Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talked to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. I think we can all agree that there's just something about the mother child relationship that is complicated. It can be loving, but also tumultuous, and is generally complex. When I saw the cover of the book What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, I knew I had to read it, And once I started reading it, I knew I had to interview its editor, Michelle Philgate for this podcast. In this collection of essays based on her essay What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, Michelle shares the stories of fifteen different writers who reflect on their complicate aided relationships with their mothers for many different reasons. Some of them are beautiful, some of them are painful, some of them are close, and some of them are not. And on today's episode, we talk about why the mother child bond is so confusing, the maternal figures that have influenced us in our lives, the importance of reading, and how writing can be so cathartic both for the author and for the reader. I cannot wait for you guys to hear this. I have to thank you so much for coming. I think maybe because I was a journalism student, or maybe because I was an only child who lost herself in books all of the time. I when when a book really hits me, I don't put it down. And in the case of your book, I picked it up and I think I was done with it in thirty hours or something. I just I was like, the day is can't I'm not leaving. I need to read this. And it was very interesting because from the moment that I opened it, I didn't know what to expect, but I had this strange feeling that I needed to read it. I saw it and and it was like when you get that drum beat in your chest, and I thought, I have to read that book. I have to understand because as as a as an adult woman analyzing my own relationship with my mother and seeing all of my friends analyze their relationships with their mothers, and also in our closeness and yet complication because everyone's complicated, I get to see so much of what my mother's relationship with her mother was as we unpack sort of matrilineal inheritance and from the moment I opened the book, I I strangely felt very exposed and also very safe. And your essay opens this collection of fifteen beautiful essays, and in the last line of it says, I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars. My mother would always say to me when I was little, but I just want her to love me here now on earth. I was like, Oh, God, And and even if that isn't your truth, you understand that that's so true. And and there's so many stories in the book you explore these themes of violence and silence and this intimacy that we as women and or as children either desperately yearned for or given very uniquely by our mothers. And I'm just so in awe of this space that these essays open for all of us. And strangely, when I finished the book, I called my mom and I said, you know, I know that we're learning to communicate differently as adults than we did when you know, I was a kid, And sometimes I know, I get really annoyed with you. And I also I owe you such a huge amount of gratitude. And it was strange because it made me realize that I also needed to just tell her that. And so this is a very long winded way of saying that I'm in awe of the project and of hopefully inviting listeners in UM who haven't read it, and I hope after this will and for the ones of you who have read it, you know what I'm talking about. So in this real space of honesty about how love itself is very hard one for all of us, I'm I'm just so curious about what prompted you to finally publish this essay, because your essays It's tough. It is, it really is. Yeah. I spent well over a decade writing that essay for several reasons. One is because when I first started writing it, UM, when I was an undergrad, I had just come out of the situation that I write about in that essay, which is that my stepfather or was abusing me and I was living with him and with my mother and it was really difficult. And so when I started writing that essay, I hadn't really found my voice as a writer yet, and my piece was really coming from a place of anger and resentment, rather than the years I've had since then to to think about this and think about what the real story is. I think it took me many years of therapy. I think my therapist in the back of the book, because I swear that every everyone should go to therapy to figure out, especially to figure out their relationships with their mothers. But um, it took me many years to realize that what what I was really trying to write about was a daughter longing for a closer connection with her mother. And also I was trying to write about the what silence can do to a relationship, the toxicity of silence, and so I I couldn't have asked for a better timing for when this essay was published. Long Reads published it in October of right when the Weinstein story broke and the me Too movement took off, and so the essay quickly went viral, shared by a lot of people, including some of my favorite authors like um, Rebecca soul Knit and Lydia Yukanovich. I love Rebecca Solnit so much. Yeah, and Lydia, They're amazing, They're two heroes of mine. And Lament as well. She shared it, so um they Yeah. All of a sudden, like the essay just kind of blew up, And I think part of the reason people responded to it is because, uh, not just the topic of my essay, but the title of my essay, which is the title of the book, what my mother and I don't talk about. I heard from so many people right away who were saying to me, I have something I can't talk about with my mom, and their relationship might be completely different than the relationship I have with my mother, but there was a connection there and that everyone had something that they couldn't articulate and that they wanted to share and wished they could share. The title is universally true, exactly, and I thank god I picked that title because originally my editor, Sara bought in it long Reads. I told her that I wanted to publish it as Lacuna as the title, and lacuna means gaps and spaces that can't be filled, and so that to me was a really great way of poetically describing my relationship with my mom. And Sarah was like, it's a beautiful word. No one knows what it means, no one will ever click on it. So I came up with a list of alternate headlines and she was like, okay, that one, And so you never know if a headline will lead to a book deal, but in my case it did. That's the mark of a good editor to exactly yeah, she's great. So I'm curious because while I don't want to harp on the unpleasantries, I think that one of the things that, to your point in Me to Move It, has highlighted for so many of us is that, for some reason, to be taken seriously, women are meant to just share their stories over and over again, which really just means we have to re traumatize ourselves over and over again, which I find a bit confounding. And and while if there's anything you want to share, I'm here to discuss it. I'm I'm certainly not kind of press. But what's interesting to me in looking at the topic and in you talking about the ten years that it took to really get to the root of what that experience meant for you. You know, the source of the pain is is the gap between you and your mother that allows all the other business to fall into that space. You know, it's it's what goes into a chasm that can make it so devastating. I felt so completely flayed open as I read your words, and I've not been in your position, Shin, but