Matthew Quick

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. M Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Matthew Quick. He is here for the second time to visit The One You Feed. Matthew is the New York Times best selling author of The Silver Linings playbook, which

was made into an Oscar winning film. He's also the author of many other novels. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. It's received a pen Hemingway Award Honorable Mention was an l A Times Book Prize finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of these Summer's Best Books for NPR. His latest book is called Every Exquisite Thing. Hey, everyone, I wanted to also talk again about the one you

Feed Facebook group. I made a mistake in last week's episode and told you to go to one you feed dot net slash Facebook, which does not work. I'll save you the boring technical details, but if you want to join the group, go to one you Feed dot net Slash group. We've had a great first week, lots of people have joined, some interesting conversations starting to happen, and we love to have you over there. So when you feed dot Net Slash group, or go to Facebook and

search for the one you Feed discussion group. Thanks. And here is the interview with Matthew Quick, who we call Q for short. Hi Q, Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be back. Yes, I'm excited to have you back. We don't have a lot of guests back a second time, and you're one of them, and I'm excited to talk about your new book and to talk about a lot of the issues that come up in your book that I think relate very much to what we do here. But let's start,

like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Well, I'll start by saying that I've listened to every single episode of your podcasts, and so I've heard it amazing. Yeah, it's been it's been a great ride. I've enjoyed found along. But I've heard this question answered in so many wonderful ways it's almost intimidating to answer now. Um, So I'm just gonna talk about in my private life

and in the work that I do. So in my private life right now, um, the bad wolf is saying things to me like you should get up and eat carbs all day and then uh start drinking alcohol at five o'clock until you go to sleep. And you know the bad thing about that is it's seductive because the wolf says you'll feel better. And if you do that, and it's true, I will feel better. It will um

ease my depression and anxiety issues. But the good wolf is saying to me, now, but if you get up and run you know, three or four miles, and you eat really healthy and you know you curb your alcohol intake, You're gonna feel better in the long run. And so that's that's been a personal battle for me lately as as I've been battling to to get back in shape. And my wife and I are planning to run a half marathon. So that's what's going on. Yeah, we're looking

forward to that. And in my professional life, I've been lucky enough to publish seven novels and I have a novel coming out next summer. And I've been extraordinary lucky because we've been able to option all of those for film. And I'm writing the screenplay for my eighth novel now

and that's going super well. Uh, and the Bad Wolf is always in my head along with a chorus of every single one of my critics has ever criticized my books for the past ten years, you know, And and that voice says things like, uh, you're not talented, You're lucky, or you know, it's an accident that this happened, or you know, how long do you think you can keep going? Or how many stories do you think you have in you? Or why you and not somebody else? Like what do

you really have to offer the world? And when I get tired and depressed, Um, those voices can can be really powerful and seductive on But of course the voice said I want to feed you know, says that you know, every single day that I get up, I'm learning something new and I'm not the same writer or the same person I was ten years ago, and I have something new to say. And though my will may get low, it doesn't run dry. And if I wait for it

to fill back up and another story will come. And you know, is that faith, uh, that is that is fueled by that that second that second wolf, for that second voice, if you will. And so you know, I fight really hard to to stay positive, and that's one of the reasons why I listen to your show every week. Well, thank you for listening. That's a it's an honor to us. And I think, yeah, it's so amazing to me. There's a couple of things and what you said there that

really strike me. One is you have been extraordinarily successful. Um, you know, you've done very well, and you you right well, and you've been both critically and popularly received, and yet you still fight those voices, which I think is a really interesting statement into the human condition. Not not just you know you. I'm not saying it's amazing that you

feel that way. It's just I think for all of us, we have a tendency to when we when we fall into those sort of things, we think that there's something wrong with us. And I think that hearing people who have been successful say that that still happens is a normalizing thing for a lot of other people. Well, I mean, to be quite honest with you, it's it can be scary too. I mean I've met some extremely famous people both um, you know, in the Hollywood land and also

in the world of writing. And you know, sometimes we'll have these private moments at a party or at the bar, like backstage before you go onto a panel, and you realize that these people who are so much more successful than you are, um, the bad wolf is is very strong in their head as well. And uh, you know, it can be scary because there's no level of success or amount of money that can make that bad wolf go away forever. Um. But it can be hardening to

that we're all on the struggle. And I think for me, I like to talk about it because so many people that I've met that have had wild success don't they hide it. They would never come on your show and say these things. And and so for me, I hope by talking about this stuff that it normalizes for other people who may be reluctant to admit these things. Yeah,

