#745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr

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Ladies and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of

the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.

Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Rick Rubin, 9 time Grammy winning producer, one of time magazines, 100 most influential people in the world, number one New York Times bestselling author of the Creative Act,

a way of being and host of the Tetra Grammerton podcast. You can find Rick at tetragrammerton.com. Where are we right now? We are sitting in the sauna. We are sitting in a very hot barrel sauna and I was told that was one of the conditions for having this conversation. And it's such an impressive barrel sauna. It's indoors that I wanted to get the specs for it when I first saw it and you have a heater that has to be what four times the size of the off the shelf heater that would

go into such a heater. Yeah, it's a much bigger heater than for the size of the room. I'm sitting on the floor because I have such little confidence in my ability to withstand heat compared to you. But we do have the alternate, which is the bath just outside of this door. And you and I have gone back and forth, of course, quite a few times with this type of cycling. But what is right outside of this door? Metal tub filled with ice. It is a metal tub about four

feet, three and a half feet off the ground full of ice. It looks like if you were to say what a horse trough times two, something like that. Something like that. It's got to be maximum low fifties, something like that. I think it's about today. It's probably about 38 degrees. Oh my god. All right. So we have two mics on the floor. I'm hoping won't explode or melt down the age for in the age six. And we have water ice heat. Nothing could go wrong. I'm looking

forward to it. So Rick, I was hoping perhaps we could start with a discussion of your physical transformation. And I'd love for you to perhaps just describe to people in my mind the picture of a fitness in a lot of ways now. And we've been paddle boarding before. And you similarly, what my ass every time we go out, I'm always impressed. There are a lot of things contributing to my lack of competency and fear there. But where were you and how did you end up

undergoing this physical transformation? Because you've lost how much weight at this point? How much fat was it? I lost at the peak moment. I lost the between 135 and 140 pounds. And I always thought I was eating a healthy diet. I was vegan for 20-something years. All the organic vegan really, you know, very strict with what I ate. And doing that, I got up to 318 pounds. And I read a book by a guy named Stu Middlman who ran a thousand miles in 11 days. And I remember reading that and

just thinking, wow, it's like I can barely walk down the block. This guy ran a thousand miles in 11 days. And it just seemed so inspiring. So I read his book. And in the book he talked about the die named film methatone who I'd never heard of before. And he said in Stu's book, he gets to the part where he said, well, I'm at this doctor, film methatone. And he changed the way I trained. And he changed the way I ate. And he changed all these things. And then all of a sudden I was able

to do all these things. And he said, okay, I want to find film methatone. I found him online. I sent him an email. And he was willing in Florida. And I asked if, you know, I could become his patient. And he said that he had just stopped treating patients and retired from being a doctor. So I thought that's terrible news. But the reason he decided to stop being a doctor was he decided to become a songwriter. And I said, oh, it's interesting. I mean, funny. You should mention that.

Yeah. If I'm involved in songwriting and the music world, maybe we can trade. Maybe I can help you with your songwriting and you can help me with my health and fitness. And he like the idea and we ended up meeting a few months later, met several times and became friends. And then he eventually ended up moving into my house and lived in my house for about two years. I did everything he said. And I got much healthier. My metabolism got turned on. The hours that I was sleeping,

shifted for most of my life. I stayed up all night and slept most of the day when I was in college. I never took a class before 3 p.m. Because I knew I wouldn't go. And this was at NYU. At NYU. So I'm used to living in night and lifestyle. I remember even in high school, I missed the first three classes of school so many times that it was really an issue. But it was just I had learned to be a late night person. And it kind of suited the music life like it worked

well with my life. And one of the first things that Phil suggested when we got together was I slept with blackout lines. And I usually didn't leave the house until the sun was setting. And he said, from now on when you wake up, I want you to go outside as soon as you wake up, open the blinds and go outside, negative possible and be in the sun for 20 minutes. And when he said it, I remember

thinking it'd be the same as him saying, I want you to jump off this ledge. You know, like it sounded like the most terrifying based on the way I lived my life that just sounded terrible. Right. What time was he recommending that you wake up? Well, by the time we started, he kept moving down. It went from 3 o'clock to probably noon to 11 to 9. And it just sort of happened naturally. And he knew that if I immediately went in the sun, that naturally my body would want

to start waking up earlier and going to sleep earlier. It was the first time ever that my skating rhythm was kicking in. I never knew that there was such a thing or knew what that was. So he got me to connect to that. And I did everything he said, change my diet, started eating some animal protein. I was, as I said, a devout vegan. So eggs and fish with the first things that I would eat. And even then I never liked eggs and I never liked fish. So I ate them more like medicine.

And slowly I got healthier and healthier and healthier and more and more fit. But I was still very heavy and I was heavy for a long time. What age were you when you brought him into your house or how long ago was this? Yeah. I'm getting guests. That's probably late 30s. And how, if you don't mind me asking, yeah, like 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago, something like that. So you're changing your diet. Well, we're some of the other things that he had you change. He had

me do 20 minutes of low heart rate exercise, aerobic activity every day. He had me start weighing a heart rate monitor. And my heart rate, I would get into, you know, for me, walking up a flight of stairs would be an aerobic activity. And an aerobic activity. So I had to work hard to stay in an aerobic space or the aerobic space, you know, in the aerobic space. So I'm stepping below that and getting hot. And he's gonna find your

hat. I was taking off all your clothes. My hands, my hands burning, all of a sudden, I tried to wrap them in napkins. I've already did. I did mention those my get hot. But sorry, I digress. So to stay within the aerobic threshold, you had, yes, work very hard. Yes. And again, my health changed, but I still stayed very heavy. And after two years of time, I'd probably lost a little bit of weight, but not much. But I was much healthier and much more

alive and much better than I was before. And after that period of time, Phil said to me, you know, anyone else who made the changes you made out of everyone he's ever dealt with 99% out of 100 people, you know, 99 out of 100 people would have dropped all their weight. For some reason, there's something else going on with you that's holding onto the weight. So I just accepted that that's how it was, but at least I felt a lot better. My life was a lot better. I was a lot

happier. And then a mentor of mine, his name is Mo Austin. He's a guy who ran one of brothers' records for 35 years. He worked for Frank Sinatra, real inspiring guy in music business. He suggested, I went up to entry then one day and he said, you know, Rick, I'm really worried about you. I know you watch what you eat and I know that you walk on the beach every day and

exercise, but you're really getting big and I'm worried. So he said, I'm going to get the name of a nutritionist and I want you to go to my guy and I want you to do it every since. And I said, okay, fine. And I knew it wouldn't work because I knew that my whole life, I had a weight problem. My whole life, I've tried every diet and nothing ever worked, but I, you know, I would do anything for most. So I went again, open-minded, but not believing it would work.

Willing to try, but not believe me, it would work. The nutritionist put me on a high protein, low calorie diet and I've never done a low calorie diet before. And over 14 months, I lost 130 pounds, 135 pounds. That changed everything. And I will say, if I didn't do the work with Phil first, I don't believe that the diet would work. It was sort of a combination of things in order. It was like the metabolism that turned on. I started being too misoccurated rhythm. I was stimulating my

aerobic system every day. I built a base and then with the right diet was able to drop the way quickly. What are things that get in the way of artists producing their best work? Can you start about what other people think? Competition, wanting to do better even someone else,

self-doubt, ego, what manifestation of ego? If someone thinks that everything they do is great, they might not be willing to edit themselves enough or work hard enough at, if I could write Tim Great songs in five minutes each, those are the best songs and I'm just going to record it and put them out. And those might not be as good as the ones that you develop over a long period of time. For example, that might be an ego-tistical artist you think everything I do is just great.

When you have the opposite, when you have an artist who is doubting themselves, how do you help them through that? What do you recommend? Just speaking personally, I have continuous self-doubt as a writer. I think most artists do. That's more the more typically self-doubt is the case. I think if your goal is to be better than you were, if you're competing only with yourself, it's a more realistic place to be. If you say I don't want to write songs unless I could write

songs better than the Beatles, it's a hard road. But if you say I want to write a better song tomorrow than the song I wrote yesterday, that's something that can be done. And if you write a better song than you wrote yesterday, every day, then you continue to get better and better and better. And it really is small steps. And trying not to think too much because so much of it is more of a, the job is

it's more emotion and hard work than it is head work. Like the head comes in after to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place and it's not the head and it's not an intellectual activity. It's more inspiration. So the key first is to really do whatever activities you can to tune into inspiration and things like

meditating help and diving into art in general doesn't have to be even your modality. I mean, going to museums looking at beautiful art can help you write better songs, reading great novels, reading great, great works of art, seeing great movie could inspire a great song, reading poetry.

So let's say being in submerging yourself in great art and the more you can do to get out of the mode of competition where you're looking at what other people are doing if you're wanting to be better than them or be inspired by them, the only way to use the inspiration of other artists

is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time, which is a great thing to do. You know, like if you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way to work through to find your own voice to matter today, then listening to what's on the radio now and thinking, I want to compete with this. Right. So it's more like a stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what's going on at the moment. Speaking as someone who is not very

well versed with music, I don't feel highly literate when it comes to music. I enjoy music, but hanging out with you and Neil Strauss, certainly I feel like I'm lacking, perhaps vocabulary and a lot of references. Are there any for people who feel like they're in my shoes? Are there any particular albums you could offer as a starting point? Not the end, I'll be all, but just as a starting point for appreciating good world-class contemporary music, meaning

not necessarily could be classical music, but are there any recommendations? I would just start by listening to the greats, which you can look at like if you look at Search Online for Mojos, Top 100 albums, Valve Time, or Rolling Stones, Top 100 albums, or any trusted sources, Top 100 albums, and start listening to what are considered the greats. It's a good place to start. I'm not sure I ever told you the first time I ever saw the name Rick Rubin was actually on the

inside of an audio cassette. It was the first heavy metal album I ever bought, which was Rain and Blood. It's a good one. I just remember that's a really good one. Not having ises be pre-internet, of course, and I was just told by my friends you have to, you will love heavy metal, you should listen heavy metal. I asked what the hardest heavy metal was that could possibly be found. Rain and Blood came to the lips of those I asked. I just remember listening to you. I think it's Angel of Death,

the first track on that, and going, oh my god, what have I gotten myself into? I just fell in love with that band, but how did you go from hip hop to say slayer? It's stylistically so different. It was seen, but how did slayer come about? Because I was coming about it with no technical skill, it's not like I knew about hip hop, or I knew about heavy metal. I was a fan of music,

and I loved heavy metal. I loved hip hop. It was more of that coming at it from this appreciation, and as a fan knowing what I wanted to hear and knowing that, especially in the case of slayer, slayer were an underground metal band who had two albums out on an independent label. We're kind of considered the heaviest band in the world. When we signed them, there was this terrible fear that slayer now doing their first album for a major label. They were going to sell out the water down.

