May 29, 2020 • 48 mins
On this special live episode of Family Secrets, recorded in Los Angeles in January, Dani sits down with indie rock icon Liz Phair to talk about the stories we choose to tell ourselves—and how the act of writing can lead to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of both our pasts and the people we’ve become.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners, It's Danny. We're hard at work on
a fourth season of Family Secrets, which will return in October.
In the meantime, I hope you're checking out my new
(00:22):
daily podcast, The Way We Live Now. We're all pretty
burnt out on the news, and The Way We Live
Now is my attempt to bring us all together in
a way that feels comforting and helpful. But now a
whole other thing. I'm excited to share with you another
of the Family Secrets conversations that I recorded live this
past winter, this one with rock legend Liz Fair. Liz
(00:45):
and I appeared together at the Fine Arts Theater in
Los Angeles to talk about creativity, self expression, the burning
need to tell the truth of what happened, and of course, secrets.
I hope you love our conversation as much as I did. Ye. Hey,
(01:12):
everyone is so great to be here in l a
um at Writer's Box with Liz Fair. It's really one
of those moments of sort of like, wait, what happened
color rock star? Under a rock star? So listen. I
(01:33):
have a lot of really interesting intersections that I had
no idea that we had until I read Horror Stories.
It's a book that I think is, among many other things,
about identity, and it plays with time because you think
about time, and it strikes me, even though I only
(01:57):
really know you through your work and of brief conversation
and backstage, it feels like you, UM have a similar
preoccupation or obsession with with time as as I do.
And so I guess I'm wondering if we could begin
with what makes a rock star want to write a memoir?
(02:22):
Because this is not this isn't like a memoir, like
hire a ghostwriter and write a memoir, or you know,
you had other things to do. And it's a beautifully written,
really soulful, really powerful book that I would urge you
all to read. I loved it, and it feels like
it was a long time in the pressure building to
(02:44):
write it. That's what it felt like to me. That's interesting. UM,
thank you, those are very big compliments. Thank you. M.
The memories that I chose to share surprise a lot
of people because it isn't about trashing a hotel room
or meeting famous people or no puking backstage. It's it's
(03:06):
about a little of that is there, you know, somebody
somebody else puking. I was, actually, I don't want to
use the word inspired. I was catapulted into action by
what was happening in our political climate. Um that may
seem not intuitive to make that leap, but I found myself,
(03:29):
as I was watching what was happening to our country,
ever more drawn to what fundamentally mattered to me in life,
what my baseline for decency, goodness, honesty. It pulled me
into a place of having to plant a flag for
what I believed in and maybe fight in the only
(03:52):
way I could to. Uh well, I was. As I
was telling you backstage, I also found myself judge jing
a lot. I was not a judge e person until
this happened, and I found myself outraged and horrified by
what I was seeing, and that both you know when
(04:14):
something just crystallizes and you just truly feel like it's
important to say what you think life is about and
what matters and what our baseline for how we should
behave is. But at the same time, what happened was
then I turned that back on myself and I thought,
how would you be judged? You know, what what would
(04:36):
people say if they were judging you. So a lot
of my book is about personal stories that you didn't
ask for and you don't need to know. But that
would be sort of what if I were going to
leave the planet, I would want to leave behind, about
everything that I had learned and experienced in life, and
what I would want to say that mattered. As you're speaking,
(04:58):
I'm thinking about there's a course that I teach once
a year on the East Coast, and and the the
title of it is the Stories We Carry m hm.
And these feel like the stories that you were carrying,
which is I guess why I said that. It feels like,
in a way, it was a long time building up,
(05:20):
even though it wasn't something that you were necessarily ever
thinking about turning into a book. It began early in
the book. You write that you were carrying around toxic
shards of souls I've casually shattered. And I found that
so hauntingly beautiful, because we all do that, whether or
(05:42):
not we're actually conscious that we're doing that or not.
We carry around these shards. They live inside of us.
Anyone here I can say this because I'm in l A.
Anyone here with a yoga practice, um right knows that
you know, when you sort of enter the sphere of
you know, the body in a certain way. Those stories,
(06:05):
those shards, those toxic shards, those people, um, they exist,
you know, they never really go away. And you brought
them forth in this book and UM named them. Um
there's um. You know, early in the book, there's a
(06:26):
girl in the bathroom that when you were in college,
you and your friends just I mean she was this
girl was in terrible shape and you she'd been drinking.
