WEBVTT - Read This: Leslie Jamison’s Search History 0:00:00.200 --> 0:00:03.240 Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. This week we're sharing our 0:00:03.240 --> 0:00:06.600 favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's the 0:00:06.640 --> 0:00:09.959 show where editor of the Monthly and Rabid Reader Michael 0:00:10.000 --> 0:00:12.840 Williams talks to some of the best and most respected 0:00:12.840 --> 0:00:17.520 writers in the world today. That person is American essayist 0:00:17.560 --> 0:00:21.079 and novelist Leslie Jameson, and Michael Williams is here to 0:00:21.120 --> 0:00:22.439 tell us a bit about the episode. 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:27.720 Hi Michael, Hi Ruby, Michael. 0:00:27.760 --> 0:00:32.000 I'm a big fan of Leslie Jameson her work. It's incredible. 0:00:32.000 --> 0:00:35.880 It really manages to knit the very personal and very 0:00:36.000 --> 0:00:39.479 private moments with this kind of wider cultural commentary. 0:00:39.880 --> 0:00:43.000 Yeah, there's this funny thing that happens periodically, which is 0:00:43.000 --> 0:00:46.600 a writer comes along and they have a certain degree 0:00:46.600 --> 0:00:49.320 of success, and then what happens is every second writer 0:00:49.440 --> 0:00:52.120 tries to emulate their style, you know, tries to ape 0:00:52.280 --> 0:00:54.880 the rhythms and the way they approach their subjects and 0:00:55.760 --> 0:00:58.480 tries to capture their voice again and again and generally 0:00:58.680 --> 0:01:02.160 falls short. Lesley Janison's one of those writers. Her first 0:01:02.160 --> 0:01:05.039 book was called The Empathy Exams. It was initially an 0:01:05.160 --> 0:01:07.200 essay and then she turned it into this award winning 0:01:07.240 --> 0:01:11.000 collection and people absolutely lost their shit over the way 0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:14.000 in which she combined kind of journalism and reporting on 0:01:14.040 --> 0:01:17.959 the one hand, and literary criticism with psychology and then 0:01:18.200 --> 0:01:22.280 self disclosure, kind of utterly fearless ability to put herself 0:01:22.280 --> 0:01:25.440 and her own experiences into these essays in a way 0:01:25.480 --> 0:01:29.240 that didn't detract from the kind of scholarly and journalistic 0:01:29.360 --> 0:01:33.360 venue but enhanced it. People love Leslie Jamison and with 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:34.000 good reason. 0:01:34.920 --> 0:01:39.120 And her latest book, it's been described as a divorce memoir. 0:01:39.640 --> 0:01:43.319 Yes, it is about divorce, and it's a memoir, so 0:01:43.840 --> 0:01:45.640 all of that is fair. I mean, if you're a 0:01:45.640 --> 0:01:49.280 writer who's known for kind of excoriating explorations of your 0:01:49.280 --> 0:01:52.640 own life, the breakdown of your relationship must feel inevitably 0:01:52.760 --> 0:01:54.480 like it's going to be part of a book. But 0:01:54.520 --> 0:01:57.360 this one's also about kind of what it is to 0:01:57.440 --> 0:02:00.880 be a parent, but not just to parent. It's not 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:04.560 just about the pressures of a newborn baby. It's also 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:07.200 about being a teacher, and about being an artist, a lover, 0:02:07.480 --> 0:02:10.400 all these different things, and part of what makes it 0:02:10.560 --> 0:02:13.880 such an interesting read is super fragmentary, these kind of 0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:17.880 short glimpses and things that dip in and out of 0:02:18.040 --> 0:02:21.880 her life and her experiences. It's really intimate and surprising, 0:02:21.960 --> 0:02:23.959 and the chat is much the same. 0:02:27.160 --> 0:02:30.519 Coming up in just a moment Leslie jamerson'sch history. 0:02:36.880 --> 0:02:39.519 One of the things for which you are most celebrated 0:02:39.600 --> 0:02:42.360 and beloved as a writer is the ways in which 0:02:42.360 --> 0:02:46.320 in your previous works of nonfiction you used a critical 0:02:46.440 --> 0:02:51.120 voice and criticism as a form to place a little 0:02:51.120 --> 0:02:54.400 bit of distance between the personal and your subject matter. 