Described as a darkly funny meditation on creativity and family, Brad Listi joins to talk about his new book, “Be Brief and Tell Them Everything.”
Debbie Millman:
Of Brad Listi’s many gifts, one of them is a gift for titles. He is the founding editor of an online literary magazine called, The Nervous Breakdown. His first novel, a Los Angeles times bestseller is called, Attention. Deficit. Disorder, with period separating each word. His podcast, where for over a decade he has been doing fascinating in depth interviews with a wide variety of writers is called, Other People podcast. He joins me today to talk about his podcast and his books, especially his latest, a work of auto fiction with another great title, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. Brad Listi, welcome to Design Matters.
Brad Listi:
Thank you so much, I’m glad to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Brad, I understand you’re quite the Grateful Deadhead.
Brad Listi:
I grew up on that music, and it was significant to me in my late adolescence, and the Midwest. And I often describe the experience of going to my first Dead show as the aliens landed. I was in suburban Indianapolis, nothing happened there. And I was living a pretty insulated life as a kid, and so it was a revelation. All these freaks were there and it terrified me, but I was drawn to it. And it was exactly what I wanted at that age. I mean, I could spend an entire hour trying to defend my position on this, because I feel the Dead get a lot of shit from people-
Debbie Millman:
Oh no, not from me. We had a lot of similar, overlapping, college experiences around the Grateful Dead, if you know what I mean? Hint, hint, wink wink.
Brad Listi:
Sure, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And life changing revelatory, sometimes hallucinatory. And so, I am a big Grateful Dead fan, and was really, really happy to see that you were to. And have spent many an hour at Grateful Dead concerts, and listening to music. Just one last question about the Grateful Dead, because for those listeners that might not be into the Grateful Dead, although my God, what they’re missing. What is your favorite album?
Brad Listi:
Oh God, I would probably say the Europe 72, live albums. I’ve probably listened to those the most, but I listened to so many bootlegs like live recordings. That’s where it’s at with them, but I think they are artistic heroes for me, beyond just being musical heroes. I love the way they did it, and the way they built their community and the visual iconography of it, and the way that it inspired so many people to start their own creative projects. And the way it created this community that sustained itself through trade, and bartering on the road, and allowed people to live this gypsy life outside of conventional reality almost. That’s very cool to me. I mean, that’s what a rock band is supposed to do at its very best, in my book I think.
Debbie Millman:
Brad, you were born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I understand the first thing you did in the moments after being born was pee in your doctor’s face?
Brad Listi:
This is what I’m told, I have no memory of this. But, this is-
Debbie Millman:
I was actually curious about that, but you’ve written that your mom saw it as an act of defiance, but you’ve posited that you were just terrified, lost bladder control in front of strangers, and was uncontrollably weeping. And I love the range in perspective here.
Brad Listi:
Well, listen, it’s easy to take that story and tell it at parties as a joke, which I think I’ve probably done. Where it’s like, this was my first statement on earth. They brought me out of a shoot, and they were like, “Welcome to life,” and I peed on the doctor’s face. But, the truth is that I was terrified most likely as a little tiny infant child, and I’m being yanked out of the womb, and that was my response. So, there’s something funny about that.
Debbie Millman:
Brad, your parents were southerners, they were transplanted to the north, because of your dad’s job. And you’ve written that they were nurturing to an almost ridiculous degree, and have said that you learned this from your childhood. “A basic sense of morality, a predisposition to favor the underdog in pretty much any human conflict. And beyond matters of scripture there was this simple example of your parents’ devotional commitment, a form of discipline, not entirely dissimilar to that which I’ve tried with moderate success to emulate in my writing life.” When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
Brad Listi:
I think, I was told I was good at it from a young age, and I think I had some natural proclivity. I think when people are creative they gravitate towards these things, I see it in my own children. They gravitate towards creative projects, and they get enthusiastic about it, and they seem to have some gift for it. But, over and over again, in conversations that I’ve had with writers, I hear repeatedly that they had a teacher who told them they were good at it. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I also think it’s funny how we as human beings need people to tell us what we’re good at. And we so believe them, this has shaped my entire life. Somebody was like, “Do you know what? You really should be a writer, you should write books.”
My dad, speaking of nurturing to a ridiculous degree, when my sisters and I were growing up as we got towards the end of high school, he brought someone to the house who administered the Myers Briggs personality indicator test to us. Because, he was like, “We’re going to help you as you go into your college years, have a greater sense of what your strengths, and weaknesses are, and all this kind of stuff.” And I remember taking that test and then, I think I went in after it was administered, and had an individual one-on-one. Where the guy went through the results, and I distinctly remember him being like, “Oh, so Mr. Steven Spielberg,” that’s what he said to me. “You’re going to make movies.” He was just selling me a little bit huckstery maybe, but I went to college and majored in film.
I was so impressionable. I was not one of these people who had a completely clear sense of who I was or what I was going to do. And I think I needed that encouragement, and guidance. And I say that and I also don’t think that it was very far off the mark, I probably would’ve wound up doing something like this anyway. It might have maybe taken me a little bit longer, but I feel like that’s the experience. It’s teachers telling me, parents telling me, getting some positive feedback on little projects that I did. And then, here we are all these years later.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I find it so interesting because you also have written about how, “If you are any kind of writer at all, it is almost certainly attributable to your Catholic upbringing and complete inability from an early age to feel at home inside the church.” And you’ve gone on to state that everything you’ve ever written or podcasted has on some level been a response to this failure. And I was really, really fascinated by how so?
Brad Listi:
Well, I mean, I think that’s one way of looking at it. And I think it’s the kindest way that I could put it rather than just coming out, and saying, “This never made sense to me, religion is bullshit.” Which, I think I felt at various turns in my life especially, maybe in my adolescence and early adulthood. But, the truth is that from a very young age, I was being taken to church on Sundays, and going to CCD as one does in their Catholic youth. And I felt very uncomfortable, and it wasn’t making sense to me, and I wasn’t getting questions answered that I was asking. And I’ve told this story many times, but as a kid I would be sitting in church and I would be like, “Okay, God, if you’re there just shoot a purple beam of light through that skylight really quickly.” I was asking for these little supernatural favors just so I could get some confirmation.
And nothing would happen. And then, I’d be like, “What kind of God wouldn’t help a kid out?” It just seemed completely nonsensical to me. And I think in hindsight, I’m just not wired for it. And I also think I did not have the right teacher, I think if I might have had a curmudgeonly Jesuit, who would have embraced me in my doubt and helped me along in a way that was less, maybe Dr. Nair. It could have stuck better, but I was an outlier, and I still am an outlier in my family in that sense, though we’re not a super religious family. It’s just that my parents are from the south and I think culturally, if you’ve ever spent time down there, it’s the air that you breathe. It’s very, very normal to go to church on Sunday.
