Good Life Project - Dani Shapiro: On Life, Marriage and Creative Expression

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

Dani Shapiro is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels and four memoirs, including her latest, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Money.A recent guest on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday, she's taught writing at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University. Dani is also the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy and a contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler.Her new memoir, Hourglass, is a fiercely honest meditation on Dani's nearly 20 year marriage. In today's episode, we explore what it's like to build a life, a family and a career when both parents are creative professionals. We also dive into writing about a relationships that you plan to stay in, sharing deeply intimate awakenings, stumbles, fears and experiences along the way and piecing together the puzzle of your life in words. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You know, when I realized that that was what I was going to be doing, I was so horrified and petrified. It was not a welcome, like, oh, this is a good idea, I'm going to write about my marriage, yay! It was absolutely petrifying, because I was writing about a relationship that I intended to stay in, one that I had no interest in betraying, but one that I wanted to find a way to write about truthfully. How do you write about a relationship truthfully without betraying it, without betraying

the person, you know, with whom you're in the relationship with? This week's guest, Danny Shapiro, is a memoirist and novelist who's been on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday and pretty much every other publication media outlet you can find. We actually met a number of years back hanging out at a small gathering in New York City. And I invited Danny on when her last book came out to talk about the writing life. She's got a new book out, a memoir called Hourglass, which takes a pretty deep dive look at her life over the last 18 years or so, really focusing on her marriage. And it's incredibly raw, incredibly truthful, honest, revealing. And I wanted to dive into that journey with her,

both the things that she shared and also what it was like for her as a writer, as somebody who's married and a mom, to be that revealing in the work that she was doing in the world. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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I have sort of this interesting context with this book too. So I finished reading it yesterday morning. Went from there to see Hamilton with my daughter. And I was like, there are some really interesting tie-ins and so many different levels and there was a moment in hamilton where towards the end after you know he had wronged his wife in a major way and also lost his son through some and she walks behind him and grabs his hand and i'm just like that was such a stunning stunning moment in a stunning stunning production but yeah the way the way that hamilton plays with time even that scene in the middle of Hamilton where the wedding is both happening, Eliza and Hamilton's wedding is both happening,

and it's being observed as if it's from a distance. I find when theater does that, it's so incredibly moving to see it as a production. Because as a writer, it's what I try to do with the only tool that I have, which is language. And then when I see something like that, like, I don't know whether you saw Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. No, I didn't see that. It's a fantastic musical where three ages of Alison Bechdel are all on stage at the same time. A little girl Alison, a teenager Alison, and the Alison of today. And at a certain point, they all actually sing in chorus together.

And I can't even talk about it without getting choked up. To see all of yourselves singing together at once, it's kind of what we all try to do with our lives, right? Yeah. No, I mean, completely. And just the, I mean, moving from sort of, moving through your narrative, and then seeing sort of like this visual narrative of time and relationships and forgiveness and questioning of everything. And then I wrapped up last night under the couch with my daughter, watching Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which, you know, is all about this, I guess, sort of legendary war journalist. And it was really interesting how the day kind of kept circling back to this memoir in

sort of different ways, shapes, or forms. But you brought up this idea of trying to move people back and forth through time, which you do beautifully. It's so hard. How, how do you even think of accomplishing that? Because as a writer, I thought about this and struggled with it mightily and I think never come close to figuring it out. You know, when you've got visual, it's one thing. But when literally you've got to create every scene and move people through, like, from one place to another. How do you think about that? the way that time exists on multiple levels. And because it can, it should. You know, that the writer should at least attempt it. Like, I actually think, we were talking about theater,

theater is the only other art form that can do it. I don't think film does it well. If you look at a flashback in film, whenever someone has a flashback or a memory in film, they're in it. Like, think about it. Are you ever in your own memory it's like oh there i am i'm seeing myself in this moment i think probably that doesn't happen to most of us and so it's like the language of film that's what happens in film but it always strikes me as a device like really not. And so I think from really early on, I was always trying to

tell stories in multiple layers of time. So like the past and the present moving back and forth in a novel, say, I tended to do that a lot in my fiction. So it felt to me, you know, in Hourglass, I really wanted to kind of upend time in a way. Like, I'm sure we'll talk about this a lot more, but I wanted to write about marriage, and I wanted to write about, therefore, my marriage, and what it is to be, to move alongside another person, you know, over time, to form yourself toward them and against them and away from them and to grow at different rates. And it strikes me as something immeasurably beautiful and also deeply complex that I really wanted to think about. But I was also really thinking about my younger self. I was thinking about my 17-year-old, you know, 17-year-old

Danny, like, was this grown woman visible in her? I mean, I even went back and saw the first therapist that I had ever gone to in my life, who I saw when I was 17 years old. I looked him up. He was still practicing, and I went back to see him. Basically, not to go see him in treatment, but to see him to say, can you believe it? Did you, like, that really, really messed up kid, like, did you really, you know, could you have imagined who she was going to grow up to become? He really surprised me by saying, yes, absolutely,

because it was very moving, actually. But I had that experience of just, I want to know who I was. And if I was alive in her, is she still alive in me? Are ourselves always alive in some way another and or another as long as we live you know our you know there's a lot of you know in the self-help world that's the inner child i don't know maybe the inner child has even fallen out of favor i don't know but you know just that sense of almost those russian dolls those nesting dolls and the way that they open up and they're smaller and smaller and smaller dolls inside.