I agree. I think it's really important to do. The Other part of what you said there that struck me was how difficult, Like you know that exercise makes you feel better. You know, there's there's never been a time after I exercise that I didn't go boy, I'm glad I did that, Like not a single time, like a success rate of that was a good idea, and yet it still is a battle sometimes to do that. And I'm kind of curious to you know, what that experience is like for you. I think anything worth doing is

is usually hard. Um. You know, if I go out, you know, I ran this morning. I ran three miles of my wife. We got up at seventy did that And there's part of me that when I'm done, I feel I feel great, But there's a bigger part of it said, man, if you had slept in, that might have that might have felt better. UM. And I know in my life, uh, you know, and I've heard you talk about this too, are quite candidly that you know.

I know for me that if I drink three scotches, I'm gonna feel fantastic like that that is the best feeling for me. Um. And you know I've struggled. I've never you know, consider myself an alcoholic, but I definitely use alcohol to um deal with my anxiety, especially social anxiety. UM. And you know, for the past twenty one years, I would tell myself that, you know, that's just the way it is, you know, like that's what you need to

get through these situations. But I'm at a point in my life where I'm really looking at that and trying to lessen that, and and so exerci eyes is a great weapon to to deal with that. It's a tool, yes, Um, but I'm not gonna get on your show and lie and say that I'd rather run five miles than having a nice scotch. I just can't say that, even though

even though the running has become important part of my life. Yeah. Well, I think it's just in the conversation we're having before, you know, you talked about how and I think it's pretty well known with us as humans that, you know, the short term pleasure, it's very hard to override that for the longer term gain. Even if the longer term gain is better, in the short term pleasure, it can

be harmful. And I was asking somebody about this the other day and they said that things like um, a scotch or a drink or a drug or um, you know, checking your next Facebook post or you know, there's a lot of these things that are very addictive because they hit you know, part of what they're doing is is hitting our dopamine system. UM. And so the response to

them is very quick. We feel better very quickly, whereas things like exercise and meditation and all that stuff really flows more through the serotonin system um, and those things take longer and and the same sort of habitual addiction just isn't built. Which is I don't know if that's actually true or not to start with, So if anybody actually knows, you can send me an email. But it's it made sense to me that certainly there is something going on there that that continues to make these things

sort of a challenge. Yeah. You know, there's an old quote about writing and somebody famous that this, and I can't recall off the top of my head. Um, I believe it was a woman writer, and I can't remember the name, but it said that I like having written. I don't like to write, you know, and I think that, you know, writing a novel, I don't think. I know that writing a novel is is a really hard thing to do, and it takes a lot of mental energy

and a lot of discipline. Um, But once the novel is really like when I published a book and you get praise or somebody says they like it, you know, your brain just lights up. It's amazing. And that's something that I I did a year and a half before. Um, so there's that kind of delay in in in the writing world. You can really get hooked on, you know, getting a twite or an email or an award or somebody says something nice and and that's that's really you

want that to keep happening over and over again. But that's not what gets you through writing a novel. You know, it takes it takes a different set of discipline. So what does that set of discipline look like? Because I think that's an interesting conversation. Um. I've had it on the show before, and a couple episodes ago we had Michelle Seeger, who's a woman who talks about, you know, making exercise a habit for life, and we talked a

lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic goals. I was talking with the coaching client about this today also, that that those extrinsic goals, the reviews, the tweets, the feedback, the fan letters, you know, are are great. But if you don't have something intrinsic, you know, which means generated from within you, it's very hard to do. So what does that for you on a day to day basis? Because you are very product. Well, thank you. Um, you know I always

make the joke. Charles Bikowski once said that fear is a great motivator. And when I wrote Silver Linings, I had zero money and I was living my in laws, and so, you know, the motivation for that, on one hand was very much, I don't have enough money to feed myself. I don't have enough money to put a roof over my head, and and so I think that

that that can be one type of motivation. Uh. I think subconsciously when I wrote that book, I had a very deep longing to talk about mental health openly, and I didn't know how to do that because nobody ever gave me the vocabulary of the tools to even broach that discussion. And so fiction became a way to do that. Um. I didn't write Silver Linings because I thought I was going to go to the Oscars or you know, I was gonna make a lot of money, or somebody who's

gonna say something nice about me. I wrote it because I was so low in my life and I needed to It was something that I wanted to say. Um. You know, the next book that I have coming out next year, my uncle and I and my uncle is a Vietnam vet, and he talked to me his whole life about you know, his experience in Vietnam and afterwards, and he always wanted me to write a book about his experience, like to fictionalize it. And he said I couldn't do that until he was gone because he was

