Meg Mason on Writing, Developing Taste, and Tolerance

Ryan talks to author Meg Mason about her book Sorrow and Bliss, how to develop taste as a writer, the vitality of being tolerant and forgiving of others, and more. Meg Mason began her career at the Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times UK, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humor for Sunday STYLE magazine and The New Yorker's Daily Shouts and been a regular columnist for GQ and contributor to ELLE, marie claire and Vogue. Meg has written three books including the one we dive into today titled Sorrow and Bliss. When Meg first set out to write this book, she found herself stuck with 85,000 of a dreadful, untitled Christmas novel. After her own experiences with mental health, she ended presenting what is now Sorrow and Bliss to her publisher. The book is a reflection on situations that commonly exist beyond mental illness as well as within it, including the way that women are treated by the health system, and the way that families create intractable roles and scripts for one another. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now. MUD WTR is a coffee alternative with 4 adaptogenic mushrooms and ayurvedic herbs with 1/7th the caffeine of a cup of coffee. Go to mudwtr.com/STOIC and use code STOIC to get 15% off your first purchase. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Speaker 00

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:52Speaker 00

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• 1:35Speaker 00

  So you can get the kind of sleep that will make you wake up and high five your pillow. Wouldn't that be nice? You can go to mudwtr.com. That's M U D W T R, like W T R instead of water. mudwtr.com/stoic. You can use promo code STOIC to get 15% off your first purchase. That's M U D W T R dot com slash stoic. And use code STOIC for 15% off all your orders. It ships from within the U.S. and Canada. All orders ship from the U.S. and Canada. Check out Mudwater. When we were traveling, we did this big road trip a couple of weeks back and we went out to Big Bend and my wife was just finishing this book and I'd finished all the books that

• 2:19Speaker 00

  I'd read on the trip and she said, you have to read this book. It's called Sorrow and Bliss. And it looked like a book I wasn't gonna enjoy and I very, very, very much enjoyed it. And I reached out, I actually reached out to Julia Baird, who wrote two of my favorite books, also a previous podcast guest. She wrote this wonderful book biography we sell in the bookstore called Queen Victoria. She wrote another amazing book we carry in the bookstore called Phosphorescence. And I said, I just read this amazing book from this writer. She's in Australia or New Zealand or thereabouts. Is there any chance you might know her? And she said, I absolutely do and I will connect you. And that's what led me to this conversation

• 3:00Speaker 00

  with Meg Mason. She began her career at the Financial Times and the Times of London. She's written everywhere from the Sunday Times UK, Sydney Morning Herald, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Style Magazine, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, and she's been a regular columnist for GQ and a contributor to Elle, Marie Claire, and Vogue. This is actually her third book, but it's the one that blew up. It's been a huge hit and it is a fantastic book. It's based on her own experiences with mental health, but I don't know, it's just, it really made me think it was a fantastic book. My wife insisted that we carry it to the bookstore and I totally agree. I love this book. We had a great conversation. I very much enjoyed it and I'm excited to bring you this conversation with Meg Mason. Check out Sorrow and Bliss.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  I'll link to it in today's show, but this is me and Meg Mason talking about writing, routines, mental health, and a bunch of other topics that I think you're really gonna enjoy.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  The first thing I wanted to ask you about, because this is sort of a writer process question. You tell this story in the beginning of the book. It opens, the woman is at the party and she's shoving the egg roll in her mouth. It's like my favorite scene, a lot of people's favorite scene in the novel. And when my wife told me to read it, she was like, you're gonna like this scene at the beginning. It feels like it should be on Curb Your Enthusiasm or something. My question is, how does that story happen? Is this something you observe in the course of your life and you squirrel it away in a notebook? And then as you're thinking about the scene to open a novel, it comes perfectly? Or is this something that just comes to you as you're sitting down and writing?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  There's definitely squirreling that goes on. I think that's just the way that if you're a writer, and I don't mean if you're a published writer, I just mean if that's your natural proclivity. You are a collector of little scenes and fragments. In my case, there's no notebook, but they're just obviously something like I have the most diabolical short term memory for just any logistical, you know, domestic quotidian details. But if I see something funny or overhear some conversation or a fragment of something I've read, it definitely, there's obviously some file in my brain where it's kept. But I don't know how it is that it comes back when you need it. You know, what is it about the mind that suddenly will throw up that

• 5:19Speaker 01

  exact fragment from, you know, five or 10 years ago? But I think as far as I have been able to work out, I think it is something connected with the sitting down and sort of being in the posture of writing. So whether or not you have anything, I think when you're sitting there, it must open some channel. And also, once you get, you know, people will say, oh, I haven't had any inspiration yet. But possibly that's because you weren't sitting down. And there's something there that just you're kind of almost ready to receive. If that doesn't sound too kind of woo woo. And also in terms of gathering what you need, you just, everything starts to look like something when you're kind of writing. So there's also a scene in the book where Martha talks about going to the optometrist