Yeah, which happens all the time. Then the album that we made, Rain and Blood, was much harder, than worse than anything that you've ever heard before. It really did come from that, I liked extreme things, and they were extreme. I wanted to maximize it. I didn't want to water down. The idea of watering things down for a mainstream audience, I don't think it applies. I think people want things that are really passionate and the best version of that they could be, and often the

best version they could be, is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience where, if you put out a record and half the people who hear it, absolutely love it, and half the people who hear it, absolutely hate it. You've done well because it's pushing that boundary. If everyone thinks, that's pretty good. Why bother making it? It doesn't mean much. Lost in the slipstream of time almost as soon as it comes out. I'm going to do a round of ice effects. Absolutely. All right.

Let's do some more ice, and we'll be back. We are back. Do you have a book or books that you've gifted often to other people? The first one that comes to mind is the Dowdy Jane. It's the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Dowdy Jane. It's great about it. It's 81 short pieces that could be, if you look at them as poems, that if you were to read the book today, you would get one thing from it. If you pick it up in two years and read it again, it would mean

something entirely different. Always on the money, always what you need to read at that period of time. It's a magic book in that way that it always fits. I actually took this, this is bringing back a memory. I took an entire class on the Dowdy Jane at Princeton when I was an undergrad in East Asian studies. It seems on some level that that book does what you do for musicians, meaning it reflects back truths that they were not aware of themselves or they could not verbalize

themselves. Any other books come to mind? Another one that's really nice is book about meditation, called, Where View Though There You Are, which is by John Kabat's in. It's a great book if you've never meditated and if you've been meditating for 50 years, if you read this book either way, you'll care more about meditation, become a better meditator and just give insight into

why we do it and what the benefits are. When you are working with an artist who believes they can't do something or it's just hitting that wall, what are some of the ways that you help them

get past that? Usually I'll give them a homework like a small doable task. Even an example, there was an artist who was working recently who hadn't made Malmann a long time and was struggling with, struggling with finishing anything and just had this, it was a version of a writer's block, but it was, I don't know, hard to explain what it was, but I would give him very doable homework assignments that almost seemed like a joke. You know, like tonight I want you to write one word

in this song that needs five lines that you can't finish. I just want one word that you like by tomorrow, you think you come up with one word and you usually would be like, yeah, I think it can do one word and then just very quickly by breaking it down into pieces like I learned from Laird and chipping away one step at a time, you can really get through anything. Yeah.

Breaking it down, it's a measure of five. Of a beach we had a zipline, you know, the theme that you balance on, oh, a slackline, slackline and Laird was pretty good at it in the beginning but had never done it before and he would work for hours. He would just be there hour after hour after our falling off and getting back on falling off, getting back on command of all of the group of people. He was by far the first one who was able to do it and it wasn't because he just naturally

was gifted at it. She knows that anything he sets his mind to learn to do if he focuses and just continues to not mind falling off and not thinking he's supposed to be good out of the box, learning to be able to do it. That's how you learn things. I also will say that after having the weight problem that I had for so long and then finally finding the solution and making the change, it really makes me believe that anything's possible. You know, we can learn, we can train

ourselves to do absolutely anything. It's really just getting the right information. Forget that the right information, we can learn to do anything. Whatever it is, that doesn't mean we can necessarily be the best in the world at something but we can be our best at that thing. The best version of ourselves. Yeah. And do things that never dreamed of as possible for us. What advice would you give? And I'll ask this for a couple of different ages but I'll start with your 20-year-old

self. What advice would you give your 20-year-old self if any? Try to have more fun. Why do you think you weren't having as much fun as you could have at that point? I think I was more driven and I didn't want to say almost like I felt I had something to prove. I don't know if I did if something to prove but it felt like doing the work was the most important thing in the world as opposed to doing the work and enjoying the process and being able to step back and see what

it was. Not just be so deeply into it that I feel like I missed a lot of years of my life because I was just in-doctor looking on music, you know, seven days a week for only 20 years. Wow. I recall it. It makes me think of a story from Neil Gaiman, the writer, when he, I think he was with the success of Sandman and he was in a huge line of readers who wanted signatures and fans who wanted to tell him stories and Stephen King pulled him aside and just said enjoy it. Yeah.

And he didn't. He was too caught up in the in the flow. What about your 30-year-old self? What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? I would probably tell myself something that I bet still might apply to me today. I wouldn't know that at all then. I know it now. I just still snap second nature. But she'd be kinder to myself. I'd be myself a lot because I expect a lot from myself. I'll be hard on myself. I don't know that I'm doing anyone and he's it by doing it.

Yeah, that's advice that I need to give myself as well. When do you tend to beat yourself up? I've made somewhat of a sport of it, it would seem. Yeah, it can happen. Anytime I can come up with anything that I could be doing further something and didn't already think of it and didn't already do it. I'd like beat myself up about why? You know why? I've not done that. Something I struggle with that I'd love to get your two cents on and is related to this, which is

on one hand, I don't want to beat myself up. On the other hand, I feel like the perfectionism that I have has enabled me to achieve whatever modicum of success have been able to achieve. I've heard stories and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but about, for instance, ZZ Top and Lafritura and how they worked on it with you from I guess I want to say what?

2008 to 2012, something like that, but how they realized the value of you wanting the art to be as perfect as it could be or the best that it could be and taking whatever time and pains necessary to make that possible. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because it's something that I continually struggle with. I want to be easier on myself, but I worry that if I do that, I will lose

whatever magic if there is such a thing that enables me to do what I do. I think that's a myth, and I think that your take on things is specific to you and it's not because of your, it's almost like you've won the war and to accept the fact that you've won the war, you have broken through to now, you have an audience, people are open to hear what you are interested in,

what you learn at, what you're interested in learning about, and what you want to share. You can do that without killing yourself and that killing yourself won't be of service either to you or to your audience. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible.

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Next up, Mary Carr, author of three award-winning best-selling memoirs, The Liars Club, Cherry and Lit, and author of The Art of Memoir, which breaks down her process, and tropic of squalor, her latest volume of poetry. You can find Mary on Twitter at Mary Carr Lit. Mary, welcome to the show. Hey Tim, thanks for having me. And I appreciate you putting me at ease when I mentioned that I have copious notes in front of me. That's usually an indication that I am nervous. And you-

It's not you. You do this all the time. You're going to kill it. It's going to go great. I'm convinced. And thank you. And you reassured me by saying, I make really good waffles. That's what I do. I'm like a no-no-no. You've got to think of me as a no-no out here in podcast film. Let's rewind the clock as a first step in podcast, Phil. And maybe we can talk about known as in the family lineage of sorts. And I want to talk about

or have you speak to a guy redoing your mother's kitchen and holding up a tile. Could you perhaps elaborate on that, please? Yeah, yeah. Right after my first memory I was published, we were having my mother's kitchen retile. My sister and I were there. And yeah, the tile dude, a prize off a tile and he holds it up. And it has a little round toilet. And he looks at my little fluffy hair, gray-haired mother and says, Miss Card, this looks like a bullet haul. And my sister says,

Mom, isn't that where you shot at daddy? And she says, no, that's where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at your daddy. So people ask me why I wanted to be a memoirist. I'm like, why would you make stuff up when that's where your mother is? So for those who have no context, I'd like to provide a bit more context. Where was this kitchen?

Or where is this kitchen for that matter? This kitchen is in Southeast Texas. It's a town that I write about to protect the mayor and the school principal and the people who didn't sign off on what I said about him. I call it Leachfield. But it's really the east of Port Arthur, Texas, a small town in East Texas. I call it the Ringworm Belt.

