbie Millman:
You had your religious epiphany when you were 27 and you thought you only had six months to live. After you realized that you were not going to die, you created a countdown clock on your computer to count down the days you had left after figuring out your anticipated life expectancy based on some Medicaid actuary charts …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… that told you that your new projected age of dying was going to be 78.68 years old. I believe you’re now 70?

Kevin Kelly:

Debbie Millman:
According to the date, duration, calendar, you figured out the estimated last day of your life was now going to be January 1st, 2031. How do you think about that day now?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, so the thing about it is the good news is that my longevity has been increasing. So now, when I look at the tables, it’s like 80, 81 or something. And there’s also something about it. The longer you live, the higher your chances of living longer and then there’s medical advances. And so in some senses, in the last couple of years, I haven’t been losing any dates. I’ve actually been able to maintain the same 5,080 days. And so that’s been a bonus, some gravy, but I think I run it just to sharpen my commitment and my focus during the day, because each day, if I have 5,080 days to do everything on my list, then is doing what I am right now, is it what I want to do? And the answer is, in this case, yes, absolutely, but it helps me focus in that way.

Debbie Millman:
I went and did the same thing after reading about you doing this. I have about 10,000 days left.

Kevin Kelly:
There you go.

Debbie Millman:
I am projected to live until 91, which means only two-thirds of my life is over. I have another big chunk, a big third. What’s interesting is that my grandmother lived until 91 and her sister lived until 91. My mother is currently 81, still going.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So I’m feeling good about that and so the 10,000 days is something now I’m thinking about.

Kevin Kelly:
Well, see, you may say 10,000 days is a lot, but to me, for all the things I want to do, even 10,000 days doesn’t seem like enough.

Debbie Millman:
No, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Are you afraid of dying?

Kevin Kelly:
No, because I’ve already rehearsed it. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I don’t want it, but I’m not afraid of it.

Debbie Millman:
Are you afraid of anything?

Kevin Kelly:
I’m afraid of being wrong about so many things. There are lots of things that I believe that I’m sure will be totally wrong. It’s a different kind of fear, but in terms of actual things that exist today that I am afraid of, no.

Debbie Millman:
From what I understand, you haven’t been wrong about that much. I think the one article … No, no, no, the one article that I think you were really embarrassed about was something called The Roaring Zeros or something like that.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. No, there’s plenty of things I’m sure, beliefs that I have that I’m sure I’m wrong about that people in the future will look back and be embarrassed. My descendants will be embarrassed by what I believed.

Debbie Millman:
Well, fortunately, I think there’s going to be enough other good stuff to cover that stuff up. I want to talk a little bit about your use of technology. In 2010, when you wrote What Technology Wants, you stated that you didn’t have a smartphone, Bluetooth, Twitter. Your kids grew up without TV as you did. You had no cable. At the time, you said you didn’t have a laptop or traveled with a computer. Now, I know now that most of the above you now have.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right, right.

Debbie Millman:
When did you decide to dive into social media and what has your experience been of it?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So I have social media, but not on my phone.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
I have it on my desktop and that works for me in terms of hearing the people I follow or thinking about. So for me, it’s very, very useful. I have a laptop which I use when I travel, but it is primarily again just to do email. I’m an email old school person. So I don’t know, I find it pretty easy to manage or to unplug things. I know people, not everybody feels that same way, but for me, there hasn’t been a problem. We didn’t have TV in our household, not because of the content, because we were actually one of the first families that got the ISDN, and then later on, we were the first with Netflix discs.

My main objection to it was the commercials. Our kids grew up without the commercials and that was the main. And the second thing was also seeing things on our demand rather than having to watch when things were being shown. So it was this idea of content on demand without advertisements, which is streaming these days …

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Kevin Kelly:
… right?

Debbie Millman:
So the inevitable.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly. That’s what we wanted. Because I do remember a great moment, when my oldest daughter was maybe eight or something, no, six or eight, she came to me and she said … Because we had borrowed a VHS tape, a Disney tape, and she came to me and said, “Daddy, daddy, there’s a program in my program.” I said, “Well, let me go see,” and it was an advertisement, interrupted her program. She had no idea what it was and we had a teaching moment about what the commercials are really about. So that was the objection. And these days, we were talking about YouTube, one of the best bargains in the world is YouTube Premium. If you don’t have it, it’s like crazy because there’s no commercials, there’s, no ads on YouTube. It’s worth, whatever, I’m paying not to see ads.

And until recently, I went off of Google, which I was a very early, one of the first Google users, went off the Googles because they didn’t offer a version of Google where you paid to not see ads, those sponsored links. So I went to a version of a search engine, it was with Neeva and I’m now going to you.com where you can pay and you don’t see the sponsored ads. So I am totally in favor of controlling what you see by supporting the site in other ways than giving my attention. I’d rather give the money than give my attention.

Debbie Millman:
You stated that the complexity of social media is akin to biology …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and that it’s not a coincidence that we speak of things going viral.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more on why you feel that way.

Kevin Kelly:
I wrote a whole book, my first book called Out of Control, which was about decentralized systems and the parallels between the world of the born and the world of the maid and how when things are complex and complicated enough we can import the behavior of biological systems to manage them, to make them work, to evolve them and adapt them, to make them more alive and organic. And we’re seeing that and one of the ideas is that very large systems like the internet can have an immune system, whereas you cannot ever completely eradicate spam, but you can keep it down to a minimum, just like you have infections or you have cells in your own body. You don’t ever actually eliminate them. You just keep it down to a manageable level.

The general principle is that these systems, when we take some of these biological principles into these complicated systems, we can make them more like a living system, which makes them better for us.

Debbie Millman:
I’d like to read a quote of yours that I found in my research about the state of social media. You state, “We cannot use something for hours a day every day and have it not affect us. We have hints, but don’t really know. As we discover how it works, a wise society would modulate how this technology is used by adults and children. As we begin to understand its tendencies, harms and benefits, we can devise incentives to continually redesign the tech to enhance democracy and wellbeing. All this must be done on the fly, in real time, because what we’ve learned over the past a hundred years is that we can’t figure out, we can’t predict what technologies will be good by simply thinking and talking about them. New technologies are so complex they have to be used on the street in order to reveal their actual character.”

That is one of the most cogent statements I’ve encountered about the quagmire of social media, Kevin, and I’m wondering, how can we best manage our relationship with social media? Do you believe that we are addicted and that it’s all a dopamine game and we’re all searching for constant gratification through our devices?

Kevin Kelly:
I think there’s an element to it, but I think the whole point of social media is obviously there’s more going on than just that. And I also don’t believe that everybody that is inherently addictive. I think there are categories. A lot of the studies on social media used right now is based on the US and the US is peculiar in so many ways. Other countries don’t necessarily have the same problems that we have with social media. We don’t have enough data from their use to know whether this is a human thing or just an American thing. And what we do know from the studies in health say is that you don’t want to base policy on just one or two health studies of a thing. We just don’t know enough. It’s so complicated. We need hundreds of studies before we can say, “Definitely, this or that,” and making a policy level.
And right now, we just don’t have enough studies about social media to understand where the harm is coming from exactly. And the third thing I would say about it is, whenever we’re evaluating new technologies, we always have to say, “Compared to what?” “Compared to the existing technology. So yes, dental fillings may cause some harm, but compared to what? Compared to cavities? They’re way an improvement.” The same thing with say influencing elections. I think there’s an overestimation of the role of the social media. You want to say, “Compared to what? Compared cable TV? Compared to Fox News?”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the self-driving cars and the outrage that people had about one car accident.

Kevin Kelly:
Right, “Compared to what?”

Debbie Millman:
There are a million car accidents a year, right?

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
Something like that?

Kevin Kelly:
Right. So the idea would be, are we going to prohibit human drivers until they’re 99.99% safe. No, we’re giving a pass to human drivers that we don’t expect or the pass that we’re not giving to the new technologies. “The self-driving cars, how safe are they compared to what?” “Compared to the old. Compared to what we have right now.” And so the same thing with whatever other issues in social media like bullying. “Okay, compared to what? Compared to what happens in the middle school hallway?” And so-

Debbie Millman:
The junior high school gym in my case.

Kevin Kelly:
Exactly. “Compared to what?” So we tend to evaluate new technologies at a higher double standard than we do with the existing technology. And part of what my idea of proactionary stance to technology is that we want to constantly evaluate the old technology too. The FDA gives a pass for approval of a drug, but it should be about reevaluating it all the time in the context of new evidence and the way it’s being actually used. And so we want constant evaluation and I think we should make policy based on evidence, evidence-based policy. A lot of the policy in AI is now being made on imaginary harms. People are imagining what could go wrong. They’re imagining the harms and they’re going to make policy based on those imaginations and that’s very, very dangerous and harmful to the technology.

Debbie Millman:
Speaking of new technologies, on May 4th, 2022, you veered from the type of daily art you were posting on your Instagram page.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
Rather than making daily art on your own, you began to use AI to help make a new type of images.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
What has that experience been like for you?

Kevin Kelly:
Well, part of what I was doing for the year posting a piece of art that I made every day was I would sit down and literally have no idea what I was going to make and I had one goal, which was to surprise myself. I wanted to make something, I was like, “Where did that come from?” I didn’t know that or I didn’t have that in my mind. It came out of the drawing or painting. And that was really fun. And so then when the AI came along, it was easy to do that part of being surprised, but it turned out to be really, really hard to get it to obey you. The AIs are easy to surprise and hard to follow your orders.
And so what I’ve been trying to do is get them to go in certain directions and have things I can imagine. Surprise part is easy, but getting them to do something great is really, really difficult. They call this new art or job of prompting. You’re constantly nudging them and you’re trying to figure out what they want to hear and you’re guessing. It’s like working with a donkey. It’s really hard to get them to go in certain directions. And here’s what the epiphany that I had recently. So I’ve been making for a year, I’ve done this, I’m using Mid-Journey and Dall-e and Stable Diffusion and recently Photoshop has a built in, which I think they’re going to open AI. But anyway, there’s the fourth one, Photoshop.

And what I realized is that there are images, art that I could imagine, but I didn’t have any words for and a lot of great art you can’t put into words. And that means that, even though theoretically the AIs could make any possible image, they cannot. These large language models cannot make art that’s not tethered to language. It’s bound to things that you can describe. So there’s this whole world of art that I have in my mind that I don’t have words for. Therefore, the AI can’t make it. I can draw because I’m able to transcend language in my mind, but they can’t. And so that was an epiphany that the current crop of AI are incapable of making images that transcend language, which is some of the best art in the world.

Debbie Millman:
I recently heard about the job title prompt engineer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… and investigated what that was like. It still seems that all of the AIs, as you put it because it’s going to be more than one or is more than one, aren’t really self-directed and that’s what John Mato once said about the computer, the inherent flaw of the computer was that it could do nothing on its own. It had to be directed by us to do it.

Kevin Kelly:
I think that is true currently. We might see abilities to make it self-directed and the question is, well, how long will it go before it putters out or stops itself? But you’re right. Right now, that is absolutely true. There is no self-directed and what amounts there are is very limited. And that’s one of the things that I’ve also observed is that they have very short attention spans.

Debbie Millman:
But you’re having a lot of fun with it.

Kevin Kelly:
I’m having a lot of fun, but they have short attention spans. So one of the first things we want to do, I had a friend, science fiction writer, we want to make a book, illustrate a book. And the problem was is that it could develop a character and then forget about it two seconds later. It’s like, “No, no, no, come on, you need to remember this.” The new versions of ChatGPT have a little bit more memory, but they’re still just not engineered or not capable of sustaining attention over long periods of time to the same thing. So that’s another failing of them currently as they have short attention spans.

Debbie Millman:
There have been so many headlines about the future of AI in the New York Times.

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
The New York Times I think published over 60 articles on the AI alone in the last 30 days. Some of them with titles including “How Could AI Destroy Humanity?”, “Big Tech is Bad,” “Big AI Will Be Worse,” and the pessimistic, “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
That was an actual headline in the New York Times, “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
How accurate do you think these headlines are?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, they remind me very much of headlines. I should go back and read the New York Times when it was talking about the internet, but we’d certainly heard similar … I wouldn’t say they’re that drastic, but we did hear very dire warnings about the internet and there was, I remember, a Time Magazine cover about, “If the internet continues, spam will take over the world and destroy the internet.” They were saying, “Well, look, how much spam we have right now. If everybody has email, then spam will just kill it.” Of course, the solution was we had spam filters and that spam filters even being embedded at the level of Google. So that’s what’s happening, is that Google is basically filtering the spam before it even reaches you.

So we developed technologies to deal with that issue and that’s what we’re going to do with AI, is there are certainly going to be new problems, biases, prejudices. These are real, but we can invent technologies and solutions that will solve them. They’ll make new problems of their own. So we’re not looking forward to a problem-free future That’s utopia, which I don’t think is possible or desirable, but what I call protopia where we are going to have more problems, but the solutions to those problems are more technologies. So I’m optimistic about that protopia, not because I think our problems are smaller than we thought, but because I think our capacity to solve them is even greater.
And so that’s the missing part, is our ability to keep solving these problems that come up. And if we can never get better at it, then yes, I would agree with the pessimists, “It’s at the end. We’re done,” but the thing is that these new technologies also help us to create new solutions at an even faster rate than before.

Debbie Millman:
I came of age as a designer in that time between doing old school hands-on …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… drafting table graphic design and then morphing and migrating to an Apple computer. And in that time, there were many, many people, older designers than I was that were absolutely vehement, that nothing creative could come out of a computer …

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
… that …

Kevin Kelly:
It was cheating.

Debbie Millman:
… this was … Yeah, yeah, and then of course, when the iPhone came out, everybody was talking about how this was going to ruin the discipline of photography. And this is another quote I found from you, “We might’ve expected professional occupations in photography to fall as the smartphone swallowed the world and everybody became a photographer with 95 million uploads to Instagram a day and counting. Yet the number of photography professionals in the US has been slowly rising from 160,000 in 2002 before camera phones to 230,000 in 2021.” So I think that you talk about the tech panic cycle and I think we’re in one of those right now with a number of different technologies.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, and we’re dwelling on AI because that is the most recent one, but there are others that cause panic cycles including genetic engineering, embryo selection. These are things that are going to come and we’ll be facing those very squarely soon, genetic sequencing of newborns and all kinds of things are going to be in front of us and there are people … Here’s the problem. The problem is that it is very easy to imagine how things don’t work. That’s entropy. That’s the easiest most probable things or things fail, things don’t work. So seeing the path where things break is easy. Seeing the path where things work in a new way for the first time is hard. It’s improbable, okay? It requires a lot more energy and effort.
And so we tend to take the easy path of just quickly imagining all the ways that these things break and are going to harm us. And going the other direction of imagining the ways in which there’s unintended benefits rather than harms is harder. And I think there are less people doing it. So what I’m trying to spend my time on is coming up with those possible paths where there’s a future ahead of us that I want to live in at least. And I think we benefited in today’s generation from people who thought about Star Trek, the communicator. What an inspiration that was for people making the iPhones. They could see it in their head, “There it was. We can make that come true.” And I think the fact that it was imagined made it easier to make it come true.

And I think it’s hard for us to really have a future that’s going to be really great unless we imagine it first. I think it’s hard to get there inadvertently. And what I’m looking for is we don’t want to ignore the problems. They need great attention and I’m glad there’s many people focused on their problems, but we just need a few more who are focused on the opportunities and who can articulate what one of those good futures might look like to help us make them achievable.

Debbie Millman:
Kevin, before I let you go, I want to talk about your new book. It is a delicious book. It is called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. And you’ve said that Excellent Advice for Living is an inadvertent book and that writing a book of advice was never on your bucket list. What made you decide to publish this book?

Kevin Kelly:
It was born on the internets and it came from a habit that I had of jotting down great sayings by other people. One, I just loved the form, the format of proverbs, just that condensation, the little kind of zip file that you have to unpack. And at some point, many years ago, I began writing down my own versions of things and it was just for the joy and pleasure of trying to compress something into a whole book of wisdom into a single sentence. And then at some point, I realized that as I was getting older that there were things I really had wished I’d known earlier. And so I thought, “Well, I should give these to my young adult children because we weren’t very preachy and I never really gave advice in that way and they would probably benefit from hearing this younger rather than later.”

So I wrote down 68 of them on my 68th birthday to give to my kids and I posted them, not expecting very much just because I’d written them and they went viral and bounced around to such an extent that I was encouraged to do the same thing a year later, 69 and 70. At some point, they made it to the New York Times op-ed page and so I thought, “Okay, there’s something here. I should put them all together in a way that makes it handy to hand someone rather than have to search through the internet to look for them.” And so it was originally to help me. I think of these as reminders, reminding myself of things in a way that I can repeat to myself that I thought would be handy for my kids to help them repeat and change their behavior.

And so some of them are just channeling the ancients and others are very practical things that probably won’t make sense in 10 years, but it could be practical right now.

Debbie Millman:
You stated that when you want to change your own behavior, you need to repeat little behavior modifying mantras as reminders and I do the same thing. I’d like to share some of my favorites from your book. Some are a little too hard, hit a little too hard, if you know what I mean, but that’s a good thing. So here’s some of my favorites, “When you are anxious because of your to-do list, take comfort in your have-done list.”

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right. The paper version of to-do list are good for that because you can see your have-dones.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, that’s why I like to check things off.

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, exactly.

Debbie Millman:
This one is really good, “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

Kevin Kelly:
We are a package of contradictions and opposites.

Debbie Millman:
Right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
A couple of these are pieces of advice that I am taking into the podcast now in terms of how I think about things. So the next two are, “A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier,” and this goes all the way back to that thinking when I was 40 that anything I didn’t know about was not important to know.

Kevin Kelly:
Well, for me, that thing has been learning about the elements.

Debbie Millman:
Oh really? The periodic table?

Kevin Kelly:
The periodic table elements. I was shocked by how ignorant I was of the elements, these basic building blocks of the universe and elements that I had no clue even existed, their names, their profiles. It’s like, “How could I miss? This is universal. This is like any galaxy, any planet, anywhere in the world. They’ll know this, but I don’t know them.” And so I’ve been reading more and more about the elements and hearing about the history of their discovery. It’s just like I’m shocked by how ignorant I was.

Debbie Millman:
Good. That’s a good thing, right?

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
“Rule of three in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said, then again and then once more. The third time’s answer is the one closest to the truth.” So you’ll be seeing me apply that in the podcast. And then I have three more. This is something I’m working on too “Forgiveness is accepting the apology you’ll never get.”

Kevin Kelly:
Oh, yeah and it’s a gift to yourself.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That’s why I said before, “Everyone will be forgiven.” “Superheroes and saints never make art. Only in perfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.”

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. If people think, “Well, I can’t make it because I’m not enlightened, I’m not there,” no, no, no, no, that’s exactly where you want to start.

Debbie Millman:
“Everyone’s time is finite and shrinking. The highest leverage you can get with your money is to buy someone else’s time. Hire and outsource when you can.” I love that.

Kevin Kelly:
That took me so long to understand. As a whole earth do-it-yourselfer, everything that was like the highest quality, but when I realized that the billionaires with all the money cannot buy more time. And so it is the most precious and scarcity that we have, and getting someone else to give you their time, oh my gosh, it’s worth anything.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think so much about time now. I don’t know if you saw the article a couple of days ago, I think it was in nature.com that scientists are beginning to believe that time immediately after the Big Bang …

Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

Debbie Millman:
… was slower …

Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
… than time now. And since the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, I’m wondering if that correlates with time feeling like It’s going faster too.

Kevin Kelly:
I asked that exact question five days ago to Brian Green.

Debbie Millman:
And?

Kevin Kelly:
So I said, “Brian, my understanding is that, from the Big Bang, the universe is expanding, space is expanding and that, compared to now, the universe was very tiny. Does that mean that time is also expanding and that, compared to now, a billion years, it went very fast?” He said, “No. So the standard theory is that space expands in time, that time is constant, the speed of light is constant, because if it wasn’t constant, the speed light wouldn’t be constant.” He says, “The standard theory right now is that, no, space expands, but time does not.” He says, “There are some other alternative theories about a flexible time, but they’re all considered not proven.” So I was very disappointed because …

Debbie Millman:
I am too …

Kevin Kelly:
… the same thing …

Debbie Millman:
… Kevin.

Kevin Kelly:
… I was thinking, “Oh, well, a billion years ago, it was only a second now.”

Debbie Millman:
That 10,000 days might just go on forever. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, he gave you a piece of advice and he said, “Tell me if this is good or bad, minimize deathbed regret.” And you felt it was good and you went on to say that the people that you respect the most in your circle are still asking themselves at 70 years old, “What am I going to do when I grow up? Who am I? What am I here for? Should I be doing this?” “That’s actually why I respect them so much because they’re still constructing their lives rather than, say, discovering it or finding it. They’re constructing it,” and I think that’s a really wonderful metaphor. And I wanted to share that with our listeners because so many people that I encounter that listen to the show are always worried about when they’re going to be able to find their purpose or make their mark or do the thing that they were meant to do. And I think that that’s a wonderful way of thinking about the long game or the long now.

Kevin Kelly:
Sure. I think that that’s a direction, not a destination, that awareness of becoming what I say the only and that it’s a lifetime duty, it’s a lifetime chore, a lifetime assignment that you’ll spend all your life to get there and it’s not somewhere you arrive. It’s like an asymptote, you keep approaching it and ideally on the day before you die, you feel like, “Okay, I fully become myself.” So-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. People talk about making it and I say, “Why would you want to peak until the day before you die?”

Kevin Kelly:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
“You don’t want to be a has been.”

Kevin Kelly:
You don’t want to arrive up too early.

Debbie Millman:
Right. Kevin, I want to end the show today by reading a little bit more from your interview with Tyler Cowen about your new book. And this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve encountered in a while and I want to read it in its entirety. You state, “I think there is one little piece of advice at the very end which is your goal in life. Your goal in life is to be able to say, on the day before you die, that you have fully become yourself. I want to emphasize the idea of fully becoming yourself and the difficulty and the challenge to discover what that is, but how powerful it is. And that’s true whether you’re starting a company or becoming an artist or a teacher, whatever it is.

