Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel - Say More - Miranda July and Esther Perel on The Rebirth of Desire

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

This week, Esther is in a borrowed bedroom in Los Angeles, the perfect place to talk about desire and the novel on every bedside table, All Fours. The writer, director, and artist, Miranda July, joins Esther to examine the erotic and to explore how love and desire relate and how they conflict in modern relationships. They discuss the tension between the domestic and erotic through the lens of Esther's new desire course, which Miranda had a sneak peek at. For more details on Miranda July's book, All Fours, visit https://mirandajuly.com/all-fours/ If you are interested in Bringing Back Desire or Playing With Desire in your relationships, then click the link below for more on Esther's course The Desire Bundle: https://www.estherperel.com/course-bundles/the-desire-bundle Want to learn more? Receive monthly insights, musings, and recommendations to improve your relational intelligence via email from Esther: https://www.estherperel.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just read All Force, the new novel by Miranda July, and it's a real tour de force. It's actually touted as a manifesto for a generation. The generation often of women, 45 to 50, who are in the next biological clock crisis, which is the narrowing down of the pinnacle of their libido and who is wondering is this it am i going to live like that for another 20 years what's now i read the book and i thought wow this is a book a fiction version of mating in captivity. It explores the tension between the domestic and the erotic, between our need for safety and our need for freedom and adventure, between stability and aliveness. And I thought I would love to have a conversation with Miranda July. I am releasing

a course on sexuality. It's a desire bundle. It's a duo course set for all the people who sit in my office day in, day out, talking about the dilemmas of desire, about the stalemates that they are in, about the sexual gridlocks they are experiencing, about the spark that has gone. And I thought, how about if I read her book and I invite her to take the course and we have a conversation about desire in relationships, particularly more so from the lens of the woman. I invited her here in Los Angeles. So I thought, since the book takes place in a room of her own, a la Virginia Woolf,

I am going to invite her not in a studio and not in an office, but I'm going to invite her in a bedroom, which is beautifully designed and where we can talk very fluidly between her and her characters. And I invite you to listen. We're all trying to figure out how to talk to each other about race.

But it's hard when so much of what we see on the topic can be preachy or alienating. NPR's Code Switch is interested in how race and identity shape your world in real and confusing and sometimes funny ways. As a winner of Apple Podcasts' Show of the Year award, Code Switch is the sort of show that handles race and identity like you've never heard before. Regardless of what color you are, Code Switch knows that identity is part of every story. Listen now to Code Switch from NPR, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, this is the first conversation I've had publicly since the book came out. So if you can imagine, everyone else I've talked to in a public sense was before the entire experience with other people.

When did it come out exactly? May 14th. And then I actually kind of went through a period of intense exhaustion such that I've really laid low. I actually canceled everything. So I've, the whole experience of it coming out has been alone in a way, like has been through, you know, wonderful emails and messages and stuff. But I think in a way friends have had, have reported back and also with my having had the experience with the world, which of course changes it a bit from when you're just talking about a book, theoretical book that no one's read. And yeah. Are you surprised? Do you feel recognized,

not as you the person, but also in terms of what you captured? It's what I hoped for. I felt like I was consciously risking, but knowing I wasn't alone. And so the whole bet was, okay. I know that this represents the lives of many. Yeah, that I'm not just being risky to for, to place precarity in my life, but actually to be able to have this conversation for the rest of my life. So that in fact, it wouldn't be a big risk. It would actually be a form of creating security. In a way, the risky feeling that this was a secret or shameful, or that something bad would happen if you spoke openly the way you might with your best friend about life, even in what seems to be a very good life,

that somewhere along the way, or maybe from the very start, you were living according to other people's rhythms. And that as you come into yourself you know start like waking up growing up you know for me this was during perimenopause another big secret um that that that not fitting into your life feeling might become so great that it's a sort of secret agony that you're you just bear because what is it it's nothing it's just you complaining or you know what I mean it's so easily that line that moment where you have one of her crowd sourcers that basically says just swallow it for the next five years you'll come out on the other side yeah and you'll be happy that you didn't jump ship yeah that you didn't blow up your life which I, I mean, doesn't that sound sort of like, not from you, but sort of sounds like sound advice.

