The One You Feed - Matthew Quick

Episode Date: September 7, 2016

This week we talk to Matthew Quick about mental health Our guest this week is Matthew Quick. He is here for his second visit to The One You Feed. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film; as well as many other novels. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, was an LA Times Book Prize finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of Summer’s Best Books for NPR. His latest book is called Every Exquisite Thing    Our Sponsor this Week is Casper Mattress Visit casper.com/wolf and use the promo code “wolf” to get $50 off!!   In This Interview, Matthew Quick and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable Short term pleasure versus long term gain Imposter Syndrome Thinking that money and fame will create happiness Removing the stigma of mental health Intrinsic vs extrinsic goals What drives us The voice of depression Finding the middle ground between rebellion and conformity The power of literature to allow us to see different worlds and possibilities How sometimes quitting is the right approach Parental understanding  How his father thought he was crazy to leave a job to become a writer The pressure to be someone that everyone else wants you to be Letting our children be who they are How lonely people need to find each other How we need music and art to rally around Social anxiety and depression The role of mental health in creating art The artist as the canary in the coal mine How being adjusted to a sick society is not healthy How do we know if we are artistic, mentally ill or just different Affecting an air of superiority over "normal" people For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Weird, lonely people need music and art to rally around. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right

direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Matthew Quick. He is here for the second time to visit The One You Feed. Matthew is the New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. He's also the author of many other novels. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

It's received a Penn Hemingway Award honorable mention, was an LA Times Book Prize finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of the summer's best books for NPR. His latest book is called Every Exquisite Thing. slash Facebook, which does not work. I'll save you the boring technical details. But if you want to join the group, go to OneYouFeed.net slash group. We've had a great first week. Lots of people have joined, some interesting conversations starting to happen, and we'd love to have you over there. So OneYouFeed.net slash group, or go to Facebook and search for the OneYouFeed discussion group. Thanks. And here is the interview

with Matthew Quick, who we call Q for short. Hi, Q. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be back. Yes, I'm excited to have you back. We don't have a lot of guests back a second time, and you're one of them. And I'm excited to talk about your new book and to talk about a lot of the issues that come up in your book that I think relate very much to what we do here. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Well, I'll start by saying that I've listened to every single episode of your podcast. And so I've heard it's amazing. Yeah, it's been it's been a great ride.

I've enjoyed following along. But I've heard this question answered in so many wonderful ways. It's almost intimidating to answer now. So I'm just going to talk about in my private life and in the work that I do. So in my private life right now, the bad wolf is saying things to me like, you should get up and eat carbs all day and then start drinking alcohol at five o'clock until you go to sleep. And the bad thing about that is it's seductive because the wolf says you'll feel better if you do that. And it's true.

I will feel better. It will ease my depression and anxiety issues. But the good wolf is saying to me now, but if you get up and run three or four miles and you eat really healthy and you curb your alcohol intake, you're going to feel better in the long run. you curb your alcohol intake, you're going to feel better in the long run. And so that's, that's been a personal battle for me lately as, as I've been battling to, to get back in shape. And my wife and I are planning to run a half marathon. So that's what's going on. Yeah. We're looking forward to that. And in my professional life, I've been lucky enough to publish seven novels and I have a novel coming out next summer and I've been extraordinarily lucky because we've been able to option all of those for film and I'm writing the

screenplay for my eighth novel now and that's going super well. And The Bad Wolf is always in my head along with a chorus of every single one of my critics who's ever criticized my books for the past 10 years. you know, and that voice says things like, you're not talented, you're lucky, or, you know, it was an accident that this happened, or, you know, how long do you think you can keep going? Or how many stories do you think you have in you? Or why you and not somebody else? Like, what do you really have to offer the world? And when I get tired and depressed, those voices can be really powerful and seductive. But of course, the voice that I want to feed, you know, says that, you know,