And the reason why I’m very pro on technology is that I think it enables us, helps us generally to become more of ourselves. We all have mixtures of talents that need external tools to help us express things. I am interested in increasing that pool of possible tools in the world, so that all of us have some chance to really express our genius and fully become ourselves.” And, Kevin, then you conclude by saying, “It’s going to take all your life to figure that out. Life is to figure it out. Every part of your life, every day is actually an attempt to figure this out.”

Kevin Kelly:
So thank you for helping me figure it out today.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Kevin Kelly, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. It has been an absolute honor.

Kevin Kelly:
And a real delight. Thank you for inviting me.

Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly’s most recent book is titled Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. You can find out more about Kevin Kelly and all of the extraordinary things he’s doing, only some of which we touched on today on his website, kk.org. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

Last year, science and cultural journalist, Jessica Nordell, published her first book. It’s more timely and relevant than ever now. It’s called The End Of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias And Create A More Just World. The Science Of How We Think Without Really Thinking, And What We Can Do To Change The Pernicious Patterns Of Thought.

            We’re going to talk about that and about her broad and varied career. She was once a staff comedy writer for A Prairie Home Companion. She’s produced literary radio shows. She’s also worked with Krista Tippett on her podcast On Being. Her science journalism has been published in the New York Times, the Atlantic and other publications. Yes, she is also a poet and an essayist.

            Jessica Nordell, welcome to Design Matters.

Jessica Nordell:

Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

My absolute pleasure.

            Jessica, I understand you are a direct descendant of the very last woman to be tried for witchcraft in the state of Massachusetts. How did you discover this?

Jessica Nordell:

Yes. When I was working on research for the book, The End Of Bias, I took a detour into genealogy, because I really wanted to understand how my own story fit into the story of this country, and the inheritances that we have received, racial inheritances, gender inheritances, patriarchal inheritances. So I really wanted to understand more about where I came from.

            I found some boxes in my mother’s home that she had been sent by a distant cousin. While I was going through those boxes, I found the story of this woman who is my, I think, 11th-great-grandmother, and was tried for witchcraft three times in Massachusetts. Acquitted each time. After the third time, she got the hell out of Massachusetts and escaped to New York with her family. She and her daughter were both tried for witchcraft.

Debbie Millman:

Do you know why? Do you know what powers they seemed to have?

Jessica Nordell:

The woman, I believe her moniker was the Witch of Wallingford.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. She and her daughter were accused of having some kind of impact on other women in the town. They were affecting them, making them sick, and were accused of witchcraft as a result.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk a little bit about your more recent background. You were born in Los Angeles to parents you’ve described as a surfer and a conscientious objector, but were raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where you said your house was halfway between a cemetery and a prison. What was that like?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. My mom is from LA. My dad is from New York. They-

Debbie Millman:

Compromised in the middle of the country?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. Compromise. They moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin without any personal connections or family or anything like that.

            It was a both very strange place to grow up and a very normal place to grow up. It was kind of this quintessential small town existence, big families, everybody knows everybody else. But it was a strange place to grow up for me, because I’m Jewish, and there were very few Jews, if any, in Green Bay. So I was always this weird, dark haired, nerdy kid in a room of blonde, blue eyed children. So grew up always being a bit on the outside, I think, as a result, which in some ways was a really useful training for the rest of life.

Debbie Millman:

Who was the conscientious objector and who was the surfer?

Jessica Nordell:

My dad was the conscientious objector. He enrolled in the army, and then filed CO status so as to not go to Vietnam. My mom was a surfer. They were, are, as different from one another as you could imagine. My mom has been a lifelong Republican. My dad is a lifelong Democrat. My mom is probably the only college student who voted for Richard Nixon in the country, and my dad was this bleeding heart liberal. So I grew up in a family of people who disagreed a lot about everything, politically and otherwise.

Debbie Millman:

It seems like you might have taken after your dad in terms of being a conscientious objector. I understand, while you were a student at Washington Middle School, you organized an all-school sit-in to protest a policy that gave students only 15 minutes for lunch.

            I have two questions. How was having a 15 minute lunch period even possible? How did you rally the entire school to sit in in this way?

Jessica Nordell:

I’m so impressed with your research, Debbie. This was in eighth grade. I went to a middle school called Washington Middle School, which was in Green Bay. I think as an attempt to control a fairly unruly student body, everyone had to put their head on the lunch table and be completely silent for a period of time before we were allowed to get up and get into the hot lunch line or start eating our lunch. But you can imagine, there were hundreds of students in the cafeterias. By the time everyone was quiet, we had 15 minutes left for lunch.

            I thought that this was insane and totally unjust. I pulled together a group of friends. We went from table to table, and explained to these different students that we thought this was unjust, and if they agreed with us, they should sit in at the end of lunch for the amount of time that we should have had.

            The administrators got very upset about this. We were sitting in. They were threatening students with detention and suspension. Eventually, the students filed out. But I was the last person standing, and got in-school suspension for a week as a result. But we did get the policy changed.

Debbie Millman:

Brava.

            Well, by the time you went to high school, you were an active member of the debate and the forensics teams. You were the host of the Alice in Wonderland costume parties. You were also teaching art in your backyard. Where did this range of interests come from?

Jessica Nordell:

Oh my gosh. I think I was always just a very curious kid. I was a big reader. In high school, debate and forensics was an amazing outlet, because Green Bay is a very small town. Debate and forensics gave me the opportunity to travel all over the state of Wisconsin, and meet other kids, meet people.

            This was pre-internet, so it was very hard to connect outside of your own little milieu. That’s, actually, how I learned to write was writing letters to these friends, because we would write each other letters, and try to entertain each other and make each other laugh. That was the main form of communication.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote a marvelous essay in the book Before the Mortgage: Real Stories of Brazen Loves, Broken Leases, and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood, titled Another One Rides The Cometbus, in which you share an epiphany after discovering Aaron Cometbus’s zine while you were still in high school. I want to read a paragraph that you wrote, because I think it’s just magnificent. In it, you state the following.

            “But then, every once in a while, apropos of almost nothing, a feeling would bloom in my chest. I’d be sitting on my bed, listening to a rock song, and a flame would swirl up and go skittering along the length of my bones. There was something else out there. I felt it. Something sparkly, concentrated, dazzling. Things were supposed to glow. Things were supposed to, I don’t know, happen.

            “It had only been a couple of years since I’d shown up at school wearing a green sweatsuit with dinosaurs emblazoned on it in puffy paint, a major strategic error. But that’s another story. And already childhood was fading out of view. I was halfway down the muddy footpath between being a kid and something else. What? Glory? Beauty? ‘Heat death,’ said the days. ‘Orthodontia,’ said my mother. But now, here it was exploding out from the pages of Cometbus number 24. That was something else.”

            First of all, I love that paragraph. So encapsulates that feeling of being a teenager and wondering, “What can I be?”

            How did you discover Cometbus? How did it impact you? Also, can you describe the zine, and share what it meant to you?

Jessica Nordell:

I love this question. I came across Cometbus through the channel of Sassy magazine from the late ’80s, early ’90s.

Debbie Millman:

Remember that? Wasn’t that Jane Pratt who was the editor?

Jessica Nordell:

The Jane Pratt era. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Nordell:

Which was sort of like this proto-feminist teen magazine, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yep.

Jessica Nordell:

I think they had a feature called Zine Corner, which would just feature a different zine every month. You could get Cometbus for a dollar. So I sent a dollar in to the post office box and got this zine.

            I can’t overstate how impactful it was for me, because like I said, I grew up in this very small town. There just wasn’t a lot going on. This zine was like a window. It was a portal into an adulthood that I didn’t know existed. It was an adulthood of people who were living these outrageous lives on the fringes of society, dumpster diving and auditing random university classes while living in hippie communes in the Bay Area. It was just a world that I’d never … that I didn’t know anything about.

            For me, it painted a picture of an adulthood that was an adulthood of creativity and wonder and mystery and magic. It made me feel excited, excited for becoming an adult, and gave me a feeling of possibility, yeah, and wonder.

Debbie Millman:

What made you decide to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and study physics?

Jessica Nordell:

Part of it was just a real passion for trying to understand the laws of the universe, and the beauty and elegance of the world that we see around us. That’s one reason.

            But I think it would be dishonest if I didn’t also acknowledge that there was a part of me, I think, that was really influenced by deeply internalized patriarchal ideas and misogyny that said, in some kind of whisper, that activities that were more associated with masculinity, with men, with the male world, were more valuable and were more worthwhile than the kind of activities that spoke to my heart, of writing and art and music and language.

            I think they were both present. Honestly, there was part of me that was really genuinely very curious and excited, and wanting to understand the world in that way. Then I think there was part of me that suppressed some of my other interests at that age, before the lifelong unpacking of internalized sexism.

Debbie Millman:

You must have been pretty good at physics to get into MIT, especially since then you also transferred to Harvard. You have a degree in physics from Harvard University. What were you thinking at that time you were going to do with it?

Jessica Nordell:

I started out at MIT thinking I would go into science, and transferred to Harvard, where I finished my physics degree, but I started taking classes in all of these other fields that I was interested in. I really didn’t know where I was headed, but I knew that I needed to be involved in something with the humanities, as well as the sciences.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how, after college, you moved home for a while, and for the first time in your life, felt completely at sea. Why?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. The first time, but not the last time.

Debbie Millman:

Well, yeah.

Jessica Nordell:

My goodness. How many times …

Debbie Millman:

Waving from the boat.

Jessica Nordell:

Right. I was completely lost when I graduated from college. It took me many, many years to learn that there’s a career for curious people. It’s called journalism. You actually get paid to learn things, which is amazing, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t have any experience with it.

            I was clinically depressed by the end of college, and moved home because I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t the last time, but I had a crisis of meaning and identity. Yeah. It was the first of several, I would say, restarts to try to really figure out what I was meant to do, and how I was meant to live in the world.

Debbie Millman:

But shortly thereafter, you decided to go back to school, and get a certificate in fine and studio arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After receiving your certificate, you got a job as a staff comedy writer for Garrison Keillor’s live radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. You also ended up being an extra in the film that was made after, with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. I watched it, trying to find you. I couldn’t.

            I’m wondering. How did you get that job, going from a degree at Harvard in physics, to then a certificate in fine art, to staff comedy writer?

Jessica Nordell:

The through line, I feel, of my life has been writing. The whole time, I was writing. Not in a professional way, but I was writing letters, and developing these deep relationships with people through language.

            When I was looking for a job after I’d moved to Minneapolis, I saw that there was a writing job available at Minnesota Public Radio. I didn’t know, actually, that it was for Prairie Home Companion. It just said staff writer position. I thought, “Well, I love public radio. What could be better than a staff writer position? I’ll apply.”

            Then through the application process, I learned that it was for this show, Prairie Home Companion. I was like, “Huh. Okay. Well, I’ll give it a whirl.” They asked for some sample sketches, so I wrote some sample sketches. One of the ones I turned in was a call-in show to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court answered listeners’ call-in questions, or something like that.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God. That would be good now. Wow.

Jessica Nordell:

Right?

Debbie Millman:

For any producers that are listening, Jessica Nordell has an idea for a show.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. Then one thing led to another, and I got hired. It was my first real job that paid a salary. I remember the first thing I did with my first paycheck was purchase a mattress, so I was no longer sleeping on a futon.

Debbie Millman:

That’s always a nice rite of passage. Absolutely.

            While you were there, you co-created and produced the five part interview series, Literary Friendships, featuring writer pairs, including Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Marie Howe, Robert Bly and Donald Hall, among many others. For that work, you won a Gracie Award for outstanding national magazine program.

            Congratulations. That’s a hard award to win.

Jessica Nordell:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

After two years, you left and joined the great Krista Tippett as an associate producer for her Peabody Award winning show, Speaking Of Faith, which is now On Being. What did you do with Krista?

Jessica Nordell:

I was an associate producer, so I researched guests, and helped put together interview questions, helped with editing sessions. It was a pretty small crew there. I think, at that point, the show was still part of Minnesota Public Radio. I think there were maybe five or six people on staff, so it was all hands on deck. Yeah. It was a great experience.

Debbie Millman:

This next part of your life really excited me. You decided to go back to school to obtain an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where you were the Martha Meier Renk distinguished poetry fellow, and received an award in the Ilona Karmel writing program.

            Now, after studying physics, and working in comedy and public radio, what made you decide to choose poetry?

Jessica Nordell:

Poetry has been very important to me since age 13 or 14, which is when I first encountered the great Adrienne Rich, who has just been a huge influence on my life. Maybe there’s something special about age 13 or 14, when the portals open and everything comes in. That was the time when I experienced Cometbus and got exposed to a lot of the world. It was a moment when her book, Atlas Of The Difficult World, had just come out. I happened to read a couple of her poems in a magazine and was just completely entranced.

            I heard about these incredible MFA programs where you get paid to spend a couple of years working on poetry, and reading it and writing it. It sounded incredible, so that’s what I did next.

Debbie Millman:

Your poetry has appeared in FIELD and Speakeasy magazine. It was also included in The Best New Poets Of 2015, and those poems were chosen by Tracy K. Smith, published by University of Virginia Press.

            I’m wondering if you could read the poem that’s included in that book. It’s a poem called Girl Running. I think it’s really beautiful.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah, absolutely.

            “Along the edge of the park, a girl is running barefoot at the top of a ledge. The girl is four or five. The ledge is six inches wide. She’s moving fast. The trees are rising behind her like dense green thunderheads. On each side of her, pigeons burble and brake, pedaling backward in air. She runs past the screech of the occupied sandlot. The voices split open, distorted in heat. She pulls past the ice cream truck, struck to a stuttering blaze, the screak and crawl of the street. The sun is warming the limestone she runs on. The wind is lapping the grit from her body. The flanks of the truck flicker, heatless and dumb as the televised blitz of a city. The meters are flashing their blank exhortations. The sun is pitched like a snare, beating time. Don’t speak to her. If she keeps her eyes on the stone, she can run this way for a long time.”

Debbie Millman:

Goosebumps. Are you still writing poetry, Jessica?

Jessica Nordell:

I have not written a lot of poetry. I’m trying to decide how much to share.

Debbie Millman:

We don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah, no. I’m happy to. Yeah.

            About 10 years ago, I experienced a pretty severe mental health crisis. Over the year or two that it took to recover from that, I found it increasingly hard to access poetry.

            Poetry is a little bit like a very shy guest, a very shy and honored guest. I feel like one has to prepare a welcome for poetry to arrive in one’s spirit and heart. I found that very difficult to do. I try to bring poetry into all the writing that I do now, and I am working on opening those gates again.

Debbie Millman:

Good. I can feel the poetry in your writing. I want to talk to you about the writing that you’re currently doing, but it makes me happy to think that you might be writing poetry again.

            I’ve talked to Elizabeth Alexander about the going back and forth between writing poetry and being a poet. You’re always a poet. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re writing the poetry.

Jessica Nordell:

I think that’s true. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You taught writing. You taught poetry in the Oakhill Correctional Institution. As you were transitioning to full-time writing, you also worked as a branding and business innovation consultant, which I was really surprised, but also delighted by.

            You initially … While you were struggling to be able to work as a full-time writer, you write about how you pitched ideas to editors at national magazines, and mostly got no response. Discouraged, you decided to conduct an experiment with your name. Tell us what you did.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. This was, gosh, probably 2005 or 2006. As you say, I was trying to break into national publications, not having any luck, just having silent … Sending out cold queries, and just having no response at all.

            There was a particular essay that I had been working on, was really proud of. It was tied to a particular event that was happening, and so it had a short window of relevance. I wasn’t getting any response. I knew that the window was closing. If it wasn’t picked up by somewhere, it would just die a slow, sad death.

            In a moment of desperation, I created a new email inbox for myself. I sent out the same essay using the initials JD. I presented myself as JD Nordell, instead of Jessica Nordell, and sent it to the same outlets. That piece was accepted within a couple of hours and published. It started my career, really, as a journalist. It was the first time my work was brought to a larger audience.

            I had a dilemma. Do I continue to use this pseudonym? Is there something dishonest about it, if I am not actually presenting myself as JD in my actual life, this is just something I’m using to get editors’ attention?

            I used it for a few years, actually. Then eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. It didn’t feel authentic to who I was. So I thought, “Well, I’ll just submit as Jessica. If I go back to hearing nothing, then so be it.”

            That was the first big moment of true confrontation with gender bias in a very undeniable way.

Debbie Millman:

You say that essay started your career. What essay was that?

Jessica Nordell:

Actually, circling back earlier, it was an essay about appearing as an extra in the Prairie Home Companion movie.

Debbie Millman:

Okay. Yes. I read that piece. That was a great piece. Really terrific piece.

Jessica Nordell:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Since then, your essays have appeared in the New York Times and Slate, Salon, many other prestigious publications. You’ve written how that experience gave you the firsthand opportunity to see how bias, and its flip side, advantage, are dynamic and penetrating forces, transforming their recipients from the inside just as they strike from the outside. Those are your words.

            As a white woman, you’ve been writing about bias for close to 15 years. What motivated you to dedicate yourself to this topic?

Jessica Nordell:

I think the door was cracked open for me by the experience we just talked about, as well as my experiences as a woman in the workplace. I worked in the marketing and branding field for a while, as I was making my circuitous way as a writer. Some of the experiences I had were so infuriating, but also felt paralyzing. I didn’t know how to get out of this box in which I felt that my work was undervalued compared to my male colleagues.

            I remember having a particular experience where I worked on a project for a particular client. The sales at this particular event were 30 times as great after I worked on this project as they had been before. The response that I got from leadership was like, “Oh, well. You just got lucky. It’s because you happen to know this sector really well.” So there was this message I was getting that, “Your success is because you’re lucky, not because you’re skilled.”

            Then there were experiences like being told I was too abrasive, when a male colleague behaved exactly the same way or even more so. You’re nodding like this sounds familiar.

Debbie Millman:

Well, especially in the branding world in the ’90s and the ’00s. It’s much, much better now. Still not perfect, by any means. But there were times, in the ’90s particularly, where in the field of branding, I was sometimes the only woman in the room, and heard a lot of those same things, and really was nodding all through reading your book, actually.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. Those experiences really just stayed with me, and made me very curious to understand what the heck is going on. How is it that I am able to be this extremely competent, capable, skilled person, and yet, the people I’m working with can’t see it, or they’re seeing it through a veil? It’s like they’re not even seeing me. They’re looking through … They’re seeing a daydream or a hallucination, rather than a human being, and evaluating me on my merits.

            So my professional interest in bias really came a lot out of personal experiences. Then over the years, it morphed into moving beyond thinking about gender bias, but what is this thing that is causing us to see so many different people through a veil, through a gauze, no matter what their social identity. This has been my driving question for the last many years.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It’s interesting. Particularly in the ’90s, when I was experiencing that, I never really saw it as gender bias, because of my own issues. I thought it was just because I wasn’t good enough. I know that you write about that in the book as well. It just never occurred to me that it was gender based. It was just Debbie based.

            Now that I’m married to a woman of color, I actually see, on a firsthand level, almost every day, micro and macroaggressions that are all race based, gender based, body based. It’s really horrific.

            Let’s talk about your book. This is your first book. It’s called The End Of Bias: A Beginning. It was published late last year. It is about to be published as a paperback.

            It has been shortlisted for the 2022 Columbia Journalism Lukas Prize for excellence in nonfiction, the 2022 New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize, was also named a best book of the year by the World Economic Forum, Greater Good, the AARP, and Inc Magazine.

            It is being used by organizations now from newsrooms to startups to universities, healthcare organizations and faith communities, to solve some of their biggest cultural challenges.

            It’s also, as you might well expect, listeners, a quite poetic read.

            Congratulations, Jessica.

Jessica Nordell:

Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:

Your book is divided into three parts. I learned so much. How Bias Works, Changing Minds, and Making It Last. In the first part of the book, you outlined the history of prejudice in the United States, and examine implicit bias in stereotyping. The second part includes a section on police violence, and outlines efforts to break the habit of stereotyping. In the last section of the book, you outline the impact bias has had in healthcare and education, which I’ve also seen firsthand.

            I want to share some statistical facts. I’m going to read this. It’s rather lengthy, but I think very, very important for people to hear and understand.

            “If you’re a prospective graduate student with a name that sounds Indian, Chinese, Latino, Black or female, you’re less likely to hear back from faculty members than if your name is Brad Anderson. If you’re a same sex couple, you’re more likely to be denied a home loan than a heterosexual couple. If you’re a white job applicant with a criminal record, one study found you’re more likely to get a call back than if you are a black job applicant with a criminal record.

            “If you’re Latino or black, you’re less likely to receive opioids for pain than a white patient. If you’re an obese child, your teacher is more likely to doubt your academic ability than if you’re slim. If your hobbies and activities suggest you grew up rich, you’re more likely to be called back by a law firm than if they imply a poor childhood, unless you’re a woman, in which case, you’ll be seen as less committed than a wealthy man.

            “If you’re a black student, you’re more likely to be seen as a troublemaker than a white student behaving the same way. If you’re a light skinned basketball player, announcers will be more likely to comment on your mind. If you’re dark skinned, your body.

            “If you’re a woman, your medical symptoms will be taken less seriously. If you’re a woman seeking a job in a lab, you’ll be seen as less competent, and deserving of lower salary, than a man with an identical resume. Pursuing an academic fellowship, one study found you must be 2.5 times as productive as a man to be rated equally competent.”

            Just need to let that sit there for a moment.

            Jessica, how much of this behavior do you believe is intentional?

Jessica Nordell:

That is such a good question, Debbie. This is something that I have wrestled with over the course of researching and writing this book. Really, this question. The psychology field tends to group bias into two categories. Conscious, intentional bias, which is overt prejudice, overt racism, sexism, white nationalism, things like this. Then there’s unconscious or implicit bias, which is unintentional, spontaneous, automatic. It happens outside of our conscious awareness.

            I think it’s actually more complicated than that. What I’ve come to really believe, over the course of doing this research and talking to many experts and really sinking into the science, is that we are an unknowable combination of conscious and unconscious biases, and that any particular reaction that we have to another person might have both components.

            There might be elements that we’re totally unaware of. There might be ways that we’re … I certainly have seen this in others. I know for a fact, I’ve experienced it myself. There are times when we react automatically and spontaneously without awareness of why we’re making a judgment or an evaluation or an assessment of another person.