afraid of um, you know, the repercussions. And and so one of the last conversations I had with him towards the end of his life, uh, you know, without getting into specifics, he made it very clear that he wanted me to write this book. And so when he passed, uh, it felt like a sacred obligation. You know. It was really an important thing that I wanted to take this forty year relationship I had with somebody and and turn

that into art. Um. And again, I didn't write that because I thought there'd be a movie deal, or because it was gonna make a lot of money, but because I've been thinking about these conversations for forty years and I needed to make order out of chaos. Um. And I think that's a thing that's hard to teach young writers. Um. You know, when they said want to be famous, so I want to have so many Twitter followers. You've lost the battle before you've even be gone. You need something

driving you're something that I'm making stick to it. I agree. I mean even in in our you know, sort of our own limited sense and doing this show, I'm always better off when I get back to why I'm doing it um versus how well it's doing. You know, if I'm spending all my time about how well it's doing. There's never enough listeners, there's never enough Twitter followers. You could always have more. And any milestone you think is great, once you hit it, you're like, what's the next one.

So for me, when it gets back to what is it that's in this activity that matters to me? You know, back to that intrinsic goal, and that's you know, that's what helps us, I think, keep going in a week after week and putting one out just despite what our other responsibilities in life might be. It's hard to teach that, I think because if you don't know what you're calling is, for lack of a better word, or what really excites you, or what you would do if you weren't getting paid. Um,

it's hard to do something that you're not meant to do. Bye. And here's the rest of the interview with Matthew Quick. So let's talk about your new book. It's called Every Exquisite Thing and uh. A particular review described it as powerful, dark, and engrossing and tackles mental issues rarely addressed in young adult fiction, which sounds to me like a pretty good description of it. I think it seems to be missing wonderful also, But on that that's a pretty pretty clear description.

I'll give a little summary of, you know, the book from my perspective, just to give the readers a high level overview, and then then maybe we'll go into it a little bit more so. The book is basically the story of a teenage girl who has up till now sort of followed the standard path of what she's supposed to do with her life. You know, be good at soccer so she can get a scholarship and go to college, hang out with certain kids, um be a certain way,

and she's always done that. And at the same time, she has this love of reading, and one of her teachers gives her a book that sort of transforms her view of the world. Um Me, Reading on the Road is probably the parallel to that in my own life.

You know, this book sort of shakes up her whole world view, and she goes from that into really searching for what matters for her and sort of stepping outside of what the expectations are for her, and uh, that journey and the consequence is good and bad of doing that? Is that a reasonable summary? One of the things I want to start with is that you talk about outside

of the book. I heard you say in an interview that you know, you ask is there some middle ground between going all in with your town or you know, kind of following exactly what society wants of you, or completely rebelling. Is there some way we can find somewhere

in between there that's healthy? And that seems to be a big part of what this book is about, is your character finding that middle ground, going from one extreme maybe to the other extreme, and watching the consequences of both those things and trying to find that middle ground between those two things. Yeah. And I think when you live in a town or you know, a small society where everybody is pretty homogeneous and in doing the same thing, if that same thing is the right thing for you,

life is really easy. Um. But if you're the one person who feels it's not right for you. It's it can be devastating. Um, you know, and I've been that person. I've been in places where I knew that what was working for everyone else just wasn't working for me. And so within the net, it's the first time that you know, it's almost like this awakening when she reads this book and you had mentioned on the Road, which I used to teach every year when I was Um, you know,

I subversive. Yeah, you know, I just think that literature for so many teenagers, you know, you all you all you know growing up is what your parents tell you, or your church or your teachers. But then you read a book and it comes from this far away place or you know, from years ago, and you realize that people are living in different ways and you start to question what all of these other people in your town

or neighborhood have told you. And you know, for me that that happened in high school, and it happens for a lot of people. And so for the Nette, she realizes that it's okay not to want to be like everyone else in her town. And if she hates playing soccer, even though it might get her a scholarship, maybe that's

not the best thing. To do. And I swear around with the idea of quitting too, you know, making quitting a positive thing, um, you know, which she reads this book called The Bubble Gum Reaper and she learns that, you know, quitting could be a good thing, and you know,

that's almost sacrilege here in America. But for my own personal experience, if I never quit teaching, if I never got burned out, if I didn't hate going into school and teaching every single day to the point where my mental health was so low, um that I was, I was borderline suicidal. And I don't say that lately because I was just so frazzled and it was just such a bad environment for me because I'm an introvert and

