Understanding Identity and How Our Past Shapes Who We Become with Catherine Gray

Published Nov 8, 2024, 1:00 PM

In this episode, Catherine Gray discusses identity and how our past shapes who we become.  She shares her journey from writing non-fiction to crafting her first novel, which contains some themes from her life experiences. Catherine also delves into the ongoing battle between nature and nurture in forming our personalities and addictive tendencies as well as the impact of our choices in determining our future.

Key Takeaways:

  • The power of small decisions in shaping our life's trajectory
  • How attachment styles influence our relationships and behaviors
  • The challenges of new parenthood and societal pressures on mothers
  • The subtle ways we manipulate narratives in our daily interactions
  • Strategies for breaking free from people-pleasing tendencies

For full show notes, click here!

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I do think all of us have the capacity to be manipulative, and being aware of it is just half of the battle.

Really, Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Katherine Gray, who is a return guest on The One You Feed podcast. She's a best selling author who has sold over a half a million books in English speaking territories alone. Her books have been translated into ten languages and received much acclaim from New York Times, BBC Breakfast and Radio Two. Today. Eric and Catherine discuss her newest book, which is a novel called Versions of a Girl.

Hi, Catherine, welcome back.

Hi, thanks for having me back.

I don't know if this is three or four for having you on, but it's been a good number and you're always one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I'm happy to have you back. We're going to be discussing something new for you, which is a novel instead of a nonfiction book, and it's called Versions of a Girl. But before we get into that, will start like we always do with the Parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops, they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, and the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do.

I love the parable and for me. So whenever I had my daughter, I became a parent age forty two years ago, and something happened which really made me think about the parable a lot. In that my bedtime routine became completely disrupted. And for many many years now, every night before I go to sleep, I write a list of gratitudes, and a lot of that is to counter the fact that I have such a negatively biased brain, as most of us do, and left unattended, my brain will become, you know, a doomsayer, a nihilist. It will focus on everything that's going wrong and everything that could go wrong. And I found it was actually a magical cure from my insomnia, this writing of all the positive things that were happening could potentially happen. And yeah, as I say, when I had my daughter, that just fell on the customer own floor because of tiredness, and you know, you schedule goes out of the window, and for six months I became very, very negative and irritable towards myself. So it really does make a difference what you feeded your brain, and for me, I need that nightly diet of positivity otherwise my brain goes to a dark neighborhood, and yeah, I have to really call it back. So that's what it means to me, Lovely.

Did you experience any postpartum depression? Was that part of the irritability and all that, or how was that time for you? Because I know it can certainly be challenging.

I definitely felt the hormones. I've read that the hormonal surge that you received during pregnancy and also thereafter, which apparently lasts about two years, is akin to feeling pre menstrual all the time. Now when I'm pre menstrual, I don't get tiery like a lot of other people do, but I do get very irritable, even sometimes murderous. I haven't got murdered anybody yet, So I didn't experience postpartum depression. I experienced what is a lesser known offshoot of it, which was postpartum rage. And this wasn't directed anybody in my life apart from potentially myself and the items in my fridge. So I found myself doing things like throwing peppers at the law, which do not do that. It creates a mighty mess, and also a tub of hermes, which again really bad things to throw. Fact. Yeah, yeah, that's completely settled down now, but I've really struggled with it, and also the tiredness, and that just everything that you can't predict is going to happen to your life happens. And yeah, it was a tough period. But I'm through and I'm out and I'm okay, and all I've murdered is some peppers.

Good. I'm glad that that's been the extent of the damage.

You know.

A couple thoughts come to mind there. I mean, I do think the first couple of years after having a child can be very difficult, just the sleep, all of it. And I think it's a beautiful time, but it's a very trying time for many people. The other thing is you were talking that I thought about was this is interesting because in men, depression is often diagnosed by irritability. Interesting, that's the way it manifests. So for me, my depression manifests is general deadness and irritability. Rue just irritable with every little thing for no good reason. Right, It's the sort of stuff that you know, at least I know, I'm like, there's no reason to be irritated by this, but yet I am.

Yeah, and it's one of those emotions that you really tend to beat yourself up about because you're like, I should be better than this. I shouldn't, I shouldn't be irritated by this, and yes I am, so what do I do? So it was a really hard time for me. The only time I can liken it too would be early recovery, although the emotions were different because in early recovery I didn't feel like that, but yeah, it was. It was a similarly challenging time. I would say.

Yeah, so this latest book is a work of fiction. Your previous books have been memoirs about recovery. How are they described?

Well, they're often described as a hybrid because they're not just memoirs. So my story does feature in them. Then I go off and explore journalistically all of the research, talk to experts, and also weave in lots of self help you tips and tricks. So it's like a hybrid between those two. And yeah, so I've done four of those now, and this is my first fiction. It's my debut novel.

I think we may have only talked about three of those. We must have missed one. I don't know which one, but we'll sort that out off air. But the fiction is. I told you that. I think the book is amazing. I was captivated from the very first sentence. Any book that basically says in a way she's looking forward to prison as a place of starting is so good. Like I'm like, well, okay, I have to know who is she and why is she going to prison and what's wrong with her life enough that she actually is looking forward to it. It's a great start.