            Then there are times when I think we are a little bit aware of it, or we can be made aware of it if we just pause to notice it. In fact, one of the cruxes of the book, and some of the interventions that I describe, really hinge on the ability for us to become aware of these processes, and to develop more of a practice of noticing our reactions, and then interrupting them through the various approaches that I talk about.

Debbie Millman:

You write that most people do not go into their professions with the goal of hurting others or providing disparate treatment, but those who intend and value fairness, it is still possible to act in discriminatory ways and that contradiction between values of fairness and the reality of real world discrimination has come to be called unconscious bias or implicit bias or sometimes, unintentional or unexamined bias. And I don’t really like those two. I feel like it takes people off the hook, but ultimately describes the behavior of people who think they’re acting one way, but in fact, act in another. How we work to end that is the focus of your book, but did you go into the process of writing this book with the idea that it would be possible to end bias? Because I feel very hopeless right now, even reading your book, which I think is marvelous and I want everybody in the entire universe to read it, because it is so helpful and so enlightening, but I also feel like there are still so many people that want to believe the world that they live in is the world that they should live in, which is all about white supremacy, which is all about women being second class citizens, which is all about people of color not getting the same opportunities and I feel so hopeless. Do you really truly believe that the world can change?

Jessica Nordell:

I went into this project wanting to find out whether it was possible to change, because unconscious or unintentional bias, implicit bias, it seems so confounding. Because how can we possibly address something if we’re not even fully aware of what’s going on? And is it possible to even motivate people to want to put in the effort?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Jessica Nordell:

Because it is work to actually interrupt this. And so, that was my question. Is it possible? And my project was looking at the data, looking at the research, trying to find examples of approaches that had actually measurably changed people’s behavior. So, I mean, it was an empirical question for me. I was like, “I don’t know the answer.” And through the process of researching and writing this book, I found many examples of approaches that did change people’s behavior. There are approaches that, believe it or not, have changed police behavior, there are approaches that have changed doctors’ behavior to eliminate disparities.

            There are approaches that have changed teachers’ behavior, to decrease the disparities in suspensions between white students and non-white students. And so, there are these approaches that actually work. Of course, the question is, do we have the political will, the collective will to use them? To actually put them in place? This is an open question. I wish I had could wave a magic wand and make it all happen, but I at least wanted to give people the tools to be able to make a difference wherever they are in their own local communities, organizations, neighborhoods, cultures.

Debbie Millman:

I do know that certain changes are possible. When my wife, Roxanne Gay wrote the book, Hunger, A Memoir Of (My) Body, she talks quite a lot about how doctors treated her, assuming that any ailment was weight based because she was bigger than they thought she should be and didn’t give her the care. And also now, how different her world is after losing a substantial amount of weight. And she now knows for a fact that doctors are given her book to read, are assigned her book to read when they are in school, so that they have a better understanding of how to treat both people of color and people who aren’t living in a mainstream body. You said that there are ways that police are being trained differently, talk about what you’ve seen in the world to give us hope.

Jessica Nordell:

There are approaches that try to tackle bias head on, and then, there are approaches who that use indirect methods to change people’s behavior. So I’ll give you an example from healthcare. There is a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins hospital that were really concerned with blood clot prevention and blood clots are really dangerous. If you get a blood clot, it can be catastrophic or even fatal. And they found that patients were not getting appropriate blood clot prevention when they were being admitted to the hospital. And so, they developed a computerized checklist that took doctors through a series of systematic questions for every patient to determine whether they should receive blood clot prevention or not. Interestingly, this wasn’t actually intended to reduce disparities at all. They were just trying to of improve blood clot prevention for everybody. But later, when they went back and analyzed the data, they found that it had eliminated the disparities between the prevention that men and women were getting.

            So before this intervention, women were receiving significantly lower rates of appropriate treatment. After this computerized checklist that really required doctors to use objective standard criteria to make a decision, that disparity was eliminated.

Debbie Millman:

Another doctor example that I found really fascinating was when you talk about how ovarian cancer’s always been considered this silent killer, when in fact there are a lot of things that point to that potentially being what somebody is suffering from that women have been talking about for decades and that’s all but been ignored. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jessica Nordell:

The history of medicine is unfortunately very much also the history of women’s symptoms being ignored. Women’s pain being undertreated, women’s narration of their own lives, their own experiences being devalued and ignored and sidelined. And in the case of ovarian cancer, it was for many years thought to be a silent killer that had no symptoms, no obvious symptoms. Well, it turned out women had been complaining of things like constipation and bloating for years and these are now seen as actually symptoms of ovarian cancer, but they were just dismissed as being irrelevant. And so, yeah. It’s just one of many examples of ways that women have not been taken seriously, that their reports of their own lives and their own experiences have not been taken seriously by the medical profession.

Debbie Millman:

Since the murder of George Floyd, there’s been quite a lot of… I want to say virtue signaling in the workplace with diversity training and you outline how diversity training is now a multi-billion dollar a year industry and how nearly every Fortune 500 company uses some form of it. You detail how the training has expanded to include unconscious bias training, which is now de rigueur at organizations across business, law, government and have given rise to a cottage industry of trainers, speakers, and consultants. But you state that DEI workshops and anti-racist training can often make bias even worse. How so?

Jessica Nordell:

Well, I don’t know if I would say it can often make it worse. I guess what I would say is that the challenge with these trainings is that they’re often not evaluated, so a comparison would be developing a medicine and distributing it in a community and then not testing to see what effect it’s having or whether it’s actually curing the thing that it’s meant to cure. The problem, I think with a lot of trainings, is that we just don’t know what effect they’re having. Some have been found to cause backlash. There’s some work by a sociologist at Harvard and a sociologist at Tel Aviv University who looked at decades of diversity initiatives in large companies and they found, for instance, that after mandatory diversity trainings, the number of women of color in management decreased.

Debbie Millman:

Why is that? How is that possible?

Jessica Nordell:

The hypothesis that the researchers suggest is that when managers feel like their autonomy is being taken away, that they’re being forced to do something that they don’t choose, it causes backlash and it causes them to do something else to protest and regain their autonomy. That’s the psychological explanation that these researchers give. So I think the important thing is to figure out, well, what are the actual goals? What are we really trying to do? Are we trying to create more psychological safety in the workplace for everyone? If so, how do we measure that? And then, how can we determine whether this training or intervention or year long program is actually getting us closer to that goal? Or is this just a legal liability check box that’s not actually having any kind of meaningful effect? I think that’s the really important question we need to answer.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I was really struck by one respondent who simply stated that he was never going to have a meeting alone with a woman again, because he was so afraid of getting in trouble. It’s like, “Dude, just don’t say the wrong things. Don’t do the wrong things.”

Jessica Nordell:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

And that was really depressing. You also found in one series of studies that lean in type messages lead people to think workplace gender inequality is women’s fault and that it’s women’s responsibility to solve. And I know that my wife, Roxanne, also says that quite a lot when people are asking her, white women in particular, “What could I do different? What could I do better?” And she’s like, “It’s not my job to teach you that.” And that lean in commands are insufficient. There will never be a smile wide enough, a tone unassuming enough to outmaneuver another person’s misjudgments. Given how much gender bias there is in the workplace, how do we overcome this? Do you think that there’s a way for women to be allowed to be as ambitious as men or as aggressive or as bitchy or as bossy? I mean, all of these terms are seen as insulting to women, but yet, commanding to men.

Jessica Nordell:

That is one of the reasons I wrote this book, because I think it takes a change of consciousness among leaders at a company. It’s not women’s fault that they are systematically denied opportunities and I think it’s incredibly dangerous for us to give women the message that if they only did something differently, if they only wore a softer sweater, if they only spoke with a smile, if they only did this, if they only did that, then the doors would open because the goalposts change and shift, and it’s an insane tight rope to ask women to walk. Be feminine, but not too feminine. Be assertive, but not too assertive. There’s no way to solve that problem. It’s interesting, when I was first talking about writing this book, some of the advice I got from people in the publishing industry was to focus the book on things that women and people of color could do to overcome the biases that were being expressed toward them.

            And I just feel strongly that is not the problem we need to solve. We need to solve the problem of the expression of bias and that’s where the work needs to be done. At the organizational level, at the leadership level, at the individual level, rather than put the burden on the people who are being most affected.

Debbie Millman:

One of the central pieces of your book is the creation of a computer workplace simulation that you called Normcorp, and you worked with the computer science professor, Kenny Joseph, and designed a simulation to quantify gender bias in the workplace. And this gave you ample real world data upon which to draw. Can you talk a little bit about your methodology and the study and the outcomes?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. While I was working on this project, I had this burning question, which was, how much do all of these daily experiences add up? Because if you look at the research about bias, it tends to focus on a snapshot, a moment in time. A moment that a resume is being evaluated. A moment a doctor is encountering a patient and making a diagnosis. And the truth is bias doesn’t just happen once or twice, it happens continuously. I mean, as you’ve described with experiencing life alongside Roxanne, you’re seeing this daily accumulation of microaggressions and biases. And what I couldn’t find was a quantification of the impact of these experiences over a long period of time, which is how they’re actually experienced in the real world. So I kept asking researchers and experts, what’s the ultimate impact? And no one really had an answer.

            And so, I approached a computer scientist about collaborating with me to create a computer simulation called an agent based model, where you create these individual agents who interact with one another over time, according to really simple rules. And then, you watch what happens in the simulation. And what we did was we created a virtual workplace called Normcorp, which is a very simple workplace where very little happens, actually. People just do projects, the project succeed or fail, they get evaluated and then, their score goes up or down and that determines how likely they are to be promoted. And then every so often, promotions happen and the top scorers get promoted to the next level. So it’s a very simplified, abstract workplace. And then, we introduced five or six patterns of gender bias that are really well documented that women experience all the time.

            Things like having their work devalued compared to a man’s work, being more penalized for failing or for screwing up than a similar man, getting less credit when they work on a mixed gender team, things like this, or being penalized for seeming too aggressive or to assertive, not communal enough. And so, we introduced those biases with a very small amount, just 3%. We just introduced a 3% bias in how women were evaluated in this simulation and what we found after we ran the simulation over many, many cycles was that in this hierarchical workplace, Normcorp has eight levels of hierarchy. What we found was that after we ran the simulation, we ended up with a workplace where the top level was 87% men. And that was only with a 3% difference, but when it happened over and over and over with enough frequency, it accumulated into a really significant disparity.

Debbie Millman:

You ran the simulation over 20 promotion cycles. Did you always have the same results?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. So we ended up running the simulation over 20 cycles. And then, we did, I think, 100 different iterations of the simulation and took an average of what happened over 100 different simulations and we found that on average, it was about 87% men at the top level.

Debbie Millman:

One of the wonderful things that I learned in your book about this notion of the way in which we learn, you refer to ants as an example, and you say ants interact according to some simple rules. They react to chemical scents, such as those of other ants, larva and food. They leave behind their own scents. They also react to sound. Over time, these behaviors compound and allow ant colonies to solve difficult problems like finding the best forging route to and from food, avoiding traffic jams. As they react to one another’s chemical traces while forging, for instance, they spontaneously form a highway system, a central inbound lane going from food source to the nest, flanked by two outbound lanes from the nest to the food source. These ants are not directed by an ant overlord. They’re merely engaging with one another, according to basic rules. And so, we are behaving in exactly the same way the ants are.

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. I mean the ant example might seem a little out of place, but I think ant colonies are a complex system. So a complex system is a system where you have many individuals interacting with one another over a long period of time and the result is maybe unexpected or large or different from what you might imagine if you only look at the individual interactions. You can have lots of micro interactions and behaviors that if they’re practiced over long enough, can have massive results. I mean, if you think about weathering in the case of race and health, there’s this idea that it’s the accumulated stressors of racism that contribute to the massive health disparities between African Americans and white people in this country, for instance. It’s not one thing, it’s the accumulation and the repetition over time that gives rise to this system that we see.

Debbie Millman:

When we first started talking about your book, I outlined all of those instances of bias and I was heartened as I went through your book to see that you believe that we can unlearn our biases and you outline very straightforward ways organizations can interrupt bias. And these include standardizing criteria for hiring and for promotions. In the field of medicine, doctors can use a standardized checklist for care to ensure everyone is treated the same. Can you talk a little bit about this standardizing criteria and checklists and how they can be created and implemented with as much ease and speed as possible?

Jessica Nordell:

Yeah. So the example that I described earlier about blood clot prevention is an excellent example of this standardized checklist approach to reducing biases. The idea is that you’re taking a decision out of the realm of a black box and really breaking it down into systematic steps. And this approach can be used in lots of different areas. I mean, one way that it can be used in the workplace for instance, is in an interview context. So say an organization is interviewing people for a job. This is an area that’s ripe for bias, because if I go into an interview with you and I’m just winging it, I might ask you questions based on some perceived similarities we have. I might slightly give you the benefit of the doubt in certain cases. I might ask you softball questions because of some affinity I feel.

            There’s a concept that I find really useful called Homophily, which means literally love of the same. And it describes the way that we sometimes gravitate toward people who remind us of ourselves. This happens in the workplace all the time. Anytime you hear someone say, “Oh, we hired that person because they were a culture fit.” That’s Homophily, right? That’s like we hired them because they were like us. And so, a way to interrupt this in an interview setting, in a workplace, is by developing a set of standardized questions ahead of time. And so, every person who’s interviewed gets asked the exact same set of 12 questions or five questions. And that way, you can start to compare apples to apples instead of just letting interviewers run wild with whatever biases might be informing the questions and the conversation they’re having with people.

Debbie Millman:

I’ve also read about ways that people are looking at the first screen of resumes without names or locations and just qualifications and that seems to be a way to avoid some of that, “Oh, that person doesn’t look like me.” Or “That person doesn’t have the Homophily that we can sometimes veer to.”

Jessica Nordell:

Right. So if you’re an astronomer, in order to get time on the Hubble Space Telescope, you have to submit an application. And the committee has started to remove identifiers from the application of astronomers to use the Hubble Space Telescope and an analysis of more than 15,000 applicants over 16 years found that before they removed the identifiers from the applications, men’s proposals were accepted at a higher rate than women’s. But after they removed the names from the applications, the disparity actually reversed. Women’s applications were accepted at a higher rate than men’s.

Debbie Millman:

I wonder what that means.

Jessica Nordell:

I mean, I think often it’s that, if a particular group has had more obstacles, has had to face more hurdles in order to get to a certain level, they might have had to have more accomplishments in order to get to that level.

Debbie Millman:

Are there any places that you found where there’s been an aggregation of these types of standardized criteria for questions, for interviews, for checklists? Is there a place, a repository, where people can go to learn about how to create these more standardized lists and criteria?

Jessica Nordell:

That’s an amazing idea, Debbie. We should make that. I don’t know of a specific toolkit as you’re describing that’s specifically around standardization. I’m actually working… I’m partnering with a researcher right now to look at checklist approaches in medicine and try to reanalyze studies to see if this pattern is holding true with lots of different studies, whether checklists are actually eliminating gender and racial disparities across different medical studies. So we’ll hopefully know more soon.

Debbie Millman:

I do think that this type of systemic change is going to require that individuals think that they could make a difference, that they can look at their unconscious bias or their bias and begin to take steps to make changes. And that needs to be something that has to be very conscious. For those that are listening to the show today, what would be one or two things that you think that anybody could do on an individual basis to confront or become more aware of their unconscious bias and make small or large changes to begin to behave differently in the world?

Jessica Nordell:

I think the very first step is to begin practicing noticing the assumptions and predictions that come up in one’s own mind when encountering another person, particularly a person across some social difference. And it sounds really easy, “Oh, just notice what’s happening.” It’s really hard. It takes a lot of practice because it’s a habit. It’s something we’ve been so conditioned to do. So developing the muscle of just first noticing, what is coming to mind when I encounter this person? What am I expecting from this person? What am I predicting? What kinds of assumptions am I making about this person’s background? Their future? Their behavior? Anything, because once you start to notice, then that is the golden key, because then, you can interrupt it. Then you can pause and ask yourself, “Wait a second. Do I know for sure that’s what that person is talking about? Is that where they’re coming from? That’s what they’re going to do. That’s what they intend.”

            That’s the first step of human agency, of freedom, being able to actually see what’s happening in your own mind. So I think that’s a really good first step. Another thing that I would suggest to everyone is learn history. This is, I think, a really under researched approach, but there are a couple of studies that suggest that learning history, learning about discrimination in the past, helps us see it in the present and be able to perceive it and understand it better in the present. And I certainly found this to be the case in my own work. I mean, the more I understood the way the policies and practices of the past affected people of the past, the better I was able to really understand the present and how those patterns from the past live on in the present. Medical racism, for instance, the scientific racism that was pervasive in the 19th century was codified in medical journals. I mean, these were professional academic medical journals that systematically disregarded African Americans and saw them as debilitated and less human. And this was taught to doctors. So I think that’s just one little slice of history that if we understand it, we can start to appreciate our present situations so much better. So I would encourage everyone to do as much as they can to understand the discrimination of the past.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said, you’ve come to see bias as a soul violence. An attack, not just on the material conditions of one’s life, but an assault on one sense of self. How do you feel you were changed over the course of your research and writing this book?

Jessica Nordell:

It was a transformative experience for me. It forced me to see how deeply I’d been conditioned by false beliefs about every group in our society. Women, African American people, people of different religions and ages. And one of the things I did over the course of researching the book was try to find out where these ideas came from originally. Where did patriarchy come from? Where did racism come from? One of the things that changed me the most was understanding the way these ideas were developed at specific moments in human history. They’re not ideas that have been with us forever. They’re not natural. They’re not supernatural. They’re not inevitable. They’re human…

Debbie Millman:

No, they’re constructs. Yep.

Jessica Nordell:

They are constructs. They’re human inventions. And for me, really seeing the way that these are human inventions, loosened their grip on me. I began to see them as human creations like the automobile. This is not something that was just dropped from the heavens, it was something that humans built. And so…

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, they’re just bad ideas.

Jessica Nordell:

They’re lies. They’re lies. And so, not just understanding that, but grasping that in the sense that Claudia Rankine talks about the difference between understanding that how the bigotry of the past affects us and grasping it, really grasping that, I think was transformative in that the grip of those ideas began to loosen more and more.

Debbie Millman:

You stated that when you began The End of Bias, you thought you were writing a work of science, but as you worked on it, the original plan dissolved and I’m wondering if you can talk about how and in what way that happened?

Jessica Nordell:

I began the project thinking, like most of us do, I think, I’m probably a little less biased than everyone else. I’m probably a little more objective than everybody else. I thought if I can just find the best interventions, the best approaches, the best science and synthesize that and share that in the most engaging way possible, then I can just kind deliver this tool. What I found very quickly when I began the project was that every bias that I saw out in the world was living inside me and that I couldn’t write a book with authenticity and sincerity if I didn’t address it in me also. So it became this dual project of research and reporting and writing and also, deep internal work and struggle and questioning and making mistakes and screwing up and trying to repair over and over.

Debbie Millman:

Well, thank you for doing that work, because I know that initially, there was someone that very early on in your writing suggested that your work was paternalistic and I know that that was something that hurt you, but then it gave you the opportunity to look inward. How did that change your approach?

Jessica Nordell:

When my own work was described that way by people that I respected, I responded, I think the way a lot of us do when we’re called out on something that we haven’t seen in ourselves, I got really defensive. I got angry. I did a lot of justifying. I realized that that was a grief reaction. Anger, denial, bargaining. That was grief and…

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I think under profound anger is always grief.

Jessica Nordell:

Yes. And I think was grieving some lost innocence. I thought that I was one person and what I found was that there were ugly sides of my own mind and heart that I hadn’t seen before, but I came to see that as a huge gift, because it allowed me the opportunity to see things I hadn’t seen about my own thinking, the racism that I had internalized from our culture, the sexism I had internalized from our culture. And I think it’s only when we see those things that we actually have the opportunity to start to shift and change. So it was a huge gift to me, ultimately.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I think that those are the moments where we really learned the most about who we are. Part of what I learned as I was even coming out later in life was the fear that I had doing that because of my own inner homophobia. So I think if people begin to see that our biases are something that we’ve been taught, it becomes a lot more urgent for us to unlearn those so that we don’t perpetuate them.

Jessica Nordell:

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:

Jessica, I have one last question for you. You talked about it a little bit, but I want to ask you about what’s next on your horizon. What are you gearing up to do?

Jessica Nordell:

So with this book, one thing that’s been really exciting is I’ve heard from lots of different communities that are using the book. And so, I’m developing some reading guides for different communities, churches, synagogues, different groups that are using the book in their own journeys. So that’s been really rewarding. And then, I’m thinking and I’m developing the next project, which is going to be looking at mental health.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, good, wonderful. Yet another thing so many of us need help with. Jessica, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Jessica Nordell:

Thank you so much, Debbie. I truly enjoyed the conversation.

Debbie Millman:

Jessica Nordell’s book is The End of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias and Create a More Just World and it is just out now in paperback. Buy yourself a copy and buy everyone you know a copy as well. You can find out more about Jessica and her many projects on jessicanordell.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.

Speaker 3:

Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the school of visual arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

Debbie Millman:

True or false? Steven Heller came of age in the 1960s and has never done drugs, not even marijuana. Steven Heller stopped drinking alcohol as a young man when he found himself running through Greenwich Village in February with his pants off and decided he couldn’t handle it anymore. Steven Heller worked for the New York Review of Sex and Screw Magazine before becoming an art director at the very serious New York Times where he worked for decades. Steven Heller has written more than 200 books. Last one, true or false? Steven Heller has appeared on Design Matters more often than any other guest. Listeners, true, true, true and true and much of it is recounted in Steve’s new book Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. Steven Heller, welcome back. It is always an absolute delight to see you back in our little recording booth.

Steven Heller:

I feel very unclaustrophobic in here.

Debbie Millman:

Good, I’m glad. Steve, let’s get right into the book. You start Growing Up Underground stating the following. This book is about, you guessed it, me. However, it is not a trek through the hills and valleys of my autobiographical topology, I focus instead on how blind luck put me in intriguing places with curious people from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These first three sentences on their own lead me to my first three questions. Ready?

Steven Heller:

I’m ready.

Debbie Millman:

First question, I know you’ve been writing, rewriting, cutting and pasting snippets of your autobiography on and off for almost 20 years. The turning point to actually doing it came after reading designer Paul Sahre’s book, Two-Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir. How did that influence you?