every single day that I get up, I'm learning something new. And I'm not the same writer or the same person I was 10 years ago. You know, I have something new to say. And though my will may get low, it doesn't run dry. And if I wait for it to fill back up, another story will come. And it's that faith that is fueled by that second wolf or that second voice, if you will. And so I fight really hard to stay positive, and that's one of the reasons why I listen to your show every week. Well, thank you for listening. It's an honor to us. And I think, yeah, it's so amazing to me. There's a couple of things in what you said there that really

strike me. One is you have been extraordinarily successful. Um, you know, you've done very well and you, you write well, and you've been both critically and popularly received, and yet you still fight those voices, which I think is a really interesting statement into the human condition, not just you. I'm not saying it's amazing that you feel that way. It's just, I think for all of us, we have a tendency to, when we fall into those sort of things, we think that there's something wrong with us. And I think that hearing people who have been successful say that that still happens is a normalizing thing for a lot of other people. Well, I mean, to be quite honest with you, it can be scary, too.

I mean, I've met some extremely famous people, both, you know, in the Hollywood land and also in the world of writing. And, you know, sometimes you'll have these private moments at a party or at the bar, like backstage before you go onto a panel. And you realize that these people who are so much more successful than you are, the bad wolf is very strong in their head as well. And, you know, it can be scary because there's no level of success or amount of money that can make that bad wolf go away forever. But it can be heartening too that we're all in the struggle. And I think for me, I like to talk about it because so many people that I've met that have had wild success don't. They hide it. They would never come on your show and

say these things. And so for me, I hope by talking about this stuff that it normalizes for other people who may be reluctant to admit these things. Yep. I agree. I think it's really important to do. The other part of what you said there that struck me was how difficult, like, you know that exercise makes you feel better. You know, there's never been a time after I exercised that I didn't go, boy, I'm glad I did that. Like, not a single time, like 100% success rate of that that was a good idea. And yet it still is a battle sometimes to do that. And I'm kind of curious to, you know, what that experience is like for you. I think anything worth doing is, is usually hard. Um, you know, if I go out, you know, I ran this morning, I ran three miles with

my wife. We got up at seven and did that. And's part of me that when I'm done, I feel great, but there's a bigger part of me that said, man, if you had slept in, that might have felt better. I know in my life, and I've heard you talk about this too, Eric, quite candidly, that I know for me that if I drink three scotches, I'm going to feel fantastic. That is the best feeling for me. that if I drink three scotches, I'm going to feel fantastic. Like that is the best feeling for me. And, you know, I've struggled. I've never, you know, consider myself an alcoholic, but I definitely use alcohol to deal with my anxiety, especially social anxiety. And, you know, for the past 21 years, I would tell myself that, you know, that's just the way it is, you know, like that's what you need to get through these situations. But I'm at a point in my life where I'm really looking at that and trying to lessen that. And so exercise is a great weapon to deal with that. It's a tool. But I'm not going to

get on your show and lie and say that I'd rather run five miles than having a nice scotch. I just can't say that, even though the running has become an important part of my life. Yeah. Well, I think it's just in the conversation we were having before, you know, you talked about how, and I think it's pretty well known with us as humans that, you know, the short-term pleasure, it's very hard to override that for the longer-term gain, even if the longer-term gain is better in the short term pleasure, it can be harmful. And I was asking somebody about this the other day, and they said that things like a scotch or a drink or a drug or, you know, checking your next Facebook post or,

you know, there's a lot of these things that are very addictive, because they hit, you know, part of what they're doing is hitting our dopamine system. And so the response to them is very quick. We feel better very quickly, whereas things like exercise and meditation and all that stuff really flows more through the serotonin system. And those things take longer and the same sort of habitual addiction just isn't built, which is, I don't know if that's actually true or not to start with. So if anybody actually knows, you can send me an email. But it made sense to me that certainly there is something going on there that continues to make these things sort of a challenge.

Yeah, you know, there's the old quote about writing and somebody famous said this, I can't recall off the top of my head. I believe it was a woman writer, I can't remember the name, um, I believe it was a woman writer and I can't remember the name, but it said that I like having written. I don't like to write, you know, and I think that, you know, writing a novel, I don't think I know that writing a novel is, is really hard thing to do. And it takes a lot of mental energy and a lot of discipline. Um, but once the novel is really like when I publish a book and you get praise or somebody says they like it, you know, your brain just lights up. It's amazing. And that's something that I did a year and a half before. So there's that kind of delay in the writing world.

