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Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Andrew Solomon, a professor
Speaker 1: of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and a
Speaker 1: past president of pen American Center. He's a writer and
Speaker 1: lecturer on philosophy, politics, and the arts, and an activist
Speaker 1: in the LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. Andrew
Speaker 1: writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Speaker 1: His twenty twelve book Far from the Tree, Parents, Children,
Speaker 1: and the Search for Identity won the national Book Critics
Speaker 1: Circle Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of
Speaker 1: the New York Times ten Best Books of twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: He's the author of other notable books, and most recently,
Speaker 1: he made an award winning film Far from the Tree,
Speaker 1: available on Hulu, and an audio book called New Family Values.
Speaker 3: Hi, Andrew, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: What a pleasure to be here, What a pleasure to
Speaker 2: be here again.
Speaker 3: Yes, we are sitting in New York and have the
Speaker 3: pleasure of being in person. I've been so excited to
Speaker 3: meet you, and as I said to you beforehand, you
Speaker 3: were a very very early guest of ours, and I've
Speaker 3: just always been thankful for that. It was, as I said,
Speaker 3: sort of a wind in my sales that someone I
Speaker 3: respected as much as you came on early. So thank you.
Speaker 2: Well. I was glad to be on early, and you
Speaker 2: are such a good interview. With that, I'm excited to
Speaker 2: be on again.
Speaker 3: Great. We're going to be discussing all of your work
Speaker 3: in a broad sense, The Noonday Demon, Far from the Tree,
Speaker 3: your recent audible audiobook on families, some of the work
Speaker 3: you're doing now on childhood suicide. But before we get
Speaker 3: into all that, let's start like we always do with
Speaker 3: the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking
Speaker 3: with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are
Speaker 3: two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
Speaker 3: What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 3: and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf,
Speaker 3: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 3: the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second,
Speaker 3: and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
Speaker 3: which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 3: the work that you.
Speaker 2: I think that in an era in which genetic determinism
Speaker 2: has become a fashionable part of our language, that the
Speaker 2: extent to which people make these decisions has been very
Speaker 2: much under sold. That in fact, you can choose to
Speaker 2: be a kind person. Some people who have had a
Speaker 2: very difficult childhood or difficult early experiences, or perhaps to
Speaker 2: some extent, who have a natural predisposition away from kindness,
Speaker 2: have to struggle more to do it. But I'm a
Speaker 2: great believer in the idea that there isn't really predestination,
Speaker 2: and that we do make this decision, and that we
Speaker 2: do choose which wolf to feed. I mean all of us,
Speaker 2: of course, have moments of greater kindness and moments of
Speaker 2: being the bad wolf. So it's hard not to feed
Speaker 2: both of them a bit, right. The more that I've
Speaker 2: done the work that I've done, and the more that
Speaker 2: I've interviewed people and talked to people and looked at
Speaker 2: people often in experiences of extreme difficulty and suffering and
Speaker 2: trouble and whoa, the more I've come to feel that
Speaker 2: people make a choice, and that there is a level
Speaker 2: of quiet heroism that's available to almost everyone.
Speaker 3: I love that quiet heroism. Yeah, I'm often intrigued by
Speaker 3: the idea of choice because it does seem that there
Speaker 3: can be differing levels of choice available to us. The
Speaker 3: example I often use is, you know, when I was
Speaker 3: twenty four and a heroin addict, the amount of choice
Speaker 3: I felt like I had about using or not using
Speaker 3: felt like just a sliver of choice. It was really narrow.
Speaker 3: Now it's just not a problem. I've been walking around
Speaker 3: New York City. I used to love marijuana. I mean,
Speaker 3: you cannot walk three steps in this city anymore without
Speaker 3: smelling it right, it's just everywhere. Once upon a time
Speaker 3: that was kind of triggery to me, but now I
Speaker 3: just kind of all right, there it is again. Right,
Speaker 3: So that choice sort of grows, I think, And as
Speaker 3: you mentioned, there's things like our difficult childhoods or trauma,
Speaker 3: the support that's available to us that we can find
Speaker 3: that I think influence maybe the amount of choice. But
Speaker 3: I think what you're speaking to is that there always
Speaker 3: is some.
Speaker 2: And I'm talking about the choice to live as moral
Speaker 2: a life as is available. Yes, there are some people
Speaker 2: for whom it's possible, you know, to be Zelenski and
Speaker 2: try to save the notion of democracy in a society
Speaker 2: annihilating it. And there are some people for whom it's
Speaker 2: possible to be as good a mother as they can
Speaker 2: under very adverse circumstances. And all of it, it seems
Speaker 2: to me, has some heroism in it. But the larger
Speaker 2: question of whether one has a choice about everything, I mean, no,
Speaker 2: one doesn't have a choice about everything. One doesn't have
Speaker 2: a choice about having a mental illness. One doesn't have
Speaker 2: a choice. Often, you know, people will say, oh, I
Speaker 2: can't believe that person and died by suicide, that was
Speaker 2: so selfish, and I think, no, that person was at
Speaker 2: a stage at which there was no choice. I don't
Speaker 2: think I had a choice about being gay. And a
Speaker 2: lot of the rhetoric, the kind of homophobic rhetoric that's
Speaker 2: in circulation now, has to do with a smugway in
Speaker 2: which people said of said, I'm not gay, and I
Speaker 2: don't see why you should be, and I feel like, okay,
Speaker 2: but you're a different person that i'm. So it's not
Speaker 2: that I think there's choice everywhere, right, It's that I
Speaker 2: think that in the sitative confines of the choices one has,
Speaker 2: one can feed the good wold.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's beautifully said. A few years ago in the
Speaker 3: Metropolitan Museum of Art magazine, they asked some people for
Speaker 3: their twenty twenty one wishes. But you wrote this lovely
Speaker 3: little piece, and there were a couple of lines in
Speaker 3: it that I felt that I wanted to pull out
Speaker 3: and talk about. And the first one, I think, certainly
Speaker 3: for me, is a big part of why I do
Speaker 3: what I do and what I hope for, and I
Speaker 3: think it is in your work too. And you said,
Speaker 3: the ability for me and everyone to learn from human suffering.
Speaker 3: Say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2: Well, people ask me a lot why I've written about
Speaker 2: such difficult and dark subjects when I'm mostly a reasonably
Speaker 2: cheerful person. I mean, with some very difficult moments and
Speaker 2: some very difficult experiences. I think growing up as a
Speaker 2: gay kid was very hard, and yet I was aware
Speaker 2: that I had a very lucky life. I had a
Speaker 2: loving family. I had a school that was a good school.
Speaker 2: I wasn't so happy there, but it was a good school.
Speaker 2: I had a certain amount of ability and talent on
Speaker 2: my side. We lived comfortably, and the sort of guilt
Speaker 2: that I felt about the struggles that I experienced and
Speaker 2: the ways in which I felt they weren't fair given
Speaker 2: how much people were struggling, who were in desperate situations
Speaker 2: in other more problematical circumstances. I was very interested, i think,
Speaker 2: always in the question of suffering in what you do
Speaker 2: with it, And I thought, well, I need to try
Speaker 2: to do something positive with this suffering, because in a
Speaker 2: way I felt unentitled to it. And then I found
Speaker 2: myself increasingly drawn to stories of human pain because they
Speaker 2: seemed to me to be more vivid and more real.
Speaker 2: I think it was Nietzsche who said that only that
Speaker 2: which is painful is truly memorable. And that was a
Speaker 2: principle that I remember learning in a literature class when
Speaker 2: I was in my freshman year and thinking, oh, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: that really makes sense. And then eventually I came out.