She'd been drinking, and she was in trouble. And it's
like these these quote unquote type like small moments walking
(06:46):
out of a bathroom and not doing anything to help,
like just not knowing what to do, and then staying,
you know, with the the haunted nous and the shame
and the feeling of like should done something, and what
happened to that girl? Like that, that girl then lives
inside of you because of what you did or didn't do,
(07:07):
you know, when she judges me. I mean that that
was a circumstance in which there was a lot of
people ignoring her and that pressure that you feel to
go along with whatever is happening. It was a freshman
in college and I was so nervous everywhere I went
that I had learned to put up a front of
not looking nervous and looking like I knew what I
was doing. So I had numbed myself out. And yet
(07:31):
this one casual encounter stayed with me my whole life
and changed how involved I become when I see that
something needs to be done. So it also becomes a lesson, right,
like you know, sort of metabolizing that. So there's a
very moving passage about this elderly dog that it was
(07:54):
a neighbor of yours who it was. It was a
neighbor of the woman who cut my hair up on
Mulholland Drive, and she said, oh, if you're thinking of
adopting a dog, there's one that this famous comedian doesn't
want anymore. And the dog was just alone, was left alone.
Was basically just someone coming in defeated, right. I mean,
I can't speak to exactly what was going on, but yeah,
(08:17):
it was for all intents and purposes, abandoned the sweet
Newfoundland that I looked at. And my house couldn't accommodate it.
There were too many stairs, it was too old. But
like I went like three times and just talked to
it on the balcony, which sounds really sweet, but like
the real crux came when like a year later and
(08:37):
then I had asked everyone, like, where can Newfunland's go?
Does anyone want this? And I had given a fair
shot and then gone on tour and gone on with
my life. And later on someone had said, oh, I
heard about some farm for new fees or something that
could help the dog. And again I failed myself and
I didn't follow up with that. And again when you
(08:59):
said time, they're so present to me. All the things
that have happened to me are still so present, and
it's how I write songs. It's all the unsaid, undone,
un forgiven things that just became part of me. So
time really didn't pass. If anything, these past memories grew
(09:21):
in importance the longer time went on. I feel like
with your book too, that sense that when the truth
came out did flattened time. Time just everything that you'd
experienced became one present moment. Well, it's so interesting, and
I wonder whether it's like this in the songwriting. I
(09:42):
know it's like this in prose writing and writing and
writing um memoir and and also in writing literary fiction. Um.
Literature is I think, really the only form that can
play with time with the greatest effectiveness. UM. I even
(10:04):
feel film. I never feel when I'm watching film and
that's being done. I'm always aware that it's being done.
Whereas in UM, when we read, we can feel the
way that memory moves. We can, um, you know that
that flattening that you're describing, or the collapsing, the collapsing
(10:25):
of the present in the past. I mean when I
made the discovery, uh, four years ago. Um, it's almost
four years ago now that my dad hadn't been my
biological father, something I had never known. Actually I should
say I had never thought. Um. I think there's a
(10:46):
phrase in Inheritance which is the unthought known. UM, A
phrase that I come back to again and again and again,
because UM, it's a psychoanalytic phrase that that means what
we absolutely do know, what we know in our bones,
what we feel, um, you know deep. But when we
(11:07):
when we think about what a gut instinct is, it's
that kind of knowledge, but it's too dangerous to think,
so we just don't go there. UM. I think I
was living in that state. Actually my whole entire life
but then to be in midlife and to make this discovery,
I had to re remember, rethink, re understand everything about
(11:31):
what had come before. May I share what you said
up in the dressing room. Was it Andrea who asked
you or said what's your next project? And you said,
I'm not sure because I feel like I've been digging
for this story my whole life. And think of how
much you've done sort of looking for that what was
an unthought, no unthought known? But I think you know.
(11:53):
One of the intersections between us and a really interesting
question for us to explore is what makes an artist
an artist? Right? Like there's a moment in your book
where a friend of yours, Um, so you're adopted. A
friend of yours says to you, do you think if
(12:14):
you hadn't been adopted, um, you would have been an artist?
And I mean, it's an impossible question to answer. It's
like saying if I were a different you know person,
really if I I mean, you you change one thing
and everything changes, or you change um. But but there's
something about your being an observer, which was something that
(12:38):
I was very aware of reading you that from the
time you were small, you were always observing and in
order to observe. I mean, one of the things I've
often thought about is writers are outsiders. Um. I don't
think you can be an insider and write about anything
(12:59):
from the inside if you're the if you're an insider,
because you don't have you don't have any perspective on it.