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. I love a bit of crime in any novel. Yes, I love somebody to Die and possible, you know, softing out who did it and why and you know what happened. So for me, it was a really key lynchpin that sort of crime aspect. Although it's not a crime novel. It's coming of age more than crime. But I guess it's a blend of the two.

It's a blend. I mean, there's definitely a who done it in it that runs through the whole book, right, Yeah, there's a character who is murdered and you don't know who through most of the book, and it seems significant, So I would say, yeah, it's kind of a mix of too. But the heart of the book is really about why don't you describe the coming of age and the split between Fern and Flick. You'll do better than I will.

Okay. So the book opens on a fourteen year old girl. She's called Flann. She's spent equal years with each of her parents. Her parents are divorced, they've been separated for a long time, and her parents are very, very different. Her father is a hell raiser. He lives hunt to mouth in Californian motel. He's a borderline genius. He means well, but he's mostly a disaster. Her mother is this ex ballerina who lives this gorgeous life in a London townhouse. Her biggest concern is what you think of her. She's more of a helicopter parent. And an unexpected visitor comes along and throws Ferm, the main character, a dilemma as to whether she stays with her father in California or goes back to her mother in London. So it's an exploration of how your dominant parent and how your dominant home life can shape your future trajectory. The story splits and then we follow both versions of the same character over the next twenty one years and see how they unfold and how they're shaped differently and how they shape similarly as well. So I wrote the first draft when I was pregnant and I was obsessed with nature versus nature, and this is what came out. So I think it's really an exploration of the kind of parent that I want to be and the kind of parent that I don't want to be. I would say, if you boil the book down to one central theme, it's the parent and child relationship. I think that would be it, because there's lots of different examples in the book of how that dynamic unfolds. And what's interesting is the parent in the book that arguably commits the biggest crime in in verse Econa, this is the one who comes off probably the best because of the way that they deal with what they did. So, yeah, it's childhood character shaping addictions and different forms, recoveries in different forms. There's lots of juicy topics in there that were fun to play with, especially with the dual timeline narrative and.

What age remind me. The two of them sort of splits how old fourteen fourteen, So up till fourteen, they're one person. They've lived the same life. At the age of fourteen one decides to go back to London to see her mother, who she's not seen in a long time. The other, at the last minute, decides not to get on the plane, and at that point they're two separate stories.

Exactly.

What I find fascinating about that is that it is nature versus nurture. But what you've got is both. Right, You've got someone who's got the same genetic makeup, someone who had the same formative year experience, but yet at the age of fourteen, they go different directions and their lives unfold very very different, And it's just interesting to think about. As a parent. I think you always think about, like, how long does what I do as a parent matter? And there's a lot of research out there that shows like it's the first few years. Those are so formative, right, Yeah, But what I love about the book is, yes, those first years are formative, but it also shows that that influence does not end at fourteen, even though it's less than it was when you're young. These two girls take very different paths from the age of fourteen, largely based on the environment theory.

Yeah, I think everything that is coming out recently says that the first three years are the most key, and if you get those rights, almost like you're fine. But I also think that launch into adulthood those years of I would define it as fourteen to twenty one, especially with so many young adults living at home now. I mean I rickcheted back to my home many times over my twenties and even early thirties. So it's so important that the way that you're sort of finished and pushed into the world and the messages that you get in adolescence when you're figuring out who you are, and also how you know, romantic relationships come into play, and also your use of substances come into play as well, and you know, we often do what our parents do rather than what they say we should do. So it was really fun to play with. And also because the same set of characters in each timeline are doing different things, there's that butterfly effect. So in the timeline where Burn stays with their father who's wrestling with a savage addiction to alcohol, because she spends a lot more time with him, the effect on him is different than in the timeline when she leaves right and he becomes famous in the other timeline for his music because he's a really talented musician, and that has an impact as well. I really wanted to explore also the idea that money doesn't necessarily solve things. In many ways, it can make being okay harder because you have the money to numb the consequences and pay to get yourself out of trouble almost And if you're surrounded by yes people as well, that can have delayed effects on any sort of self realization and improvement that you want to make. So I wanted to play with that as well.

Yeah, it's really fascinating the way that unfolds. And I think what you said there is really important about adolescence in that we put into action what we've learned about romantic relationships. And again, by and large, that's when substances, you know, drugs, alcohol, come online for us. And what I think is interesting about the two characters, and you mentioned this in an email to me, is you know, thinking about their attachment styles. We've done episodes before about attachment styles, anxious attached versus avoidantly attached versus securely attached. Right, And neither of the girls is securely attached. And that happened early, right, that's when that forms, It forms early on and so neither of them had a life that would have been securely attached. But it is interesting that in those adolescent years their attachment styles avoidant and anxious come to the play. They each have a different one, and so I think it further shows this idea. How yes, a lot of things are formative in those first few years, but they're not definitive.

Yeah, there's a fourth attachment style that often people don't read about. It's disorganized attachment, which basically means that you're both.

