The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - When Gen X Culture Collides With Reality

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Author Allyson McOuat loves horror stories, especially those real and fictional specific to gen X pop culture. So much so that she wrote a book of essays with 1980s and '90s as their backdrop. "The Call is Coming from Inside the House," is a raw look at McOuat's influences and touchstones as she navigates her life from early adulthood on as a queer woman trying to fit into society's prescriptions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. Growing up here felt a little bit like living in a gothic novel, I do have to admit. It was like a Bronte sister or something, having a forest to explore and green grass and water and trees.

And then there's this beautiful creek and this this creek was called Spring Creek, and in the 1800s was considered to bring long life to someone if they drank from it. And so a little hotel propped up in the town as it was being formed, and people would come from all over Ontario to drink from Spring Creek. and people would come from all over Ontario to drink from Spring Creek. Horror movies are something that I love. I'm a big fan of it. I enjoy participating in movies and horror novels and things that are a little bit spooky and scary. And so I wanted to take a look at moments in my life where I connected with a trope that is common in scary movies or scary literature. So those moments where my story might illuminate a universal issue rather than the other way around. And on this warm spring night, we have the moon roof open and the windows down, and we are all chair dancing and singing to George Michael's Freedom 90. The George Michael Freedom 90 video said something to me about how even in secret places,

like your own bathroom, your own bedsheets, the places you're half naked and vulnerable, you are always first and foremost queer. And that means you're never alone because like the Borg in TNG, we're a collective consciousness. We can recognize each other through our gaydar. Now, of course, hiding and being invisible are two different things. Hiding is fear-based but invisibility can be a superpower. At least that's what I was contemplating at the time because I was scared to make my queerness visible to my friends in the world, afraid I would scare them. My bi-ness was not supermodel beautiful to me yet. I was afraid they wouldn't understand. I wasn't interested in Linda Evangelista. I was already swooning over pictures of a

shaven-headed Ripley in David Fincher's next project that was coming out a month later in 1992, Alien 3, and it was a love that was growing desperate to burst out of my chest. Being a queer woman and feeling that strong affinity for horror films or thrillers or scary bits and pieces of culture that come up, the reason why it felt so prevalent for me in this time period, the 80s and 90s, was we were really, really taught to be very hypervigilant around anyone who seemed to be hiding part of their nature out in public, like the Ted Bundys of the world

who were so wonderful up front and then were hiding something. And in the case of gays and lesbians, people were hiding something, but it wasn't something frightening. It was something beautiful. It was love that we were hiding, and yet people turned it to become something more villainous. And that's why they used queer characters quite, you know, often. If you look at the queer coding, it's quite often the characters who are the villains are queer coded in life. And so that's a strong connection that happens often. In the calls coming from inside the house, the essays are all outlined underneath common

tropes in film and literature. And so I take that trope, so for instance, the babysitter, and I look at a moment in my life when I was the babysitter and all of the kind of nerves that came with it and all of the moments that were a little bit spooky or strange that came with it, the stress that came with being responsible for children. And then I look at some of the theory behind it, and I compare it to films that are within that genre and try and connect it to illuminate a stronger universal truth. At 18, all I want to do is drive. I'm in mad, passionate love with the

freedom that it presents, and my mother lends me the car because she never seems to want me to take the bus. She doesn't say anything to me outright about the risks and dangers of the world. I think she knows that if she said something to me that I'd just roll my eyes at her so hard that I'd do a cartwheel. I think our being attacked or something, it seems about as likely to happen to us as a man with a hook for a hand climbing through my bathroom mirror. But for a long time now in the news, girls like as young as 15 have been followed home by a man from bus stops near Scarborough. I think that Gen X absolutely, growing up in this time period, definitely, that is where my worldview comes from. And for this particular book, it fit in perfectly with the film and television and exploring

things through that trope because we were the TV generation, right? We were the, typically the latchkey kids who were growing up on MTV and coming home from school and watching Young and the Restless and, you know, a lot of us were. And, you know, so that is part of it. Media and connecting with media was a big part of our education, I think, especially for me during the teenage years, informative years. So, you know, I'm curious about how that impacted me and my thoughts and what lessons I learned from it. So Gen Xers now at the certain age that we're at, I'm looking back at the first half of my life

and kind of assessing the collateral damage. Although as a mother and cis femme queer woman, I've struggled with centering my stories and experiences, separating the expectations of my role from the individual being, and as they say in the film Orlando, not drowning anonymously in the milk of female kindness. We must stay sweet, calm, and sheltered. we must stay sweet, calm, and sheltered. The stereotype of a screaming teenage girl exists because teenage girls have valid reasons to scream.

And teenage girls need plenty of healthy opportunities to scream together in fun, so when we need to scream in outrage or fear, our voices are prepared. I'm a mother raising two daughters, one who's just about to become a teenager and one who's right in the thick of it

and they are both absolutely informed and intelligent and capable girls but I worry that what maybe I've done is swing the pendulum too far and, you know, by frightening them a little bit. I think they definitely don't fall into some of the same

things that I do, but every generation has their issues and concerns and, you know, I worry that maybe where I was naive, maybe they are too well informed, and it could be frightening or negative to have too, too much information, just like I feel like growing up in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, I didn't have enough at all. My fertility journey was, you know, it was almost Tolkien.