You don't have that anthropological view, and so you you
were always seeing the world from that place of this
slight removed the slight distance, and you know, it's impossible
(13:21):
to know exactly what created that or what caused that,
but what what would you say to your friend in
that regard or as anything about that? It makes perfect sense.
I think that a lot of the freedom that I
feel as an artist to do what my mother would
consider very outrageous and completely inappropriate things is because there's
(13:42):
there's I have one foot out the door always, I
have one foot in another state. That could be anything
I could, I could have come from any kind of people,
And so that gives me a freedom to both search
for who I am, sort of like a I guess,
permission to search for who I am, but also gives
(14:04):
me that, like you said, that remove from being internal,
like I was definitely raised by a tight knit family,
but there was one foot that was still outside of
that looking back on it and looking back on my
place in it. And there's that insecurity, which I think
you went through so vividly, and it was just beautiful
(14:26):
your description of that, like who am I now? And
that feeling like the floor has just dropped out from
under you. And I just had that in a slow,
low grade way the whole time, like I was always
here and I was committed, and I belonged to my family,
but not totally. And I think that is the artist
(14:46):
side of me, that did stand outside myself, did look
for the I love it. I'm sorry. The unknown thought
or the unthought O there's unsought known is what I'm
always searching for myself. There's also this great this this
great term that I came across when I was just
(15:10):
madly researching and trying to understand, you know, whatever I
possibly could about this new knowledge. And it was a
term from adoption literature, and it's genealogical bewilderment, and I
mean it's it's it's it's so poetic and beautiful and powerful,
and I mean one of the things that's come up
(15:31):
a lot for me in the years since Inheritance came out.
Is right around the time that it came out, or
even before, I would have mostly adoptive parents come up
to me who hadn't read the book yet, or maybe
if they had, were reading it through a certain lens.
And what they thought that I was saying, or what
(15:53):
they thought I was going to say, was that nature
matters exclusively. And I remember the first time I had
this conversation. It was with a writer standing by a
pool at a writer's conference, the kind of pool where
somebody always falls in every year at this writer's conference
(16:13):
in Austin, Texas. And he he's gay, and he's a dad,
and he and his husband have three adopted kids, and
he was kind of a little bit confrontational on the
subject of nurture and nature. And I said to him,
do your kids know they're adopted? And he said, of course.
And I said have they always known? Yes, of course,
(16:35):
they've always known you ever since they you know, we
were sentient beings. I said, so, okay, So their identities
are formed around something that is true about themselves. What's
true about themselves is that they know that they're adopted.
They know that, um, there is a reason for that
(16:57):
genealogical bewilderment as they grow up, maybe not looking, you know,
like their family because there isn't a biological connection, or
feeling a little bit other or different because there is
otherness and difference and genealogical bewilderment, the sense of it's
(17:18):
a wide open world, this question of where I come
from biologically and the difference. And this took me a
while and some deep thinking to do. But the difference,
I mean, if our identities are formed by the stories
that were told from the time were very small, then
that story, the adoption story is you're adopted, and that's
(17:38):
really it's complicated, but it's a different story from being
from the truth of identity being withheld. So what happened
with me is that my parents, for reasons that made
a lot of sense in the place and time that
(17:59):
they raised me, we're never going to tell me. I
was never going to know this. They were going to
go to the grave with this, which they both did,
and I was never going to know, and no one
would ever be the wiser. And what we don't know
doesn't hurt us, right, Yeah, So my sense of identity
as a child, um, was based on something that was false,
(18:21):
and so the image I have for it is almost
like something being wrapped around um, like a husk being
wrapped around something that isn't solid on the inside, because
there was something that wasn't true. And I think, you know,
I mean, I started this podcast Family Secrets because there
(18:42):
is so much secrecy in our society and our culture
in so many different ways. And we're in this moment
now and you're a part of that where it's coming out.
And whether it's the Me Too movement or it's the
fact that DNA testing has made all all of these
kinds of secrets absolutely impossible to keep any more, this
(19:04):
is what's happening. We'll be back in a moment with
more Family Secrets. I think fighting the shame of being
human is something that I've crusaded on for a while
that you know, there's so much in our society that
(19:25):
is stuck around this idea of let's let's not say it.