That phrase too. I mean you could just call it like both or dual attachment styles. But the fact that it's called disorganized and I think I have that one cracks me up, Like, like, who knows what's going to happen?

Could go either way. Yeah, basically, I think the easiest way of thinking about it. So John Bowlby, who I believe, came up with a theory of attachment style and did a lot of groundbreaking work on it in the sixties. He theorized that it happens in the first five years of life and ultimately, if you have a secure, consistent, safe relationship and home life, then you are likely to grow up to be securely attached. Whereas if you do not, then you are likely to grow up to be either anxious, avoid or both, which is disorganized, and I definitely relate to that. Mostly I skew anxious, but that is because I'm very attracted to avoidant people, and so therefore that tweaks my anxious side, whereas when I have dated secure people and also anxious people, I skew avoidant. But ultimately, what you're subconscious is trying to do in this awful recreation of your early years is to stop you being stable and to almost keep things unstable, because that's what you're used to, and we repeat what we don't repair, and so it's almost if you do find yourself in a secure relationship, I will burn things down, I will blow them up. I will find a way to make them unstable. But the awareness of that is the key to changing it. So that's why the two different versions of Fern, one of them skews anxious and one of them skews avoidant, because of the relationships that they're in. And that was really fun to play with as well and really made me think about myself. I think while I was writing the book, I did actually realize I am both and before that, I would have told you that I was anxious because I really related to the avoidant character as well.

Yeah, you more or less described the way I am in relationship if I'm not bringing a lot of consciousness to it, which is, if you are attached to me, I'm going to run away. On the other hand, if you're not attached to me, I'm going to chase you. But there's going to be a certain amount of distance between us either way. And yeah, right, just whichever way you move, I'm going to move the opposite way exactly. It's just perverse. I guess that perverse makes it sound like it's a willful thing. It's just baked into me. Now I've become very conscious of it, and I'm better able to work with it than I used to be. But that pattern haunted all my relationships until this one.

Yeah, if somebody was really into me and they were like I want this, you know, I want to get married and have kids with you, that there was nothing more likely to turn me off. I've had some psychologists describe it to him really brilliantly, and she said, it's like a box dance where you know, like you said, you always maintain that distance. So if somebody steps towards you, you step away, and that just carries on none and none and on until you finally break the pattern by being aware of those urges and impulses and trying to counter them. And I'm now engaged to a long term partner. We have a child together, we have a house, and he excuse avoidant, and I've just sort of accepted that's my fate. You know, I am destined to end up with avoidance. But thankfully he is aware of being avoidant. And I'm very aware that that tweaks my anxious sides. But it doesn't mean that it's not without challenges. It presents many challenges as dynamic, so we have to work with that constantly and be aware of it.

Yeah. I think what's interesting about that is, as you said, you know the pattern, know my pattern, it doesn't stop the feeling coming up, Yeah, of wanting to pull away or wanting to grasp that still emerges within me. It's just as you said, I have most of the time enough awareness to go okay, hang on. That's just an old pattern, and it's similar to how we learn to work with not drinking early on. Right, The desire to drink emerges, but we learn how to handle it differently, although I will say it is different in the sense at least for most people who are in long term recovery, the desire to drink or use just disappears, kind of vanishes, but the feelings that caused us to want to do that don't.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I think what happens is you just learn to deal with them in other ways. That's maybe why it fades into complete obscurity, because you've actually just assemble the whole new toolbox, the things that you do instead of drinking. And I'm now eleven years sober. I just turned eleven at the weekend, and I honestly never missed it, crave it, wants it. It doesn't even occur to me now, no matter what is going on in my life, Like when I was talking about that postpart and rage that I experienced, my hand never itched for a drink because that's just not part of my coping strategy toolbox now. So I have just so many other ways that I deal with that, And yeah, it does fade, and it's lovely exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm in Amsterdam right now and I was a heavy marijuana smoker. In my using days, I loved it. It was up there with alcohol, and I've been getting used to this over the last few years as it's become legal in parts of the US. Also because with alcohol, I just became immune to it because it was all around me all the time.

Yeah, it's omnipresent. You literally can't get away from it. That's really interesting. I've never thought about how the legalization of marijuana could affect people who are in recovery from addiction from marijuana.

Yeah, because all of a sudden it's showing up yeah again in a way that it hadn't before. It also has the allure of sometimes what a new drink will have to somebody who's in recovery, Like, oh, I never got to try that drink, right, It's like, oh, there's all these different types of weed I could try, and I could just go shopping for it. So even with that, though, my point in bringing that up is I walk by pot stores all the time here in Amsterdam and it smells like weed outside of all of them, and I just have it's a flicker. It's just a flicker of a like hm. I used to like that, and then it just kind of dies away, you know, and it's so minor, but it's weird to see it occasionally brought up. I imagine it's what would happen to me if suddenly they start selling heroin on street corners. I'd probably that long dormant part of me would probably be like, well hold on, you know, like I still won't watch any sort of like needle being used in any way in a movie or on me. I you know, close my eyes. I just I don't want to see it because it's triggery.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I've never thought about that, And that's perhaps one of the reasons that with alcohol you do have to become immune to the constant marketing in presence of it, because it is just everywhere, even you know, every single social event is the centerpiece of it. Yeah, and so you're sort of thrown into the fire. I've never thought about that. Yeah, what an interesting way of thinking about it.

