The Bulwark Podcast - Jennifer Senior: Secrets and Lies

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Pulitzer-Prize winning Jen Senior joins Tim Miller for a free-form conversation about jail-bound, faux martyr Steve Bannon, the debilitating reality of living with long Covid, unearthing a family trauma, and how Americans with differing political persuasions can find their way to back to each other. show notes: Jen's story on her Aunt Adele Jen's "On Grief," originally published as the Pulitzer-winning, "What Bobby McIlvane Left Behind." 

Hey everybody, as I mentioned on yesterday's pod, I'm in Portugal at my friend's wedding this week and so I pre-taped this interview with Jen Senior, who I just adore, has been nominated for two Pulitzers, one won in the past couple of years. I wanted to talk about those articles, but also her analysis of our political life right now. She's written movingly about COVID and long COVID. She wrote about Steve Bannon. She's written about conspiracy theories. We definitely have some deep personal talk at the end about some of her profiles that are a little bit off the news, but stick around for the top because she's got some real insights into the authoritarian right and what's happening in our political moment. Tomorrow, Wednesday,

AB will be in this chair talking about the end of Roe with some very special guests. On Thursday, JVL will be in this chair with our old friend Amanda Carpenter who volunteered to come anytime on vacation. So I'm grateful to Amanda at Protect Democracy. We'll take Friday off and then I'll be back next Monday. So enjoy this conversation with Jen Senior. Be nice to AB and JVL and Amanda and and I'll see you all next week. Peace. All right, we are here with Jen Senior, my friend, staff writer at The Atlantic, the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her piece,

What Bobby McIlvain Left Behind, which turned into a book on grief. She's also the author of the book, All Joy and No Fun, The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. And she was a finalist for the Pulitzer, no big deal, for a 2023 piece about her aunt Adele, The Ones We Sent Away. Jen, what's happening? Thank you for doing this. You're welcome. You know, I adore you. So, no problemo. Nothing is happening. Well, actually, that's not true. Okay. Mutual adoration society. Yes. No, I could totally fanboy at you. So many things, so many good one-liners that I would

gush about, but that's kind of nauseating. But you've been terrific. So, I got in at two last night, so I'm kind of exhausted. And I was at a sleep conference in Houston. Do you talk at a sleep conference or do you sleep at a sleep conference? Well, this is what I was going to say. No, you attend a million lectures about sleep. All of which seemed, by the way, for those of us who are sleep-deprived, to be saying, you know, the subtext was like, Jen Sr., you're going to die an early death. The amazing thing was how many people drink coffee, like a ton of coffee.

And then my flight is like delayed by eight hours and i have to wake up early today so i come back from a sleep conference and i'm like exhausted anyway sorry i'm just venting that's perfect for podcasting actually are you using bowl and branch sheets have you started your bowl have you tried your bowl and branch sheets this is a freebie that one wasn't that wasn No, wait, wait, wait. I can build on this. Okay, you swung the door wide open, so I'll walk through. My pillow. We should do them.

Or as Bannon likes to say, I'll do my pillows read here. Pillows read. Did you ever try my pillow? You know, I was told it was such a piece of shit. I think I should because if it's only a $40 piece of shit or whatever it is, it seems like it's worth test driving and charging to the company. But no, have you? No, of course not.

Never. Give me the heebie-jeebies. Right. Well, I don't think that he slept on it. But anyway, yes. Even still. Even still. It was around him.

It was in the building of him. It's very creepy. The whole thing is creepy. You don't know where. It might be China. Oh, no, wait. That's a shtick that it's not, is creepy i don't know where it was it might be china you know we don't oh no wait that's a shtick that it's not right i don't know not china okay so we're going to talk about some of your long form pieces that are not non-politics but though they might have a politics angle so we'll get to that but before we do i i feel obligated because it was like a sign from the gods that an hour before we taped this, our mutual friend, Stephen K. Bannon, was informed by a judge that he has to report to prison at long last by July 1st.

He has been the subject of articles by both of us. Yours better than mine. No, yours much funnier. It's not just funnier sure but you know uh there are other there are other gradients where you can judge writing besides uh besides you know poop humor i think you can argue that vaudeville is the way to go but anyway yeah fine with bannon so i'm just wondering your reaction to that and just kind of like a reflection you have a little bit of depth you did talk about that article when you're on with charlie a while back but you know kind of just reflection on on the ban and the ban and oof oh interesting okay well

first of all he plumped like a sponge in front of the cameras today i mean i don't think that was an act i don't think you can fake that i mean it was almost the way that in the anthony weiner documentary he couldn't suppress how pleased he was when he was watching himself on Chris Matthews, when he was secretly kind of embarrassing himself and revealing himself to be a horrible narcissist. I think Bannon was genuinely kind of plumbing to the prospect of going to jail for this. I don't know how he'll feel once he's there.

But this is super on brand to be the martyr, all that stuff. I'm sure you had the same reaction, right? I agree. He seemed too excited. It actually took my joy away. I had a moment when I saw the saxophone. I was like, yeah, no, this is nice. But it did take my joy away a little bit. I don't want to comment about sort of how I felt about it. I mean, I'm sure reading that piece, you could see there was this very strange act that was going on when I was writing it, where at the end, I realized that I'd been lulled into sort of feeling like I was Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, where I felt like, okay, he's out there in the world, but he won't come after me.