It’s part of the social fabric, and I didn’t grow up in the south. So that, made be an outlier too. I think I’m just a person that has to learn the hard way, and I’m a person who has to learn on his own. And I’m never going to be able to accept religious dogma without a lot of doubt, and a lot of questioning. Where I ultimately landed was with Buddhism, if I had to pick one. I mean, I’m also not going to Buddhist temples on Sundays or Saturdays or whenever it happens, I do all of this on my own through books and seated meditation. It’s something that’s important to me, this spiritual exploration, but it’s something that I have to do on terms that work for me. I can’t fake it, and I can’t do it to indulge somebody else’s preferences. When you’re a kid, and you’re getting in trouble for not wanting to go to church. And then, you’re dealing with all of the moral constructs that Catholicism or any religion tends to offer, it can give you a sense of having failed.
Debbie Millman:
You had a lot to reckon with as you were growing up, I’m going to talk about some sensitive subjects now. In the fall of your senior year of high school, one of your closest friends lost his older brother Billy, to brain cancer and he was 20 years old. And you’ve written about how you, and your friends bore witness to Billy in his final days, delirious from chemo, fighting like hell to stay alive. And you’ve said that the cruelty of his loss scared you terribly, and put you in something of a nihilistic mood just as you were all turning 18 years old. How has that impacted the trajectory of your life?
Brad Listi:
Well, hugely, and in the book it’s fictionalized slightly. Though, my buddy Timmy did lose his older brother to cancer. And this was just a few years after he lost his father in an absolutely freak accident in Indianapolis, where an air force jet was flying a test run and had engine failure. And the pilot ejected from the plane, because it was going down, and the plane ghost road into a hotel where his dad was making a payphone call. He was a salesman.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.
Brad Listi:
And this was just a couple of blocks from where my dad worked. So, the cockpit of the plane landed in my dad’s parking lot, and they all rushed outside when they heard the boom. And it was my buddy’s dad, we were in seventh grade at the time. That was maybe one of the first unexpected, tragic deaths. I think that was the first one. And then, I want to say my sophomore year of high school, there was the loss of an old friend from when I lived in Milwaukee. His younger brother died, he was nine or 10, I think, of a freak infection. It was sepsis or whatever it was, a flu. It was just like a virus came in, and in a matter of a couple of days he died. And then, within that same week, one of my neighbors on my little cul-de-sac in Indiana, she got home from school in the afternoon and went inside, and found her mom who was in her 40s, dead, of a freak heart attack. It was in the same week.
So, people were dropping all around me, it was very hard for me to comprehend at that age. And then, also, you take into consideration my spiritual confusion. Then, my buddy Timmy’s brother gets diagnosed with lymphoma, and we watched him deteriorate, and die as we were basically turning 18. And it was really tough. It was quite an experience to be that age, and to be with him when he was so close to the end. Cancer’s really brutal, it can really do a number on you physically. And so, the experiences were haunting, and just too much. It was too much for the family to lose their dad, there were four boys and then, the mother then loses her eldest son just a few years later. It was a double whammy, and just utterly cruel. An utterly cruel turn of fate, and that’s always hard to comprehend.
Debbie Millman:
And then, while you were in college, one of your closest friends took his own life.
Brad Listi:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
How were you able to manage this level of grief at that stage of your pretty young life?
Brad Listi:
Not easily or well. And you asked me how it changed my life, and I think the high school experiences probably made me angry in ways that I didn’t fully understand. It was cynical in ways that I didn’t fully understand, but also, there was a lot of joy and just the energy of childhood. Where you’re like, “I don’t want to deal with all this, I’m young, I’m ready to have fun.” And so, there was that, and in that spirit and at that time, generationally and geographically and otherwise, we were doing a lot of drinking. I don’t know if it was this way for you, but I feel like kids these days don’t do nearly the binge drinking that my generation did, and smoking pot and all that kind of stuff. And then, I went off to college and there’s that freshman year thing, where you’re released from your cloistered Midwestern suburb.
And suddenly I was in Boulder, and it was sunny all the time. Instead of having a low gray overhang of slate gray clouds or whatever, and cold rain. It was just so lovely, and the mountains were so shocking to me. I’d lived in the flatlands, it was very festive and overly so, I think in retrospect and I think with the benefit of hindsight, I can see the ways in which I and my cohort, it wasn’t just me. We were medicating ourselves, medicating pain, medicating the confusion of adolescence, not really operating wisely. I didn’t have great instruction when it came to substances. And I wish that I would’ve, because I think I would’ve responded well, I’m of the, just say no generation. And just say no was a blanket dictate.
It was just say no to everything, any kind of drug except for alcohol, and cigarettes of course, when you became of age, which are probably two of the worst. And once I realized that pot was relatively benign, and I just laughed a lot, and ate cereal with my bare hands. I was like, “Well, these people lied to me, these people don’t know what they’re talking about. All this has been a bunch of bullshit, I’m going to try everything and find out for myself.” So, here again, we have young Brad Listi, trying to go his own road and find things out on his own. And you learn some hard lessons that way, in terms of what, say an ecstasy hangover feels like, which I don’t recommend. And I had a very intense period in the early part of my college existence, the first year and a half essentially, where I was just wide open.
And it was lovely, it’s not something that I look back on with uniform regret. I have some nostalgia for it even, it was a lot of fun, but it was too much. And it crescendoed with the suicide of a friend of mine, right after we had done a semester abroad. That was a true pivot point in a way that I think these earlier deaths were not, I think at that point something snapped. I was so shocked by it. I was a little bit older, and I felt a real sense of responsibility as one does when someone close to you takes their own life, but I hadn’t seen it coming. And then, yet, I worried that maybe I had, which I think again is common with these kinds of losses.
It’s a very particular kind of grief, because it comes with so many questions. It’s very haunting to think of how thin the membrane is between life, and death. And when somebody crosses through by their own hand, who you know and who you were just skiing with the other day, that’s what happened. I mean, I’d just seen him. We got back from our semester abroad, I was in such a rush to see all my friends, and share all the “Wisdom” I had gained. I was probably the most annoying 19 year old on earth, I’d just gone abroad for the first time, and thought I knew everything. And we came back, and we were in Boulder, and the semester had ended.
So, we went up and went skiing, and I had no sense, just no sense. So, I was blindsided by it, and traumatized by it. I see now with the benefit of hindsight, that was when I got serious about my education as I write about in the book. And that was when I started to try to reckon with how to deal with my suffering, and how to deal with the spiritual problem, if that’s a way of putting it, of being alive as a human being on earth. And I’m fumbling my way forward still, but it definitely changed my life.
Debbie Millman:
After your experience at the university of Colorado in Boulder, you went on to get your MFA at the university of Southern California, where you took a fiction seminar with Hubert Selby Jr. The author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Requiem For a Dream, both amazing, amazing books. And you called the experience, “Several other wonderfully, profane meditations on the American underworld.” And so, I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that was like?
Brad Listi:
Well, for me at that stage of my life, where I knew that I wanted to try to write books, but I didn’t really know how. And I’d never really had a creative community especially, one that was centered on literature. To be in the presence of Hubert Selby Jr or Cubby, as he was known, was to be in the presence of somebody who had done it. That was very powerful for me, just to be … I was like, “Okay, this is the guy who’s walked the walk. This is the guy who he’s now towards the end of his life, he’s written all these books.” One of them got made into a cool movie. It was just like he had lived my dream, but he was also a very poignant figure in particular at that stage, because he was in poor health. He passed away, I think, a year after I took that class with him.