I know that my parents didn't always tell me what
was going on, and that that always caused me a
lot of cognitive dissonance. And the shame is so much
more destructive than the truth a lot of times because
like you said, you're wrapping a husk or you're building
(19:46):
scar tissue around a vacuum. So there's no way to
resolve it. It's never going to heal. Yeah, I mean
just because it isn't spoken doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In fact, it's not being spoken creates a kind of
I mean, I think of my parents and myself now,
and I'll never be able to have these conversations with them.
(20:07):
But the air in our house was thick with this. Um.
And as a writer, I mean I inheritances my tense book.
All of my my novels were about family secrets. Um.
They were about the corrosive power of family secrets in
one way or another. Um. If you had asked me
(20:28):
to explain why this was my theme, Uh, you know,
I had this kind of pithy thing that I that
I have to say about theme, which is that it
is just a fancy literary term for obsession. And we
don't and we don't choose what obsesses us. And you know,
writers don't like to look under the hood too much
about what's really going on. It's like, you know, that's
where the magic happens. You want to mess with that.
(20:49):
So I just kind of bopped along with family secrets
being my theme. And then I started writing memoirs and
I was a novelist. Why was I writing memoirs? And
that's where I think the digging, you know that I
was talking to Andrew upstairs. I think that's where it began.
Was just this sense of there's something, there's something there,
and you are receiving feedback that there was another nous
(21:11):
about you. You were receiving feedback all the way along
the line that that hinted. I felt maybe it's the
way you wrote it, but it felt like no. I was.
I was absolutely constantly receiving the feedback was you don't
look Jewish. There's no way you're Jewish? You know? Now?
Is is Shapiro your husband's name? Uh? You know, just
(21:31):
but constantly, I mean really like every day, um. And
yet that's feedback. But if you're kind of entrenched in
a desire to, in a need to not know, you
can ignore that feedback and contort yourself around not knowing.
(21:51):
I mean, what would happen to me when somebody would
say to me, as they did every day every day,
you know, you don't look Jewish? I would say a
raised kosher, you know, observant family, went to yeshiva, spoke
fluent Hebrew, two sinks, two dishwashers, you know, like recite
my you know, my, my, my Jewish cred. Yeah, like
(22:15):
sort of basically getting in people's faces about it, like
what's what's your problem? Like this is what Jewish looks like,
why can't you go there? Yeah? I mean really a
little bit like I mean it would I found it
like it offended me, um, but it was true. And
what people were saying when they were looking at me
and saying that was something that they saw because they
(22:37):
had no skin in the game. And so that's that's feedback,
I wonder. And I don't remember if you touched on
this in your book what your mother was processing when
these comments were happening. So let's go back to that too,
Is that too, No, not at all. Let's go back
to the unfought known, because I think that there's a
way in which when we are told that something really
(23:02):
is a secret and can never be revealed, like air tight,
which I think my parents. You know, back in the
early days of reproductive medicine, there was a lot of euphemism.
There were there was an outright deceit in a way.
So I believe that by the time my parents were
(23:24):
um bringing home a baby, they had my mother more
than my father, had pretty much decided that it had
never happened. You're gonna build that house right on the
foot of the denial. That's right, that's right, And that
becomes a kind of UM. It's like a kernel of
(23:48):
something that's true, that's somewhere lodged way deep, deep, deep
deep in the psyche, but is not going to UM.
It's not going to emerge with a kind of clarity.
It's gonna leak go all over everything. UM. And that's
how I think of it, as like there was this
like toxic leakage that was always there. Which is interesting
(24:09):
because my mother I always got the sense that said,
over and over again, if you ever want to find
your biological parents. You know, her brother was a lawyer's
or attorney, so she said, you know, we'll go through Mark.
But there was I could tell that that was not
something she really wanted per se to happen. There was
(24:30):
this sense because ultimately we are our parents children, it
doesn't matter where we come from. I mean, when I
was little, I used to imagine the way I processed
being adopted was I would make up stories, like I
thought we lived in Cincinnati when I was very young,
and then we'd have these huge thunderstorms, and in my mind,
(24:50):
I thought those were my parents coming to check up
on me. So I'd like, I don't know why I
did that, but that's one of the things that I
thought of. And then recently, I have a god's sister.