And so, yes, I wanted to try to find a way in the book to create that feeling for the reader of, on the one hand, this is not moving chronologically or linearly through time at all. But I never wanted the reader to feel lost or, wait a minute, where am I? I didn't want it. I mean, that would have defeated the purpose, to feel unmoored. So that was one of the creative challenges of it. Yeah, and executed beautifully

because I felt like I was moving around a lot but not untethered. That's a great word. Exactly. I wanted there to be a sense of tethering, like tethering to the turning earth of the book. Yeah. It's funny, when I read a book like this, there are certain writers and certain books that I read. And on the one hand, there's just the human being reading. I'm like, this is just really interesting reflections. And I always feel like the purpose of a memoir is as much to help you discover about yourself as it is the revelation in the writers.

And then I always have the writer's hat on. When I'm looking at it, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. Just from the craft side of things. So it's a really interesting exercise. I've been reading a lot more. I've spent a lot of my life reading sort of prescriptive books and spending a lot more time these days reading biographies and memoirs and fascinated by a whole side that I feel like utterly incompetent at and also deeply aspire to a completely different level of craft when I read that.

And I realize, I think memoirs make me realize what's possible as a writer. And that it's, the information is, you know, is a thin slice of the world of writing. But it's the creation of worlds and experiences and illumination and all this other stuff. Yeah, no, it never feels to me that I'm imparting information, ever. It feels, or that I'm receiving information when I'm reading, you know, really, really good memoir. I feel like what the writer is attempting to do is to transcend the life in order to be able to, you know, almost send dispatches from it, to be able

to see it as a story, as a, or something even actually, I didn't think of this as a story at all in Hourglass. In fact, I write about that in Hourglass. It's like it's, I almost felt like I was breaking up with story in some way by trying to write it in the way that I did. But it's, I mean, Emerson has that beautiful line about great writing that touches the universe, touches the thread that runs through the universe and all things. And to me, when I read, from the time that I was a little girl, I met Judy Blume recently, and it was like meeting Mick Jagger.

It was like the coolest thing ever. She has this bookstore in Key West, and I was down there and we met and she was a fan of mine, which was like, oh my God, I've done something right in my life. But when I was a little kid, and I read Judy Bloom for the first time, it was, are you there, God? It's me, Margaret, which every girl my age read. The feeling that I had was, oh, me too. Like, me too. I didn't know that anyone else felt this way that I feel inside and Margaret feels this way. So maybe I'm a little less alone in the world and I'm a little less fragile and maybe I'm not so crazy after all. And I think that those of us who love to read, at some point or another, we had that feeling, whether as a kid or as a young adult or whenever, that feeling of an author, a writer, a character reaching out a hand and saying, me too.

And so we feel less alone. And that's what's so profoundly instructive. Like, it's not the story or the information that's instructive. It's that feeling of the way that we are so much all of us so similar in our deepest feelings, and it is the set of circumstances I have with which to illuminate these feelings. But basically, it's just, you know, here is my inner world. And also, reading is so private. You're not sitting in a theater with a thousand other people. You're one-on-one with this book, so it's this very intimate experience between reader and writer in a way that you don't

get in any other art form, including, you know, the museum goer doesn't get that there are other people in the museum. It's just one on one mano a mano, just reader and writer. Yeah, it's so interesting that you mentioned that I was recently talking with a friend about, about books and how they reach people. And I was saying, yeah, like, a book is one of the ways that you sort of go one to many. And he's like, no, no, no, that's actually, that's not true. Like, a book is a one-to-one experience. It is deeply intimate. He says, yes, you know, like, millions of people can potentially be exposed to it.

But fundamentally, the experience of interacting what's in it is a deeply intimate, personal, individualized, you know, sort of thing. Exactly. And Vonnegut once said that every writer writes for an audience of one. And I think about that a lot because people will sometimes ask me whether I think about my audience when I write. And I always tell my students, like, that's catastrophe. Catastrophe lies that way because the minute the writer is thinking about the masses or the many or the audience, then self-consciousness sets in, fear sets in, a sense of separation in a way sets in. When Vonnegut said that, he was actually referring to his audience of one, which was his sister, who was dead. So it wasn't even an audience of one that would necessarily be picking up the book and reading it. It was just that level of specificity. So with the current book, with Hourglass, who was your audience of one? Who are you writing it to i would say to my husband um that's a great question

um he i call him m in the book his name is michael but i call him m in the book and um he he's a writer as well and he was reading every page as i was writing um it's kind of our process anyway he is my first, and I tend to share work with him as I'm working on it, always, historically, whether I'm working on a novel or a memoir or an essay. He tends to hold things closer to the vest and share them with me, only once he's kind of beat his head against a wall

so much that he can't think anymore. Sounds like more my style also. It may fall along gender lines. I don't know. But especially with Hourglass, because I was writing about us, you know, when I realized that that was what I was going to be doing, I was so horrified and petrified. It was not a welcome, like, oh, this is a good idea. I'm gonna write about my marriage. Yay. It was absolutely petrifying. Because I was writing about a relationship that I intended to stay in, one that I had no interest in betraying, but one that I wanted to find a way to write about

truthfully. How do you write about a relationship truthfully without betraying it, without betraying the person with whom you're in the relationship with. And so in his sharing, in his listening to the work every day, there was this almost kind of sacred quality to that. And if at any point he had said to me, I don't want you to do this, I wouldn't have done it. I've thought about that a lot since I finished, actually when I finished. And I gave him the whole manuscript to read, and it was the first time he was going to be reading the whole manuscript. And I was away for the weekend teaching, and he called me, or maybe he texted me.