He had always had pulmonary or for a long time, had dealt with pulmonary health issues, dating back to when I think he had tuberculosis in the Merchant Marine, if I’m remembering correctly. And so, he would come into class with oxygen tubes in his nose, wheeling a tank behind him. And yet he was very funny, he was sharp as a tack. He got every joke. He was exactly what I hoped he’d be like when I’m an older man. And he was also very open about the struggles that he had had. And in particular, he was open about it in his writing, and I had seen him read his writing. And if anybody ever saw Cubby Selby read they would remember it, because he was an extraordinary performer of his work, unbelievable emotion that he would convey.
And he had this, I always describe his voice as Muppet like, but with a Brooklyn accent. He had this very, I can’t do it, but it was very distinct. And to be around him, that alone was revelatory to me and felt like a relief. It was like, “Okay, so now here I am, I’m this close to it.” He said something about being a frustrated preacher to me, that resonated in the sense that I think he, and I shared spiritual frustration and also a spiritual interest, and wanted to try to say our peace. And as I say in the book, “Articulate our confusion and our doubts,” hearing it put that way, and hearing it come from his mouth meant a lot. And I’ve never forgotten it.
Debbie Millman:
What were you planning to do after you got your MFA? What was your intention at that time?
Brad Listi:
It’s so funny, my understanding of the world of publishing was so antiquated, and I had no innate business sense. I thought it was like 1926, and that I was going to go to New York, and have drinks at a bar with an agent. And the agent was going to sell my book for lots of money. And I was going to live abroad. I mean, do you know what I’m saying? I had this fantasy in my head based on books that I had read, many of which were older and had come from a time when the culture was entirely different, but I was doggett. I got all my coursework done for my MFA a semester early and then, spent that last semester trying to find an agent, which I was able to do.
She’s still my agent to this day. But I mean, Debbie, I bought a bad suit. I thought you wore a suit. My parents who have no background in the arts, my dad’s a businessman, he was like, “You’re going to New York, you’re going to need a suit.” So, here I am, trancing around Manhattan for the first time in my life, by myself in a bad suit, a bad blazer. It was herring bone pad, I mean, it was really bad. And I remember distinctly walking into some of these meetings with literary agents, and them looking at me like, “Who the fuck is this guy?”
Debbie Millman:
A fuller priced man.
Brad Listi:
I mean, what, are you going to sell me insurance? I was supposed to be in a t-shirt, I’m a creative, but again, I am so impressionable. I’ve been this way since I was little. I will listen to you if you tell me things, and maybe to a fault. And I was walking around town, dressed like I don’t know what, trying to introduce myself. I thought you needed to meet people in person, which I don’t think was maybe the worst idea. I think a lot of it’s done over the internet these days, but I wanted to look at somebody before I went into business with them. And so, I went out and got an agent, and it took us a while, but we sold that book. But, you learn pretty quickly in contemporary literary publishing that it’s very difficult to make your way financially, unless you get very lucky or have some extraordinary talent that just rises above or maybe some combination. And so, that began my long struggle.
Debbie Millman:
Well, your first book, Attention. Deficit. Disorder., was published in 2006. It was actually a Los Angeles times bestseller. So, I mean, that’s a really cool thing you can have forever on your resume.
Brad Listi:
Yeah. I mean, it’s so hard to get a book published.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.
Brad Listi:
I mean, it’s hard to write one, do you know what I’m saying? So, there’s all these things, and that all these steps along the way that you have to get over, you got to finish the manuscript. You then, got to find an agent, that’s not easy. Then, you’ve got to go out, and deal with the many rejections that will almost inevitably come trying to find a publisher. And none of it is simple. Then, you have to deal with the thing coming out, and the culture not caring in the way that it used to or not feeling like it cares at all. There’s a disequilibrium that I think can sometimes hit an author, especially a young author, where the book comes out and there’s pub day. And it’s so exciting.
And yet your editor might not even call, that happens. I remember my agent sending me flowers and I was like, “Oh,” and I held the vase. And it meant something to me, because I was like, “Somebody’s acknowledging that this happened.” And then, I remember going into the bookstore to visit my book, to see it in the store for that debut is a big deal. And then, subsequently, and maybe a little bit pathetically, I would revisit my book in the bookstore to check in on it as if I were visiting a patient at the hospital.
Debbie Millman:
I think that’s really wonderful, I think that’s really charming. You simultaneously or nearly simultaneously launched your online magazine, The Nervous Breakdown in 2006 as well. You originally launched it on MySpace, which I love. Does anybody out there remember MySpace? And it was really an outgrowth of the work you were doing to promote your novel. So, talk about the motivation for doing that? Why you went to MySpace? Why the name, The Nervous Breakdown? Talk a little bit about the origin story of this whole aspect of your life now.
Brad Listi:
I think it was right at the dawn of social media. Again, I had my agent call me up and say, “Hey, there’s this thing called MySpace. I think you should look into it in advance of publication, a lot of musicians are using it, but some authors are onboarding now.” So, I set up a MySpace music account for me and my novel, and I just started blogging daily, and people started to show up and comment, and interact with me. And I started to get hit with that dopamine, which was a new experience. I felt I was building community around my book, and I felt like, “Wow, I could sell some books this way,” which was only somewhat true. You learn these things. But, that was a heady experience, it was also a heck of a lot of work, and it was also a great way for a writer to burn himself out, and to burn up all of his creative energy on a daily blog.
I did it for over a year, and I was really dedicated to it, because I thought it would bear fruit. And because I was addicted to the dopamine, and because it was fun, and it was interesting. As I did this and experienced some success with it, I started to think, “Wow, the barrier to entry’s really low. And what if I joined forces with other writers, and we launched our own magazine, why wouldn’t we?” So, I started talking about it to the woman who cut my hair back at that time, it was really this haphazard. And she’s like, “Oh, my sister does some web design.” She really didn’t.
And then, the next thing I knew I was sitting at my kitchen table with this young girl who sort of knew how to make a blog online. And then, I put up Craigslist ads, because I initially conceived of it as being this international thing where there would be expatriated writers around the world reporting from Tokyo, and Beijing, and Paris. And I did get some hits. We did have some early contributors in places like France, and Spain, and New Zealand, and Australia. In those early years it became an incredibly vibrant community, I see now in retrospect. People were posting daily, and there would be three to 500 comments on a post.
Debbie Millman:
I remember those great old days. I was part of The Speak Up crew, the first ever design blog, and Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio started that. And oh my God, the glory days of blogging.
Brad Listi:
Yeah. And also, really gifted writers who have since gone on to great publication success, including some who answered my Craigslist ad. I mean, we were all just getting into the internet really, in a serious way, in terms of building a presence as they say online. Having an author website, having a social media presence, all of that was new then. And so, I thought maybe I could build it into this thing that became a profit machine with poetry, and weird personal essays. And that’s really not going to do it most of the time, I have since discovered.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s a labor of love, and it’s evidence of a group of people coming together making something meaningful. I mean, you moved off MySpace, you’re now located at thenervousbreakdown.com. You’ve launched a book club, a live event series, a small press, in 2011 you started the podcast, Other People. You’ve done a lot with all of this extension into what has always seemed to be the new media at the time. So, I would say, congratulations.