Speaker 2: And when I came out, I had a sense of
Speaker 2: enormous anxiety around doing it and also enormous relief around
Speaker 2: doing it. But I decided, when I finally managed to
Speaker 2: be fully out, that the secrets I had tried to
Speaker 2: keep had been the basis of my own agony, and
Speaker 2: that I wanted to be a person who didn't keep
Speaker 2: secrets anymore. I mean, I can be quite private in
Speaker 2: my way, and there are plenty of things that I
Speaker 2: have experienced that I may not mention on today's interview,
Speaker 2: but that I didn't want to have a sort of
Speaker 2: major secret like that again. And I saw that there
Speaker 2: were so many people around me who were suffering because
Speaker 2: of the secrets they held. And then I happened to
Speaker 2: fall into my original first book, which was about a
Speaker 2: group of Soviet artists and the way their lives changed
Speaker 2: during glassnost And what was astonishing to me was that
Speaker 2: these were people who had suffered so enormously and so
Speaker 2: profoundly and had been inspired by their experience of difficulty
Speaker 2: to make art, which was some of it really good art,
Speaker 2: but all of it morally extraordinary. And at the same
Speaker 2: time my mind other developed cancer and was dying younger
Speaker 2: than I am now, and she initially was very angry
Speaker 2: about being sick, and then in the final year of
Speaker 2: her life, which happened to coincide with the year when
Speaker 2: I was finishing that book, she took the occasion of
Speaker 2: her death and turned it into a moment of extraordinary
Speaker 2: dignity and even nobility and great generosity. And somehow it
Speaker 2: was the confluence in my early twenties of coming out
Speaker 2: of ending up in Moscow and what was then Leningrad,
Speaker 2: and of watching what was happening with my mother, and
Speaker 2: I thought, this is where meaning lies. And when I
Speaker 2: went back and tried to interpret my own life, I
Speaker 2: felt like there was, you know, kind of a double narrative.
Speaker 2: I had this really lovely childhood and I had this
Speaker 2: unbelievably difficult childhood, and I thought, well, how do you
Speaker 2: reconcile those things? And that reconciliation has been my topic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, recently I heard you talk about you know, being gay,
Speaker 3: and you were talking about the extraordinary lengths you went
Speaker 3: to try not to be gay. I think you called it.
Speaker 3: Was it sexual surrogacy?
Speaker 2: Yes, treatment, Yes, I did go to extraordinary lengths. I
Speaker 2: had the idea, which was then a relatively current idea,
Speaker 2: that this was, you know, an illness that could be
Speaker 2: cured and that could be addressed, and so I tried
Speaker 2: to cure and address it. I pursued an ad in
Speaker 2: the back of New York magazine and went and had
Speaker 2: what was euphemistically called therapy with women who were somewhat
Speaker 2: euphemistically called surrogates, and they were really essentially exercises, which
Speaker 2: did allow me to get over a lot of anxiety
Speaker 2: that I'd had about the idea of having sex with women,
Speaker 2: and led in fact to my having some relationships with
Speaker 2: women that were very wonderful and very rewarding, but they
Speaker 2: were not very honest and they were not very authentic
Speaker 2: to who I really was. Part of it was that
Speaker 2: I desperately wanted to have a family and to have children,
Speaker 2: and at the time it seemed like gay people couldn't
Speaker 2: do that. That's obviously no longer the case, but partly
Speaker 2: I think it was also just a sort of perfectionism
Speaker 2: in me, and a perfectionism in my parents too, And
Speaker 2: I felt as though I had all kinds of accomplishments
Speaker 2: and achievements, but being gay I was going to be
Speaker 2: a terrible disappointment to everyone, and I was going to
Speaker 2: live at the margins of society. And I had a
Speaker 2: very narrow vision of what life was supposed to be
Speaker 2: like when I was growing up. I mean, I grew
Speaker 2: up in New York. My parents' friends were almost all
Speaker 2: doctors or lawyers or business people. They were mostly Jewish.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were wonderful, wonderful people, many of them,
Speaker 2: but they were all kind of the same. And I
Speaker 2: didn't know that there were other routes to having a
Speaker 2: meaningfuler rewarding life. And I thought, if I couldn't reproduce
Speaker 2: my parents' life, I was going to end up with
Speaker 2: something terribly inferior to what I had run up with.
Speaker 3: That sort of leads into a central concept and a
Speaker 3: lot of your work between illness and identity, Right, so
Speaker 3: we could talk about you being gay in that way.
Speaker 3: Originally you might have thought of it as an illness.
Speaker 3: Many people might have thought of it as an illness,
Speaker 3: but now it's more of an identity for you. In
Speaker 3: the book Far from the Tree, you show people who
Speaker 3: are different than the rest of us, many of whom
Speaker 3: claim that difference as an identity, not an illness. So
Speaker 3: if we think of Dwarfism, right, there's some beautiful scenes
Speaker 3: in the documentary right and in the book, but the
Speaker 3: documentary is more recently in my mind of these people
Speaker 3: really claiming like this is who I am, and this
Speaker 3: is who I want to be. I don't want to
Speaker 3: be fixed. And I wanted to see if in any
Speaker 3: way that has been able to apply or what ways
Speaker 3: it does apply to you when it comes to your
Speaker 3: own mental health, because there's an idea of depression as
Speaker 3: an illness, and it certainly is something not good when
Speaker 3: it gets to the stage that you had it or
Speaker 3: that I've had it, right, And then there's also the
Speaker 3: idea of a thoughtful, melancholy temperament, and I, as I
Speaker 3: get older, am finding it harder to tweeze those two
Speaker 3: apart and go, oh, well, I thought this was this
Speaker 3: really bad thing, and it had some bad points in
Speaker 3: my life. But in some ways some of this seems
Speaker 3: perhaps to be temperamental perhaps to be an identity as
Speaker 3: to the way I orient to the world in a thoughtful, compassionate,
Speaker 3: slightly melancholy way. I'm curious what you think about that.
Speaker 2: Well, it rings very true that that's the way that
Speaker 2: one experiences it. And I think when I was working
Speaker 2: on Far from the Tree, both the book and the documentary,
Speaker 2: the narrative that I primarily had was how do you
Speaker 2: get from an illness model to an identity model? And
Speaker 2: that remains. I mean, it's become much more of a
Speaker 2: general conversation in the years since then. There was a
Speaker 2: piece in The Times a few days ago by Ed Hirsch,
Speaker 2: Who's going Blind, That was all about how he had
Speaker 2: come to love his blindness and now he's thrilled to
Speaker 2: be going blind and all the things he's learning from
Speaker 2: going blind, and it was quite an inspiring and exciting piece.
Speaker 2: But the reality is that it is an illness and
Speaker 2: an identity. And trying to say, oh, I used to
Speaker 2: think it was an illness and now I think it's
Speaker 2: an identity is very reductive. So who would I be
Speaker 2: if I weren't melancholic by nature? I would be somebody else.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know who would I be If
Speaker 2: I were a Norwegian fisherman, I would be a different.
Speaker 3: Person, probably be a great one, though I think I.
Speaker 2: Think it would not be a grand success. But anyway,
Speaker 2: you know, just the sort of sense of it being
Speaker 2: set of somebody very different. So there are aspects of
Speaker 2: my experience with mental illness that I could have done without,
Speaker 2: and there are experiences I had that I would be
Speaker 2: thrilled to be able to erased. A lot of them
Speaker 2: I learned from, and a lot of them I grew from,
Speaker 2: and a lot of them I made something out of,
Speaker 2: and I still would love for them not to have happened.