Which I've also heard you describe as a swampy town. So moisture, humidity, ringworm, as a former wrestler, I can say those things combined to prevent your home from coming. Exactly. Yes, no, that's it. And industrial, like a lot of oil, we're fine rays all around. So not Paris in the 20s, I guess is the way I would put it. No, I'm going to hop around like momentum of the movie. If I must and I must because that is my way. And you've written extensively

about your childhood. You had in many respects an extremely difficult, painful childhood and will probably unwind some of that. Now you've written extensively about it and you've also mentioned about writing memoirs. And if this is a misquote, please call me out. Quote, I've said it's hard. Here's how hard everybody I know who waits deep enough into memories waters drowns a little. And certainly in your book, you paint a high resolution picture of just how painful

that can be. And certainly an element might be catharsis, but it is painful. And I would love for you to speak to the catalyst for beginning to publish this type of work right and then publish this type of work. The publishing is nothing compared to the writing, I think. Publishing for me was great because they gave me money and I didn't have any. So that was good. But yeah, I think I had a flamethrower on my ass. Can I say ass on your show? You can say ass, not only are our three letter

words allowed for letter are allowed as well. Oh, there we go. You know, I was a weird little kid and I was just my mother was Captain in nervous and married seven times and twice to my daddy and both my parents drank hard. It was Texas. Everybody was armed. And we were a loud combative house. So I loved my parents. I mean, that's what I should say. It's I don't think anybody who's read anything I've written about them would challenge that. But it was not a safe childhood. And yes, it had its

fear share of blows. I mean, I always, you know, look, I was born in the richest country in the world. My skin color is something the whole country privileges. I'm, you know, I'm a college professor. I grew up skinny and my teeth came in relatively straight and I have a lot of advantages. So whatever I went through a lot of people and people I grew up with and loved had it way worse and didn't make it. So I think I was haunted. I was a haunted little girl. I tried to kill myself when

I was a kid when I was still in grade school. I took a bunch of aspirin. It said pain relief and I thought, okay, this is what I want. So I didn't have a choice. I was in some ways not having a choice was a lucky thing because I went into therapy very early. I managed to get after leaving school without a diploma. I managed to weasel my way into college and had a really kind professor

and his wife kind of took me under their wing and urged me to go into therapy when I was 19. And so I was sitting in rooms talking to, you know, co-dependent social workers starting when I was a kid and all of that help. But I guess I've been really blessed with a lot of outside help. I'm a big big fan of the mental health professional and the librarians and English teachers and those kind souls you meet along the way. So you've kind souls that you meet in person. You mentioned a few

and I want to talk more about weaseling into college in a few minutes. But I've read a lot about your reading. Yeah, I read a lot. Yeah. Some might envision in their minds that childhood you described as a family of a literate, nobody picked up anything other than people magazine, but that was not the case. No, the huge advantage. Yeah. Describe that a little bit. And also if I could tag on an additional piece of that question, I've heard you describe finding and reading poetry

as eucharistic. And I would look for you to just speak to that as well. Yeah, I started reading poetry when I was a little girl and I, you know, reading a socially sanctioned disassociation. You know, if you can't, they won't let you drink or, you know, gays heroine when you're a little kid, but you can disappear down a valley of Winnie the Pooh or Charlotte's web or or. And in some ways, the poets I read, I think a lot of time, I think poetry really captured me

early. And my, my mother had, who was a painter, had gone to art school in New York and was enormously well read. There were books all over my house in a place for the nearest bookstore. The bookstores in my town sold, you know, Bibles as big as station wagons and, you know, little dashboard icons, but there wasn't a lot of literature to buy. But I found a home in the, the library was a three block walk for my house. And I could disappear down the snowy valley of a book and I

was somewhere else. And so poetry saved my life. I mean, my best friends were poets. I think the way people worship saints and, you know, have crosses blessed, I felt that way. And if you think about the idea of the Eucharist, we weren't Catholic. We were atheists. My father was a union organizer and said, you know, church is a trick on poor people to get their money away from them. And my mother was a kind of Marxist lady who was very smart. And, you know, just a little bit of

the loose cannon. So we were not churchy in the Bible belt. And yeah, you take someone, when you read a poem, you know, you put it in the meat of your body. I mean, you're a body person. I'm a body person. I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you. And it changes you. It, it transforms you. I had this idea of being a poet starting when I was five or six years old that I wanted to be a poet. It was a strangest thing because there were no poets around. No one

had ever, no one I knew had ever met a poet. What was the feeling that elicited that desire? Was it just these tangible brilliance and some type of wordplay? Was it a kinesthetic reaction to the aesthetics of certain poets? What was it that? Wow. I'll produce that desire. You said it better than I could. Tim, you win. I mean, it's not a joke that I use the Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat. That's literally what happened. I sat when I had to reach the table. I sat on this

giant edition of Shakespeare, my mother had that was very water stained. And I was a book that I read very early and I started memorizing not Shakespeare poems, but the speeches from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and Richard III. And I would memorize these speeches and say them to my hungover mother. And she liked it. You know, it was something she and I got her attention that way. She was a very, to say she was not nurturing. I mean, Lady Macbeth is probably

not nurturing the way my mother was not nurturing. I mean, she, her disinterest in being a mother was profaneless, just put it that way. She went said to me when I was early on when I was getting sober, I, she was supposed to watch my little boy. He was then a toddler when I went to an A.A. meeting. I came back one day and she was like, I can't keep him. He's just too, I mean, I was come for an hour

and a half. She said, I just don't do kids. And I was so mad. I said, mother, you had four children. What do you mean you don't do kids? You don't cook, you don't clean, you haven't had a job in 40 years. What exactly do you bring to the party? And she thought for a minute and she said, I'm a lot of fun to be with. Yeah, I forgot to do anything for any other living human being, but I am fun to be with, which was not untrue. So I guess I had an aesthetic sense. She played music. She played opera.

She played blues, Janice Joplin grew up in my hometown or rather I grew up in her hometowns. And she was older. Her brother would be in my high school carpool. So there was a lot of music I listened to. And I think poetry was part of that, the form, the shape. You know what it felt like? Tim, I felt less lonely. I was a lonely person. And I would read these poems and I felt like someone understands me. Someone knows what it feels like to occupy this body. And I remember trying to tell other

little kids in my neighborhood about it about poems that I liked. There's a E.E. Cummings poem. I went to try to tell some girls about it in my school. You know, it's just spring in the world is mud luscious and the little lame balloon man whistle spar and we and Eddie and Bill came come running and it's spring and the world is a pedal wonderful and the goat foot of balloon man whistle spar and we something like that. I can't even remember it, but it's so long ago. That's pretty good for

not remembering. I can remember a little bits of it, but I'm really these girls and my school just going, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, what about it? It doesn't make any sense. You know, it's about it's being spring. And she's like, well, what is the mud luscious? Like that's not even a word. I'm like, no, it's like muddy and luscious and delicious. And it's

like, how is mud delicious? You know, it's like, like, no, like y'all aren't getting it. And I thought they were messing with me. It seemed so obvious to me how great this was. So I learned to shut up about it very early, you know, by like third, fourth grade. I learned just don't you like this step. Nobody else. Your mother likes it. Your sister likes it. Your daddy likes it. Nobody else is going to

like it. You shut up. One expression that I think was in the art of memoir. I've read it in other interviews. And again, I'm probably going to paraphrase here, but that poetry should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Yes, I wish that were my line. Isn't that a great line? It's so good. Where's that from? Or do you recall where you learned it? Yes, I know, I know vaguely where it's from, but I can't remember the guy's name. You can Google it. It's early 20th

century, maybe 1920s to 1950 journalist guy. So I'm sorry, I don't side up. I wish I could take credit for it. But yeah, all art should disturb the comfortable and comfort this is disturbed. And all therapy should. And most foods, you know, it's not a bad goal to shoot for at the

beginning of a day. How did you weasel into college? If you could slash back because I would imagine that there's some listeners like me who are just in their minds, I seeing this little girl sitting on Shakespeare and out of focus behind her head in the same kitchen are bullet holes in the tile. Imagining the experience and the experiences, although truly you endured some horrific,

horrific things. But wondering how does someone in that position get into college? Especially when they're missing, at least based on some of my homework, for instance, 87 days of school in the sixth grade, things like this. How on earth does someone get into college? Was it your wielding of words and an essay that just unlocked it? Was it something else? I won an essay contest when I was in high school. I remember I think it was from the National Council of Teachers of

English. And I had some professors. Actually, my my mother had gone back to graduate school and got me a recommendation from this teacher of Chinese history who felt me up as sexually assaulted me in his office and then wrote me a recommendation. So maybe that helped. Actually, what I think helped when I looked back on it was I opposed to be it non-war and I wore black arm bands on

moratorium day. And that's the kind of thing that where I grew up, you know, I remember my coach, the football coach, pinning me up physically, like pinning me up against the lockers by the front of my shirt and holding me against the lockers and threatening me essentially to take my black arm band off. So I did things like I didn't stand up for the American flag. I mean, I don't know. I thought I was calling Cap or Nick or something. It didn't win me any friends. Let me just say that.

But I later found out when I got to my school and I had to have a lot of jobs to go there because it was a private school. Whether it was a MacAulister college, it's a very good school. And I later found out that the assistant principal of my high school who had brought me out a lot for things like my skirt was too short. One time he threw me out for not having a bra on and I said, what makes you think I don't have a bra on? And then he called in the gym teacher to look under my

shirt and confirm. In fact, I didn't have a bra. So I was just I was a pain in his ass. And I later found out that he called MacAulister and told these people in the admissions office that I was a bad citizen that I wouldn't stand up for the pledge of allegiance. And stuff. Well, they hear this old red neck assistant principal and they hear about this little girl who's doing this. And they think she sounds great. She's perfect. Perfect. So I actually think my misbehavior that got me

in so much trouble and made him hate me so much. I once had an algebra teacher revealed me. He really is after you like you're not paranoid like he's he's really he wants you out of here. And so I actually think I don't know how I got in. I don't know how I got it was clearly a mistake. I made a D in art. You know my senior year and my mother was a painter. So I mean all I had to do was slap art on something and I would get have gotten you know a B and I couldn't handle the

pressure. It was too hard. So I don't know how I got the college. But once I got to college, I've got to say I really well everybody else was complaining about their parents and the I don't know that you that you couldn't speak just about cotton or whatever they were mad about. I was like this is great. This is all these people read books and they'll talk to you about them. And I made straight A's and I got a scholarship and it was just shocking to me that I might

succeed at something you know. What about the environment aside from people who read books and are willing to listen if it was the environment. Maybe there are other variables led to the straight A's. Was it being outside of your home environment? Like what was the recipe that contributed to that sort of conversion of sorts from deferred to FIANT to straight A? Maybe you're still

to FIANT but you got straight A's. I wasn't to FIANT. I wanted to please people. I mean I think I had a lot of jobs like I had one of those hair net wearing jobs at the food service where I had to go in it like four in the morning and like cook scrambled eggs and wash dishes and stuff. And so I think in some ways I had to organize my time but I had been living with a bunch of drug dealers

before I went to college out in Southern California. We moved out there initially we looped in cars and stuff and then we got some couple of us were slinging dope mostly pod and psychedelics although one guy had robbed a drug store and it was I hitch was hitchhiking one day from Laguna Beach to

San Clemente where my friends were surfing and I got picked up by a guy who really scared me. I thought he was going to rape me and had to jump out on the side of the road and it's interesting because there were six of us who lived in that house when I left home and of the six four went to

jail and two of those were dead before they were 20 and only me and one other guy might see who's still my best friend Duney wound up getting sober and we both kind of made it quote unquote him in construction in Southern California me doing whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing.