Brad Listi:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve always hustled and been interested in experimenting, and I’ve always wanted to both make art and say my thing, but also serve my community. And I think my community is definitely writers, and people who are into books, and who are into making meaning with books. And I feel one feeds the other. I don’t know if I could write, I mean, maybe I would write more, I’ve had that thought. But, I feel if I didn’t do the podcast, and I didn’t do The Nervous Breakdown and these various permutations of it, that I might not have as much juice or something or I wouldn’t feel as good about myself. I like to be interacting with people, and helping other people realize their creative visions. And I also feel in this culture, books and maybe, it’s always been this way. But, I feel especially with digital media, and movies, and television and all of that stuff, music, you’re competing with a lot.
It’s a very crowded media universe, and it feels to me that book people or at least some book people need to help create book media, and we need to promote ourselves. And there’s nobody who is more acutely frustrated with great writers not getting the attention they deserve than I am. It drives me absolutely nuts. And I think it’s what fuels me, I think it fueled me as I got underway at the nervous breakdown. And it has especially fueled me through the years that I’ve done the podcast, because that really feels like the truth to me. There are people who write masterpieces or close to masterpieces, however you want to define it. But, just excellent works of art that only a few hundred people read. That seems insane to me. And I’m trying to rectify it one little episode at a time.
Debbie Millman:
Your podcast has been continuously running for 11 years now. I think you’ve done close to a 1000 interviews, is that right?
Brad Listi:
It’s getting close to 800. So yeah, on that-
Debbie Millman:
It’s rounding up.
Brad Listi:
Rounding up to a 1000, and it’s still shocking to me.
Debbie Millman:
And you have interviewed undeniably some of the world’s absolute greatest writers. In my research, I discovered that you’ve said despite the podcast success, despite everything that you’ve accomplished with this remarkable body of work. You’ve said the truth is you’re genuinely confused about the podcast function in your life. How so?
Brad Listi:
Well, I mean, it’s just this thing that I started as a LARC, and I truly thought of it as a finite experiment. And now I’m here 11 years later, and it’s become close to the center of my professional life, and it’s something that I probably rely on in ways that I don’t even fully understand. Just the degree to which it means something to me, and sustains me. I’m sure you have a similar feeling like to have-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I actually have the same feelings, both the positive and the questioning. I’m not going to say it’s negative, because I don’t think it’s negative. I just think the confusion about,” I’d never set out to do this, this wasn’t my goal as I was growing up.” So, I totally get it. And I’m so interested in what you have to say about this.
Brad Listi:
And so, I think as the episodes pile up and the years go by, and I keep having these conversations with people, it’s hard not to feel a little bit odd. As a person who seems to need to have these conversations and then, to share them in public. And I’ve often described it as a continuing education for me. And that’s a big reason why it’s hard to give up, because you get so much from it. And then, you also feel a sense of … Nothing makes me feel better than to get a letter from a listener or even a tweet, that just says, “Wow, this episode knocked me over” or “This really helped me” or “I have been alone working in my Haval in the Yukon territory or somewhere far afield, and I didn’t know anything about how to become a writer, but I’ve listened to this show and it has helped to light the way for me.” It’s enormously gratifying. And it doesn’t even have to be at some maximum volume in terms of the number of letters that I get.
You can get one a week even, and it just keeps you going. And it makes you feel so good. It also makes you feel like you’re not crazy, because this is how I feel about it nine times out of 10, I’ll turn off the recorder after a conversation. And I’ll just be like, “Wow, that was great.” I feel good having connected with a person in this way, and having had this dialogue, and this concentrated, no smartphone interaction with a human being where we’re really trying to get somewhere. And we’re really trying to connect, and trying to understand each other. Podcasting the way that blogging became a punchline at a certain point, because of how many people had one. I think that’s part of it is the low barrier to entry, and these things become bastardized in the culture.
But, I always bristle. I go, this is a really cool medium, and it’s giving us something that I think we desperately need. This deep dive conversation, and this wide access to so many different subjects, and the educational value that it can have. This is the way that I explain it to myself. But, I think when you come into something accidentally like this, and you didn’t really foresee it, it’s probably natural to sit around evaluating every once in a while. How did this happen? How am I here?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Brad Listi:
But, I feel lucky that it did. It’s such a cool thing that I am able to do this, and that these incredible world class authors, and artists will come talk to me week after week. How many people can say that? I mean, that’s a blessing. And so, I’m going to keep going. I often joke that I want to go until I’m 90, I think I’ve done the math, and that will put me at 3000 episodes. I don’t know if that will happen, it could end tomorrow, right? Anything could end tomorrow, but I don’t have a sense of an ending, but I do like the idea of a podcast, accruing power, especially a podcast over time. Maybe, in a world where pretty much everybody has a podcast, there’s something to be said for longevity.
This is a theory of the case that I have. And you are a testament to that, you’ve been doing this longer than I have. So, you build that body of work and also, your listeners come along for the ride with you. I think that a podcast could maybe build in its poignance, as it follows a person through their life, the host through their life, but also their guests. I’ve had some repeat guests, so we revisit each other at different stages of life. And I think that’s part of my theory of the case at the moment, and I really hope that I’m able to continue.
Debbie Millman:
You have talked about how, because you’ve interviewed 800 of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers, how people often ask you some variation of the question. What’s the best advice you’ve gotten from a writer? And it’s gotten where you can boil it down to three things.
Brad Listi:
Yeah. I mean, you do get this question. You interview a lot of writers, people are like, “Well, how do you do it? What have you learned?” And I try to simplify, what I have found is that writers who tend to have the most productive careers and the most success in publication, right every day or close to it. They’re very disciplined about getting words on the page, which seems-
Debbie Millman:
So, that’s number one.
Brad Listi:
That’s number one, it seems elemental and it is. Number two also elemental, they read. I think this is the place where maybe most authors in this day and age, would probably stand to improve. Not only because they have multiple responsibilities bearing down on them, financial and otherwise, reading is a big commitment. It’s also, I think increasingly hard to carve out time for it in the world that we live in, the smartphone, digital screen culture that we live in. But, people who have productive writing careers read a lot. You have to have intake if you want output. And it has to be disciplined in the way that we are often disciplined about getting to the page at 06:30 in the morning or whenever we do it. And then, the third thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that the writers who write without as much thinking about money, tend to be the happiest.
And I’m going to put an asterisk next to this, because writers should get paid for their work. It’s not a bad thing to want to make money in publishing, and to want to have a wide readership. But, there are just certain realities about literary fiction, and non-fiction and poetry, especially, that one has to come to grips with. To write a book that goes on, especially a book of, let’s say, literary fiction, that cuts through and sells 3 million copies around the world or whatever it is. And makes you a ton of money, and makes your name, sets you up. That is the equivalent of winning the power ball. I don’t even know what the odds would be, it might even be longer odds. You can do the math, but that’s what I would compare it to.