I was being a fake extrovert every day. Quitting was the healthiest thing I could do, um when I was a teacher, and it also led to amazing opportunities for me as as a writer as well. But that was a really hard thing for me to do, and it's a really hard thing for Nanette to do. And you know, when you're in a town or a society where everyone says what you're doing is the right thing to do, even something stupid like quitting the soccer team, or you know,

quitting teaching in my case, can seem like a monumental thing. Yeah, it's it was interesting for me to read the book from the position that I am in life right now, because I certainly very much identify with Nanette as a teenager, and like I said, my teenage experience was was similar to that I read a book and and listen to some particular music that sort of shook up everything for me. And some of the things that came out of that were good, and some of the things that came out

of that were really not very good. It's interesting for me to watch it as a parent and to sit there and sort of see, like, yes, I want my son to be a freethinker, and I want him to be his own person, and I want all that, and boy, I sure love to keep him in the safe path, just because it's you know, like there's that desire of

protection there. And I was really touched in the book by the parent characters that were in you know, Nanette's parents because what she finally came to them with the truth of who she was, they really, you know, at least from my perspective, really kind of came around to her side and made a lot of effort to be on her team. Yeah, and I think communication is so important. You know, when I told my parents was leaving a

tenure teaching position to write books. You know, my father, who's a banker, you know, he thought that was the most idiotic thing that I could ever do, Like, he didn't understand, but then he watched me work on it, and now he's one of my biggest fans. He reads

all of my books. And I got a fan letter from a young woman who is a freshman in college now, and she read every exquisite thing this um summer and she told me, you know, for the first time, she felt like someone really understood what she had gone through in the past year, and she gave she gave the book to her mother to read, and her mother came to her and said, this makes me so sad that

you relate to Nanette. And this young woman said to me, you know, it shocked her that her mom was sad, but she felt good because at least her mom knew the truth for the first time. And I think that's really hard thing for teenagers to do, because especially if the parents who are involved in their life. They're constantly being told who they should be, and when they're not that person, it's very difficult for the teenager to tell their parents I'm not who you want me to be,

but I could be this other great thing. It took me until I was thirty to do that. Yeah, and I think that you know the way obviously every parent. I think it's just it's just a nightmare of making mistakes. I'm its always like I wonder what you know, what the list will look like at the end for me. But I just worked so hard with with him to take a position of I have no preference on what you want to be at all, Um, I just want to see you engaged in in in something in some way.

And even that sometimes he is asking a lot out of a teenager. Yeah, I think so. Um. You know, when I was teaching, I would I would see this all the time, and parents would would say things like that to me. You know, I don't care if my daughter to play soccer, and I just want her to be involved in something. But then if you said to them, well, she's going to quit the soccer team and lose her

college scholarship, you know the conversation. I'm not saying this about you, but um, you know, I think we all, you know, whether we say it directly or not, imply certain things to people. And teenagers pick up on that. They know what the adults in their lives want them to be and if they're good kids. And Nanette, I think is an extraordinary young person. She wants to to please those people. She wants to make those people feel happy. She wants to you know, make her parents proud of her.

So how does she do that? Um? And also take care of herself? And I think that's the real battle when you leave childhood, to realize that you are an individual and not part of you know, a family or you know, a community that you're allowed to have views that that's straight from you know, the herd. I agree, Like I said, it's interesting to watch it. My son, after playing athletics and lacrosse for pretty much every year recently to sided he wasn't going to do it anymore.

And uh, I have to say, there was that part of me that was like, no, don't, don't. Don't you know? And I told him what my opinion was. I said, here's my thoughts on it. You have to decide, And so I just am interested in it because I kind of feel like I've sat in both spots. Now. One of the things that you say in the book, I really liked this part. You say that weird lonely people need each other, and you also say there are a lot of lonely kids in this world, but the problem

is they don't know about each other. Yeah. I think that that's true. Um, and especially if you grow up in a small town like the Nette grows up in, and there's a lot of pride, people tend to be the same or if they're not the same day, they tend to pretend that they're the same. In I've been in those environments where it's not safe to be other and and and sometimes it takes leaving that town or

leaving that that environment. But it's it's strange because you know, there's another line in the book too that they say, you know, weird lonely people need music and arts to rally around. And I do think that that's where music