And that was, I think, true, but he outsourced it and other people did very aggressively after the piece about him came out. He had his deputies, you could see, and there were all these kind of, you know, on MSNBC that he had clearly outsourced this work where it was the most unflattering shot you could take of a 50, what was I, two-year-old woman at that point where they would zoom in on my face just as I would, they would freeze as I was doing, you know, like one of those um i guess this is mainly a podcast but i'm making a frog face um or whatever face i want to get back to the point you're making though because it's i feel the same way he is not like some of these other people in the mega world his dark side is the same as theirs but he's he's affable he's charming

and like he's an interesting hang yeah if you had to suffer through a five-hour boozy dinner with donald trump jr or stephen miller or dan bunge you can just list uh all these people all these horrible people laura engram or or greg gutfeld or bannon it's like bannon i mean please you know what i mean like he would by far be the most interesting person to sit with for five hours and all these other horrible gnomes. And so you have to process that a little bit when you're thinking about him. So if I can jump in for just one second here, Jeff Goldberg said to me after I had written two sociology pieces, one that was about the McIlvains and another that was an essay on friendship. He said, OK, democracy is on the line. You have to choose a MAGA person any MAGA person and um I said ban it exactly it was the same like ban it for 500 please because he was the only person I thought

whose company I would find like genuinely interesting also I mean as we know he's whether he likes it or not, he is an establishment guy. So he knows how to code switch. And so I thought it'd be interesting to watch him doing that in real time. I mean, he'd sit there and speak to me about John Sayles movies and then go live on the air and start howling, you know, braying and howling to his listeners. But anyway, yeah, he genuinely seemed energized by this. The funny thing to sort of think about also in terms of him going to jail is you could think about like, oh, this is sort of the Omerta thing, right? You don't talk. But you're doing that on behalf of the Don, right? Which has

two meanings here. I'm now realizing the Donald and the Don. But he also is in some ways the Don because he really does think of himself as being the head of some other grassroots movement. So it's sort of interesting, like, I don't think he thinks he's martyring himself, even though he says publicly that it's on the movement's behalf. I think that there's some part of him who thinks it's on his own behalf, that his own listeners are going to be, you know, know energized by this not just on the movement's behalf but on his that's my secret theory the dark part about him was the follow-up statement not his bushy-tailed press conference where he was just had a shit-eating grin and he's

pleased to play the fighting right and was heckling the heckler yeah yeah the dark side of him was a statement after that which is uh he said don't pray for me pray for my enemies he said this to jonathan swan i think it seems like he used it a couple times yep and like it's such bullshit bravado you know it's like it's such bullshit bravado and he doesn't want to send anybody after you or me anybody knows it's not like his actual enemies are not that like the media he loves like the democrats like he watches msnbc all day you know like this is all part of a big wwf wrestling thing for him the problem is that there will be real like some people will suffer you know and if that's if they do get back to power and they do seek revenge then there will

be real suffering and these guys don't care about that, actually. And that's the part that makes him so loathsome. Well, whenever he lost his shit, he would say, hey, I'm Irish, right? I mean, and I think there's a little bit of the, you know, he definitely, this is in no way to ascribe this to Irish people, but like he keeps falling back on that because he doesn't want to in some ways own his own, you know, anger and his own, you know, he's got like a deeply vengeful streak. And also, I think you're right. I don't think it would necessarily come out at people like you or me, but the number of people who I spoke to who were afraid to be on the record and who really did feel like they were getting threats and they would describe to me those threats and they were pretty sure they were emanating from ben and there's no way to know

you know there's no way to know i'm not really clear on whether he's got his own goon squad i don't think it's tough to say right and he's got goons and he's got security you know and i think that i don't think he's gonna bodily harm anyone or you know yeah if you're between him and power on the right you definitely are at threat right like in some ways like we're his performative enemies like his real enemies are the internal the intra part like he wants control over the maga and the republican ecosystem and so his real enemies are the ones that try to stop him into that fight right and so those are the people that are his actual enemies the rest of us are kind of enemies via kayfabe. Right. I mean, I think that, you know, I don't know what the state of affairs is now, but his

biggest enemy when he was in the administration was Jared, right? So, you're exactly right. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that this man is truly going to outsource any violence, but, you know, or come out. I mean, I don't know. But it might be not intentional. I see what you're saying. Yes. I do think that he is responsible for a lot of the energy. I don't think, you know, the guy can't even organize a birthday party. He's so disorganized. But I do think he's responsible for summoning a lot, conjuring a lot of the energy around January 6th. And so, in that way, and what we saw on that day is that it only takes a handful of people to breach the security of the Capitol, I mean, to storm the Capitol. He's an asymmetrical threat, right? You don't need that many people. And so, in that way, of course, he's a danger.

And you also listen to his podcast. I mean, you can see what he's doing. You, like me, have listened to hours, you know, thousands of hours at this point, probably. Hundreds. So, yeah, you know what kind of threat he poses. One hour a week. It's my medicine. Yeah, I mean, my last thing for you on this is to that asymmetric thing. You know, it's just when I was on a live podcast and I was writing something about him.

And so I was kind of hiding inside. And like he sees me and calls me out there to the the danger versus the kayfabe the faking he's laughing his staff like thinks it's funny and like likes me like he's picking on me some in the crowd are laughing and think it's funny a couple of them in the crowd come up to me afterwards and are like fascinated by me and like wow what is this never trumper think you know one guy's really mad starts yelling starts cussing like ban and security has to get between them you know what i mean it's like just as if that's like a little microcosm of his audience you know it's like yeah if it's only one percent you know with their hundred there was two percent they're probably 50 people there you know if two percent are getting really violently angry, that's a lot. That's too many people. It's a lot of people.