• 6:04Speaker 01

  and he falls off his rolling stool and she kind of gets glasses because she can't bear the pathos of the situation and wants to make him feel better. And that was something that I was at the optometrist like the day before and he didn't fall off the stool, but I remember he was rolling really fast across the treatment room. And I was like, what if he did fall off, you know, and it's the tiniest scenario. But then the next day you need it and there it is. So it's a strange answer, but that's all I've been able to work out about how it all works.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, who talks about how you have to put your ass where your heart wants to be. And there is, there is something about sitting in the place and you commute. And Toni Morrison is talked about, like you make the connection.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Untact and there is something out, you put yourself in the right spot, you follow the routine. And it does, it comes from somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Like it's an art and a science, but also Anne Patchett has written about, if you want to play the cello and be a cellist, why would you think that you didn't need to practice? And it's the same with writing, just because you can type doesn't mean that you can write without practice. And it's really true. You need to put in, I mean, I don't know if it's 10,000 hours, but you need to kind of be there just to practice the form and eventually you get better and better. And one day you might even like a single sentence and not have an existential crisis about your gaping void where your talent should be, which is refreshing.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  That is a very hard thing to understand as a writer where like you want to work so hard to get your first thing done. And then when you look at the arc of your career, you're like, oh, the first two were garbage and they were leading me to the, the third, like for me, my third book was the one where I was like, I think, I, obviously there's moments I'm proud of in the first book and the second one, but it's really the, the, actually not that dissimilar with yours, where you've done a few other books and then this one sort of blew up. But if you could have gone back and told your earlier self that your first two books, which you slaved away, you were so proud on, and then you gave interviews about that actually those were warmups and they're like, they don't even matter. That's like the, it would be heartbreaking.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Sorrow and Bliss is my third book, my second novel. The first novel, which is called You Be Mother, which is actually about to come out in the UK. I haven't read it since it came out, but I have described it kind of as my training novel, where I was learning the really technical stuff, like how to move time forward and how to get in and out of a flashback. And those kind of things that I know some people, you know, the people who write their wonderful bestseller first off and they're 25, you know, good on them. I'm so impressed. But for me, it was much more learning the functions, which is, that's fine. I guess it's different for everybody. But lately, definitely, especially when I was writing Sorrow and Bliss.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I could feel there were things I could do with language that I wouldn't have known how to do before, you know, really mechanical things in a sentence that I just sometimes would write it and I'd think, oh, that's the product of of the work. So I wouldn't have known how to get that sort of done previously. So I guess it's an evolution.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  I think it's the confidence that comes with basic competence. Like, since you've gone from beginning to end on a book, you now know that you can do that. And then you're able to be both more conscious and less self-conscious on the next ones. Because you're like, this is a thing. This is how it works. It takes this long.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  People seem to think I'm a novelist. Yeah, exactly. I can't sort of deny that I am. Ironically, though, having written a novel before and thinking, oh, I'll be able to do that again, I did take a little year-long tangent in terms of writing something that was really horrible. And I think one of the battles with that manuscript that never got published, thank goodness I didn't want to pursue that line by the time I got to the end of it and was very happy to drag it to the trash in one sense. I think the battle was, why is this not coming again? You know, I've done this before. I thought that kind of guaranteed that I could. But there are separate pitfalls, I suppose, with every story that you're trying to tell. And you do hear novelists talk a lot about how

• 10:19Speaker 01

  each book is a different challenge. It demands to be told in a different way if you don't want to keep reproducing what you've done before. So that was really hard to get my head around. Because I thought, you know, I had done my training. I knew you had to sit down. I knew you had to turn up and stay there. But that didn't work for me that time for some reason. And I think that was because I think the problem that that was building and building is that I was trying to be novelistic, and I was trying to be clever, and I was trying to be impressive and literary, and I just ended up in absolute knots. And it wasn't until I gave that away, I decided to just, I suppose, write how I talk is the closest way of describing it. It was then that it kind of unlocked something and I was able to start again with that canapé scene.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, you can't think about what other people are going to think about this, or that's sucking away like, resources from actually being in the moment of what you're supposed to be doing.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Totally. And my publisher, who I adore, did a sort of mini intervention on me just after I trashed that manuscript and was telling her that I'd quit and I was never going to try again. It was all too painful. And she said, the reason this has happened to you is because you look at what other people are doing. Look at Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan and anyone along those lines. And you think that's more valuable because it's harder or impossible in my case, because you can't do it, that you think it must have more merit than what you can do. And the other place I've gone wildly wrong is thinking that literary meant serious. And then I, I would have to strive to keep jokes out. I mean, not jokes, but you know, the sort of abstract and absurd things that I personally find funny. I really

• 11:59Speaker 01

  worked hard to make sure they didn't get in and they didn't. And so that was part of the reason it was awful. And there was something in that, that when I sort of almost surrendered and when I'm just, okay, well, I can only do what I can do and I'll have to believe that it has merit of its own. And that was again, another massive step towards getting on the right track.

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• 13:17Speaker 00

  That is something I've noticed since I opened the bookstore that I have because like I like a very specific type of book and then my wife tends to read more novels like yours and then the one she really loves I end up reading. But you can see these kind of waves, not of like what's in the books, but of whatever people in publishing have decided covers are supposed to look like this season. And it's almost always derivative of what has sold well. In my space, this was a couple of years ago, like when Mark Manson put the subtle art of not giving a fuck, then all books had to have blanked out curse words on the cover. Like, you watch how much people are just like, well, I don't know what I should be doing. So I'm just gonna do what other people are doing.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's so interesting. I've wondered about that so much because there's definitely, there was actually a story in the Guardian newspaper a little while ago that was talking about the trend at the moment, which Sorensen is a part. Apparently, it was at the vanguard, thank goodness, but of this woman reclining or prone or her head is against, you know, the wall for it. And I'm sort of thinking, I mean, A, this poor woman, she just can't stand up. Someone needs to splint her legs. But, I mean, surely the contents of all of those books is so various. I know it's part of just wanting to locate it, you know, in a certain category of fiction, but I think it really does a disservice to authors because it makes it look like these are all variations on a theme and they could be so different in terms

• 14:44Speaker 01

  of the actual contents. I think it's a shame that that tends to happen.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like everyone suddenly fall in love with pastel covers on novels. And and the irony of it is that when you do what everyone else is doing, and you're right, you're at the vanguard of it. So when everyone's copying you, they think that that's safe, but it's like ironically, you make yourself heart less likely to stand out because you look like everything else.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  And it ages so fast. Yeah, because if it's a trend, it will come and then it will crash out. And so it's one of those things that in two years' time, this poor woman is gonna look extremely 2021 slash 2022. So I think if you can, I suppose a classic cover or just something that's unique unto itself is, that's what I'm always going to. Ask for, once I get, you know, hopefully more established demand, when such as, you know, my reputation.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  You know what I think it is too, and I felt this on my first book, where it's like, here's what I like, I had my sense of what I wanted to do. And then

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  You're kind of strong in it, but you don't want to be egotistical or a dick. So you're just like, well, this is what I think. And then someone will come along and be like, well, the sales staff says X.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, of course they know what they're doing.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  And I'll defer because they've done this a million times. I've done it never, and they seem to feel really strongly in this direction. Exactly as you say, you don't want to be difficult. But I think what I always used to believe before I was a novelist, I assumed that every author adores their cover and that it's to their taste and it's not. And of course you don't want to be difficult, but at the same time, I think you do as the author, you do have much more of an instinct to some degree. I know you can't anticipate the market like somebody in sales, but I just think you need to feel that it represents the book because what I always think is these covers last. And really it's like getting a tattoo and you're not necessarily going to want that

• 16:43Speaker 01

  barbed wire tattoo around your bicep forever, but you're going to get it. That's it stays, it never ever goes away. And the cover of my first book, I just, I kind of wins. You know, it wasn't to say it was wrong, but it just, I didn't like it and I kind of went with it and deferred. And I now can't even have a copy of that book in the house because I slightly shudder every time I see it. I mean, it's 2012, so we've also moved on, but it's such a fascinating area.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  I very much relate to that because my first book came out in 2012 and I had an idea for what I wanted the title to be. And then my publisher came up with something that was very catchy and very provocative, which worked. So I was like, hey, they know what they're doing. And it worked in one sense, but I also didn't. Think about the universe in which I would have to say I was the author of a book with that title for the rest of my life. Like, the publisher doesn't have to talk about it at parties. I have to do it. And