I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life right. Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want to step by step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass. We talked about nature versus nurture a little bit earlier. Let's talk about nature versus nurture in the creation of addiction.

Well, I have done a lot of research on this for previous books, so I'm just going to quote you some of the studies that I've seen and things that experts have told me. But it's quite commonly know that if one of your parents is addicted, then you are four times more likely to grow up to encounter addiction yourself. What's less commonly known is that the chart topping predisposition to a later addiction is a traumatic childhood And when we think of trauma, we think of very extreme events, but actually childhood trauma includes things like just being routinely insulted by a caregiver, or moving house a lot, or bearing witness to a caregiver's addiction, whether it's a step parent or your actual parent, and so a lot of us would actually qualify the childhood trauma, and we don't think we do. So there's a test. It's a really interesting test. It's the Ace test that you can look up and find out if you would fall under that umbrella. And so that seems to suggest that nurture, more than nature, is the thing that sort of activates addiction within and I think it often takes grit in adolescence, which is one of the reasons why I made very fourteen, because I think that's when it's activated, because that's often when we pick up alcohol or whatever other drug we later become addicted to, and that's when it really get teeth and calls into us. And there's also very compelling evidence that shows that if you pick up young, which I did, I was twelve, So if you pick up before the age of fifteen, I think it is you are again four times more likely to later become addicted. Because it makes sense, but our brains aren't fully formed until we're twenty five. So if we are drinking routinely to medicate anxiety or whatever other emotion in our early teens, then we're going to become more attached to it, right.

We just have more time for our brain to alter in the negative ways that alcohol or drugs alter the brain. Yeah, and I know this question was of particular interest to you as you were about to have a child, and it certainly was of great interest to me unbelievably twenty five twenty six years ago that my son was born because his mother and I were both heroin addicts. So it was this like, are we birthing a destined to be an addict child? So talk to me about that for you, you know, from a personal.

Sense, Well, that was one of the reasons that I arrived at motherhoods so late, because in my thirties now I know, so I thought I don't want to have a child. So from the ages of thirty three to thirty nine, if you'd asked me, I would have said, no, that's not for me. But when I had a lot of therapy around my own childhood. I realized that the reason I didn't want to have a child was because I thought I was going to be a terrible parent and b that I was going to birth a child that was pre destined to become an addicts and therefore I would be subjected to that terrible ordeal of what the person love the most, go through what you've been through, and knowing that you can't really do anything to help until they ask for help. So a lot of that research is what informed my decision to have then become a parent, and I was very lucky that I was able to in my forties and now I feel much more at peace. My daughter does have a higher chance, but it's not as simple as you're just four times more likely to become addicted. You inherit characteristics that can predispose you to addictions, so things like anxiety, introversion, but also spontaneity and extraversion. I believe, so those characteristics you can inherit them, and therefore it depends on the home environment as to where those characteristics lead you. So that's the way I see it now, and I've made all these promises to her that she's completely unaware of because she's doing in that I will always endeavor to make her feel safe. That was the word that my research kept coming back to, was feeling safe. That is the way that you can give your child the best possible start. And that doesn't necessarily look like a nuclear family that stays in one town forever more with a white picket fence and a labrador. You know, that doesn't necessarily look like that. But certainly so if you look at my childhood, we moved seven times before I was eighteen, and I was adjacent to three very acrimonious breakups, and so that didn't make me feel safe. And so there's lots of things that but it doesn't necessarily, like I say, mean that I will stay with my partner forever or I will stay where I live now. It's just that I would be much more conscious of the impact that it could have on her that consistency. So no matter what I do, I will try and provide an environment isn't hostile because that's something that I experience and I'm not going to be perfect. That's another thing you just have to reconcile. Yeah, life is going to throw me all these curve balls, and there are going to be choices that I make that are imperfect as a parent. That's just how it is. But as much as possible, I want to point myself in that direction.

Yeap, it's a beautiful intention. My son is, as I mentioned, much older, and I guess that you know, you never know, But up till now, he shows no signs of addiction. That the way I describe it, he doesn't have the desperate personality I did, right, you know, even my teen years before I started using, there was just a desperation about me that he's just never seemed to have. And so I think we hopefully did okay. But his mom and I split when he was two and a half, right, like she fell in love with somebody else. I mean, I ended up being foreign away the stable parent, which blows my mind that anybody would apply that to me, given the fact that you know, when I had him, I was three years off being a heroin addict. So for now he seems okay.

That must be so satisfying to see it is.

And you know, I think the satisfying thing for me is I don't believe, by any way, shape or form, I did it perfectly there's some things I can look at and be like, oh boy, I wish there could do a do over on some of that. And I know that at every age i've looked at him, I've been able to say he is more mentally and emotionally well than I was at that age.