Steven Heller:

It just made me competitive. It was unusual for a designer to write what was officially technically a memoir or autobiography. There are lots of monographs and there are lots of me, me, mes in the monographs, but Paul actually covered his life and I reviewed it for Eye Magazine and I said, “I’ve been sitting around with little bits and pieces of this for a long time, so I’d like to do one too before my coil unravels.”

Debbie Millman:

My second question about that intro was why the specific timeframe, that 10-year timeframe from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s?

Steven Heller:

Well, I was a big fan of John Reed who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. I wanted to do something that was 10 years that shook my world.

Debbie Millman:

Then last question, do you really truly feel as if it were blind luck that put you in these intriguing places with these specific and intriguing people? What about the specific choices that you made to get to those places? I just have such a big issue with the idea of luck.

Steven Heller:

Well, I have an issue with luck and fate, but I think there was some divine intervention and that’s the reason why I never did drugs.

Debbie Millman:

Why is that, Steve?

Steven Heller:

Because in my superstitious semi-religious way, I said to myself, if I ever do a drug, something terrible will land on my head, the old piano falling out of the window.

Debbie Millman:

Roxane Gay, my wife, also feels that way. I think she’s done drugs one time and she’s written an essay about how that one time she smoked marijuana, she was so paranoid she was laying on the bed. She was so paranoid she was going to fall off the bed. She actually thought about tying herself to the bed and ended up in the hospital, but that’s a whole other podcast on a whole other day.

Steven Heller:

We’re funny people.

Debbie Millman:

You go on to state in the introduction that this is not a comprehensive life story. Rather, you’ve assembled a sampler of essays that revolve around two facets of your life. First, the personal, which includes a psychological rationale for being a typically rebellious teenager and the professional, which reveals how becoming rebellious led you into a career as a graphic designer and art director first with the underground newspapers and hippie pornography that we’re going to talk about, and how that ultimately led to a 33-year career at the straight and narrow New York Times. What made you decide to structure the book in this way?

Steven Heller:

Well, I didn’t think my total existence on the planet would make for good stories. I structured it in this way so that I would have less to write. I did a biography, as you know, of Paul Rand who lived to be 86, and then I did a few years after that, a biography of Alvin Lustig who lived to be 45. I always joke that I chose Alvin Lustig because he had less years, which meant less work. I figured 10 years was a good book-ended journey.

Debbie Millman:

Because anybody that knows you knows what a slacker you are in terms of shirking away from hard work.

Steven Heller:

Well, I have a ambivalence about work.

Debbie Millman:

You are what you refer to in the book as an appointment baby. Talk about that.

Steven Heller:

I think the appointment baby issue is really what triggered the final manuscript. I found out one strange day that my mother had made an appointment with her doctor to induce labor and have me, and I had never heard that story before and she seemed to be very proud of it. I realized that it fit her narcissistic way of living that she wanted to go on a trip, which my parents did often, all over the world. She wanted it on a certain date, which meant I had to be born prior to her leaving on her cruise, which meant that her figure had to return and she had to look as good as she could on said cruise. I became an appointment baby and I never heard the term before. I’ve heard about induced pregnancies, I’ve heard about cesareans, but the appointment baby thing seemed so 1950s.

Debbie Millman:

Did she get her figure back in time?

Steven Heller:

She said she did. In fact, when she was showing this video that she had made from an eight-millimeter film, my father was dutifully photographing her on B deck and he was on A deck and I wasn’t around anywhere. My wife, Louise Fili, she was showing the video too said, “Where was Baby Steve?” My mom said, “He’s at home with the housekeeper.”

Debbie Millman:

Shortly after you were born, she just left you, handed you off to the housekeeper and took a cruise with your dad?

Steven Heller:

Yeah, her figure was back.

Debbie Millman:

It’s sort of crazy to think about what women did back in those days in the ’60s. My mother proudly told me that she decided when she was pregnant with me that she was going to go on a diet and the first, this is what she told me proudly, the first thing she did after she had me was weigh herself.

Steven Heller:

Well.

Debbie Millman:

How is this something you think is good?

Steven Heller:

I think people worry about a lot of personal things that are perhaps triggered by the chemicals in the brain that happen when you’re in that kind of physical state.

Debbie Millman:

That’s generous of you.

Steven Heller:

I’ve become a little less cynical about the whole affair having written about it and having cut out a lot of the anger part.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get past that? What gave you the sense that that wasn’t something that would necessarily be helpful to the memoir?

Steven Heller:

Well, I didn’t want to write a revenge book because there was nobody I wanted to take revenge against. I mean, I’d do it all over again the way it happened because the way it happened is what’s turned out and I’m relatively happy within my constant depression. The paradox is that for 10 years before my mom passed away at 93, she was writing a memoir and she was doing it all in long hand on sheets of paper of different sizes and colors.

She had this huge file and that every time I would come to their house for dinner, which wasn’t often, but every time I did, she would pull the file out and say, “Can you please help me edit this?” It became an absurd part of my life. I just wanted to avoid it in such a visceral way that I would just say, “Nope,” cut her off and she’d continue. She was very persistent and tenacious. It was all about her travels around the world. I presume there was some interesting things in there because they had met a lot of interesting people, but I wasn’t about to spend a large chunk of my life and time rehashing her life.

Debbie Millman:

Do you still have those files and that writing?

Steven Heller:

I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:

That’d be an interesting read.

Steven Heller:

I have the eight-millimeter films my father took, but they’re films and we haven’t transferred them to digital.

Debbie Millman:

Early on in the book, you tell us your full legal name isn’t Steven Heller. Can you share what that name is, what your full legal name is and why you don’t use it?

Steven Heller:

No, because then people won’t buy the book.

Debbie Millman:

You’re going to want to make people? Spoiler alert.

Steven Heller:

No, I can tell you.

Debbie Millman:

Oh good.

Steven Heller:

It’s Harmon, H-A-R-M-O-N. It was the name of a baseball player who played second base and I think outfield as well for the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins or some team like that. His name was Harmon Killebrew. Even though I wasn’t named after him as a kid, camp counselors and so-called friends would call me Killerbrew or Killer, but I thought the name being rather odd to find a person that I didn’t want to be. The names that people have now are so exotic and eccentric. I could easily have been called Moon or Moon Walker and live nicely with it in the ’60s, but that name wasn’t going to get me very far.

Debbie Millman:

Now, is it true that Louise Fili, your wife, the legendary designer, Louis Fili, told you that she probably would not have wanted to go out with you if she knew your legal name was Harmon Heller?

Steven Heller:

That’s what she said.

Debbie Millman:

Why? It seems uncharacteristically shallow.

Steven Heller:

It is uncharacteristically shallow of her, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want to have to yell, “Harmon.”

Debbie Millman:

When did you tell her about your name?

Steven Heller:

I told her a year after we met. I didn’t tell my son until he was about five or six years old.

Debbie Millman:

Now, from what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong here with my research and the material from your book, when you were 15, your parents went on a month-long sight seeing trip to Russia and they sent you to live with a family friend in Stockholm, Sweden. The Swiss were the first folks who refused to call you Harmon. They felt Steve was easier to say. And so, you became Steven Heller at that time. Is that true?

Steven Heller:

Sweden changed my life.

Debbie Millman:

How so?

Steven Heller:

Forever and ever. Well, it changed my life in terms of the name. I realized I didn’t have to live with that albatross around my neck, but it also changed in terms of political consciousness and social consciousness. The people I lived with were very enlightened about world events. Vietnam was just beginning. There were many Europeans who were against our involvement and I lived with one family that was definitely communist. I was, let’s say, indoctrinated between courses of smoked fish and other things.

Debbie Millman:

Now, while you were there, in addition to your political awakening, you also grew your hair and in your book, you write about how at the time, strangers went out of their way to physically and verbally attack you when you came back because your wavy black hair was down to your shoulder and your hair then became a lightning rod for really rude comments and unwanted physical contact that culminated in an experience at the all boys prep school you attended. Can you talk a little bit about what happened at that point?

Steven Heller:

Well, in Sweden, they were far ahead socially of the US just as they were in England. What seemed like freak show, hippies called themselves freaks, was perfectly normal in Sweden, but I felt that hair had always defined me. It was the thing that was a lightning rod for my mother. She was always very particular about dress and appearance and grooming, and it was the easiest way to defy her by changing the norm.

I grew the hair long and I had no real sense that it would be offensive to anybody. I knew it would be different. I was self-conscious about doing it, but I did it anyway. But it really did cause people to be upset, they questioned what their lives were about. It triggered some sort of deep mass psychosis so that Greenwich Village was the only safe place I could be unless I disguised myself, which I essentially did and took strange circuitous roots through dangerous parts of the Lower East Side to get to MacDougal Street.

Debbie Millman:

They made you cut your hair when you went to school.

Steven Heller:

I went to a boys prep school and I went there because my parents had me tested at NYU a thematic apperception test, which to this day I despise. It was actually a fun test because they show you these drawings that had some things purposely going on. They’d have different objects. It was the opposite of a Rorschach test and it was intended to let your emotions dictate how you saw the narrative of the picture. There was one that just cracked me up, and I don’t explain why it cracked me up in the book because there’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but it was prurient to say the least. The graduate student who is giving me the test just made copious notes as I’m unable to speak, I’m laughing so hard, but it turned out that that test was the measuring stick that was used to determine whether I would have a normal co-ed life or become a regimented businessman to be.

Debbie Millman:

Why did they make you cut your hair? Why were they so brutal about your hair in that school?

Steven Heller:

Well, you got to remember that in those days, everybody was kind of organization man, except on a younger level. There was a lot of conformity and prep schools were conformist by their very nature. This particular school, which doesn’t exist anymore, thank heavens, had what was called a dean of discipline and his name was Demi. I used to think he was a demigod, but he would stand at the top of the stairway as we answered the bell for the first period, and he would literally measure the amount of fringe that went over your shirt collar. If there was too much, well he would tell you to have it cut by the next day or if there was too much, as in my case, he had other means.

Debbie Millman:

Which was rather devastating.

Steven Heller:

Which was very traumatic. I mean, the school was adjacent to the YMCA and there was a barber in the YMCA and he and Demi must have worked out a strategic tortured plan, kind of the equivalent of water boarding. It sent me into a tailspin. That combined with my mother’s obsession with it and being proper and all, I just started slowly or quickly going down the slope.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I mean, it’s really, from what I understand, what motivated you to start drawing pictures of your feelings and those drawings became a big part of who you were and they became a topic of your twice weekly therapy sessions and really, I think in many ways it seems like those drawings saved your life.

Steven Heller:

Being able to draw was a release after the haircut, which was basically taking a nice head of black hair and making it into what I look like now. I just went home and I stayed home and I had to only go to school, but I went out and bought myself some Dr. Martin’s dyes and some India ink and sketchbooks and started drawing. I had a particular apocalyptic view that I talk about in the book.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that your therapist was so enamored by your work that it helped you develop confidence about your drawing.

Steven Heller:

She helped develop confidence in everything. She was the one that told my parents what they were doing wrong and you needed some intervention like that. She told them the things that could trigger me and whether it’s a snowflake kind of thing or whether it’s a really good intervention, I opt for the ladder, but she also did like the drawings a lot, and so, I thought there might be something here and I should continue. I did continue until it was suggested that I try to sell them to The New Yorker of all places.

Debbie Millman:

Start of the time.

Steven Heller:

New Yorker didn’t have any use for them. I remember at 15 or thereabouts visiting the art director of Evergreen Review who was an illustrator named Dick Hess, and I noticed when I went to pick up my portfolio the following day, it hadn’t been touched and that sent me into a tailspin for about 6 to 12 months.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad orchestrated a transfer. In the middle of your junior year, you transferred to Walden where Neil Shevlin, your art teacher, liked your work. I understand that his encouragement gave you the courage to begin to show your portfolio to several underground newspaper art editors. You’ve got a very different response from those editors and art directors. How did you even know about these underground newspapers?

Steven Heller:

Well, when I was 15 or so, I saw on the newsstand a cover of the East Village Other, and I show it in a slideshow of mine. It’s not in the book, and it was a collage of General William Westmoreland, the commander in the field of Vietnam. Coming out of his fatigue uniform was a serpent and I just loved that. Then there was another cover that I saw and I bought the issue and it was of Cardinal Spellman who was the vicar of the US Army, and he was the cardinal in charge of the New York Archdiocese and he had died. The headline read, Congratulations on your promotion.

It was just the kind of humor that I needed. I had grown up with an uncle who was a terrific man, professor at Columbia. His daughter, my cousin, is now Vice Dean of Law at Columbia. My other cousin, his daughter, is a cellist in Paris. He was the one who saved my butt. He told my parents to send me to the shrink or I would fall into the pit and never come out. He was the one that told me about the birds and the bees, told me about contraceptives, was frank with me just about everything and introduced me to the great comics of the era, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, Jules Feiffer, who was my hero and who I later worked with. I fortunately had that support. I didn’t have it 24 hours a day, but I remember the phone call on a Saturday morning where he called to tell my parents that I should be allowed to drop out of school.

Debbie Millman:

High school?

Steven Heller:

No, college. By that point, there was something else going on at NYU that led to my release, but he convinced them that I didn’t need college. He, of course, was a PhD and his field was among other things, academic freedom.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you started working after you graduated high school that’s why I was like, “Wait, I thought you graduated high school.” You were offered a job at the free press doing old school paste-up by the art director JC Suares, and he left the paper three weeks after he hired you. You became the defacto art director at 16 years old-

Steven Heller:

At 16.

Debbie Millman:

… of The New York Free Press. What was that like for you?

Steven Heller:

It was kind of unreal, but it was a job. I mean, I had been working since I was 12. I worked actually in the art department of Bergdorf Goodman. I worked for an advertising agency when I was 12 or 13. Didn’t last long at either place and screwed things up royally in both places, but working was not unusual or aberrant for me. When I was brought on, it just felt like, okay, this is the way life is. I was taught how to do something, not very well, but I fit the bill that they needed, but it was that stuff that got me interested in design, particularly design and illustration.

Debbie Millman:

You also decided at that time or around that time to create your own magazine with gift money that you saved from your bar mitzvah. How much money did you save and what made you decide at that point to start your own publication?

Steven Heller:

Well, I know exactly how much I made because my father was an accountant for the Air Force and he kept meticulous records. It was to be put away for college. College was not expensive then. NYU was probably $500 a semester and School of Visual Arts was even cheaper. But after experiences in both NYU and SVA where I was either thrown out or left depending on how you read the records, I had some of that money available to me.

Debbie Millman:

Well, just as an aside, you now have two honorary doctorates. Well done, Dr. Heller.

Steven Heller:

Denada.

Debbie Millman:

You titled the magazine Borrowed Time. Why that particular name?

Steven Heller:

Because I felt we all lived on borrowed time. I was reading a lot of Sarte and Camus at the time. The thing that kept me sane while I was in high school was reading Russian literature.

Debbie Millman:

That was my minor in college, by the way. I don’t know if you know that about me.

Steven Heller:

I didn’t know that. Well, Russian literature is not a lot of laughs.

Debbie Millman:

No, that’s why I love it.

Steven Heller:

But I would find myself alone during certain periods of time and I would go into the bathroom of our Stuyvesant Town apartment and there was a riser, a heat riser, steam riser, and you could hear into other people’s apartments through the riser. I would sit and listen to other people’s conversations and read my Russian literature. I didn’t feel alone, and at the same time, I felt kind of morose. I enjoyed feeling morose. I figured the Russians enjoyed feeling morose. I remember reading Lermontov and how depressing hero of our time was and how good I felt.

Debbie Millman:

Yep. I completely understand about Russian literature. People often ask me, “Oh see, that means you speak Russian?” I’m like, “No, no, no. I read it in English translation.” It was the content that I was so desperate to read and related to.

Steven Heller:

Well, at Walden, there was actually the woman who much later became the headmaster taught a Russian literature course. It was like you’d go in there all jolly and you’d come out with clouds over your head

Debbie Millman:

Weeping. Your friend Timothy Jackson was going to be the art director of Borrowed Time, but after Brad Holland answered an ad you placed for illustrators, he took over the role. I think that it’s safe to say that Brad Holland is one of the very big influences in your life and in the direction your life took at that point. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steven Heller:

Well, I devoted a whole chapter to Brad as my mentor. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s one of the greatest illustrators in the United States and really helped change the course of illustration from being a profession of visual mimics to creating content, creating ideas that would supplement or compliment texts. He had come off the boat, so to speak, from the Midwest. He had worked at Hallmark cards at the rabbit division is what he called it. He answered an ad for contributors.

Most of the contributors who answered the ad were just local hippies who I would see around periodically around Washington Square. Brad was the first serious artist that I met other than Neil Shevlin, who was my art teacher, who I learned later committed suicide. Brad just wanted to be able to place his drawings somewhere. He had just gotten hired by Playboy to do a monthly column. He had done something for Avant Garde. He had done all these little books for Hallmark. He was a true professional and he taught me what a typeface was. He taught me what a paste-up was. He taught me that you line things up, that there’s a grid that you follow. He gave me in a month’s time a full graduate program.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote this about what Brad taught you, and I want to read it because I think it’s so special. You write, Brad became my teacher, not in the ways of illustration, but in publication design in general and visual thinking specifically. I learned aspects of type use I hadn’t appreciated before. Notably, I learned to achieve expression through letters and their accents, voices and pitches. This is the expression that different faces bring to text and headlines. I admired Brad’s passion and listened spellbound as he told me about his duals with editors and art directors over his principle to never render anyone else’s ideas. I understood that Brad was not only fighting the conventional wisdom that an illustrator was merely the extension of an art director’s, or worse, an editor’s hands. He was also trying to radically alter, if not expunge, the conventions of slavishly sentimental illustration and create a more intimate personal art.

You and Brad joined forces with underground cartoonist Yossarian and created a plan to conquer the alternative art and cartoon world by offering subscriptions. You made a few hundred of the first and only issue of Borrowed Time and sent it to every underground newspaper that you could. Then you waited for the landslide of return subscription cards to arrive in the mail. What happened next?

Steven Heller:

Well, it was slightly different. We actually went out in front of the Fillmore East and sold them to people waiting online to see Big Brother in the holding company or whoever else was playing Johnny Winter’s brother. I remember Edgar Winter was in line for some reason.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Steven Heller:

He kept calling me gentleman. What we did was we started a syndication service called the Asylum Press. Brad did the logo. Well, we made a bunch of silkscreen posters of it. I have one framed in my office still. We thought we’d send this work to underground papers around the world and get some nominal fee for doing so. It didn’t really amount too much of anything except we did the one piece… Brad’s work was being picked up in any case. I mean, my stuff never really went that far. I got picked up I think by the Underground Press service, picked up by one of the Columbia University radical papers during the uprising there, but mostly, it was running in the New York Free Press where I had a weekly spot.

Debbie Millman:

Why did you decide to stop drawing?

Steven Heller:

I decided to stop because I wasn’t that good at it.

Debbie Millman:

According to who?

Steven Heller:

According to Brad, in a way, in a tacit way. He never said, “Hey, good work.” I assumed if you don’t say, “Good work,” that means you don’t think it’s good work. I wanted some sort of accolade, which I wasn’t getting. Also, I couldn’t draw realistically to save my life. I could draw expressionistically. There are a few of the images in the book and there was another reason, a silly reason in retrospect, but it was a reason nonetheless. My mother actually liked the drawings.

Debbie Millman:

Didn’t she collage with them?

Steven Heller:

She made a collage on a table. My mother would’ve been an artist had it been another time of life. She created children’s clothing lines. Some of it was about design. Most of it was about sourcing, but some of it was designy. She liked the drawings and wanted to show them to her friends. I say in the book, she used them like her travel photographs. I let her do it, but it really upset me that it was being exploited and co-opted. One reason for ending was my frustration with that. It was self-indulgent.

Debbie Millman:

Your drawing was self-indulgent or her behavior?

Steven Heller:

No, my drawing was self-indulgent to be sure, but to quit was self-indulgent. I was doing it for spite.

Debbie Millman:

I wish you hadn’t. In any case, by the time you were 17, ripe old age of 17, you became the first art director of Screw Magazine, which was the pioneering underground sex review that really helped trigger the 1960 sexual revolution. It was founded by Al Goldstein. How did you first meet Al and what gave him the sense you could art direct what was ostensibly a national magazine at 17 years old?

Steven Heller:

Well, first of all, it wasn’t a national magazine at the time.

Debbie Millman:

But it became one.

Steven Heller:

It became one, but we grew into it.

Debbie Millman:

But you grew into it with your talent, so it still counts.

Steven Heller:

Well, there was no talent involved. I mean, the pictures in the book will show that to anybody. I was working at the Free Press, our typesetter and managing editor was a guy named Jim Buckley, who was, I always thought very straight and narrow. When Al Goldstein came into our office unannounced one day, he came to sell a story. The story was about being an industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation. Goldstein had a lot of strange sub-careers.

He was a very neurotic, mixed up guy, but he could write his way out of a paper bag, as they say. He offered the story to our editor who thought it was worthy of publication. Not only that, it was worthy of going on the cover as the cover story. Unbeknownst to me, they came up with this idea to start a sex paper. Goldstein was writing these blood and gut stories, lover kills intruder with ice pick up the nose kind of thing for these tabloids that were run by a guy named Myron Fass.

The tabloids were national inquirer type things, except worse. They wouldn’t run anything related to sex. They thought sex was dirty, but ice pick murders were a-okay. Goldstein wanted to break that tradition of hypocrisy. Since he was also interested in getting laid a lot, he figured the best thing to do was start a sex paper.

Debbie Millman:

Ah, the ’60s.

Steven Heller:

I happened to be sitting in an office adjacent to the typesetting machine, and somebody must have asked, “Who’s going to paste this up?” They looked at me and I looked at them and I did. It looks like I just chopped things out of books and threw them on a page. It was very easy in those days because you could use wax, which also felt very soothing on the hand.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get Milton Glaser to design the Screw logo?