He texted me, and I believe that what he said is, this is fucking brilliant, I believe was his phrase. And that night I couldn't sleep. I did not sleep for one single solitary second because I thought, now this book is going to go out into the world. I hadn't sold it yet. It's a book that I wrote without selling it. Not typical for me. I didn't want to sell it until I finished it. And the next thought that I had was, well, it's going to go out in the world, and then I'm not

going to be able to control it anymore. And he feels okay about it now. But what if he doesn't feel okay about it in a couple of years? What if people don't read it in the way that I intend it? What if people say mean things about us or mean things about him? I just felt so staggeringly vulnerable for him, not for me. As a memoirist, I've written about myself, you know, since I could hold a pen, pretty much. And people always ask me if I feel exposed to my work. I've never felt exposed. I don't feel like people know me because I've written these books. I feel like these books are crafted works in which I've chosen exactly what to leave in and what to leave out. And I've written about my parents,

and I've written about old lovers, boyfriends. I've written about people over the years, but the two people that have been quite sacred to me have been my son and my husband. I've written about my son, but always very careful to... The question that I would always ask myself is, is it possible that he will be 30 years old someday

and say to me, I wish you hadn't written this? And that was to me like my own personal litmus test, and I don't think I've written anything that he will say that about when he's 30, although I could be wrong. It's weird to be the child of a writer. It's just weird. But my husband, even in my memoir, Devotion, people said to me, where's your husband in this book? And he wasn't. He really wasn't in Devotion almost at all. And the reason why he wasn't is because he had nothing to do with my spiritual journey. He's

an atheist. I was on a spiritual journey. He went along for the ride, but it wasn't about our marriage. And so I had never come up against, oh, this is now something where I'm going to be writing about him. He recently told me that he knew from the moment that he met me that someday I would write a book about him. So he knew that, but I didn't. He's just waiting it out. Yeah, it is so interesting, because reading it, that's one of the thoughts that went through my head was what was going on between you as you were writing it, and you share some of that in the book. And then how was he feeling about it along the way? And you actually share at one point in the book that you were showing him some pages and his, I forget exactly the line, but he's basically like, you need to actually be meaner to me or harsher. Harder on me. Yeah. We were, we were actually in the Denver airport and we were each about to get

on planes going in different directions. And I was feeling not happy about that. There were, you know, storms and wind and closed runways, and I was not so happy about getting on two different planes. And we were talking about the book. I actually, this isn't in the book, but I emailed him a copy of my manuscript so that if my plane went down, it would still exist. So that's when I really knew I was committed to the book. But we were walking around the Denver airport, and he said to me, you're doing really good work. And I was surprised that he said that, because he's very hard on me and doesn't tend to, compliments don't come, you know, sort of

flowing from his lips. And he said, I have only one note. And I kind of braced myself, because I thought the note is going to be something about us, something he's uncomfortable with, you know, what, what. And he said, I'm an okay guy, but you're not being nearly hard enough on me. And, and I knew he was right. And I also knew at that moment that that was going to go straight into the book. Like, it was almost a dividing line in the book between a moment where the auntie got upped, you know, a little bit, where there was a little bit more of a sense of, he gave me permission. He basically said, you know, if you're going to do this, do it. If you're going to reveal what it is to be in our, at that point, 18-year marriage, if you're going to

try to write something that's honest and true about everything, about the disappointment, about the risk-taking, about the fear, as well as about the beauty and about the love and about the commitment, then go for it. There was a moment where I was reading him a scene that I remember being very nervous about reading him. And we were actually in the car going somewhere, he was driving. And I read it to him in the passenger seat. And there was this pause, and he said, did you think that was going to upset me? And I said, well, I didn't know. And he paused again. And he said, but it's true. And so that was something that was, I said, well, I didn't know. And he paused again and he said, but it's true. And so that was something that was, I think, very genuine coming from him was,

if I had written something that he felt wasn't true, that wouldn't have been okay. But writing something that was about the truth of us felt like more than fair game. It felt like, yes, that's what this endeavor is. That's what you're endeavoring to do. Do you have any sense for how much of that you think may have come from his background and sort of like super high stakes journalism? I think he's pretty comfortable with stakes being high. I think he's more bristlingly alive when things are very intense around him. So yeah, maybe in part, it has something to do with that with whenever he's been in an environment,

you know, as a filmmaker, when he was making his first film, and the stakes were incredibly high, and every day counted if there had been a snowstorm. Well, it wouldn't have been a snowstorm. It was shot in North Carolina. But if there had been a monsoon or if one of the actors had gotten sick or anything like that had happened, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Like that level of you're counting on the goodness of the universe to have everything be to just that that's not going to happen and um or or or perhaps another way of putting it would be you know he's talked a lot about being a foreign correspondent um and the way that when one of them would