the words about silence and about what we need versus what we say, and then that kind of being stuck that makes you feel like you're drowning. I felt recognition in that, And I'm curious why you think that is now that you have um some time in perspective on the essay and on the book under your Belt, that that so many people have read this, both the essay and the book, and whispered, oh you too, because most people don't share the exact same circumstances as one another. But there's some kind of recognition when when in the right way, we do get to share our stories and offer them to other people has permission to share their own, And there are these spaces like this book to me feels like a talking circle. It feels like a safe space to share and to feel recognized. And I'm curious how you delineate That's that's a great question, because I think that you You are absolutely right that, especially with women's personal stories, there's this it's almost this pressure to sensationalize them. Some bad publications, will you know, like have terrible click baby headlines to get people to to read them, and really tapping into trauma in a because trauma cells or some other disgusting viewpoint. UM. For me, I did want to create a safe space, and not just for women, because this book also has men in it. Um, it has Son's perspectives as well. I wanted to create a safe space in general. I saw it as something that um is a continuation of the work that I do already in in my life. UM. I have a reading series that I created in Brooklyn called red Ink that is dedicated to women writers past in present, and it's a panel I curate with writers of different ages and stages in their career in genres and so UM, that is something I was I was already thinking about, is like putting voices together and the idea of community, because I really think a lot about community and how um I say this in the introduction to the book, but it's easier to break silences together on a rather than being alone on a stage. Um. And so for me, I always saw this book from the very beginning as an anthology, a collective of many different voices. And the fascinating thing to me is that unintentionally, these different voices gathered in the book speak to each other, right there's a lot of overlap, there's and people do see themselves, like what you were just saying about people seeing themselves in stories that are very different from their own, but they still relate to it. And I think that's so true. I think that we all are looking for human connection, right and a lot of times we can find that in beautiful writing, especially in person essays. I think there's really a need right now. There's kind of a golden age of especially like women essays, and I feel that seeing it as art rather than just tell all sensationalized stories is the difference. Like we are looking at people creating art out of their pain or out of any kind of complication they've had. And in this particular collection my goal was to have I wanted not just you know, a diverse lineup of authors, but a diversity in the types of relationships between the mother and child, because I wanted anyone to be able to pick up this book and find something that speaks to them somehow, And that's the beauty of what personal essays can do. I love that you write in the essay about your writing while you were still at home, and that that image of you sitting against your dresser with the dresser knobs pressing into your back is so vivid to me. And I think about that that version of like just needing to be in a little bit of pain so you know you're alive when you're struggling. And I'm curious if you weren't writing about any of these experiences while living at home when you when you moved out and started at the University of New Hampshire. What's it like to make the first crack at writing a story like this. It's very very rough. Um, it's hard because you are re entering that traumatic moment um so and I think at that time I was too close to it. I was still very much processing what had just happened to me, but not even fully processing it. I was still it was still such like I couldn't I didn't have any distance from it. I couldn't see it clearly. So I think it was it led to some bad writing right where it's just about the emotions and not about seeing yourself as a character, almost right. And I so I needed that removal and I needed years to kind of process those emotions because I mean, I think back to that moment you mentioned in the essay where I talked about writing in my room, leaning up against the hard knobs of the dresser. I mean, I'd write a lot of really bad poetry, as many teen girls do, right about my boyfriend at the time and love and you know I um and inkst. I mean I talked about how I had this collection of pros and poetry that I called Summer's Snow, and I thought that was very clever. So a lot of my writing was really overly earnest and pretty terrible at the time. But the writing saved me in many ways too, because it was an outlet. It was it was a place where I could express myself. And so writing has always been what has saved me, whether through my own writing or the words of others. Um. You know, books have always been my escape as well as where I find myself time. How do you think, because I do think it's it's such a wise observation that when you're still too close to an experience, it's so difficult to clearly articulate it. And for example, in this you know Me two conversation, people will say, well, why didn't they report sooner? Why didn't they And you can't get the words out when you're underwater. It's very hard, I think, to make sense of any kind of trauma until you've finally gotten enough distance from it that that things can settle in your body and you can figure out how to speak without being back in it. Yes, And I'm curious about the transformation as you got some distance to going from the experience itself to the realization that this core truth was really about the fracturing you've felt in your relationship with your mom. Yeah, if that's not too heavy a question, No, it's not. I just I think I honestly, I think I was kind of blinded by my anger a lot, and also by fear. You talked about like people, you know, not reporting things or you know. I talked in my essay about going to the school cop. We had a cop in our school who was assigned to to be there and as a resource, and I went to him and would tell him about my stepdad, and then I would stop him from talking to him and to my mother because I was too afraid. And I think that's all that's that happened so often in these cases where a woman is abused and is afraid that speaking out will make the situation worse. So when you would tell the police officer what was happening, but beg him not to confront your parents. Yes, that came from the fear that once he'd to the house, it would be worse with your stepdad. Yeah, exactly, I was. I was terrified that and I also didn't want to I was terrified of what my stepfather would do, but I also didn't want to hurt my mom. You know, I can't. I mean, I I blamed myself at that point for a lot of what was going on, because that's what abuse victims often do. You always you often think, you know, if I was a different person, maybe this person wouldn't treat me this way. You know. Um, he would constantly tell me that I was the cause of problems in their marriage. You know. Some so stuff he said reinforced to the fears that I felt. And so I think it took me a long time to realize, to realize the longing that I had to have a better relationship with my mom. And I think the reason it took so long