Like, because I think also, especially as women, like, don't be erratic, don't be messy, don't be a basket case, right? There's so much shame around kind of intuition or actual change. I mean, we are erratic. It's actual change that is selfish. It's change that suits her. Yeah, right. I think it's that. It's not the change in and of itself. If they all move to Paris tomorrow. Changing schools. Yeah. We've done that a lot of times. It's the change where she puts herself at the center rather than her care and worry for the well-being of others. Yeah. Which is actually part of the definition of motherhood,

which is why so many women struggle to retrieve the woman behind the mother. Because motherhood has to come with a certain chastity, a certain sacrifice, a certain abdication of oneself for the well-being of all the others. And so a mother that is selfish is a woman. Right. I mean, it's less categorical than that, but a woman comes with autonomy, comes with freedom.

And the mother. Right. And in some ways, if you don't have children, one way you can show your good is by caretaking in other ways. Your children can be elderly parents, can be the parents of your partner, can be your alcoholic brother. Yeah. partner can be your alcoholic brother yeah are you being accused of by the moral police of trying to influence women to uh um yeah i worried about that i actually yeah had right before it came out i i was having real anxiety that didn't make sense to me because i was like well i'm excited i have the sense this is going

to go well, you know, like what is the anxiety? And it's like, oh, I'm, I'm going against like my dad, my, you know, just like a whole sort of patriarchal structure of good men, you know, like, and there was the, the feeling like what happens when you do that? Like, I literally, like, and there was the feeling like, what happens when you do that? Like, I literally thought, like, am I safe here? I mean, I guess it's still early days, but. So you didn't treat this book as a novel. When you speak like this, the auto fiction part of the book seems to be, it's as if you took a responsibility for your characters. I mean, as far as I can speak to the relationship to my own self,

you know, it is something I thought about a lot because I didn't name the character and her job. You know, you could map my career onto hers. And that was, initially she was a writer. Her name was Marion. And I think after a while, I just was like, well, this this is a book about the body partly. conjuring up this sort of fictional body, like it seems more useful to kind of generously loan some parts of myself to this narrator. And it doesn't take very much reality to make something come alive. It's like red food coloring or something. You just need like a little drop and suddenly the whole thing is pink. And I thought, I think that might be interesting

and that's kind of where we're at with fiction and selves and social media. You know, everyone is already so busily constructing themselves that it just seemed like I think we're sophisticated enough to handle that this is fiction, but that I haven't gone out of my way to prove that, you know. There was a woman yesterday who asked a question that she had divorced after whatever years, and she wanted to know how she could start a new relationship in which, or she was basically in a new relationship, but she was constantly worried that she would lose herself again,

which I think is a question that I don't hear as often from male-identified people. I hear it more from women, this notion that coming close to someone, holding on to another, often stands in opposition with holding on to oneself what do you think of that yeah i'm thinking about um the beginning of my so me and my girlfriend both came out of long marriages. And I remember the beginning of our relationship as just this joyful pleasure state.

And then for some reason, that made me think of just this one day where maybe a couple months into the relationship, it's going so well, so new. And she said something in an offhand way, but for some reason I had this, like, wait, do I even know this person feeling? And then I did what I do, which is just kind of turned off. And in the turning off, it was like these bright lights that had been shining on us just went off and I was like oh why did I think this was like this great new thing this was just like

a drug state and now it's worn off and this is just nothing and and right I'll go home and whatever just live my life and this is sort of awkward now. And it was such a dramatic drop. And I was so sad about it. And I had this nagging feeling of like, I felt this before. Throughout my life, I've had this utter disappointment. And because we'd done pretty well at talking about things so far, I was like, I'm going to force myself to just say this. And I, I did. And I, I was nervous because in the past. Like somebody who's been swimming out in the ocean and suddenly realized they've got, they've kept swimming and they're very far.

Well, I just didn't care about her suddenly anymore. I just. So you disconnect. Yeah. I just, well well what my experience was just like fuck like I built this person up and um now yeah I just I don't I just don't feel that way anymore and I in the past if I'd said something along those lines even if I said it with self-awareness like this is kind of weird this just happened I'm not sure what to think. The person would have in the past been like, well, that makes me feel pretty bad. Like, here I am. We're driving along. I thought we were having a great day. But there was somehow this new thing about her. And so I just said it. I just said, I don't,

you know, I don't know what to make of this, but I'm just going to be honest. This is what is going on inside me, why I've been quiet for the last few miles. And she said, yeah, it's really scary, isn't it? Vulnerability. And I was like, what? Like it hadn't occurred. I was like, vulnerability, that's why I shut off? Because I scared myself.