You can really get hooked on, you know, getting a tweet or an email or an award or somebody says something nice. And and that's that that's really, you want that to keep happening over and over again, but that's not what gets you through writing a novel. You know, it takes, it takes a different set of discipline. So what is that set of discipline look like? Cause I think that's an interesting conversation. I've had it on the show before. And a couple episodes ago, we had Michelle Seeger, who's a woman who talks about, you know, making exercise a habit for life. And we talked a lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic goals. I was talking about the coaching client about this today also, that those extrinsic goals, the reviews, the tweets, the feedback, the fan letters, you know, are great. but if you don't have something intrinsic, you know, which means generated from within you,

it's very hard to do. So what does that for you on a day-to-day basis? Cause you are very productive. Well, thank you. Um, you know, I always make the joke, Charles Bukowski once said that fear is a great motivator. And when I wrote silver linings, I had zero money and I was living with my in-laws. And so, you know, the motivation for that on one hand was very much, I don't have enough money to feed myself. I don't have enough money to put a roof over my head. And, and so I think that that, that can be one type of motivation. Uh, I think subconsciously when I wrote that book, I had a very deep longing to talk about mental health openly. And I didn't know how to do that because nobody ever gave me the vocabulary, the tools to even broach that discussion. And so fiction became

a way to do that. I didn't write Silver Linings because I thought I was going to go to the Oscars or, you know, I was going to make a lot of money or somebody was going to say something nice about me. I wrote it because I was so low in my life and I needed to. It was something that I wanted to say. You know, the next book that I have coming out next year, my uncle and I, my uncle's a Vietnam vet and he talked to me his whole life about, you know, his experience in Vietnam and afterwards. And he always wanted me to write a book about his experience, like to fictionalize it. And he said, I couldn't do that until he was gone because he was afraid of, you know, the repercussions. And so one of the last conversations I had with him towards the end of his life, you know, without getting into

specifics, he made it very clear that he wanted me to write this book. And so when he passed, it felt like a sacred obligation. You know, it was really an important thing that he wanted me to write this book. And so when he passed, it felt like a sacred obligation. You know, it was really an important thing that I wanted to take this 40-year relationship I had with somebody and turn that into art. And again, I didn't write that because I thought there'd be a movie deal or because it was going to make a lot of money, but because I'd been thinking about these conversations for 40 years and I needed to make order out of chaos. And I think that's a thing that's hard to teach young writers. You know, when they say, I want to be famous, or I want to have so many Twitter followers,

you've lost the battle before you've even begun. You need something driving you, something that'll make you stick to it. I agree. I mean, even in our, you know, sort of our own limited sense in doing this show, even in our, you know, sort of our own limited sense in doing this show, I'm always better off when I get back to why I'm doing it versus how well it's doing. You know, if I'm spending all my time about how well it's doing, there's never enough listeners, there's never enough Twitter followers, you could always have more. And any milestone you think is great, once you hit it, you're like, what's the next one? So for me, when it gets back to what is it that's in this activity that matters to me, you know, back to that intrinsic goal. And that's, you know, that's what helps us, I think, keep going, you know, week after week and putting one out just despite what our other, you know, responsibilities in life might be.