And so, I think sometimes writers can delude themselves and I’m raising my hand here, because I was one of them in my early career, who thought that this was a much more common experience than it actually is. And who thought that there was a way to impose my will on it, to a degree that there’s really not. And I think writers who have a sense of expectation around the work that they do, and the reach that it typically has. And who set their lives up financially and professionally, so that they can accommodate creative work while also making a living, and having some stable income. Just seemed to be the happiest, and sanest. A lot of times it happens in conjunction with an academic job, which seems to be most symbiotic with a creative life, because of summers and sabbaticals and not maybe having the most standard nine to five schedule. But, it can be other things. That’s the third thing, and it’s the one that has the most to do with just the practical aspects of life and adulting, as they say.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you for sharing that. I’m dying to talk with you about your new book, there’s so much else to talk to you about. And I have so many other questions that I’m just now skipping over to get to your book, because I’m just antsy and want to talk about it. Your new book is called, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. And you start the book with this statement, “This book took 12 years to write. It started out as a novel and then, it became a different novel. And then, it was another different novel and then, it was an essay collection and then, it was nothing for a while. And then, it was a memoir and then, it became a novel again. And now, it’s whatever this is.” First of all, I think that’s one of the most perfect first lines of a book I’ve ever read. I sat down ready to read your book, I read that line and was like, “Okay, I have to put the book down, and just live with this beautiful first line.” How long did it take you to write that opening? It’s so good.
Brad Listi:
I mean, in practice it probably came out of me pretty quickly, but it took me many years to get to the point where it could. This is usually the case. People say, “Oh, I wrote this draft, this book shot out of me in three months.” They don’t tell you that they spent six years in the wilderness.
Debbie Millman:
Torturing themselves.
Brad Listi:
So, the way that I’ve been describing the book that you’ve read, and the book that’s out there now, is a work of art that involved a lot of surrender. It’s basically me surrendering to it after so many years of frustration, so many different failed versions and very frustrating experiences, trying to find a way to say what I needed to say. And ultimately, because of life circumstances I think, I got to a place creatively where I was like, “Fuck it, I just have to deal with this head on. I have to say what happened as plainly as I can.” And auto fiction became the right fit. And I think maybe if I had a big picture epiphany about the book that helped me see it through, it was that I understood finally that this was a book about creation and creative exasperation. Not only artistic creation, but also the creation of family, and these questions around why. Why do this? Why make art?
Why make a family? Why subject yourselves to the risks of love? As a human being you put your heart on the line when you decide to have children, especially in this day and age. But, you do it as well when you get married or lock into a relationship or put your heart on the line in any number of ways. Likewise, there is something insane about writing books, making art in a world that’s so distracted. And making this slow food in a world that seems so designed for fast food. And is anybody going to care? And why am I spending all these years on this? You can start to feel a little bit nuts.
And so, these were all the questions that I had, and all the lived experiences that I was dealing with. And I think what happened was that for this particular narrative, I just finally landed on an approach that was pretty close to the truth, that gave me some flexibility as needed to make the experience readable, which is very important. But, which finally allowed me to articulate my confusion as I say, in a way that felt satisfying. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally get to the point where I was writing this book, and felt like it was coming together after all that time, because I didn’t know if it would.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve mentioned the term auto fiction, and for our listeners that might not know what that is. Can you talk a little bit more about the genre, which seems to be gaining in popularity quite a lot over the last couple of years?
Brad Listi:
Yeah, and I don’t know if I’m just sensitive to it, because I have a book of auto fiction out or if it’s something that a lot of people have been noticing. But, like podcasting, it’s one of these cultural punching bags. It’s like, “Oh, auto fiction.” And I bristle at that, I’m like, “Hey, listen, people writing from their lived experience,” which is what auto fiction is. Its autobiographical fiction and then, tweaking it a bit for the purposes of narrative, and readability or the protection of innocence. Sometimes you change details to protect the people who might be implicated. There’s nothing wrong with it, and at its best for me as a reader, which is, I think the point of Genesis for me as a writer of auto fiction. When I’m reading a really good work of auto fiction it comes as a huge relief to me.
I respond very strongly to works of art where I can really feel the artist in there grappling, and talking to me plainly, this can come in a variety of forms. I think it comes most directly in auto fiction and memoir, if I can feel the artist in there and I can feel a sense of personal truth permeating the book. And I can get a real sense of the human being inside of the art, it makes a big difference to me. And I think with this in mind, it makes sense that I would be a person who would be interested in talking to people on a podcast.
I’m always interested in the artist, and I know some artists go, “No, don’t be interested in me, it’s about the art itself. Just enjoy this world that I’ve built.” And I’m like, “No, I want to know what’s going on with you.” And I think we write the kinds of books maybe that we most respond to. For me with this one, auto fiction ultimately was the form. And it was the only form that it really could take, I tried other ways, trust me and they just didn’t work.
Debbie Millman:
I’m very similar in that, I like to know everything about somebody that I’m talking with. And as I was reading your book, because I know that you know my wife, Roxanne Gay and she adores you. I keep asking her, “Did this happen? Is this true? Is this really … Does he have this? Does this …” And she kept giving me the answers that I was needing to be able to figure out the narrative in my own way. And you’ve said, “That auto fiction is very natural for you as a writer, but you also really appreciate it as a reader.” And I was wondering why? I was wondering wouldn’t you rather given how curious you are, and how interested you are in the details of a person’s life, rather know what exactly did happen and to whom? As opposed to wondering if, is Brad talking about this or is he talking about this? Or is this made up? Or did this really happen?
Brad Listi:
I mean, I think with auto fiction that’s as close to the bone as my book is, and as a lot of works in the category are. You usually can tell, you have a pretty good sense of the person giving it to you straight, maybe with some tweaks. And I think I can accept them, because usually they’re in there again, just to help the narrative along. What I found in writing and struggling to write this book, is that if I delivered just the facts, it became a little bit suffocating or maybe a lot suffocating. And it just didn’t work. This was just the way that I could make it work, and I wanted it to be as truthful as possible. And sometimes, as the saying goes, you can be more truthful in fiction than you can in non-fiction. And I don’t have a great memory, in some cases that was the impetus. It was like, “I don’t even remember.”
In the chaos of life we have maybe an emotional memory or something of a moment, but we don’t have a clear picture or I don’t. I should say too, as you’ve mentioned Roxanne, that her book, Hunger was instructive for me. I remember distinctly reading Hunger as I was struggling along on my way and being like, “Oh, well, here’s how it’s done. You go right at it.” And that book is a great example of that. And I knew that I had tough stuff to talk about in my book, I knew that I had to, the phrase that I always go back to, is slow down where it hurts, which is a Steve Allman line, which I think is really what you need to do as a writer. It can be counterintuitive, because you’re sitting there writing and you’re like, “Ooh.” This is where you just want to gloss over, I’ll be very succinct here, but that’s actually where you do need to stretch out a little bit.
And it’s not the most natural thing in the world to do. And it can be very easy even for a person who likes to think of himself or herself as an honest broker. It can be easy to trick yourself into thinking you did it, and you got it all out there. And it’s like, “No, we need to see even more as a reader.” And that’s where the emotional power, and the real human feeling of a book comes through. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced that as a reader without a problem. It’s exactly what you want as a writer, it can be more difficult. And even up to the point of publication for my book, the sections of my book that are the most personal, and heartfelt, and wrenching and difficult, were the ones that I was most concerned about when it came to how the book would be received. And of course, without fail, these are the sections of the book that people have responded to most strongly. And we’ll talk about when they write to me or talk to me. So, go figure.