0:02:54.600 --> 0:02:57.600 And so I want to maybe begin there, because letting 0:02:57.639 --> 0:03:00.000 that go must have been an intense. 0:03:01.280 --> 0:03:01.560 Yeah. 0:03:01.600 --> 0:03:05.560 So one of the things that I not only believe 0:03:05.760 --> 0:03:09.560 but kind of viscerally need to do with each project 0:03:09.720 --> 0:03:13.200 is to do something that feels very different from anything 0:03:13.200 --> 0:03:18.000 I've done before, to feel both thrilled by that difference 0:03:18.160 --> 0:03:21.040 and a little humbled and bewildered by that difference, to 0:03:21.040 --> 0:03:23.720 feel like I'm sort of learning the new terrain and 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:26.519 texture and rules of any given project. And when I 0:03:26.560 --> 0:03:30.359 started to work on Splinters, I knew from very early on, 0:03:31.280 --> 0:03:34.320 I knew the emotional intensity that it was at its core, 0:03:34.360 --> 0:03:36.040 that it was going to be about the beginning of 0:03:36.080 --> 0:03:38.360 my daughter's life the end of my marriage, those two 0:03:38.360 --> 0:03:41.120 things happening roughly at the same time, and that it 0:03:41.200 --> 0:03:46.800 was very interested in that not of feeling at the 0:03:46.840 --> 0:03:50.160 center of my life in those days, that was feeling intense, 0:03:50.240 --> 0:03:54.080 intoxicating love and deep grief at the same time. And 0:03:54.120 --> 0:03:57.280 it was really, more than anything, I think, interested in 0:03:57.320 --> 0:04:00.520 what it feels like for life to hold radically conflicting 0:04:00.560 --> 0:04:02.400 and different feelings at the same time. So that was 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:05.120 like I knew the beating heart of it, and very 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:10.240 early on I kind of discovered the rhythms and unit 0:04:10.360 --> 0:04:12.600 size of how I wanted to tell the story, which 0:04:12.640 --> 0:04:16.680 is these very short splinters. Really these you know, the 0:04:16.720 --> 0:04:20.080 title is about form as well as content, these short 0:04:20.160 --> 0:04:26.400 splinters that are like vignettes of distilled, whittled shards of experience. 0:04:26.600 --> 0:04:30.880 And once I found the rhythm of those shards, I 0:04:31.040 --> 0:04:32.200 knew that I wanted. 0:04:31.880 --> 0:04:34.200 The book to live very close to. 0:04:34.160 --> 0:04:36.599 The personal almost the whole time, that it wanted to 0:04:36.640 --> 0:04:39.440 live in these little shards of prose and these distilled 0:04:39.480 --> 0:04:42.239 fragments of experience, and that I wanted it. I wanted 0:04:42.279 --> 0:04:46.680 its intensity to rise from staying very close to my subjectivity, 0:04:46.760 --> 0:04:49.440 very close to my body, very close to my physical experience, 0:04:49.520 --> 0:04:52.880 very close to my emotional experience, not at all from 0:04:52.880 --> 0:04:56.560 a sense that my experience was inherently more interesting than 0:04:56.600 --> 0:05:00.560 anybody else's, but from a sense that the particular ferocity 0:05:00.720 --> 0:05:04.400 of this book was very related to that sense of proximity, 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:07.560 and so I wanted to kind of follow that proximity. 0:05:07.680 --> 0:05:11.080 And there is some criticism in the book, but you're 0:05:11.200 --> 0:05:14.360 right that it's a very different kind of criticism than 0:05:14.640 --> 0:05:16.920 shows up in a lot of my hybrid essays, where 0:05:17.240 --> 0:05:20.000 you sort of move from the personal to a more 0:05:20.080 --> 0:05:23.680 disembodied critical voice. And the criticism in this book is 0:05:23.760 --> 0:05:28.719 very embodied. It's me in galleries, engaging with art as 0:05:28.760 --> 0:05:32.080 I'm nursing my infant daughter, as I'm pushing my daughter 0:05:32.080 --> 0:05:35.240 in the stroller, as I'm kind of hungry for models 0:05:35.360 --> 0:05:37.240 of parent artists. 