Speaker 2: But there is a great deal that is proximate to
Speaker 2: those particular moments of extreme anguish. That's been really the
Speaker 2: basis for whatever I've learned or whatever perspective I've had,
Speaker 2: and I've become particularly aware of it. And I don't
Speaker 2: mean this is sound precious, but since becoming a parent,
Speaker 2: I think I look at the suffering of my own
Speaker 2: children and of the people around them, and I have
Speaker 2: a gentler relationship to it than perhaps my parents had
Speaker 2: to some of my initial problems, though they were very supportive,
Speaker 2: or then some other people have. I think I'm a
Speaker 2: nicer person because of it. You know, would I have
Speaker 2: been so inspired by those artists in Russia, or even
Speaker 2: by my mother's death, or by any the other things
Speaker 2: that have inspired me by the work I'm doing now
Speaker 2: on youth suicide, Would any of it have spoken to
Speaker 2: me if I hadn't had those struggles and if I
Speaker 2: didn't have that perspective. So I wouldn't want to give
Speaker 2: it up. But the fact that I wouldn't want to
Speaker 2: give it up and the fact that it's become my
Speaker 2: identity doesn't mean that it's all been dandio and that
Speaker 2: it's all worth it. I mean, how can you say
Speaker 2: worth it? You know, I don't have the option of
Speaker 2: giving it up, So there's a level at which I
Speaker 2: can't imagine what it would be like to give it up,
Speaker 2: because it's unfeasible and unimaginable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's an interesting narrative around human suffering
Speaker 3: that has emerged, which is that it can always be beneficial, like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's a chance to grow. And I feel like that
Speaker 3: is also reductive, right, that idea of you know, people say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, everything happens for a reason, or things happen
Speaker 3: for the best you know, which is not a thing
Speaker 3: I believe, right. I tend to be more in the well.
Speaker 3: I think I can make the best out of the
Speaker 3: things that happen, yes, right, But to your point, not
Speaker 3: that I wish they would happen, right.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: You hear people who've lost children, and we'll talk about
Speaker 3: that with you suicide. Who will say, have I grown
Speaker 3: as a result of this?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: Would I trade it all in a heartbeat to have
Speaker 3: my child back? Yes, you know. And so I think
Speaker 3: that's holding both of those things.
Speaker 2: And it's also I think holding the things that are
Speaker 2: tragic because of the society constructed around them and the
Speaker 2: attitudes they attract, and the things that are inherently tragic.
Speaker 2: So I grew up feeling it was tragic to be gay,
Speaker 2: but I didn't think it was tragic to be gay
Speaker 2: for reasons that were really endemic to the idea of
Speaker 2: two men being in a romantic or sexual interaction. It
Speaker 2: was tragic because people didn't like you, because you were
Speaker 2: laughing stock, because it was stigmatiz I mean, they were
Speaker 2: a million different because you could get murdered for it.
Speaker 2: Because aides was lossoming at the time in affecting the
Speaker 2: community because there were so many people who had been
Speaker 2: rejected by their own families and were full of self hatred.
Speaker 2: I mean, there were a million different things that were problematical,
Speaker 2: but they weren't central to it. If you're looking at
Speaker 2: mental illness, you know, being depressed is not a pleasant experience,
Speaker 2: and you could erase all the stigma in the world,
Speaker 2: and that would not make it into a pleasant experience.
Speaker 2: It is inherently an unpleasant experience. Now, some level of
Speaker 2: melancholy may be sufficiently rewarding, so that even though it's unpleasant,
Speaker 2: there's something else that counterbalances the unpleasantness. But part of
Speaker 2: the reason that I've been interested actually in trying to
Speaker 2: write about this problem of youth suicide is that, you know,
Speaker 2: some people have said have said it was transformative and
Speaker 2: it helped me to grow. But there's nobody who ends
Speaker 2: up saying, oh, I'm really glad my child died by suicide, right,
Speaker 2: And I'm interested in trying to look at something where
Speaker 2: they're just there isn't an upside. I mean, even you know,
Speaker 2: I think that's a problematical argument that there are people
Speaker 2: who would say, well, dropping the bomb in Hiroshima saved
Speaker 2: so many other lives, and you say, well, I don't know,
Speaker 2: nuclear bombs are not so terrific, but losing your childhood
Speaker 2: suit said, there is no upset, I know, and I
Speaker 2: want to look at the fact that that's a reality
Speaker 2: and get away from this slightly mawkish idea that well,
Speaker 2: you know, whatever has happened, you know, sort of you'll
Speaker 2: grow from it. I mean something you don't grow from.
Speaker 2: Some things you just regret.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and some things crush you. You know. I've
Speaker 3: been very interested over the years in that question of
Speaker 3: why do some people come through difficulty and emerge as
Speaker 3: having grown in some way again, even if the difficulty
Speaker 3: is still lamentable and tragic. They carry on, and they
Speaker 3: carry on in a way that eventually starts to look
Speaker 3: a little bit like thriving to the best of the
Speaker 3: ability under the circumstances. And then other people are utterly
Speaker 3: crushed by it, become bitter defeated, And what is the
Speaker 3: secret sauce in that? And it's the same thing I've
Speaker 3: often been like, well, why do some of us get
Speaker 3: sober and others don't? Right? There's not an answer, There's
Speaker 3: not a single answer anyway, and there's answers that might
Speaker 3: apply to this person in this circumstance, and we might
Speaker 3: be able to see some patterns here and a few
Speaker 3: things here, but there's no ultimate answer.
Speaker 2: But I get letters all the time, and I think
Speaker 2: you said that, you get parallel ones from people who
Speaker 2: write to me and say, you appear to have gone
Speaker 2: through a depression that was catastrophic, that warranted hospitalization, in
Speaker 2: which you were utterly paralyzed, and now your life seems
Speaker 2: to be essentially okay, which you know, it has some
Speaker 2: really tough moments, but it's essentially okay at least for now.
Speaker 2: And they say, why is it you were able to
Speaker 2: do that? And I wasn't. And when people write to
Speaker 2: me and say that there are some factors that are obvious,
Speaker 2: you know, I had access to excellent therapy and psychopharmaceutical care.
Speaker 2: I had very supportive people around me. I had grown
Speaker 2: up in a loving household. I had all of these advantages.
Speaker 2: But a lot of that I think it's actually just
Speaker 2: the nature of one's personality. And my concern about the
Speaker 2: model of resilience is that you want to encourage people
Speaker 2: to pursue resilience, but you don't want the people who
Speaker 2: really can't do that to feel as though they've failed,
Speaker 2: so that, in addition to being depressed, they feel like
Speaker 2: they've somehow flunked the test of how they were supposed
Speaker 2: to recover and get patter. I just think different people
Speaker 2: have different capacity. You know, I can't play tennis. I'm
Speaker 2: just I took a lot of lessons. I'm really bad
Speaker 2: at it. And I mean I took a lot of
Speaker 2: lessons when I was a kid. Not in a long time,
Speaker 2: because I gave up completely. But I have bad hand
Speaker 2: eye coordination, and bad depth perception and all kinds of
Speaker 2: other things. I think resilience also is the thing one
Speaker 2: is fortunate to have, and that leads into a sat
Speaker 2: larger question of which it is a part, which is
Speaker 2: the notion that a meritocracy is somehow more fair than
Speaker 2: an aristocracy. And I spent some time once in a
Speaker 2: diamond mine in South Africa, and I thought, oh, this
Speaker 2: idea I have a sort of if you're only willing
Speaker 2: to work hard enough, you can have a terrific life.
Speaker 2: Those people were working harder than anyone I know has
Speaker 2: ever worked, and their lives were living hell. And the
Speaker 2: idea that somehow, if they only really devoted themselves and
Speaker 2: if they only really persist. Some people have skills and
Speaker 2: advantages and are able to thrive in a meripocricy and
Speaker 2: other people don't. And it's a question of what you're
Speaker 2: born with, and if you're born with the resilience, you're
Speaker 2: going to do better. That doesn't mean it can't be cultivated.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that you don't have to make an
Speaker 2: effort to achieve it. But we aren't all dealt in
Speaker 2: even hand in any regard including that one.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not. And I think what's interesting about that idea,
Speaker 3: and I actually agree with it to be true, is
Speaker 3: this balance of it's not good to embrace fatalism either.
Speaker 3: And you said somewhere that you wish for a new
Speaker 3: generation dead catered to equality but also respectful of merit.