Yeah. That's what I meant by I swam so far right yeah you got it I and and then I turned her because she'd been so and it has very little to do about her and a lot more to do about us yeah right right and she'd been so into me and and um that's also part of why I turned off and then I said to her well do you ever feel this way like you you, you know, you don't. I know this is a thing about me. I can be hot and cold, whatever. And she was like, oh yeah, when I dropped you off the other night, I thought maybe I'll just burn this whole thing down.

And I was like, I so gleeful, like just like felt so in love. I was like, you're kidding me. You were gonna, she's like, yeah, I was like, maybe I'll just never call again. And I just loved her so much. And that was sort of the beginning in a way of realizing like, oh, there can be trust. Like I'm neither gonna lose myself nor disconnect to a degree that I can't be found again.

But it's all still very new to me. You know, it's been like a little more than a year and a half. It really joins what I began to answer the woman yesterday, you know, but I broadened it and I said there's often a tension in the good sense of the word in a relationship between one person more afraid of losing the other and one person more afraid of losing themselves. We all feel both. Right. But we often outsource one side of the fear to the other person. So one person more afraid of abandonment and one person more afraid of suffocation. Right. Yeah, no, and I've been more afraid of suffocation, but it can flip around.

Yes. I think flexibility in a relationship is when in fact people can go back and forth. Yeah. What often happens is that people take on one side of the equation and they project onto the other person the part of the equation that is more challenging to them. Right. Yeah. Kind of outsourcing that. Yeah. But you outsource the part that makes you more vulnerable than the one you keep. Right. Oof. And we do that all over the place, right? So once she tells you, I do this too. Yeah. For one, your fear gets diffused. The extent of, oh, I can disconnect to such a level gets a little diluted because you've got someone else who said, I thought I was going to drop you off and never call you back. Yeah. And

so suddenly the part of you that doesn't want to lose her comes. Right, right. I'm going to drop you off and never call you back. Yeah. And so suddenly the part of you that doesn't want to lose her comes up. Right, right. I'm going to be abandoned. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. So now you're in both places. I can be called, but I also don't want you to leave me.

You're right. Now you're experiencing both parts of what I think is what we all have. Right. We all need security and we all need freedom. Right. We all need security and we all need freedom. Right. But you can experience freedom better when the other person doesn't threaten you with their freedom. Right. Well, wait.

Break that down for me. Okay. I'll break it down in like, I love your metaphor, so I'll'll try to give you a metaphor the little kid sits here on your lap yeah doesn't have to be your kid a kid and at some point a child gets up and goes into the world right to explore to play to discover right and at some point they turn around are you still still there? Yes. And when they see that you are there, what do they do? Go a little farther. Exactly. That's it. Your freedom doesn't exist on its own. It feels that it can go further into playful, unselfconscious, carefree, risk-taking, because there is a solid base here.

Yes. That you can come back to when you're done. If this base goes and does the same, that is often scary for people. We have to take a brief break. Stay with us. Support for Where Should We Begin comes from Babbel. Learning a new language is like a key that unlocks entire cultures. The best way to get that key is through immersion, which can be difficult for a lot of people.

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Do you use the word erotic and sexual interchangeably? No. I guess sexual to me means like you're going to get into it more, whereas there can be a sort of turned on feeling that just lives. in some moments, like with your partner throughout the day, you know, but maybe, yeah, but it's not something that has to be acted on. So I'm curious what you think of that. I often think that modernity has reduced eroticism to sex and that in the mystical sense of the word, eroticism has been about aliveness. Yeah. And your character is in search of aliveness.

It involves sexuality, but it is not the most central element. Eroticism is what gives sexuality meaning. Right. You can do sex and feel very little. Right. Oh, yes. Right? I mean, women have done that for centuries.

Yeah. So I make a point of saying sexuality and eroticism, two different things. Yeah. Sexuality is the pivot. It's the basic instinct. But eroticism is sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It's the poetics of sex. It's what gives it meaning.