So I was scared I was scared by how dark things that I brought to darkness with me you know you get to Southern California from where I grew up and you're like where is all this been you know everybody's worth a donchered and you know people's teeth are great and nobody's missing any digits or anything they nobody's everybody looks so amazing and everything's so beautiful and you're like God I've never seen anything like this a golly and so you would think everything would have been great but

you know as you know when you have a lot of trauma growing up you bring the darkness with you so I had this idea after the I was hitchhiking and I got scared I had to went to jump out of this guy's car it was a Volkswagen that had no back seat and had a bunch of garbage in it and I pulled up on the

handle of the door and it just went floppy round and round and round like it was locked and I couldn't get out and so the window was open stuck open wouldn't go up wouldn't go down and I stuck my arm out the side of the window and opened it from the outside and jumped out and went down this

embankment on the side of the road I was really scared I was you know how those moments of trauma are I was scared like I had been when I was a little kid and there were bullets flying around my house and I thought I know you know I'll go to college and Minnesota and I mean it's just that was the

other thing everybody in Minnesota is so damn nice have you ever been there I have I have it's just that time there I couldn't but I used to make a joke about an unkind joke I'd say if you're not a virgin when you get here you will be when you leave it was just everybody was so damn

nice oh my god I'd never seen such nice people in my life and it's still I got there and I did extremely well for two years and I won all these prizes and then I dropped out I couldn't handle the prosperity you know I couldn't handle the success it took me a while to finally start getting

sober I guess I guess that was a lot of my problem which we will definitely talk about I want to dig into that and I also am going to ask you just to the plan of seed about how those mentors initially convinced you to go to therapy but first I want to bounce around chronologically yeah it's because

from these origins I've in the process of doing my homework read about your graduate seminar at Syracuse described as hyper selective and you certainly a writer and poet of great note at this point lots of people know who you are lots of people love your work lots of people love you

describing the craft and process goes into your work how do you select the students who make it into your graduate seminar or how did you I mean I do it it's I wish they would just give me a wand and I got to pick all my people but interestingly I've been teaching their gosh 30 years

something like that I only teach in the fall and I go and I commute from New York City so we do it based on the work we do it solely based on the writing and George Saunders my colleague got George Saunders he got in so fit his gotten so famous that you know he attracts a lot of people and have a

lot of people who teach there are through flowers you know Diaz is taught there we just have gotten up to you know 1200 applications at for 12 positions you end up with these 12 gems of sorted colors and kinds yes what is day one class one what does that look like oh you're thinking

my met when I teach my memory class yeah well I used to do I used to do this thing yeah that's so funny I used to do this thing where I would stage a fight in my class with someone who was opposite for me so let's say like you know like my colleague George Saunders who is just the sweetest

guy I can't even tell you I I was in the car with him once and there was a bug on his shirt and I was like George there's a big bee line your shirt and you'd be like well he has to be somewhere you know I'd be like kill it and he's like this Tibetan Buddhist with this amazing practice you

know just the sweetest guy so George comes in and starts arguing with me that my classroom is in fact his classroom and this is in front of all the students and front of all the students and it's for them it's the first day of school and it's like having their parents fight and I script it so

that I say only nice conciliatory things I back up he walks forward he's bigger than I am and then it ends with him like throwing the papers up and you know telling me to go fuck myself or something they're telling me to go hang maybe I don't know if you can say the F4 can you say the F4?

F4 it is not only allowed but endorsed okay good group on Long Island you're in a good company I feel so much better it just telling me to go fuck myself and and then we asked the students to write so let's say there are 17 18 students in this class 20 somewhere between 15 and 22 and they're all smart and they're all young they were all incredibly juiced on adrenaline and cortisol because they were scared and it's a public scene and they don't really know each other that well and they don't

know us that well so they're all extremely alert they're hyper vigilant and we asked them to write down what happens and everybody writes something just a little different interestingly people will describe me and very aggressive terms like even though I'm the one backing up and I'm saying well

I can clear out during the break George but like I don't understand why you're so upset and he'll say you don't understand why I'm so I mean he walks forwards and I'm backing up and my head is down I'm doing every conciliatory gesture I can think of and people will say you know she stood her

ground like a bulldog or she had military strength facing off against him and one year I did it with my student assistant who was an undergraduate just a beautiful young track star Betsy and you know Betsy just threw her papers up in the air and was screeching at me well you know she's this

kid and here I am this professor with you know fancy clothes in a position of power so people would in that class of undergraduates assume that I had done horrible things to Betsy that had in one class there was a young woman one of the ruses I set up is that I lead my cell phone on so I can

start to argue with George before he comes in and then ask the students you know how often did he call how long between each call and ask them to guess things or remember things about time and some people they he calls three times some people say he called once some people four times

so all those details are very influenced by who they are the young woman was sickle cell anemia will have this enormous compassion for me because I'll say I have to leave my phone on I'm waiting for medical results and she'll assume I'm waiting to hear if I have some awful ailment

and she sees George as a complete beast and me as this woman perhaps ill who dragged herself to class well everybody else in the class thinks what a diva she's answering her phone in the middle of class she can't wait an hour to get medical results I mean come on so there are always people

in class who have you know have those perfect memories I remember one kid often their musicians this kid was a jazz saxophone player who was very famous in Brooklyn for giving these amazing house parties I think he made a living giving house parties for like I don't know years

so this kid had this amazing memory he got we had a script and he remembered the script exactly he remembered what George had on he remembered where we stood he remembered that I backed up every step and then when he wrote it he wrote it exactly as it happened he didn't miss anything

and he said George was the aggressor but I wonder what she'd done to make him act that way I guess the purpose of the exercise is for you to realize that you remember through a filter of who you are memory is not a computer it's not a perfect storage system obviously we

even these fine minds of these young people very alert and paying attention in their first class and wanting to get everything right and do well misremember and what's more what I want them to think about is how they are not just perceiving things but beaming the world the landscape

into being with whoever they are inside it's important as a writer of anything to realize what kind of filters you're strapping on that prevents you from seeing what's going on I would imagine that is an opening exercise that a lot of your students remember speaking of memory for a very

very long time what other exercises or aspects of your teaching it could be in in any setting do many of your students remember or have stick out for them would you imagine I think a lot of practice things a lot of I think it's important as a writer or as in anything to develop habits I

mean you talk about this and for our body for our work week you've developed a lot of practices in your life to shape your life so that you were kind of operating you know to constantly be growing and developing and so things like keeping a commonplace book just keeping a notebook where

you write down beautiful pieces of language what is a commonplace book that is where you capture the beautiful turns of phrase that you encounter yeah things you read so you might copy poems you might copy something you ever heard on the street there was a guy standing on my street this is like

a couple of years ago when I first moved into this apartment screaming murder or suicide at the top of his lungs and everybody was walking around the street walking around him and it was early in the morning and I walked up to him and I said excuse me sir he was screaming murder or

suicide murder or suicide and I went up to him and said sir isn't there like a third alternative like isn't there a door number three and that little encounter I wrote down but things I overheard hold on hold on that's too much of a cliffhanger so what happened when you said that

well you know what was beautiful I went into I was going into get a pastry for a friend of mine who was visiting from London I got him one I thought I'd bring him a pastry when I came out but when I walked into the bakery he was looking at the sky you know with a curious look you know he was

thinking like isn't there a door isn't there a door number three isn't there another gosh we might just be a door number three but mostly what I write down are pieces of language or things poems that I read paragraphs anything so that you're just constantly copying a long hand you can't type it

you're constantly copying things sort of beautiful you're constantly guzzling beauty you're guzzling the beautiful language so that you're kind of steeped in it you know like a fruitcake and good brandy is the value of the commonplace book and using it this way in the writing down or do

you have some approach to review or using that later I mean the great thing about them is that if you get on in the airplane or you're going along you sort of know what you're reading but I've also been doing this a poet named Stanley Cunitz who was a poet laureate in like 1978 or something

told me to do this so I've been doing this since 1978 also every time I give a lecture I put the quotes I use in the lecture on index cards and so I have like you know I've been teaching for 40 years I mean I I have 40 years of index cards with quotes on them it's oddly satisfying I don't

know what it is it's it's like a sit-up you do it's like a push-up you do it's something you don't really I often don't look back on I think it's in the writing down I think it's in the practice and kind of it's like an altar you're making an altar for yourself every day you know I wanted to

do that as well use this as a segue altar could you speak to the importance or utility of prayer in your life yeah I mean I'm a prayer I was an atheist my whole life and I got sober in 1989 and believe me I drank my share I did my part I remember some guy I went to high school with

telling me I was when my mother was still alive I was home and he says you don't even drink any more you don't even smoke pot I was like no jackalander and I I don't do that stuff anymore it's like why I was like well it just didn't agree with me you know it made me do things I didn't want to do

and he says I just think you're a quitter I just think you're a quitter I just think you gave up I mean what a smoke and pot can do you never gonna like rob anybody's television or anything he said well that's true that's true enough jackalander but you have had this job pumping gas

since the 11th grade please tell me this guy's name was actually jackalander his name was jack we call him jackalander because of a sad tooth two thingy hanged and because we were not ones to stand on ceremony and he said I said you have had this job since the 11th grade and