It's hard to teach that, I think, because if you don't know what your calling is, for lack of a better word, or what really excites you or what you would do if you weren't know what your calling is, for lack of a better word, or what really excites you or what you would do if you weren't getting paid, it's hard to do something that you're not meant to do. Bye. And here's the rest of the interview with Matthew Quick. So let's talk about your new book. It's called Every Exquisite Thing, and a particular review described it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As powerful, dark and engrossing, and tackles mental issues rarely addressed in young adult fiction,

which sounds to me like a pretty good description of it. I think it seems to be missing wonderful also, but beyond that, that's a pretty good description of it. I think it seems to be missing wonderful also, but beyond that, that's a pretty, pretty clear description. I'll give a little summary of, you know, the book from my perspective, just to give the readers a high level overview. And then, then maybe we'll go into it a little bit more. So the book is basically the story of a teenage girl who has up till now sort of followed the standard path of what she's supposed to do with her life. You know, be good at soccer so she can get a scholarship and go to college, hang out with certain kids, be a certain way. And she's always done that. And at the same time,

she has this love of reading. And one of her teachers gives her a book that sort of transforms her view of the world. Me reading On the Road is probably the parallel to that in my own life. You know, this book sort of shakes up her whole worldview, and she goes from that into really searching for what matters for her and sort of stepping outside of what the expectations are for her and that journey and the consequences, good and bad, of doing that. Is that a reasonable summary? Yeah, I would say so. One of the things I want to start with is that you talk about outside of the book, I heard you say in an interview, that you ask, is there some middle

ground between going all in with your town or kind of following exactly what society wants of you, or completely rebelling? Is there some way we can find somewhere in between there that's healthy? And that seems to be a big part of what this book is about is your character finding that middle ground, going from one extreme, maybe to the other extreme and watching the consequences of both those things and trying to find that middle ground between those two things. Yeah. And I think when you live in a town or, you know, a small society where everybody is pretty homogenous and doing the same thing, if that same thing is the right thing for you, life is really easy. But if you're the one person who feels it's not right for you, it can be devastating. You know, and I've been that person. I've been in places where I knew that what was

working for everyone else just wasn't working for me. And so with Nanette, it's the first time that, you know, it's almost like this awakening when she reads this book. And you had mentioned On the Road, which I used to teach every year when I was, you know, high school. Subversive. Yeah. You know, I just think that literature for so many teenagers, you know, all you know growing up is what your parents tell you or your church or your teachers. But then you read a book and it comes from this faraway place or, you know, from years ago. And you realize that people are living in different ways. And you start to question what all of these other people in your town or neighborhood have told you. And, you know, for me, that happened in high school and it happens for a lot of people.

And so for Nanette, she realizes that it's OK not to want to be like everyone else in her town. it's okay not to want to be like everyone else in her town. And if she hates playing soccer, even though it might get her a scholarship, maybe that's not the best thing to do. And I toy around with the idea of quitting too, you know, making quitting a positive thing. Um,

you know, which she reads this book called the bubble gum Reaper. And she learns that, you know, quitting can be a good thing. And, you know, that's almost sacrilege here in America.

Um, but for my own personal experience, if I never quit teaching, if I never got burned out, if I didn't hate going into school and teaching every single day to the point where my mental health was so low that I was borderline suicidal. And I don't say that lightly because I was just so frazzled

and it was just such a bad environment that lightly because I was just so frazzled and it was just such a bad environment for me because I'm an introvert and I was being a fake extrovert every day. Quitting was the healthiest thing I could do when I was a teacher. And it also led to amazing opportunities for me as a writer as well. But that was a really hard thing for me to do. And it's a really hard thing for Nanette to do. And, you know, when you're in a town or a society where everyone says what you're doing is the right thing to do, even something stupid like quitting the soccer team or, right now, because I certainly very much identify with Nanette as a teenager. And like I said, my teenage experience was similar to that. I read a book and listened to some particular music that sort of shook up everything for me. And some of the things that came out of that were good, and some of the things that came out of that were really not very good. It's interesting for me to

watch it as a parent and to sit there and sort of see like, yes, I want my son to be a free thinker and I want him to be his own person and I want all that. And boy, I'd sure love to keep him in the safe path just because it's, you know, like there's that desire of protection there. And I was really touched in the book by the parent characters that were in, you know, Nanette's parents, because once she finally came to them with the truth of who she was, they really, you know, at least from my perspective, really kind of came around to her side and made a lot of effort to be on her team. Yeah. And I think communication is so important. You know, when I told my parents,

I was leaving a tenured teaching position to write books, you know, my father, who's a banker, you know, he thought that was the most idiotic thing that I could ever do. Like, he didn't understand. But then he watched me work on it. And now he's one of my biggest fans. He reads all of my books. And I got a fan letter from a young woman who is a freshman in college now and she read every exquisite thing this um summer and she told me you know for the first time she felt like someone really understood what she had gone through in the past year and she gave she gave the book to her mother to read and her mother came to her and said this makes me so sad that you relate to Nanette. And this young woman said to me, you know, it shocked her that her mom was sad, but she felt good because at least her mom knew the truth for the first time.