And then it means that it's about a quality of vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness. Yeah. That, that's what makes it erotic, makes it alive. And when I wrote The State of Affairs and I went around the world talking to people who had affairs, the one word that they all shared was, I felt alive. They didn't talk about the sex. Some of them had had once, some of them had had a lot, some of them that really wasn't the center,

but alive was the word. Alive and vibrant vital energetic something reconnected with oneself what do you think of that yeah i like that so much in your course that it it extends out of it's not just thing this thing in bed or something like it's not just this thing in bed or something. Like it's in all of life and you kind of cultivate it. You know, it's like something that can be in you all the time. I did, yeah, I wanted to get that across in the book. And that's why, you know, so she has this kind of affair, emotional affair, but the reason why it's so hard to go home is because once you've been alive, it's really hard to go back, you know, and it's, and she's made one thing very alive. This is where I can be alive

in this room, you know, or with this person. And then she's just, you know, this home is not where I feel alive. And I think it's like, since we're talking about such ephemeral things, like there's no real reason why that's true. You know, there's no, I mean, I do think there's real reasons kind of built into the structure of marriage or what people, you know people don't realize they're agreeing to. And you have to kind of re-agree to other things. But I guess it's not putting it all back in the box when she goes home that creates the problems, because that's tremendously painful to be faced with how little space you've given yourself moment to moment to feel alive.

The fascinating thing for me is that you call it an emotional affair. Yeah, maybe it's not. I think I got that from other people. Yeah, but this is a real cultural conversation. I mean, in the United States, there is a real desire to make a distinction between a sexual affair and an emotional affair. Yeah, I don't actually myself, I realize. I feel like I've had affairs with people I've only touched their hand. And I've always sort of joked that I'm a bit Victorian, but I think it's also just that sex can be a lot of things.

I mean, I've also like had repeated intercourse that didn't really seem very, you know. Exactly. So I think of it sometimes as puritanical hair splitting because there was no penetration, then it's no longer a sexual affair. But there were feelings, so there was an emotional affair. When in fact, you know, you can have a very erotic experience without touching anything because your imagination, you know, it's like Proust's famous line, it's not the other person that's responsible for love, it's your imagination.

Yeah. So the character has a very erotic experience in this room. To me, it's as sexual as they come. And I think one of the things I try so hard, especially in my work with heterosexual couples, is to decouple sex from intercourse. That if there is no penis entering a vagina, then that meant there was no sex. Which is actually a thing that two women

can really sidestep much more easily but in in it is so entrenched that this is where sex starts and and then it becomes so narrowly focused on those genitals which when those genitals are not as available people don't really know what to do yeah i know i do feel like all the little comments throughout the day are sex to me you know like foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm that's that's that's the thing right it's the ways that you keep that energy that you continue to eroticize your partner. You see, you sexualize your partner. That doesn't mean you're constantly thinking about having sex with him. It means that you see them as a sexual being rather than you see them as your partner in management ink.

And then at the end of the day, you know, you think that you can just roll around and suddenly be all hot and sweaty yeah you live together no do you think that that structure by definition yeah allows for the preservation of that energy in a way where setting up home, living together, paying bills together, maybe having children together, you know, being a couple, even without the legality of marriage, but being a couple in a system. Right. Yes. I mean, rather than you are a couple outside of a system.

Yeah. I mean, I know plenty of like divorced moms who went on to find a new person and that became a new family unit. Right. I didn't want that. I wanted to get to live alone with my child and kind of figure out what my home was like what like just sort of almost start from scratch. Like here's who I really am. Sorry it took so long, but just, we can just, I'm just going to be me day and night. It didn't take so long. Life, we get to know ourselves better. Yeah.

We develop confidence. We may even have had those thoughts 20 years before, but that didn't mean that we had the confidence to live by them. And I think it's developmental. I don't think people at 20 or 30 know necessarily what you call who they are. I know. I really, yeah, I agree. And I've kind of had to tell myself with my, you know, when I think about my child kind of going through all this, it's like, well, I'm showing them change. Like I'm modeling. You get to change.