Steven Heller:

Well, that came many years later. I worked for Screw for first six issues and then Goldstein and I got into a big fight about the change of the logo. I didn’t know how to draw letters or do typography or lettering, but I knew that what we had was terrible. I knew that what he wanted to use, which some friend of his made was just as bad, if not worse. He called me one night to say, “We’re using it.” I said, “I’m not going to use it.” He was often not the most pleasant person, although I really loved him dearly, but he made me cry. The next day, I quit and started my own sex paper.

Debbie Millman:

What was that like?

Steven Heller:

That was just like normal. Why not start a sex paper? I had an idea with my co-publishers that we would do something different from what Screw did. Screw was kind of the funny, but raunchy. We were going to be more serious and artistic. We managed to get Grove Press to finance the first issue. We got full color printing on a heavier news print. I got type faces from these $1 a word places and I was actually able to design something that was not as embarrassing as Screw, but I was also called the only person in New York that could make a sex paper fail.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Steven Heller:

Because we couldn’t sell. The first few issues sold. It was called The New York Review of Sex. Then, we called it the New York Review of Sex & Politics.

Debbie Millman:

Politics, yes.

Steven Heller:

Ultimately, the New York Review of Sex & Aerospace and then it was gone.

Debbie Millman:

While you were working on the fourth issue of the New York Review of Sex & Politics, you received a telephone call from the New York District Attorney’s Office. What did they tell you?

Steven Heller:

They said, “Don’t leave. We’re coming over. You’re under arrest.”

Debbie Millman:

And you obeyed, you did not leave.

Steven Heller:

No, I had no place to go. I was cowed by authority anyway. My partners who were much older than I-

Debbie Millman:

You were still a minor.

Steven Heller:

I was a minor and my partners weren’t around. One of the cops who came, I call him the heavy set one. He had come to our office a few weeks before and bought a bunch of papers saying he ran an adult bookstore. That was the evidence they needed.

Debbie Millman:

It was a sting operation.

Steven Heller:

It was a sting. The younger cop, the thinner cop, Toody and Muldoon from Car 54, he was an idealist. He was interested in disrupting the mob and Screw, the New York Review of Sex, all the other underground sex papers were distributed by mob families. That’s a whole other story and a whole other book. But he said, we’re not looking to shut you guys down, but we are interested in disrupting organized crime.

Debbie Millman:

But they were rounding up all of the Blue Magazines.

Steven Heller:

There was a lot of vice policing in New York City. Gay clubs were being raided all the time. It was the era of the massage parlor. At a certain point, it calmed down. But apparently, all you needed was one or two people or organizations to complain to the District Attorney about something and he’d go after, unless, of course, there was some legal reason he shouldn’t. We I think were able to prove in state supreme court that it was prior restraint, and legally, they had no right to take our publications off the newsstand. In those days, you had to be a veteran to run a newsstand. There were a lot of blind newsstand dealers, so they didn’t even know what they were selling, but they would have their papers taken from them and sometimes be arrested. It was a crazy time legally.

Debbie Millman:

In the period between that arrest and the trial, you were arrested again in another roundup. Somehow during the blitz of briefs and testimony, it was determined that the DA did not adhere to the law and you were exonerated on all charges before going to trial. At that point, your newsstand distributor gave you an ultimatum, either you include more hardcore sex, so first it was being taken off the newsstands because it was too lewd, now the distributors wanted you to have more hardcore sex to interest a viable readership or he fooled you. I believe that’s when you went back to Screw.

Steven Heller:

No, that’s when I went to a magazine called Rock. I went from sex to rock and roll.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, the Rock Magazine, not… I have so much sex on the brain that I was like, “That’s right. Rock Magazine, the magazine for men with rocks.”

Steven Heller:

No, I remember it was Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.

Debbie Millman:

I have a dirty mind, I’m sorry.

Steven Heller:

I didn’t work for High Times, although I knew a bunch of the editors there.

Debbie Millman:

But you were in jail for a bit, right? You were held?

Steven Heller:

I was held in a detention pen twice. The first time it was with the prostitutes because I was underage and I had a long ponytail at the time and they were all playing with it. It all seemed very cute and they were making jokes. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to be in the tombs in New York City. I’m sure it still isn’t. But the second time I was arrested, I had turned 18. I was no longer with the goyles. I was with hardened vagrants and drunks and other people that were put in the tank for night court.

Debbie Millman:

You have a rap sheet?

Steven Heller:

No, I was able to expunge the rap sheet. I thought it would help me expunge other things, but it never did.

Debbie Millman:

While you were at Rock, now it’s all coming back to me, that’s where you met Patti Smith.

Steven Heller:

I met Patti Smith there.

Debbie Millman:

She was an editor, right? An editor and a writer.

Steven Heller:

Well, she was a writer, reporter. I mean, anybody who was a writer was kind of an editor. She was an interesting character who often talked about her ambitions to be a rock and roll star and mentioned a few names in passing a lot that were of interest to me like Sam Shepard, the playwright. I loved his work, particularly Operation Sidewinder. She never mentioned Robert Mapplethorpe. She mentioned Todd Rundgren a lot and I was not a fan of Todd Rundgren.

Debbie Millman:

For shade.

Steven Heller:

But we hung out a little bit. At that time, Rock Magazine was producing rock and roll shows at the New York Academy of Music, which became the Palladium. I would do programs and posters and things for the shows. Most of the shows were oldies shows, 1950s doo-wop groups, really great ones too. But one show we had was Van Morrison, Linda Ronstadt, and Tim Buckley. She and I went to the show and that’s where we kind of disappeared. She went one way. I went the other.

I had heard that she was fired from the paper because the publisher wanted more reportage and she was writing more lyrical stuff. But she met her lifelong music partner there, Lenny Kaye, who was a writer for us, who I always liked. I’m still in touch periodically with him. It just became this one little blip in her life and in my life, it meant something years later when she became a punk icon.

I ran into her one day because her kids went to the same school that my son went to. I said, “You don’t remember me, I’m sure, but we used to hang out.” She looked at me and she kind of in a daze said, “Oh yeah, I remember that. What are you doing now?” I said, “Well, I’m art director of The New York Times Book Review.” She said, “Oh, they just gave me a bad review for a book of poems.” That was the end of it.

Debbie Millman:

You then went back to Screw and that’s when you worked with Milton. Talk about that experience.

Steven Heller:

Well, when I went back to Screw, I wasn’t sure I was going back to Screw. I had finished what I could do with Rock. I was going to do an interim gig at Screw because I met the woman who became my first wife there. The magazine just looked like shit. I had learned to discern good from bad or at least good for mediocre. I suggested that they get a redesign. Since I figured I wasn’t going to be working there very long, let somebody else redesign it and I’ll pick up the pieces.

I had heard about Push Pin for the longest time and I convinced Al and Jim to contact Push Pin and see whether they’d be interested. Seymour Chwast, co-founder with Milton who is my best friend now, admitted to me that there was no question that they would do it because they did anything that would pay money. Goldstein was willing to pay a fairly sizable amount at that time. They took it on as a serious job. Milton did some logos and Seymour did some logos. Seymour’s, as I remember, more decorative. Milton did one that was just so corporate, it seemed a total anomaly. He did a Helvetica logo, all caps, and he took the middle part of the E and extended it like a hard-on into the W.

Debbie Millman:

One of the great logos of the 20th century, Steve.

Steven Heller:

Probably.

Debbie Millman:

It really is. Really so witty and-

Steven Heller:

It sure beats out I love New York.

Debbie Millman:

Well, definitely on par.

Steven Heller:

But I didn’t appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Steven Heller:

I really didn’t. I didn’t appreciate the Helvetica and the pages inside were stripped of any kind of decorative elements. He redesigned the Peter Meter, which was Al Goldstein’s measuring stick for-

Debbie Millman:

Device.

Steven Heller:

… films. He redesigned the shit list, which was also one of Goldstein’s favorite tools. But they used Helvetica, Lightline Gothic, straight columns. There was no ragging or anything like that. The photographs were basically straight black and white pictures on a full page, no bleed because it was a tabloid. When they gave us the pages to work with, they had tissues over them. I put it my own tissue over their tissues. I made copious notes about why this is bad. Goldstein sent it back to Milton and had me surreptitiously listen on the other extension. Milton was rather annoyed by it. I lost my battle and the Glaser issue came out and we continued to follow his lead for about six months. Then a year later, I had somebody come in with an airbrush and balloon up the Helvetica so that it could be run as a duotone and give a sense of marqueeness.

Debbie Millman:

In 1973, Brad Holland had a party wherein you met the great Ruth Ansel, then our director of The New York Times Magazine. There, you talked about the magazine business. You asked if you could show her your portfolio. She agreed. The meeting went better than you could have ever expected. What happened next?

Steven Heller:

Well, we had lunch and we seemed to get along. I was looking for another job. I wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be an art director. Herb Lubalin was always a hero. There were other designers who were doing things that were of interest to me like Lester Beall, Frank Zachary, who was the art director of Holiday Magazine. I related to him. I didn’t know what he did, but his name was on the masthead as art director so I thought he must be great. We later became good friends.

Ruth and I talked magazines and she looked at the portfolio, which had stuff in there that was from Screw and stuff that was from other places and other things that I did at Screw. We did other publications, some that weren’t sexual. She seemed to like what I did with type or she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She offered to me a temporary position designing pages for the magazine. Said she had to show her boss, Lou Silverstein, who was the great newspaper designer and assistant managing editor of The Times. I got a call a few weeks later saying Lou wanted to see me about another job.

By this time, most of my friends who were illustrators were working for the op-ed page. It was like that was the creme de la creme-

Debbie Millman:

Holy grail, absolutely.

Steven Heller:

… of illustration and of alternative journalism at the time. Lou said, “I’d like you to help out with the op-ed page.” I kind of pressed him, “Do you mean art director?” He went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Art director.” He offered me less than I was making at Screw. There were less benefits. Screw gave incredible benefits and I figured this would be a good career move. I took the offer.

About two weeks after I started, I had two offices. I had an office in the art department, long desk in this crazy old 1930s art department, and I had an office up on the editorial floor around the library and in that area where all the editorial writers. Here were the kings and queens of editorial journalism and I was one of the members of the group.

I got a call from the guards downstairs and they said, “There’s some guys down here with very long hair that want to see you.” I figured the guards were just being guardy. People with long hair were still suspect. He said, “And you have to come down and we can’t let them in until you come down.” I came down and the first thing I saw when I turned the corner from the elevator bank were three apes, three people dressed in ape suits. They took me into a limousine and brought me to the market diner where the owner came out with a big bucket of bananas. That was just one of three different times Al Goldstein did his best to embarrass me at The New York Times.

Debbie Millman:

But it didn’t work. You ended up not only working for the op-ed page, you also ended up becoming the art director of The New York Times Book Review, this section that is one of the most read sections of any newspaper in the world. You did that for 33 years.

Steven Heller:

I did that for a long time.

Debbie Millman:

You worked for six different editors while you were at The New York Times Book Review and you write about how this job became the foundation of your professional life as an art director and all that followed, but you conclude the book stating that that is another story.

Steven Heller:

That is another story. I had grown up. It’s called Growing Up Underground. I had come out of the caverns of New York. I knew Hilly Kristal who started CBGBs. When I saw CBGBs for the first time before he opened it, I thought, this is disgusting and I had no desire to be part of that group. Certain friends of mine were already making their way out of the underground. The op-ed page was this transitionary point. I did it for two and a half or three years, whatever it was. I did the Book Review simultaneously for six months or more. I didn’t get along with the op-ed editor

Debbie Millman:

Charlotte Curtis.

Steven Heller:

Charlotte Curtis, who Gay Talese warned me to watch out for when I got the job at the time as he was working on his book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He spent a lot of time at Screw and I just figured that was a good place to end because if I started on the Book Review, everything else falls into place after that and I didn’t know how to make it into the same kind of story.

Debbie Millman:

Will there be a sequel to this memoir to tell those stories? Seems like there’s so much more to still be told.

Steven Heller:

Well, I’m not sure. I liked the idea of writing something that was very personal. I’ve written a lot of objective essays, journalism reportage. This was, as you said upfront, about me. I don’t see myself as a fiction writer, but I do see something that happened during those 30 years that could make a possible roman a clef. (romanaclef?)

Debbie Millman:

I’ve known you a long time. I’m very fortunate you had your lunch with Ruth Ansel. I had my lunch with you, the lunch that changed my life, that helped me write my first book, which you essentially handed to me on a silver platter, invited me to co-found the masters in branding program where we’re speaking in my little podcast studio.

It is a glorious, glorious book. I’ve read it several times. I have spent the last hour plus talking with you about just a sliver of some of the remarkable stories that you recount in this book, time working at Interview Magazine, working with so many of some of the world’s greatest art directors and illustrators. For listeners that might want to hear more about Steve’s many experiences at The Times or his role as co-chair at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Designer as entrepreneur, or his 40 years at the helm of Print Magazine or the other 199 books he has written, we have 14 episodes with Steve in the Design Matters archive that you could listen to in anticipation of the sequel to this remarkable memoir.

Steve, I just want to thank you so much for everything that you do in the world, for your writing, for your reportage, for your generosity, and for your friendship. Thank you for joining me today to talk about this remarkable new book of yours. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters.

Steven Heller:

Well, I must thank you. You’re the first person to interview me on this book.

Debbie Millman:

It’s good.

Steven Heller:

I have looked forward to it for a long time. Our friendship is very important to me and dear to me, and it’s been a great ride.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Thank you. Steven Heller’s latest book, his memoir is titled, Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. You can read more about Steve and read about all of his other wonderful books he’s written at hellerbooks.com and you can read his daily Heller column on printmag.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Roxane Gay:
A few short years ago, Candace Carty-Williams came out with her debut novel Queenie, about a young Jamaican British woman in London trying to get her life together after a bad breakup. It’s funny and sharp and deeply felt, and one of those books that makes you think this woman is one hell of a storyteller. Well, we’re lucky because now she’s back with her second novel, People Person. And it is the best book I’ve read all year. The novel follows the Pennington family, five siblings really who have the same itinerant father, who has been mostly absent from their lives. When Dimple Pennington runs into something of a crisis with her boyfriend, she turns to the family she hasn’t seen in years. And now as adults, the siblings reconnect and help Dimple solve the biggest problem in her life. And in doing so, they find that the bonds between them are stronger than they could have ever imagined. I am so excited to speak today with Candace about her novels, her work in publishing, and where she goes from here. Candace Carty-Williams. Welcome to Design Matters.

Candice Carty-Williams:

Roxanne Gay, thank you very much for having me.

Roxane Gay:
I am so pleased to see you again.

Candice Carty-Williams:
And me too.

Roxane Gay:
We first met need to in London with the Black Girls Book Club. I’m curious, you’ve said in a number of interviews that you came to writing late and never really thought of yourself as a writer when you were younger. And I’m wondering what was that moment that made writing possible for you where you thought, “Actually, I might be a writer and I can do this?”

Candice Carty-Williams:
Is that day coming yet? I don’t know. I still may be not there, but do you know what it was? It was working in publishing and seeing so many books coming through, but none that I could relate to really. And finding that really hard and honestly writing Queenie was me being like, “Let me give it a go, let me see. I like stories, I like to tell stories, I like to hear stories. So maybe if I try one for myself, it could be something.” Writer, is still something that I’m grappling with. I get imposter syndrome. I suffer from it badly all the time. But I think it was just me being like, “You got something to say.”

Roxane Gay:
How do you go from, “I have something to say,” to a novel because I know that you wrote a lot of the novel at JoJo Moyes’ Country House, which sounds made up when you say it out loud. What was it about that space that opened those flood gates?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I think when I go back to sort of this imposter syndrome thing, I’d won this place on this retreat and I borrowed my friend’s car because I didn’t have a car. And I drove that, I bombed it down the motorway. And when I got there, I just knew that I had to earn my place. And I was like, “You can’t leave without having done something.” And it’s not that Jojo was ever going to come in and be like, “How much have we done?” But I was like, “You owe it to yourself and you owe it to being in the space to produce something from that.”

And so when I got in, I locked myself in there and I wrote maybe 8,000 words I think on the first night because I was like, “You have to do this, You have to this because also you don’t have the space otherwise.” London is a very loud, London is very busy. And I’m one of those people that always, I really try and beat, have gratitude about being in a space that isn’t mine. Or in a space that’s kind of been given to me. And so it was just being very much like, “Earn this now.”

Roxane Gay:
What does your writing process look like when you finally sit down? And I ask that because every time I ask a writer, “How do you do it?” Every writer has a different answer and even sometimes can’t even articulate how I do it. I’m like, “I sit down and most of the time I mess around on the internet, but then once in a while, some words show up.” So what does that look like for you?

Candice Carty-Williams:
It’s in the middle of the night so that I can’t be distracted by the internet or by people. And it’s very intense. And so I will sit and I do a shift of writing for maybe eight hours. And then I will look up and be like, “Oh okay. You’re still here, you’re still fine.” And I won’t have done anything. I might have drunk some water. And then I tend to have a cigarette at the end to punctuate the session. So I know that I’m done, I’m a very weird sort of purist and then I feel quite sick and I feel kind of giddy. And then I have to not do any writing again for another maybe three days, three, four days.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, interesting.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Just to recover. So I’m good at giving myself recovery time because if I try and do it again the next day, my head will explode.

Roxane Gay:
It’s interesting because I do try to write every day, but my best writing, and I will say all of my books were written in very compressed amounts of time. And for many, many hours a day, I wrote my first novel, An Untamed State, writing up to 10 hours a day during a summer. Because I knew this was the only unstructured time I was going to have before a new semester started. And so I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And I was just deeply within the story. And so it’s really wonderful to hear that another writer has a similar process where sometimes you just hit the ground running and I’m a night writer as well. I need everything to be, I need the house to be quiet. I need the animals to be quiet. Yeah. I don’t do well with distraction.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Oh, I do. So I need a lot of noise. I need a lot of music.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, I watch television, I will say.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah no, something in the background. I’m really funny with quiet, so I’m in quiet right now while I talk to you and I’m very, I’m like, “What’s that noise?” What’s that? Who’s over there?” And so as soon as we finish, I brought my speaker with me on this book tour so I can have something all the time. But I love distraction because I think I’ve just got quite a jumpy fast mind and I think that feeds into it.

Roxane Gay:
What kind of music is best for you to write to?

Candice Carty-Williams:
At the moment, so it’s usually been sort of UK rap, lots of grim, but at the moment it’s soundtracks. So Romeo and Juliet soundtrack, that’s a firm favorite. West Side Story, firm favorite. Dream Girls, another great one. And also there’s, oh my gosh, Moulin Rouge, that one. That’s a very good one. So at the moment lots of film soundtracks and I love musicals. I love musicals so much. And so it’s like, “Okay, carry the energy of a musical or the camp all the loud, all the excitement and put it into the work,” if that makes sense.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. I love musicals. I love any situation where people might spontaneously break into song and dance and really make important life decisions through lyrics. Like, “Yes, give me more of that.” And Dream Girls is top 10 show, so good.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Absolutely.

Roxane Gay:
Now, Queenie received such a beautiful reception and I know that one of the things that motivated you to write Queenie was reading all of these books while working in publishing and not being able to connect to many of them. Not seeing anything resembling your life on the page. And now you’ve been able to give that to Black women. And so what has been your favorite moment of having a book like Queenie out in the world? And of course now People Person.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Thank you. It feels like a privilege, first of all. That is an incredible thing to me. And actually I really love being part of something that is a connector of people, that’s super important to me. But I get so many people who just tell me that Queenie made them feel less lonely. And that’s the thing that’s the most important to me because I wrote it because I was feeling so lonely. And when I say that I really had something to say, I just felt so sad always in myself in trying to be this girl, this Black girl who was perfect, who had her shit together. Who was really smart, who was really good at doing her hair, who had the right skin tone, who had the right nails, who had all of this stuff, and who dated properly and behaved properly.

And I was like, “I can’t be alone in always feeling this.” And so whenever I meet somebody who is like, “I’m the kind of girl that Queenie is,” I’m always like, “Okay, good.” Because she’s found her people. And that’s important, that’s me. And also when men read it is always really interesting to me and what their take homes are. But it’s always when women are like, “Yeah, I recognize her.”

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Candice Carty-Williams:
And not just her, but sometimes her mom. I like that connection.

Roxane Gay:
With Queenie, when I read it, I was like, “Oh, I love that. It was a story about a young Black woman who didn’t have it all together. Who was absolutely a mess, who was dealing with anxiety and needing to work on mental health.” And then also just having a sort of precarious living situation, which so many of us have in our twenties and thirties. So I love that you put that book into the world. I’m curious, how do you measure success as a writer? How do you feel like, “Yes, I’ve done good and I’ve made it?” Or do you feel successful?

Candice Carty-Williams:
Do I feel successful? It’s interesting. I don’t know what the measure is. I’m not interested really in money as a metric. I’m not really interested in social media following as a metric. I just like to, if anyone goes on social media, I just sort of post some stuff very irregularly. And my stories are just me doing stupid shit. I don’t have a curated brand. I’m not really interested in being that sort of person.

I think it’s knowing that someone has connected to my work, which takes back to what we’re talking about before. But that’s the thing for me that makes me feel like I’m important and feel like I can talk to someone. Because so much of my life, just as a person is always trying to find a way to connect with people. And I think having two books now where people can come and say to me, “Ah, you’ve captured what I have gone through and I didn’t know who to talk to about, I didn’t even know I needed to talk to about it.” That’s how I measure what success is to me. It’s having found a connection.

Roxane Gay:
Those connections can be so important. I read a piece in The Guardian, and you talked about how Queenie was written about Blackness and response to whiteness, but your second book was a book just about Black people. How have people responded to that difference in focus? And what are you really proud of in People Person and how you grew as a writer between Queenie and People Person?

Candice Carty-Williams:
Thank you. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask that. I’ve had a very interesting response to that, which I recognized quite early on. So I had lots of reviewers and all white ones actually say, it’s not Queenie. And it’s like, “Well yes. Well, of course not, it’s a different work.”

Roxane Gay:
Funny how that works.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Yeah, interesting. And so I think that there is something interesting that I’m finding and when I see plays and when I watch films. There is something about whiteness that is still, whiteness has to be centered even if it’s negatively because it’s at least you still recognize that I’m here. And so the lack of that in People Person I think has really flummoxed people. If there’s not even a lens being held up to me, then what’s the point? And I found that really interesting. So lots of people who were like, “Well, where are the white people?” And I had a journalist, a white journalist, ask me why I had othered the white people in the novel, in People Person. And I was like, “In what way do you mean?”