My parents chose godparents for me who had adopted their
child from the same adoption agency. So I sort of
(25:12):
had to go that way to find out what my
adoption agency was. And then when I looked googled it online.
Then it turned out to be established in eighteen eighteen,
and it was originally called the New Haven Orphan Asylum.
And there's this campus with these big brick walls and everything,
(25:33):
and it just it started this whole other identity. Now
I'm like this gothic tragic figure in my mind, you know. Like,
but that's how you can transmute, Like my identity can
shift depending on what the details are, and each new
item is really not really relevant. I'm still my affectations
(25:54):
are my mother's, you know, my father's temper. It's all there.
I am my parents child immutably. But that identity question,
which is so fascinating. I had freedom and you weren't
given a choice until you discovered what that was. And
I wanted to ask you about that, like, did you
(26:17):
feel that it was sort of betraying your parents? Too?
Question it so much? Well, I would be. I would
begin by saying, I found out accidentally, right like I wasn't.
I wasn't going in search of I think that there's
something here and I'm gonna go find it. I recreationally
took a DNA test because my husband was taking one.
(26:40):
So it began with sort of this accident I could
so easily has spent my whole life never knowing. I
had a couple of moments where I felt that I
was betraying my father, and one was when I met
my biological father. Um, I felt almost like all my
(27:00):
my father died when I was twenty three, and all
my life, UM, I have carried him with me. I
feel his presence. Um, you know, an irony because for
the for the people who were thinking that I was
saying nature is all that matters. My mother was someone
who I did not feel close to, and she is
my biological parent. I checked. I made an elderly cousin
(27:24):
actually go do a DNA test because I was so baffled.
I trying to piece it all together. But she was.
And my father, who was not, as it turns out,
my biological parents, is the person who was most formative
of me, who had a profound kind of soul connection
with and I would feel his presence. And when I
first found out that he hadn't been my biological father,
(27:47):
I briefly lost it. And I think I lost it
because of course it's coming from me and that chain
had somehow been broken. I lost, Yes, I had lost
him again. I was grieving him again, and I was
wondering what he had known and all of that. So
when I met my biological father, I had this feeling
(28:10):
of you know, we have magical thinking about the people
who um have passed, who we love, and I think
many of us do. And my magical thinking was that
my father could see what was going on in my life,
because when he died, I was a mess. It was complete,
total mess, and he that's his last you know, that
would have been his last kind of memory or knowledge
(28:31):
of me. And then I grew up and I kind
of made something of myself, and I had had this
idea that he could see that. But if he could
see that, then he could also see everything else. You
can't like have magical thinking in one way. So I
was like, he could see that, then he can also
see that I'm marching into this restaurant in Teenack Teenack,
New Jersey and meeting the man who was the sperm donor,
(28:52):
like the secret, the thing that he never wanted anyone
to ever know. So that there was that, and then
the and the other piece. I was upstairs signing books,
and there's a picture of my dad and me, the joyous,
beautiful father daughter picture and the young father in that picture.
If he could have you know, talked about collapsing time right,
(29:14):
if he could have imagined a future where that picture
would be on the cover of a best selling you
know book, and his his thing that he held as
so private and secret, would be in the world. I
thought about this a lot, because some people make these
discoveries and their parents are still living. Um. I thought
(29:34):
a lot about what that would be if my parents
were still living. I know one thing, there would be
no book. I wouldn't have written this book with my
father living um and my mother. Maybe because I was
I tended to be more willing to throw her under
the bus. I just did. I did because our our
lives together were so um. Yeah, but I want to
(29:57):
I want to go. I want to vote for you do.
I just want to say something. When you said that upstairs,
what I thought was before I even cracked her book,
my first thought was how much he looked like your
father in that picture. That's exactly what my read was,
which is so funny because that's just your joy and
your glee and the connection that you have with him.
So I just wanted to say, and that's it though,
And that's you know what I mean. I I now
(30:19):
feel like I come from three people, you know, not
many people can say that particular thing, right, and and
and I think that I wonder if that's true for
you as well. You come from you come from four people?
And I sometimes think, you know, even if I could
find my mother, I probably couldn't find my father. I've
(30:40):
made up so many stories about what their deal was.
It's almost like like adoption porn, you come up with
Like twenty one birthday, I came slinking downstairs, waiting to
find out that, you know, like my trust fund that
was supposed to be there, just like sat at breakfast
and I stared at my mom for a while and
she's like, and I'm like, you know what she did?