is because I couldn't really admit it to myself, this deep pain that I had for so long. I could easily be angry about my stepdad. But I wasn't really thinking, and this is what came out of therapy. I wasn't really thinking about the absence of my mother and my life and and how sad that made me. And you know, my mom still did remain in my life, but we just There's a line in my essay where I talked about how we eventually do talk about it, but it's it's not enough. Sometimes when you talk about something, if the person, if there's denial involved, the person isn't really listening. It's it's the same as almost not having the conversation. Right. There are all kinds of ways we can be silenced, so that silence is really something that has lived inside me for so long. And I felt like, even though I was afraid of publishing this essay of what it would do to my relationship with my mother, I also felt like I had to publish this. I had to because I knew it would help other women who are afraid of speaking their truth for whatever reason that might be. And there's a real reality I think too, that whether it's an issue with your mother or something you've been through in the past, when you're ready to get it out of your body, you have to get it out of yourself somehow, you do you really? Do you know? It's it's kind of an exorcism, it is. Yeah, absolutely, that is exactly how it feels. Because I think about this all in terms of really your relationship with yourself, and and perhaps it's because I'm projecting my own experience and having to get to a point where I could talk about certain things and own certain things and not worry about other people's feelings in regards to certain experiences of my own. So I think about your relationship with yourself and what kind of permission someone has to give themselves to have these sort of great revelations about their experiences, and especially when those revelations include someone else, because women have historically and culturally been so afraid to say this happened to me or this was sucked up, because somehow we've been taught that that's us saying, well, you fucked me up, you did this thing, and the irony is that that's often the truth. So going from you know, this undergrad student to ten years later, the woman who publishes this essay in hindsight, do you see how you mustered up the courage to say it was was it getting was it just getting ready to get it out of your body? It? I mean it was. And it was actually way more than ten years until I published this essay, so it took well over a decade. I think it might have been. Let's see, I graduated college in two thousand and six and this came out in twenty um seventeen. So but I I'm really glad you brought up the idea of permission and women giving themselves permission to tell these kinds of stories, because I was at a writing conference this past year in Portland, Oregon, and I was on this really incredible writing panel called Writing the Mother Wound. This writer Van SMR. Tear, who I really admire, actually teaches this class called writing the Mother Wound. And I was on a panel with a bunch of incredible writers and you could hear a pin drop in the room. It was standing room only, and so so many people showed up because everyone there had their own kind of mother wound somehow. And I after the panel was over, a bunch of strangers these women came up to me asking me for permission to write about their own stories, and I had to tell them I can't give you permission. That's something you have to give yourself, and that's easier said than done. And I think that sometimes you just have to force yourself to give yourself permission, even if it feels difficult or if you're afraid. Often the things were doing come with a lot of fear, right And so I I've found that in my life at least, that often the things that have been the most rewarding and the most significant and most important to me have come with a tremendous amount of fear at the same time. And so I think that, you know, one of the things I was thinking about in publishing this essay and this book is I've taught creative nonfiction, including like personal essay and memoir writing, for years now, and one of the things I always teach my students is to, like one of the very first exercises I give them is to write from a place of shame or vulnerability. To make a list of things that they feel shame or feel vulnerable about, and to pick one of them to write an essay about. And I wasn't following my own advice. So I was teaching this, but I was avoiding myself on the page, you know, And I think a lot of women do that. I think a lot of us do because we're because we shy away from the stuff that has kind of set us on fire again to be back. And you know, wonder because in this moment, while you're talking about this, a my chest is burning be I'm like, oh, right, We've also, for generations been told that our role is to nurture others. And no one's ever taught women how to nurture themselves, how to soothe themselves, how to love themselves. Were meant to put it all out and hope that someone else gives it back, exactly, And it's this really kind of warped exchange. It's not like when a battery charges, it's like plugging into something else. Right, And hearing you say that, I'm just thinking, Oh, of course, we make space for everyone else's pain, but never for our own. And if we don't really make space for our own pain, are we really making all that much space for our own joy? Right? Right? Because we need to? We are, right. That's an excellent question. And I I'm really glad you just brought up like nurturing yourself because I'm working on an essay right now actually about learning to be a mother to yourself, because that's something I've really realized in putting this action together especially, is that no matter how close someone is with their mother, or if they never knew their mother, or if they're estranged from their mother, no matter what their relationship is, you can't depend on one other person to be everything you need for nurturing, right, And so so much of being an adult is about learning how to navigate that and to be good to yourself, whatever that might mean for you, and to allow yourself to be good to yourself, right. Giving their going back to like giving permission. We need to give permission to ourselves to to be the mother's are the ideal mother to ourselves, right, whatever that might mean. And in some ways I feel like we have that conversation finally more about partnership, that idea. You know, you you're never going to be able to love someone else until you love yourself or accept love from someone else until you love yourself. But you haven't crossed the threshold of you have to be your own nurture. You have to learn how to be your own mother, even if you love your mother, yeah you know, yeah, yeah, Because I think even if a mother is great. A mother can't possibly check all of the boxes of what we need. I talked about this in the intrup of my book. You know, we mothers are set up to fail in our society in so many ways, and as women are, just as women are exactly like you know, I personally don't want to have kids. I'm child free, and I've always felt kind of judged by that. But I have friends who are amazing moms, who who might feel judged because of how many kids they have. You know, so even no matter what, whether we have kids, whether we don't, whether we get married, whether or not, whatever choices we make that involve our bodies and our relationships, it's just like society is just there to judge and it's ridiculous me. So, yeah, it's really strange. And