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's all by committee. But then when the time really comes and it's really published, as far as it looks to the outside world, it is just you and you are responsible for the cover and you are responsible for the back copy and the font and everything about it seems like it was all of your choice. It's just you alone. Everyone else behind you kind of disappears and you have to sell it. You know, you have to be at least disconnected to it enough to publicize it. And as you say, talk about it at every party that you'll go to for at least the next five years.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Well, one of the things I tell authors now is I'm not sure there is a sales staff at the publisher. I don't think they exist. I think it's a lie. And someone who knows for a fact that the vast majority of my books are sold on Amazon and Amazon doesn't have, doesn't interact with salespeople. It's an algorithm that decides what to order. And then now that I own a bookstore, I've never talked to any of these salespeople. So who are these salespeople and who are they selling?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  There must be an algorithm too. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think the main thing, though, really, to me, that the most essential part of it all is that it represents what's inside. Because obviously, the cover will draw a certain customer. And if they, you know, if it is disconnected from the content, the cover will tell them one story and then they open it and they don't like it. And they will pile onto Goodreads, but also that cover will put off anyone who might like what's inside. You said they'll never find it. So that's kind of the challenge. I think, I suppose aesthetically, it doesn't matter quite so much is that it really does what it says on the tin.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  It has to be consistent and authentic as much as it is eye popping and good for marketing.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. And preferably, you want your surname to be in the middle of the alphabet. So it's always on the shelf at eye line. Is that getting too?

• 19:25Speaker 00

  No, no, that's, that's totally right. That's totally right.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  These are all my tips. The other thing I've learned, this is for the writers and the would be writers listening, this is probably the most important piece of advice I will ever give. And that is do not wear a distinctive item of clothing that you really love in your headshots, because you will never be able to wear it again. Because everybody would be like, oh, is that your headshot shirt? Do you only own one shirt?

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Wear something that you're about to retire. That is, I wish someone had told me the amount of clothing that I've had to rest after headshots. And it's really, it's been a loss.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  That is, that is very funny, actually. I saw this little thing you wrote about Robert Caro, who I obviously love.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. I love him. Sorry, I just had a swoon at his name. I just adore him.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  I saw The Power Broker on your shelf when we were briefly on video that didn't work. I mean, it's, it's one of the, the greatest books. I think it's a feat of literary achievement for a couple of reasons. One, that it's even interesting. Two, the message of it is fascinating. The other thing I heard is, um, he cut a quarter of a million words out of the book.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Oh, more words than you and I have collectively written in our career. He just was like, I don't need those. But exactly, if someone had have said to me, for your birthday, here's a book that's 1,000 pages long about a town planner in a different country that you've never lived in, I would have been like, hmm, can I have the receipt as well with that gift? But it was absolutely, it reads like a thriller and it's.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Angel Hated Guy.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  That's what he does.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  It's not even like a wonderful person. It's about a monster.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Unlikable male protagonists. I know. And I just, it was so compelling. And I mean, he is so interesting when he talks about it. And I discovered him through a podcast, you know, a New Yorker podcast. He was speaking to David Remnick and he was talking about how he realized that he had to situate all of this within the context and sort of class and race. And I mean, that's what he so successfully did. And the book, if listeners didn't want to go straight into the magnum opus on Robert, um, on Robert Moses, his book on right, is it writing?

• 21:26Speaker 00

  I think it's called Working.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Working, yes. And I just found that, I mean, it's sort of a summary, I guess, almost an abstract of everything he's done. And it's just so brilliant. I think I've read it sort of three times and listened to it at least twice because he reads the audio himself. And I mean, that accent's to die for.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Well, he's a great example of that. Put your ass where your heart wants to be. Gets dresses in a suit every day. He goes to the office, he writes longhand and then his wife types it up. I mean, it's such such a.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  It's I know. I think I was equally in love with her when I was reading it behind every great author. But also he made some references, in fact, you know, he plans out his chapters scrupulously and has them on that pinboard. And he, it doesn't matter how long it takes. And he said, you know, I find that if I do that, then the first seven years is a drag, but the next seven years on that chapter is much easier. And I'm like, I will never do that. But I really appreciate there's someone in the world with that level of artistic integrity. I think we're all better off for the existence of Robert Caro.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  If you thought the the Robert Moses stuff was good, the Lyndon Johnson stuff is incredible. Again, you wouldn't think he would care.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I'm a volume in, I'm a volume in, but I feel like I would have to potentially take a sabbatical and make that my project. Because that is pretty intimidating, especially for an antipodean who doesn't have quite such a grasp on your politics.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I think he started the first one, the year Lyndon Johnson died, and he hasn't gotten to Vietnam yet. Like Vietnam has not started yet.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And I heard him say that the book binding technology has changed and evolved so much since he began, that they now find it really difficult to use the same, like he wants the book to fall open.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, lay flat binding.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  To spring close to get exactly. And so they have to rediscover. I mean, they're hauling out old technology to make sure all the books match.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  I had that in one of my books, The Daily Stoic. And I think, I think they have to like print it in Germany or something. It's something weird where like they can't do it the normal way. And which is, yeah, which by the way, is so insane where it's like, so people in the future just want their books to shut automatically and can't like, like, who, who, who thought this is an improvement?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if you're trying to keep these things open, I mean, these enormous books that kind of weigh five pounds, it's um, you need all the help you can get. I sort of found that with, I had to listen to The Mirror and the Light, partly because, you know, by Hilary Mantel, because. It's almost above my skill grade to read that book, but also because I just physically couldn't haul it up the stairs. It's just simply too heavy. I get myself tendinitis trying to read it in bed.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Actually, in the book that I just finished, I talk about Robert Moses and how he would have this big, long, flat desk with no drawers. So if problems couldn't pile up, or it couldn't be tucked away, you had to always have access to them. And I was like, oh, I'd remembered that. Like we were talking about earlier, something pops in your mind. You're like, ah, I could go back and use that. So I went and pulled my behemoth hardcover off the shelf. And it was this amazing experience because like I sort of open it and I'm like, I remember the Chinese restaurant that I read this in, you know, 15 years ago, and the food stands are still there.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, no, it becomes this living record. And I'm not anti Kindle, anti e-reader. I think that they serve their place. But I often find that I don't engage or connect so consciously with a book when it's not physically lying around the house. You know, have you noticed on Kindle, it's easier to forget what you were reading, even if you're enjoying it. Like, oh, I was reading Speedboat by Manasa Adler in February and simply forgot and came back to my Kindle the other day and was like, oh, that's right. I was halfway through because you just don't, you don't see it and engage with it and pick it up quite so readily because it's right there and you're waiting for the kettle to boil. So you may as well read a page. I think it's interesting. They do become such personal. You just own it more. Do you know, it's something that's yours.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Well, and you're creating something. So like, again, to go back to the power broker and be like, I highlighted this passage and wrote a note to my future self 15 years from now. I have no sense that I would, I was predicting, I predicted some, without knowing it, I was predicting the future, that my future self would need the message that I'm writing right now.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And other times you look at it and like, why did that speak to me? That doesn't resonate at all. But clearly it was at the time it meant something. I know that as, you know, I've been sort of on book tour in the UK recently and There was signing queues and I would, you know, you're so grateful for the person who buys the book at the event, but someone who brings me to sign their copy that has clearly been half dipped in the bath and dried on the radiator and stained with food. You're also like, I'm so happy to sign that one because this, you two have been in a relationship, you and this book have been on a journey.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Well, I definitely feel that. I see that sometimes people go, this is my favorite book I've ever read. And I, I'm looking at the copy they're handing me and I'm like, no, it's not like you're lying. You're telling me what you think I want to hear. If you'd actually love this book, I could tell.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Because you'd have beaten the crap out of it. That, to me, that's how people who keep their books pristine are not respecting the author. It's actually the opposite. I want you to scribble and disagree and have a