0:05:37.560 --> 0:05:39.080 So you're always still right. 0:05:38.960 --> 0:05:42.360 There, kind of in the casing of my skin, as 0:05:42.400 --> 0:05:44.839 you're looking out at the art. And I became really 0:05:44.839 --> 0:05:48.920 interested in how criticism itself functioned a little bit differently 0:05:49.040 --> 0:05:50.320 when it was embodied in that way. 0:05:50.880 --> 0:05:53.479 Once you hit on that form, once you hit on 0:05:53.520 --> 0:05:58.040 the splinters or the shads, did that inform the territory 0:05:58.080 --> 0:06:00.200 that you had to traverse, Like once it was clear 0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:02.600 to you that okay, these are going to be as 0:06:02.640 --> 0:06:05.160 you say, concentrated, they're going to be immediate. They have 0:06:05.240 --> 0:06:09.280 to be a certain kind of true. Did you find 0:06:09.320 --> 0:06:13.279 yourself then within that logic making new discoveries about what 0:06:13.400 --> 0:06:14.200 had to be included. 0:06:14.400 --> 0:06:16.479 Yeah, it's a great question, because I think what I 0:06:16.600 --> 0:06:19.840 felt more than anything once I discovered the shard or 0:06:19.880 --> 0:06:22.240 the splinter, as my form is, I felt a tremendous 0:06:22.240 --> 0:06:24.880 amount of freedom. I felt like I could come and 0:06:24.960 --> 0:06:27.719 go as I pleased in relation to my own experience, 0:06:27.720 --> 0:06:30.840 so that I could kind of dive into experience and 0:06:30.920 --> 0:06:35.800 extract very particular moments, extract, you know, the moment of 0:06:35.839 --> 0:06:40.640 me standing with my students at a cocktail party monologuing 0:06:40.720 --> 0:06:44.800 about how motherhood has made me more attuned to daily 0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:47.040 life and the universe and everything around me. And then 0:06:47.040 --> 0:06:49.600 one of my students says, I think your daughter might 0:06:49.640 --> 0:06:51.560 be choking on a great you know, and it's sort 0:06:51.560 --> 0:06:54.200 of that. But I don't need to tell you what 0:06:54.320 --> 0:06:57.000 happened earlier that day. I don't need to tell you 0:06:57.040 --> 0:06:58.960 more about that party. I don't need to tell you 0:06:59.200 --> 0:07:01.920 what happened that later that night, Like I just need 0:07:01.920 --> 0:07:03.640 to give you that moment. And there was a lot 0:07:03.680 --> 0:07:07.400 of freedom and a lot of energy, I think, in 0:07:08.200 --> 0:07:10.760 just kind of whittling everything down. 0:07:10.600 --> 0:07:11.600 To its essence. 0:07:12.120 --> 0:07:13.720 But it also gave me a lot of freedom in 0:07:13.800 --> 0:07:19.240 terms of moving across time and space and life roles. 0:07:19.480 --> 0:07:23.400 So I dip back into my childhood and into my 0:07:23.480 --> 0:07:26.040 relationship to my parents' marriage, and into my kind of 0:07:26.240 --> 0:07:30.280 early relationship to divorce and what divorce could mean and 0:07:30.320 --> 0:07:33.880 how it could transform a life, and move between being 0:07:34.320 --> 0:07:37.640 a teacher, a mother, a lover, on a date with 0:07:37.680 --> 0:07:38.280 somebody new. 0:07:38.320 --> 0:07:40.400 Like I just I could pivot as. 0:07:40.320 --> 0:07:42.800 Much and as freely as I wanted once I found 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:46.720 those shards, both in terms of chronology and in terms 0:07:46.760 --> 0:07:49.200 of emotional terrain. And so I think it was that 0:07:49.800 --> 0:07:54.720 ability to discard everything that wasn't absolutely necessary to the 0:07:54.760 --> 0:07:58.080 particular story I wanted to tell, and to kind of 0:07:58.280 --> 0:08:01.200 move in my little spaceship exactly where I wanted to 0:08:01.240 --> 0:08:05.240 go that felt really thrilling to me about the form and. 0:08:05.240 --> 0:08:07.760 Also where you didn't want to go. I mean, you 0:08:07.800 --> 0:08:10.640 mentioned