Debbie Millman:
Ordinarily, when I interview a writer about their book, I will talk and ask about specific things in the book. In the case with you, Brad, what I actually really wanted to do was read some short excerpts from the book that I truly loved, that I wanted to talk to you about. Because, it didn’t feel fair asking you questions about things you’ve written about in the book, without actually sharing little pieces of the book, because it’s so beautifully written. So, are you cool with that?
Brad Listi:
I’m cool with it, please.
Debbie Millman:
So, this is the longest excerpt and this is really, I think, my favorite paragraph in the book. And this is where you’re writing about the question of whether or not to write a memoir. So, I wanted to start with that one. You write, “Memoir, but is this true? I can’t help but wonder, did I really know? Did this moment actually happen in the way that I recall? Some version of it certainly did, but it’s possible and even likely that over time, I’ve come to embellish it as a way of apprehending the past. Giving our history some definition, and a sweet cinematic beginning, because this is what humans do.
We tell ourselves nice little stories, and believe them as if they were true, but they aren’t actually true. At best, they’re only kind of true. And the more that a person remembers a thing scientists say, the less likely it is to be accurate. With each retelling the essence gets lost, which if true, leaves me wrestling with a fairly big conundrum. If my sense of self is constructed from memories, but the memories are not to be trusted. Then, how am I supposed to have any clear sense of self? I’m never entirely who I think I am, also, what the fuck actually happened? And how has all of this time gone by?”
Brad Listi:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Mic drop, Brad, mic drop. I love that paragraph. I mean, the idea of memory, the thing that I’ve come to understand about my memories is that some of them are true, and some of them are false. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. I have diaries that I have kept from the time I was in the seventh grade until I was about 30. And so, those help me reconstruct specific things. I also have a piece of jewelry that I remember getting as a result of this or that thing happening or a t-shirt. And that becomes evidence of that experience. But, other than that, it’s all ad hoc, as far as I’m concerned at this point at 60 years old.
Brad Listi:
I mean, it’s crazy how it becomes a fiction, and you tell yourself or I tell myself stories. Especially, when you’re trying to harken back to big moments, the things you’re not supposed to forget, like meeting your spouse and how those early days were, that big date where the light bulb went on, and you knew that it was serious. And without hopefully going too far afield, I think when I wrestle with this question about sense of self and how slippery, and mysterious it is, this is tied to the Buddhist lens that I look at existence through. And the Buddhists have quite a lot to say about not self, and how if you start to investigate it there’s really no there there, and it can be very easy. I mean, this is part of the human condition I think.
To invest certain experiences or people or things even, with a sense of identity, we do this over and over again, and we fool ourselves. So I think, again, it’s one big aspect of this broader confusion that I live with openly as a human being and I can’t help, but tether it to this acute sense of the passage of time. I mean, we all feel this as we advance through middle age, right? It’s like, “Wow, it’s really going fast. I want to hang on to things, I want to have a sense of what’s going on. I want to live well, I want to be good at life.” Then, you can find yourself looking back on say, that big first date or the birth of a child, some big moment and realizing like, “I don’t really have it, it’s disintegrating. Everything does.”
Debbie Millman:
Another piece of the book that I loved was how you articulate struggling to find the narrative arc that you want to take through the book. And then, how you begin to understand that you have to write about your shame. And so, you articulate that here in this paragraph, “On the flight home I wrote the following in my notebook, in the end all art is about the artist’s personal struggle. And whenever I get away from this essential fact I lose interest, I lose the thread, feel phony, go adrift. The most critical thing is to tell the truth, even if it’s fiction, especially if it’s fiction. Even though it’s impossible to ever do such a thing, you can never tell the full truth, but you try. And this is the project, it’s about the attempt. Maybe kids can do it, adults can’t.
This is why kids art is charming. Maybe, the only way to do it as an adult is to write something that will never be read. Write your story as honestly as you can, include every lingering guilt and scalding shame, share it with no one.” And you go on to write, “The entry ends here in abrupt fashion followed only by the word turbulence written in a wobbly hand, a couple of lines below.” So Brad, you write out a lot of your shame, what you see as shame, which I just see as comradeship, in the book. How hard was it to do that?
Brad Listi:
Maybe, not as hard as you might think at that point. I think I was surrendered to it, and I was exhausted in a certain sense. And for the period of time that I wrote this book, this final draft, it was a very intense creative experience and the best one that I’ve ever had. And there was a sense of abandon, there was just a sense of, in a experimental frame of mind, I wanted to try to write it as if I were already dead. And I think in retrospect, that might have been colored by the pandemic, because this last draft was written in that spring of 2020. When the pandemic was just coming on board all of our lives, and affecting and upending everything. And so, maybe there was this sense of mortal doom or something, where it was like, “Fuck it, just write it. What do you have to say?”
And then, there’s also a part of me, a pretty strong part of me, that thinks like, “Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do as storytellers and as writers and as communicators? Isn’t this what we’re all hungry for? Is for somebody to drop the mask and really say what’s on their heart and on their mind.” I say that, and I’m on board with it as a reader. I’m like, “Yes, that’s what I want.” But, I also understand that it’s not for everybody. Some people just want to escape into a fantasy world in the books that they read, and to have some middle aged man reckoning with his shame, but it might not be their idea of a nice day at the beach. So, I will cop to that. But for me, in this stage of life, and maybe for me temperamentally and spiritually or otherwise, this is what I’m drawn to. And maybe, this is what I’m just plainly wired for.
Debbie Millman:
Another line in the book that I loved was when you write, “The first half of my existence has been spent with only moderate success trying to become someone, and the back half would be spent learning to become no one.” Talk a little bit more about what that means.
Brad Listi:
Well, I think it’s just having a really acute sense of death, which I want to believe most of us have. I know I’m not alone in this, I think a lot of people are really death obsessed, and not in a bad way. I think it’s healthy to comprehend your life through that lens, it’s coming, we are going to die. It could happen today, it could happen tomorrow. It will be the end of this incarnation or the end period, depending on your worldview or your spiritual framework. I am often at odds with cultural values for this reason. It can seem crazy to me. I think it seemed crazy to me in the phase of my life when I was trying to “Become someone,” which I’m not entirely divorced from. I mean, we all have to do what we have to do to get by in life. But, I think maybe the grief experiences that I’ve lived through, these untimely losses, made me who I am in a lot of ways.
It gave me that acute sensitivity, and brought to mind all these big existential questions, what’s it all for? What are we doing here? I want to try to deeply reckon with my own mortality, and I don’t want to use the phrase I want to die well, a lot of people say that like it’s an accomplishment. It’s like, “No, I’m sure it’ll be messy and a little terrifying, but I do want to have courage. And I do want to look at it, because I’m fascinated by it.” It’s the ultimate reality to me. And I don’t think it has to be this heavy, morbid albatross that you carry around.
I think it can actually be a positive, even daily ritual, that adds a sense of urgency to your existence and helps to put things in perspective. And helps you to relate to the people in your life whom you care about the most, at a level of depth that would otherwise not be there. When you have a sense of like, “Wow, the clock is ticking, what matters most? Who matters most?” It’s these kinds of things, it’s priority inducing. And so, that’s the way that I try to relate to it. And maybe, I just have a deeper sense of it or a bigger fascination with it than most, but I know I’m not alone in it.