Speaker 3: And there's a balance there, right, And this is the
Speaker 3: balance we're talking about, which is like, not everybody has
Speaker 3: it in them to recover. You say elsewhere about depression
Speaker 3: that the best treatment for depression is belief, which is
Speaker 3: far more essential than what you actually believe in. And
Speaker 3: I think part of it is the belief maybe somehow
Speaker 3: I can find my way through. And so when we
Speaker 3: say some people don't have it. I sometimes worry that
Speaker 3: the people who believe they don't have it then take
Speaker 3: that and go, I don't have it. But to your point,
Speaker 3: we also don't want to make people feel bad for
Speaker 3: not having it. It's this really delicate thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, a topic that you've addressed. But I've known
Speaker 2: people who are addicts and who have recovered or who
Speaker 2: are in recovery, or whichever phrasing one wants to use,
Speaker 2: but who have managed to emerge. But I've also known
Speaker 2: people who didn't. And I sometimes think, gee, if you
Speaker 2: just really worked to that program and if you really
Speaker 2: threw yourself in. But I also think people have different capacities,
Speaker 2: So it is a balance. You want people to do
Speaker 2: their best and to insist that they try as hard
Speaker 2: as they can, but not to punish them if when
Speaker 2: they try as hard as they can they don't succeed.
Speaker 3: I think to do their best is more their belief
Speaker 3: in their ability. But I agree. It's why I've often said,
Speaker 3: if I get a chance to sit down with God,
Speaker 3: after some pretty foundational questions, I'm going to move on
Speaker 3: to this very question, why do some people recover and
Speaker 3: others don't? Because I went through treatment with people, and
Speaker 3: there are some patterns I can pull out, Like you,
Speaker 3: I was relatively fortunate, right Like, I got arrested for
Speaker 3: a bunch felonies and was given a diversion program instead
Speaker 3: of going to jail. Why because I was a suburban
Speaker 3: white kid, right Like, It's just obvious I had that
Speaker 3: advantage when I, after driving my life into the ground,
Speaker 3: climbed back out of that a little bit. I had
Speaker 3: a reasonable high school education that I was given in
Speaker 3: a decent school to fall back upon. I mean, I
Speaker 3: had resources that a lot of people around me didn't have.
Speaker 3: So there are some factors I can certainly look at
Speaker 3: and me like, well, I had that advantage, and I
Speaker 3: had that advantage, and I had that advantage. And then
Speaker 3: there are people who had all those advantages I did
Speaker 3: who are dead today, you know, And it looked at
Speaker 3: one point like they were trying as hard as I was.
Speaker 3: We were in the same treatment centers, we were going
Speaker 3: to the same meetings. And then you see people who've
Speaker 3: had nothing the worst hand in the world dealt to
Speaker 3: them that end up winning the tournament, and you just
Speaker 3: look at it and there's a certain amount of just like, well,
Speaker 3: I guess we can name some things that we know
Speaker 3: are more prediction give in one direction or the other.
Speaker 3: And then there's just to me a certain mystery, you know,
Speaker 3: which is sort of what you're talking about. Something in eight.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's not measurable, and it is mysterious, and
Speaker 2: I think it's often not predictable. Though to people with
Speaker 2: a lot of experience, it's more predictable than it is
Speaker 2: to people with less experience. I mean, when I worked
Speaker 2: in a prison in Minnesota for a while, I really
Speaker 2: it was juvenile felons, and I formed pretty close relationships
Speaker 2: with a number of them. And I remember one of
Speaker 2: the people who worked at the prison. There was one
Speaker 2: guy who was particularly He was charming and he was brilliant,
Speaker 2: and I thought he could have gone to an Ivy
Speaker 2: League school and he could have run a major corporation.
Speaker 2: And the guy who worked at the prison said, he's
Speaker 2: a psychopath and he's going to spend the rest of
Speaker 2: his life in jail. And I thought that's a horrible
Speaker 2: defeating thing to say, but it turned out to be true.
Speaker 2: He is a psychopath, and he is in a maximum
Speaker 2: security prison now and it's his sort of third imprisonment
Speaker 2: since then, and he's in for a long time this
Speaker 2: go around. But others of the people I met, some
Speaker 2: of whom I didn't automatically warm to as much, have
Speaker 2: actually made really good lives for themselves and have not
Speaker 2: gone back to jail. And so the program that I
Speaker 2: was working in was focused on rehabilitation rather than simply unpunishment.
Speaker 2: And what I realized was that I started off thinking, well,
Speaker 2: we have to rehabilitate everyone, and I ended up thinking, Okay,
Speaker 2: if twenty percent of the people who are here, who
Speaker 2: might otherwise have gone on to a hollow, empty life
Speaker 2: of criminality and destruction, instead go on to positive, productive
Speaker 2: lives in which they're able to do terrific things, that's
Speaker 2: a triumph. You don't have to have it work out
Speaker 2: for everyone, and it won't ever work out for everyone.
Speaker 2: You can't rehabilitate all the criminals, or all the addicts,
Speaker 2: or all the people with mental illness, or all the
Speaker 2: whatever other category you want to propose. But there is
Speaker 2: no category of come across in which you can't find
Speaker 2: some people who managed to pull through. I mean, there
Speaker 2: are Holocaust survivors who somehow survived all those years in
Speaker 2: the camps and who then came out and became great
Speaker 2: moral philosophers. Yeah, there's nothing that's so bad that some
Speaker 2: people can't find resilience in it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So let's turn to youth's suicide because we're kind of
Speaker 3: right on it a little bit, because there's something you
Speaker 3: said about it that I think is really interesting and
Speaker 3: I think applies to what we just said. You're describing
Speaker 3: the research you've done on it. You've written a very
Speaker 3: extensive piece for The New Yorker, you're writing a book
Speaker 3: on it, and you said, I really would have loved
Speaker 3: to discover a guiding principle in which I could say,
Speaker 3: terrible things happen to these families, but they'll never happen
Speaker 3: to me, and they'll never happen to you. This is
Speaker 3: how you steer clear.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I came up with a certain amount of wisdom that
Speaker 3: may be helpful to some people, but overall, I felt
Speaker 3: like people are probably going to go on dying by suicide,
Speaker 3: and there's nothing I can do to make that not
Speaker 3: happen to anyone.
Speaker 2: Well, that's absolutely true. I'man. The impulse to endra life
Speaker 2: exists in a lot of people, and it actually exists
Speaker 2: in more and more people as we move into this
Speaker 2: period of climate change and political extremism and all of
Speaker 2: the other the social immobility, all of the other problems
Speaker 2: that are affecting us, also into an era of technology
Speaker 2: and information overload, and you know, to some extent, though
Speaker 2: myself I'm not religious, I think the movement away from
Speaker 2: a certain kind of mainstream faith has been devastating for
Speaker 2: many people, for whom it would have served as a
Speaker 2: protection against suicide. You aren't going to be able to
Speaker 2: make it all go away, but there is a lot
Speaker 2: that can be done to reduce the rate, especially of
Speaker 2: youth suicide. I mean, that's what I've been primarily studying,
Speaker 2: and we aren't doing it, and nobody empower seems to
Speaker 2: be very interested in doing it. And mostly I think
Speaker 2: people in power aren't very interested in doing it because
Speaker 2: doing it would entail admitting the vulnerability to this possibility
Speaker 2: that exists in every family in the world, and nobody
Speaker 2: wants to acknowledge that vulnerability, and the force of that
Speaker 2: insistent denial results in social policies that are destructive, damaging problem,
Speaker 2: and that are leading to enormous numbers of unnecessary deaths.
Speaker 2: So you can't make the problem go away entirely. But
Speaker 2: you don't have to indulge it the way that we
Speaker 2: do and face up to the fact a that you're
Speaker 2: afraid of it and be that actually it could happen
Speaker 2: to you. I mean, let's hope it doesn't. It doesn't
Speaker 2: happen to most families. It doesn't happen to most people,
Speaker 2: but it happens apparently out of the blue to many
Speaker 2: families that are good and loving and whatever else it
Speaker 2: is that families are supposed to be insightful, generous, whatever
Speaker 2: our families are supposed to be that one would hope
Speaker 2: is protective. None of it is fool proof. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Do you think that this increase is cultural and the
Speaker 3: factors that are at play in our culture? You say
Speaker 3: that certainly, if you've got a terrible childhood and you're
Speaker 3: traumatizing all that you're more likely to do it. And
Speaker 3: I think we can all see that. I think that's
Speaker 3: more commonly understood now. Right, bad things happen to you
Speaker 3: as a kid, you're much more likely to have challenges
Speaker 3: as an adult or even in your youth. Right, But
Speaker 3: you mentioned, as you said, families that it appears like
Speaker 3: everything is going right and still a child wants to die.