either a photojournalist or a journalist would be killed in Somalia or in any of the places where he found himself. The other journalists at the hotel that night would gather around and pretty much say to each other, well, that couldn't have been me because, you know, I wouldn't have gone out after curfew. Or that wouldn't have been me because everyone knows you don't go down that street. Or, you know, that couldn't have happened. There's always this reason, like that's not going to happen to me because. And so that kind of combined with a sense of, kind of a sixth sense for where it's safe to go, where's the calculated risk, all of that kind of stuff is kind of what makes him up. I remember when he was shooting his last movie, there was a scene in it that takes place in Brooklyn in a cafe.

And the main character is a writer, and he walks into the cafe. And from his point of view, he feels like a loser. He's writing a first novel. His girlfriend has left him. And from his point of view, the cafe is filled with writers writing the great American novel. And the gag was that he, Michael actually cast 45 and, you know, just all of these amazing writers in this cafe. And Philip Gorevich was one of the writers, and Philip was a foreign correspondent. He was in Africa a lot with Michael. They knew each other from there.

And he wrote a beautiful book about Rwanda. And I went up to Philip at one point and said, this is like Michael's, like a different version of a war for Michael. And I thought Philip knew what I meant. And he just looked at me like, yeah, you know, sweetheart, this is not Rwanda. This is not Somalia. This is a Brooklyn cafe. But that feeling of like being immersed or, you know,

enveloped in a world is something that he's very comfortable with, those high stakes. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need

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Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Yeah, I mean, I think if my husband were an attorney or a doctor or an accountant or a teacher, I think many, many spouses would not have been comfortable with even the idea of this endeavor. Yeah, well, it's like you're both in the business of truth-telling. The way that you write, the way that he films, it's not, you know, it's not made-up stuff, although, you know, you're a novelist as well. But even then, there's like, I think, a lot of truth-telling in the way that you write. One of the threads that sort of appears in the conversation as you write is sort of building on this conversation around his work in the early days and, you know, in some of the worst parts of the world as a correspondent on the ground. And how that seemed, the way that you share it, to really be something that lit him up. relationship with him as you sort of move, you know, and settle into the city and get married and have a child and then move out to the, you know, like to the country.

And there's a lot of questioning that happens about not just how you're sort of navigating that, but how that sort of like increasingly steps into domesticity affect you and your relationship with him. And also it seems like questioning about whether you, quote, did that to him. Yeah, that was one of the more illuminating parts of writing Hourglass for me because it's not something that I think either of us ever looked back and thought very much about. The question of when we met, he was a war correspondent.

He had just gotten off a plane from Africa the night before. He had been ambushed on his way to the airport. He, you know, he had nine lives. It was, it was, it happened again and again and again. And we met at a party in New York and the most, you know, sort of almost banal literary circumstances of just a party of a bunch of writers off of Gramercy Park. And we pretty much fell in love, you know, at first sight, and very quickly, we're never apart again, and he never went back to Africa. And it's not something that we ever discussed. We didn't have a sit-down conversation at the beginning of our relationship of, you know, his saying, I may want to go back to Africa someday. How would you feel about that?

Would you ever consider living in Nairobi if I were going to be made the bureau chief? Or any kind of, you know, do we want to have children if we were going to be made the bureau chief or any kind of, you know, do we want to have children if we were going to have children? We did not have those kinds of practical information-based conversations with each other. We just kind of fell in love and embarked on this life together. Seven months later, we were married. Another year and a half after that, we were parents. And in the interim, things would come up and people would invite him to come do things like be dropped into the Congo. But the reckoning that really happened was, in my thinking, because he, you know, things happen

very sort of naturally. He got a job for a year at New York Magazine as a contributing editor. He absolutely hated it. He hated every minute of it. He was going from having reported on wars to reporting on things like there was a cover story that he was writing about, about taxis and taxi drivers. And what he did was try to report it the way that he would have reported any story, which is he was getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning and going down to the diners on Lower Ninth Avenue where the Ethiopian cab drivers were hanging out

and trying to find out really about their lives. But the then editor of New York Magazine was like, no, no, no, we don't care about that. The consumer of New York Magazine is what we're interested in, and, we don't care about that. The consumer of New York Magazine is what we're interested in. And we care about why it's so uncomfortable in the back of taxis or that kind of thing. And so it was awful for him. And then he very, again, organically and naturally transitioned into becoming a screenwriter because a couple of things fell into his lap. A book that he wrote was optioned improbably,

a book about foreign policy, a kind of wonky book got optioned, and next thing he knew he was writing scripts for HBO. But that is a very hard life, the life of being a Hollywood screenwriter, and it makes being a memoirist and a novelist look like a walk on the beach. And so it's been full of ups

and downs. It's been full of, you know, fits and starts for him. And so one of the things that I felt like I really, really needed to think about was what would his life have been if he hadn't left Africa? I mean, he would say he probably would be dead and that he's never regretted not going back. But it's like a door is there. And every time, and I write about this in the book, every time anybody ever asks us our origin story that every couple gets asked, you know, how did you meet? They always say, do you miss it? Do you miss Africa? They always ask Michael that question.