But you are modeling for him that a person can be very happy without any drug of any type. So that has a massive impact on a child and something that I try and do with my daughter every night. I've read this research. It's really good for them to do. We have a dance party. And when I was teen, I would describe myself as very buttoned up. I was very tense and very anxious. And when I discovered alcohol, I was like, this is the answer. This is the magic solution to my constant feeling that I'm almost locked within my body and I can't let go, and I'm really quiet and I can't express myself and I can't dance or talk to people that I fancy or whatever I wanted to do when I was a tea And I try and model that with my daughter by throwing myself around the kitchen like a total loon to try and show her and to encourage her to have that lack of inhibition that made me feel like I needed something in order to disinhibit. Yeah, your son has had the most incredible role model.

In that in some respects. The other thing that we did is his mother and I started talking to him as early as it seemed like he could actually understand what we are talking about, about the fact that we were both addicts and how destructive it was to our lives, and the fact that given that he is the child of that, he is more predisposed to it, and so he should approach substances with more caution than the average person would. I don't think it stopped him from experimenting, but I do think there was an idea in his mind of like, Okay, I need to be a little more careful here.

Yeah, I think that's so important. I do remember having a chat with my father along these lines as well, but it was too late by that point, and I was seventeen, and I remember us going I remember it so clearly as well, us going for a walk on the beach, and he clearly clocked that I had a growing addiction to alcohol already. I was so shabbagely hungover I could barely talk, and he said to me, you know, twenty years over or whatever he was at the time, Actually he would have been more like ten, and so you have a greater likelihood. So just to be aware of that, you need to be careful with alcohol. But by that point I was going in yeah, and I thought, you don't know what you're talking about. You know, it will be different for me. I will be able to outside do it unlike you. And no. Yeah, yeah, So I think it's great that you've got that message in early. And I will allow my daughter to read my books whenever she's you know, probably very young.

As we look at the two girls, they have their own different set of problems. You alluded to this a little bit before. But the one who takes on the name Flick grows up in a very wealthy London home. And I find it interesting because you talk about how self obsessed she becomes with her appearance, which she gets largely from her mother, And it was just striking how well you wrote about how uncomfortable that is.

Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of women of my generation grow up with. But again, it's everyone, isn't it. You know, everyone's surrounded with images of perfection, and that's now being countered by a lot of different sorts of images. But I certainly I remember taking two hours to get ready for college. I mean that's and if I was having a bad hairdo or a bad skin day, I just wouldn't go, even though I was obsessed with learning the type of college students that would hand in extra essays, and my tutor was like, what are you doing someone and mark me the extra essays. We've got enough to do. But something that was paramount to my self esteem was looking perfect or as perfect as I could, And so I poured a lot of that into Flick, because I do think that relates to that whole love addiction, anxiously attached feeling like your outsides have to be as flaw as as possible in order to be accepted as a person. Oh my gosh, I do not miss those days. I mean I constantly carried abound this little magnifying mirror and would check my face before I met anyone, just in case there's anything in the teeth or anything out of place. And now I couldn't be more different. I just basically only quit makeup on for precedents or whatever. So it's so nice when you break free of that.

Yeah. I interviewed somebody recently. She wrote a book called boy Mom, and it was about raising boys, and she takes a similar approach to how you described your books, which are there's a thread of memoir in it and then there's a lot of journalistic research, right, And one of the things that she found was that more and more boys are taking on that.

Oh I can imagine, which I mean for me.

I mean, I feel like I had it from the very beginning, I said to her in the interview. You know, comic books I used to read had the Charles Atlas comics in them. Charles Atlas was a bodybuilding system and it showed like this skinny kid on a beach getting beat up or pushed around, and then he goes and buys the Charles Atlas comics gets big and bulky and strong, and now all the women love him. And so I mean, even for a boy that was marketed so young.

To me, yeah, now I'm thinking about all the superhero stories and with boys, it was often if you have muscles, then everything will be sold.

Yes, yep, Yeah, it's a thing we all wrestle with and it is good to see more body positivity things coming out. I still think it's a long way to go, but it's some progress. There's a particularly telling part in the book where you're describing Fern slash Flick, the one girl who split into two, her mother, and in the story, her mom kind of gives her up at like age four. Is that about the time it is?

Or age seven six and a half seven?

Yeah, yep, So she just basically says to her dad, here take her, and the book starts to explore her experience up to that point. Yeah, definitely the mother's experience. And there's a particularly telling part where in my notes I titled it the mother inquisition, which you write about like did you have a natural birth? Did you have pain relief? Are you breastfeeding you know? Are you swaddling enough? Are you reading to her? All these ways that we like interrogate mothers to make sure they're doing the right thing. Where did that come from?

Personal experience? Entirely because I found that when I was pregnant, And also I would say it's fallen off now, but I've curated my life so that I'm less exposed to it. I'm not in touch with any sort of NCT group or anything like that. NCT is in the UK. It's something that you go see when you're pregnant and you meet lots of other parents. Okay, also in the same stage of the process as you now. I actually ended up because I did feel there's just so many messages when you're pregnant that your body is no longer your own, and people feel entitled to a pine all over your pregnant body, and you're told to do things and not do other things, and eat this and don't eat that, and stop running or keep running, and you know, everyone seems to have an opinion. And that then continues into the early years, where lots of people interrogate you as to how you're doing it and whether you're going to use baby rice and start weaning it four months or whether you're going to wait to six months or you know, and often the only right answer is the answer is that you give that matches how they.