and art comes from. I know, I I sometimes go to a party and I see people who are quote unquote normal, you know, parents of children and uh, you know, going to birthday parties and doing family things and if if I go to a family party or like a kid's birthday party, I will feel like I'm a Martian. And you know, it's it's not a judgment thing, because there's a big part of me that says I wish that I could be normal. I've always felt that way, and I've tried to blend in. But I know that

my writing comes from not being normal. It comes from feeling outside of the herd and looking back in. That's where my unique perspective comes from. And the irony is that every book that I write is an attempt to to communicate with the masses at large. And so when I get a positive reviewers somebody, I got that letter

from that young woman the other day, it's amazing. But every time you put out art into the world, you also get that response of people saying what or this doesn't work or this is bad and and and so it reinforces that, but that also sends you back to the page to to try to figure it out and to try to find a way to to make that bridge.

Um So I think that for me, the most gratifying thing about writing books is when somebody sends me an email or sends me a letter and says, you know me too, And there's no one else has ever described this in a way that made me feel that I could talk about this um And I think that is what great art should do. Not that my work is great art, but I think that that's what we should strive to do. That was the next line that I was going to ask a question about that line you

had there. And you know, it's funny, I feel the same way, uh going to my kids parties. It's like there's these voices going on in my head when I was like, I'm not really that different from these people. I live in the same town, and I've got you know, I've got a kid that's the same age, and and yet I do I kind of feel like I still have never really figured that piece out about how to uh socialize well in those situations without alcohol. Yeah, that's

that's right there. Yeah, I mean yeah, And I think it's the same thing with my social anxiety and my depression. You know, I look at people who never there are people who never really go to the depths that I go to with my depression, and I envy them so much. You know, if I could just get rid of my social anxiety and depression. You know, if I could snap

my fingers, I would. But at the same time I realize that because they never are depressed, or they never have to leave a party because they're too anxious, they don't think about the things that I think about the things that create the art. And so in some ways it's a gift in a curson like, I don't want to, you know, glorify like mental illness, but um I do think that, you know, you have to look at the aggregate and see that you know, maybe you're different for

a reason. You know, you're different because you need to, um to to express that different point of view. Or like Vannage used to talk about canary in the coal mine, you know, the canary dots for everyone else, and that's the artists gets sick before everyone else so they can

they can send up the warning flag. So yeah, yeah, I think that's an interesting point there, or an interesting discussion, which is I think it was Christian Murdy who said something like being well adjusted to a profoundly sick society is not health and uh, you know you in a tweet said normal suburban American life can make some of us mentally unwell. And so I think it's an interesting question. Are we talking about men while illness or are we talking about um a response to a sick culture? And

the answer is probably both of those things. And I just think that's an interesting you know, because you can look at that as, as you said, as mental illness, and you can also look at it as being artistic, being sensitive, being different, And how do you reconcile those things? Yeah. I remember my second school I taught, and the first day I went in, Uh, the first day, I was so psyched up to teach and I was really you know, positive,

and I couldn't wait to get in the classroom. And I walked into teacher's lounge and there was a big sign on the wall. It said a hundred and seventy nine days left till summer. And you looked around and I saw how apathetic and miserable those teachers were. And I didn't get it. But after being in public education for three years, I understood. But the difference was is that there are some people who can endure all of

the bullshit of public education for twenty years. I can only take six years before I needed to get out. And you know, I think, I think that might be a way to look at it as well. Um, you know, sometimes the artists can't take it as much. Yeah, I thought one of the things that you did in the book, it was very subtle, but I thought it was really important, was that there was no sense that you were making the nette and the artists in the book necessarily better

then the so called normal people in the book. I think you really did a nice job of emphasizing it's just different. This isn't a I'm better than you or you're better than me, or you know, because as you said, some people fit perfectly well into the world the way it shaped, and I think sometimes a coping mechanism for those of us who don't fit in that world is to try and affect some air of superiority. Either that

or we think we're broken. But I thought the way you did that in the book was a very nice, um, subtle but nice way to sort of present that perspective. Well, thank you, you know, And I don't think that, you know, artists are people who are depression or whatever, you know, what we've been talking about, are better than other people. You know, they're just different. And um, but I will say that people who are extroverts and people who don't deal with a lot of things that we're talking about.