It's the literally versus seriously. I mean, the 2% who take him literally, sorry, who take him seriously. What was the old Trump saw? Why am I forgetting it now? This is where the, you know, no sleep because I was in Houston problem happens. Yeah, his followers take him seriously, but not literally. Right. So, and we take him literally, but not seriously and and i think that for the people who take them both ways this is where the problem comes in and those are the people who showed up at the capitol and those are the people who decide you know who are in the horns and the fur dresses so yeah i want to kind of get into your articles in this way though i want one more kind of politics

question last week we had mckay coppins on and he talked to a 25 year old woman in poland and her question for him is what the fuck is happening in america or what the fuck is wrong with america something one of those and you know you because of you know your travels you're at sleep conferences you're you know doing a lot of interviews with regular people we're going to talk about some of these articles are seeing the full the full pastiche the full majesty of america like how do you just process all of it and it's just what is happening yeah just like just the radicals like the people are so interested in what bannon's offering that that people in your life that are were Republicans were kind of normal Republicans like off the deep end angry now and like just the polarization and the

radicalization even on the left in some ways how are you processing all that you have any kind of wisdom for us well one is that when I write about normal people America I discover that thing that you always find in polls which is that two-thirds or whatever percentage, I mean, it's fewer now than it used to be, but it's still a substantial percentage of Americans still aren't very interested in politics, which we always forget. And the other thing is how many Americans who voted for Trump, but in point of view, have very nuanced personal feelings about things. And one always forgets that too. That still, I think, remains something that we don't pay attention to. This said, I am also amazed at how many things from the margins are infiltrating,

the way that the Overton window really has been expanded on the left and the right. So one of my closest friends who just blurted out a statistic to me and i'm not even going to bother saying what it was whatever and i said really and i was rooting around online for it and i couldn't find it there was just one place that it was can we know the topic can we know the subject matter yeah it was about okay sure it was about millennials dying at a greater rate. And was this because of vaccinations? Got it. This originated on band and show and filtered out into the, you know, dark webby super mega E ecosystem. And it's somewhere how made its way back to my friend, right. And so how that leaked through is sort of, I mean, that's amazing to me,

the porousness now of this kind of stuff. So I'm saying two contradictory things, I recognize, but this friend is very, very interested in politics. So it would not actually be weird for her to have, you know, kind of expanded her diet and somehow, boom, there it is. And she also mentioned to me that she's quite horrified by the trans issue, which I think is really interesting because in point of fact, I get it, but in point of fact, this doesn't affect very many people. Like, why truly would you vote based on this when democracy is in fact on the line? I would argue that, like, solve the democracy problem first. Make sure we've shored that up.

And yeah, then worry about the left's excesses on, let's say, the transition. You know, I think your priorities sort of have to be clear here. And it got muddled, and one has to wonder how that's happening. So I think that's also true. Your turn, because you're going to have a far more nuanced take than I actually. No, I don't have a far more nuanced take. And honestly, we're going to have to start cutting out the compliments. You keep complimenting me. It's making me uncomfortable. Okay, that's fine. You've got an editor. the uh my question for you is okay this is happening the crazy is leaking out from the extremes and it is contaminating regular people at a greater degree like i don't think we need

to know this i think this is just observationally true is that something about connectivity like people's lack of connectivity with community you know lack of church all that kind of stuff or is it news consumption is it lack of having a shared truth you know that people are like getting news now from the from whatever like they're scrolling by on their phone is it mass onsetosis? Let's rule out three for now. Let's definitely say that two is right, that people are getting their news from all sorts of places and that the moderating forces are no longer really moderating anymore. And we're in the minority now, I think, and that what my kid sees on TikTok is sort of horrifying. I also think that what you said, the Robert Putnam bowling alone arguments that were first made in 2000, or popularized, and sort of there was really granular data

showing exactly, you know, we have fewer friends, we have fewer closer friends, we don't socialize. All that stuff, I think, absolutely plays a role. You know, who's keenly aware of it to loop it back through what we were just talking about Bannon. Bannon knows this. The most interesting thing that Bannon said, and it wasn't to me, it was to Errol Morris in the documentary that no one would show and it's a darn shame and Errol was momentarily deplatformed for it, but it's great, right, is that this one point that Bannon made where he said, look, I worked in Hong Kong for a gaming company, and the first thing I noticed is that all these lonely guys who were playing video games in their basements felt really emboldened when they were online as avatars. Because if they died in real life, you know, Bill in accounting, if he dropped dead, 10 people would show up at his funeral, 100 people would show up at his funeral, whatever. But if he dropped dead online, thousands of people would show up. And, you know, he would be known as Ajax online and people would carry him to his

funeral pyre on a caisson and he would be celebrated and people would miss a day of work, like actually miss a day of work to celebrate him. And that's loneliness, right? He was, his starting point was the guy in the basement. People are gonna go to these sources where they feel like people are drumming up a community. You know, I mean, Tucker Carlson is talking to you. Steve Bannon is talking to you. So, yeah, I think there's some of that. A lot of that.

Yeah, the young boys. But also feeling estrangement. Feeling, yeah. And, you know, finding your community. And lack of empowerment. Lack of purpose i do think that the breakaway republic of the one percent and the fact that a lot of people don't feel like they are getting anywhere i think you can't emphasize that stuff enough purpose matters yeah they feel real despair so i think all the deaths of despair we're reading about i mean i

think those are all real and it's millennials millennials, it's working class people. I mean, it's everything. I think it's everything you've isolated. It's all of it. I had a great Scott Galloway convo about this, but I just I keep coming back to it. It's like people need to feel like they are accomplishing something or like that something they're doing matters. The upper middle class version of these boys are like they have some stupid job that they think is totally worthless and pointless and the working class version of this is they struggle to find a job you know they're struggling to find like meaningful work and they're struggling to date and like there's a version of this at both levels i think is it's tough and this is like david brooks's and orin Kass's project, right?