Speaker 3: What's going on.
Speaker 2: Some of that is just an organic quality that may
Speaker 2: exist in that child. As we were discussing before, Different
Speaker 2: people have different levels of resilience. Some of that, I
Speaker 2: think has to do with the relationships that kids now
Speaker 2: have to social media and to the internet. It used
Speaker 2: to be that you were bullied at school, but you
Speaker 2: came home and it stopped. And now you come home
Speaker 2: and it doesn't stop. And it used to be that
Speaker 2: if you were paying attention to what was happening in
Speaker 2: the world, perhaps your father read the paper in the
Speaker 2: morning and you all watch the news for half an
Speaker 2: hour in the evening. Now you have an alert on
Speaker 2: your phone every forty five seconds telling you about some
Speaker 2: other hideous disaster somewhere or other. I mean, there are
Speaker 2: a million factors I consider to spend the next hour
Speaker 2: listing what a lot of them are. The problem, I
Speaker 2: think is that we don't make any attempt to notify
Speaker 2: people of what those dangers are and to prepare them
Speaker 2: to negotiate those problems. So there's a lawyer with whom
Speaker 2: I've had some interesting conversations who's based in Seattle, who
Speaker 2: for many years worked on asbestos claims and the issue
Speaker 2: with asbestos was not so much that a product had
Speaker 2: been developed that turned out to be carcinogenic. It was
Speaker 2: that nobody was told that it was carcinogenic. The companies
Speaker 2: tried to hide the fact that it was carcinogenic. There
Speaker 2: is a great deal of damage that could have been
Speaker 2: prevented and it wasn't. And he now is representing families
Speaker 2: who have lost children to suicide because apparently of their
Speaker 2: experiences on social media, which I could detail, but in
Speaker 2: any event, the case is quite convincing. And what he
Speaker 2: said is, you know, people need to be warned. They
Speaker 2: need to know what are the algorithms, what are the
Speaker 2: dangers with those algorithms, What is it that you're getting
Speaker 2: into when you sign up for these different platforms, what's
Speaker 2: going on? I mean, I think TikTok is responsible for
Speaker 2: an enormous amount of despair among American youth, and that
Speaker 2: many people have ended up dying by suicide in part
Speaker 2: because of the way that the TikTok algorithms feed people
Speaker 2: who have clicked on one thing about suicide once so
Speaker 2: much material that they then come to think that this
Speaker 2: is what everyone is doing and end up forming an
Speaker 2: identity around and the group of people contemplating suicide because
Speaker 2: they don't have a strong enough identity elsewhere. The debate
Speaker 2: that's going on in Congress right now is about whether
Speaker 2: TikTok should be banned, and I don't actually think anything
Speaker 2: should be banned. That's a separate topic. Whether their TikTok
Speaker 2: should be banned because it might be used at some
Speaker 2: hypothetical point by the Chinese to spy on American citizens
Speaker 2: and collect And I thought, okay, but it's killing children.
Speaker 2: TikTok is killing children. Shouldn't we be having a conversation
Speaker 2: about that. You know, obviously it preferable if national enemies
Speaker 2: don't have extreme amounts of information about one another that
Speaker 2: could be used to cause damage and chaos. But the
Speaker 2: level of hysteria about the I think very remote possibility
Speaker 2: that TikTok could somehow be weaponized in a war is
Speaker 2: so tremendous, and the lack of interest in what it
Speaker 2: is about TikTok that has caused it so particularly to
Speaker 2: lead children down a path toward despair and self injury
Speaker 2: and self harm and death through a variety of sort
Speaker 2: of weird challenges and things that are on TikTok, and
Speaker 2: ultimately towards suicide. That's barely discussed at all. It's a
Speaker 2: very distorted system of values.
Speaker 3: So when you're referring to social media being sounds like
Speaker 3: the lawyer you're talking to would use the phrase responsible
Speaker 3: for or we could say contributing to. It's not just
Speaker 3: the way we normally think of social media in that well,
Speaker 3: you might be on it and you might get bullied.
Speaker 3: You might be on it and you might negatively compare
Speaker 3: yourself to other people. You might be on it and
Speaker 3: it keeps you from relationships in the real world. You're
Speaker 3: talking about actually people who are being fed suicidal ideation
Speaker 3: by the algorithm, because all the algorithm is essentially doing
Speaker 3: is saying, if you like this, I'm just going to
Speaker 3: give you more of it. If you like just a
Speaker 3: little of it, and you like a little more of it,
Speaker 3: I'm going to keep feeding it to you. That that's
Speaker 3: the very direct link.
Speaker 2: Here until you finally get to the point at which,
Speaker 2: as happens more and more frequently, people are live streaming
Speaker 2: their suicides to a group of other people who are
Speaker 2: egging them on and cheering for them and saying, I
Speaker 2: know you can do it and go ahead, and so
Speaker 2: on and so forth, and it becomes a social structure
Speaker 2: within a world to which again, people who haven't been
Speaker 2: able for one reason or another to fit inadequately in
Speaker 2: their own opinion, to whatever their general social context is,
Speaker 2: school or some place, then they find an identity in
Speaker 2: this and they follow through on it, and it could
Speaker 2: be regulated. I mean, we do regulate, back to what
Speaker 2: we were talking about earlier, but we do regulate certain
Speaker 2: substances of abuse. We do regulate certain dangerous medications. There
Speaker 2: would be ways to regulate it without banning it, without
Speaker 2: saying that you can't look up this material, without trying
Speaker 2: to bowdlerize texts. You could just say, okay, but you
Speaker 2: know this is a dangerous direction. You could have alerts
Speaker 2: of various kinds that came on. I mean, there also
Speaker 2: are many people I should emphasize who find community on
Speaker 2: social media in all kinds of other ways, and it
Speaker 2: can be very rewarding. It's not that I think all
Speaker 2: social media is terrible, or that we should be getting
Speaker 2: rid of social media, which we couldn't do anyway, but right.
Speaker 2: It's just that I think that it has a dark side,
Speaker 2: and that dark side needs to be acknowledged, and there
Speaker 2: needs to be warnings about it, and then it needs
Speaker 2: to be regulated.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, one of the things about technology that's
Speaker 3: so challenging at this point is obviously it does an
Speaker 3: enormous amount of good, it can also do an enormous
Speaker 3: amount of harm. And it is changing so fast that
Speaker 3: our systems of thinking about regulation, ethics, all of that
Speaker 3: are like stone age speed, and technologies like computer speed
Speaker 3: is just even just with AI is just crazy how fast.
Speaker 2: But a friend of mine pointed out that every time
Speaker 2: we have a breakthrough in communications, there ensues a period
Speaker 2: of chaos and horror before we really figure out how
Speaker 2: to control it. So you had the invention of the
Speaker 2: printing press, and then you had one hundred years of
Speaker 2: religious wars in Europe. Immediately following you had the invention
Speaker 2: of broadcast technology, and you had fascism and communism. And
Speaker 2: now we have the invention of the Internet, and we're
Speaker 2: once more in a period of I think, quite a
Speaker 2: lot of horror, and hopefully we'll eventually be on top
Speaker 2: of it. But you're right, technology is now proceeding so
Speaker 2: rapidly that we no sooner get on top of what
Speaker 2: seemed to be problematic two years ago than something new
Speaker 2: has come along.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're still figuring out what to do with Twitter,
Speaker 3: and now now we got chat GPT to worry about.
Speaker 3: Which is going to start? You know, how do I
Speaker 3: commit suicide? Chat GPT? Right, Like, I mean, one of
Speaker 3: the things from your work on you suicide that was
Speaker 3: startling to me, and I know it was to you,
Speaker 3: was this idea that obviously those being bullied or at
Speaker 3: a higher risk for suicide, but so are the bullies themselves.