They don't understand how hard it is. Um. You know, I spent a long time with my mother, who's an extrovert, trying to tell her that I couldn't go to a family party for two hours. She just that she didn't understand that for thirty years. Um. And there have been reviews of the book where people will say, you know, I I thought that Nnette was selfish. You know, she she's this privileged person that's selfish. You know, why can't she just suck it up and play soccer? You know,

her life isn't that hard. And you know, I understand that Nnette is privileged, but she's also depressed and mentally unwell. And there's even a line in the book where she says, what good is being privileged if you don't get to do anything that you want to do? Um And I think that that is an important distinction. She's not just rebelling or you know, going against the Grange just for the sake of it. She's doing it because she's been profoundly miserable for the first seventeen years of her life.

And she she's put others before her for for seventeen years, because she's a people policer, because she's a good kid, because she cares about other people. And as soon as she says what do I want, people point at her and say, you're selfish. And unfortunately I've seen that in

my life as well. Um. You know, I think if if you are an introvert or you deal with mental health issues, like people don't understand that your needs are profoundly different than their needs that you know, going to a party for most of my friends is it's it refuels them, it makes them feel good. Whereas if I go to a party with fifty people, my energy level will my tank will just go down, like facts like, I can feel it going down, and by the end,

I'm in a really, really, really bad place. And if I do that too often, I'm in a really dangerous place. And I know there are some people that will never understand.

They'll say you're antisocial, like you don't like people. I love people like one on one basis, or you know, having a conversation that's not surface level, like will be going depth about something I'm all in until three in the morning, but you know, going around and chit chatting about surface level things like that is is literally painful to it really is is um a tough thing to do. And I think that's where the net is as well. Uh, And so it's I try to be honest about that.

It's just that there's there's a miscommunication. It's not that one is better than the other. It'sists that it's much easier for an extrovert who goes along with with with the status quote to fit into society. They don't they don't have the same battles, and they'll never know what that feels like. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think people who don't experience it don't always know what it's like. And I never can tell whether the world is changing or just the part of the world that I look

at is changing. Um, you know, you never know whether you're in an echo chamber. But it seems there's a lot more discussion of mental health, about depression, about different things that seems to be permeating the public consciousness, not certainly, not as much as it needs to. And I think there's a long way to go, But it feels to me like that, you know, we're headed in that direction. But again, I can never tell, like you know, what's real and what's sort of my limited view of the world.

I mean, for my own personal experience. I talk about mental health all the time, and you know, fifteen years ago, I would have been scared to death to talk about that. I don't think that's just because I've changed. I think that,

you know, society has changed. But that's said I'm I'm always whenever I get a fan mail from a teenager, it's always about how much they loved the book, and it's always about how much they thought they couldn't talk about these things with anyone else in their community, and that's why they love the book. So it's always a happy occasion for me to provide that experience for a young person. If they read my book and they feel not alone, that's beautiful. That's what I wanted when I

was a teenager. But it also makes me profoundly sad because why aren't the people in their community providing that experience for them. So, you know, it's I don't want to talk myself out of a job here, but uh, you know, it's it's mixed bag that way. Yeah, I think. So we had Frank Turner on the show Who's a musician that I deeply love, And his response to that was, yeah, it probably is. But you know what, there's always sixteen

year olds who feel like sixteen year olds. Do that feel like you did when you were a sixteen year old, and so the battle is always kind of on to continue to reach out in that way. Yeah, so we are kind of at time. But I'd like to to wrap up by reading, um a little bit of the ending of the book. I don't think it gives anything away, and then just let you add any last comments to it,

and uh, we'll we'll go from there. And if I read it and it sounds like it is a spoiler, you can say, don't say that, but here we go. And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating, thrusting your best, true, authentic self into the universe with wild abandoned. Maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown, towards targets that we haven't even dreamed up yet but

exists nonetheless. Yeah, I mean, that's that's that's what the book is about, and that's really what my personal battle throughout life has been about to believing that who you are is important enough to be that person. When I signed books for young people, I always just write simply be you in there, you know, and and it seems so trite or so silly, and yet it is the hardest thing to do to be an authentic version of yourself, um, without uh infringing on other people's right to be an

authentic version of them too. That that is the battle right there. And I know that you're finding that battle and I am to Yeah, I think the battle to do that and be okay with who that self is is really, you know, really at the heart of of living a good life for sure. Absolutely well, Q, thank you so much for coming back on. I have a feeling we could probably go a couple more hours with this, but um, you keep writing, so we'll keep having you back on. We'll do this again and I'd love to

be back next summer. Thanks for having on, Thanks for thanks for what you do. I'm a huge fan and it's important work, so thank you, Thank you. That means a lot. Okay, take care you too, all right bye. You can learn more about Matthew Quick and this podcast at one you feed dot net. Slash quick,