emotional terain, and one of the things that strikes 0:08:10.680 --> 0:08:14.320 me is as a subject matter, and obviously this might 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:17.760 also be true of all kinds of things that we 0:08:17.800 --> 0:08:21.000 would write memoir about, but divorce and the breakdown of 0:08:21.000 --> 0:08:26.200 a relationship, particularly when there's a child involved, carries with 0:08:26.280 --> 0:08:29.440 it even societally, in the way we talk about it, 0:08:29.480 --> 0:08:32.640 in the way we narrativize it, all kinds of pockets 0:08:32.679 --> 0:08:37.760 of shame and an idea around privacy because you're not 0:08:37.800 --> 0:08:41.800 the only person involved and you feel such complex emotions. 0:08:42.040 --> 0:08:46.199 How hard was it to work out what was appropriate 0:08:46.440 --> 0:08:50.480 and what was necessary to make the book what it 0:08:50.679 --> 0:08:51.199 should be. 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:56.079 Yeah, amazing question and very related to form and structure. 0:08:56.280 --> 0:08:58.160 So I'm glad to be thinking about it in those 0:08:58.280 --> 0:09:03.000 terms because I think another thing that discovering the form 0:09:03.080 --> 0:09:05.480 of this book, the form of the Splinter, allowed me 0:09:05.559 --> 0:09:10.120 to do is tell precisely the parts of the story 0:09:10.160 --> 0:09:12.640 that I wanted to tell, and yes, leave a lot out, 0:09:13.080 --> 0:09:15.800 but hopefully leave a lot out in a way that 0:09:16.760 --> 0:09:19.480 doesn't give a reader a sense of the sort of 0:09:20.280 --> 0:09:24.280 violence of the curtain being forcibly drawn closed, like oh, 0:09:24.320 --> 0:09:26.720 here's this window, but you can't see what's in here. 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:27.000 You know. 0:09:27.280 --> 0:09:29.600 To create a work of art that feels whole. 0:09:29.400 --> 0:09:32.840 And complete while leaving a lot of lived experience out 0:09:32.960 --> 0:09:36.559 not only you know, allows me to hopefully avoid repetition 0:09:36.720 --> 0:09:41.440 TDM redundancy but also to protect the privacy of yes, 0:09:41.640 --> 0:09:45.640 my ex husband, various members of our family. And I 0:09:45.679 --> 0:09:48.520 think that, you know, the part of the breakdown of 0:09:48.559 --> 0:09:51.040 my marriage that I was most interested in exploring was 0:09:51.080 --> 0:09:56.040 really grief. I didn't want to place blame. I didn't 0:09:56.040 --> 0:09:59.040 want to litigate old struggles and sort of convince a 0:09:59.120 --> 0:10:01.600 reader that somehow I had been right about all these 0:10:01.679 --> 0:10:04.800 arguments we'd been having like that. That was just miles 0:10:04.800 --> 0:10:06.480 and miles away from the book I was. 0:10:06.440 --> 0:10:08.319 Interested in writing. But what I did want to write 0:10:08.360 --> 0:10:08.840 was grief. 0:10:08.880 --> 0:10:12.839 I wanted to write the grief of love ending, and 0:10:12.960 --> 0:10:15.760 I think even more specifically, I wanted to write the 0:10:15.840 --> 0:10:20.560 grief of having a vision for what a relationship might 0:10:20.720 --> 0:10:24.440 be and that vision never really coming to pass, and 0:10:24.480 --> 0:10:27.880 so in a way you're grieving not what was, but 0:10:28.000 --> 0:10:30.600 what could have been. And that was a grief I 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:34.400 was interested in writing. So I knew the emotional dimensions 0:10:34.440 --> 0:10:36.960 of the marriage plot line that I was interested in 0:10:37.000 --> 0:10:40.040 and also the parts that I wasn't interested in. But 0:10:40.440 --> 0:10:43.480 even within that, the process was quite ragged and imperfect, 0:10:43.520 --> 0:10:46.600 and I think revision was very helpful in terms of 0:10:46.679 --> 0:10:52.280 steering the manuscript away from these parentheticals. Where I still 0:10:52.400 --> 0:10:54.439 was kind of doing that thing where maybe I needed 0:10:54.440 --> 0:10:57.480 to get this little barbin or say, my little piece 0:10:57.520 --> 0:10:59.959 about a way that I'd been wronged. And what's wonder 0:11:00.120 --> 0:11:04.000 about revising a manuscript is you don't have to You're 0:11:04.000 --> 0:11:07.640 not beholden to the first version of how you said 0:11:07.679 --> 0:11:08.079 of things. 