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this has clearly been in the car and on a plane. Exactly. There's my friend's father tells a story about when he was at university in the seventies, everybody was claiming to read Ulysses and there was only one copy of Ulysses in the university library. He was like, I guess I should read it. I'll go and get it out. And he did and discovered that the pages hadn't been cut properly. So the last sort of whole section was bonded together. And he's like, okay, so nobody has read this book because you simply cannot access the last pages unless you get the scissors out. So it's like, they definitely, they reveal, don't they? How much they're really connected to

• 27:19Speaker 00

  That's my absolute favorite thing is because sometimes I'll end up reading sort of really old obscure books, you know, that are out of print. So you buy them on Amazon, used or whatever, and they'll come. And it'll be like, somebody checked this last out of the library 50 years ago. And then it went to a garage sale. And then I ended up getting this book that the edition is from 1888. It's not like a rare book. I mean, I guess it's rare, but it was like $3 on Amazon. And this is just the one they sent me. And there's like leaves pressed inside of it.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my word. And sometimes you'll get an old family picture, a postcard fallout. I also do, I always write my name and the date and where I was either living or traveling somewhere in the front of the book. And then if I lend them to someone, I always want them to do the same thing underneath so that we can, you know, it's essentially like a library card in itself, get my friend to write their name and where they were. And I don't know, it just makes it all more alive.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  My, my somewhat selfish rule is I'm happy to borrow books, but I will not lend books. And also when I'm borrowing, I'm actually taking.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you had need to accept that if you lend this to me, you're never getting it back.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's so funny, isn't it? Because as an author now, I used to borrow and lend very freely. But if I really like a book, especially if it's by a debut author, I'm like, no, no, no, buy your own, buy your own. And if someone tells you as an author, like, I love your book so much, I'm lending it to everyone I know. Like, really? You're kind of robbing me. And if you want me to write another one, I kind of need those royalties. So you feel you're like, oh, I'm glad you liked it that much. And I'm glad you're, I suppose, spreading the word, but kind of also robbing me at the ATM.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was just, I just gave this virtual talk to this group in India last night, actually, I had to get up at like midnight to do it. And I was telling them, my favorite thing is I will get pictures from people who.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Oh, the screenshots marked up?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  No, no, no, it'll be clearly pirated copies, like in the streets of a country. I'm all about that. But then when I hear someone go, oh, I checked, I got your book, your audio book or your ebook, like from my library lending app. I'm like, you know, okay, if you're doing this in India or Bangladesh or something, I just want you to read it. But if you're, that your local library bought one copy of a digital product and then is sending out unlimited versions of it, you know, that's not the best for supporting a vibrant publishing industry. Put aside my royalties, it's not great for the thing. I do try to just buy the book if I can.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And were you drinking a twelve dollar grain juice from a cafe while you were reading it? Because maybe you could just have a cup of tea and buy my book.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  We sound really bitter, don't we? But we kind of know, I guess, the sacrifices, the fiscal sacrifices when you're really trying to establish yourself in this. It's not especially well paid in those early years. It's more like an extravagant hobby that costs you a great deal.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  No, that's totally right. Like, when there's a band I like, obviously, I'm streaming their music on Spotify. But if it's like a band I really like, I'm like, I'm gonna go buy a T-shirt from this band because I know.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  That's so benevolent.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Their margins on a T-shirt are like ninety percent and they got point zero zero zero one cents for me streaming their song on Spotify.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  That is incredibly, and your support of the arts is admirable. I'm gonna do the same thing from now on.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  I was thinking about the father character in the book because he reminded me of so many authors I know. Well, at the beginning, he reminds me in a bad way of authors that I know, where like a little bit of praise becomes sort of paralyzing and then they become the role of the writer without doing the thing. My friend Austin Kleon says, "Do the verb instead of being the noun."

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Oh, that is so inspired. That is so true. I've read similarly, someone saying, "If you didn't write today, you were writer today."