(31:04):
This is such a jerky move. So I said, well,
I just wondered, you know, I'm I'm twenty one. I
thought maybe there would be something that you would want
to tell me. And she looked at me. She just
sat back and she said, if there were, what would
you do with it? And so like it prolonged. I'm like,
it's just like a test, you know, but length there wasn't.
(31:25):
So so I want you to read a passage um
that particularly. I thought it was really powerful from your
book about what we're talking about here. So I guess
we're talking about my adoption. I never know how much
importance to give it. Is it a minor detail in
my biography or does it define me? When I look
(31:47):
at old family photographs, do they really pertain to me?
Are those my ancestors? Or am I playing at nostalgia.
However much I wish to belong to any one person
or group, that urge is almost always counteracted by an
awareness of being different, as though there's a barrier around me.
(32:09):
Thin is a layer of ice on an eyelash that
prevents full integration. I keep people at arms length and
in their separate categories, even those with whom I have
long term, committed relationships. I remember when my father sent
me the original copy of my birth certificate for the
(32:29):
purpose of gathering passport paperwork, or because I'd lost my
driver's license. I want to add yet again, um it
arrived in a Manila envelope. When I held the yellow
document in my hands and looked at the time and
date punched out on an old school typewriter, I burst
into tears. I was It was overwhelming to touch the
(32:54):
last artifact that connected me to a mother I never knew,
a young woman for whom, whatever reason, couldn't raise me.
I saw a vulnerable infant changing hands, and I wept
for the agonizing decisions of everyone involved, for the snap
shot of a fleeting moment of wholeness before I carried
(33:16):
in my heart this broken piece of glass, which I've
been careful not to disturb lest it cut me. I
cried because I recognized a feeling I must have once had,
but could no longer summon, No matter how quietly I sat,
or how happy I was. It makes for great art,
though I'll say that we'll be back in a moment.
(33:50):
I was thinking again of the collapsing of time as
you read that. Everything about that was right there in
that yellow birth certificate. Injibly, I saw her, I saw her,
for a brief moment, the real her, the young woman,
and I was a mother at that point, I should say,
so it hit home very deeply. My My family says
(34:14):
that I held my son too closely when he was born,
but I had this overwhelming need not to let him
feel that separation which I must have experienced because I was,
I guess two weeks old when I they had me
in the hospital. I guess for two weeks and for
a newborns as a mother, I can look back on
(34:35):
that and think that's an unthinkably long time, you know.
And so I just wherever I could put him, I
couldn't put him down. I think early motherhood and motherhood
parenthood perhaps in general, makes you evaluate or compare. But
(34:57):
you know that line about it makes for good art. Okay,
I'm sure I had a happier life. I'm sure that
this was like this was someone who wasn't ready to,
and there would have been I'm sure it was a
selfless thing, but the sacrifice would still be extreme. It
would still be incredibly hard to give up a child
(35:19):
and she's out there somewhere knowing that I'm out there somewhere,
and that's that's a tough thing. Oh that's really interesting, actually,
I mean, so you think that's one of the reasons
I've never actually sought out my biological parent. One of
them is just that I have enough to deal with
it the holidays. I can't handle anymore. Really, But um,
(35:41):
just this, this, this like it could be something she
never told another person, And I was very aware of
that reading your book, thinking about that from that point
of view, and that's just a sense I had. You know,
it's really probably not even fifty fifty that she would
want to have to own that. It's interesting too, because
(36:05):
as long as you don't search, or you know, I
have that desire, it remains a mystery that are are
ye well, And as long as it remains a mystery, um,
there's there's so much nuance and so much possibility. Even
the trust fund, Well, what did you do with it?
(36:27):
If you had it? Those seconds were like, Um, you
said something really um beautiful when we were talking on
the phone yesterday, UM about you? You equated it to music.
Do you remember what you said? It was about um,
like one note versus accord? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
(36:48):
it's there's what was it in the context of the turn?
Remember it was in the context of knowledge, you know,
like like to to know. Well, anytime there's an hiphany
anytime you get any kind of insight into whatever it
is you're searching for. And I'm a big proponent of complexity.
(37:09):
I think that as uh as a species, we need
to come to terms with things being complex. I think
we're really living in systems, overlapping and layering systems, and
I don't think we think like that. I think we
still think in binary terms right wrong, black, white, good, bad,
all these kind of oversimplifications of what's really going on.