You get to grow and change your whole life and become more yourself as you get older. How old were you when you started to write the book? How long did it take? Yeah, I started at 45 and finished at 49. Now I'm 50. So I think I started meeting probably around 42. Oh, wow. You know, and I wrote it over two years. I actually had never thought about what stage I was in when I started to write it. Wow. That I began to think as I was reading your book. I thought of it as the stage of my youngest is five. I can finally start a project where I can read a book and remember the beginning when I reached the end. And I am ready

to do something new and something creative. And so I took a year to write the initial article and then the book project came out. But I didn't associate it with where I'm at. I just thought about all the things that I had learned, professionally too, that I'd questioned. Promises that we were instructed with about the meaning of sexuality in relationships. How do we interpret sexual stalemates in the context of the overall

relationships? All these truths that I had kind of learned and I began to question them one by one. And that's when I said, okay, love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict. Yeah. And therein lies the mystery of eroticism. That's what I want to probe. What is the nature of desire in long-term relationship? Because in effect, you don't challenge the love of your relationship. Right.

You challenge desire and you challenge a certain experience of deadness that creeps up in you and and in him yeah and in him i mean he's actually i think he's a very important character in in the book in the book and and and not spoken enough about well i'm a couple's therapist so i'm not just looking at the female partner but i have in this in this case, he's a man, but I'm very interested in his character, in his energy, in his own fantasy life, in his own relationship with Carol, which energizes him, which he then brings. He seems to be able to bring it home. I mean, it's interesting. I've gotten so many messages and emails from

women who said, I never would have been able to say all these things to my husband, but I gave him the book and somehow he was able to understand it and now we've changed everything we've begun these conversations and i think in some ways it's exactly the goal of my courses companion yes it's uh if they go to they really go together it's amazing how little people talk about this especially with the person they're having sex with. Right. Yeah. Is it, it's, it's so hard. I mean, I see you with the course, like really brilliantly trying to figure out how do you, it's like seeing around a corner that you just can't see around, you know? And I think it does begin with a lot of questions. Like you were saying, when you started writing, mating, like, why are things the way they are? And she begins to ask that in the relationship. And it was really important to

me that he's a good guy. Like, I didn't want the book to be about him in the sense, like, if he's doing terrible things or things that are, you know, you can't live with, then like, well, of course, it's a less universal story in a way. It had to be about her. And I think in doing that, I sort of accidentally gave him more personhood because he's not just the instigator of her, you know, as often happens in a story. But he's presented as less complex. Well, she was going into her darkness and he was sort of content to have the darkness of women near him. Without having to go into his own. Yeah. And that in some ways, that's often the women's role in this culture. Without having to go into his own. like an upstanding citizen of a world that frankly was made for you. And I guess, I mean,

it's been interesting as the book comes out, like I mentioned, some, you know, women have given it to their husbands and so forth. There's also been a lot of men who've written me who just identify with the narrator and with the woman. And it kind of made me think oh just as my whole life I've read these heroes journeys and learned and gotten very good at being ambitious and brave and conquering and all these things that we attribute to to the masculine or whatever um I mean I'm great at those things. I'm a great, you know, archetypal man in a way. But the whole like world of interiority that I have with my friends, like when we spend five hours in a row together, those men have no access to. And until it's sort of modeled for you, this is how intimately we're allowed to talk as humans, you know, of any gender.

You can talk in this much detail. You can feel this much. The emails I've been getting or the DMs, I should say, are like as if they were deprived of that knowledge. And they feel almost like they shouldn't get to know it. You know, they shouldn't even get to know about this kind of thought or conversation, but they are identifying it with their deepest selves, you know, not maybe with their lived relationships, but with their own feelings. And that's, I didn't, you know, that isn't what I was thinking about when I was writing, but it's quite moving to me.

It's interesting. When you talk about the institution of marriage and you say that it was created to serve men, yes, there's a lot of that. But I also think that when we look at the kinds of relationship that you write, there's no winner. Yeah. This thing is not working better for him than for her. Right. Even though men are more social if they are in a relationship, they are less likely to be in a bad health situation.