And she was like, “Well, they’re just the other.” And I was like, “I honestly don’t know what you mean.” I was like, “I’m not being rude, I just don’t know what that is.” And she was like, “Well, the woman in it, she’s described as a white woman.” And I was like, “Well, how would you describe yourself?” And she’s like, “Well, a woman.” And I was like, “Well, that’s the issue.” And so it’s that interesting thing of being like, “Unless I’m writing about whiteness in a way that even is negative, positive, anything.” Unless I’m signpost whiteness is something that is there that is disruptive, then no one really understands what I’m doing. And that’s really interesting.

Roxane Gay:
That is interesting. And it’s always revealing when you press white journalists and readers about their inherent biases about who is the center of a narrative universe. Because it reveals time and time again that what they’re really saying is that white people are the center of the universe. So I’m a woman, but you are a Black woman. You womanhood is qualified by your race. How do you have the, I don’t know what the word is, it’s not courage, but how do you hold that line with journalists and actually ask the questions? Or push back on the question so that they have to confront that sort of bias that they would normally be allowed to skate away with?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I think I try not to do this whole like, “I’m teaching people things.” Because I’m not necessarily interested in that as a sort of function of survival and living. But I definitely think you need to be asked this question and I think I’m going to ask it in a much nicer way than someone else is going to. And so it’s just being patient. And I’ve never been rude to a journalist, so I have had a lot of reason to be. But I’ve never, not because I’m afraid of I’m, I just don’t like being rude to people. I don’t think it’s very nice. But in this, it’s like, “Yeah, I just want you to have a think about what that is and in a space that is safe and in a space that I’m interested.” And I am interested, typically it’s not me being like, “Oh, I’ve caught you out.” It’s me being like, “How did we get here? And how did you get here? And how did you feel that this was appropriate to ask me or talk to me about.”

Roxane Gay:
That’s such a good question of how did you get here? And I’m also interested in the question of where do you go from here with this new information or new perspective? And as journalism goes, it’s rare that we get to follow up with journalists who are interviewing us. But I often think, where are you going to go from here? Is this just going to be an awkward blip on your radar or is this going to be a moment where you have actually learned something.

In People Person, one of my favorite things is that there really weren’t any white people. And it was refreshing and I didn’t realize it until I got to the end and I realized, “Wow, this was just about Black people in a Black community.” And even one of the siblings has a white parent. And even then we barely see her. She only pops up at the end when everyone comes together for something. I would love to know the origin story of People Person, because I loved this book so much, I just loved it. And I rarely say that about a book because there are a lot of okay books. But this was just so warm and so wonderful and the siblings… Tell me about the origin story of People Person.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Thank you so much, that really means everything as you know. So I was in lockdown, paint a picture, I was in lockdown. I was living by myself in a one bedroom flat. And I was incredibly lonely, very, very lonely all the time, obviously as many people were. And I spent a lot of time on the phone to various people as we all did because there was nothing to do. And I spoke to one of my big sisters. So my dad has nine children in total, my mom has two, and there are various step siblings here, there and everywhere. But I spoke to the eldest of my dad’s children with whom I have a good relationship, I don’t have that with the rest of them. And I just said to her, “Oh, what would happen if someone hurt me or someone did something to me?” And she was like, “Well, we would all be there.”

And I was like, “No, you wouldn’t.” And she was like, “No, we would, because even if we don’t all get on, we’re family.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then maybe an hour later I was like, “That’s going to be a novel. That’s what I have to do.” And I’d written another version of People Person before the one that you see in front of you. And I wasn’t vibing with it, I didn’t like it at all. And I’d done so much work on it. And I was halfway through the edit of that in lockdown, and I was like, “I just don’t care about this.” And so as soon as I started writing this new version of People Person, I could feel so connected to it. And I was like, “Okay, yeah. This is a sign. You just have to keep going with this one.”
And I off my editor, I pissed off my other editor, I pissed off my agent, I pissed off everyone. But I was like, “But you want me to talk about what I care about and what is real?” And it also occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything about Half siblings. So many people have them, and it’s such an interesting and delicate and often unsuccessful relationship, I think. And I would love for people to be able to talk about those things because I grew up with, as I’ve just said, so many half siblings. And I talk to a fraction of them. And that’s really, really hard. And it’s kind of like, “Okay, well…” A lot of my work in some ways is always, I guess, Queenie in some way was fantasizing about who I would be if I didn’t have to be sensible. And didn’t have to be in control all the time.

And this was fantasizing about what would happen if I did have a relationship with my half siblings and I wasn’t even necessarily Dimple. I think that I put bits of myself into all of those characters. I think I could only write them well because I believed in all of them and I believe in all the different bits of them that make up me. But it was definitely me exploring that. And then of course when it comes to dads, the relationship I have with my dad is effectively non-existent. Someone asked me at an event yesterday like, “Oh, has he said well done? Has he read the book?” And I was like, “Are you joking?” Like, “Of course, what?” They said like, “That felt like such a mad question.” And so thinking about dads and thinking about what it means to people when there is someone in your life who you are always taught by TV, by other books. By your friends, by other family members that you see, you are taught that this person is meant to love you and meant to care about you and meant to check in and meant to protect you.
What does it do when that doesn’t happen? What does it do to you when that doesn’t exist? And what does that do to five people who are very, very different in their ways? And how affecting is it when they are just going through life, not necessarily incomplete, but definitely with questions? And definitely understanding at some level that there was rejection there and how do they do that? And so my whole thing was like, “These five cannot reject each other. I can’t let them reject each other though way they’ve been rejected.”

Roxane Gay:
One of the things that I thought was most compelling about the book, most honest, and as a writer, just truly audacious, is that we have this, I think desire, at least I do, to give the reader everything they could possibly want. And then I pulled that back and give them about 85% if I could put a number on it of what they actually want. And what they think they need from the book. And toward the end, as the kids have dealt with the primary obstacle, but there’s still like, “Okay, now what do we do? And how do we engage with our father? How do we get him back in our lives?” And I don’t want to spoil the book for people, but you made a really interesting choice where you didn’t make the easy choice. How do you make difficult decisions in your writing and how do you make those difficult choices where you know that you may not satisfy every reader, but you satisfy the story instead?

Candice Carty-Williams:
So actually, it’s funny, I did the same thing in Queenie in a different way. I remember so many people have come up to me to be like, “Cassandra should have got what for? I can’t believe you let Cassandra get off.” And it’s like, “Yeah, but it’s good for the story.” I think it took me a long time to sit in this in myself. And this was when Queenie was coming out. I’m just thinking about how I like to do things in the world. And I thought, you can’t do this for everyone else. And I, of course, there were 10 versions of People Person that could have ended the way that I think would’ve served everyone. But that didn’t serve me as the writer and it didn’t serve my story. And it’s my job, I think, to be like, “What is the story that you want to tell? And you can only tell it convincingly if you tell it in the way that you need to.”
And so, yes, the ending of that, and actually lots of choices that I made in that were difficult. But they were followed because I was like, “But that’s the thing that’s authentic to me and that’s what the story is telling me to do.” And so I will listen to the story before I listen to anyone else. But when the book comes out, I love hearing from people. I love hearing their quivals. I love hearing their arguments. Queenie got a lot of shit as a person. And I had to keep saying to people, “She’s not real. This is a work of fiction.” And I wrote her this way because I knew it would, I wanted, it’s a story.

But I think she was so frustrating to say to people, that people forgot that she wasn’t a real person. And it elicited such a passionate response. And sometimes quite an angry response. And sometimes people are really being pissed off with me. It’s a bit intense. I think there is a space between writing the story and then the story coming out where I’m like, “You need to do what you need to do.” And then you just deal with everything afterwards. And I really like that. And I really like that it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I like making people feel things that they wouldn’t necessarily feel if I’d just given them the story that they’d expect.

Roxane Gay:
So there are five siblings, Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, Prince, and Dimple. And I noticed that all of them were distinct, which is challenging to do when you have an ensemble and you want people to understand that these people are connected, but they are also individuals. And so how do you build characters and how did you ensure that they would be distinct characters?

Candice Carty-Williams:
So I feel like this is a hack, but I just start with Zodiac signs. It’s the easiest thing ever for me.

Roxane Gay:
Oh yes.

Candice Carty-Williams:
So I’m just like, “Who is this person?” So Nikisha is an Aries, clearly. Danny’s obviously a Gemini. Dimple is a cancer. Lizzie is a Leo, and Princes are Sagittarius. And then it was like, “Put those five signs in a room, what’s going to happen?” And it was just the easiest thing. So I had so much fun being like, “Okay, so the most difficult relationship is going to be, I mean, Dimple in kind of everyone, because Cancer’s…” I’m a Cancer myself. And I’m so feeling that so many of my relationships were when I was younger, difficult because I didn’t understand why people didn’t feel exactly like I did. Why they didn’t respond exactly like I did. Why they weren’t quick to emotion like I was, I couldn’t get it.

And then as I got older, I was like, “Okay, star signs, think about this stuff.” And I started to get really into it. My mom was really into it, and I would always be like, “Okay, whatever.” But then I got older and I was like, “Oh no, this actually helps me as a framework for people.” And so I knew that having Dimple as a Cancer, her being that central point, those relationships that she was going to have, especially with Lizzie as a Leo, that is going to be very difficult. But also Nikisha, who would be always telling her what to do. And it’s like, “Why are you telling what to do and not thinking about my feelings? My feelings are so…” And then Prince, who is Sagittarius, it’s like, “Nothing sticks.” And her being like, “Everything sticks on me. Why does nothing thing stick on you?” And then Danny, who’s just this sort of wide thinking, Gemini, who’s really optimistic because he’s not bogged down by anything and he’s not bogged down by his past in particular.

And just thinking about Dimple and these people, but also the rest of them. And honestly, star signs is just my favorite thing because I just know what I’m dealing with. And so very simple. And just even down today, they would talk to each other and the way they would talk amongst themselves. And also the journey of them. So if I take two characters, Lizzie is a Leo, as I said, she’s very upfront. She’s going to say things, she’s going to call things, how she sees them.

And what we learn about her through her life is like, “Okay yeah. This is the person that she is.” But it’s not a surprise. It’s not a tell because we know how she’s going to operate. But Danny is a lot slower because he’s not urgent. He’s just thinking about things and taking the day as it comes. And so as his story is revealed, and it takes a lot of time, it takes time because Danny takes time. And so it’s just thinking about how they would be and how they are telling us who they are, just from that standpoint. And so I just had a very clear vision of them just with, I will always use Zodiac as my starting point because I don’t know, it just helps. It just feels like I have a great trick, like I’ve tricked everyone.

Roxane Gay:
I’ve never heard that before. And it makes sense. I mean that really, it really makes sense. I’m a Libra, so of course I would think it makes sense.

Candice Carty-Williams:
No, I know. Aren’t you a triple Libra?

Roxane Gay:
I am like a quintuple Libra. I have all but one of my suns are moons. A couple years ago for my birthday or anniversary, my wife got me a private reading by Chani Nicholas.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Oh, [inaudible 00:25:18] a dream, the dream.

Roxane Gay:
Oh. It was so good. Everything was in Libra. And I was like, “Yes, that tracks.” Seeing how these characters, yes, come together. And when you describe them through the Zodiac, I was like, “Yes, I know these people. I know them.” You mentioned your mother was very into the Zodiac.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Yes.

Roxane Gay:
What kind of relationship did you have with your mother growing up and now?

Candice Carty-Williams:
Gosh, my mom, I really love her. She’s a Gemini, it’s difficult. It’s difficult because she’s like a fucking fairy. I’m very far from a fairy. I’m very realistic. I’m not pessimistic, I don’t think, I’m very realistic. And she is optimistic to the point of delusion sometimes. But we get on, we had a difficult childhood, I would say. There was a stepdad involved and she just wasn’t able to be present in a way that I would’ve needed from her. But it was okay because my Nan swooped in and was like, “Right, fine. I look after you.” And other family member swooped in and they were like, “Right, well, she needs help.” And actually a lot of the stuff that we’ve worked through recently, a lot of therapy, a lot of my stuff has been around, I guess, acceptance and forgiveness of that. But I’ve always known that throughout everything, she’s a very kind person.

But I think that her optimism is a thing that gets her carried away and she flips off and she’s like, “Oh.” Like we will go to, I remember there were a few years of my life where I was suffering from terrible, terrible anxiety. And she’d dragged me somewhere, she’d be like, “No, you should come. I’ll stay with you the whole time. We’re going to have a nice time. I’ll look after you.” We’d get in and she would see her friend the second she stepped through the door and run away. And I wouldn’t see her for three hours. And so I was always like, “Oh, okay. That’s how it is.” But as time has gone on, I don’t want to say she’s like a friend because I still call her when things are upsetting. That’s the person that I want to speak to. And so it’s a relationship that I’m really happy that I work towards. I don’t want to say mending, but I work towards understanding, if that makes sense?

Roxane Gay:
It does.

Candice Carty-Williams:
And so she’s kind. That is so underappreciated sometimes.

Roxane Gay:
It does seem that way sometimes. And I value kindness probably above all other things because it can do so much and it can go such a long way. You can have other deficiencies, but if you’re unkind, I just don’t see a way forward.

Candice Carty-Williams:
I agree.

Roxane Gay:
But if you are kind, then we could probably work almost anything out. You’ve spoken very openly and eloquently about childhood trauma and dealing with anxiety and also getting healthcare through therapy. What prompts you to be open about the things that we tend to try and keep to ourselves instinctively?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I suffered so much when I was young with being this sort of strong Black woman. And I just wanted someone to be like, “I’m not, that’s all I wanted. I just wanted one person to be like, I’m not that strong.” And I never had that. And I was seeking it for years and years. Not in my family, not around my friends, not on social media. And so I made a decision when I had any sort of public profile to be someone who is like, “I’m not a strong Black woman at all.” And that’s fine because I’m sure there is someone out there who’s going to be like, “Well, great, neither am I.” And also it’s like, this is a very strange, you’ve seen 8 Mile, I imagine.

Roxane Gay:
Yes, I have.

Candice Carty-Williams:
And I think you just like Eminem does at the end, Rabbit, you just got to say the stuff people might say about you up front because there’s nothing I’m ashamed of. In my bio it says that I’m the product of an affair. That’s true. And had this idea of a journalist being like, “Oh, so your parents, were they together?” And me having to be like, “Oh.” And maybe someone finding out that. And I was like, “No, I’m never going to have anything that anyone can use against me.”

And so I think it’s two things, it’s like, I don’t know, I think also I’m a person in the world. I’m not perfect, I have many flaws. I’m trying to work them out. As we say, I’m trying to be kind as I do it, but there’s nothing about myself that I’m ashamed of or embarrassed of. And I don’t think anyone should be, because I honestly think so many of us are just trying to get through the day. And so I think this idea that I’m strong or that I’m impermeable or that I’m the best or that I can do everything that other people can’t do, it’s just not real. And so I think, just say it because we’re all just figuring it out. And that might sound naive or quite silly, but we are, everyone is just trying every day to deal with something.

Roxane Gay:
It doesn’t sound naive. To my mind it sounds realistic because it’s the truth. And sometimes the truth is just plain and simple. You were raised in South London and you said that you’re going to always live there. What makes South London home to you and what holds you to that place?

Candice Carty-Williams:
That is a really beautiful question for my heart. South London feels very safe to me, I think because I’ve been there a lot. But also because I’m quite a sad person, which is fine. And in a way that I’m cool with that. It is cool. I can have a laugh and I’m funny, but naturally the emotion is sad. And I’ve spent a lot of years walking around South London, being sad, listening to music, walking around parks all times of night, all times of day. And I’ve always felt very held still, always by this space that’s always looked after me.

It feels very consistent. And it is the most consistent thing in my life. I’ve moved around a lot. I worked out that I lived in, maybe I’ve lived in 25 houses when I was growing up and they were all in South London. And I always felt okay because I knew that I was going to be in this place that I understood. And so for me it’s that and it’s the nostalgia of always walking around this place and always feeling okay. And always knowing I was going to be safe and I always was. And I hope that I continue to be, but I’ve always been safe and held by that particular area, which is very interesting. I don’t know if many people have that, but I know it and I long for it.

Roxane Gay:
Safety, I think like kindness can be underrated. I think it can be overrated in certain contexts, but I also think especially for Black women, it can be incredibly underrated. And when we do find places and spaces that are safe, they are invaluable because there are so few of them, quite frankly. Before you were a writer, you worked in publishing quite a lot. And in fact when I met you, I think you were still at Fourth Estate. I know that being Black and publishing in the United States is challenging because there are very few people in publishing, editorially as agents, as marketing executives, which is where you were. How did you navigate publishing as a Black Britain?

Candice Carty-Williams:
How did I? How do I answer this question diplomatically? In my first job I had, and legally, in my first job, I had a really fun time. Fourth Estate was really amazing to me. I was able to start the short story prize with the Guardian for Underrepresented Writers. That was incredible. And that was me being like, “I have an idea, I have a plan.” And them being like, “Okay, do it. Enjoy yourself. If you need us, we’re here. You can chat to us.” That was incredible. And so I had a really good time there, but I think, because I was 25 and I was sort of just running around drunk all the time. Just doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing. That was okay. And publishing understood me as a young person. And so most of the seniors would say to me and my friend who I worked with that time, my best friend, they would be like, “Oh hey kids.” And that was cool.

And then I went into my next job and it was not as, it wasn’t good at all. I felt the weight of being the only Black woman. There were many, many incidents that I found very, very tough. And I would’ve loved to have stayed on and carried on working publishing, because I know that when you have someone Black or someone of color working somewhere, it makes a massive difference to what is published, even if it’s one person. Because it just takes one person to stand up and be like, “I can see how this book would sell. I can see why it’s important.” But I had to go. I had to go. And for many reasons that basically they paid me off in it. But one day I reckon, I took a break and give them their money back.

But I had to go. I had to leave because I was like, “It’s killing me. It’s killing me. It is killing me being here. The weight of that is hard.” And I’m a very resilient person. I always have been. I can do a lot. I can feel a lot and I can cope with it. But that place, I was like, “I don’t think I’m going to make it out alive.” And so I had to go. And I think writing a novel, I was asked by Human Resources, “Did you get permission to do that from your boss?” And I was like, “Ah, okay. It begins.” So it was a time.

Roxane Gay:
I have to say, every time I talk to a Black person in publishing, I hear a story and I think I’m never going to hear anything more fucked up than this. And then I talk to someone else and I hear something worse and I think, “Okay, this is it. This is the apex. I’m not going to hear anything worse.” When you’re asked, “Did you ask for permission to write,” that hearkens back to so many white supremacist activities like enslavement. Are you kidding me?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I mean, I laughed. I laughed because I thought it was a joke. And I was met with just a very straight face. And I was like, “Oh, that’s not a joke. You are serious.” And I was like, “No, of course not.” And at that point I was so kind of like, “Oh, should I have?” But I was even then I was like, “This isn’t right. That’s not right.”

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s not. It’s curious to see the ways in which employers tend to think that because we work for them for eight hours a day or so, that they have ownership over all 24 of our daily hours. When such is not the case.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Absolutely not.

Roxane Gay:
Do you think publishing has improved in recent years as we’ve had more open conversations about diversity, inclusion, representation?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I think it has improved. I am hopeful that the change is here to stay. So every hopeful part of me genuinely does think that is the case. Because I look around when I go to book events and I see that the workforce is way different to how it was when I started in publishing. And when I started publishing, which was maybe, let’s say 10 years ago now, things were in vastly different and for the worst. And so when I look around and also I see what’s being published, and I see that the literary landscape for us is so much broader and it’s so varied. And that’s important because I think that there was a time when it was all the slavery books were the thing, and then it was like, “Okay, all the books about being African and in Africa, nebulous Africa with a thing.” And so now it’s like, “Okay, we do see different stories and different backgrounds and different perspectives.” So I remember working on a book, Behold the Dreamers, which was by a Cameroonian author…

Roxane Gay:
Oh, Imbolo.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Imbolo.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, great book.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Beautiful book. And I remember just the way they tried to market was just, I think for some reason it was like send it to these Nigerian influencers. And I was like, “You don’t understand.” So it’s like you just have to have people who are in there, people who can pick up on the nuance, which isn’t actually nuanced to us, but you know what I mean. And make sure those things are correct in the way they got into the world. And so to answer your question, I think it’s better. And I’m hoping that it’s sustainable.

Roxane Gay:
I am too. I think that’s the real measure because I’m often asked the question I just asked you. And I don’t think we have seen improvements that are commensurate with the amount of discussion that there has been around the issue. And the amount of promises publishers have made about addressing the issue. And every time there is a step forward, there’s a step back where, for example, senior editors at a major Black imprint are suddenly fired from that imprint. Which is something that recently happened at Amistad, at Harper Collins in the US. And so I’m always curious as to what it’s going to take for sustainable change to happen, which is the real measure. How long can we sustain this where we have more inclusive editorial culture and every other culture within publishing so that people don’t think Africa is a country. I can’t believe sending a Cameroonian author’s book to some Nigerian influencers. God bless them.

Candice Carty-Williams:
But that was the whole plan, that was and I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was like, “Let’s get a focus group together so I can prove why this is so wrong.” And so I think you need those people who are going to just be there and be like, “That doesn’t make any sense. But again, let me show you in a gentle way why it doesn’t make sense.” It’s exhausting. I don’t do and I don’t miss it. I would go back into it. People ask all the time, “Would I?” I would, I would go back in. I would, I would go back in. I loved marketing so much and I would go back into that.

Roxane Gay:
You are a writer now full time. And I’m curious, are you working on your next novel?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I’m not at the moment because I’m show running one of two TV shows that I’m working on. I’m working on a TV show called Champion, which is a musical of course. And I am working on the adaptation of Queenie. And so there is no time for a novel. The adaptation Queenie is a fucking headache because adaptations are hell. Because it’s just like, “Why buy the book if you want to just do your own thing with it?” That’s interesting, just get someone to write something different. You know?