I do think that it is an act of revolution to learn to love yourself. It really is. And I mean, look, we're all working on it, right. It's like that's I don't think it's a place that you arrive and then you go, oh my god, look I solved it, and forever all feel great. But it's it's about creating a kind of new practice and reparenting and re partnering with yourself to create a new way of relating to yourself in the world. And I've been looking around lately going like, nobody told us about this ship? Where where? Why have we not been having this conversation? Because everyone I know who's in their thirties and in their forties is in the throes of this right now, And I'm going, huh, okay, we there there's some some version of, you know, an empathy curriculum or an intimacy education that we need to start in schools so that this stuff can change. Seriously, I know, when we talk about school, I'm curious because I do love to know. I get to meet so many people and and invite so many friends into the space when I'm already so impressed with the adult that they are. And you know, I'm clearly so in love with your work, and I know you to be this beautifully eloquent and thoughtful writer. But I'm always curious when I look at really impressive people and I go like, what were you like when you were a little were you always were you always so observational? Were you very wordy? Were you quiet? Were you rampunctious? Like? Who who is Michelle. As a kid, you always have your head in a book. Okay. Yeah. In fact, in some of the family home videos you can see me walking around like reading aloud to myself in the background, I would always have my head and like a babysitters Club or Sweet Valley High or you know. Matilda was my favorite book when I was a kid. I loved Matilda good right movie. It was so good, amazing. I know, I know, I still watch it sometimes I do too. I loved it, um but that you know, I I just that was like one of the first books where I found myself on the page in Matilda's character and I was like, oh, a bookworm who has superpowers to that's so cool. I want superpowers, no stuff and is smart no matter what the grown up sat exactly and defends the me mean headmistress or I'm sorry, defeats the mean head mistress. But yeah, as a kid, I was I was a bookworm. I was nerdy. I was definitely picked on a lot because I was a nerd. I but I spent a lot of time imagining things. I grew up on a lake in Connecticut, a beautiful lake, and so I feel very fortunate about my upbringing and that for my parents got divorced, we lived with my grandmother and so I would spend a lot of time actually like in the woods around the house, playing there and um, taking walks there. And so a lot of my early short stories have to do with that landscape, and that landscape really like looms large in my imagination. Still. She's actually the one who turned me into a bookworm, because she would take me to the library book sales and we'd fill up, like you could get a bag of books for a dollar. So I would love that. And she played organ at the local church, and she would take me with her when she was playing organ at funerals and weddings and mass, and we would stop at the library or the bookstore on the way and I'd read while I was in the loft with her, sometimes during these stranger's funerals, which was really weird. And so yeah, she and but she herself, this is memo, that's what I call her memo. She she was fired for one of her first jobs because she was caught reading behind the clothing racks at this close store. So and she's kind of your spirit, Oh yeah, she totally is. So so yeah, from a very early age. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Um, I got sidetracked for a little while and was a journalist and worked at the CBS Evenings with Katie Kirk, which was great. But I always knew I wanted to be a you know, a writer. And so that's that's where I've landed. And how old were you, um, when when the dynamic and your family changed, when you were no longer living on the lake. So my parents got divorced when I was I think nine or ten, and so that's when things kind of changed. And then when I was like entering my preteens and my teens is when stuff got bad with my stepdad. So my stepdad was in the picture pretty much right away when he was in the picture right away when my parents separated, and so yeah, and that was really hard, I can imagine. And you say that you always knew that you wanted to be a writer, and we talk about you know, angsty teen poetry, but were you also writing in the sort of more idyllic years of your childhood when you were playing in the woods and living on the lake, where you were you also writing poetry? Were you like trying to be a little Mary Oliver. Oh man, I love Mary Oliver. Have you listened to her be interviewed by Krista Tippett being I've got to because I love guys. I mean, I think she's ninety two when they do the interview. It's one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever heard in my life. I'm going to go listen to that, like I will look up the link before you leave in something it's so good. Yeah, but I do. It's weird because the way you're explaining it and also talking about your grandmother, I'm literally picturing her like Mary Oliver and you like a mini me of her in the woods, and it's like I'm directing a movie about your life in my head. Now, I love it. No, I would saying the idea of years of my childhood. Actually, what I was obsessed with writing were ghost stories and mysteries. Mystery stories. But I like, like, I loved sending ghost stories on the bottom of the lake because the lake I grew up on is supposedly built over an Indian burial ground and it's a man made lake, and so so I loved I don't know, I was obsessed with ghosts. And remember those Scary Stories books that we had, the really creepy illustrations. It's now being turned into a TV show, which I'm so excited about. But I loved those books and scary stories and fear Streets. Yes ruined me. Oh my gosh, I read fear Street all the time or else Snein was amazing. Yeah, So I I loved being scared, even though I was terrified being scared too, like I was a very scaredy cat kid, but I loved ghost stories at the same time. So I wrote a lot of stuff about ghosts. So I know that you you studied English and college, right, Yeah, I studied English journalism. Yeah, okay, and that was sort of as you say, how you got sidetracked and wound up at the evening news. What did that feel like? I'm curious not only what the side track looks like into journalism, but I also wonder now, in hindsight, what you were watching or observing. You know, when you were watching Katie. You know, she's the first solo female news anchor ever. That's such a moment for America. And and in a way, when I think back to watching her, I think, as I'm contemplating this idea of nurturing and intellect and all of the things that women are, but for some reason we're told to be one or the other. I think about the way she was able to really nurture and hand hold us as viewers, but also really cut to the core of issues, and I wonder what was it like to watch that and to be there. It was incredible. I actually started there the first week she started, So yeah, my first very first day at the job was when Bob shei for they were throwing like a thank you party because Katie was taking over, and my my very first job was to be that evening. I was stationed at the front door and my boss was like, do not let anyone in who is not on the guest list. So here I am, right out of college, right, so excited to be there, and I'm monitoring the guest list and I'm I'm doing