And I think that's really a hard thing for teenagers to do because, especially if they have parents who are involved in their life, they're constantly being told who they should be. involved in their life, they're constantly being told who they should be. And when they're not that person, it's very difficult for the teenager to tell their parent, I'm not who you want me to be, but I could be this other great thing. It took me until I was 30 to do that. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the way, obviously, every parent, I think it's just, it's just a nightmare of making mistakes. I'm just always like, I wonder what, you know, what the list will look like at the end for me, but I just work so hard with, with him to take a position of, I have no preference on what you want to be at all. Um, I just want to see you engaged in, in, in something in some way. And even that sometimes

is asking a lot out of a teenager. Yeah, I think so. You know, when I was teaching, I would see this all the time, and parents would say things like that to me. You know, I don't care if my daughter plays soccer, and I just want her to be involved in something. But then if you said to them, well, she's going to quit the soccer team and lose her college scholarship, you know, the conversation, I'm not saying this about you, but, um, you know, I think we all, you know, whether we say it directly or not imply certain things to people and teenagers pick up on that. They know what the adults in their lives want them to be. And if they're good kids and Nanette, I think is an extraordinary young person. She wants to, to please those people. She wants to make those people feel happy. She wants to, you know, make her parents proud of her. So how does she do that and also take care of

herself? And I think that's the real battle when you leave childhood to realize that you are an individual and not part of, you know, a family or, you know, a community that you're allowed to have views that stray from, you know, the herd. Yeah, I, a community that you're allowed to have views that stray from, you know, the herd. Yep. I agree. Like I said, it's interesting to watch it. My son, after playing athletics and lacrosse for pretty much every year recently decided he wasn't going to do it anymore. And, uh, I have to say there was that part of me that was like, no, don't, don't, don't, you know? And I, I told him what my opinion was. I said, here's my thoughts on it. You have to decide. And so I just am interested in in it because i kind of feel like i you say in the book i really like this part you you say that

weird lonely people need each other. And you also say there are a lot of lonely kids in this world. But the problem is they don't know about each other. Yeah, I think that that's true. And especially if you grow up in a small town, like Nanette grows up in, there's a lot of pride, people tend to be the same. Or if they're not the same, they tend to pretend that they're the same. And I've been in those environments where it's not safe to be other. And sometimes it takes leaving that town or leaving that environment. But it's strange because there's another line in the book too too, that they say, you know, weird, lonely people need music and art to rally around. Yes.

And I do think that that's where music and art comes from. I know I sometimes go to a party and I see people who are, quote unquote, normal, you know, parents. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight

about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really.

No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast of children and uh you know going to birthday parties and doing family things and if if i go to a family party or like a kid's birthday party i will feel like i'm a martian and you know it's it's not a judgment thing because there's a big part of me that says i wish that i i could be normal i've always felt that way and i've tried to blend in, but I know that my writing comes from not being normal. It comes from feeling outside of the herd and looking back in. And that's where my unique perspective comes from. And the irony is that every book that I write is an attempt to

communicate with the masses at large. And so when I get a positive review or somebody, I got that letter from that young woman the other day. It's amazing. But every time you put out art into the world, you also get that response of people saying, what? Or this doesn't work or this is bad. And so it reinforces that. But that also sends you back to the page to try to figure it out and to try to find a way to make that bridge. that bridge. So I think that for me, the most gratifying thing about writing books is when somebody sends me an email or sends me a letter and says, you know what, me too. And there's no

one else has ever described this in a way that made me feel that I could talk about this. And I think that is what great art should do. Not that my work is great art, but I think that that's what we should strive to do. That was the next line that I was going to ask a question about that line you had there. And you know, it's funny, I feel the same way going to my kids' parties. It's like, there's these voices going on in my head. One of them's like, I'm not really that different from these people. I live in the same town and I've got, you know, I've got a kid that's the same age. And, and yet I do, I kind of feel like I still have never really figured that piece out about how to socialize well, in those situations without alcohol.