And, and his response is always pretty much, yeah, I missed it. I miss it. But I met Danny, and I never looked back. So the whole question to in a long relationship about regret, or paths not taken, or, you know, if I hadn't gone to the party that night, or if, I mean, he almost didn't walk into that party that night and I almost didn't walk into that party that night. Everything changes. You change one thing and everything changes. Yeah.

It's, I think we always think if I could just rewrite one little piece of the story, like it would be perfect. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't. And there's such wisdom in that, too, in really understanding that. You don't get to say, I would like to change this one. Like, for example, sometimes I really miss living in New York. my son would not, because of particular things about his childhood and kind of help that he needed when he was a little kid and stuff like that, he wouldn't be the kid he is today. He

ended up going to a school in the country that was, I could have searched the world over and never found a more perfect school than this little Montessori school that he went to, that really changed his life and has made him this kind of the fantastic 17 year old that he is now so it's like i can't say i wish i still lived in new york because i still lived in new york then i would have a completely different kid it just doesn't work that way that's why regret is so unskillful you know to use the buddhist term yeah true i love how almost like there's something about the universe where almost anytime the conversation turns to New York, we hear sirens. That's funny.

It's like we're in a soundproof studio, the one thing they can get through is sirens, and it always does at the perfect moment in time. You brought up your son a couple times now. Two big questions just started weighing, not weighing, but just dancing as you wrote about him and as you speak about him. And you brought up one of them, which is, you know, when he turns 30, will he look back at this and say, huh, I wish that wasn't out there? Because that's something I think about a lot, not just when I write, but when I create media, you know, we're both on social media and we're both public, whether we want to or not, sort of part of the path these days, public in ways that we would probably, to a certain extent, prefer not to be.

So it's always interesting to me to see sort of how a writer chooses to speak about family, and then to speak about a child in the moment. And so I'm curious, I know you said you were showing the manuscript to your husband as it was going along. What about the kid? Yeah, the kid. I didn't show him the manuscript as I was writing it. I did give him one of the very first galleys to read, which he read about half of, really loved, and then promptly lost. And he did not ask me to replace it.

Classic virgin nature. lost and has not asked me to he did not ask me to replace it classic virgin you know what actually and that's and and it's really in a way kind of the perfect uh response because it's sort of like you know it's not really his world or his life it's he he cares and he um he was very lovely and loving and admiring of it. He's in the book not a huge amount as himself today. Like there's only really one or two little kind of recurring motifs in the book where he's in it. And I knew he wouldn't mind the way that he is. There's nothing that's revealing or embarrassing or anything like that, which is, I think embarrassing or revealing are both the benchmarks for me. Is there some way in which

there's something that he wouldn't want out there? I thought about this a lot when I was writing my memoir, Devotion, because my son was sick as a baby, And that is his story. But it also happened to me as his mother. And so, but and he's completely 1000% fine. So I had to really think, is it okay to tell this story? Is it okay for me to tell the story of what it was to, you know, time will tell. I think it's fine. But it's always, you know, one never really knows how, how, you know, in the fullness of time, anybody is going to feel about having been written about. I can tell you right now that he's extremely proud at 17, you know, that he's proud of his parents. He's getting a group of his friends at school together to come to one of my readings. He tells his teachers about his parents who are writers. But at the same time,

I am increasingly respectful of the fact that it is complicated to be related to a writer. And, you know, he's related to two of them. And, you know, I'll see sometimes someone meet him, say a fan of mine or something, meet him. He's, you know, runs into me or recognizes me when I'm with him. And one of the things people will often say to my son when they've read Devotion is, oh my God, you're so big. Because the thing that memoir does, and people don't talk about this a lot, but having written a number of memoirs, I think I really have come to understand it, is it pins the moment in time. It doesn't tell the story for all time. This is not the story of my marriage for all time. This is the story of my marriage as I understand it in the year 2017 at the age of 54, having been married for 20 years.

This is what I understand about being a mother. My son is 17. This is what I understand about being a mother. My son is 17. This is what I understand about having both of my parents be gone X number of years. That kind of, you know, if I were to, like my friend Sylvia Borstein read an early copy of Hourglass and had a really beautiful response to it. But I had been so nervous about her response to it because she's been married 60 years. And I thought, you know, I'm a pipsqueak marriage-wise when it comes

to people who have been married 50, 60 years. What do I know about that? The answer is nothing. I know nothing about that. I know about this right now. So could I write another book, you know, 15 years from now that would be quite different from this one. Yeah, you know, so that idea of that little boy in devotion got pinned in time as, you know, the seven-year-old that he was in that book. And, you know, now he's the strapping guy and people are like, oh, you look so, you're're so big so it's a strange reality for him it's almost like being in some sort of hall of mirrors where he means something different to people than who he is and that's got to be a little funky uh so i have a lot of respect for

that just you know ask i check in with him once in a while about that like so how was that for you and he just laughs yeah no it is so interesting mean, I think one of the things that was going through my head also is there's the way that it lands when you write directly about him. But there's also the way that it lands when you write about you and your husband, when you write about – this is funny. This popped into my head. It's funny how I read this stuff. I was wondering how it would land with him. When you would weave through narratives about how sometimes brutally hard the profession is on you, on your marriage, on your finances, in a very raw, very transparent and truthful way. Yeah. raw, very transparent and truthful way. Yeah, I mean, that, you know, I was like, wow, this is, this is, this is all out there for you guys and for him.