They're more likely to live longer. I mean, there's a lot of indicators that say that the well-being of men in the context of a relationship goes up and the well-being of women goes down. But that's really by choosing certain kinds of indicators. I think in terms of losing oneself, in terms of disconnecting from one's own sense of pleasure, from one's desires, from one's sense of aliveness, I don't know that the situation is by definition

worse for women than men. And in same-sex relationships, it exists no less. You know, there's something about the needs for creating the structure of the domestic that exists somewhat, well, the way that Stephen Mitchell says, it's like, you know, we all have two sets of fundamental human needs. Security, adventure. Stability, change.

Predictability, surprise. Familiarity, novelty. And these two sets of needs actually spring from different sources and pull us in different directions. And basically, for me, the fate of desire in modern relationship is about reconciling these two seemingly opposing sets of human needs. Right, right. So it's always like there is a certain context that is more likely to maintain desire,

but it is not the same context that is more likely to, you know, what a love story needs is not the same as what a life story needs. Right, right. And this is the mystery for me. We have to take a brief break, so stay with me and let's see where this goes. Searching can be fun when the stakes are low. Looking for a great tattoo artist? That's kind of fun. Same with trying to find the best Thai food in town. But when the stakes are high, all of that searching can be stressful. Hiring is one of those mission-critical situations where it'd be nice if great candidates just materialized out of thin air.

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In your course, there's lots of stuff about... Yeah, tell me about your experience of it, actually. Yeah, no, it's really pretty remarkable. I feel like it's one of those things, like sometimes, you know, when you read like a great text when you're young or at a certain point in your life, you read it, but it doesn't really click. And then you might continue living your life

and suddenly you're like, oh, that's what she was talking about. Like, you know, like people should feel reassured that even if they don't feel like they're doing it well or getting it all, it's all going in and it's now a resource so they can recognize it in their life. You know, I had all these questions, but I was like, oh, she's not going to want to talk in detail about her life. But I guess like I wanted to know like I know what's erotic for for me or what's foreplay for me like I could and I the like writer in me wants some details from you like I want to know what you like you know it's interesting it's not a direct answer to question it's something that that i was talking before because you go to see this endocrinologist and she's starting to talk

with you about hormones and all of that one of the very interesting findings about hormones therapy and women is that the placebo response is around 50 something 52 54 if i remember well can't be the exact number maybe but it's astoundingly high wow so you ask yourself what does that say if half the women respond to a placebo it says that if she goes to get help, because she says, I want to experience some arousal again, even spontaneous arousal. I want to experience the energy of my body that I used to know and not just feel completely numb. If she thinks about herself, if she attends to herself, if she pampers herself, all of those things will have an effect comparable to the hormones or in other words in your case if you give her a new plot sometimes she doesn't need hormones just give her a new story a story that motivates her engages her her, ignites her, you know. So that to me is a very important piece.

So it's like, how do, for me, it's a ton of different things. You know, sometimes it has to do with music and singing. I love to sing and I love to dance. Now, the difference is that you can sing and be very, very sad, but you cannot dance and be sad. Uh-huh. Yeah, sometimes. The body just won't dance when it is completely collapsed. Yeah.

And so I love both of these things. Yeah. Anytime. I mean, there's probably not much else that can get me out of a mood than to move. Yeah. And then it's about, you know, paying attention to, I grew up above a clothing store, you know,

and I grew up in a clothing store with my parents. So clothes make a big difference, you know, to paying attention, to making yourself feel good. It's that. Then it's about laughing. I mean, I have a partner who has a phenomenal sense of humor and can really take me out of different situations. And I find humor is an exquisite form of intelligence.

Yeah, isn't it? And then a lot of it is doing new things together with my partner, things that we haven't done, from travel to art to projects that we do together. It's throwing ourselves into expansive and new situations rather than settling on what is more cozy and familiar. It's like, you know, the friendship part of a relationship loves to be cozy and comfortable, but the erotic part of a relationship wants to experience novelty and mystery and surprise. And so I am, I'm very,

an active seeker of those kinds of things. So it's, it's a lot, it's a lot of different things, you know? And I think because sometimes it could feel like different things, you know. And I think because sometimes it could feel like, oh, you're just an experienced junkie or something. And it's really not. The reason I'm actually really, really interested in eroticism is because I grew up in a community of people who had experienced massive trauma.

They were all Holocaust survivors. They all had lost pretty much their entire family, their entire life. And I was fascinated by how does one get up after all of this and still find the taste to live and maybe even a joie de vivre. Yeah. So that's why my interest came up and why I keep thinking about aliveness, because aliveness is freedom, possibility, adventure, self-definition, self-determination. It's all of that. It's not just excitement. Yeah, I know.