you're 50 years old and you have an ambition deficit disorder by my yardstick so no but he would say jackalander I said he'd say don't call me that no more I'm like what do you want me to call you like that's your name dude that's been your name since super 15 that's your name

what does prayer look like for you what is praying well I think it started off I think poem to my first prayers the ones that I read like I said I felt less lonely so I started praying not out of any virtue not I didn't believe in God I had no religious training whatsoever when I was

a little girl you know people would say would talk about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny I thought they were kidding I thought they don't really believe this horse shit I mean I figured out pretty early on you know by the time I was like six or seven people were serious that they prayed

when people weren't looking at them I couldn't believe it it was shocking to me and daddy would say well you know folks ignorant you know what you're gonna do so I had not a religious bone in my body but I did notice when I tried to stop drinking that I couldn't like like that I tried to stop

drinking for two or three years and I tried by myself and I tried drinking only beer and I tried drinking only alone I tried drinking only with other people and I tried drinking the only wine I tried drinking with food I tried drinking you know weekends not I mean I just somehow I had cross

some line where I just couldn't stop drinking and I went to get help and I went to sat in church basements and I hated everybody I saw who was sober I just hated them they just seemed like you know the guy selling incense at the airport I just didn't like them they just didn't look fun

and I just they were so nice too it's like getting a minister there hi you know welcome I'd be like oh god I hate these people and finally the last time I drank the last night I drank I had gotten together for like it was the longest amount of time sober I'd had since I was 15 and I got

together 90 days sober by going and you know sitting in church basements and talking to people who were sober and I got a 90 day chip and then I had to give this talk I had to give a poetry reading at Harvard so I didn't try just since I don't know how much familiarity when you say 90 day

chip is that some like literal token that you're a given because it looks like a poker chip and so like you get one the first day you go and then you get one at 30 days and 60 days and 90 days so this was for me an epic accomplishment I mean there was no time that I ever ran the

hundred yard dash and that was as important to me as that 90 day chip and I was happy that I was sober I felt better I was sleeping better my kid was better everything was better and I had to give this poetry reading at Harvard College and I I was nervous I'd never given a

reading without drinking the reading went okay I was teaching at a bunch of places including one class there and I went out with some of my students and the next thing I know it's three o'clock in the morning and I'm my car spinning out on store drive and lost and and I'm going towards

this concrete and I somehow didn't crash the car and I somehow got home and and so at that point everybody had been saying you know got to get on your knees and pray and there was this great heroin addict recovering heroin addict Janice at this halfway house where I did volunteer work

I drove people to meetings basically and I would pick people up and drive them to meetings a lot of disabled people and Janice had just get on your knees and I'm like Janice you know what kind of God wants me to gravel and go oh God you're so great oh and she said you don't do it for God you asshole in that Boston accent you don't do it for God you asshole I'm like well who am I

doing it for? So like you doing it for yourself just get on your knees just say help me stay soba in the morning getting your knees and I say thank you for helping me but stay soba and so I'd be like okay so I get on my knees I help me stay sober and I'd say thank you for helping me stay

sober well some weird things started to happen I mean sometimes I would literally shoot the finger at the light fixture because I just thought I hate this you know what's terrifying about praying is the loneliness of it I always tell people young women I sponsor you show more face

praying when you have never prayed before than any none to sit in that silence with all your fears and all yourself down is so scary and hard if you have a big loud head like I do and like I have a big inner life and mine never has anything good to say it

thinks it can kill me and go on living without me something started to happen I would have these moments of quiet and the only way I can describe it is it was south of my neck it was like in the middle of my chest if I was living my life with my head like yammering at me like a chihuahua

all day do that don't that stupid bitch put that down pick that up go over there I mean it was just eat this don't eat that call him I hate him you know like just these moments like in the middle of my chest would be like this broad expanse of quiet and I remember one particular day our

little shitty car broke down my kid was a toddler and he was I had to pee we were on the road I didn't break down I had a flat and didn't have a spare a working spare it was rush hour we were on memorial driver trying to get home and I just in that moment what I normally would have done you

know I would have been there you know like throwing the jack around and trying to get the car jacked up and in the state of indignant fury that I didn't believe in God but I believe that there was fate that had doomed me to misery and that the guy with the Jaguar would always get my parking

place right before I pulled in and and I believed I had a head that had memorized the bad news and spewed it out all day and I remember that day it was the sum was setting I just got out on the side where I got dev out of his car seat and the sum was going down and he was looking at me afraid

that I was going to be like angry and I just sat there and he said he was hungry and I didn't have anything to eat in the car and I'm sitting there and I said let's just look at the sunset a minute and then we'll we'll go we'll walk and we'll get some help and we were just sitting there

looking at the sunset and this truck pulls up with these Goomba guys from this 12 step meaning and they have ginger ale they have a jack they have a weight of toe my car they give dev potato chips and it was just like you know all I have to do is just find some space in my body and just wait

for a minute and so I started to notice things happening when I wasn't been over the day like a dog over like a bone that was about to be stolen you know like that and I could just I could just like could sit there for a moment and so I began to get a space in my body and I began to get

I began to hear not the voice of God I would call it I would have some leanings like I would be thinking I should have just killed myself like literally this is what I'd be I should have killed myself my husband would marry some nice girl who wore berets and my son would have

this great mother and his life would be better if I weren't there and I would hear this voice and my head that was like you need a sandwich why don't you get a sandwich why don't you make yourself like the biggest sandwich you can make and I'd be like oh great idea like I just started to have

these small good ideas that were not like anything I'd ever heard when I was afraid before yeah then I had all these crazy spiritual experiences and like one of the things I had this great sponsor Joan the Bone God I loved her she was so great she was a kind of girl who lived in Alaska and

would go to the bar when it was like 50 below in a 22 she was just like a badass like she was just and she was a Harvard social theorist too I've got to tell you she was just all that Joan the Bone Joan the Bone all that and a bowl of biscuits yeah sounds like a mobster what's the origin of the name

do you have any idea I just called her that that was my nickname for Joan the Bone I see I see right Joan the Bone and Joan would tell me things like I was such an ingrate she'd say you have to make a gratitude list and so she'd call me and say what's on your gratitude list I would say I

have all my limbs she'd say no okay here's what you're gonna do you're gonna make a gratitude list every day this month for every letter of the alphabet and you're gonna call me and read it to me I said shut the fuck up I'm not gonna do that like yes you are or else you know like I won't talk to

you anymore I'd be like okay so I just started trying I just started trying instead of sitting there with my arms crossed and my lower lips stuck out and my baseball cat pulled down over my eyes I just started trying shit that people who were happier than me suggested I should try

it was so simple and so one of the things I said to her she said you've got to pray for what you want what are you praying for I said I pray to stand it yeah not to kill myself not to just stand it just to get through the fucking day that's what I'm praying for and she said okay well you got

to pray for what you want what do you want I said I made nine thousand dollars this year I would like some money please she said well why don't you pray for money I'm like you can't pray for that she's like well why not I said okay so I would literally get on my knees the morning say

keep me sober I would like some money I'm not even making this up and I would get on my knees and say thank you for keeping me sober I would still like some money three weeks later after I started this a true story and you can look it up I get a phone call from a guy who says he's from this

foundation he's giving me thirty five thousand dollars that I'd never applied for asked for that somebody just put me up for and I so thought it was I thought it was my friend George playing a trick on me and say you don't fuck you George and I hang the phone up and the guy calls back and he

asked me on you know the speaker for when you can hear people laughing maniacally so I've never gotten money from prayer again and then Jen the Vence says well you must believe that there's some sort of guy I'm like no because they were meeting to give me that prize before I had stopped

drinking and started praying she said Jesus Christ and I would also talk to her all the time should say how can there be a God because look at the Holocaust how do she's like God didn't do the Holocaust people did the Holocaust like what are you mad at God for people did that God didn't do that has

nothing to do with God so that's how my prayer life started bizarre story I like bizarre so Ignatian exercises does that mean anything to you yes yes I became a Catholic I became a Catholic and I do something I practice a kind of spirituality called Ignatian spirituality which

when you become a Jesuit you go away to the Jesuit place or the Jesuit make in place so you do a quote you you go to Jesuit school and then they give you these thirty day exercises and the purpose of the exercises is to find God in all things so like this election just turned around

to look at my screen to see if we had any president so this election for instance just decide not somebody just sent me a text before we start recording and so the entire country has a electile dysfunction which I thought was pretty clever that was a clever turn of phrase yes oh my

heart no it really is so finding God in all things finding God in all things so that means you know like when the car breaks down instead of thinking you know your cruel fate you know has come to hurt you you so what you do actually Tim is in the morning I do a prayer and meditation

thing for twenty minutes where I do like centering prayer for maybe I don't know five six seven minutes and then I read a scripture and I meditate on the scripture and and then I have a bunch of people I pray for I have a list of people I pray for and things I pray for then at night