Roxane Gay:
I do know.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Yeah, I’m sure. And I’m really candid about that. And I don’t really care who hears it because it’s like, “Why buy it? I don’t understand why you would do this.” And so I think I’m going to have to earmark my time to get back into novel writing. I think end of next year. TV is a really, really… I feel like I’m trapped in a web and it’s going to take a long time to extract myself from it because there are so many moving parts. And when you’re show running, you have to be there all the time. You have to be active and engaged and you have to talk to people all the time. And I just think when I started writing, I never thought I’d end up managing anyone. Do you know what I mean? You just sit.

Roxane Gay:
I do. I do.

Candice Carty-Williams:
You just sit and then I’m not I’ve got to-

Roxane Gay:
I’m show running a show and I’m grateful for the work.

Candice Carty-Williams:
As am I.

Roxane Gay:
It’s not what the dream was.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Do you sleep?

Roxane Gay:
Not enough, not enough. Not enough and my shows have not yet moved into production, which I know is going to amp things up immeasurably.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Oh yes.

Roxane Gay:
I really am grateful for the work, but when I dreamt of being a writer, all I dreamt of was books. And that really would have been enough. This is not something I ever anticipated. And of course I do enjoy it, but it’s a different beast. Book people, I know what to expect from book people for better and worse. And TV people are just buck wild. They’re just buck wild. They don’t care. They’re going to do what they’re going to do.

Candice Carty-Williams:
Nope. Absolutely.

Roxane Gay:
He who has the most money wins and they have the most money. So it’s very interesting to see what happens with adaptations. Are you also writing the adaptation of Queenie?

Candice Carty-Williams:
I’m writing some of it, but not all of it. Because I think my thing is, Queenie came into the world with me, and I put her out there. I was able to be like, “This is what this book is about. This is why I care about it.” And I think that I’ve done that work now. And I think that when it’s a TV show, it’s a different life. It’s a different thing. And I would actually be okay to be like, “Someone else can do that.”

But there’s a really amazing bunch of writers working on it, and it’s been so fun and collaborative and that’s been one of the best parts of it. Sitting in a room with other Black people, just sharing our experiences and really, really… And men as well, Black male writers who were like, “Yeah, I know this and I understand this and that. What’s this?” And who ask questions as well, crucially. But when it comes to actually writing the thing, I’d like to back up, I’d like to step away from it because I’ve done it. It’s eight years since I started writing her, I don’t need to do it again.

Roxane Gay:
I have one final question, which is a question I like to ask every writer that I have the pleasure of speaking with. What do you like most about your writing?

Candice Carty-Williams:
That’s a lovely question. Do you know what I like most about my writing? I like in my writing the way that I speak. I do what I want, and then you just catch it and take what you want from it. That’s what I like. I don’t try to write or speak like anyone else.

Roxane Gay:
I love that. Thank you so much. Candace Carty-Williams, latest book, hot off the press is People Person. This is the first time I’ve hosted Design Matters, but this is the 18th year of the podcast. Both Debbie and I would like to thank you so much for listening, this week and every week. And remember, as Debbie tells us, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Roxanne Gay and Debbie is looking forward to talking to you again soon.

Debbie Millman (00:00:00):

Chip Kidd has been on the podcast before. Four times, actually. I went back to the archives and counted. He’s been on to talk about a novel he wrote. He’s been on to talk about the fabulous book covers he’s been designing at Knopf for decades. He’s been on with Chris Ware to talk about graphic novels.

Debbie Millman (00:00:19):

More recently, he’s been on to talk about his book, Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. That book is now out in paperback, and there’s so much more to talk about like his Batman exhibits, and his cameo in the last Star Wars movie, just to mention, two of his latest projects. Chip Kidd, welcome back to Design Matters.

Chip Kidd (00:00:44):

Thank you so much. I can’t believe you wanted me back again, but I-

Debbie Millman (00:00:48):

Of course.

Chip Kidd (00:00:50):

I’m so grateful, and I just want to say thank you for creating Design Matters. What an incredible, incredible achievement. It’s just-

Debbie Millman (00:01:01):

Thank you.

Chip Kidd (00:01:01):

Yeah. Thank you. And I’m proud to call you my friend.

Debbie Millman (00:01:03):

Oh, Chip, you know that I call you my brother.

Chip Kidd (00:01:07):

Well, all right. Then, that-

Debbie Millman (00:01:10):

You’re my family.

Chip Kidd (00:01:10):

I’m proud to call you my sister then.

Debbie Millman (00:01:12):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And hi there, Mrs. Kidd.

Chip Kidd (00:01:15):

Hi, mom.

Debbie Millman (00:01:16):

Chip, I want to start by asking you about something that I seem to have missed in our four previous interviews, which I’ve subsequently regretted, and wanted to ask you about now. You designed the original Jurassic Park book cover in 1990, which subsequently was used in the 1993 movie directed by Steven Spielberg.

Debbie Millman (00:01:40):

And since then, that same logo has been part of the five additional movies. The most recent being the blockbuster summer hit Jurassic World Dominion. It’s also on thousands, if not millions of merchandising and promotional items. Is it true that the original Jurassic Park book logo was really dark green?

Chip Kidd (00:02:07):

Oh, yeah. First of all, just to clarify, the original book jacket is just the typography and then the drawing of the dinosaur. And the drawing of the dinosaur, which I did both, but the drawing of the dinosaur is what they used for the logo. So, the lettering is by somebody else and all of that.

Debbie Millman (00:02:25):

Okay. Yes. We must be accurate about every bit of the credit.

Chip Kidd (00:02:28):

Yeah, I think so.

Debbie Millman (00:02:29):

Absolutely.

Chip Kidd (00:02:31):

But yes, I don’t know what I was thinking with a couple things with that cover. The drop shadow on his name, why is it there?

Debbie Millman (00:02:42):

Design regrets.

Chip Kidd (00:02:43):

Maybe somebody had said his name needs to pop more or something. But yeah, from a distance, the dinosaur looks like it’s black. But then when you get up real close to a first edition in the unforgiving light of day, you can see that it’s a dark green. And I think what I was thinking was something about primordial ooze. Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:03:09):

What is the strangest thing you’ve seen the logo on?

Chip Kidd (00:03:13):

A human body.

Debbie Millman (00:03:15):

Really?

Chip Kidd (00:03:15):

Oh sure. Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:03:16):

So, people have tattooed.

Chip Kidd (00:03:17):

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:03:18):

I thought you were going to say something about the toaster. I know there’s a Jurassic Park toaster.

Chip Kidd (00:03:23):

Well, which you were so sweet to give me. They made a toaster that upon putting the piece of bread in and pushing the button, when it pops up, the logo is on it. And I will admit, I have it in the box, but I haven’t opened the box.

Debbie Millman (00:03:39):

It’s probably worth more not opening it.

Chip Kidd (00:03:46):

The kind of guy I am, but yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:03:46):

All of the history of the logo and the identity is now shared in another new book that’s come out about Jurassic Park that actually has been published by Topps, the card company.

Chip Kidd (00:04:01):

It’s actually been published by Abrams.

Debbie Millman (00:04:04):

Okay.

Chip Kidd (00:04:04):

But Abrams publishes these… and they’re beautifully done, these collections of Topps collector cards. So, they’ve done Star Wars, and Wacky Packages and Mars Invades. So, then, they were going to do Jurassic Park, and the editor of this series is my dear friend, Charlie Kochman at Abrams. And he suggested, I guess, to Topps and including Universal, that I write an afterward.

Chip Kidd (00:04:32):

And so, I did, and they had to vet everything. And I basically just explain again how this happened with photographic evidence, and they published it. So, for me, it’s a very meaningful hallmark for me because it’s the first time that Universal Pictures is acknowledging that I did this because I’m never in the movie credits and-

Debbie Millman (00:05:02):

Haven’t received a penny of the proceeds.

Chip Kidd (00:05:02):

That is certainly true. So, there it is. It’s in print with the stamp of approval by Universal Pictures. I’m glad that it’s at least acknowledged that way. I did two Ted talks and the first Ted talk was basically like, this is who I am and this is what I do. And I very much wanted to make creating Jurassic Park a big part of that because I want this… I was going to say I want to own it. I want to own the fact that I did it.

Debbie Millman (00:05:38):

Absolutely, as you should. It’s one of the most recognizable logos of the 20th century. And now, it’s continuing into the 21st. It’s so interesting that they rebooted the movie. They rebooted it with all new actors, only in this third movie are Laura Dern and some of the rest of the cast back. But the logo has been there-

Chip Kidd (00:05:59):

But the logo is the same.

Debbie Millman (00:06:00):

… for all six movies. That’s incredible.

Chip Kidd (00:06:02):

It is. It’s amazing.

Debbie Millman (00:06:03):

Even the Star Wars logo has changed a bit over the years. But the Jurassic Park logo hasn’t.

Chip Kidd (00:06:08):

No.

Debbie Millman (00:06:09):

And the new book is really beautiful. One thing I found in my research that I didn’t see in any of the previous times that I’ve interviewed you is a fax that Michael Creighton actually sent to Sonny Mehta, which it has the normal heading of a fax, the to, from, the date, et cetera. And then, in giant typewritten letters, it says, “Wow, fantastic jacket.” And I thought that was pretty cool too.

Chip Kidd (00:06:38):

Yeah. Boy, those were the days, faxes.

Debbie Millman (00:06:40):

Faxes. Chip, you were born in Shillington, Berks County in Pennsylvania. And I know as a child, you were enthralled by pop culture. And I love to remind you that in the prologue to your first monograph, you stated, “I did not grow up yearning to become a book designer. What I wanted to be was Chris Partridge on The Partridge Family.”

Chip Kidd (00:07:05):

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman (00:07:06):

I still don’t understand why you were so fascinated with Chris, especially since two actors played the same character.

Chip Kidd (00:07:13):

I know. And that was fascinating too.

Debbie Millman (00:07:14):

What was it about Chris that enthralled you so?

Chip Kidd (00:07:17):

I wanted to be a drummer, and that I did sort of become. But the idea that he’s eight years old or whatever it is, and he’s the drummer of this band. I was just obsessed with that show.

Debbie Millman (00:07:32):

I was, too.

Chip Kidd (00:07:33):

And the music was so good. In that sense, it was sort of like The Monkees. It would be so easy to write it off, but the music was terrific.

Debbie Millman (00:07:42):

Yeah. I think the music actually holds up. I think Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque is one of their great unsung hits that deserves a lot more recognition. I loved that show. There was something about the dynamic of this family without a dad, with-

Chip Kidd (00:08:02):

Which they never talk about.

Debbie Millman (00:08:04):

Never, never. With these little kids being part of a big band. I had a massive crush on Susan Dey, but I also had a bit of a crush on Danny Bonaduce as well. I love them all. Bobby Sherman, still to this day. I love Bobby Sherman.

Chip Kidd (00:08:21):

Right. Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:08:23):

Your mom was very supportive of your interests. And I think in many ways was the catalyst to a lot of what you ended up loving. I know she made you Batman costumes every year for Halloween. And talk about how she influenced your thinking about cartoons, and comics, and characters.

Chip Kidd (00:08:48):

Well, it was my mom and my dad. Actually, when it came to the cartoon characters, it was much more dad than mom. Because he wasn’t trying to taunt my brother and I, but he would tell us that he had Superman #1. He had the Superman #1 comic and the Batman #1 comic.

Chip Kidd (00:09:07):

And he had all this stuff when he was a kid, but then it all got tossed into the paper drive for World War II. But he was a terrific cartoonist who pursued chemical engineering instead. But I remember going up into the attic in the house that I grew up in, and just poking around, and I would find his old chemistry textbooks, and he would have cartoons in the margins.

Chip Kidd (00:09:34):

And I was just fascinated by that. I think the difference between my parents and me is that I felt I could pursue an actual career doing something creative. Whereas, I think for them, they were much more pragmatic. Like I said, my dad was a chemical engineer. My mom was what used to be called a personnel manager, which we now called human resources.

Chip Kidd (00:10:02):

And they both did creative things on the side for fun. And I wanted to do a creative thing as my main job, hopefully, for fun that hopefully, to get a salary. My mom, her brilliant creative thing was she was a seamstress. When we were really little, she would make our clothes, my brother and I, brother Walt. And she would make our clothes, and there would be these little junior league fashion shows.

Chip Kidd (00:10:29):

And we’re like three and five years old, tramping down the runway in these little onesies that she made, and it’s so funny. But yeah, then when we went to elementary school for Halloween every year, my brother and I would think up what we wanted to be. And for about, I’d say five to eight years, they would figure out what we wanted to be.

Chip Kidd (00:10:54):

It was Batman and Robin right away. Then, for me, Captain America, Zorro, Captain Marvel, the DC Captain Marvel, my brother wanted to be Hawkman one year. There were these dolls, the silver knight and the gold knight. They were like GI Joes, but they were knights, and had all this armor, and he wanted to be, I think, the gold knight. So, they were very nurturing, and loving, and sweet in this regard. Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:11:26):

You recently gave one of the costumes to Anderson Cooper, talk about why, and the worldwide sensation that that costume has become.

Chip Kidd (00:11:41):

Well, I thank you. You’re exaggerating a little bit.

Debbie Millman (00:11:46):

Not really.

Chip Kidd (00:11:47):

I had designed book jackets for Anderson’s mother, Gloria Vanderbilt for what seemed like forever, since 1991. And that came about because she was published by Knopf. And somehow, her jackets started getting assigned to me, and that’s how I got to meet her. And she was just amazing, and fascinating, and sweet, but this window into this whole other world.

Chip Kidd (00:12:19):

One of the book covers that I designed for her was called A Mother’s Story, which was her memoir of her older son with Wyatt Cooper taking his own life. I was just tremendously affected by that. And so, through the years, she would make a book, and I would do the cover. And then, Anderson was publishing his first memoir, which was just after Katrina.

Chip Kidd (00:12:45):

And he wasn’t out yet. And it was published by HarperCollins. So, for me, that was a freelance job, and that’s how I met him. And he was just amazing. I went to his office at CNN, and I’ll never forget he had a mouse pad that was the Wonder Twins from Super Friends, Zan and Jayna, shape of this and form of that. And I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s the Wonder Twins.”

Chip Kidd (00:13:13):

He’s like, “You know what the wonder twins are?” I said, “Yes, I love the Wonder Twins.” So, I did the cover of that book. And then, in the middle of the pandemic, I got an email from him. I think it was like June 2020, that he was going to be working on a history of his family, The Vanderbilts. And it was going to be the Schwartz and all thing.

Chip Kidd (00:13:45):

And he was inspired to do it because he had conceived a child through a surrogate, Wyatt. So, long story short, I did the cover. He really liked it. He sent me this text video of him with the book. I hadn’t seen it. And he wanted me to do the end papers too. And I made it coordinate with the jacket and all this stuff.

Chip Kidd (00:14:08):

And he was all excited, and I wrote to him and I said, “Could I come by your house, and meet Wyatt, and get you to sign a book for me?” And he said, “Sure.” And then, I started thinking, I have a couple of bits of these costumes that survived over the years, amazingly, that my mom made.

Chip Kidd (00:14:31):

I have the Batman cape, and I have the Robin tunic, but I had this other blue cape that was… I’m pretty sure it was used for my brother’s gold knight costume. But it looks like a Batman cape. And I thought I’m going to take this and give it to him then. And then, I had this vintage Batman, Japanese, 1966, like a Halloween mask, but it’s for a little kid. It’s small. And I thought I’m going to bring that too.

Chip Kidd (00:15:00):

And so, I did, and it was just the most lovely experience, but hilariously, I thought… and he starts filming, and there’s the nanny there. It’s like, that’s it. It’s like us three or four. I’m wanting to take pictures, but I’m thinking this is a private thing. But he starts taking pictures, and he starts taking little movies and stuff. And I said-

Debbie Millman (00:15:27):

And so, the baby is in the actual costume and he’s-

Chip Kidd (00:15:32):

Yes, he’s in the mask and the cape. There’s something about capes. And by, I guess last fall, he would’ve been 18 months. So, you’d put the cape on him, and then he’s just running around. There’s just something magical about that that I think literally empowers a child. For whatever reason, I don’t know. But he starts filming that. And then, I’d like, “Can I?” He’s like, “Sure.”

Chip Kidd (00:15:55):

So, I start filming and taking pictures. And then, he signed a book for me, and he signed a book for my mom, and we just had a lovely, I don’t know, it was like an hour, hour and a half. And I just thought that was just a lovely private thing. And I’m going to have to figure out a way to tell my mom, but I’m just going to wait because I knew, and Debbie, you know my mom.

Chip Kidd (00:16:23):

As soon as I tell her, she’s going to want to get on a bus, and come up to New York, and see little white… and I should say in the past, I was supposed to have lunch with Gloria. I believe it was the fall of 2016. And Gloria had suffered a fall, and she couldn’t do it. And so, she wrote to me, “I’m so sorry.”

Chip Kidd (00:16:46):

And Anderson wrote to me and said, “Look, I’m really sorry that she can’t do it, but is there anything that I could do?” And my mom and my aunt Syl were coming to New York. So, we were his guest at CNN for two hours. He’s just the best. He is exactly what you see on TV. He’s just a great, great guy.

Chip Kidd (00:17:10):

But anyway, so I just thought, I’m going to tell my mom, but I was just putting it off because I’m sure she was going to call the local paper and have them put it on page one. And so, the following week, my mom goes to this meeting of… she’s on one of these committees for the local symphony, for the Redding symphony, it’s the lady’s committee or whatever they call it.

Chip Kidd (00:17:34):

And one of these women said, “Well, that’s really something about Anderson giving the cape that you made for Chip to his little boy.” And my mom is like, “What are you talking about?” The previous day, he had gone on CBS Sunday Morning. I think it was Gayle King said, “What are you going to do? Are you going to take him out for Halloween?”

Chip Kidd (00:17:59):

And he said, “I’m not sure, but if we do, I have the perfect costume.” And he told the whole story. And so, that cat was out of the bag. And then, he told it again on Drew Barry Moore. And he told it again on Stephen Colbert. And I just-

Debbie Millman (00:18:15):

Your mom is now getting orders for little Batman costumes.

Chip Kidd (00:18:18):

No, I got the biggest kick out of it. But I should add, that evening after I had given him that stuff, he texted me and he’s like, “Are you sure you want to give this away? Because if you want it back, I will totally understand.” And I said, “This means so much to me that you have this and that he has it.” And I said, “Oh, and by the way,” and I sent him a couple other pictures of the stuff that I still do have.

Debbie Millman (00:18:45):

Well, it’s giving whole new life to these wonderful things that were handmade with lots and lots of love.

Chip Kidd (00:18:51):

Yeah, exactly.

Debbie Millman (00:18:53):

Talk about your love of Batman. You’ve been called a bat maniac, which I’d never heard. I’d never heard that term until I did the research for this show. What fuels it? What fuels that passion?

Chip Kidd (00:19:06):

I feel at this point, it’s such a universal thing. But I think the gateway drug was the Adam West 1966 TV show. And the fact that I have a brother who was two years older, I think I was two when the show came out. So, he would’ve been four. We were the perfect audience for it at the perfect time.

Chip Kidd (00:19:29):

And it was just so mesmerizing as a kid, and exciting, and like this crazy other world where they… I think it’s the escapist aspect of it. And part of that is that he’s a billionaire. You start to fantasize, like it would cost money to be Batman to do it properly with the car and all of that. And then, as I was growing up, there were all these other… the show came and went. That was pretty quick.

Chip Kidd (00:20:03):

But then, the comic books really picked up on the much darker origins of the strip. And DC Comics was very good about constantly reprinting the original stories. So, that was a revelation to me, that it was dark, and scary, and the Joker was really scary, and killing people in mysterious ways, and announcing it on the radio, and just fascinating. And I don’t know, I just never got over it.

Debbie Millman (00:20:36):

Which is your favorite Batman portrayal? Aside from Adam West.

Chip Kidd (00:20:40):

Right. The cop out answer is the voice actor, Kevin Conroy, on the animated series. I think he’s near perfect. I think in terms of the movie portrayals, it’s just so hard to say, because at this point, there’re so many. I was very impressed with Robert Pattinson, I would say, yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:21:03):

Yeah. My nephew too. He’s-

Chip Kidd (00:21:04):

I was impressed with him, and I thought the costume was great. Yeah. And this is a whole other geeky discussion. I think Christian Bale was the best Bruce Wayne. Again, I love the millionaire playboy carefree aspect of that. So, that’s his disguise that you would never guess that he was this other thing. And they did away with that in the most recent movie. And I wasn’t so crazy about that.

Debbie Millman (00:21:31):

You recently curated an art show at Artspace in Louisiana titled Batman: Black and White. And it features an extraordinary selection of over 150 original Batman drawings that you commissioned from artists, including Alex Ross, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Ross Chest, even Gloria Vanderbilt.

Debbie Millman (00:21:53):

And the project really began back in 2012. When DC comics invited you to write a story for their Batman: Black and White anthology comics title, which was based on their hugely popular 1996 publication, how did it grow into an exhibit of this significance?

Chip Kidd (00:22:14):

It was a total accident, and I don’t know how easy this… or effectively I can explain this on a podcast. But basically, when issue number one that had my story in it came out, by then, I think it was October 13. It was New York Comic-Con, and they issued it with different covers. And one of the covers is what’s called a blank variant.

Chip Kidd (00:22:40):

So, it’s this uncoded card stock cover that is just blank white, except it has the logo of the comic on it. And the idea was, is they do it to this day, you get that version, and you go to a convention, or you go to a show, or you go to whatever where there’s artists, and wait in line, and get Neal Adams to draw on it, or get your favorite artist to draw on it.

Chip Kidd (00:23:09):

And so, as is my temperament, I became completely obsessed. I started buying these things up on eBay, just thinking of like, “Who?” And it was a really interesting exercise. And first of all, there had been people who I wanted to draw a Batman for me for a long, long time who don’t normally draw a Batman.

Debbie Millman (00:23:31):

Like who?

Chip Kidd (00:23:32):

Well, Art Spiegelman, this Dutch cartoonist, Joost Swarte. So, a lot of the raw artists, Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, Gary Panter. It was this strange opportunity to at least tug on their sleeve and say, “Would you do this?” And 165 people said yes.

Debbie Millman (00:23:54):

Isn’t that incredible?

Chip Kidd (00:23:55):

It is.

Debbie Millman (00:23:56):

What surprised you most as you were collecting these pieces of art from these extraordinary artists?