Speaker 3: That's actually a correlation that goes to both of those.
Speaker 3: I thought that was unusual. I was struck by it.
Speaker 2: I hadn't really stopped to think very much about the
Speaker 2: experience of bullies, because we as a society are sympathetic
Speaker 2: to victims and not sympathetic to perpetrators. Right, bullies are
Speaker 2: mostly not very happy people. Very happy people don't become bullies.
Speaker 2: I had also worked a lot on the experience of
Speaker 2: families of people who commit crimes, and therefore looked at
Speaker 2: the experience of criminals. They're also not mostly people who
Speaker 2: are having a really great time. They are people who
Speaker 2: are suffering. We may be unsympathetic to their suffering because
Speaker 2: they cause so much suffering to other people, but we
Speaker 2: shouldn't forget that they are suffering. And people, for example,
Speaker 2: who are school shooters almost always die by suicide. And
Speaker 2: even if what they've done, what's remembered is the people
Speaker 2: they killed. Part of their impulse was a suicidal, desperate impulse.
Speaker 2: And so the fact that bullies have a very high
Speaker 2: rate of suicide made perfect sense to me. Bullies are
Speaker 2: not happy, and nobody likes them. Yeah, accept I suppose
Speaker 2: Donald Trump, but that's its own, full separate.
Speaker 3: We're recording on the day that mister Trump is being
Speaker 3: indicted here in New York, and the city's a little
Speaker 3: interesting today. It's always interesting in New York, I know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it makes total sense. And I
Speaker 3: do think that question of how do we relate to
Speaker 3: people who do awful things, who almost certainly have had
Speaker 3: awful things done to them, or have been the victim
Speaker 3: of some difficult circumstance, how do we relate to that.
Speaker 3: I think it's a broader question about how do we
Speaker 3: relate to people who make mistakes and what do we
Speaker 3: allow for rehabilitation.
Speaker 2: When I was little, I remember having a conversation with
Speaker 2: my mother that didn't particularly strike me at the time
Speaker 2: is extraordinary, but it does in retrospect. There was a
Speaker 2: kid in my class who was bullying me quite badly,
Speaker 2: bullied other kids too. And I was talking at the
Speaker 2: breakfast table when I was I think in second grade,
Speaker 2: so I was maybe seven or eight years old, and
Speaker 2: I said, you know, I just I can't deal with
Speaker 2: going to school and having to interact with Kenny. And
Speaker 2: it's just my mother said, well, she said, look, she said,
Speaker 2: you know, Kenny's behavior is horrible, she said, and I've
Speaker 2: talked to the school and I'm trying, she said, But
Speaker 2: you know, she said, Kenny does not come from the
Speaker 2: same circumstances you do. She said, Kenny has a single mother,
Speaker 2: she works incredibly long hours. They have a lot of
Speaker 2: financial problems. They live in quite a violent neighborhood. She said,
Speaker 2: Kenny is not having an easy time. And at the time,
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously it stuck with me because she said
Speaker 2: it's me when I was seven, and I'm now fifty
Speaker 2: nine and.
Speaker 3: I'm talking about it tom anything from seven. But I'm impressed.
Speaker 2: I do remember it very vividly. But when I was older,
Speaker 2: I thought, oh that she didn't say it's okay for
Speaker 2: Kenny to bully you. She didn't say you shouldn't be
Speaker 2: upset by it, but she did say, you know, everyone
Speaker 2: is a person. And so I guess if the work
Speaker 2: that I've done is partly about compassion, I think that
Speaker 2: was the attitude that formed it.
Speaker 3: It's interesting, as we were just talking, I just had
Speaker 3: a memory of me being in elementary school, and I
Speaker 3: realized that I was both bullied and a bully to
Speaker 3: one particular kid. And when I think back on the
Speaker 3: way I was a bully to this one kid, to
Speaker 3: forget all the crime I did when I was a
Speaker 3: heroin addict on, like that is my deepest regret. Was
Speaker 3: a real unkindness to him. But I'm able to see,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of your point, Like I was both right.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like, well, it's coming downstream. So I
Speaker 3: passed it on through, right, which is the way a
Speaker 3: lot of hurt works. Right.
Speaker 2: A lot of the people who are both actually have
Speaker 2: the highest rate of suicidality, higher than either the ones
Speaker 2: who were just bullies or the ones who were just bland.
Speaker 3: I think I made it through, Yes, So it's good news.
Speaker 3: Let's turn our attention a little bit to families. You've
Speaker 3: done a lot of work on families. You've got the
Speaker 3: audible audiobook. Is that what you call it?
Speaker 2: Book?
Speaker 3: All right? We'll call it a book all right about family,
Speaker 3: the different types of families. This is one of the
Speaker 3: current projects you're working on, and I'm curious, what do
Speaker 3: you think of family?
Speaker 2: Is? Wow, Well, that's a huge question.
Speaker 4: I think a family is a group of people who
Speaker 4: are committed to one another, even in moments when they
Speaker 4: don't like one another very much, and who negotiate the
Speaker 4: world collectively to some degree.
Speaker 3: That's a good one. You talk a lot about the
Speaker 3: diversity that families take today, and you made a point
Speaker 3: in the book that I really loved. You were like,
Speaker 3: you know, all the words we have for sort of
Speaker 3: extended different families are like modifiers put on existing words
Speaker 3: step father, step brother. Right, Like we take a word
Speaker 3: like father, brother and we modify it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: You're saying that you think, given all the different forms
Speaker 3: that families can take today, like you've mentioned you've got
Speaker 3: six parents for what is it, three children in four states?
Speaker 2: Right? Four children?
Speaker 3: Yeah, four children in three states. All this diversity, you
Speaker 3: think that we may be using impoverished language to be
Speaker 3: able to describe all the different ways that families take shape.
Speaker 2: Today we use a very impoverised language. You know, we
Speaker 2: all know twelve thousand words that we didn't know twenty
Speaker 2: years ago that relate to the expanding field of technology.
Speaker 2: And you know what a tweet is and what a
Speaker 2: PDF is and what I don't know anything else that
Speaker 2: you can come up with. But there are many of
Speaker 2: these words, and yet the words for family remain the
Speaker 2: same small group of words. And so people will say
Speaker 2: when we talk about my husband's biological children and my
Speaker 2: relationship to them, that they'll say, so, you're sort of
Speaker 2: like a special uncle. And I feel like, well, I'm
Speaker 2: sort of like a special uncle. But wouldn't it be
Speaker 2: good if we actually had a word for what I
Speaker 2: in fact am. And it caused a lot of chaos
Speaker 2: in our lives that we didn't have words for what
Speaker 2: we were. So those children called us daddy and papa,
Speaker 2: but they were being brought up by their lesbian mothers,
Speaker 2: and we weren't actually their parents, and didn't make any
Speaker 2: of the decisions about what was going to happen in
Speaker 2: their lives, and had very little influence, and yet were
Speaker 2: deeply involved and loved them enormously and cared from the
Speaker 2: bottom of our hearts. And I guess it's like an uncle,
Speaker 2: it is like a godparents. Just let's come up with
Speaker 2: some more words. If we could come up with so
Speaker 2: many new words for expanding technology, why not for expanding family?
Speaker 2: And I think the reason why not is essentially that
Speaker 2: there has been a consistent insistence that all variant models
Speaker 2: of family essentially ape the original and ideal model, which
Speaker 2: I think was never really so consistent, and it's certainly
Speaker 2: not necessarily so ideal, but that in the quest for equality,
Speaker 2: we've had to make a lot of false claims of equivalence.
Speaker 2: And so you know, it's okay that my husband and
Speaker 2: I have a child who lives with us all the time,
Speaker 2: because it's really our family is just the same as
Speaker 2: another family. And I think myself, well, actually not. Our
Speaker 2: son is having a different experience with two dads than
Speaker 2: he would have if he had a dad and a mom.