Did it exactly exactly.

So I did some things that were potentially controversial, like I co slept once my baby was big enough, and I breastfed for a lot longer than some people would. I did it until she once. I'm still doing it and she's over too.

Yeah.

So I really found that in order to stay sane, you just have to detach from all of that, which is one of the reasons why I actually ended up leaving the NTT WhatsApp group that I was a part of, because I really felt myself being drawn into that and you just have to go off instinct and make your own decisions and say okay, yeah, thanks for the advice, and then do whatever you want to do.

Yeah. Yeah, there's so much of it. There's so much of it. I remember we parented Jordan's similarly, where you're describing like he slept with us, and he breastfed for much longer, and people told me over and over, you'll never get him out of your bed, he'll never learn to sleep right, you know. And there just came a time where all of a sudden, it just seemed like it was the right, natural time and he went off to his own bed and everything was fine. Yeah, And you made the joke there, and you made it in the book, which is the only acceptable answer is the one that you did, you know, like when you're asking somebody, because I think we're all insecure about the choices we make as parents, and so when somebody's doing something different, we read that as oh, I didn't do it right, which we then turn on its head and make it you're doing it wrong in order so that we don't feel wrong.

Yeah, we like people to match us, and so whenever I'm talking to parents to be or new parents, I try absolute best to just keep my mouth shut. Unless they asked me directly for advice, then I will give it, but I will very much posit it in the context of this worked for us. Yeah, that every parent and every child is different, So that seems to be the way around it is to remember that you are an individual who had a very individual experience and everyone's going to have a different way.

That advice giving or thinking that the way you did it is the way everyone should do it also applies to recovery.

Right.

Yeah, we see this again and again. Unfortunately, it most often comes out of people who are in twelve step traditions insisting that everybody do it their way, although there is an equally large group of people who insist that twelve step programs are garbage. But it's this, here's how I did it, It's the only way to do it, which is patently insane.

Yeah, I low that rhetoric, and I think it comes from all pathsive recovery. The you know, this is how I did it, so this is the right way, and that's why I actively rail against it in all of my writing about addiction and recovery. I just say, there is no one way, and you just need to try everything and work out what fits you. Beth Is. It entirely depends on you as a person and your internal beliefs. Like, for instance, I discover having left twelve Step, but one of the reasons it didn't fit with me, even though I learned a lot there in the six months that I was there, I innately knew that I would need to move away from it in order to continue is because I have something called an internal locus of control I've since been told by a therapist, and that means that I don't feel comfortable when I'm sort of making things dependent on external influences. Even though I know that the Higher Power doesn't necessarily have to be a theistic, you know, bearded god as you know it can be a god as you understand them. I literally don't believe in any sort of like force of good out there, which is a bit depressing. Actually, I literally believe, you know, we're bored, would die and that's it, and there's no sort of unseen force looking after me. So I found that I continually butted up against that aspect of the program. I was having to contort myself quite a lot to sort of fit in with it, and so I just found other ways. But I would never presume to tell anyone that my way was the right way, because I really believe that every recovery path is different, even if it does follow a traditional mode. I do believe it's always slightly different, even if it looks the same, and so yeah, people just have to find their own way. There is no one.

Way right right There absolutely isn't, and I think we've gotten to a place where more and more people are acknowledging that. Thankfully, you know, I ran into some of the same challenges in AA, although it saved my life twice, so I'm extraordinarily grateful to it. Where I eventually felt like the contortions I was having to do to translate everything just got to be a bit much for me. There were some other challenges I had also that had to do with how what being an alcoholic meant to me and what it seemed to mean to a lot of people in twelve step programs, and those increasingly diverged as I got better.

Yeah, I found that too, things like I would no longer refer to myself as an alcoholic. Now I do if I'm in circles where that's the term that everyone uses. But about four years sober, I let that term fall away, and I did it very quietly because I was a bit scared, to be honest, I had internalized the belief that if I did allow that term to fall away, then I would slip into denial and start thinking I could moderate it again. But for me, two things coexist. I no longer believe I'm addicted to alcohol, but I also believe that if I were to pick up again, I would very quickly become addicted to alcohol. So I approach it in a very neuroscientific way. So I believe that the path in my brain that was addicted to alcohol does still exist, even though it's disused and overgrown, and it's more of a frail that's been forgotten throughs and woods, whereas once it was a six lane highway. Ectly. Yeah, yeah, but it does still exist there. So I will never drink again. I will never believe that I could moderate, because I don't believe I can. But equally, I do not feel like I am currently addicted to alcohol, So it doesn't feel right for me to call myself an alcoholic these days that I'm eleven years sober.