I do something called the examine of conscience where you it's not like going over your day making a list of good things that happened or whatever and then repenting for the bad things it sounds like that but it's not that what it is is you kind of press play on the recorder of your day so you

think I woke up and so what did I do where was I what mindset was I in and you close your eyes and you try to review your day literally like you're watching a movie and for you see moments of grace or luck or even something you know a good sandwich something yummy to eat you're supposed to save

her those moments and occupy those moments and it's a very body oriented exercise you're supposed to smell what do you smell what do you hear what do you taste how do your clothes feel you're supposed to really recreate that moment in a sensory way and thank God for the grace or the gift of

that and then you kind of press play again and you see moments where you turned away from God or you your best self didn't act and you say yeah I want to do better next time instead of snapping at the robo call voice snapping at Siri because she doesn't understand me love me for myself alone you

know to just you know tomorrow I'd like to be more patient help me to be more patient so what it does is it made those moments of gratitude and I also keep kind of a list or journal of those things and a prayer journal daily I don't keep a journal journal but I keep a daily prayer journal

and and I just will kind of highlight some of those things like for me today right now Steve Krenak he's haircut which I know he does himself I don't know the guy who delivers the big map thing on MSNBC I just like the guy I just like him every time I see him I feel like I'm spending the night

at my girlfriend's house and he's her nerdy brother who's like secretly hot I had this flash of panic so I was like oh fuck here's somebody important I'm not saying it's unimportant but I'm just saying oh god there's another guy I know someone the guy who delivers the darn you know what the electoral map says on MSNBC so if you're liberal you're like a nut and you watch this way other people watch other things so he's this really nerdy kind of math group guy who wears like khakis and

a really like a clip on Thai and has this really bad haircut and I just have a complete crush on him I just crush on him I don't even like young men I don't I really don't you have to have some you know you have to have a some hair coming out of yours for me to want to date you but this guy

just does it for me I just like him I'm just like wait a second tie that together for me is that does that mean anything to do with the prayer journal yes or were you just confessing that oh no no it's it's I have a crush on a ton of this guy who's on TV every day and it tickles me to see him

is kind of a little thrill it's a little thrill to see him it really is it's so stupid but it's also it makes me feel like a child it makes me feel like like I'm in junior high school and so there's something innocent and sweet about it also the fact that he's so dorky I like I just like that so you have a prayer journal you have the commonplace journal right right any other journals no that's it those two the prayer journal I don't really I only write like actually write and it's mostly kind

of looks like a list do you know what I'm saying it's mostly like a list of things like the lady at my drugstore who the my pharmacist who they were all out of you know the pneumonia vaccine I get pneumonia a lot and she went out of her way to call me and say you know I got you the pneumonia

again if you can come in right now that we had a cancellation I you know I can do the just kindness moments of kindness but also moments of presence and awareness of God a lot of people feel it in nature I feel a little bit in Central Park which is all the nature I have I am currently

in Austin Texas which is home based for me shut the front door yeah I've been here for three years I live in their public of Austin class public of Texas one of my favorite t-shirts not everyone's going to get this but is a shirt with the Texas flag which says most likely to secede

Jack quite like yes so I'm in Texas although you wind up down there would argue that I'm not in Texas but yeah I know right listen or do you have a weapon if you have a weapon you belong I do I do I don't get good for you what do you have can I ask him we talk weapons weapons yeah sure I have a

a seven millimeter wind mag is hunting rifle I have a clock 34 which is a nine millimeter I know what it is I know what a nine millimeter you know what a nine millimeter guy I'm not explaining it for you I'm explaining it just like getting on your knees not for not for God is for

you I'm explaining to the listeners so nine millimeter clock 34 I have an m and p 45 and a few other you hunt firearms that I don't use much I hunt but infrequently and that started in 2012 I always had a very negative association with hunting I just given my exposure to it kind of a great saying

yeah yeah I had a very negative association because I saw very irresponsible hunting on the island yeah and then in the process of working on the four hour chef and learning to forage I felt it was incumbent upon me to hunt and if I were to consume animal protein so

I had my first deer hunt with an incredible hunter and conservationist named Steve Rinella and that really completely shifted my lens on how ethical and responsible hunting could be now in Texas you have the whole spectrum from responsible to you know machine gunning hogs from helicopters

which I do not partake in although people could argue it's an invasive species etc etc but yes so I do hunt infrequently probably you know let's just call it once every year or two you know those havelina hogs are fun to shoot I'm sorry to say it I'm embarrassed to say it but I've

shot a havelina hog so I'm anti-gun but pro hunting so does that make sense it does I mean I'm just imagining these kind of backwood kiwis in New Zealand hunting hogs with knives walking into the woods barefoot which is a real thing I know one guy who did that so you can be pro hunting

while being anti-gun I think that's possible no but I mean if I were to hunt I would hunt with a gun but I'm it's funny one of my best friends is a young writer named Phil Lamar Shus and a mate is one of those guys who stalks his freezer with bow and arrow kill venison he called me this week

and said a very interesting just killed his a deer and he said you know the longer I hunt you know the only thing I hate about it is the killing I think there's a lot of shared sentiment to that but the by a lot of hunters yeah that I mean the most reverent people I know about the

natural world are practicing many of them are practicing hunters. True fact well I want to use this to tie a bunch of things together in the most awkward fashion possible that's okay because I've been up and trying to force fit a segue somewhere so I might as well do it here and do it and that is

to hear your description or explanation of how some of your wordsmithing came to be part of what I enjoy so much about your writing is that you have this let me get this right time critic Lev Grossman said in his review of lit car seems to have been born with the inability to write a dishonest or

boring sentence that's high praise now love him the least the least boring sentences for me and a god I wish I could remember it but you take this what seems like this sensitivity to language and poetry to create sentences using catch it sandwich metaphors and so on

which also seems to me and maybe this is you tell me if this is warranted or not but to be a very kind of Texan thing also it kind of makes me think of like a trial lawyer in God knows where in Texas right who gets up and just demolishes some slick trial attorney from Los Angeles in a complete

mismatch right I mean just dismantle someone with these really clever turns of phrase where does that come from or how did that develop in you because I do think it is one of your superpowers well I think growing up in Texas is it's a storytelling culture you know I Texas idiom is

poetry as far as I'm concerned and I had two great practitioners I'm a seventh generation Texan I'm a mother side and fifth generation of my daddy so my daddy was a great bar room storyteller I mean he was he was a labor union organizer for the oil chemical and atomic workers local

1242 and he was just funny as a crutch and told these amazing kind of tall tales like out of Mark Twain and but he also spoke in poetry like he would say like a woman with an ample behind he'd say she has a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag and for him that was a compliment

there was nothing insulting about that that he used to call me I'm a little skinny thing he used to call me a gimlet ass polka you need you need some tower on that ass you need you need you got you a gimlet ass I don't even know what that is but I knew it wasn't good a little flat butt or he

would say it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock you can scan that by the way it's raining like a cow pissing on flat rock what do you mean by scan real quick what I mean like like it shakes pierce a ambic pentameter or my first love poem that was ever written to me I saw you

on your horse today your eyes like eggs your hair like hey that's like it's a ambic pentameter it's da da da da da that's it doesn't matter what it is but you can hear it when I say it right that it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock and that you hit that flat rock it creates

for one thing it creates a whole landscape in which cows piss on flat rocks and people stand around a marble and go my goodness look he at that and then you attribute that to the rain it's a metaphor it operates way beyond the bounds of propriety it's not how you talk in church you're not

supposed to talk like this so the minute you say this and somebody laughs at it you have them they're in your boat they have transgressed by laughing at your joke well daddy was just the master of a story but he was also a poetic imagery I mean to me that poetry I grew up I was steeped in it my

mother who was an enormous reader who read everything Chinese history and Russian novels and philosophy and just read everything was just the master of you know I remember when she was dying she had all these old men she were always trying to marry her which why but she's dying she's

actively dying and one of these old boyfriends has come to see her at the hospital in Houston and the nurse been suffering says miss car your husband's here to see you and she says well he must look like shitties been dead 20 years and you know I mean she just can't stop herself from saying like

the most horrible thing you've ever thought and so I think between the two of them and just growing up in in Texas the idiom the language I grew up with is epically beautiful and the need to not be boring when you speak you know people will I'm a stompa mud hole in your ass that is so

much better than I'm gonna whip your ass it's just like yeah right my friend doony got in a fight once for the guy in a bar and the guy said and he told the greatest story about it it was actually the guy he decided to stab he went out and his truck and got a knife and came back with like a

Swiss army knife and he starts thanks and this guy who was a state congressman by the way I won't tell you his name but he starts chasing him around this bar well to brandish a weapon in a place where alcohol is served as a mandatory I think 10 years sentence seven 10 some big you know it's

not they it's frowned upon and he's chasing this guy around and wanted somebody says to Danny at one point that's a little video knife you got through you said well notice he don't want to get stabbed by it and then he runs out and then it we hear the sirens so here come the say here comes all

woo doony runs out he gets in his truck and one of those mall cops security guys runs out and doony says he stands in front of my truck in front of my headlights he's got a belt buckle that will pick up HBO and he holds his hands up and goes halt halt and doony just puts it in first gear

and hits the guy I mean he doesn't hit him hard but he knocks him down and then leaves and gets pulled over in his convinced he's going to prison for brandish in this weapon for trying to hit this guy but anyway it turns out he had to call the guy to apologize the guy's daddy new doony

standing and he said all he wants you to is apologize and do this like apologize you know I'll blow the guy like I don't want to go to jail of course I'll apologize but here's the punchline this where he and this is what makes doony my still my best friend since I was 15 so he calls the guy

out and the guy answers probably goes and doony goes I am so sorry man about last time I am so sorry and the guy says you almost killed me and doony says man I'm so sorry I didn't know it was you don't you want to say that though the next time somebody happened I didn't know it was you

the next time you do some harmful things next time I get and I really stupid I know my girlfriend that's what I'm going to use don't want to say I didn't know it was you honey I don't know only in the state of Texas do you have that story it's just got all the elements of a Texas story

how could I not love it down there I mean oh my god let's talk about revision okay revision that's not serious I'm a big advisor but so you have said you know anyone who's read a rough draft of anything I write it's just shocked at how bad it is it's terrible and what does the process

look like I mean I know this is a very hopefully doesn't sound like a really naive question because I know that there's a there are many many aspects to revision I'll lead with just a bit this is from writer mag.com but Carstice takes a hard look at every sentence she writes can I make the sentence

less boring more interesting prettier more colorful more true so that's a teaser what does your revision process look like because I've read that you threw out something like 1200 pages throughout 1200 pages of lit yeah finished pages too that's not draft and that was written over about I want

to say five or six years and I remember when I threw it out Tim I was so upset I had been well first off they were about they were about to hang me I was so late I was like seven years late on a contract I mean they and so I finally my agent called me and said you know you're going to

have to I said you know what I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don't shut up and leave me alone it's just gonna take me a minute so anyway so I'd send them I don't know I'd send them like 130 140 pages and my editor at the time estimated that I'd thrown out 1200

pages and let me tell you when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked I mean I knew they sucked when they sent them which fight them want to send them I wanted to keep working on them so I just I went to bed for like two days and I watched you know Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of

cooking shows and I ordered a lot of curry I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathroom and then I called Don DeLolo is one of the people I call it's like you know the nuclear button you know who's like just one of the great novelist who also happens to be a

friend of mine and I said Don I I think I'm writing him he's like what are you crying about I said I think I'm writing a bad book and he said well who doesn't and I thought about that and I thought God he's right tall stories written bad but I mean people I read you know every writer I know is

written a bad book okay so maybe it's just supposed gonna be a bad book but it's the book that's standing in line to be written and I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time