0:11:08.120 --> 0:11:08.800 But I think you. 0:11:08.760 --> 0:11:13.679 Know, in the process of figuring out how to write 0:11:13.480 --> 0:11:16.000 the thread of this book that's about my marriage and 0:11:16.040 --> 0:11:21.720 it's dissolution, I also really benefited from the wisdom of 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:25.440 close friends and readers. And I remember, in particular the 0:11:25.559 --> 0:11:27.960 memois who's also a dear friend of mine, Mary Carr, 0:11:28.080 --> 0:11:31.480 read an early draft of the book and said, you 0:11:31.559 --> 0:11:34.760 never let us hope with you, like it's written too 0:11:34.880 --> 0:11:38.439 much through the gauze or the kind of dark veil 0:11:39.240 --> 0:11:42.640 of disappointment and regret, so that even when you're writing 0:11:43.160 --> 0:11:46.200 the early moments of your relationship, we feel their doom 0:11:46.640 --> 0:11:49.600 already embedded inside of them in your retrospective voice. 0:11:50.040 --> 0:11:51.320 So what if you let us. 0:11:51.360 --> 0:11:54.720 Inhabit them more fully, inhabit your hope, inhabit your love, 0:11:54.800 --> 0:11:58.200 and habit the good parts. And she said, I remember 0:11:58.240 --> 0:12:01.000 it really clearly because it was so wise and so 0:12:01.120 --> 0:12:05.160 immediately like, Oh, I don't necessarily want to hear the 0:12:05.200 --> 0:12:07.320 truth of what you're saying, but I recognize the truth 0:12:07.360 --> 0:12:10.199 of what you're saying. She said, you don't write the 0:12:10.240 --> 0:12:12.080 pain of divorce by writing what's. 0:12:11.960 --> 0:12:13.199 Difficult about the divorce. 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:16.559 You write the pain of the divorce by writing deeply 0:12:16.720 --> 0:12:19.920 into the love that came before. So that was really 0:12:19.960 --> 0:12:23.280 some of the work of revision as well, was truly 0:12:23.320 --> 0:12:28.680 allowing myself to reinhabit the hope and kind of intoxicating 0:12:28.760 --> 0:12:35.200 love of the early years. But I do think there's 0:12:35.240 --> 0:12:40.520 something useful about the process of trying to find precise 0:12:40.559 --> 0:12:43.080 and accurate language for the things that torment you, And 0:12:43.120 --> 0:12:45.440 I do think that the process of writing a book 0:12:45.559 --> 0:12:48.199 can be helpful in that regard. And maybe more than anything, 0:12:48.280 --> 0:12:52.199 I think that revision and what happens in the course 0:12:52.200 --> 0:12:56.680 of revision can be useful in kind of enacting the 0:12:56.720 --> 0:13:00.920 fact that it's possible to have a transforming relationship and 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:03.880 an evolving relationship to the events of one's life, that 0:13:03.920 --> 0:13:07.920 one isn't stuck in a certain mode of feeling towards 0:13:07.920 --> 0:13:09.760 a thing that happened, that you can kind of tell 0:13:09.800 --> 0:13:11.800 the story and then tell it in a different way 0:13:12.440 --> 0:13:16.400 re excavate. For example, so much of what was beautiful 0:13:16.440 --> 0:13:19.560 about the marriage. I did that for creative and aesthetic 0:13:19.640 --> 0:13:23.440 reasons in revising this book, but it actually also feels 0:13:23.480 --> 0:13:27.160 like a place where the truth of that early beauty 0:13:27.200 --> 0:13:30.120 can live. And there aren't, honestly that many places that 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:32.840 I can currently live in my life, So to have this. 0:13:32.720 --> 0:13:35.120 As a repository for just like there was. 0:13:35.120 --> 0:13:39.719 So much of this love that to me remains beautiful 0:13:39.840 --> 0:13:43.320 and worthwhile and part of me even even though the 0:13:43.360 --> 0:13:47.480 marriage ended, it feels that felt like, oh, I can 0:13:47.559 --> 0:13:50.480 actually claim that, and I don't need anybody to agree 0:13:50.520 --> 0:13:53.120 with me for that to be a truth. 