my job, and then I turned someone away and I just hear dead silence and the person next to her says, you do not turn Maureen Doubt away from a party. Oh my god. I became a joke in the news from people put moreen doubts. Picture above my desk. I was my first day on the job. Is that I accidentally tried to turn Maureen down away. You're like, I don't know what, I don't know, leave me off. I wasn't even looking, you know, if I had looked up and seen her. But I was just like head on down on the list, waking at the list. But she had like a Leslie Man moment and go doorman, Doorman, Doorman, Doorman. I'm sure, but but yeah, Katie. I mean, it was incredible to be there in that historic moment with Katie taking over. There was a lot of excitement in the news room. So that really inspired me. I mean. The reason that I mean when I said that, like I side tracked with journalism, I actually still see myself as a journalist and love journalism, you know, in addition to many of the things I write. So it wasn't really a sidetrack in just that like it fed who I am now. It absolutely did. And the reason I worked there is because when I was a kid, my dad he took me to subway at a ka the sandwich shop in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where I grew up, and my dad loves TV news and we would watch NBC and we would always watch the local New York NBC news and one day we were there and he said, that's Carol Jenkins whose NBC. And I was so excited. So he brought me over and introduced me, and she invited us to shadow her at the evening news. So we went. I went a couple of times, and so Carol was a mentor to me. She's amazing. She's no longer at NBC. She left and became head of the Women's Media Center for a while, and now she does I believe the show is called Black America on Cunei TV. She's the host of that. She's incredible. So Carol was already somebody who I admired. And then when I was in college, I interned for Ed Bradley at sixty Minutes and that was amazing. I interned for a couple of his producers and I spent the summer working on a story about the Emmett till civil rights case. It was an incredibly inspiring summer to work on such an important story. So that gave me the thirst for for journalism. Um. And so when I graduated, I got this job working with Katie, and Katie is amazing. She's are inspiring. I feel like she's really great at taking other young women in the newsroom kind of under her wing. You know. She definitely like encouraged me with my own writing, and I wrote for her blog a few times and that was great. So yeah, that's so cool. And from there, I know, you went back to New Hampshire, you worked at River Run, and and then you ended up back in New York and you were you were working for a scientist like you you have this these crazy couple of years where you're all over the place and what happens and how do you wind up back here? And and beginning to I think prepare for all of this. Well, while I was still in college, I worked for River Run bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I loved it. And then when I was working for Katie, I worked there for a year for that show and ended up producing a segment on the show called Assignment America where I would find the feel good story of the week, which I loved. And Steve Hartman, the reporter, was wonderful to work with, so I really really loved and I was torn about leaving, but you know, I was definitely like on the rise there and already producing a segment within my first year, which was great, But my heart was still so set on books and on print and that, and I felt like I had to give that a chance. So I quit a job at a national TV show to move back to New Hampshire to run events at River Run Bookstore because my former boss there said, hey, come, you know, come run events here. And I'm I do not regret that move at all because I learned so much and being able to curate the events series and meet writers and hear how they wrote their books and get inspired by them. It was like a little mini m f A program And I learned so much about the industry and started writing really in earnest at that point. And I moved back to New York City because Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson Um, had heard about me because I like was really involved in the bookselling world, and she recruited me to come run events at her store. So that was what got me to come back here. I didn't think I was going to come back here. The funny thing is part of why I ran away was like the first time around, New York really overwhelmed me, even though I grew up an hour outside of New York and I loved coming here. But I moved to Bushwick in two thousands, six or seven. I can't remember the exact year. Um when I was working at the Evening News and I lived in this really not nice apartment and as a lot of people did that year, I got bed bugs and it was awful. I'll never forget the third time the exterminator came. I was like out and in Union Square, actually at a cafe, and the guy next to me was scratching his arms furiously and it turned out he had bed bugs too. It was just very common that year, especially, a lot of people had them, and uh, I ended up but it that experience ended up turning into an essay that I published on the Paris Reviews website because because bed bugs turned you into an accidental book Yes, tell me, how do you accidentally set a book on fire? Well, it's really hilarious. So I had to microwave every single book I owned, which was a lot of books, because the externator told me that the bed bug like eggs can live inside of the books, so I wasn't thinking it was just microwaving, and of all books to put in the microwave. I had Insomnia by Stephen King. So it's like the poetic justice that this is hilarious because I'm not sleeping well because of bed bugs. And then I put this book in and it had a metallic cover and it's set it on fire in microwave. So I ended up writing this essay years later about that experience. Yeah, but so I had the Paris Review in the Paris Review Daily their website, Yeah, they have a blog, and I wrote that essay for them. So I, I mean, so everything happens for a reason, I feel like, and you know, I didn't think i'd end up back in New York, and second time around has been amazing. I've been back here since eleven and I ran events at McNally Jackson for a year, and then I left there and ran events at Community Bookstore in Park Slope in Brooklyn, and also got a job for working for a scientist at Rockefeller University. And so, just as most writers do, you have to kind of cobble together a career, right because writing does not pay enough to pay the bills. So I would do whatever I could to be around writers and to soak up the information and learn as much as I could. And is that what got you to start writing? Yeah? Yeah, because because of my time running events at all these different bookstores, I had really wanted, always wanted to have my very own series with complete control over it, even though I could do that when I was running events at the other places, I just wanted to be able to have my own thing and not being responsible for all the other events at the stores. So it's a quarterly series because it is a lot of work. I read every single author's book that's on the panel and write questions directed towards them. I mean, you know, I know as you look at my nerdy prep docs, I'm like, I get it. Yeah. So you do this quarterly series. You interview these writers about their work, their life. Do you think that there's some piece of that that started informing this idea of turning the essay into a book of finding and sourcing