Speaker 2: I mean, he would have a different experience with one
Speaker 2: dad and mom than with another dad and mom too.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of variety in humanity altogether. But I
Speaker 2: think this sort of absence of vocabularies because people keep
Speaker 2: wanting to shove everything back into the relationships that have
Speaker 2: been recognized for a long time, and the nature of
Speaker 2: and complexity of relationships has enormously expanded in the last
Speaker 2: you know, fifty years, more or less, and our refusal
Speaker 2: to come up with a way to talk about all
Speaker 2: of those relationships presents as a principle the notion that
Speaker 2: those relationships are only acceptable or valid insofar as they
Speaker 2: are really essentially the same. You know, it's okay for
Speaker 2: gay people to have kids because everyone wears polar shirts
Speaker 2: and they go to church on Sundays, and they drive
Speaker 2: station wagons and they join the PTA or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: And you get some gay people who are playing that
Speaker 2: to the hilt in a way that's actually quite unnatural,
Speaker 2: because they keep wanting to prove that they're the same
Speaker 2: as everyone else. You get some people who feel like
Speaker 2: they've failed because they can't pull that off. You get
Speaker 2: some people who just aren't interested in it and are
Speaker 2: annoyed by the supposition that they're supposed to conform to it.
Speaker 2: But who then worry, am I traumatizing my children by
Speaker 2: not playing that? Get you impose a lot on people
Speaker 2: instead of saying we as a society celebrate diversity. We
Speaker 2: celebrate diversity. We should really celebrate diversity, and we should
Speaker 2: say there's this thing, and there's that thing, and there's
Speaker 2: this other thing, and make a celebration of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've often wondered about gay marriage from that perspective,
Speaker 3: and I'm wondering that from the outside. So I'll be
Speaker 3: clear than that, and I recognize there are legal reasons
Speaker 3: that marriage is really important, but it was sort of
Speaker 3: a little bit of it feels like, maybe are we
Speaker 3: shoehorning a concept like we want equality and yet also difference.
Speaker 3: You kind of get the drift of where I'm going.
Speaker 2: It's very tricky territory. When John and I got married
Speaker 2: in two thousand and seven, the most radical thing that
Speaker 2: we could do was to have an extremely traditional wedding
Speaker 2: because the idea that that was happening with two men
Speaker 2: at the center of it seemed so much to challenge
Speaker 2: the social norms.
Speaker 3: And so I mean not to mention the pink tank.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, I was going to say we did. We
Speaker 2: did add some flourishers, but you know, we had a
Speaker 2: minister and a rabbi, and we had dinner and there
Speaker 2: was dancing. We had a rehearsal dinner, we did all
Speaker 2: of the stuff that's kind of associated with a certain
Speaker 2: kind of American wedding. Within five years, I would look
Speaker 2: at people who are having a wedding very much like ours.
Speaker 2: I mean, everyone should have whatever kind of wedding they want,
Speaker 2: but I would look at them some of the time
Speaker 2: and think, oh, come on, I mean that's kind of silly.
Speaker 2: I mean, why need to come up with something that's
Speaker 2: fresh and new and that's original. And so I think
Speaker 2: the reality has shifted quite rapidly. And of course, in
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, we weren't legally allowed to call
Speaker 2: what we were having a marriage, and we weren't legally
Speaker 2: allowed to call it a wedding. And when all of
Speaker 2: that shifted, that was very meaningful. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: we're living in this moment when the rights of gay
Speaker 2: people and gay families, in particularly of trans people and
Speaker 2: trans families are coming under really grotesque and hideous attack.
Speaker 2: And I feel like, okay, but if you allow too
Speaker 2: much of the othering, then you become a group that's
Speaker 2: easy to victimize because people don't relate to you. And
Speaker 2: if you don't allow enough of it, then you're being
Speaker 2: shoehorned into an artificial life. And it's a very complicated balance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of nuance in that. I mean, even
Speaker 3: in my own life. And this is just a minor
Speaker 3: example of everything you're talking about. Like, my partner, Jenny
Speaker 3: and I are committed to each other, like as committed
Speaker 3: as we could possibly be, but I don't think we're
Speaker 3: going to get married. And yet, you know, partner's sort
Speaker 3: of a word, you know, but it's not exactly. It
Speaker 3: doesn't feel like what we are. You know, a lot
Speaker 3: of times when I tell people my partner, they assume
Speaker 3: I'm gay, right, you know, and so there's not even
Speaker 3: a word for that, sort of like, you know, what,
Speaker 3: what are we to each other? You know? Oftentimes I'm like,
Speaker 3: I just maybe I should ask her if she wants
Speaker 3: to marry me, and she'd just become my fiance, because
Speaker 3: that's a term everyone understands, because to say she's my girlfriend,
Speaker 3: well that really isn't it.
Speaker 2: No. I agree, And you know, and I think girlfriend
Speaker 2: and boyfriend always sounds a little bit juvenile. I mean,
Speaker 2: there was a point at which I was calling John
Speaker 2: my boyfriend, and we were sort of we were just
Speaker 2: too old to be going around saying that, and I
Speaker 2: knew some people who would say love her, and I
Speaker 2: just feel like that's kind of really getting you carry
Speaker 2: away with.
Speaker 3: Particular, say my lady friend.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly my sway. But there again, intimate relationships that
Speaker 2: are not marriages have gone on forever, of course, but
Speaker 2: they have gone on as a kind of established social
Speaker 2: norm for a long long time. And why why don't
Speaker 2: we have a word? I mean, I find that I
Speaker 2: say partner. We had a hilarious moment actually at my
Speaker 2: Christmas Carol concert at my son's school. We were sitting
Speaker 2: down and some somebody came along and he said, are
Speaker 2: there shoe seats available at It takes place in a
Speaker 2: church and we were in a pew and he said yes.
Speaker 2: And he's so good, he said, because he said, my
Speaker 2: partner is just coming and if you see him, he said,
Speaker 2: and he gave a description, and my husband brightly said, oh.
Speaker 2: He said, I thought we were the only gay parents
Speaker 2: at the school, and he said my law partner. And
Speaker 2: I just said, well, let's have a word that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean all these different things. Makes it clear what we're
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeap, when you're talking about families, And I love this idea.
Speaker 3: You said, any model of family can work, and any
Speaker 3: model can fail. What matters is the integrity, lovingness, and
Speaker 3: purposefulness of the people who participate. That makes me think
Speaker 3: of when my son's mother and I were divorcing. I
Speaker 3: was just really terrified and I didn't want the divorces anime,
Speaker 3: and so I was like, divorce is not good for him, divorce,
Speaker 3: you know, And I remember the therapist said this, and
Speaker 3: at the time it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear,
Speaker 3: because I kind of want somebody to shame her into
Speaker 3: staying with me, right, But they said, you know, what
Speaker 3: doesn't matters whether you're divorced or not. What matters is
Speaker 3: whether you can effectively co parent the child. And that's
Speaker 3: true whether you're married or not married. And it was
Speaker 3: a revelation, like, oh yeah, and so I love that
Speaker 3: you're making that point about it's not the structure of
Speaker 3: the family that matters. It's the intent and the heart
Speaker 3: and the way people are in relationship.
Speaker 2: And you have to have some awareness also of the
Speaker 2: structural issue and then be awake to its particular advantages
Speaker 2: or challenges. I mean, for instance, I have a daughter
Speaker 2: with my best friend from college and they live in Texas,
Speaker 2: and John and I have a son who lives with
Speaker 2: us in New York, so I don't see my daughter
Speaker 2: as much as I see my son. I've had to
Speaker 2: be kind of self aware about that in the way
Speaker 2: that I think anyone who has divorced and remarried and
Speaker 2: had a second family has to be aware of, Okay,
Speaker 2: what are the ways in which I have to make
Speaker 2: a special effort for the person whom I don't see
Speaker 2: as frequently in whose day to day life I'm not
Speaker 2: as enmeshed with what are the things that I have
Speaker 2: to do to make that work. So it's not that
Speaker 2: it's all the same. You have to figure out in
Speaker 2: each situation. How do you deal with making a divorced
Speaker 2: family work? Is different from how do you make a
Speaker 2: whatever it is primal family work? But there are ways
Speaker 2: to do it, and I mean, goodness knows, we've all
Speaker 2: seen families that are structurally absolutely of the mainstream and
Speaker 2: that are a total disaster.