0:13:53.800 --> 0:13:57.280 And you reflect on the evolution of the use of 0:13:57.320 --> 0:14:00.960 pronouns in the book, from my Daughter to the ways 0:14:00.960 --> 0:14:04.880 in which the act of writing, the act of narrativizing 0:14:05.480 --> 0:14:11.160 also both mirrors and drives a capacity to move. 0:14:11.040 --> 0:14:14.240 Forward absolutely, and I think, yeah, I love that you 0:14:14.280 --> 0:14:16.520 brought up. I think of it as the pronoun subplot. 0:14:16.640 --> 0:14:18.959 You know that there are many subplots in this book, 0:14:19.040 --> 0:14:23.160 and the fraud grappling with. 0:14:23.200 --> 0:14:26.400 That hour is it's also. 0:14:26.360 --> 0:14:29.600 A kind of a secret reference to what I think 0:14:29.640 --> 0:14:32.280 of as one of the core Godmother. 0:14:31.960 --> 0:14:34.720 Texts of this book, which is Elizabeth Hardwick's. 0:14:34.280 --> 0:14:37.960 Sleepless Nights and amazing book. It's a stunning book. It's 0:14:38.120 --> 0:14:41.680 very much a book about divorce, although she's incredibly oblique 0:14:41.680 --> 0:14:44.880 about it. But at one point she's describing all the 0:14:44.920 --> 0:14:48.920 furniture that she's brought from Boston to New York after 0:14:49.000 --> 0:14:52.920 what she calls a change in government, and she's describing, 0:14:52.960 --> 0:14:56.320 you know this, the tall high boy and the bookshelves, 0:14:56.360 --> 0:14:59.840 and she says, you know these these things had once 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:04.400 in hours that tea bag of a word steeped in 0:15:04.480 --> 0:15:08.160 the conditional, and that was such a beautiful formulation of. 0:15:08.080 --> 0:15:11.040 Like part of the heartbreak of divorce. 0:15:10.640 --> 0:15:13.760 And a marriage ending. But it also felt like, yeah, 0:15:13.840 --> 0:15:19.280 this word hours is always a way into kind of 0:15:19.360 --> 0:15:23.760 emotional process of building a life together and then dismantling 0:15:23.800 --> 0:15:25.400 it and like what was ours? 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:26.960 What remains ours? 0:15:27.160 --> 0:15:31.560 How both losing the hour and having to kind of 0:15:31.560 --> 0:15:34.120 grapple with the endurance of the hours are hard in 0:15:34.160 --> 0:15:34.800 different ways. 0:15:39.520 --> 0:15:42.600 Coming up after the break, Leslie shares the frustrating ways 0:15:42.600 --> 0:15:45.440 in which women writing from their lives can often be 0:15:45.480 --> 0:15:49.120 dismissed as role or at less. Will be right back, 0:16:00.080 --> 0:16:02.840 I'm interested in how you approach the ways in which 0:16:02.920 --> 0:16:09.520 this as subject matter, divorce, parenting, lands engendered, ways that 0:16:09.600 --> 0:16:13.600 the expectations around women writing about this and about mothers 0:16:14.120 --> 0:16:16.960 writing about this, and the ways in which that represented 0:16:17.880 --> 0:16:20.320 a burden or a framework that you felt you had 0:16:20.440 --> 0:16:21.880 to push back against. 0:16:22.920 --> 0:16:25.720 One of the overwriting truths I think here that I 0:16:25.800 --> 0:16:29.160 was certainly aware of is the ways that women writing 0:16:30.040 --> 0:16:32.920 from their lives making art from the material of what 0:16:32.960 --> 0:16:36.600 they've lived, And often the material of what they've lived 0:16:36.640 --> 0:16:41.520 has something to do with partnership, domesticity, various forms of caregiving, 0:16:41.640 --> 0:16:45.600 including caregiving for a child. That kind of art making 0:16:46.480 --> 0:16:51.480 is dismissed and misunderstood in a thousand ways that I 0:16:51.480 --> 0:16:54.800 think have everything to do with gender. And sometimes sometimes 0:16:54.800 --> 0:16:57.680 it's dismissed in very explicit ways that it's somehow less 0:16:57.720 --> 0:17:00.840 ambitious than you know, writing about other people's lives and 0:17:00.960 --> 0:17:04.360 writing about war than writing about these kind of bigger 0:17:05.119 --> 0:17:10.680 social subjects. Sometimes it gets dismissed in more implicit or 0:17:10.760 --> 0:17:15.000 backhanded ways. You know, a text is called raw or 0:17:15.119 --> 0:17:21.000 vulnerable or confessional, and often these are sincerely meant, maybe 0:17:21.040 --> 0:17:24.720 as terms of praise, but sometimes to call. 0:17:24.560 --> 0:17:26.080 A work raw is. 0:17:27.520 --> 0:17:30.919 To act as if it hasn't been intensely crafted and sculpted. 