other writers asking them all this question, what what do you and your mother not talk about? Yeah? Absolutely so. I you know, I didn't have open submissions. Once I sold the book, I knew the authors I wanted to approach. I was so curious how you connected with them because it's such an incredible group. So so you found them all ahead of time, not all of them, um, but I got a bunch of them to agree before I sold the book, and then I approached some mothers after the book was sold. How did you start picking people? How? How do you go about that? I mean, it's oh, man, well, a big thing is that, I it's kind of hard to approach people and be like, so, what's your relationship like with your mom? But but you have to and so you know, some people signed up to do it and dropped out because they realized they weren't ready to write about their mom um. And some people, um were signed up with the project right away. Like I knew I wanted to have Leslie Jamison, who closes the book with her incredible essay about trying to understand who her mom was before she became her mom by reading an unpublished manuscript by her mom's first husband that's based on their marriage. He wrote a novel based on them. Is so fascinating. It's really really fast, especially because her mom and her mom's first husband are still so close exactly, yeah that was mine. Yeah, and she's very close with her mom. And I find that essay to be extremely hopeful, which is why I wanted to end on that on that piece for the book. But so when you right away, I mean Leslie Jamison is one of the best essayists of our time. She wrote this incredible book called The Empathy Exams. I don't know if you've read that, but what how do I know? Oh, it's amazing, quite literally writing it down. Yeah, And and everything she writes is great. She has a new essay collection coming out this fall actually called Make It Screen, Make It Burn, And so she was signed on from the get go. Same with Alexandrici, who wrote a really beautiful essay for this book about being abused when he was a kid in hiding it from his mom to protect her. And Alex has this stunning essay collection that came out recently called How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and he's he's one of my favorite essays. So there were people who automatically came to mind like, oh, I love the writing, I need this. Then there were a few people in the book who whose essays had already been published elsewhere, and I read them and thought, immediately, I need this in the book. And and that for those two that was Brandon Taylor, who wrote a piece for Literary Hub about his mom, who was very abusive and she is no longer alive, and he wrote about he wrote just like with tremendous tenderness about her despite what she did to him, and it's one of the most beautiful essays I've ever in devastating essays I've ever read. And then Andrea Asimum is in the book and his piece was originally in The New Yorker about growing up with a deaf mother, and I thought that was a fascinating angle to have in this book. And also I love him because he wrote Call Me by Your Name, which is one of my favorite movies, and I love his book too, but the movie isn't eazy, So yeah, so the right away I knew they would be in there. But yeah, I mean, I the main thing when putting this anthology together was that I didn't want to have too much overlap. Although the irony is there is a lot of overlap, even with the stories being very different. There's a lot to a lot of common themes that emerge. But I didn't want the essays to be exactly the same as what I'm saying, Like my especially my editor at Simon and Schuster was like, we cannot have every single essay be an abuse story, and I agreed with her. You know, I wanted to have a wide array. I love the diversity of perspective. I love that that it's so many women and so many men. I love that it's so multicultural. Every essay really surprised me. And yet you're right, you do feel the through line in all of it, and I guess that that makes me curious. Why do you think that the mother child bond is so unique yet so universal? Oh that's a great question. Oh, I mean it's universal because everyone comes from a mother. Everyone has a mother for even like just a brief amount of time, So there's always this idea of I mean, in my essay, I open it with our mothers, our first homes, and that's why we're is trying to return to them to have some sense of where we belong or where we fit. And I think that's true, is that like, as we live our lives, even if our moms are no longer in it, we're trying to understand who we are in relation to where we come from. So even though our stories with our mothers might be very different there. You know, at the end of the day, the stories of relationships are universal in general, Like there there are so many common threads we can see in somebody who might have had a completely different upbringing, completely different relationship with their mom, there's still there's That's the same way you might feel in watching a movie where you connect with a character who grows up in a completely different place than you did and has a completely different story, but they come to some realization about life that speaks to you, right, Yeah, and you mentioned it. You know that mothers really are set up to fail. Yeah, the the expectations are unrealistic. Not one person can be all things to all people at all times. And obviously that means that the mother child connection is a complicated one. So there's this great disparity between the greeting card family and most people's reality. Yet we still make the greeting cards. We still live in a society where we have holidays that assume a happy relationship with your mother or with your father. And I'm curious why you think that is. And and and as a person who exists on the not happy end of the spectrum in your in your maternal relationship, what advice do you have for people who are experiencing that dissonance? Similarly, what do you what do people do with Mother's Day? I myself have a very difficult time on that day, especially on Facebook. You know, people tend to use that day to post photos of their moms and celebrate their mothers. And that's wonderful and I'm really happy for everyone who do who does have a great relationship with them mom. But for those people who who have some pain around that, I think that you really need to practice self care on that day, of all days, whatever that might mean for you. And that might mean avoiding social media and the parade endless parade in your feed of people celebrating their moms and buying into Mother's Day. I think that that could be a great day to practice being a mother to yourself, right. But I also think it might be an interesting exercise to to write down your own thoughts about what you would say to your mother if you could. Um. Actually, the Smarter Living section of the New York Times someone just recommended that exercise from my book in the New York Times last week, and I was like, Yeah, I love that somebody did that, because it is a good prompt right, what would you not? What would you talk about with your mom if you could, even if your mother is no longer around, maybe that might be something that helps you feel better if you can't actually say it to her face to face, And so that might be a good thing to do that day if you can't get your mom out of your head. And I'm very curious what what your thoughts are also for those people out there who might just be starting to figure out what they're complicated relationships have been or or or who are coming to terms with whatever trauma