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Yes, sure.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  You know, it's not, I don't think it's a permanently conferred life title, you know? It's not like tenure. And so, but I do find that really overwhelming. And I know that particularly after this book, more so than with the last two, I really feel, I guess, kind of intimidated by starting again and the idea of, you know, I can't imagine becoming paralyzed just when you feel that there's, that you're slightly more visible than you once were. The idea that there's expectation or, and yes, I definitely wrote all of that into the character of Fergus, the father, without realizing that it was going to become potentially quite relevant to me down the line. It's ironic. I guess I was seeding in my subconscious fears for the future.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's a champagne problem, of course, but it doesn't mean that it's not something to struggle with.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm so conscious of that. I think that writers particularly, we're very quick to complain about the challenges of the job, especially when you think we're not saving lives. You know, why does it matter that I'm in my garden shed writing and I'm completely tortured by the fact that I can't quite nail the characterization on this invented person? But at the same time, it is a job and someone's paying you to do it. And so you have an obligation. And, you know, there are challenges in every job. There are challenges of being an A-list celebrity who's being paid $50 million to do a film. I think there's a balance, definitely. There's a balance. It is a privilege as well. As a job, it's an extreme privilege.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to respect it, right? I think you have to respect it, but then also not be intimidated by it. And so it's kind of this balance of like, I treat it, it's sacred, I take it very seriously, I won't phone it in. And at the same time, it is a job like laying bricks and you have to show up and lay the bricks every day. You can't call yourself a bricklayer if you sit at your house not laying bricks.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when the final, in the final stages of Soron Bliss, Wonderway, the copy editor, you know, all of that kind of really intense work. I was in my chair so much that I started to have a little bit of back pain. And I went to the physiotherapist and she was like, oh, this is an injury of excessive sitting. And so I'm like, okay, well, if we can have a workplace injury, well, then that's definitely a job. If it's going to foreshorten our hipoductors to that extent, then, you know, that's a little bit of a job. You're just self-employed, so there's no kind of payout from the HR department.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Well, I think I also very much related to Fergus as a person with multiple popular Instagram accounts with quotes in them.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  That was his redemption. I wanted every character to have some kind of evolution towards the end. And him becoming an Instagram poet when he didn't actually know how to operate what he called the Instagram at the beginning was, felt right for him.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  I like that character the most. His arc was so interesting because you didn't, you kind of saw him as this selfish sort of weak guy. And then it sort of comes around that everyone's kind of been sleeping on him. And then he might have been the most dependable, uh, selfless.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and self-sacrificing. Exactly. And I think the same thing happened with, so he is married to Celia, who's Martha, the protagonist's mother. And Celia has a sister called Winsome, who's seven years older than her. And, you know, Celia and Fergus as artists have obviously been living this much more bohemian, chaotic life that Winsome and her husband Roland have actually been bankrolling. But they don't, you know, they don't get on because there's intense awkwardness there. But Winsome, kind of when you first meet her, seems concilius and, you know, officious and she's controlling. And then you realize that actually she is sort of the beating heart of that family who, much like Fergus, has been sacrificing quite deeply for the good of others. And I get, you know, I'm very lucky to get a lot of letters from readers.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  And there is definitely a contingent that is sort of devoted to Winsome in particular. And someone had sort of. Tweeted, you know, justice for winsome, hashtag justice for winsome. And I'm like that. It's I'm glad some people have identified, you know, related to her in particular.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, it reminded me of that. There's like some famous graphic or artist, a piece of art where it's like, uh, it's just like fuck the rich. And then like a rich person is buying it, you know? And it's like, the rebellion only exists because it's subsidized by the people you're supposedly rebelling against.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  That is so, so true. And she is, you know, in the same way, keeping everything together and it just it's underground. She doesn't need to kind of be recognized for it. And then, yeah, there she is. The family wouldn't exist without her.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then back to Robert Caro, I thought if anyone could have used Patrick's advice, it would have been Fergus. That he it's like he needed to attack the day, right? He needed to wake up and attack the day or whatever that little snippet that he'd heard.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. From the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yeah. Yeah. That was a squirrel's piece. I did actually listen to that podcast at some point and think that, you know, he was talking about when there was an anniversary of a really tragic event, he said, you have to attack the day, else the day will attack you. And really resonated at the time. And then there it was when I needed it.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of my favorite quotes from General Mattis, he was a four star general in the Marines. He was briefly the Secretary of Defense in the US. He's sitting, being interviewed by this reporter. And the reporter says, you know, General, what keeps you up at night? And he says, I keep people up at night. And I like the idea of like, yeah, you attack the day. You have to be on offense because if you're not on offense, it means you're on defense.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness, that's, do you write this stuff down? And do you just find that you remember it?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Uh, I I remember it because I write it down. So I'm a big note card person. So all this stuff gets squirreled away on note cards. And then when I sit down, I'm supposed to start my next book in a couple of weeks. I go through the note cards and I go, I don't even remember that. But now I remember it because I found that I'd written it down. And that the multiple interactions with it creates the recall. And then I figure out where it goes.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Do you find though, that if you have them next to your bed and you wake up and write something at three o'clock in the morning? The next morning you look at it and you're like, what does that mean? What was that? You know, it would say something like, Palm tree pancake batter, question mark? And you're like, oh, that obviously meant something at three AM. And now it seems like the scrawling's of an insane person.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Well, my handwriting is gets increasingly worse as I get older because at this point, the only thing I write by hand are to do lists and note cards for my books. The two things that I can't afford to have be illegible are essentially unreadable. And I like to use Sharpies and so they they sort of, the more I use the Sharpie, the blunter it gets and then the more it blends together, it's a nightmare.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're writing it on a note card in the dark and you realize you've written half of it on your nightstand. But I have this time developed the practice of setting up a different Gmail address for everything I'm writing and I'll email it to myself. But you know, if I think of something that pertains to one thing, I can email it to that specific account because you do lose things. And of course, once you've lost them and you know they were there, it was the best, most apposite lyrical and profound thought you'd ever had because you can't remember it and that's an awful feeling.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  It is.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  So that's how I get around that.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  I do the same thing. I have a second email address and I, whenever I find a passage, like in an article I like or something, I send that and then I go through it, you know, every couple of months. And again, I'm always surprised by the things that I forgot, but actually were exactly what I needed several months later. Like, how does that, how do you know that you were looking for something?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely some plan.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Had you found it if you weren't looking for it?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And that's why you do hear authors say all the time, you always need to be reading, make sure you're always reading. It doesn't matter what it is, but just be reading. And I think that's right because if you don't fill up that reservoir, then there is nothing in it when you come to kind of draw down on it. I think that's more important than, because I didn't read as a child or a teenager.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Really?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  At all for pleasure, just not at all. And I think that, you know, my mother, who was very bookish, was desperately concerned. And I think in a way you would think that disqualified me. I guess what I'm trying to say is if there are parents listening whose children don't read, all hope is not lost. You can come to it late.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's that they haven't found the right books yet. You find, you find the one and you go, oh, this is what reading is for.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is what I didn't realize. And I think that can be lost in high school, especially when you're forced to read a lot of dreary material that for some reason was on the curriculum since 1965. But that's why I think especially, you know, there is always that debate about high art and low art, and that there are too many books for children that are not quality fiction. But reading is reading, and they're all a gateway, right? Like, they'll get you to the next thing.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it is true. I think we often assign people books that we think they should read, not books that they would actually enjoy.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah. What do you think about repeat reading? Is there a book that you go back to once a year? And what's on your list of repeats?