Yeah, I think I still refer to myself as an alcoholic and addict. But I do it because it's just a shorthand for me of saying something similar to what you just said. Yeah, I clearly am not addicted to alcohol because I haven't used it. I haven't used a mind altering chemical in fifteen years, so I'm clearly not addicted. I like the neuroscientific thing because the other danger, this is the thought that sometimes gets in my brain, and it is the one that says, well, sure you use drugs and alcohol because you didn't know how to cope with the world, But now you know how to cope with the world, so perhaps, And that's what got me, after eight years of sobriety, back to drinking. It was that exact line of thinking, You've done all this work, you've done all this recovery, you make good decisions and all aspects of your life. I was sure it would be fine, and of course it wasn't. And so for me, I just basically stay with a risk reward calculus, which is the reward if it went right, would be that a time or two a week I got a slight buzz on, that would be the reward at best. The risk is everything, right, The risk is my entire life. And I'm just like, well, that's a crazy trade. Like I wouldn't do that for anything else. If somebody was like, well, you know, twice a week, you could come here and you could play this game and you'd be happy for an hour, but you're betting at the same time that if that doesn't go right, I'll take everything you own, I'd be like, that's a crazy bet. Like no, like that's not now, and that are terrible. So that's kind of where I am. But I love your neuroscientific idea too that that pathway still exists. And yeah, because that was my experience after being sober eight years and picking up and using again was it wasn't immediate. I didn't immediately go back. I never went back to using heroin, but over the course of a couple years, I ended up just as sick as I had been in the first place.

Yeah, and I really do believe that that would happen to me. And what you were just saying about the risk reward analysis really reminds me of that recovery saying that using or drinking is temporary fun with permanent consequences. Oh yeah, I love that and I think about that a lot. And also it's the addictive voice. So I also use something called addictive voice recognition back in the early years. Now, now my addictive voice is nonexistent. I don't hear it. But if that voice were to pipe up, the voice saying but you're you know, it's been eleven years, surely you could just maybe have one or two I'd be like, no, I know what that voice is, and that is just my addiction in a different form, because it will take so many different wily conniving you know, that thing about it being cunning and powerful. It is, So I would shut that down immediately. There's a nuance there, even though in the right circles I would use the term addict and alcoholic, yeah, because I'm not against those terms. It's just that ordinarily I would describe myself as an ex adict that feels more accurate to where I'm at.

Yeah. There's a line in the book where Flick, which is the version that moves to the rich London home, has a friend named Sita. Is that how you would pronounce it? Yeah, that's right, And Cita accuses her of being manipulative, and Flick says, well, what do you mean manipulative? And she says, you know, massaging the narrative for your own means. And I'm reading what you said. Flick didn't understand why they would even war it comment. Wasn't that what everyone did? Wasn't that just being good at life?

This came directly from my own experience, because I recall I was probably one year out from sobriety one of my friends saying that I had become very, very manipulative, and similarly to Flick, I didn't even understand what the word meant. I couldn't wrap my head around the word because I just had assumed that everyone did that, everyone manipulated the narrative and tried to control how other people saw them and tried to get the best results for them. So I'm still manipulative now, I know that I have that in me because it was so much a part of me verse thirty three years of my life. And I do often have to stand back and think, Okay, what am I trying to gain? Here? Am I withholding parts of information in order to make people think about me a certain way? And I really have to pull myself back and just be straight down the line and you know, counter that manipula to urge that I want to go with all the time. Yeah.

The problem is that none of that is as straightforward as just drink or don't drink, right, Because we all are, to some degree, even without knowing it, controlling the narrative that we tell ourselves. I mean, the way we present to the world like that is kind of baked into us. And there's a subtle form of it that I recognized in later years. Right, there was the obvious manipulation where I'm manipulating something to get what I want, right, Yeah, But there's another type of manipulation, which is that I'm trying to control your emotional response.

That's it that really hits the knell on the head. I think for that reason, sometimes I will type a text and then I will delete it because I know that I am trying to emit a certain response from the perform I'm texting, and then I will bring it back and I will remove information that is, you know, designed to evoke pity or admiration or whatever it is. You know, my minipulis of alter euros come up with and I just keep it as straight as possible for one of a better word, And that's how I fight against it. Yeah. I do think all of us have the capacity to be manipulative, and being aware of it is just half of the battle.

Really, As you were saying that, it made me laugh a little bit. I was thinking in my mind, like this being thoughtful means that I have to retype texts and emails over and like, you know, I write it out and I'm like, hang on, let me, I need to think of it.

You know.

It's just funny. But the subtle nuance of this that I even realized was that I was manipulating people with quote unquote good intentions because I would think they can't handle what I'm going to say, or what I'm going to say to them is going to make them upset, and I don't want them to be upset. Yeah, it's a whole another level of withholding honesty, which in certain situations I think actually makes a lot of sense, and in other situations, if you're trying to be intimate and close with people is a terrible idea.

Yeah, it really is, because that leads to resentment, because if you're not being honest with people about how you feel, then you're running the danger of nurturing resentment. So it's really hard about I know exactly what you mean, and I like to be as nice as possible, but also have people think well of me.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's another great line in the book where you're talking about Flick where she realizes she's a people pleaser, like she desperately wants to please people, but she has the unfortunate habit of displeasing people the time.

Yeah.

But personal experience.