It was so epic. It was very long. It took a lot in order to bring our two children into the world. So there were multiple miscarriages, lots of different doctors involved. I had several surgeries, even when I was pregnant at one point in time. And then in between to make sure that the next pregnancy would stay. And it was, yeah, a lot of bed rest. So there's something kind of gothic around being on bed rest. But I think it's really important to share your fertility journey because so many people are going through it. And because we don't and didn't talk about it, I know for myself,

it felt very isolating. I imagine for my partner at the time, it also felt very isolating not being able to have a voice as the partner. Everything is, you know, it's all about the mother who, the gestational mother who's going through it and not so much for the partner. So there's a little bit about that that I think needs to be spoken about. And then, you know, there are parts of me where I kind of question how deep we went into that, how much it cost us, how much was required, and how much were we sort of led down a path to try and do this in a particular way.

way, what was necessary, what wasn't. The costs were extraordinary to our bank account, but also the relationship, my career, taking time off for all of that, your sanity and sense of self. It was all-encompassing for a very long time. And so, you know, I want people to know that they're not alone in that. And I think also giving a voice to queer women and how we go about creating our families as well is unique and specific to our journey. At first, we had thought to ourselves, you know, how are we going to do this to women? How is that going to happen?

And then there were so many options and opportunities, which you don't really think about to create this family. And so finding the right path for us, you know, was a bit of a challenge. But ultimately, I would do it again every single day for the rest of my life to have the kids that I have because they're phenomenal. This essay is really the impetus for the calls coming from inside the house. And it's from the New York Times Sunday style section, November 1st, 2020. And it is an essay about living in a potentially haunted house at the end of my marriage. So living with ghosts post-divorce. Who is the harbinger? So the harbinger is one of the tropes that I explore in the book. And the

Harbinger is the character at the beginning of a horror movie who fuels up the plot line by stepping in and saying, don't go into the woods or stay away from Camp Blood on Friday the 13th. 13th. The harbinger is the person who knows the landscape and warns the protagonist to be careful of what's about to come. And in the book, I personify that character as my anxiety. So for me, I live with generalized anxiety disorder that developed significantly when I was going through the fertility process, trying to have children. decided to deal with it and go on to medication, which has now really, really supported me and helped me with some of the physical sensations of anxiety, so I don't feel like I'm tense at all times, but the intrusive thoughts still come in. And it's something that I think people are becoming more comfortable talking about intrusive thoughts and fears and worries that are cycling through at all times. So for me, anxiety and the harbinger really showed his face after I had the children and became a single mother when our family structure changed and so what the times I was parenting I was a single mother and so yeah he would be very vocal about

letting me know that you know the worst things in the world could happen at any moment my ex-wife and I used to call it death at every corner so I could walk into a room and just let you know immediately where all of the dangers are. Some traumas are so big that they won't fit up on a shelf or in our curio cabinets. Some are so big we have to carry them with us 24-7 which can be awfully heavy so we turn them into stories that are easier to share with others and take some of the load off of ourselves for a while. We make them entertaining so they're less likely to traumatize someone else.

So that segment is in a story called The Storytellers. And it's the storyteller or my dad's first murder. My father was not a murderer. He's a journalist in the 1950s in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And so he is a very dynamic man and he's wonderful with words and he certainly is where I got my love of writing from. Growing up with a father who was a journalist and writer and a mother who was a teacher, literacy was very important to them, and so we had the great fortune of having access to books

and the classics. So instead of bedtime stories, my father would read to us from An Invitation to Poetry and read stories and poems like The Cremation of Sam Magee, which is one of my absolute favourites. So a little bit spooky and maybe not the most appropriate for bedtime, but it was always fun and got me interested in stories that were maybe a little bit on the darker side. The story of his first murder is he was a journalist. He was doing the crime beat, and he was listening to the police scanner on the radio, and they said,

there's a body on Vernon Street. There's a body on Vernon Street. They were calling for another police officer, and my dad realized, oh my God, I'm on Vernon Street. They were calling for another police officer and my dad realized, oh my god, I'm on Vernon Street. He was only 17 years old. He'd never seen a dead body before. He had never been a part of anything like this. And so he pulled up and stood over this body in the middle of the street and felt utterly terrified and got back into the car and drove off and then came back once the police had arrived. That's kind of the gist of the story. Stories are so big and complex and tell so much about who the storyteller is as a human being. And, you know, when it comes to telling a great story, you need a little bit of both facts and fiction and fun and a little bit of elaboration and a little bit of fabulousness in it, I think, to make the story really, really perfect.

We lost my mom. She passed away in April of last year on my birthday actually, which sounds really sad but there was something quite beautiful about that too. Something about, you know, being there for each other in the moment of birth and death and it was quite beautiful actually. My mother had an illness called multiple systems atrophy, and it's a rare neurodegenerative disease. And I could compare it to ALS, I suppose, where just she slowed down quite gently over a period of years, but eventually she was unable to really speak. She had to be fed.

My mom was once a dancer. I say she remembered the dance, but she couldn't get her feet to move and she you know, knew all the words to the songs, but she just couldn't quite sing them the way she could before. So she was a beautiful woman, a very gentle and peaceful spirit in my life. I say in the book that my mom did disappear from my life sort of task by task, and that maybe that's the responsibility of all moms is to disappear from our children's life slowly and as they take on each task in their life to let them step forward into the spotlight and move back step by step smart stories for queer girls I wasn't really writing it specifically for queer women, although I'm sure it will resonate for women who, you know, are queer, bi, lesbian, trans, wherever you are in the beautiful rainbow spectrum. You know, there's definitely stories in there for women.

I've been really surprised and interested to see that men are really enjoying this book. I've had several reviews from men who have really kind of connected with it. And that was surprising to me. I thought for sure this would be strictly for women but I was on a terrific podcast called Spooked and they had read it and he loved it. I was like that interesting okay and then another reviewer who was male also. So it's not just specifically for queer women and it's not specifically for women, it's not specifically for Gen X. When I was writing it, I did not have an ideal audience in mind. I try to put that out of my mind actually entirely. I try

to put the business of writing a book out of my mind when I'm writing the book so that it can be as authentic to the story that I want to tell as possible. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions Thank you.