Yes. I think that that was probably the scariest thing for me because, you know, two things that people are never honest about their marriages and money. Right. And, you know, I guess, you know, creative risk taker that I guess I am. I couldn't write about my marriage without writing about what it is to be two artists together. And also, I guess I have this feeling that I have increasingly as I get older, but that I've always had that when, when I feel that I'm being, that I'm being misunderstood, or that there are assumptions that are being made about me or about my life, that are that are incorrect, I somehow feel like it's almost my job to correct them. In the sense that, you know, I've always been a myth buster about writing.

I am a quote unquote bestselling writer. This is my ninth book. I have, you know, a career that a lot of people think is really charmed. It is in many ways really charmed. Does that make it easy? Does that mean, you know, that sometimes I'll be at a reading, giving a reading, and there'll be a line of people to buy books, and there are invariably people online to buy books where someone will say, you know, I took your book out of the library, and then I lent it to my sister, and she gave

it to her cousin, and they're telling me this, like, it's good news, right? And Michael and I have talked about that a lot of times. And I was like, what are people thinking? And Michael has said to me, they think writers are rich, which is hilarious. But it's really true. There is, you know, we live in a really pretty house. We drive decent cars, our son has gone to private school. And so there's this way in which people just think that there's like a level of comfort and that there's no insecurity and that there's no risk. And that's been something that's come up with people reading the book early, people even who know me pretty well saying, I didn't know this. I thought everything was, you know, I thought there was like, you know, some big cushion somewhere. There isn't. And, you know, just the other day, Michael turned to me, he's actually in the process of seemingly to being about to make a second movie. It's all come together for the moment. And, you know, and it's a very high stakes game. It's famous actors and, you know, big budget and all that kind of not big, but indie big. And he said to me, I want you to know that there is no part of me that wishes that I was working in a regular job and waiting for my bonus at the end of the year. Like I am more alive right now than I am at any other

time when all of this is going on. And it's all firing, you know, it's all firing on all cylinders all the time. And, you know, that gave me such a measure of relief that he's doing what he has no regrets about what he's doing. He's doing what he really wants to be doing. And if all we have is the present, if there's a moment in Hourglass where I'm listening to an ad on the radio and it's for a financial planning firm. And they're talking about the future. And I'm not going to remember the exact phrase, but uncertainty is inevitable. But I was thinking about just the whole idea that there is, you know, there's Sylvia Borstein said this great thing to me that I quote in the book without naming her. But she said, you know, the future, even an hour from now is an actuarial

guess. So if the future is an actuarial guess, even five minutes from now, we don't know what's going to happen. And the idea of being completely engaged and immersed in doing what you love, even if what you're doing is a bit of a high wire act, every couple that I know who are both in creative fields grapples with this in one way or another. And I really wanted to try to write about that. I mean, I write about other literary couples in the book, you know, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, or, you know, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Virginia and Leonard Wolfe, you know, some of these were, did not end well, but they were people trying to kind of keep their world afloat together as partners together.

And I wanted to try to write about the beauty of that and the uncertainty of that. Yeah, I mean, it landed. You know, because there is, I work with my wife. I did not know that. We had the last four or five years, I guess, you know, we're quote in business together. And you know, I'm solitary, I'm a writer, and I'm a creator on that side, but we also have a company that we're building, like a media company, an education company. But we're entrepreneurs at the same time,

so we are in the business of constantly creating and recreating from nothing, and we're charged with, even when we feel like things are going great, and we're comfortable breaking what we're doing because there's no sideways. And I think that there's a creative bone in your body. That's what you have to do.

And it's terrifying, especially. And I'm glad that you wrote about this. And I'm glad we're talking about it because I think when we're younger, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you get to a certain part of your life and people are like, you're still doing that? And the eyebrows get raised.

And yet, what is there supposed to be if you're a creative person? A moment where you change course and become something else? There's one of my favorite cartoons from the New Yorker years and years ago. There's a split screen and there's a man who's standing there and he's looking out the window and his desk is in the background and he's looking out the window with his arms crossed and he has glasses on and underneath it says writer's block temporary. And then on the other side of the screen, same guy, same stance, same glasses, same crossed arms, but he's standing in front of a fish store that bears his name.

And it says writer's block permanent. And I just love that so much. But the thing is, I'm guessing that you and your wife never don't have stuff to talk about, right? Like you're in it all the time in this kind of, in this stream together. That's like, on the one hand, all of your eggs are in the same basket. On the other hand, all your eggs are in the same basket. And it's a very beautiful way to go through life. It's, you know, it's not without its complexity, though.

And that's what I really, that's what I wanted to look at. You know, the idea of, you know, being partners. I mean, Michael and I do different projects. We rarely do a project together. And in fact, there's been conversation about possibly, you know, Hourglass the movie. And everyone is in agreement that Michael shouldn't make it. You know, because that's not wise. It's not wise to be that much in the same thing, either creatively or financially or professionally.