they've been through. Because again, in this world where we are not really taught to nurture ourselves and we are often taught to deny our experiences, I had to to learn that doctors, psychologists classified trauma as any environment that is not nurturing. That's where trauma begins. And then on the sliding scale, you can go from you know, an unsupportive, dangerous, manipulative home all the way up to what I think so many of us think is the definition of trauma being you know, veterans who come back from war with PTSD, But yes, that's trauma. But doctors have also now shown in tests you know, psychological and brain tests and everything that you know, women have been sexually assaulted experience and carry the same levels of PTSD as war veterans. And so that's a far end of trauma. And then there's there's sliding into it from any non nurturing environment. And I am just so curious about how we help people recognize what might be traumatic in their lives so that they don't have to carry it, how we help them recognize it. I mean, I think your book is helpful. I was going to say, I think that people might find themselves in one of the essays in this book. I absolutely recommend meant, I recommend that they read it in that case. Um, I mean, I think what we need to do, especially for people we care about, is help them recognize trauma, right like, because sometimes, like you said, you can be blinded to yourself and not really understand it. Um. And there's so much stigma. There is so much stigma, and not everyone has access to a therapist, right like, having a therapist's privilege, having the money to afford to go to a therapy as privilege. And so for me, I often, like I talked about earlier, I found myself in books and books were really what helps me to to come to an understanding of what I had been through. And I'm hoping that that's what this book can do for for people, is break these silences, break these stigmas. I mean, I even know some like as I've toured around the country, there have been some moms who have bought copies of this book for their daughters. Um even though they at least they tell me they have good relationships with their daughters, but they want their daughter to feel like they can talk about anything, Like there's no topic. That's even if a relationship is good, it's not all good. No, it's not possible, no, exactly, that's not a relationship. That's a cartoon. Every relationship is laud and complex exactly. So, so I think we need to break the stigma of there are certain things we should tiptoe around or or or keep to ourselves, because I think I think it's really important to be able to articulate what we carry in our bodies, whatever that might be, and to give yourself permission to recognize it and carry it and also still carry joy, also still have a really good time. Exactly before we started this interview, we were laughing about travel and trips, and you were telling me about, you know, backpacking with your significant other through Europe and being an artist in residence and getting to say above the Shakespeare and codebook story like how amazing. And so I guess I'm also curious where where do you find joy? What makes you happy? You know what, when you're not exercising the profundity of words like what are you doing for fun? Traveling definitely and spending time with friends and family really important to me? What else gives me joy? It's like, whenever anyone asks me what my favorite thing to eat is, I can't think of anywhere I've ever been, And literally I planned my entire life around where my next meal was, but I don't when someone asks, It's like my brain just goes like white noise. Well exactly, and that same one people are asking for my favorite books. But I'm glad you brought up eating, because actually food is what gives me a ton of joy. So and it's something that connects me to my mom because my mom is an amazing cook. So even though we have a complicated relationship, whenever I'm cooking, I can think about how that's something that relates to her. But yeah, I live to eat. Basically, I travel so that I can eat. Yeah, I like I'm always looking for the best reviews. Yes, and we have to trade less. So talking about you being being an artist in residence, you know, you're getting your um, your master's which is so cool, and you're teaching, yes, And I'm curious you're teaching creative nonfiction. But I'm actually teaching fiction and poetry all at n y U. I'll be teaching for the first time. I mean, can I get your syllables? Of course, I'm really proud reading it. I would really like to see it, Like we can learn out about this. But I am curious as a teacher, what advice do you give to your students. You mentioned that you take them through that exercise, and I do having heard you say that. I think a lot of writers, a lot of people are afraid of delving into certain topics, you know, for what that kind of vulnerability might mean. How do you encourage your students to put that fear aside and and dive in. I you know, when I was on book tour, I read and gave talks with a lot of the contributors to the book And one of the my favorite things someone said was Melissa Phoebos, who's an amazing writer, gave the advice when we were on a panel that you really need to write with blinders on when you're writing about your own life and I and and that is essentially what I tell my students too, is that you have to kind of trick yourself into thinking that no one else is ever going to see this. It's different than writing for a diary. Write a diary is just more stream of consciousness and not about trying to create a narrative out of something necessarily. But when you're writing for an essay about something that happened to you, even if it's not traumatic, just something in your own life where there's any kind of complication, you do need to pretend that no one will ever read it, because otherwise you might paralyze yourself. Um and I think that's so important is to just worry about getting the first draft down and thinking about it as a conversation between you and the blank page, and not thinking about the wide world out there and what people will say. I love that a conversation between you and the blank page. That believe it's so much pressure it really does. Immediately. It does, because otherwise you're instantly thinking about like, oh, if this is published, what are people going to say about this? What is my family going to think? How are people going to react? There are a million things you can say to talk yourself out of writing something, but there are a few things you can say to talk yourself into writing something. And the other thing. The other thing I have my students do that I learned from my friend, the writer Dylan Landis, who also has an essay in this book. Um is the palmadoro technique. Do you know about this? Oh, I love a technique, I love a tool. Oh yeah, me too. So this is like something that's used in a lot of colleges. But it's basically, you set a timer for twenty five minutes, and during that twenty five minutes, you do not check your phone, you do not check the email. You know, you're not on social media, you are just writing. And there's something about that concentrated amount of time. Twenty five minutes feels like possible, even no matter how busy you are, right and so there's something about just being able to focus for twenty five minutes that it's enough time to get you into what you're writing, but also to not feel overwhelming. And then when the timer goes off, you said it again for five minutes to give yourself a break to do whatever you need to do, and then you