0:17:31.040 --> 0:17:37.640 And I think so often the texture of honesty, intimacy, proximity, 0:17:38.480 --> 0:17:41.800 which are the things the experience, the reading experiences that 0:17:41.840 --> 0:17:44.160 I think are often being summoned with that word raw, 0:17:44.560 --> 0:17:49.040 are actually really totally a product of craft choices and decisions. 0:17:49.040 --> 0:17:51.320 How do you make a reader feel close to your experience? Well, 0:17:51.320 --> 0:17:55.800 it's not actually by transcribing your diaries or writing everything down. 0:17:55.840 --> 0:17:59.159 It's often by really sculpting a particular version of the 0:17:59.200 --> 0:18:01.119 truth that can bring somebody that's not it's not an 0:18:01.160 --> 0:18:06.080 authentic for its sculpting. It's just it's it's it's it's artfulness, lies, 0:18:06.160 --> 0:18:08.520 and its ability to make a reader feel that way. 0:18:09.280 --> 0:18:10.919 So I think that there are all sorts of ways 0:18:10.920 --> 0:18:14.800 that women writing from life the writing gets treated as 0:18:14.880 --> 0:18:22.240 somehow less shaped by craft, intentionality, artistry, when often I 0:18:22.400 --> 0:18:26.199 find that my artistry is most challenged when I'm that 0:18:26.240 --> 0:18:29.240 I have to bring everything I have as an artist 0:18:29.440 --> 0:18:32.639 to that work that is about the closest and most 0:18:32.800 --> 0:18:34.720 personal experiences that I've had. 0:18:36.280 --> 0:18:38.840 One of the other threads that I so love in 0:18:38.880 --> 0:18:42.920 this book is about teaching, and teaches and about your 0:18:42.920 --> 0:18:46.119 identity as a teacher, And that seems to me to 0:18:46.160 --> 0:18:49.280 be almost as fundamental to it as the story of 0:18:50.040 --> 0:18:53.639 a disillusion of a relationship, the story even of parenthood. 0:18:53.760 --> 0:18:55.240 Is what it is to be a teacher and what 0:18:55.280 --> 0:18:57.640 it is to devote your life to that. How important 0:18:57.720 --> 0:18:58.200 is that to you? 0:18:58.560 --> 0:19:03.320 Thank you for bringing that up, because because teaching and friendship. 0:19:03.040 --> 0:19:05.320 Are two threads of this book that. 0:19:05.280 --> 0:19:08.600 Are just tremendously important to me, and that feel connected 0:19:08.640 --> 0:19:10.399 to all the other threads as well, I think, I 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:12.679 you know, one of the questions of this book is, 0:19:12.720 --> 0:19:17.560 like when when your nuclear family breaks apart, When when 0:19:17.600 --> 0:19:20.520 a marriage ends, when you're no longer raising your child 0:19:20.680 --> 0:19:24.439 inside the family structure that you'd expected to raise them 0:19:24.480 --> 0:19:30.480 inside of, Like what other forms of family and community 0:19:30.760 --> 0:19:34.760 and intimacy become not only possible but essential, Like when 0:19:34.760 --> 0:19:37.880 you kind of don't have this one kind of stable 0:19:37.960 --> 0:19:40.679 structure the core of your life, Like where do you 0:19:40.760 --> 0:19:44.040 go looking for a sense of self and a sense 0:19:44.080 --> 0:19:47.639 of relation? And so for me, teaching in friendship became 0:19:47.680 --> 0:19:50.439 these extremely important forces in my life. They'd always been 0:19:50.440 --> 0:19:54.600 important to me, but after my marriage ended, they became 0:19:54.760 --> 0:19:57.359 like ferociously important to me, and I think part of 0:19:57.400 --> 0:20:02.240 it with teaching had to do with this deep hunger 0:20:02.359 --> 0:20:04.680 to be a caregiver in all these different ways at once, 0:20:04.720 --> 0:20:06.879 like I was always being a caregiver to my daughter. 