And so we each have our own projects, but at the same time, we're constantly thinking, talking. You know, I'm talking to him about casting ideas for his movie, he's talking to me about and you know, you mentioned the word entrepreneur. I don't think this is going to be a fairly bold thing, I think to say, but I don't think that it's possible to be a writer, an artist working today who is ambitious. And by ambitious, I mean both creatively ambitious and ambitious in terms of wanting to have an audience who can afford to not be an entrepreneur. I completely agree. And I actually have learned to enjoy it.

I'm pretty much an introvert. My favorite way of spending my time is pretty much alone in a room, for which the internet is actually a very useful and kind of, you know, wonderful way of being able to get out there. But to really think, what's going to make this work? How can I reach people with this book? How can I be sure that the people who are going to respond to this are going to know about it and find it? What is my, and you know,

and this is something a number of years ago, even when I wrote Still Writing, I made some joke about the word platform, you know, and like the, you know, I only like the word platform if it's on the sole of a very cool shoe and that kind of thing. But you know what? It you know platform i only like the word platform it's if it's on the sole of a very cool shoe and that kind of thing but you know what it's life continues to evolve this life of ours with all of its attendant noise and all of its um you know just the the

the endlessness of it you just wrote about this really beautifully the other day you know all of just like what at what point do we at what point is it consuming us and at what point are we consuming it? But really finding that place and not being ashamed or embarrassed about saying, yes, I am trying. Do the cool kids not try um i want to be sure that that i'm you know that that this work that i've bled over and as is has like takes has taken from me everything that i have to the point where it's like at the end you know i was like the boxer in the ring with the you know with the with the you know, referee, like counting down, well, then if I've gone through that, in order to be able to write this book, then I want people to

be able to find it. And that takes that kind of creative spirit, a different kind of creative spirit than it takes to do the writing of it. Yeah, I completely agree. And my sense is that and I'm much newer to the world of writing than you are, but in my experience, I've been in it since 2008, let's call it, that to want to be a writer without also being even reluctantly raising your hand to say, I will also do the work to on some level become an enterprise. I don't see how, unless you're just planning on being that miraculous soul who writes something that just taps into the zeitgeist in the most astonishing way at the right moment in time, and everything happens magically, which can happen on rare occasions. And once or twice in a generation that happens. Right. But other than that, you know, there's a certain, I think, responsibility that we need to own.

You know, I think on the one hand, it's a scary time for some writers and creative artists of almost any field. And on the other hand, for those who are willing to step into that place and say, okay, but I now have more ability to actually build direct sustained relationships with those i seek to you know like share my art with if if i actually go out and do it like that opportunity creates possibility for artists in any medium that i think are astonishing if but you've got to be willing to do the work

do the work yeah i couldn't agree more do the work. Do the work. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Do the work. And also, I think there's another layer to it, which is own who and what you are in all of its idiosyncrasy. Take me more there. Okay. So, you know, I used to, even up to a few years ago, I used to, you know, once in a while think, but wait a minute, I'm sort of unclassifiable. Who are my role models? I mean, on the one hand, I am decidedly a literary writer. On the other hand, I was on Oprah. I teach academically, but I teach in yoga centers. And when I teach I often lead my students in meditation now which is not an academically pedagogically recognized although increasingly I think it should be I mean maybe

heading there but I have written books that have helped people that aren't self-help but then get embraced by the self-help community. And then I started teaching in this much bigger sort of leading retreats kind of way. And in the beginning, and I was kind of being dragged along a little bit at the beginning. In the beginning, I was just being dragged along by the energy of it and the momentum and the invitations. But there was part of me that was holding back, and there was part of me that was feeling like, but wait a minute, I'm a literary writer. Who else has done this?

I need to find someone else who has done this so that I can figure out how she did it, and then I'll do it that way. And then in the last couple of years, something really shifted where I thought, you know what? This particular aspect of me in terms of the way all of this has happened in my creative life and my work life is unclassifiable. This is, you know, it's okay to be a, you know, to have a fairly significant following on social media and be someone who has written a very delicate literary memoir. My books can help people without them being, you know, meant to be or my approaching them as self-help. I can teach in this way because I'm teaching what I have learned to do for myself and what works for me. And so I'm developing my like all of that sort of rolled up into a feeling, you know, of just like, yeah, it's not only is it fine, but I think it's necessary. Like people ask me all the time about finding their voice.

Like what is, somebody just the other day said to me, what would be the one piece of advice you would give a writer starting out. And I surprised myself with my answer, which was embrace your own idiosyncrasy. Understand that that's what you have going for you, not what you have going against you. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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Yeah. I'm still working on that. We all are. I think we all are. Yeah. I wonder also if part of it is I'm 51, so we're close to the same age. I think there's a seasonality also to it, where you get to a point where you're just kind of like,

you know what, take me or leave me. Yeah. But I've got to kind of be me. The thing that I'm still not comfortable with is I still, I filter a huge amount. Like what people see of me publicly is me, but it's not the whole me. It's nowhere close to the whole me.

