Hey, there are part time genius fans. It's Mongas particularly aka Mango, and I'm here with a very special feed drop. Years and years ago, when Will and I were at Mental Floss, we had a little magazine. I was always looking for great writers, and when I was scouting the front pages of New York Magazine, I'd seen this guy who had written this little tidbit on the Park Slope food co op, and I thought it was so wonderful.
It was historical, it was funny, it was written in this like really sharp and brilliant way, and I thought, man, I really want this person to write for Mental class So we sort of recorded him. And his name is Matthew Cher, and he wrote a couple articles for us, and every time he wrote an article, I just felt so lucky to have his words in our magazine. Now, Matt has gone on to have this incredible career, not
just as a journalist but also as podcaster. He's made some of my favorite shows at his company, Campside, and he has a new show out called Origin Stories, and it is really so good. It's him sitting with other writers or directors and talking about the creation of these works that are close to their hearts, and for me, as someone who's always felt like an outsider writing, I never got to learn at someone's elbow or looking over someone's shoulder at a big magazine or a big publishing house.
I've always loved shows like this because it gives you real insight into how to write, and how writers think, and how storytellers really perfect their craft. Anyway, for today's PTG recommends, we are recommending origin stories, and I'm going to play you just a little clip with the incredible
author Stephanie Fou. I know her primarily for her work at This American Life, but she also wrote this incredible memoir that was a huge best seller, What My Bones Know, And they talk about how she worked her way through telling the story about both her struggles and also really about the healing process and the journey she goes on. So take a listen. I think you'll love it.
Did you have readers in the writing process? Did your husband read it, for example, or did you have friends read versions of the manuscript?
Totally, it's funny because I guess this is a really
nice thing. He thinks it's a really nice compliment. He's like, you are the best revisor that I know, he was like, your first draft was so bad, which doesn't didn't make me feel good at the time, certainly, but he is always like, your first draft is always terrible, and then you get your edits, and then by the second draft you have really turned things around and it's beautiful and it's magical and it's great and you really know how to like take edits well, So thanks, I guess Joey.
Well, I mean, that is a skill that not everyone has, to be fair to Joey, there are people who are really bad at taking edits in one of two ways, are one of multiple ways. They get angry, or they get defensive, or they're just like, I'm not taking these edits.
I think that I have a good gut feeling of when to not take an edit. I try to take like ninety percent of edits, like my editor. One of the edits you gave me was that my book had too many fart jokes for a heavy book about trauma, and I was like, no, I'm keeping in the fart jokes. Thanks.
How many is enough? How many? How would like two have been fine? Are great?
I don't know, but it was just like, you know, this is a lot of potty humor, and I was like, well, first of all, I'm Asian, potty humor is our culture. And second of all, I wanted it to be a funny book, like I wanted there to be respite in the book, and fart jokes are one way to do that. Sure, but yeah, I imagine having the self confidence to just be like, I'm not taking edits. Making edits is like
an act of kindness to the audience. It's a way of like looking out for them in terms of making it easy for them, making it smooth for them to read. Your editors your like first audience, right, And I think for my book anyway, I thought, I don't know, maybe some artists think about this differently, and they make art for themselves and they think my audience will come along for the ride, who are like me. But for me, I was thinking very intently about my audience in every
single sentence of this book. I would go back and read it over and over again as different people in my mind, and specifically people with different kinds of trauma, Like I would read it as somebody who had sexual trauma, read it as somebody who had childhood trauma. I'd read it from somebody who was queer or whatever as Asian. I just really wanted the book to be gentle and good and helpful to people with complex trauma, because it is really really hard to have complex PTSD, and it
is really really hard to read about complex PTSD. It's really painful, and it can easily feel very judged. I wanted it to be gentle and good for them, and so yeah, especially with my editors, who were all readers with complex PTSD, I took their input very, very seriously. Like one of my first endings was more ungi dory, like everything's so great now. One of my readers who had complex PTSD was like, this is not realistic enough.
It is hard.
It continues to be really hard. You have to convey that, and so I did change the ending, and I think that was a really great edit. If you're not writing for your audience, I don't know who are you writing for.
I don't know yourself to hear the sound of your own voice, which I think is common. I'm really struck by the shape of this book because in some sense it's really traditional, Like have you ever heard the phrase that there's only a few different kinds of stories? And we repeat them over and over again. It's much more
than that. But if you were to like diagram it out, if you like map it out, it's someone who has a bad experience, learns to understand what it is, experiments with understanding, like really digging into the literature, and then tries to find her way through the end. It's like a clean art, although it's not too clean as you say it's.
Yeah, it's the hero's journey, though definitely I'm the character. I am the main character who's like going on the journey and looking around trying to find the answers.
And was that instinctual as soon as you knew that this was going to be your book, was the shape of it relatively clear to you?
Yeah? I think so. It's clear from all of my work in the past that that's how you have to do what. There has to be a main character who is looking I wanted to be a first person narrative first of all, because I have mostly dealt in first person narratives throughout my entire career. That's again what I know how to do. But I also know the power of it. If you have like a very clinical book or a book that's telling you how you should feel
about something, or straight facts and figures. I mean, I struggle with a lot of nonfiction in reading it because I get bored. But also I think that you have the possibility of really pathologizing these topics and not making them human. I think when you have a first person story, the primary benefit of that is people feel seen.