0:20:07.440 --> 0:20:09.800 But I think that I kind of on the other 0:20:09.920 --> 0:20:13.280 side of marriage. I found myself both with a kind 0:20:13.280 --> 0:20:17.120 of a sense of exhilarating freedom that I hadn't necessarily expected. 0:20:17.160 --> 0:20:18.720 And at one point in the book, I describe it 0:20:18.760 --> 0:20:21.679 as it felt like I was in this a tub 0:20:21.720 --> 0:20:23.959 full of bubble bath. It was just overflowing, like I 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:26.760 had all this like love and care that I just 0:20:26.840 --> 0:20:30.040 wanted to give somewhere, and you know, hopefully not in 0:20:30.080 --> 0:20:30.920 a totally. 0:20:30.560 --> 0:20:32.000 Creepy or unboundaried way. 0:20:32.000 --> 0:20:33.880 I was giving a lot of it to my students, 0:20:33.920 --> 0:20:37.560 and I loved putting my daughter to bed and showing 0:20:37.640 --> 0:20:40.399 up for their work. I felt very energized by this 0:20:40.560 --> 0:20:44.680 work of kind of getting this intimate contact with my students' 0:20:44.720 --> 0:20:47.480 creative impulses, with their lives, with the art they were 0:20:47.520 --> 0:20:50.880 trying to make, and that kind of collaborative process of 0:20:51.400 --> 0:20:54.399 helping them understand, hopefully a little bit better what they 0:20:54.480 --> 0:20:56.560 wanted to say and how they wanted to say. It 0:20:56.600 --> 0:21:00.520 was just it was a tremendous source of purpose and 0:21:02.280 --> 0:21:04.879 really community for me. I mean it still is, but 0:21:04.960 --> 0:21:07.639 there was a way that my nerve endings were so 0:21:08.119 --> 0:21:11.800 raw and my needs were so intense in that time 0:21:11.840 --> 0:21:14.080 after my early separation that it felt like it turned 0:21:14.119 --> 0:21:17.199 up the volume on every feeling in my life. 0:21:17.320 --> 0:21:20.280 I wonder whether it also reinforced a thing that you 0:21:20.600 --> 0:21:23.440 needed to have reinforced of a time, which was the 0:21:23.480 --> 0:21:29.000 idea that caregiving and relationships in the emotional space was 0:21:29.080 --> 0:21:34.679 also an intensely intellectual and creative process, that these weren't 0:21:34.720 --> 0:21:38.719 two fractured parts of who you were, they could be 0:21:38.760 --> 0:21:40.560 integrated in a real way. Yeah. 0:21:40.600 --> 0:21:45.640 Absolutely, I think that's a very resonant insight. That part 0:21:45.640 --> 0:21:49.280 of why I was hungry to be kind of thinking 0:21:49.320 --> 0:21:52.200 about and making sense of my relationship with my daughter 0:21:52.440 --> 0:21:54.800 in those early years, even as I was living it 0:21:54.440 --> 0:21:58.240 was because I didn't want to understand that emotional work 0:21:58.320 --> 0:22:01.719 and the kind of intellect work of thinking about feeling 0:22:01.760 --> 0:22:04.200 and thinking about how a self is sort of made 0:22:04.240 --> 0:22:07.080 and unmade and remade by its relationships, Like I wanted 0:22:07.080 --> 0:22:09.720 to think about caregiving and thinking together. And I think 0:22:09.760 --> 0:22:13.640 absolutely my relationships with students also bring together a sort 0:22:13.680 --> 0:22:17.720 of caregiving impulse and like a deeply intellectual enterprise. And 0:22:18.200 --> 0:22:21.480 one of the deep subjects of this book to me 0:22:22.040 --> 0:22:26.919 is understanding wisdom or the generation of wisdom as a 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:31.119 collaborative enterprise. So, you know, for me, it is a 0:22:31.119 --> 0:22:33.760 collaborative enterprise. Like I don't come up with insights on 0:22:33.800 --> 0:22:38.920 my own I come up with insights in conversations, by reading, 0:22:39.119 --> 0:22:42.960 by listening, by you know, any anything. My mind thinks, 0:22:43.040 --> 0:22:45.640