And it's not nowhere close to the whole idiosyncrasy me either. Well, is it ever though? Yeah. Because I think it always involves crafting because it is a public performance. I often will say to my students, you are not publishing your diary, you know, and, you know, and you're not reading my diary. These are not, it is not like a, let it all hang out. You know, Annie Dillard has this great line where she says,

you may not let it rip. I love that. It's like, no, it's about sitting down and chiseling and crafting and choosing and, and finding the puzzle pieces that belong together and creating out of all that something that is resonant. I think it only becomes resonant when it's being crafted and created that way. But that's not at odds with embracing your idiosyncrasy. It's just sort of saying like, Dolly Parton has this great saying that you may have heard, which is something to the effect of figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. I love that. And at the same time, I think there's a really big risk of somebody reading something like Hourglass and saying, well, this is almost like the stream of consciousness, live journaling of her processing this in real time, because it feels like that. It feels like

we're in your head as you process and move through these moments. And you write in present tense very often, which makes you feel like I'm looking over your shoulder the whole moment. So it's interesting to hear you say, yes, it's my truth, and this is also, it is an edited, selected, refined performance to a certain extent. Oh, completely. There was nothing stream of consciousness about the writing of Hourglass. It was, in fact, as I was writing it, my process was that I had a huge pile of index cards all the time with thoughts I had about what might absolutely in order to, for it to do what I hoped it would do, it needed to have a shape. And so, you know, you asked earlier about the question of

regret and, you know, over a long marriage, beginning, you know, like the whole question about Africa and whether Michael ever would have, you know, like the whole question about Africa and whether Michael ever would have, you know, wanted to return and that becoming something that I, in a way, shaped that in the book to, I mean, to have it have an arc over the course of the book, not just have it be sort of one section of the book, where there's a motif that runs through it where very early on, M says to me, I'll take care of it. And it's about something. It's like our roof leaking

or the woodpecker pecking away at the side of our house. I'll take care of it. And the next sentence is, an important part of our marriage, something I've always loved and longed to believe. And then at a certain point, I'll take care of it became this refrain in the book. And then there was this great moment, a great moment for me as a writer, where I understood something about the shape of the book, where I realized, oh, because there was a passage much later in the book where I wrote, I'll take care of it.

You know, I was looking at M sleeping and worrying and thinking about the future. And, and I silently think to myself, I'll take care of it. And one of the most beautiful things that anybody has said to me so far about the book was from Sylvia Borstein after she read it, she of the 60 year marriage. And she said, but that read it, she of the 60-year marriage, and she said, but that's it in marriage over the time. Over time, you know, the idea of one of you taking care of it is like a hot potato that you keep on tossing from one to the other and back again over the course of a lifetime. And it's only if it gets dropped that it's a problem, or if you're both holding hot potatoes at the same moment, that it's challenging. But in a marriage that works, I think there's always this sense of fluidity of who's stronger right now? Who has more energy right now? Who's more able to bear

this burden right now? Who's the one who's going to say, let's take the day off and play hooky and go to MoMA right now? Who's, who's the one to say, you know what, you really, really need a massage, I'm gonna book you an appointment, like whatever it is, two people doing that together. And, and that's when I understood the shape of the book, that that was what was going to contain it in a way, because I did upend time in it. But it was very, very deliberate. And I think one of the things that readers often when they read something that reads as effortless, this is in all genres, they believe that it was effortless and excellent for them to believe that.

But work that appears to be effortless is the work that has been like slaved over so that, so that there's never a moment where the reader is like stubbing his toe and thinking like ouch that doesn't that doesn't feel right or that doesn't make sense yeah i i so resonates with me um one of my aspirations as a writer is to reach a level of craft where people don't see the craft anymore exactly it just vanishes it vanishes there's just a sense of such ease in the experience that the craft vanishes. That's right. And that's where I think you've really started to operate on a different level.

Oh, I love hearing that. And, you know, another thing that I was trying to do was to show the seams, which I think if you reach a level of craft where you're not afraid of showing the seams, of saying, like, this is how this thing is made, like the moment where M turns to me and says, you're not being hard enough on me, or there are a couple of places in the book that I actually refer to the fact that I am writing a book,

because it's also a book about being a writer, being a writer who's traveling and teaching and writing and struggling and, you know, doing different kinds of writing jobs and all of that kind of stuff. And I wanted to be able to actually show the making of it in some way, and have the making of it be part of the, hopefully part of the artfulness of it. Yeah, no, I love that. So it feels like a good time for us to come full circle. So I asked you this chunk of years ago, but as we've talked about, these are snapshots. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So as we sit here today,

if I offer that phrase, that term to live a good life, what comes up? I would say so much of what we've been talking about in this conversation in a way, to live in the present, to live with a sense of personal authenticity, a sense of one's own realness. You know, I'm thinking of the Velveteen Rabbit, I think maybe, as we get older, a little bit of that feeling of, it's really okay to be this real. And to reveal one's realness, or I'll speak in the first person person to reveal, you know, my realness or my vulnerability or my rawness or my openness does not expose me and make me vulnerable in, uh, in a, um, in a scary, unsafe way. I think it makes me feel stronger because I'm not hiding behind a whole lot of layers of artifice or subterfuge or masks that I'm either aware of or I think even subconsciously aware of. I mean, I really, it's so much about just taking off the masks. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for

two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's life, take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas

become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.