Yeah, definitely personally through it. I promised the entire book isn't autobiograph. Just the line that you're plucking out really only just things that I've experienced. That is one of the things that I think is so true of people who come into recovery and just people in general, is that so many of us intend to be or are driven to people pleasing, and then we accidentally end up people displeasing because actually it doesn't really work. It just ends up going very, very wrong. And so that's something that I fight against it on a daily basis as well. It's a lifelong battle though.

What I've found is the longer I sort of I never know what to call it. I don't really like the phrase the longer I'm on my journey, or the deeper I go into trying to be the best version of myself. Maybe that's the best way to say it. The deeper I go into that, the more subtleties I see that ten years ago I would never have seen. I never would have thought of that way in which I am, you know, not being the best version of myself.

Yeah, it's so true. And I continually have a problem with my ship with the word now and I really have to work on that, especially from a work point of view, because I want people to like me, and therefore I say yes to par too much and then I burn out. So it's something that I do battle with a very regular basis.

I wrestle with this a little bit too, and some of it is that I don't want to say no to people. The other thing that drives it, and I don't know if this is part of it for you. But when you're like you, you're an author, right. You make your living by people buying your things, Right, So when people ask you to do something, it's often the reason you do it is because you're getting your stuff in front of other people. And so there's certainly a I don't want to say no to people. But then there's also in my case of fear like I can't turn down any opportunity.

Yeah, a fear of becoming irrelevant. Yes, yes, we're all going away. I don't have to go and work in tefco on the counter. You know, every creative has that fear because they've often worked so hard to get where they are and spent so many years. I mean, I've spent many years doing second jobs and scrambling to get by, and it's only really in the last few years that things have really come together. So there is a constant alarm. But it might all disappear overnight just because you've said no to have coming on one.

Event, you didn't go to that one place you were asked to speak where there were six people, and it just it tanked your entire career. Really Late in the book, this quote from Carl Jung that goes something like we are not what has happened to us comes up and one of the characters reacts fairly strongly to that idea, say more.

Yeah, So the exact quote is something like, we are not what has happened to us. We are what we choose to become. And I take some serious umbrage to the first part of that quote, that we are not what's happened to us, And so just the character in the book flick because I think that's naive. I really don't think that you can erase the first eighteen years of your life or whatever and start afresh and decide who you're going to become now that you're an adult and you're supposedly sort of free of your childhood and your parental influence, because I just don't think that ever the case. I mean, no, we now know so much more about it. We know that the body stores early experiences, and that nervous system reacts before we do consciously, and that's why often we have outsized reactions to things because they remind us of the childhood wound and all that sort of thing. So I do really think that in order to move past that and start to be able to choose you become. You really have to go deep and do the work. At the risk of sounds like a cliche. Otherwise, if you don't have the awareness of why you say, for instance, react in an outsized way. If somebody delays responding to your message and knowing why that hurts, you can't choose your reaction. So I didn't see it in so many people that I think in our twenties we often just sort of ricochet around in reaction to our childhood and often repeat our parents' mistakes or go to far the other way and go to the polar opposite. And it's only really in our thirties, forties and beyond that we begin to be able to choose who were going to become and make more conscious decisions about the person we want to be and how we want a parent. So it was something that I really wanted to sum up in the book, and I feel satisfied that I have.

Yeah, I think. So. I was walking down the street the other day and I saw a quote on a card from Jack Kerouac, and I don't remember it exactly, but it said something like nothing behind me and everything ahead of me. About being on the road, and I was like, well, no, not exactly. Like now, we are a result of the countless causes and conditions that have come together to make us who we are today. Yeah, you can't unwind that far enough, right, even if you start to go, well, I think I might be this way, We're just making it up to a certain degree. Am I that way because my mom did this? Or am I that way because Johnny in third grade punched me over a juice box? Or I think that because some musician I loved when I was fourteen said, I mean, it's just this. You can't sort it out. Yeah, you can make some attempts to see what some of the big things were, but we never really know fully, No.

We don'n't. But I think there is a middle ground to be found. So something that I do tend to do is I've been in and out of therapy. I've done therapy really three big times in my life. But I've always had an end in sight, and for me, I don't want to stay in forever because I do think that there is a happy medium to be found between It's that bumper sticker. Don't look back, You're not going that way. You do need to look back, but then you also need to go that way. Yes, so I think both can be true. That what has come behind us, you know we've already been through, doesn't form where we go. But then also that there is a point where you've done enough work on it that you can really start to choose your own directory.

Can we use the line near the end of the book to sum that up? Or is that too much?

I think we can so. Towards the end of the book. This isn't too much of a spoiler, because there's plenty in the book that has in surprised, lots of twists and turns, you know, the murder mystery, and another big reveal. But towards the end of the book, one of the versions of her flick rewrites that Carl Young quote and it becomes we are what have happened to us? But now I choose who I've become. And if anything could sum up my motto for life, it would be that.

I think that's a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Catherine, It's always such a pleasure to have you on. I can't recommend the new book highly enough. I've loved all your writing, but this novel. I was so excited I just read it and it was one of those I didn't want to put it down kind of books from start to end. So bravo.

Thank you.

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