Chip Kidd (00:24:05):

What surprised me the most? Well, what surprised me is what they’ve come up with. Some people would say, “What do you want?” And then, others would have some crazy idea that they just wanted to do. One of the most recent ones that I got over the pandemic is by this amazing artist who goes by R. Kikuo Johnson. He’s just a brilliant illustrator.

Chip Kidd (00:24:29):

And he does covers for The New Yorker, and he just released a new graphic novel. He uses a very clear line, and I had been wanting to get in touch with him for years to try and publish a graphic novel by him at Pantheon. Finally, he did a cover for The New Yorker called Waiting. And it’s this sole Asian woman alone. I don’t know if you remember it, on the subway track, looking at her watch.

Chip Kidd (00:24:54):

With this furtive look on her face like, “Train, please get here now.” And it was just so timely and moving. And that’s what finally nudged me to like, “Come on, get ahold of this guy.” But he’s like, “Yeah. All right. I actually have an idea for that.” So, I’ve sent him the book with a return slip, and it’s brilliant.

Chip Kidd (00:25:20):

So, Batman is laying on his back, and he’s trapped by this giant chicken that has the Joker’s head on it that’s menacing him. And it’s brilliantly done, but it’s like, “Where the hell did that come from?” What does this mean? And he’s just like, “I’ve just always been fascinated by this idea.”

Debbie Millman (00:25:46):

Interesting. Well, that’s what makes him the brilliant genius he is.

Chip Kidd (00:25:51):

He is. He is, indeed.

Debbie Millman (00:25:52):

There was also a rather risqué cover of Batman and Robin kissing.

Chip Kidd (00:25:58):

Yes. That’s Art Spiegelman.

Debbie Millman (00:26:00):

Talk about that, if you can.

Chip Kidd (00:26:01):

That’s a reference to his, I guess, infamous New Yorker cover where he has the Hasidic man kissing the African-American woman. Plus, he did it in color. That was the interesting thing. If people wanted to do things in color, that was fine with me.

Debbie Millman (00:26:17):

You’ve written extensively about Batman, your books about the Cape Crusader include Batman Collected, Batman Animated, which garnered two of the comic book industry’s highest awards, the Eisner Awards and Batman: The Complete History. Do you anticipate a Batman: Black and White will also become a book?

Chip Kidd (00:26:37):

I would love that, but the problem is it would be a permissions nightmare. I’ve actually pursued it. It got as far as somebody at DC had drawn up a release form, I got a bunch of the artists to sign it, but there was a bunch of them that would not sign it. They’re like, “If you want to use this in a book, fine, but there’s no way…” because I can’t remember what the release language was.

Chip Kidd (00:27:01):

But it was basically, the artist can’t republish it without DC’s permission, and DC can’t republish their art without their permission. One day, I will try and self-publish it just so that it exists, but that would be a lot of work. But I’d really like to do that.

Debbie Millman (00:27:18):

Yeah. I think it should be. It should be made, or maybe a catalog from the shows.

Chip Kidd (00:27:23):

Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:27:24):

Batman is not the only comic character you have worked with. You have also designed the trilogy, Superman: The Complete History and Wonder Woman: The Complete History for Chronicle Books, several books about the art of Alex Ross, which are magnificent, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, and so many more. One of your upcoming projects is a book titled Spider-Man: Panel by Panel. Tell us about that.

Chip Kidd (00:27:55):

Well, that is going to be again, that’s Abrams and my friend, Charlie Kochman, who made the connection, because it all has to be sanctioned by Marvel. Spider-Man first appeared in a comic book called Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962. And that was an immediate hit. And then, Spider-Man #1 quickly followed. And so, what we’re doing is a photographic reexamination of both of them.

Chip Kidd (00:28:29):

So, going super close up with the camera because by now, my God, a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 just sold for like $3 million. It’s just insane to try and find original. But Charlie hunted down or found a collector, who had this that had not sealed it in Plexiglas, who allowed us to photograph it. So, it will allow the fans to see what it was like to have this comic book in 1962 up close.

Chip Kidd (00:29:01):

It’s almost like you’re under the covers in your bedroom with a flashlight looking at it. That’s the kind of effect. And plus, some mysterious donor had the original art by Steve Ditko to the Spider-Man origin story from Amazing Fantasy #15, and donated it to the Library of Congress. They were going to allow us to photograph it, but COVID restrictions prevented that, but they’re photographing it to our specification. So, you’ll get to see the original art, which is always so fascinating.

Debbie Millman (00:29:36):

Speaking of original art, in 2019, you collaborated with JJ Abrams, different from Abrams book publisher, JJ Abrams, the man on the comic Spiderman #1, which featured a unique die cut. How did that project come about? And how did you go about making that cover?

Chip Kidd (00:29:58):

JJ is a friend. Well, he hired me through Paramount Pictures to do a print campaign for a movie that he was producing called Morning Glory. And this was quite some time ago. The movie didn’t do much business, but the experience was great, and the print campaign turned out really well. And we became friends from that.

Chip Kidd (00:30:22):

And he and his son, one of his sons, Henry, I guess pitched to Marvel, we want to do our own take on Spider-Man, and it’ll be six issues long. The first one had three or four variants, and they asked me to do one of the variants. And so, I researched what had been done before in terms of really zooming in on the Spider-Man mask, and the classic eye.

Chip Kidd (00:30:48):

And so, I decided to do that, but I wanted to see if they would allow a die cut whole so that when you open it up, there’s something else revealed underneath. I did what you’re really not supposed to do as a freelancer. I sent it to JJ first, before sending it to Marvel. And so, he fell in love with it, and Marvel didn’t want to spend the money because it’s extra money.

Chip Kidd (00:31:13):

And JJ insisted. And so, he prevailed, and it totally sold out. And so, then the Marvel art director approached me and said, “Well, actually, we’re doing a new Wolverine #1, and we’re doing a new Spider-Woman #1, can you do die cut covers for those?”

Debbie Millman (00:31:31):

One of the most unique things about you is how you’re able to make things happen through the sheer will and creativity of your spirit. And one of my favorite stories that I really want you to share with our audience, because it really is about manifesting a reality that you want to make happen is your experience with JJ Abrams, and your cameo in the last Star Wars movie. If there was ever a story about persistence, and grit, and manifesting something that you want more than anything, this is the story.

Chip Kidd (00:32:18):

Well, I have to say, it’s hard for me to talk about this. It’s really a story about a friend helping another friend grieve. So, my wonderful, beautiful husband, Sandy McClatchy had be… we’ve been together for 20 years, and he became ill, and I was a caregiver. And through that time, JJ would write periodically because he had met him, and we had spent time, and how are you doing, and how is he doing?

Chip Kidd (00:32:53):

And so, by the summer of 2018, I was alone. And I got this notion actually from Chris Ware who had visited the set of The Force Awakens. Because when he was over in England getting some sort of award, and they were filming that back then, and Chris had told me about this experience. And I just wrote to JJ out of the blue and said, “You know, actually, I’m going to be in London for a while this fall, could I come by the set, and maybe be a Storm Trooper or something?”

Debbie Millman (00:33:30):

Or something.

Chip Kidd (00:33:32):

And he wrote, he wrote back and he said, “We’ll figure something out for you. And I’m going to hand you over to my, my AD, Josh, and you can work it out with him.” And so, for two weeks, November into December of 2018, I was on the set in Pinewood, and they’ve thrown together this costume for me. But they also-

Debbie Millman (00:33:58):

So, you weren’t a Storm Trooper, you actually-

Chip Kidd (00:33:59):

No, I wasn’t. Yeah, I wasn’t a Storm Trooper.

Debbie Millman (00:34:01):

You show up on screen as not you, but you know-

Chip Kidd (00:34:03):

Right. I mean-

Debbie Millman (00:34:04):

… your face is Chip Kidds’ face.

Chip Kidd (00:34:07):

I have a beret and a leather trench coat. The thing is if you don’t know to look for me, I’m actually in it three times. But if you don’t know to look for me, blink and you’ll miss it. But I’m in what passes for the Cantina scene, where three of the leads are sneaking through trying to evade Kylo Ren, but it’s Daisy Ridley, and Oscar Isaac, and Anthony Daniels is C-3PO are sneaking through this bar. And as the band is playing, and I’m sitting at the bar chatting with this giant creature thing. And that was just wild.

Debbie Millman (00:34:46):

So, not only did you have this wonderful costume made for you, I know that they also gave you a book to hold.

Chip Kidd (00:34:53):

They gave me a prop book. They took my book, Go, and they made a Star Wars version of it. It was just so touching, the effort that they went to. And that was all JJ.

Debbie Millman (00:35:06):

I know you’ve been a Star Wars fan since you were quite young. And when you were a little boy, you made a Star Wars scrapbook. Talk about that. Why are you laughing?

Chip Kidd (00:35:19):

Yes. I made this scrapbook and it had, for some reason, David Prowse, who was the physical embodiment of Darth Vader, I guess was doing this tour. This was way before Comic-Cons existed. This would’ve been the late 1970s. And he came to our local department store, Boscov’s, and I waited in line, and got him to sign it. And this scrapbook that I had that… it was not a scrapbook, it was a notebook.

Chip Kidd (00:35:46):

It was a spiral notebook that had Darth Vader on the front. And then, I started putting stuff in it. Many years later when I was helping my parents to move, I found it in their storage unit. So, when I went over on the set, I gave it to JJ as a present.

Debbie Millman (00:36:04):

Could you imagine what little Chip Kidd would’ve thought when he was making that scrapbook that one day, you’d end up on not only on the set, but in three scenes in the movie, the final chapter of this-

Chip Kidd (00:36:21):

What can one say?

Debbie Millman (00:36:23):

… nine-film saga?

Chip Kidd (00:36:25):

Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:36:26):

I know that it’s a hard story in that you were grieving quite terribly during that time. But I also think it’s a really beautiful story about manifesting something that you really want to help your spirit.

Chip Kidd (00:36:42):

Yeah. And something that he was willing to giving.

Debbie Millman (00:36:44):

Yeah. Shows JJs generosity, for sure. I want to talk about Go, but I also want to talk about so many of your other books. You attended Pennsylvania State University where you graduated in 1986 with a degree in graphic design, which you’ve written about in The Cheese Monkeys and in The Learners, your novels. Afterwards, you were hired as a junior assistant designer at Knopf where you still work today all these years later.

Chip Kidd (00:37:12):

Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:37:13):

In addition to working as the associate art director now, you are also editor at large for their graphic novels division. I think it’s safe to say that you’ve designed over 2,000 book covers, book jackets.

Chip Kidd (00:37:28):

I would think at this point, yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:37:31):

Yeah. Because in our last interview, which was several years ago, it was at the 1,500-, 1,600-mark. So, I was trying to do the math. So, the covers include work for Cormac McCarthy, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, Whoopi Goldberg, Oliver Sacks, John Updike, James Ellroy, who stated that you are the world’s greatest book jacket designer, and he’s not lying, time out.

Debbie Millman (00:37:53):

New York stated that the history of book design can be split into two eras before graphic designer, Chip Kidd, and after. So, I’d like to talk about some of your recent covers because you really are in a whole new zone now with some of the work that you’re doing, which is magnificent. First, you designed Billy Jean King’s memoir, All In, which immediately became a New York Times bestseller. What was that process like? What is it like to work with these legends, living legends?

Chip Kidd (00:38:22):

Well, I’ll tell you. The process was so different because it was by then, we were in the pandemic. And I was down in a little studio in my apartment. So, it was all virtual. I think had the world not changed, I would’ve been taking meetings with her at the office. And as it was, there was a lot of Zoom. It’s interesting when you work with somebody at that level, they have a team.

Chip Kidd (00:38:55):

And she very much wanted the team involved. And it turned out fine, but it was just a lot of time, talking to this person, and that person, and then explaining why I was doing what I was doing, but she was great. And she knew Charles Schulz, and they were friends. And so, I don’t know, somebody did their homework, and knew that I had that history.

Chip Kidd (00:39:23):

So, I think that helped. The big question was what image of her would we put on the front? And we, as a publisher, really, really wanted a vintage action shot of her on the court. And she was saying, “But that’s not who I am anymore. I’m an activist now. That was 30 years ago, 40 years ago.” And so, you have to listen, no matter who the author is.

Chip Kidd (00:39:57):

You have to listen to them if they have strong ideas about what they want. And so, we tried, I tried a couple of options where, “All right, here you are now on the front, but look at this amazing shot of you nailing this.” And so, she, I guess acquiesced is the word. And so, we put a big photo of her now on the back, and this great action shot on the front. And I think it really did what it was supposed to do.

Debbie Millman (00:40:30):

Rodrigo Corral, another great book designer puts up a lot of rejected covers on his Instagram, which is so interesting to see. Many, many, many times, I think some of the rejected covers are far better than what ended up going to market.

Debbie Millman (00:40:47):

How do you present different options to a client, whether it be Knopf, whether it be one of your freelance clients, that shows a range of work that both provides the type of work that the client might be expecting to see, but then also, takes them to a whole other place that surprises them?

Debbie Millman (00:41:13):

Because that’s really what you’re known for. You’re known for breaking paradigms, doing work that’s never been done before. How do you get clients to feel safe enough to take those risks?

Chip Kidd (00:41:25):

Because in most cases, we’ve been working together for so long. So, like Haruki Murakami just trusts me. This latest new one for Cormac McCarthy, he just trusts me. Now, sadly, after doing this for almost 36 years and counting, a lot of the authors are gone. Michael Crichton John Updike-

Debbie Millman (00:41:49):

They had it in their contracts that you were their designer for their book.

Chip Kidd (00:41:53):

Some of them did, Oliver Sacks. I think if you have a reputation that you’ve built up over a long time, people will at least look at what you’ve done, thoughtfully consider it. And then, it goes from there. The editor has a say, the publisher has a say, sales has a say, marketing. But I think with me, I have a certain reputation. So, they’ll at least take it seriously. But again, no matter what kind of reputation I have, if the author doesn’t like it, that’s just it. And you have to start over.

Debbie Millman (00:42:34):

How often does somebody like Murakami or Cormac McCarthy say, “Mm-mmm, sorry, Chip. This isn’t a winner?”

Chip Kidd (00:42:42):

It happened with Cormac McCarthy on the road. And that’s hard to explain. What it came down to was that book was so personal to him. And it was an allegory about something else in his life that he started micromanaging it in a way that he didn’t, on the other four books that I designed for him. He didn’t want his name on the front, which made our editor in chief’s head explode. And it can become very tricky.

Debbie Millman (00:43:12):

You recently worked on three book jackets for Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular, Murakami T, and Writing as a Vocation.

Chip Kidd (00:43:22):

Yeah.

Debbie Millman (00:43:23):

Were they all different types of experiences?

Chip Kidd (00:43:27):

Completely, completely.

Debbie Millman (00:43:27):

In what way?

Chip Kidd (00:43:28):

Well, and what I love about designing for him is that you start from scratch every time. Those are three completely different books. So, First Person Singular is short stories. Murakami T is this little gift book that’s about his t-shirt collection. And he’s got all these stories about them. It’s really interesting. And then, the new one that’s coming out this fall is Writing as a Vocation. It’s precisely what it’s about. It’s about his writing process.

Chip Kidd (00:43:58):

So, those are three completely different things. And you just have to consider what’s the book about, and how are you going to convey to the reader what’s Murakami doing now. The new one, Writing as a Vocation, I made the letter M into a huge labyrinth. So, writing as is going into the labyrinth, and then coming out at the bottom is a little arrow, a vocation. And so, the visual metaphor is going through all these starts, and stops, and false endings to get finally where you need to go.

Debbie Millman (00:44:36):

Do you start by sketching? Do you start on the computer? How do you work?

Chip Kidd (00:44:40):

You know what? I’ve never been a sketcher. Back in what, a sophomore in college, one of our graphic design classes, we had to keep a sketchbook. And that was work. Doing the actual assignments, that was much easier than actually having to document them in a sketchbook because it’s just not my temperament. I do all the sketching up in my head.

Chip Kidd (00:45:07):

And if there’s something that I need executed by somebody else, like a photographer, what have you, then maybe I’ll make a sketch and say, “Hey, we want a monkey raising his hand or something like that.” But-

Debbie Millman (00:45:18):

It’s so interesting when people work in their heads like that. My wife, Roxanne writes an entire essay in her head before she starts typing.

Chip Kidd (00:45:27):

Now, that is amazing because writing is a whole other thing for me. Yeah, no, no. I need to be at the keyboard, and writing, and writing in InDesign.

Debbie Millman (00:45:39):

Well, what’s interesting is that you’re not only just a designer, you’re also a writer and an editor. You’ve written several novels, and you’ve edited two important books over the last year, Original Sisters by Anita Kunz and Our Colors by Gengoroh Tagame. How do you pivot back and forth between these different vocations?

Chip Kidd (00:46:01):

I’m hugely grateful for it. Especially, in the last two years, I’ve been so grateful to have work to do, because I was just in isolation for so long down in my place in south Florida. And how do you pivot? I’m a fan of all of it. I really love it. And so, that really helps. I can’t imagine how people work on things that’s assigned to them that they don’t want to do. And that’s most people.

Chip Kidd (00:46:36):

Occasionally, I’ll have to do a book cover for something that I’m not all that interested in, but I can get interested in it. Computer coding in 1940 or whatever, that’s not something normally I would-

Debbie Millman (00:46:51):

You and Michael Bierut have that ability to find something interesting about anything.

Chip Kidd (00:46:54):

Well, anything that’s thrown at me.

Debbie Millman (00:46:58):

How do you go about finding and inquiring books? Because you do that, you look for graphic novels to publish.

Chip Kidd (00:47:05):

It’s a totally organic process. In the case of Original Sisters by Anita Kunz, I had known her for a long time. I had known her work for a long time. I think she’s absolutely brilliant. It had never occurred to me to publish any of her work because she’s not what we call a sequential artist. She’s not a graphic novelist, which is mainly what I’m looking for.

Chip Kidd (00:47:27):

And so, a couple months into the pandemic, I got this proposal from her on email. And she had originally called it The Originals. I was stunned. It’s a book of portraits of women in history, some of whom you know, but a lot of whom you don’t, and then her researching of them. And so, you have people to bounce things off of.

Chip Kidd (00:47:51):

And so, I sent it to some of my colleagues and said, “I think this is kind of great. What do you think?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we think this is really kind of great.” And so, that’s a submission. The Gengoroh Tagame, Our Colors, I pursued that, and we had published him previously and very successfully. So, that makes it much easier to do the next project.

Debbie Millman (00:48:14):

How involved are you in the editing process when you acquire a book?

Chip Kidd (00:48:18):

That’s a really good question. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes intensely, like I’m publishing this graphic novel by this guy, Wonderful Toronto, a cartoonist and illustrator named Maurice Vellekoop. And he was just in town, and we were working on that, and it’s really one of the first graphic novel, because usually, we get them fully formed. And I’ll have a couple of ideas.

Chip Kidd (00:48:45):

And we have a copy-editing department that’s going to take care of that stuff. But with this, the book by Maurice Vellekoop is called I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, and it’s a memoir, and he had a difficult family, and they were very conservative, and he was gay, and he wanted to be an artist, and they were all upset about that. We’ve been working on this thing for 10 years.

Chip Kidd (00:49:10):

I think it’s finally going to come out in the spring of what, ’24, but that this is one I’ve really been putting input into, really, actually editing. Usually, editing a graphic novel, for me, means being an ambassador for it, into the publishing house. And you have all these duties that you have to do. You have to do an audio presentation for the salesforce so they can listen to it in their car or now, at home. That’s part of the editorial process at Pantheon and Knopf.

Debbie Millman (00:49:44):

You have a book that has been recently published. It is the paperback version of Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. Congratulations.

Chip Kidd (00:49:55):

Thank you.

Debbie Millman (00:49:55):

What made you decide to create a book about graphic design for kids in the first place?

Chip Kidd (00:50:00):

Well, as I’ve said in every interview about this, it was not my idea. I cannot claim ownership of the idea. It was this amazing woman named Raquel Jaramillo, who by now is much better known by her pen name, R.J. Palacio. And she had been a book cover designer of great renowned. She did everything for Thomas Pynchon. And then, she became an editor at Workman.

Chip Kidd (00:50:27):

And she called me, I don’t even remember what year it was, 2010, 2011 and said, “Do you want to have lunch? There’s a project I want to talk to you about.” And I said, “Sure.” And I just thought it would be a book cover that she wanted me to do. And so, we met and she said, “Okay. Unless I’m mistaken, no one’s ever created a book to teach graphic design to kids.”

Chip Kidd (00:50:51):

And as soon as she said it, this flash went off in my head, I’m like, “Oh my God, you’re right. I can’t think of one.” And she said, “Yes. And I think you should do it.” I probably said this in the last interview we did about this, but I thought, “Okay, I don’t know any kids. I don’t relate to kids. I don’t like kids. Sign me up.” Because I just thought nothing is going to put me outside of my comfort zone like this.

Chip Kidd (00:51:26):

But what was great about it, and at time is frustrating was okay, rethink all of this. I learned these things in college, but now, what do I say to a 10-year-old? It forced me to rethink about what graphic design is, about what the components are, how to teach somebody about it, who doesn’t have a lot of life experience.

Debbie Millman (00:51:53):

How do you go about doing that? How do you go about teaching somebody something where they don’t really have the construct in which to potentially envision it on their own?

Chip Kidd (00:52:06):

One of the things that Raquel said from the beginning was don’t talk down to them. Don’t talk down to your audience. And I had figured that out with kids, despite all of what I just said. It’s like talk to them like they’re a peer and not like they’re 10. And they’re going to take you a lot more seriously, and listen more effectively to what you have to say.

Chip Kidd (00:52:29):

And then, it’s imagination. I have to think about, “Okay, if I was 10, what would I be able to comprehend about this?” And I’m sure I’ve also said in the other podcast about it, the challenge became not so much what to put in the book, but as to what to leave out. Because when I learned about graphic design in college, we studied the history.

Chip Kidd (00:52:55):

There are all these important historical moments and contributions in the history of graphic design, which is mainly the 20th century, that I did not want to get into with a 10-year-old, war propaganda, pornography, sex sells. And in fact, I didn’t want to make any of it about selling something, really.

Debbie Millman (00:53:18):

That’s hard.

Chip Kidd (00:53:18):