Trying to find meaning and purpose in life when I think people don't have a purchase in their communities anymore or right. They don't have kind of professional fulfillments and they don't have family fulfillments. It's all of it. And it's, it's hard, you know, fragmentation is hard and not feeling purpose in your work is harder that you've got a union behind you or that you've got like a family at work is not, you know, you don't want it to replace your church. And in fact, some people are trying to do that and it's not working, you know, because church attendance is down and neighborhoods aren't neighborhoods

anymore. All that stuff, it all plays a role. It all plays a role. Yeah. I wish Oren Kans could just focus on the goody two-shoes part of this and not like, I agree. anymore all that stuff it all plays a role it all plays a role yeah i wish oran casca just focused on the goody two-shoes part of this and not i agree you know the overthrowing our democracy side of it you know just kind of laser focus on the giving people purpose and sort of shed the turning our stupidest citizen into an autocrat part i think you have some more insights on this that are going to be revealed based on your two Pulitzer nominated articles, which we're going to talk about. But before we get to those, I want to ask you about something you also wrote recently about questions not to ask you about long COVID. You have long COVID. I just couldn't help but notice that during the period that you have long COVID, you've also been nominated for

two Pulitzers and one won. So I do wonder about that. Well, first of all, the 2022 Pulitzer was for a piece published in 2021. It's always a little deceptive. You win whatever year Pulitzer for something you wrote the previous year. For those of us who don't have any awards, it's hard to get that straight. Sorry, this was never on my bucket list because magazine people weren't qualified until like five minutes ago. But, and also, by the way, I was at New York Magazine for like 18 years and I got really

used to saying, no, New York, not the New Yorker, you know? So, I was very comfortable working at Avis, like we're number two. I was really happy there. I privileged my happiness for a very long time. And by the way, we were a great magazine. Just nobody took us seriously for forever. Davis is a great rental car company. Right.

They get you where you need to go. Exactly. And New York, thank you. And New York was a great magazine. Exactly. So I was healthy as a horse when I wrote the McElveen thing. I had a great, really productive year. When I won, it was like in the beginning of May and I got infected June 28th. That's when I popped positive in 2022.

So I had like six weeks to enjoy that before it all went to hell. And by the way, the piece that I wrote that was a finalist, it shipped out in June of 2023. That is one year to work on one piece. I mean, that's crazy. That's one third the number of long pieces that I'd done the year before. And I wrote the whole thing while lying on my back. Like, not even sitting, but lying down with the laptop on my tummy. Let me tell you, I didn't realize until then that there is a real connection between how much you move and how fast you think, you know, and how much you think. I didn't have any brain fog. I mean, those are not my symptoms, the kind of brain fog, fatigue, shortness of breath. I don't have any of that stuff. I have, you know, kind of

next-gen stuff from the Omicron wave. And the other thing is, I mean, if you heard me in my interview, in the final interview that I did, there's a moment where I said, can I lie down on your couch? I need to lie down. And I conducted the whole interview, like the next three hours were me being horizontal. And she was lovely about it. Long COVID thing, I have a mission against interest here. And we might not actually get to your antidepressants. You might storm off the podcast when I ask you this question. But I feel like it's important because if I have this bad thought in my head,

then some percentage of listeners probably have this bad thought in their head. And so it's good to get it out and hash it out. And that is i went through a period of time really i think before we met uh recently in person and been another person i've met recently that is struggling with long covid where i was like are we sure this isn't psychosomatic and i know that that just might make you want to choke me it does a little yeah it feels confusing It feels confusing. It feels confusing.

It's confusing because I pass as a normal person. So I'll say two things about this. I was taking one medication before this, Unisom, to sleep. I'm now taking 12. So I'm pretty humpty-dumpty over here. And a number of them are really strong, including an anti-epileptic. And my primary symptoms are really intense, kind of strange vertigo, where it feels like a heavy metal gyroscope is spinning in my head.

And if you think about that, I didn't even know a body was capable of generating that sensation. It's a very weird concept to gin up for someone. And it happened immediately after, right? Immediately after. I mean, I was blazing through the world. I was highly productive. Just for people who, like me, are dumb and don't have two Pulitzer nominations,

because you wrote this in the article too, the gyroscope in the head. What are we talking about? What is that? I mean, neurologists have sort of heard variations on this before or this exact thing. It means that I don't feel like the room is spinning. I feel like something is spinning inside my head. I have always been infection prone, and I'm sure that this is one of the reasons. I have a natural killer cell deficiency when my natural killer cells show up in medium or low concentrations. And these are the first

line of defense in any kind of viruses. I mean, I've had immunologists looking at this. So it qualified me early for getting a vaccine and all that stuff. I mean, it's a part of my medical profile. And so when I had spinal meningitis in my 30s, I had something that was a little bit similar where when I sneezed, it felt like my brain was banging against the front of my head. That's a pretty classic sign of that you've got spinal meningitis and not just a 104 fever. So I will often have the sensation that if I tip my head forward, my whole brain feels like it's moving forward. And if I tip my head backwards, it will feel like everything is sliding backwards. And if I sit up, it will feel like something is spinning.