Speaker 3: There's no shortage of them, you know. Yeah, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: just love that. And I love the words you chose integrity, loveliness,
Speaker 3: and purposefulness, right because I think that gets to everything.
Speaker 3: You just said like, yeah, I had to be very
Speaker 3: purposeful about how do I parent my son now that
Speaker 3: we're not I think you just called it a primal family,
Speaker 3: which is maybe not a term I've ever heard. But
Speaker 3: now that we're not one unit, we're going to be
Speaker 3: different units in different ways. I've got to be very
Speaker 3: purposeful about this. But I should be just as purposeful
Speaker 3: when I'm married, right, Like, you know, it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: the scenario with children, it's you know, all the things
Speaker 3: you're saying.
Speaker 2: And there are so many ludicrous assumptions that get made
Speaker 2: from the mainstream, including, particularly as I've worked on the
Speaker 2: subject of foster care, the assumption that parents in the
Speaker 2: first place, that they can't learn the skills that they
Speaker 2: perhaps don't have because they didn't have easy childhoods themselves,
Speaker 2: but in the second place, that children are really often
Speaker 2: better off being taken away from a supposedly dysfunctional family
Speaker 2: and placed with the supposedly functional one. Children mostly would
Speaker 2: rather be with their parents of origin. And while there
Speaker 2: are some instances in which the foster care system has
Speaker 2: worked out incredibly well, and there are some people who
Speaker 2: really can't parent, most people either themselves or in their
Speaker 2: larger extended family, There are people who can help take
Speaker 2: care of children, there are ways to make it work,
Speaker 2: and ultimately most children who are removed are removed not
Speaker 2: for abuse, but for neglect. The symptoms of neglect are
Speaker 2: often actually the symptoms of poverty rather than the symptoms
Speaker 2: of neglect. The amount of money that's spent on a
Speaker 2: foster care placement would be sufficient to alleviate that poverty
Speaker 2: and to allow the children not to be neglected in
Speaker 2: the ways that they are. And the assumption somehow, which
Speaker 2: is essentially there, that growing up poor and uneducated means
Speaker 2: that you are unhappy, and growing up in a sative,
Speaker 2: more advantaged environment is going to make you happy. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's nicer to have an advantaged environment. I'm not, for
Speaker 2: a moment suggesting that poverty is not an enormous problem,
Speaker 2: in that it is an incredibly difficult for families and children,
Speaker 2: But there is a tendency to think that there is
Speaker 2: a way that's better, and it's often wrong.
Speaker 3: This is kind of close to home right now in
Speaker 3: that a good friend of mine and his wife recently
Speaker 3: brought in a child that had been taken away from
Speaker 3: her sister. Her sister has severe drug abuse, severe schizophrenia,
Speaker 3: you know, and real delusions, and she's not a fit
Speaker 3: mother right now, right right. But what's interesting is that,
Speaker 3: you know, when I got sober early on, right, I
Speaker 3: was around a lot of mothers who all they wanted
Speaker 3: was to get sober so they could get their kids back, right,
Speaker 3: And so I'm in this weird spot of like, well,
Speaker 3: it's a family member. They brought him in, they're good
Speaker 3: parents to him, they're a good family, and so of
Speaker 3: course I'm pulling for them in there, you know, like
Speaker 3: they're stepping to the table and being great parents. But
Speaker 3: then there's the mother and like, well, wouldn't it be
Speaker 3: great if she got better and could take her child back?
Speaker 3: And ideally there would be a way that they all.
Speaker 2: Cooperate, bingo, Because that's the problem is that we and
Speaker 2: to say we will take the children away from the
Speaker 2: problematic situation and put them in this other situation. And
Speaker 2: you know, which is an issue that's been discussed in
Speaker 2: adoption for a long time, but needs to be discussed
Speaker 2: much more broadly in fostergether. There has to be a
Speaker 2: way of negotiating a complicated family and maybe maybe the
Speaker 2: person who is the biological mother can't actually take care
Speaker 2: of the kids all the time, but can hang out
Speaker 2: with them some of the time. Yes, and maybe there
Speaker 2: are people who can figure out when and when not,
Speaker 2: and there should be systems to make it work, and
Speaker 2: there are gestures toward those systems, but they don't really exist. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you don't have to look very far into
Speaker 3: all sorts of classical literature to find the constant example
Speaker 3: of foster parenting gone wrong. Right, I mean, there's just awful.
Speaker 3: There are stories out there that are hideous. We're nearly
Speaker 3: out of time, and I didn't even get to get
Speaker 3: into many topics that I wanted to. But maybe we
Speaker 3: will end with something that you said in The Noonday Demon.
Speaker 3: I believe, and we were talking about you know who
Speaker 3: gets better who doesn't? Right, you say, sense of humor
Speaker 3: is the best indicator that you'll recover, is often the
Speaker 3: best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and
Speaker 3: you have hope.
Speaker 2: I was impressed when I was in Moscow in the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties by how much of a sense of humor
Speaker 2: all of the people I met had about their experiences
Speaker 2: of being shipped off to the Gulag put into prison.
Speaker 2: Cams pushed to the edge of society, not having enough
Speaker 2: to eat. I thought, this isn't funny, this isn't horrifying.
Speaker 2: What do you mean about being funny? But your sense
Speaker 2: of humor is sort of your final defense. And I've
Speaker 2: quoted sometimes Burmese writer named math Tenegee, who I spent
Speaker 2: time with when I was in me and mar And
Speaker 2: she had been Asang Suchies's personal assistant, a job she
Speaker 2: had done and knowing it would center to prison, and
Speaker 2: then she was put into a prison with a lot
Speaker 2: of women who were sort of prostitutes and drug dealers,
Speaker 2: and I mean, who were in for other reasons. And
Speaker 2: I said to her, what was it. What were your
Speaker 2: years in that prison like? And she said, I had
Speaker 2: the most fantastic time. And I said, what do you mean,
Speaker 2: You had a found out you weren't in a horrifying
Speaker 2: prison under a sort of hideous governant. And she said.
Speaker 2: The purpose of the government in sending us there was
Speaker 2: to make us miserable, she said, and if we could
Speaker 2: go on having a good time while we were there,
Speaker 2: then they had failed and we had won. And that
Speaker 2: point of view I found was incredibly instructive. And I
Speaker 2: remember being at an exhibition opening in Berlin some years ago.
Speaker 2: It was a Moscow Berlin show and you walked through
Speaker 2: It was about the period of the sort of around
Speaker 2: the Second World War, and you walked through the rooms
Speaker 2: full of Nazi propaganda, and the Germans were blushing as
Speaker 2: said they had found their mother, you know, naked on
Speaker 2: the kitchen table and looking on with horror. And the
Speaker 2: Russians were looking at the propaganda and saying, how ridiculous
Speaker 2: is it that anyone ever believed in that? And they
Speaker 2: were laughing and laughing about it. And I thought, okay,
Speaker 2: I mean, there is a reason why not that Russia
Speaker 2: has been a more successful experiment than Germany has, certainly
Speaker 2: in this era. But I thought, there is something that
Speaker 2: keeps people going about being able to see the absurdity
Speaker 2: of their situation and to see what's ridiculous about it.
Speaker 2: And I find over it. I find with my own children,
Speaker 2: if we can get to the point of laughing, then
Speaker 2: we can address the other things. And when you do
Speaker 2: public speaking, which I do some of, if you get
Speaker 2: people laughing, then you can make them cry, because once
Speaker 2: you've laughed, you actually open up emotionally. And as long
Speaker 2: as the laughter is held at Bay so is everything else.
Speaker 3: Well, that is a great place to wrap up. Andrew,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for coming back on the show
Speaker 3: and for traveling over here to join me in the studio.
Speaker 2: Well, it's been a great time. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: It's a privilege to be here.
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