I think one example I give in the art of memoir is that when I'm my mother is driving me to college and I think the sentence I started with was something like mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon we stopped every night at the holiday in and got drunk on screwdrivers

I can't remember might have said puke and drunk on screwdrivers I somehow was able to remember being in that car the thing about my mother's yellow station wagon was that it didn't have an air conditioner so that at that time you could buy an air conditioner that strapped under the dashboard well it would build up condensation and when she turned right and I was sitting in the you know shotgun the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet and it was icy icy

cold water and I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas and she was drinking vodka drive and drinking vodka and orange juice and eat in these watching our eat a peach you know when you're 17 years old to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is

just so horrifying you just want to die there's just nothing uglier than watching another eat a peach when you're 17 you just think my god woman shut your mouth take a smaller bite Jesus it's not going anywhere you know but I the smell of the peaches and being in the and suddenly

I remembered that I had a copy of a hundred years of solitude that was her book but I had started reading and she said read it aloud to me and I remembered reading that book and driving and I remembered you know you grow up around these kind of Texas dirt forms I mean there's plenty of

corporate farming in the state of Texas but then you get to the Midwest and it's just so organized is just there aren't the rested cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch you know it's these rows and rows of corn and these big cinnamon colored silos and I remember driving into

that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn't do well at school that I would fail I

been such a screw up you know I've been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail I didn't because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper and I still remember sitting in hit she came

to pick me up wearing a leopard she leopard skimpy jamas it was July 4th and she had on a beaver coat with a mint collar and those leopard skimpy jamas in the in this hot night in Coons County Texas and here sits this judge behind this is liver spotted judge with these palsy hands and

every meal is every known as tie when she came to pick me up and he said I remember your mother she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen and she said oh you old fool I mean it was just like oh my god mother get me out of here sucking up is underrated so anyway yeah I think it's

memory it's I do an exercise I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine Dana Spietta wonderful young novelist I teach with and she's teaching an undergraduate class and I said you know I want to do this right there are 90 kids in the class I said I want to do this writing

exercise she well they're writing you know it's been uneven and I said trust me every one will write well and you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell to try to remember a room your mother your mother's cooking your grandmother river you had a good

meal when you were little and try to close your eyes and smell that because you know smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory and it's stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts you try to get in that memory and

interrogate your body about what you can smell taste touch and then finally what you want what are you yearning for and what's keeping you from getting it maybe it's a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer or what's going to keep

you from getting it it's my big-footed sister who as daddy said nothing ever got between her in a bag of groceries you know she's going to get all the oysters and I won't get any and so it's really more about trying to occupy a former self because I think as you know just as in trauma

the body remembers the body also remembers beauty it also remembers pleasure and love and those other things too so the body keeps the score and if you go excavating for these memories sometimes there are costs associated with that yeah I've read that while you were working on

the lyres club that you'd suddenly fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon as if you'd driven all night and you would sob you'd really suffer what did you do to cope with that pain and I should just say you know I were chatting before the recording about trauma a bit and you know I've

recently described some of my childhood sexual abuse and the podcast that I did related to it didn't seem to exact a horrifying toll but the process years before of trying to write about it and getting a very very rough draft brutalized me and just left me paralytic for got more than

six months in some ways and I just yeah thank you for saying that and I'm horrified by the experience and also fascinated by it in a way because I don't know why those two things should be so different and I just love to hear you expand a bit on the price that you've paid or your experience

with dredging up a lot of these memories or recalling them putting them down and why writing seems at least in my experience to be so different from some other forms of expressing these things well I mean because you're alone I mean that's for me where the prayer and the God comes in I do have

a sense now that I didn't have back in the day I mean when I by the time I started writing Liars Club how old was I I don't know 35 I've been in therapy for 16 years and I'd also had a prayer practice for you know I'm meditation and prayer practice for some years I hadn't converted

I wasn't a Christian I didn't I was a Catholic but I was about to become Catholic and I was very active in recovery programs and I had a sponsor and I also had based on all of those efforts I had done a lot of the processing and recovery I had blown down to Texas when I was 23 years old and got my mother drunk on margaritas and told her you know you tried to kill me with a butcher knife and it's not because I was a bad kid and it ruined my life and what the hell was wrong with you what

was going on you know I had done a lot of that work before I and I tell people when they tell me they want to write a memoir about some horrible stretch of childhood or some awful period of trauma maybe they don't maybe they don't right now so I think I had a sense of you know when I was

drinking my idea of medicating myself or anesthetizing myself that was all I knew how to do that was what my parents told me to that was all they knew how to do was try to drink it away hear my daddy was in the battle of the bulge I mean he went in Normandy and he came out at

Bucamall I mean that's plenty of trauma plus being married to my mother would have been simple there's only one person with a weapon supposed to the Nazis so yeah I think I'm a big fan of a hot bath I'm a big fan of nutritious food I'm a big fan of cardio even now I mean I'm 65 I don't

do five dance classes a week but I get up in the morning and I walk four miles and then I do Pilates three or four times a week and I take a dance class a couple times a week and all those things keep me in my body and when I'm in a lot of pain I take care of myself when I was drinking I

felt like I had this screaming baby that I was holding and I was screaming at it all the time to shut up so yeah I think I still have even writing anything now I find very I'm not dealing with anything like that I'm so much but I'm also I'm so much happier now than I've ever been in my life

I mean I'm 65 years old I've never been so happy in my life I've never been less good looking had less social power had you know any of the things that you would think would make me happy joys and free and I'm just I wake up every day really feeling lucky to be alive and feeling loved

and feeling like not every day I mean I wake up plenty of days and I'm you know mad as an old stompissant but most of my days are pretty lit up and it's a lifetime of practice so I tell a lot of my students my young students you know want to write about sexual assault or trauma of various

kinds well maybe why don't you get some treatment for this first why don't you treat your heart first treat your body treat yourself with a lot of care and see if this is what you want to write about right now something you can write about maybe five years from now or something you know

what advice would you give yourself about therapy if you were talking to your 19 or 20-year-old self and how are you first convinced to go to therapy remember you mentioning that long ago you know I didn't have to be convinced I mean here's the other thing yeah no and there were

a lot of people saying gee I wish you'd stop drinking I mean I let a pretty isolated existence the way a lot of people who grew up the way I grew up do I mean my idea of telling somebody how I felt I remember right before I stopped drinking I remember I was teaching sort

of all over the academic ghetto around Boston but I remember specifically one day at Tufts I was copying something for a class and I was I dropped my kid off like vomiting out the side of the car before I dropped him off the daycare I mean and then I dropped to Tufts and I was zero-oxing

something and somebody said how you doing Mary and I was like you know I want to blow my fucking brains out and that was my idea of telling somebody how I felt making a glib sort of awkward socially awkward statement to somebody I hardly knew and I've been in therapy them for a while

but I was also drinking every day everything I could get my medicine so what is good therapy to you because therapy is is a term that's extremely broad it's kind of like saying medicine right exactly there's so many different specialties what has proven to be good

therapy for you you know I think it totally depends on the on the person I mean the best there the best therapist I ever had I think I mean for me the difference in therapy and recovery I think in therapy I'm the baby and they're the mommy and that model sort of especially when I first

started I just felt like I needed a lot of nurturing and I had great therapist you know my first therapist when I look back on things he said and it was insane he would have been fired he told me to go down after he'd been seeing me nimes and confront my homicidal suicidal mother about all

this horrible stuff she'd done to me and I did it and he said I won't see you until you do it well I mean nobody's ever done for a pound yeah I know I mean I look back on I was like he was crazy nobody's ever I had a great therapist who my son was a baby who was a psychologist PhD

psychologist and who really helped me try to learn how to be a mother when I hadn't had one and all the feelings that come up around what you didn't get when you were a child when you have a child the protection and stuff it's funny my son watches me with his daughter now and just says I

don't know sort of gives me nothing but a stroke and I said let me just tell you I was not this good with you like I was crazy about you and I loved you but I didn't have what I have now that I have with her that's just I don't even break a sweat going in there I can do this stuff it's funny I was

in I maybe sit one or two days a week I was in Prospect Park this week and I had taken her across the park in a stroller and a thunderstorm broke out I mean pouring rain and I've never shared DNA with somebody this good nature as this baby this baby koo smiles last never cries I mean sleeps

eats is just the best nature kid I I used to babysit in high school in college so I've taken care of a lot of babies and she's just the easiest kid I get across the thing is pouring rain and she starts screaming crying like she's being beaten and I take her out of the stroller and I hold

her and she calms down I go to put her back in the stroller she just starts screaming crying again well it's two miles across a muddy field in the pouring rain and I've got a stroller and a bunch of crap and I've got this you know 27 pound unit screaming unit and I just had no problem doing it

and when I was 40 years old 35 years old it would have been like being beaten with a house I just thought you know what daddy was in the battle of the bulge this is not that hard you know I just had the physical energy even at my age that I didn't know I had to do it and I

got back to the house and I went to fold up the stroller there was four inches of freezing water in the bottom of the stroller that I've been putting her in and she was soaked through to her skin yeah the recite she was perfectly reasonable to be you know now I understand I could have just

emptied it out and put her in the stroller and wrapped her up in a blanket but I didn't know what it was but I just thought well I'll get her home and it'll be fine you know I didn't feel like oh my god oh my god I'm a terrible mother and I'm gonna wind up trying to stab her with a butcher knife

which is how I felt when my kid was at age you know I didn't know that I wasn't gonna be my mother I wasn't I didn't know that so scary that is scary yeah super scary and you know it sounds like please crack me from wrong but that you've learned in some form or fashion or maybe many forms

and fashions to where the world like a loose garment I'd love to know if you agree or disagree because based on my reading okay so your first confession absolutely not no preset to you where the world like a loose garment what does that mean to you well I mean I think it's not you know the problem

isn't whatever your mind is telling you the problem is the problem is the fear and for me the solution to fear is curiosity and presence and I can't be terrified and curious at the same time and so when I was walking the baby across the field just all I was was physically uncomfortable