And I'm used to it. I'm now just used to it. For YouTube viewers, I was just kind of testing that out. And that's not, I don't have that symptom. Yeah, well, of course you're not going to feel that. I mean, like I've never felt that in my life, except for mildly when I had spinal meningitis. I mean, you can see it. If I stand up and I close my eyes, I immediately tip over and my eyes sort of, everything bounces. I feel like I have a GoPro camera on my head. And I've had that when I had inner ear infections. Again, I'm prone to this stuff. But they all go away. This just hasn't gone away. I'm

probably living in some permanent inflammatory state. And by the way, before I do anything, I lie down for like three hours. That's the other thing. You don't see the rest preceding a social visit. You don't see all that. You also don't see the rest preceding a social visit. You don't see all that. You also don't see the fact that I've made myself kind of worse and worse and that I keep taking more and more meds in order to be functional because I am stubborn and my self concept is so intertwined with work. I now wear a nicotine patch. I've never smoked in my life. It's the lowest dose. Nicotineotine patches i tried that once that made me dizzy well you get the spins at first that's absolutely true and i thought i was getting

worse but um eventually it was great and there are two theories number one um nicotine binds to the same receptors that the spike proteins do and it's a stronger molecule so there's some thought that maybe it dislodges the spike proteins that are sort of clamped onto your nerves like squid and that nicotine lodges on instead. And then your very shitty immune systems eventually gobbles up the spike proteins. This might just be a cockamamie theory. But the other is that nicotine raises your blood pressure and mine craters because I now have this thing called POTS. And that an entire long COVID cohort is walking around with. That's not at all arcane. I didn't have it until now. This is an autonomic

nervous system problem, and this is probably something that has happened post-virus anytime there's been a pandemic. I'm sure people walked around with this in 1918 or after any major flu pandemic. There's just these post-viral syndromes that happen. So I got that, never had it in my life. These are measurable symptoms. I also have microclots. You can't will your way toward microclots. You don't have them, I do.

That can't be a by-product of anything psychosomatic. So you could say, sure, that it's psychosomatic, but then you have to ask, why did I wait until the moment I had COVID to have it? I feel compelled by your answer. I feel apologetic that I felt like you need to defend all of your symptoms. But I like I think it's important, though, to hash because like, I know what the boys are saying after a couple beers about people along COVID. And so it's important for people to hear. I mean, the question is why anyone would do this to themselves. You know, I have a talent for getting all sorts of crappy things, but I always get over

them and I've always been fine. This time I'm not fine. You know, this was the thing that sort of did me in. All I could say is I had 52 years, you know, to be on my fainting couch, you know, and to have the sort of Victorian lady problems. But I mean, why on earth would I choose this? By the way, I'm going on disability because I've just made myself worse and worse I want to know how I'll be after a month of truly resting because

I will get off this podcast and I'll tell you what will happen my head will be juddering and vibrating like a lawnmower and my ear will be ringing and it will suck my other question on this then is, so you wrote about what people shouldn't do. I always ask this to people that are going through things. I have trouble processing is like, has anybody done anything that's been like, man,

that was really great. You know, is there a support advice that you have? Has anybody offered a conversation, a gift? My friends who just sort of say, okay, well, I'm coming over, you know, like, I'm just going to show up with like, you know, food, you know, I mean, just people showing love is really cool. This is true of healthy people, too.

I'd love a drop in. I feel like we've lost the drop in an American culture. For some reason, I want to drop in Louisiana friends drop on in just swing on by. I'd love to have somebody ring the doorbell and have it not be somebody serving me a jury summons or the Amazon man. I'd like for someone else to be at the door sometime. Totally with you. The pop-in, as Seinfeld called it, right? I think he probably was not a fan of the pop-in, but that's all Kramer did, right? Was pop-in. And I think actually, if you look at the most successful TV shows, like Friday Night Lights,

nobody called and said, I'm coming over. Like the kids just showed up at the door, right? Wanting to talk to the coach, right? And to his wife, right? I mean, I think there's something appealing about all that. The other thing is, I mean, what do people say? They say, describe what you're feeling. And when I tell them what I'm up to, they don't say, oh my God, this is a nightmare. Because of course, when they say this is a nightmare, I hear your life is a nightmare. And I don't want to hear that. So, even though it's totally well-intentioned, it's completely well-intentioned when they say that. Okay, that's a good flag. Yeah. They're trying to show that they grasp the enormity of the problem. But what I hear is, your life is a nightmare. What's nice is when they say, oh, my God, so what do you do for that?

When they kind of lean more into the curiosity thing. And one of my friends, when I said, I think I have to spend the rest of my life in bed, and I was weeping, and I was at that point genuinely suicidal. Jonathan V. Last sent me chocolate and a book. And I have to call him and tell him, look, I'm up right now. I looked at my husband and I said, I don't know how long I have like on my own two feet, but we're going on a family vacation. Like, I don't know how long I got doing this because if I get reinfected a third time, you know, maybe I'll just always be horizontal. And by the way, I really have the spinny sensation

right now. Right now? Oh, it's horrible. I'm just super, super used to it. And I'm gonna lie down. And I was lying down before. I podcast from like bed usually. Yeah, we can continue this from bed if you want. We can have this part three be from bed. Possibly. I didn't take my dizzy pills, to be honest, because they make me a little low-key. I didn't want to be I mean, you kind of have to have your running shoes on when you're with Tim Miller. You, you know, you're quick on your feet. I'm coming clean on multiple things about my false doubts about long COVID. And now the fact that I never actually read the Adele article until today. And I was bawling, like walking around my neighborhood in Ferrette. I was just on a single person walk. And it's like an old lady

that was maybe like doing a nanny possibly situation, like pushing a stroller down the street. She looks at me like, is everything okay? And I'm like, I have to wave. I'm waving at her. I'm like, it's fine. It's fine. I have it in my ears. I was like, absolutely.

I totally lost my shit altogether. So, you know know you achieved that once we sent away is what it was called it's about your aunt adele who had disability i guess you'll you can explain what that was and um how she grew up in an era where kids with this kind of disability were put into institutions instead of how we treat them now and i guess guess that's the contrast in the story. So maybe give people a thumbnail for those who haven't read it. Yeah, I didn't even know I had an aunt. I thought my mother was an only child until I was 12. And I think I actually outright said, I wonder if I had a disabled kid, how I would react. I don't even know how we could have got there. It may have been because my

grandfather was a volunteer at what was then, it was called WARC, which was, the acronym is so outdated. It was called the Westchester Association for Retarded Citizens. And my aunt at the time was diagnosed as profoundly retarded. He had given his daughter away when she was not even two years old, he and my grandmother. And this was the protocol. There was just no choice. They were these working class. They had no education. My grandmother hadn't gone to college.