Yeah, that's the rub right there. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and I think it's the same thing with my social anxiety and my depression. You know, I look at people who never, there are people who never really go to the depths that I go to with my depression and I envy them so much. You know, if I could just get rid of my social anxiety and depression, you know, if I could snap my fingers, I would. But at the same time, I realized that because they never are depressed or they never have to leave a party because they're too anxious, they don't think about the things that I think about, the things that create the art. And so in some ways it's a gift and a curse. And like, I don't want to glorify like mental illness, but I do think that, you know, you have to look at the aggregate and see that, you know, maybe you're different for a reason, you know, you're different because you

need to, um, to, to express that different point of view or like Vonnegut used to talk about canary in the coal mine, you know, the canary dies for everyone else. And that's the artist gets sick before everyone else. So they can, they can send up the warning flag. So, yeah. Yeah. I think that's an interesting point there or an interesting discussion, is i think it was christian murdy who said something like being well adjusted to a profoundly sick society is not health and uh you know you in a tweet said normal suburban american life can make some of us mentally unwell and so i think it's an interesting question are we talking about mental illness or are we talking about um a response to a sick culture and the answer is probably both

of those things. And I just think that's an interesting, you know, because you can look at that as, as you said, as mental illness, and you can also look at it as being artistic, being sensitive, being different. And how do you reconcile those things? Yeah, I remember my, the second school I taught and the first day I went in, the first day I was so psyched up to teach and I was really, you know, positive and I couldn't wait to get in the classroom. And I walked into the teacher's lounge and there was a big sign on the wall. It said 179 days left till summer. And you looked around and I saw how apathetic and miserable those teachers were and I didn't get it. But after being in public education for three years, I understood. But the difference was, is that there are some people who can endure all of the bullshit of public education for 20 years. I can only take six years before I needed to get out. And, you know, I think, I think that might be a way to look at it as well. You know, sometimes the artist just can't take it as much. Yeah. I thought one of the things that you did in the book, it was very subtle, but I thought it was really important, was that there was no sense that you were making Nanette

and the artists in the book necessarily better than the so-called normal people in the book. I think you really did a nice job of emphasizing it's just different. This isn't a, I'm better than you, or you're better than than me or, you know, because as you said, some people fit perfectly well into the world the way it's shaped. And I think sometimes a coping mechanism for those of us who don't fit in that world is to try and affect some air of superiority, either that or we think we're broken. But I thought the way you did that in the book was a very nice, subtle, but nice way to sort of present that perspective. Well, thank you. You know, and I don't think that, you know, artists or people who had depression or whatever, you know,

we've been talking about are better than other people. You know, they're just different. But I will say that people who are extroverts and people who don't deal with a lot of things that we're talking about, they don't understand how hard it is. You know, I spent a long time with my mother, who's an extrovert, trying to tell her that I couldn't go to a family party for two hours. She didn't understand that for 30 years. And there have been reviews of the book where people will say, you know, I thought that

Nanette was selfish. You know, she's this privileged person that's selfish. You know, why can't she just suck it up and play soccer? You know, her life isn't that hard. And, you know, I understand that Nanette is privileged, but she's also depressed and mentally unwell. And there's even a line in the book where she says, what good is being privileged if you don't get to do anything that you want to do?