• 40:09Speaker 00

  I mean, I just reread Gatsby somewhat recently. And, you know, every time you read it, you're just like, this may be the greatest string of sentences in the English language. It's just sort of perfection. And what I like about it, too, is just always remembering, like, that not only did the editors reject it, but then also the public thought it was pretty meh at the same time.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Are you serious? Like, did they reject it? Will you tell me that story? I didn't know that story.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, Max Perkins, maybe the greatest editor of all time, thought it sort of wasn't ready for publication a handful of times. So he kept sending it back. I'm sure he was right to a certain degree, but largely forgotten and rejected in Fitzgerald's lifetime. Like, some people knew, like, I was just reading a Hemingway's Movable Feast, and he was like, as soon as I read Great Gatsby, I was willing to put up with an unlimited amount of F. Scott Fitzgerald's bullshit, because like, it was the greatest book ever written, right?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  But that that wasn't really appreciated. I think the story that, as I understand it, and actually, I was just speaking of borrowing books, someone just gave me back one of the few exceptions I've ever made to my rule. There's this great book called Careless People, about the writing of The Great Gatsby, and it's about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, but. One of the things that happened in the US is in the 1940s, the US government wanted to provide books to soldiers. And so Gatsby was one of the titles that they printed like millions of copies of and then just gave out to the troops. And that's

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Like candy. Oh, I love that.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, they got it hooked on cigarettes, Gatsby and chocolate and it sort of stuck around.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Well, that's the trifecta. You could do a lot worse than that is a, you know, essential supply. I also find that I, you know, there will be quotes about the work that will really resonate with me during an actual project and they'll kind of end up on a little pinboard that I have on the wall. And one of them that is funny, it really speaks to everything we've talked about so far is F. Scott Fitzgerald. And someone had asked him how long it took to write Gatsby. And he said, to write it, it took three months to conceive. It took three minutes and to collect the data in it all my life.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Which is, um, yes, true, because especially because I thought when I began, you know, what became Soram Bliss, it wasn't a novel. It wasn't a redraft. It was nothing because in my mind, I really had quit. And this was just something I felt I needed to do and kind of developed that momentum. I stopped saving anything. So I think you think, oh, I know I'll use that for a different novel or I'll hold that back. And this was very much everything that I'd ever seen, read, felt, heard. I just tipped it all in because it was my last hurrah. And I think that's why, you know, maybe to the extent that the novel is quite specific and has a lot of specific scenes and really granular detail. It's because all of that was there and I just bunged it all in, like someone running

• 43:08Speaker 01

  down the fridge before you go on holiday.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Have you read The Crackup by F. Scott Fitzgerald?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I feel like I have, but I don't remember. Tell me about The Crackup.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  The Crackup is a work of nonfiction and it's basically his collection of essays and journal entries after the books, when his life falls apart. And it actually reminds me a bit of sorrow and bliss where you're like, this person is clearly suffering. In his case, it's alcoholism and probably some other stuff. But you're like, this person, something is clearly not right with this person. And they're being failed by the people around them. They're also failing themselves. And it's a marvelously vulnerable and raw, especially then, if you think about how stigmatized that kind of stuff was then, you're just watching this guy, one of the most talented,

• 43:57Speaker 00

  greatest people ever, just sort of going like, why and how did it go down like this?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Hmm. It sounds like a companion volume two. There's an essay called The Catastrophe of Success.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Yes, Tennessee Williams.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  By exactly after, was it, which one was it that came, was it Cat on Hot Tacos?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Streetcar, maybe, yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Streetcar, yes, you're right. And he talks about, and I don't think I'm quite at the point of having to worry about success as a catastrophe that will change me forever. But he does talk about, you know, when it does all change and your set of problems becomes a much more privileged set than what you had before. You're no longer writing to keep food on the table. You're, you know, you're writing because you're gonna win another Booker. I think that he's talking about that you need to get back to whatever it was that made you a writer in the first place and try and access that urgency and that need and that desperation, because it doesn't feel like that anymore.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  You know, you're right. They could go side by side because catastrophe of success is Tennessee Williams walking back from the edge. And the crack up is what happens when you go over the waterfall.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's perfect. I think you should cover mount them at the bookstore, you know, the way we put mascara in the front of Marie Claire. I think you should do that with the essay on the, on the front of the book.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Now, what I, what I thought was so beautiful about sorrow and bliss, I mean, it is like, I think some people might go, like, is mental illness really that stigmatized these days? You know, we talk about it, people go to therapy, etc.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  And then as I, as I was, between the time we connected and, or I read the book and now we're talking, like, literally the most powerful, richest person on the planet with the largest platform.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Elon Musk is like tweeting about how nobody should be taking Wellbutrin and stigmatizing mental illness like for 60 million followers. And you're like, oh yeah, okay.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  It's definitely still a problem.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  I bet he would never say, nobody should be taking chemotherapy drugs because you know, you shouldn't need them. You should just pull yourself together. And whatever I understood about mental illness and stigma and where we were up to in the conversation, you know, in society, before I wrote the book, I have by dint of writing it, learned so much. And I don't think we're quite as advanced in that conversation as we would love to claim because, you know, there's a contingent of readers who don't like Martha, the protagonist, you know, who is suffering from this undiagnosed mental illness all her life. That's sort of what the book is the central axis of the story. And they will say, oh, she was awful. She was cruel. She was self sabotaging. I wanted to shake her. And I sort of feel

• 46:41Speaker 01

  in her defense. I'm like, but she was sick. Did you miss the part about the mental illness? You know, the whole question of the book is, you know, and what she is trying to determine is where does she end? And where does the illness begin? Because she would tell you that it informs everything she's doing. And, you know, it's, it's determined her role in the family and it's built this reputation that she's just difficult or too sensitive. But who would say that about a physical illness? Who would say, oh, Martha ruined Christmas again because of, you know, she kept throwing up because of her chemo. Like, I just, I'm really surprised that, that that's been sort of a reaction. I just think there's a real discrepancy there.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Well, and that's what I thought about the tweets when I saw them. I don't know if you did, but he was, this is when one of his sort of manic Twitter binges, probably also not to diagnose anyone, but probably some issues going on there too, I would imagine.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  But it was like, why do you give a shit about what other people do with their bodies? And the advice they get from their medical providers? Do you know what I mean? Like,