My grandfather, I guess, had. But they went from doctor to doctor. And every doctor said the same thing, which is, this child will ruin your life and moreover will ruin your daughter's life. And for her sake, for your sake, for everyone's sake. And not only that, but the institutions will know better. There are schools, they will be able to figure out how to handle her. And so my grandparents followed their advice.

But in some ways, it really, I think it broke their spirits. They managed to live their lives and lead full lives with this gaping, Adele-sized hole at the center of it. But they put her in Willowbrook, which was notorious later on when Geraldo Rivera, of all people, did this expose, just kind of ambushing them with a camera in, was it 1972, I think? I think I just listened to it today. So I feel like it was 74.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't remember. I will confess. And again, these drugs are eating. I mean, the brain mice of middle age are already pretty hard. So then you add it with all these things I'm taking, and that's even rougher. Willowbrook, as it turned out, was, here's the weird thing. It probably wasn't even unusual.

It was just the place that Geraldo Rivera wound up getting access to. He was given a key by a whistleblowing doctor who said, you have to see what a hellhole this is. And sure enough, there were 40 or 50 people to one attendant. I think that was the ratio. So 80 people on a floor and let's say two attendants who were stark naked rolling in their own feces or in diapers wailing and they had absolutely no toys they would all fight for like a piece of paper if someone dropped it on the floor because it was something to play with seven or eight kids to a crib if they were infants but just the wailing and the stench was what overpowered Geraldo when he was in there.

And the doctor is saying, there's no way to even know how realizable the potential are of these people. My aunt was shifted to another institution that was closer to where my grandparents lived. I subsequently found out my grandmother learned how to drive for the sole purpose of driving out to Staten Island to see her. I wish I'd known that when I wrote the story. It's weird. The one person who I didn't talk to was one of my mother's first cousins who knew this. Anyway, it was hideous. And this is where my aunt spent the formative years of her life, but it's also then she was shifted to another institution, which I'm sure was just as horrible until she was 29. And then she was put in these group settings that weren't really any better until she finally, finally was put in this group home. It wasn't even,

it was this tiny family, you know, this family setting with two other people in the house. And she lived there happily for 24 years. And, you know, what I did when I finally decided like, look, here's this person who's always been this kind of blank spot on the family tree. And she was old. And I looked at my mom and I said, I'd like to visit her. You don't have to visit her. It was, I'm sure, really traumatic to have her ripped away when you were six years old. You couldn't have had any comprehension about why this sister, who must have seemed perfect and adorable to you was sent away and she was told

that she was sent away to walking school so you can imagine my mother's confusion like how long does it take to learn how to walk and you know whether unconsciously she was going god if i don't learn something on time are they going to send me away forever right so we went and we saw her and i actually had her genetically tested this is the craziest part of the story to me first off you were right it was 1972 so your brain mice are your brain mice are doing just fine they're still hitting the hamster wheel we're mixing metaphors they're still getting up there making sure they're hitting the cotton not the wires i don't know yeah this was one of my notes as i was as i was listening to the to the article today was just

like it's crazy that she was never tested. And I guess you know she's never tested back then, but you would have thought then later in life, you know. Totally. So anyway, go ahead, continue with that. And here's the thing, even if she had been tested, you know, she would have been the one in three people for whom they have no diagnosis.

And actually, that's now. They still were telling me there's a 33% chance we'll be like, we don't know and it turns out that she has something called coffin cyrus syndrome number 12 it's a particular variant and if they had tested her in 2019 they wouldn't have found it they just found it in 2020 so i tested her in the winter of 2022 they'd barely known what it was and there were only there was like a database of maybe 30 people in the world who had it so I was trying to find one person that didn't live in Italy or Russia who had it who I could visit with and see just how

much more they could be cultivated. And of course, nobody's going to be exactly the same, but I was still curious, how neglected was she? And, oh my God, was she neglected? I mean, the second I saw this seven-year-old, I mean, your heart just breaks. I mean, to think about how much more potential was there that no one tapped. I want to get to Emma in a second, who's the seven-year-old you talked about and her adopted mother and caretaker, Grace. But just before that, there was one phrase that kept coming back to me, this stupid aphorism of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind aphorism that you have in life. And that was kind of like the fundamental premise behind which people dealt with folks with developmental disabilities in your aunt's era yep that's exactly right there's some elements of that that's kind of true right like there were some ways in which life was able to go on for your mother and her parents and they're

able to do things they might not have been to do but there are other ways in which that's just so wrong totally and and backfires in such a degree. So I was just curious if you could kind of reflect on that a little bit. It's not a cliche. I think it's exactly right. And I think it was much easier for doctors to say that than for the families. Pearl S. Buck had a child, you know, Nobel Prize winner for literature. And I can't remember what year,

1950, had a child with Down syndrome who she put in an institution and she was brave enough to actually write about the experience. It's amazing how many families did not forget and their hearts were broken their whole lives. And they thought about it a lot. And the children were very confused because the child was home and then not home. Of course, then there were families where the mom would give birth and then come back from the hospital empty handed and say that the child had died. And that happened too. Arthur Miller had a child who was put away and it was a huge fight that he had with his first wife, Inga Morath, I think, where she really wanted to keep her son at home. He also had downs. And I guess Arthur Miller won. He was institutionalized in Connecticut. And in his obituaries, there wasn't a word written about this kid, except maybe in the

LA Times, maybe in Variety, and the New York Times didn't mention him and he never mentioned him in his memoir. And I don't know, maybe it was easier for the men. Maybe Arthur Miller did think about him. I've not really revisited his plays to see whether there was any kind of veiled theme. I think other people would have noted it, but maybe not. Maybe if I reread him, I would hear a different frequency in his work.