(37:30):
And for me, when you gain some kind of insight
on on your identity on the take, for example, having
empathy for my parents and what the adoption would have
been for them, and how fragile that sense of what
if she leaves us, what if she doesn't like us,
or what if we're doing the wrong thing or what
is her nature. But any kind of deeper insight, it
(37:53):
goes from being a fact to being a chord of knowledge.
There's the low part of it, there's the middle a
part of it, there's the high, keening, yearning part of it.
There's just a complex, deeper knowing, which I'm a junkie for.
Like that. That's what I'm in the game for in
anything I do in my life, is to have that
(38:14):
expansion of a fact into a truth. Yeah, there's something right,
I'm gonna see if I can find it. Right. At
the very very very end of your book, you write, Um,
horror stories is music not data. The haunting melodies I
hear over and over again in my head, and I
(38:37):
loved that. Um, just that language of music, not data,
because what's data? I mean data is just think of
how often you live in data? Though we all do.
We take it's it's a difference between knowing what it
would be like to be stranded at sea and actually
being stranded at see like a real truthful understanding, And
(39:02):
no matter how much you try to have the understanding
and you think of yourself as a deep and thoughtful person,
there's no substitute for actual knowing. And I think your
book is such a beautiful portrait of the journey from
data to knowing and what was data can be false too,
that's true. So I mean I spent my life creating
(39:27):
narratives to make sense of what I thought I knew,
Like what I was trying to make sense of. My
father was sad because my mother was angry because you know,
we were the family system that we were, you know,
(39:48):
because and I would write about it. I mean, when
I go back and I look at my earlier work,
it's all there, Um that those you know, those that struggle.
I was. I was trying so hard to make sense
of something that didn't make sense. And the way that
we do that is we tell stories. That's how we
(40:08):
just human beings from the time that we were cave
people scratching hieroglyphics on you know, on on on cave walls,
that's what that's what we were doing. And um, that
was my attempt. And one of the sort of stunning
things to me, and especially in the early months as
I was trying to understand and sort of put put
things back together again, was that I was, you know, like,
(40:32):
was all that wrong? You know? And what I came
to realize, is it wasn't wrong. It just wasn't the
whole truth, you know, it was a piece of the truth.
It was true that my parents were unhappily married. It
was true that they were older. It was true that
I was their only child. It was true that they
had conflicts in their religious beliefs, you know, with each other. Um,
(40:55):
you know. It was true that I was this very fair,
blonde child that didn't look you know people. All these
things were true, but they weren't the chord. They were
data points. And and I think to go back to
like if you know your friend's question, if if you
hadn't been adopted, would you have become an artist? Those
(41:18):
are um, you know, whatever, those whatever, those pieces are,
they are what create the obsession, create, you know, the
the searching, the you know, the artist. As you know,
there's something that I can't figure out, that I can't
get to, and the only way that I can get
to it is by following the line of words or
(41:41):
by you know, writing a song. Um. That is that's
that's the way that you know, And that's why I
love the idea of a chord. Isn't that how we know?
You know, whatever we think of as God, isn't that
how we know? Love? Isn't that how we know? Like
it isn't data, it is. It's a board and we
all have to right our way toward faith and belief
(42:05):
in something that is intangible. And I love that. I
love that. Yeah, and it becomes the past. It becomes
you know, the way through a lifetime, you know, a
lifetime of of making work, of making art. You know.
I've I've been thinking about one of the reasons why
I have no idea what's next is because I don't
(42:27):
ever want to imitate myself. I don't ever want I want.
I mean, I I'm a seeker and I'm a I'm
a searcher, and I actually think I do think for
myself that these unanswered questions that I could not apprehend
or touch is what made me an artist. I mean,
I'm I'm glad that I had the capacity, the ability,
(42:50):
the gift, whatever you wanna call it, to be able
to actually actualize it and do it. But that's searching,
not I say to my students sometimes, you know, if
you went outside right and you just you know, did
man on the street interviews with people, and you know,
you sir, do you do you ponder your internal life
all the time? Is this something that you think about?
Do you lie awake at night and consider, you know,
(43:12):
you're you're you know? And a lot of people say,
I feel like it's a Woody Allen movie that I'm describing.