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  So much of the stigma is like, Us having opinions about other people's issues as if we have any right to it and as if we could even conceive what their experience in the world must be like.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if he then suddenly became ill in the same way, because mental illness doesn't care if you're the most famous richest man on the planet, would he then take his own advice? And be like, oh, no, I'm not going to be medicated, even though I'm in the depths of despair and feel like I'm on the edge of death. I shouldn't take it because, you know, somehow it's it's not for the good of humanity. I just think exactly more than anything else. I don't think we can judge until we've been in that place ourselves.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  And it does. It is helpful, I think, to realize that some of the things, the people that bother you or the people who don't have it together in the way that you think they should, all this stuff, just the idea that they could be fighting this battle that you know nothing about is to me, just is not just, I think, a just way to go through the world. It totally turns down the volume on how frustrated and disappointed you can be about things because you're like, oh, this person is probably doing the best that they can and probably dealing with something that I don't even know about. So like, I'm just gonna let this go.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think because Martha has a sister in the novel called Ingrid and they're very, very close. And Ingrid doesn't have what Martha describes as little bomb go off on her go off in her brain when she's seventeen. And so her life has evolved in a different way. But the function of her and the reason that she's a sister rather than just a friend is because a sister can't leave in the same way that a friend would have deserted Martha a long time ago, based on her behavior. And what I really loved and wanted to show in Ingrid is that she thinks the best of Martha at all times and can see through her behavior. And even if it is baffling her in the moment, she will give Martha the benefit of the doubt. And I think that is something that I would want to try and do in life as well is because why, you know,

• 49:47Speaker 01

  for all Martha's atrocious behavior, why would anybody want to behave like that if they really had a choice? Who wants to be the family member who ruins every event and who upsets everybody? Nobody really, a decent person is not going to choose that. So I think that. You know, it's so easy to look and judge. And I think that's why, you know, there's something interesting about the idea of labels. And we sort of think, I don't want to be labeled, you know, something, something doesn't define me. But in terms of an illness, to an extent, it does. If you feel that it's informing all your decisions. And I think for whatever reason, in the absence of a label, in the absence of a correct medical diagnosis, someone in that position is going to get a moral diagnosis. I think you see it especially

• 50:31Speaker 01

  with conditions kind of in that realm of ADHD. You just look like a sloppy, bad person who lies and loses things all the time. But, you know, if you can say, I have ADHD, then that explains why. It's not something you've chosen. It's not something you can just train yourself out of in the same way that, you know, a neurotypical person could just not function that way.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually, I was just reading this thing and they were, the, the writer was sort of trying to define one of the Stoic ideas as to go through the world, assuming that you have power over your choices and decisions, but that for everyone else, they're determined, like that it's deterministic. And so you're like, okay, I have the choice not to be angry, not to, you know, to get my act together. But I have this agency and power. I have free will, but then other people don't. They're being acted on by forces they don't control. Normally, it's kind of largely true because people have different experiences, traumas, illnesses, et cetera. But it also makes you so much more tolerant and forgiving because instead of being, in the case of the book, Martha is a bitch.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Look at what she just did to this person. Look at how she's torturing this person, whatever. You're like, Martha can't help it.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I never sort of struggled with her. People will say, oh, why did you set out to write an unlikable character? And I'm like, I didn't. I set out to write a suffering character. And when you read the book, if you read it through the lens of this is a confession, an act of repentance, then, you know, you can see she's never proud of that behavior. She's confessing it. And, you know, in the way that you would to sort of, you know, as a, as a large apology, but. I think as well, what is just interesting is the way that her family swings between, you know, wanting to believe her and not being able to believe her. And I think that that is really challenging. I imagine it to be, you know, when I really try and put myself in the position of somebody who was looking after

• 52:27Speaker 01

  a chronically ill person, there would be days when you're just tired and you just stop believing and you just want them to be better. But at the same time, what I've really been interested to see is that a lot of friends my age, kind of in their early forties, often because their child has just been diagnosed with something, especially like ADHD. They will then look at the list of symptoms and be like, oh, oh. You know, and so there seems to be a real crop of people in my age group now being latterly diagnosed with something. And what I've noticed is there is a tremendous relief that comes with a diagnosis, but then there is grief. Because look at everything that was lost and you sort of will look back at the arc of your life, which is what Martha is doing.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I think if only I had known, I never had a chance. And the reason that I was in trouble always at school or the reason that I didn't do as well in my exams as I, as I should have based on, you know, raw intellect. It, it is a real grief to be worked through.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Well, then it's, it's also, I think guilt, where you're like, look at what I've been subjecting myself or other people to as if they were in control of it, as if they should be punished for what they're doing.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Really, they didn't have a choice and they didn't want to be acting that way. I, they didn't even know they were doing.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then some rage, then some side rage, which I definitely wanted to show in Martha, because she has this fury that everybody stopped believing her. And why did they not look at her and think this is not right, this is not normal, this can't be her, she shouldn't throw plates at her husband, that's not, let's investigate and nobody does. And so I think it, it is a huge area and it's so real. But that is also at the same point why I didn't want to name a specific diagnosis because.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  I thought that was a really interesting choice.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Thank you. I mean, I think the majority of readers, or at least the ones I've spoken to, really understand why I did it and appreciate it and kind of, you know, understand why it had to be that way and the function of it. There is a small contingent too that hasn't enjoyed it, has been really frustrated. They're usually the same people who were fundamentally frustrated by Martha. But I think even in that case, I'm like, yeah, it's pretty annoying, isn't it? Pretty annoying to not know what the diagnosis is. I wonder if that's why Martha behaves in much the same way as you are now with your vociferous monologue on how annoying and, you know, frustrating it is. So that's kind of been a private, I guess, validation of it myself.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  No, that's a really interesting, you're putting this sort of most minor, you're inflicting upon the reader the most minor version of what she would have gone through her whole life. And they find it totally insufferable and unbearable.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I've invested three hundred and fifty pages in finding out and I deserve to know. It's like, yeah, Martha put twenty years into that same project. So I think, I mean, again, it's not one of those things that I realized that I was doing or I set out to consciously do, but afterwards, when it was done, I sort of realized that that was what it was achieving. So it was.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  What's actually even worse than that, because not only did she not know what it is, people repeatedly told her it was a different thing than it actually was. So she was under the wrong impression as to what she was dealing with. And so how much worse that is, it'd be like if you said it was one thing in the book and then you revealed in interviews it was actually another thing and only some of the readers found this out.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's true. And I think, again, you know, I didn't try and, you know, I didn't look at it and think, I'm going to have a conversation in this book about medical misogyny. But it is an experience, especially of women, to be handed this incorrect diagnosis or no diagnosis. You know, to be told, no, there's nothing wrong with you. It's hormones or it's hysteria or you're bored and you need to get a hobby. And I think that's not resolved either. I think women still experience that a lot because we're not trained to question these supposedly godlike medical practitioners. Of course, you know, the majority of doctors are brilliant and incredible, but we do, most of us would say we've had one doctor who's disqualified.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Oh, pain and and sort of minimized it and made it to feel like it is something that is innately wrong with us, but we don't have a legitimate medical defense, as it were. So that's something that I hope the book does investigate.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I was I was just thinking of that the other day because I was reading this. Someone had posted that they're like, my relationship's falling apart. And he's sort of talking about this experience he's having with his wife. And it's like, you know, anyone with like a modicum of experience or or empathy would see that this this it's like, it all started right after our child was born, you know, and it's like, and it's like, I mean, come on, like, we've like, as a society, they've done so much work explaining what postpartum is. You're like berating this woman for piles of dishes around the house and the sweatpants she's wearing. It's like, how could you not see what this is? And then you're like,