I don't know. I don't think these people were out of a lot of people's minds there's some ways where i understand it you know it's like i have a friend who has a kid with minkus which is just like i'm embarrassed to say i don't know yeah no that's because like three people in america have minkus it's like it's this even rarer than the disease that your aunt had and it's degenerative so you know so just get every day is worse yeah every day is worse yeah every day is worse than the last you know it was really tough for him obviously

you know as i'm thinking about that you start to imagine like what do i do in this situation how would i handle it and like what was the right thing and like there is a part of you that's like maybe the right thing is to have the kid in the hospital and to go on with your life and have your other kid be able to live a more normal life and you go visit still and you know it's not like it's like we're not talking about willow brook but you know that you're like you can still go and and get as much out of the person as you can and they've not done that obviously and and their son is in the home and i think about them and it's just like the challenge of that is real, but like, the value of it, when you actually spend time with people that have developmental disabilities, like the value of that presence, like, seems so obvious.

You know, even though like, in some ways, it seems logical, you might want to have distance. It's like, that feels wrong. It seems like that was what you obviously came to the more time you get to spend with Adele. I'm having so many thoughts about this because, all right, let's set aside the degenerative piece for a second, because that's just its own setup for a heartbreak. Let's set that aside for a moment. I think that thinking first of all about the fact that you're being on some level denied a full parenthood if you don't have that child with you. And the child is certainly being denied their full potential. We now have a lot more infrastructure in place, you know,

free aid from the state in every state for occupational therapy and physical therapy and for speech therapy, all these things. And it may not for some children, by the way, be enough. Often parents need to stay home and it's often mom and you're forgoing income. And let's be clear, a lot of parents are giving over their lives to this, stepping out of the workforce. It makes family life harder. It shapes the lives of the siblings in all kinds of ways. And my mother, being the very rational woman that she is, she was a music major and she taught music theory at Brooklyn College to put my dad through law school. And she worked at IBM, an early programmer.

She's got this super rational mind. And she will say, well, look, we wouldn't have had the same life, Jennifer. I mean, we were able to go on family vacation. My parents were able to enjoy this wonderful, beautiful retirement. I mean, by the way, I don't want to judge or weigh in on any family that makes the choice to put their child in an institution if they cannot do this by themselves. It's so hard. It's so grueling. So, it's just that there were no options then. And the institutions were so hellish. So what your friend is doing is, it's much more common these days. I think also all these diseases that where the child dies often in childhood or dies

early, they're excruciatingly hard, like spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, every way. And you have teams of people who are trying to maintain quality of life for that child, right? And it becomes harder and harder as they degenerate. So, it becomes more and more expensive and more and more labor intensive. And also, they have the heartbreak that it's probably an arcane disease. So, when you've got rare genetic diseases, every year, I think people go before Congress and talk about this. And it's hard to get funding, right?

Because you're talking about 3,000 people in the entire world who have it. So, you know, nobody's wearing a ribbon for it. No, it's just brutal. But the thing that was the most, well, the most moving about your story, the most uplifting part is the value that comes from having, you know, that person, the young person with a disability around. And you talk about Emma, who you go to visit in Kansas City, and she's adopted by this couple. His mother's name is Grace. Aptly named.

Yeah, very aptly named. And her last name too, Feist, for feisty, because she hits. Just tell us what you learned when you went to visit Grace and Emma. Oh my God, a million things. First of all, you know, if you have a child with a disability, boy, oh boy, do you want Grace as your mother? I mean, she was just this unbelievable life force. Walked around in flip-flops if it was like 20 degrees, you know, I mean, she's just amazing. Had her first kid at 16. She was a military officer, I think. You know, she got pregnant in high school, but her mom took care of the baby, so she got to,

and this kid is terrific. I just love her. She's 16 now herself, or probably older, 17, but she's super Christian. She felt called to adopt this child, like knew that she had to adopt this child. She loved fostering and knew that she wanted to adopt Emma, knew it from the start. And her husband is just kind of this easygoing guy who runs this Christian YouTube channel. But she told me about the moments that she was wailing in the shower, asking God why this was Emma's fate, never her own fate, but Emma's fate, and why was Emma suffering, and why was Emma banging her head on the floor until her forehead turned purple, you know, what was Emma unable to say? They've redesigned their life, restructured their life around this girl, and this girl is just amazing. You know, she has like a huge collection

of stuffies and she's named them all and wanted to show me all of her dance moves, which are fabulous. My aunt could dance, P.S., and sing and sing like my mom and do needlepoint like my mom and likes to make necklaces like my mom. It's all crazy how they are the same person. I mean, it's really weird. And it's fastidious, like my mom. Won't let you load the dishwasher, like my mom. Anyway, I could go on and on. But Emma was not like that.

Emma, well, I mean, she liked order, but she also had a very messy room and had a very kind of more laissez-faire way about her and could articulate her interstate. How does not being able to read make you feel you know mad and sad everyone else can read i can't read i have to color you know maybe not with the full grammatical but most of it actually anyway but charming and god i'm just psychotically smitten and in love with grace. I will just be in love with her for life.