Debbie Millman:
No, not at all. In thinking about the structure of the book, you stated that it required a lot of failure. And for example, there’s a chapter in the book where you talk about a miscarriage, a single miscarriage that you and your wife experienced, even though you experienced multiple miscarriages. I believe five miscarriages, which is just horrific. And you decided that was too much. I think there was even a moment where you felt the book could have been called, The Five Miscarriages. But, you’ve stated that when you go through all that failure you start to get a more developed sense of the reader. How does that happen?
Brad Listi:
Well, some of its feedback. Some of its people in publishing telling you that the book is just too depressing or suffocating where they’re not sparking to it. I think there’s a temptation, and a natural reflexive inclination for people who are writing, what you would call, a trauma or a grief narrative, to want to just render the experiences accurately and truthfully in full. And I tried that mode. The problem, even though the writing was probably pretty good on a line by line basis, is that’s not enough for a book to work. I knocked myself on this front as maybe a blind spot for me or an area that I could stand to improve, is having a more well developed sense of the reader at the end of the line. If you’re writing a book you’re writing for a reader, and sometimes I think you can be like, “Well, I’m writing this because I need to express myself.”
Debbie Millman:
It’s not a good reason.
Brad Listi:
No, you have something to say, that’s a different task. If you want to express yourself get a diary, you can express yourself all day long. But, if you’re trying to write a book you’re trying to communicate with somebody, and you have to have a sense of them, and it should be primary. And it took me a while to get there. There are little things about a book that make it more pleasant for a reader, things move along, there’s not a lot of wasted motion. There’s a couple laughs here and there, even in a dark story, there’s a sense of real intimacy and risk on the page, which causes people, myself included, to lean in. I always appreciate that you go, “Oh, okay. Here we go.” It’s that sense of somebody really dropping their guard and bringing you in, and being willing to say what often goes unsaid. And I hope in subsequent books that the learning curve will not be so steep, and will not take me as long.
Debbie Millman:
I have one last question from the book, and one last excerpt that I want to share. So, the question that you ask, you ask a lot of really good questions in the book, and they really made me stop, and think about how I would answer the same questions. And you ask, “How much of what we do or don’t do in life should we be penalized for?” And I’m wondering if you’ve got an answer to that?
Brad Listi:
Now, this is again, through the Buddhist lens, this is a karma question, it’s a cause and effect question. From this perspective and with this basic understanding, if we do good in the world, if we act skillfully we’re probably going to have consequences that please us, and that are not harmful or painful or whatever. Conversely, if we act unskillfully, if we speak unskillfully, I think we’ve all had this experience it tends to come back to bite us. I think there’s another realm of personal error that I’m really struggling with in life, and in the book. And it’s in particular, with respect to my son and his disabilities, and the decisions that were made along the way in the process of conceiving medical decisions. A person can go through life in good faith, and can make errors along the way that cause a lot of pain, and the outcomes are very difficult to deal with.
Not only for you, but for others and getting to a place of self forgiveness for that is not easy. And I think that’s where the heart of the question lies for me, because it’s one thing to be irritable, and to snap at somebody or to lose your temper with somebody on a phone call or something. And then, to have a friendship fall out for a while or something as a result, you can see the line more clearly in that sense. But, when you’re operating in good faith and you just mess up, you’re just not thinking enough or you’re too busy and you’re not concentrating or you’re just uninformed or there’s somebody who should be giving you advice, and you’re not getting it. There’s a professional failure on the medical end. But maybe, you should have asked for a second opinion or held them to account more, these are the things I grapple with when it comes to having a child with disabilities.
I don’t know if I have an answer. I think I have some sense of personal responsibility, but I also know that it’s not useful to beat myself up for it. It’s not going to serve me, it’s not going to serve my kids or my spouse or anybody that I know. And so, at some point you do have to let it go. And I don’t think that means you have to completely absolve yourself and say, “I did nothing wrong.” You cop to your mistakes, but you have to move forward. And there’s a parable I think you would call it, in Buddhism, it’s called the second arrow. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, but you screw something up or you’re dealing with some difficulty and it’s like you get shot with an arrow.
But then, you sit around and you go, “Oh my God, I screwed up. And I did this, that and the other. And I’m so terrible.” And you start to build this narrative around it, and it’s like shooting yourself with a second arrow. So, as much as possible I’m trying not to shoot myself subsequently with additional arrows. And I think that’s the most a person can do, we all make mistakes in life, and some of those mistakes turn out to be more consequential than others.
Debbie Millman:
I have a fortune cookie with a similar sentiment that I keep taped to my laptop, which states, “Avoid compulsively making things worse.”
Brad Listi:
An ideal outcome if you can manage it. And we do this, I know I can beat myself up and I can worry. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but I can be out for a walk and I can have an entire argument with somebody in my head. That’s like an Opera.
Debbie Millman:
I live in New York, I can have an entire argument with an actual person.
Brad Listi:
But I mean, that’s almost more noble. I mean, at least in New York you’re in somebody’s face. I’m supposed to be out hiking, and enjoying nature. And I just spent the entire ascent of this mountainside debating politics with one of my relatives or something. And it’s ridiculous, you just find yourself lost in these fantacims. And as much as possible I would like to avoid that. It’s about the balancing act between having an honest relationship to your own shortcomings, and seeing things clearly, but also understanding that there’s only so much within our control. And I believe, if you’re a person who’s operating in, broadly speaking, good faith, we have to be forgiving of ourselves, and of one another for our foibles.
It’s just hard I think when maybe the consequences affect, like in my case a child, that’s especially difficult. You don’t want ever to bring harm to one of your children. And when you feel maybe something, some blind spot you had might have caused that to happen. It’s a big grief. Grief is a theme in my life for whatever reason, this is what I’ve been dealt. And it’s something that I have to write about, and reckon with, and live through. And hopefully over time gain some insight into, it’s the most you can do with it, right?
Debbie Millman:
How is your son doing?
Brad Listi:
He is doing very well, he started walking at age four. So, I think the hardest years, maybe for me so far, were the years of two and three, where all of his peers were on their feet and he was still scooting. He would scoot, and he was very enthusiastic about it. I mean, he was moving around faster than you would probably think. But, having him up on his feet is a big deal, because not everybody with his condition, which is cerebral palsy, not everybody does get up on their feet. Some people with cerebral palsy wind up needing to eat through a feeding tube. There’s a pretty big spectrum of outcomes. And so, he’s walking, his left hand and arm are weaker than his right. But, he’s hilarious, he’s a kid. In so many respects, just a six year old who loves Spider-Man and thinks he can shoot webs out of his hands.
And all the things that I did at that age too. So, we’re pretty lucky ultimately, and I have two kids. My daughter is 11, she’s his older sister and his guardian angel. And you of course love your children, there’s no delineating it. I can’t do that. It’s all love, but when you have a child who has pretty serious health issues, the way that I describe it is like, “It’s a steroidal.” I use this word a lot lately, steroidal love. It is imbued with grief every day. Every time you look at them, it’s this combo of just big love, big grief. And that experience on a regular basis is very intense. It might not be for everybody, but it is a big privilege to have that … What’s the word? That emotional baseline, everyday I get hit with that.