I mean I was thinking gee can I shove this thing and hold her moose you know and get everything and get all this stuff how am I gonna do you know and so I went crossways across the mud field so I'm shoving the stroller and carrying her I didn't know physically if I could do it I've

said sort of dubious I was thought maybe I can't do this but all I had to do was do it I thought well if I get tired I'll sit down it'll rain on me a minute then I'll get up and go again like that's what we'll do but I don't know here's the way I put it I tell people it's like I have a trick

knee it's like most of the time I walk fine I run fine I can you know squat more than my body weight and do advanced Pilates for an hour and ten minutes and I'm tough as a boot but there days that I don't feel that way or there are moments where I get my knee goes out and I fall on the ground

all I have to do is honor those moments all I have to do is I have a heating pad I have a weighted blanket my kids have a pit bowl I'll bring to stay with me while an idiot is my little comfort animal you know I call people I still have a sponsor I still have a therapist I don't talk to

all the time but I didn't have to be convinced to go into therapy I knew I needed it but when I first started it as you know it was just so damn painful and I just for those of your listeners out there if you're having a hard time I just want to say it's like you lance a boil and the

infection straining off and if you can just get by that it's going to tell you that it's endless but it's not endless there's a bottom to it so did you ever smoke you never did I was never smoker yeah you're just such a jog you're such a specimen you're such a specimen well we're all

specimens it depends on how we look on the autopsy table but the the I was born premature so I have respiratory issues on my left lung and that was part of it so I had a lot of breathing issues growing up to begin with and secondly I was sports saved me so sports kept me out of a lot of

trouble yeah you know I was good at sports and then I quit when I was like I quit I'm much more of a jog now than I was then you know I want to ask about smoking yeah I was going to ask you about smoking because when you quit smoking there's a phenomenon that happens it's also when you quit

drinking but somehow it's more intense when you smoke you'll have a craving for cigarette and the craving is as intense as it was the first day you quit it's as overpowering but if you just keep note of how long the craving lasts and how many of them there are there are as intense

but they're not as long and as frequent so it's the same thing about suffering when you first start therapy or you first lance that boil and you're unearthing some of the painful things you grew up with it's as intense the first day and you just feel like oh my god I'm in the burn

ward and I just got snatched out of the fire and I every answer me hurts and I want to run screaming down the street like my hair is on fire and it just won't last as long as it did the first time and so for your listeners if you know if you're just you know looking at hard things that you

grew up with or you're trying to quit smoking trying to quit drinking trying to recover from trauma I promise you I will send you money if this is not true that it will get easier it's not linear and there will be those days when it's as painful as the first day and you'll think but I'm

no better than I was but you are you just it doesn't feel that way yeah excellent advice just a few more questions I'm having so much fun I can go forever but I you got what you do do I do I though I don't know I mean it's very nice to do you live well I spend most of my time downtown

for recording and then live in the burbs outside of that I love it in Austin and expect to be here for quite some time I wanted to move here right after college I didn't get the job and there was more ones they screwed up yeah well you know possibly I also think that that could have been

and everyone's best interest really I think I make it quite terrible employee in most circumstances me too but at the time and you know I didn't expect this to lead here but at the time that I was not given the green light to get an offer from trilogy software way back in the day it seemed

like a death blow right this seemed like the end of the world because I put a lot of eggs in that basket I didn't want to do anything that was recruiting on campus really otherwise and I listened to and watched your circus university commencement speech and so nice of you and then I

read transcript and I think this is from the speech unless it was sort of mistranscribed but here's the paragraph almost every time I was super afraid it was of the wrong thing and stuff that first looked like the worst most humiliating thing that could ever happen almost always led me to something

extraordinary and very fine so my question is could you give us an example of that that comes to mind how can you be something humiliating it could be a favorite failure but anything that I'll tell you what it turns out when I first did a kind of moral inventory and recovery that they encourage

you to do I had a lot of resentments against God when you say they this is in 12-step program yeah and uh John the bone you know John the bone phrase like one of the things I really resented God for my son who was just this little beautiful blonde hair blue eyed in a tank of a boy a natural kind

of athlete when he was little he was sick all the time I mean he would get a cold and he would get these sinus infections his fever would go to like 105 we'd rush him to children's hospital in Boston it was terrifying we're always rushing to emergency rooms because his fever was so bleeding

high and just so terrifying and so I never slept I never slept and I was depressed I was probably postpartumally depressed and I was drinking I by then I had started I decided drinking would help me take care of a sick child great idea mere it's like the bad mom in the

after school special and so what and I remember so when it came time to do Ignatian spiritual exercise usually trying to fight God in all things where is God in that where is God in a sick baby I'll tell you secret when I actually looked at my life and the decisions I was making I would have

kept drinking if I'd had one of those playboy babies you know that like sleeps 12 hours a night and never is sick and just you know kuzin cuddles and like and and I have been able to I would have kept drinking if I'd had my granddaughter who's like the easiest like 12 hour night sleeper eats

everything you give her laughs at everything you do I would have kept drinking I could not physically drink the way a real alcohol needs to drink and take care of a kid who was sick all the time couldn't do it and work and make a living I couldn't do all those things is too hard

and so I don't think God sent pathogens into my infant son's body I don't know how any of this works but when I ask where God is in this my own physical discomfort forced me to get sober so my sister died this summer very suddenly a pancreatic cancer and less than a week

yeah I'm sorry too you know we were not in touch we had a terrible childhood and we had not been really in touch for seven years and that was my choice and I remember saying do my therapist isn't it going to be terrible when she dies she said yeah it's going to be terrible anyway

and although it's horrible that she's dead there's nothing I feel my love for her I don't have to defend myself against my love for her the way I did when we were estranged I can cherish and remember all the times we were there for each other all the ages we were in each other's lives

and I would give anything for her to be alive but I still think our not being in touch was the best thing for both of us you know I don't regret that and there's this amazing gift to me of being in touch now with her son and her husband and her stepchildren and I would give anything if

she were alive but there are gifts in this suffering that are real spiritual gifts I practice when things happen that I find very disappointing my son had a film coming out his first feature film coming out at Tribeca Film Festival and it's a global pandemic and so there is no Tribeca Film

Festival and he's raised somehow all this money and put years worth of work in and moved to heaven and earth and you know what the films being released he's got a great distribution deal he just won best director at frightfest and you know it's unfolding just the way it needs to unfold

it's getting curious about where the light is you know just being curious about where the light is getting curious about where the light is and the all powerful reframe and it is really incredible what can happen as you said when you really get curious I have to say this on here Tim because I

have to say it I just I have so many young people who come to me about sexual assault so many young men who have come to me my students young writers young poets and you're being open about this on this podcast is just been such a gift to all these young men thank you so good for you so good

for you so a horrible thing that happened to you that's being used to help a lot of give a lot of people hope and it's going to prompt a lot of healing I hope so and I've seen seen a lot come out of the woodwork and it's been simultaneously and I know you've experienced this certainly

it's been simultaneously appalling rewarding and brutal in a way I mean it's all of those things I mean there's a lot of pain and beauty in it and you know I'll just mention that of my closest male friends and they really aren't that many I don't collect friends like in a little porcelain

tea cups or whatever people collect I have a fairly small ish circle and I would say 30% of my closest male friends reached out to me after that podcast to describe their own experiences with sexual abuse that I know nothing about and these are people I've known for a very long time

so I hope they're healing of course there is we're living look we're not curled up on the backwards and mental institutions and we both could be yeah very true well we're we're going to talk again and I want to ask one more one more question which sometimes is a dead end

I'll own that if it is okay then but we'll see where it goes the question is if you could put anything on a billboard metaphorically speaking to reach billions of people however many you want a word of phrase a question a quote a poem anything what might you put on that that's so hard core

oh my god that is really god that's a little it's aggressive it's aggressive it's hard it's aggressive it really is it's a little haveling hogs as a pack of haveling hogs running out of the bushes and and it doesn't have to be the one and only this could just be the first billboard

the first billboard you know put down that gun you need a sandwich um you need a sandwich and a hot bath no I know what I would put I would put 90% of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath that's what I'd put I love I love that well Mary this

has been so much fun I've really really enjoyed this people can find you at your website uh Mary car dot com that's Mary Karr r r dot com twitter at Mary car lit LIT so anything else you'd like to say suggest ask no just let's let's all heal let's all heal as a country no matter how

different we think we are we're all suffering souls and we all want to heal this driven country of hours so that's what I'm wishing for all of us and wishing everybody a lot of love and light today and a big nice cigar here here you're here you're here

curious look for the light thank you Mary everybody take care you go do you I will and to everybody listening we'll link to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes a Timed up log forward slash podcast and until next time thanks for listening

hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter

my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind of like my diary of cool things

it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them

with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash friday drop in your email and you'll get

the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by eight sleep I have been using eight sleep pod cover for years now why well by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like fitted sheet you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed eight

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