And I think that that is an important distinction. She's not just rebelling or, you know, going against the grain just for the sake of it. She's doing it because she's been profoundly miserable for the first 17 years of her life. And she's put others before her for 17 years because she's a people pleaser, because she's a good kid, because she cares about other people. And as soon as she says, what do I want? People point at her and say, you're selfish. And unfortunately, I've seen that in my life as well. I think if you are an introvert or you deal with mental health issues, like people don't understand that your needs are profoundly different than their

needs that, you know, going to a party for most of my friends is it's, it refuels them and makes them feel good. Whereas if I go to a party with 50 people, my energy level will, my tank will just go down like fast. Like I can feel it going down. And by the end, I'm in a really, really, really bad place. And if I do that too often, I'm in a really dangerous place. And I know there are some people that will never understand. They'll say you're antisocial. Like you don't like people. I love people like one-on-one basis or, you know, having a conversation that's not surface level, like, or we go in depth about something. I'm all in until three in the morning, but you know, going around and chit-chatting about surface level, like where we go in depth about something, I'm all in until three in the morning. But, you know, going around and chit-chatting about surface level things,

like that is literally painful to me. It really is a tough thing to do. And I think that's where Nanette is as well. And so I try to be honest about that. It's just that there's a miscommunication. It's not that one is better than the other. It's just that it's much easier for an extrovert who goes along with the status quo to fit into society. They don't have the same battles, and they'll never know what that feels like. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think people who don't experience it don't always know what it's like. And I never can tell whether the world is changing or just the part of the world that I look at is changing. You know, you never know whether you're in an echo chamber, but it seems there's

a lot more discussion of mental health, about depression, about different things that seems to be permeating the public consciousness. Not certainly not as much as it needs to. And I think there's a long way to go, but it feels to me like that, you know, we're headed in that direction. I think there's a long way to go. But it feels to me like that, you know, we're headed in that direction. But again, I can never tell like, you know, what's real and what's sort of my limited view of the world. I mean, from my own personal experience, I talk about mental health all the time. And, you know, 15 years ago, I would have been scared to death to talk about that.

I don't think that's just because I've changed. I think that, you know, society has changed. But that said, I'm always, whenever I get a fan mail from a teenager, it's always about how much they love the book. And it's always about how much they thought they couldn't talk about these things with anyone else in their community. And that's why they love the book. So it's always a happy occasion for me to provide that experience for a young person. If they read my book and they feel not alone, that's beautiful. That's what I wanted when I was a teenager. But it also makes me profoundly sad because why aren't the people in their community providing that experience for them? So, you know,

I don't want to talk myself out of a job here, but, you know, it's kind of a mixed bag that way. Yeah, I think so. We had Frank Turner on the show, who's a musician that I deeply love. And his response to that was, yeah, it probably is. But you know what, there's always 16 year olds who feel like 16 year olds do that feel like you did when you were a 16 year old. And so the battle is always kind of on to continue to reach out in that way. Yeah, I agree. So we are kind of at time, but I'd like to wrap up by reading a little bit of the ending of the book. I don't think it gives anything away. And then just let you add any last comments to it, and we'll go from there.

And if I read it and it sounds like it is a spoiler, you can say don't say that. But here we go. And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating. Thrusting your best, best true authentic self into the universe with wild abandon maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown towards targets that we haven't even dreamed up yet but exist nonetheless yeah i mean that's that's that's what the book is. And that's really what my personal battle throughout life has been about, too. Believing that who you are is important enough to be that person.

When I sign books for young people, I always just write simply, be you in there. And it seems so trite or so silly, and yet it's the hardest thing to do, to be an authentic version of yourself without infringing on other people's right to be an authentic version of them, too. That is the battle right there. And I know that you're fighting that battle, and I am, too. Yeah, I think the battle to do that and be okay with who that self is, is really, you know, really at the heart of, of living a good life, for sure. Absolutely. Well, Q, thank you so much for coming back on. I have a feeling we could probably go a couple more hours with this, but, um, I'm, you keep writing, so we'll keep having

you back on and we'll do this again. Hey, I'd love to be back next summer. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for, thanks for what you do. I'm a huge fan and it's important work. So thank you. Thank you. That means a lot. Okay, take care. You too. All right, bye. you can learn more about matthew quick and this podcast at one you feed.net quick