Most people only get hit with that once in a blue moon, that’s maybe their good fortune in some ways too. But for me, it’s every single day, it’s both and it’s powerful and it’s positive ultimately. Your heart breaks every day. And I think parents who have children with disabilities or illnesses understand that. I think people who are dealing with a health issue or who have parents who are at the end of life or something, we go through phases. But, a parent child relationship is its own beast, and it’s for a lifetime. So, that’s my existence, I did not expect it, but here we are.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it probably is and maybe isn’t, serendipity that the last little excerpt I want to read has to do with these types of emotions. So, I’ll read this, “Emotions I find have a way of becoming bearable over time. The feelings however leveling are always temporary, but to speak of the darkest aspects of one’s trauma, to dig down deep and try to get real about it, to bring oneself into direct contact with its heavy and imovable nature. And to then arrive at something resembling insight.
All I can tell you is that it’s a problem, and where it leaves me, where it seems to leave most anyone who engages with it in a serious way, is in a small private place of quiet surrender, which is that I think these kinds of tragedies have a tendency to do. They beat you, and they beat you, and they beat you. And then, they put you in a little mental cul-de-sac where words are essentially useless, and the powers of logic reach their terminus. And the only thing you can really do is try your best to let go of it all, to relinquish the past and accept what is, and get on with the rest of your life.”
Brad Listi:
Yeah, that paragraph is about acceptance. And when you’re dealing with something like the disability of a child or a terminal diagnosis or any of these really huge things that come at us in life, that’s what you’re confronted with. That’s certainly how I’ve experienced it. If you don’t accept it, I understand in the early stages there’s going to be some confusion and some denial, all the things that we go through, but you get through those phases. And if you don’t accept it, then we’re shooting ourselves with the second arrow and it’s not a peaceful experience, this acceptance. It’s not like I accept it, it’s a bitter pill. It’s hard, but it’s necessary, in my experience. In the absence of some acceptance, and I should say too, that it’s also not entirely static. We can revert, there are moments where I still go, “Oh” and I bristle and I wish, and I just struggle with it.
But for the most part, I accept it. And I accept it because I know that it will do a disservice to me and to my kids and to my wife and to my family and friends, if I don’t. And I also know that too much of non-acceptance is insane, because this is how things are. Whether I like it or not, this is my life. And to sit around wishing that it were not my life, what a profound waste of time and what a profound misallocation of time. When in the aggregate, and at the end of things, my children, these are magical creatures. How did this happen? People come out of people. I mean, I know I sound like a college freshman right now, but if you spend too much time in regret or in the past or in wishing that things were other than the way that they are, then you miss the real magic and I desperately want to not do that.
So that’s, what I’m trying my best to manage, and it’s imperfect. I think it is for anybody who’s coping with something, but it took me a while to understand that. I think maybe the way that acceptance is talked about in the culture, we can sometimes think that it’s supposed to be accompanied by some profound piece. And maybe, there’s a little bit of that, but it’s also accepting defeat in some ways. It’s accepting that things are not the way you wish they were, and that it really hurts and that it’s not going to ever stop hurting to some extent, and you just move forward with it.
Debbie Millman:
It’s such an important lesson sharing. I mean, I don’t want this to sound like a cliche, because I mean it in the truest sense of the words. But, it’s a way for people to see how to integrate or live with the aspects of life that we sometimes refuse to want to see or deal with. And I think that it’s the most beautiful thing you can give someone. Brad, the last thing I want to talk to you about is about a new project that I read about, that you’re working on. I don’t know if you are still, but especially as we’re listening to the January 6th hearings. I read that during the days between September 2020 and January 2021, you kept a meticulous diary of both your personal activity, as well as a very meticulous log of breaking news stories, and tweets. And you’re now going back through and unpacking it all, looking at the news stories, reading through them, pulling quotes, assembling a very rough collage that, at last count, I read it was a million and a half words and almost 4,000 pages long.
Brad Listi:
Yeah, it’s obnoxious.
Debbie Millman:
What are you planning on doing with this material?
Brad Listi:
I want to make a book of it. The impetus for the project was a sense that I had as we careened toward election day 2020, that it was going to be Rocky, which proved to be a correct instinct. And even beyond my “Dreams,” as a writer of narrative, I mean the January 6th insurrection is quite an end to act two. Do you know what I’m saying? It really unfolded to script almost, maybe it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise considering who Trump is, and his reality TV instincts and his showmanship and there’s-
Debbie Millman:
The foolery.
Brad Listi:
Yeah. I mean, it’s all there and you could predict it, but when it actually happened there was still some element of shock to it. And so, I had experienced the years of his presidency with a lot of horror, and anger, and disgusted as I think a lot of people did. Not everybody, but I certainly did. I was haunted by how much got washed away, and how fast the news cycle moved. And how the strategy that Trump seemed to be executing, which was in the words of Steve Bannon, “To flood the zone with shit,” was really working. It was working on the media and the media culture, but it was also working on the population. You can only keep up with so much, it’s easy to forget and it can be manipulated. People’s minds can be manipulated, history can be manipulated if we let it be. I got tired of that, and I want to fix in a work of literature.
I think it will be non-fiction, but I’m not entirely sure, because I’m too early in it. I want to fix in a work of literature what it was actually like, and what actually happened in those crazy days at the end of 2020, in the beginning of 2021. It feels like a vital act of resistance to me. And I think what I learned in the writing of Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, is that if I’m going to write a book and sustain the energy necessary to see it through, I have to have a real sense of urgency and a real deeply felt emotional connection to the material. My job now is to take this enormous research document, which is essentially like a collaged timeline, just as you described it, of events as they unfolded both for me personally and also, in the news cycle and on Twitter, which is where a lot of the Trump presidency happened.
And to try to distill it into something that will be enjoyable for a reader, edifying a little bit terrifying, but also hopefully something that can be passed down. I think it’s for my kids too, because it’s not just the election, and the craziness of Trump. It’s also the pandemic. We were living through some history and my kids, my eldest in particular, old enough to comprehend it a bit. But, I do want for them to understand what happened. We need to tell this story, we need to tell this history openly and honestly.
And not just this one, but many of our histories, there seems to be an argument in the culture about whether or not we should tell our darker stories, and our more difficult truths. And I come down on the side of emphatically, yes we should, because it’s the only way we’re ever going to improve things and to really heal, and to move forward in a way that’s saner. And so, that is the mission that I’m on now, I hope I can do it. I hope I can wrangle this giant document into something that makes sense to people, and that adds some insight.
Debbie Millman:
I hope so too, Brad and I can’t wait to read it. Thank you so, so much for making such beautiful work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Brad Listi:
It is an honor to be here, I have so enjoyed it. And I’m enormously grateful to you for the work that you did reading my book, all the research that you always do. But here for my purposes, I’m deeply grateful to you and just thrilled to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Brad Listi’s latest book is titled, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. His online magazine is at thenervousbreakdown.com, and you can find his podcast and info about all of his writing at bradlisti.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.