• 57:28Speaker 00

  maybe nobody explained to this person that there is a thing that happens to way more people than we think it happens to. And they don't want it to be like, it was just, it was so perfect. He's like describing this thing. And every part of it is attributing to malice and laziness and disinterest.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. Yeah, or just being a bad mother. No, it's true. And I think oftentimes because we do have the vocabulary now, or we understand the fundamental symptoms of P and D in a way that we didn't used to or any condition. We can talk the talk, but then do we do we actually connect it to what is going on in this house right now? Because I know a lot of women, you know, friends of mine with children, it wasn't until afterwards that they look back and be like, oh,

• 58:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  I was really impressed. I just thought that was motherhood, or I just thought that was me and I was too weak and I didn't have the wherewithal for what I was doing. And and sometimes you just don't look at it through that eye of like, especially I think partners, it's like, is this the woman that you knew nine months ago? Or is this feel like a completely different character? So maybe we should look at that.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Well, I and and yeah, I'm not exempting myself from this too, because you look back at arguments you have when you after you've had kids and you're like, wait, was I arguing like? What was I doing? Right? Like, I think it's kind of, it's kind of like, you don't notice like your hair getting longer or grayer because you're not, you're not watching a time lapse of yourself. So you can't notice the change where it's like, you're not realizing that the person is undergoing this transformation or has been taken a hold of because you're like, we just had a normal conversation about movies that we like and everything seemed right. But then now, again, the inability to say do the dishes, it seems like when you put on clothes this morning,

• 59:19Speaker 00

  it's very hard to realize, oh no, this person isn't in complete command of themselves or their facilities. Maybe that's really what we don't, it's like, we don't even want to think about that because the thought of it's fucking terrifying.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And there's an incredible book that I read actually after Zora and Bliss. And Martha's condition, you know, it is manufactured. It doesn't,

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  It's something that I sort of amalgamated from everything I knew of every condition and had changed those symptoms to fit my narrative, which is another reason why I redacted it because it wasn't actually accurate. But after that, I read a book called The Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfeld-Jamison, who's an academic who, a psychiatrist as well, and was writing about her own life as someone with bipolar. And it's just the most incredible book. And I just will never forget her description of depression, you know, her absolute lows. She would say, "The idea of refilling the ice tray was overwhelming." And I just, I'll never forget that is like, that is, yep, that's depression.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's very vivid. Yeah, Churchill talked about the black dog. And I guess it's just, it's easier to just be like, fill up the fucking ice tray than to think. What, how terrifying is it that a sane, healthy, normal person could be besieged by a thing, whether you call it a black dog, or depression, or mental illness, or whatever, in which they become incapable of doing. It's like in sports, nobody talks about this thing called the yips, which is like, when your ability to play the thing that you're world-class at, suddenly, or partially disappears. Like, wait, suddenly the pitcher can throw it one direction,

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  but not the other direction, and there's no explanation for it whatsoever.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true, and no one would choose it. So it has to be, it has to be real, it has to be a phenomenon.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Yes, but if you think about it, I think it's like, well, could I catch it? You know, I think that that's part of why we don't want to think about it, or it's like, we'd rather, we'd rather foist it on the individual, and be angry at them, or even cruel to them, than to conceive that this thing, it's like, uh, Trump famously said during COVID, if we do less tests, you know, there'll be less COVID, right? It's like, we'd rather not think about it, because that makes it not exist.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And I remember, because I had COVID a few weeks ago, and I was convinced, because I hadn't, you know, I'd sort of managed to avoid it for two years, and everybody that I know who had done that, we'd all started to consider ourselves above COVID, like medical marvels, who science would take an interest in our extreme, you know, strength of character, that we didn't get it. And so when I started to get the symptoms, I was like, no, no, no, this is absolutely no way this is COVID. I just have, you know, this is allergies, that's why I have a sore throat. And then I was, um, going up the stairs one morning, and I was like, oh, I, I really need to sit down and have a break after five stairs. I think I might have COVID.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Well, I, I hope you didn't just jinx me, because I'm still in that camp, and...

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Oh, well done. You're a better person than I am.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Well, I would, I would say, you know, not getting it in Australia is less impressive than not getting it in Texas.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  That is true. I have to, I have to concede, which makes me an even worse person that I managed to catch it here.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  It's been like Mad Max over here, just sort of every man, woman, for themselves, that's pretended it doesn't, it doesn't exist. And you know what? It hasn't stopped anyone from getting it. So I think it all comes full circle.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so true.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  Well, I loved the book so much and I can't wait for the next one. This was a very fun conversation.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. I loved it. And will you thank your wife for forcing you to read it?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  She didn't force me.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I need women like her.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I found that that is a very powerful marketing thing with my own books, where it'll be like, you know, my wife told me to read it, or, you know, my husband told me to read it. It's because you think about how often that actually happens, right? Like, my wife and I read very separate things. It's only the things that we really like. So when it happens, like when she's like, you have to read this.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Seriously, trust me. Exactly. I completely agree. I completely agree. It's almost like, if you don't read this, then our relationship, we can't survive it. Because you need to read this book. It's the way I feel about. One of my favorite novels of all time is called Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trupeto.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  Ooh, I'm gonna write this down.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  And if I meet someone who read it and was apathetic about it, and just didn't feel one way or the other, I'm like, well, this is not gonna work out. That's my only criteria, and a friend that they adore this book. So I'm sorry, I'm just not gonna be able to pursue this friendship.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  I love that. Well, thank you very much. Let's call it here.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

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