I want to ask about Grace. The exchange that really, I think, put me over the edge, I guess you were talking with Emma about maybe you had a picture on your phone or something of Adele, of your aunt. And Grace said to Emma that you guys have something in common. And you were kind of expecting her to explain the disease. And she said like you both have found somebody that loves you i can't even think about it now without like getting so upset and i literally i was sitting there i was listening to it my husband sitting on the next

chair over i belted out oh my god and then started walking around the neighborhood and i was like and thank god for her and then this my brain is so fucking broken that after I finished sobbing, I thought to myself, I wonder if Grace is for Trump. And I think she probably is. And in some ways, that's a good thing for me to know and think about just because there is some goodness. Maybe that is an area of connection. So anyway, that ties us back to our first topic.

Am I right about Grace? 1,000%. Yep. She voted for Trump. She was really thinking about DeSantis this time around because, you know, she has lots of questions about Trump's character. And I'm guessing she has more now. See, I just made a sarcastic face at Grace right there. Even though she's such a good person and even though i know better i can't help myself just i made a sarcastic face i can't help

she's such a good person yeah i didn't just for the record i did not yes that was your sarcastic face i will never make a sarcastic face about grace so here's the thing we talked about politics but always in that what one would think of as being more stereotypically female way where we were looking immediately for consensus. I was talking about what I thought were the excesses of the left, and she was saying, right, and how ridiculous is it that people got all worked up over masks? I mean, how hard is it to wear a mask? And, you know, my four-year-old, who is not Emma, is immunocompromised. We were always wearing masks. I mean, how tough is this really? You know, right? I don't think we are going to make our way back to one another in politics. Something tells me that it will be quite a while. I mean, maybe it'll happen, but it seems so improbable. We're standing on different epistemological substrates, different moral values kind of substrates. We've just got different frameworks for understanding what truth is and what our real objectives are and values are. So, I used to think that really

the only irreconcilable difference in American life was abortion, because it's life, ultimately, whether you believe that this is or isn't life. But everything else, I thought we could find our way to, and I don't think that anymore. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, the things that I've spent my time doing, I would never have articulated this to my boss, because I knew what he meant when he said, like, democracy is on the line please write about someone in the MAGA movement but you could argue that what I'm doing is political in the following sense I think the only way that we will make our way back to one another is by bonding

over the things that make us vulnerable and in some ways broken and in some ways human, are most deeply human. And that's over having a disabled child, having a friendship that ends, which is what my friendship essay was about, right? You know, it's your friends who break your heart and all the obstacles to friendship and all the things about friendship that make your life meaningful. Parenting. And parenting, right. And the difficulties of parenting parenting but also in the McIlvain story loss grief we all lose people and this is the way that you can love the people who have a different politics and there was just a study I can't remember who did it but it was sociologists who talked about the fact that you know you are always much more sympathetic to

someone who voted differently from you if you hear their backstory and how they arrived at their politics, you're always going to like them more and find their politics a lot more comprehensible. And I'm not talking about that when I talk about that here, but it's like, do I care that Grace voted? I mean, sure, I care that Grace voted for Trump. But look, I didn't go and voluntarily adopt a child with coffin cyrus 12 she did and god bless her you know we need that you need i need you need to it's easy especially on the internet to have like to use to use the george w bush term to think about the worst examples of your political opponents and like i need to do my best to think about uh think about grace vice because i think plenty about my the worst examples but that

um that is a good woman oh she had more time there's more in the story i shouldn't ruin it for everybody people should go read the rest of it if they haven't um there's a lot about your mother and the ayala's the family that took care of adele. And it's, it's something, Jen, I don't know, how did you process it? In the very end, I guess is my final question for you. How'd you process learning, learning this about your family and about kind of the loss that Adele experienced? Thanks for asking that. That's such a nice question. Um, so heartfelt. You know, I wish I could say that it deepened my relationship with my mom, and it did. But I don't know how much it did for her. I was hoping it would do something for her.

And I think it was just totally bittersweet for her. I think like the sense that it happened so late in her life that she had to be, what, 76? You know, for this to happen. You like to think that your journalism is doing a good thing. And what if it was for everyone except the person who matters to your mother, which is your own mother, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, well, I mean, your own children and your spouse, but you know what I mean? I mean, your own family.

People want a silver lining out of this or they want, you know, and I don't maybe it's my psychosomatic long covid oh go on all your i'm never gonna get over that no it's because alex berenson went after me online so you know i am a little yeah fuck all these people i know now i'm back to my normal self. I love Grace. Hug Grace. Fuck Alex Berenson, though. Your poor mother. Well, give her a hug for me. I will.

This is not her fault. And it was a brilliant story, the ones we sent away. Thank you. This is already like twice as long as I told you it was going to be. And so we didn't even get to what Bobby McElveen left behind. That's another banger, though. That's okay. If you guys didn't read that one please go and check it out and um you know one day we'll have another chance to talk about it again yeah thanks so much

this has been great i love your show senior thank you i love you too thank you for coming on the bulwark podcast on my little vacation and um everybody else will be back tomorrow uh somebody else is in the chair ab's in the chair i, I think, tomorrow. It'll be great, though. Listen to it, and I'll see you all next week. AB Stoddard, you know her, Jen? We came of age at the Hill. Oh, my God, together. We were cub reporters. Oh, she's amazing. And by the way, I love you. I think you

said you love me. I adore you and your show, I just want to say, because I think you were like, I didn't want people thinking it was asymmetrical. That's not the asymmetry I was describing earlier. Mutual love society here. Everybody, A.B. Stoddard will be here tomorrow. I'll see you all next week.

Peace. Time's come for us to pause And think of living as it was Into the future we must cross, must cross I'd like to go with you And I'd like to go with you You say I'm harder than a wall A marble shaft about to fall I love you dearer than them all, them all So let me stay with you

And as we walked into the day Skies blue had turned to grey I might have not been clear to say, to say I'd never looked away I'd never looked away And though I'm feeling you inside My life is rolling with the tide I'd like to see it be an open ride Along with you Going along with you The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.