set another twenty five minutes if you have time. But I really like breaking it into those little chunks because what I find is it's a lot more doable than just sitting down for like a four hour stretch and being like I need to write, which just there's no that's daunting. Yeah, exactly exactly. So I think that, you know, that makes it manageable. I think it's all about like that. And then another thing I one of my favorite writers is Elizabeth Gilbert. She's incredible. Her new book is so good. She is the best. Yeah, but her book Big Magic about Creativity and her ted talks on fear and creativity have really stuck with me. And one of the things that I've I take away from that that I try to remind my students of and I tell them I learned this from Elizabeth Gilbert is she talks about finding the joy and creativity, which can be hard, especially if you're writing about complicated things, right, because like, where is the joy in that. But there is this She talks about how we have this myth of the suffering, tortured artist and that there can be joy in the act of creating um And I think that's true. And I think, you know, like this this essay in the book that I wrote, it's the hardest thing I've ever written. Did I have joy while writing it? No? But did I have joy in knowing that it helped other people? Yes? And there's other stuff I'm writing now where I do feel joy, right, And I think it's important to be able to work on the things that give you joy, especially if you're working on something that's hard, right, and maybe you had to get the icky thing out of the way so that you could plug into the joy exactly. Yeah, It's it's that duality again. Yeah. And I think it's so important that we give ourselves permission to be whole people, because it really is the sum total that puts us where we are. So on that note, I have a last question that I love to ask everyone because the title of the podcast is called work in progress, and I think from the outside, when you've published a book or work in media or whatever, looks you know, fancy people think, Oh, that person has it all together, but any of us who sit in a talking circle are talking about what we're still trying to figure out. So I'm I'm curious at this stage in your life, whether it's something personal or professional, or political or passion project, what feels like a work in progress to you myself? I mean the same I would say imposter syndrome, right I it's ridiculous. But the more successful I am, the more I haven't poster syndrome. Everything that happens, I'm like, oh, well, this only happened because of this reason, or I can like justify everything, right, I can think of it that way. And I'm going to be thirty six in October. I'm a grad student right now, I'm like everything that happens to me, I'm always explaining a way of like, oh I only got this because of this, or this only happened because of this. And I'm really trying to get out of that mindset and I and I want my friends to get out of that mindset too, because I have a lot of friends who also have a similar feeling. I mean, I think anybody who has ambition has imposter syndrome, especially women. Oh yes, I'm right there with you, and it's interesting. Some friends and I. I don't know if this is helpful, but we just had this conversation that can you imagine if you spoke to one of your best friends or or your boyfriend the way you talk to yourself. If your boyfriend looked at you and was like, hey, Michelle, I love you, and you were like, yeah, but you only say that because you have to, he'd be like, the funk is wrong with you? You know, like like if we spoke to the people who we love and value in the way that we talk to ourselves, they would just be like, are you okay? And and when you think about saying what you say to yourself to someone else who you trust, you realize it's an insane thing to say yes. And that when my imposter syndrome is really firing. You gave me some exercises. This is the exercise I've been doing where I literally imagine saying everything I'm thinking to my best friend and the like smack on the back side of the head she would give me if I ever did that. Seriously, I love that. I'm going to use that from now on with myself because it's the worst we can be our own worst enemies. So awful how we talked to literally, I think about like saying things to Nia and her just going no, no, sit down, and I'll be like, okay in trouble. Well, this is also the part of learning to our mother ourselves, going back to that, right, like imposter syndrome, like getting over that that idea is part of being good to yourself and nurturing yourself. So I think I I at the same time, I think that you know, it's okay to be like questioning where you are at and what you can do to make yourself better. That's something that's different though than imposter syndrome of the idea of like I don't belong here, And when you think about how much energy we probably waste worrying that we're not supposed to be somewhere where we've been expressly invited, it's so crazy. It's the worst. So I'm I'm trying to get over that, and I think that will be something that I work on for a long time, because are again, I think our society kind of encourages women to think this way, and we have to actively work against that encouragement. Absolutely, even you know, I've I've heard several editors from magazines or publishers tell me how you know, whenever they give encouraging rejections to people, without a doubt, they'll never hear from a woman again, but a man will send them like a bunch of new ideas. So again, it's about like getting over this idea that we're not enough. My friend Jen passed alof who's another great person you could have on this podcast. By the way, She's amazing. She's based in l A. And she wrote a book that Elizabeth Gilbert like, raved about it on Instagram and Cheryl Strae blurbed at Pink, blurbed at patent oswal a bunch of people. So Jen used to work in a famous restaurant in Hollywood called the Newsroom or in l A. I'm sorry, yeah, and so um. Her book is about She's she's one of the most inspiring people I know. She is partially deaf, but she's one of the best listeners I've ever met. She leads these incredible manifestation workshops around the world. I mean, we have to go, yeah, you do. They They are life changing. You will not leave that room without crying. And she talks about all kinds of stuff like the bullshit stories we tell ourselves. And I think about that a lot, and that ties into the imposter syndrome. And the you are enough is one of her other phrases. I love that, And so that book on Being Human is a dear treasured book to me because so much of what Jen says in there speaks to this idea of questioning ourselves and thinking we're not good enough, and actually, you know we we we are good enough, right, We just have to allow ourselves to feel that way. Yeah, and we have down the anxiety backpack and we're good enough. Flaws and all. That's the thing that she really encourages. And I love that because we are all flawed. There's no person who is not, not a single one. Yeah, exactly. So awesome. Thank you so much, of course. Thank you for coming and sharing and for writing your beautiful book. I think everyone in my life is like, we get it, the essay book, We get it. Stop talking about it. But I just I feel like a broken record. I keep coming back to it. It's so special. Thank you, Really, this conversation has been wonderful. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick, Our associate producer is Kate Linley. Our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by Clarion. Anatomy asked