And part of why I got then hooked myself in it is because I thought, if you are the child of that legacy you better do something with your life and that meant I wasn't gonna have a little life whatever I defined as little I wanted a rich life not money not fame rich rich with people with experiences with meaning with meaning and because I had to make up for all those who hadn't had a chance to live yeah and it's from that place that my drive comes it's a very young old drive and i spent decades not connecting the dots yeah isn't that wild know, so when you say like, you know, why didn't I do it earlier? Because earlier you plant the seeds.

Right. But you don't always know why. Yeah. And then one day I write my book, like you wrote your book. And I remember the conversation with Jack about that, where I just really understood that distinction. I'm not writing a book about sex. I see loads of people who have regular good sex, fine, but that doesn't make them feel alive.

And I know people who have not that much sex anymore, but they have an energy in their relationship that sparked that je ne sais quoi. What is it? Right, right. That's what got me interested. Yeah. Oh, that's so important because it also, it sort of cuts through this idea that pleasure is kind of connected to luxury or something, you know, that there's a, like, I feel like when I've been forced to contend with my body the most, it's been out of suffering.

And that's when I've been kind of most in my body and learned to notice what it feels and wants. And I think somehow sex and pleasure got very divorced from the same body that feels pain. And there really is all the same. And in a way, you need to understand both to understand either of them. Can you understand pleasure without understanding pain? Yeah, that's sort of right right and somehow humor connects them too

right yes yes i mean it's the same as can you can you be happy without having known sorrow and humor is the part that's like points at kind of the wrongness of that you know and that that's okay you know that they're mixed up, the suffering and the pleasure and the pangs and the different, the pleasure isn't this one creamy thing. I mean, you, you speak really eloquently about that, of course, but that it's like a whole person, you know, along with their childhood and all their, you know, all their suffering is part of what they have to work with and pleasure wise. So the one thing that I was thinking about that, you know, you brought up humor as well and playfulness, but also the playfulness of the language. Sexuality is a very treacherous language in itself it is a very interesting language as

in vocabulary and talking about sexuality is often especially i have to say in this society it's either smut or sanctimony right and it And it's very, I mean, so much of what I've tried to do is to provide a vocabulary for talking about sexuality that is neither of these extremes. And that just helps to develop a comfortable, metaphorical

language to talk about one's desire, one's preferences, fantasies, fetishes, and frustrations for that matter. But you bring, you know, you've got a ton of these fantastic metaphors from the one that everybody quotes of the whistling tea kettle, but it is an amazing image. You kind of visualize it immediately. That's what metaphors do. So I'm very curious about your quest for that language, your playfulness in the language. It's not just

that it's raw and unvarnishedly direct and all of that. It's more than that. I mean, I guess I have to be interested and surprised by any anything I'm writing you know for it to come alive and so with with any topic that's kind of been hit a lot I mean you know it's like I go off the path in order just to feel surprised and to feel it as it really happens in life. Because, you know, when it's interesting, presumably all the sex in the book is like worth writing about, you know, then you want to come up with like, well, what's like, I remember what that feels like, you know, but it doesn't, it's not going to work just to write something that happened in my life, because I'm not surprised by that anymore

so I have to be surprised all over again you know like have my breath taken away I remember the point um there's a character I don't want to give stuff away or whatever who um who's kind of a smaller character in the beginning and who comes back midway through the book and the narrator spends like a night with her. And I was so, I kind of knew this night was going to happen in some form, but I was so shocked that it was her. And I was like, oh my God, she was there all along.

I think it's a great place to stop. Thank you, Miranda. And Miranda July is the author of All Fours and Tour de Force and an artist that you absolutely want to discover. So it's a pleasure. Thank you. It's such an honor. If listening to my conversation with Miranda July inspires you to want to learn more, I invite you to read All Force by Miranda July.

And I invite you to explore my course, the Esther Perel Desire Bundle. It has two parts, bringing desire back for if you are really stuck and playing with desire for if you actually want to take the flicker and see to what extent it can become a more heavily burning flame Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel

is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julianne Hatt. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller,

and Jack Saul.