But a lot of people would say, no, I just
you know, it's like those that couple in the Woody
Allen movie, the you know, I'm just shallow and he's
handsome and we're good whatever that, But it's not not
everybody actually walks around with the need to express in
(43:34):
that way. I can't argue with that. So so let's
go back to I mean, you said it was the
political climate, and that makes sense to me, But why
why a memoir? Why not pour it into song? Well, hilariously,
my manager is sitting right there, and he was part
of the impetus because he was I was on tour
(43:57):
with the Smashing Pumpkins and this is during the must
have been I guess I'm about to do your voice
right in front of you right now, But um, Prince
had just passed away. It was the day Prince died,
and I was playing a show that night and we
were having a conversation about something else, but then it
(44:18):
all became about Prince and we had lost Bowie and
that had affected me very profoundly. And he goes, He's like, Liz,
you know, you don't know how much time you've got.
You know, you could be gone tomorrow. You don't you
have no idea, And like is this is this? Like
are you making the work that you would want to
make if it's the last thing you ever did? And
(44:42):
it stopped me because no, I thought I had like
dozens of chances left, And it just completely changed my
outlook and I thought I had better be making the
work to the best my ability that I would be
okay leaving. But like, what did I have to say?
(45:04):
What did I What had I learned in my you know,
almost fifty years at that point, Like what had I learned?
What did I have to give back to my son,
to other young women and just two people in general?
Like did I have something to give? Did I have
something that I could you know, make the world a
better place than you found it? And I didn't have much,
(45:27):
but I had my own experience and my own insights,
and I had the ability to go from a place
where the public perceives me as higher, you know, like, oh,
your life must be better, and to be able to
just open it up and be like nope, see like
exactly as pathetic as we all are. And I had
the ability to do that. And I did had the ability,
(45:49):
thank god, from songwriting two turn it into a sort
of a small take those painful things like a grain
of sand and a noyster, sorry to use a very
tired metaphor, and make it into a beautiful jewel that
people can read and say like, yeah, I've felt that,
or you know, there's one story about me going through
(46:10):
a breakup and going I was. I felt like such
a raw nerve. It was such a bad breakup. He'd
had a baby with another woman behind my back, and
I found out about it after the child was already born,
and he'd been asking me to marry him. He'd wanted
for us to become pregnant, and I was so devastated
that going to Trader Joe's was like a huge outing
(46:33):
for me, and it took like all my and I
felt like everyone was looking at I felt like I
had like a loser like across my face, you know,
and it was so hard pushing I can still feel
pushing that cart in there, having overdressed, you know what
I mean? Like, so I had the ability to give
that to people, and that's what I chose to do.
(46:54):
That's what I felt like I wanted to do with
the pain in my life was make it both funny,
make it okay at the end, and just say like
it's all of us. You also do something really with
the those shards, you know, those those toxic shards of
those memories of UM, the people uh that you felt
(47:16):
that you had failed in one way or another, of
UM honoring honoring them in a way, you know, like
when when you said that, your manager said to you,
if if you know, if if you have limited amount
of time left, what what do you want to leave behind.
It's almost like settling a debt. There's kind of an
existential debt that feels like it's being settled here. UM.
(47:40):
That has nothing to do with whether these people would
ever read these portraits and go with like, you know,
I was I was that person, I was that girl.
It's it's UM a kind of UM way of making
something whole, yeah, trying, yeah, trying to make something that
can't quite be made a whole. But it to be
made beautiful is the way I looked at it. Yeah.
(48:21):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners, It's Danny. We're hard at work on
a fourth season of Family Secrets, which will return in October.
In the meantime, I hope you're checking out my new
(00:22):
daily podcast, The Way We Live Now. We're all pretty
burnt out on the news, and The Way We Live
Now is my attempt to bring us all together in
a way that feels comforting and helpful. But now a
whole other thing. I'm excited to share with you another
of the Family Secrets conversations that I recorded live this
past winter, this one with rock legend Liz Fair. Liz
(00:45):
and I appeared together at the Fine Arts Theater in
Los Angeles to talk about creativity, self expression, the burning
need to tell the truth of what happened, and of course, secrets.
I hope you love our conversation as much as I did. Ye. Hey,
(01:12):
everyone is so great to be here in l a
um at Writer's Box with Liz Fair. It's really one
of those moments of sort of like, wait, what happened
color rock star? Under a rock star? So listen. I
(01:33):
have a lot of really interesting intersections that I had
no idea that we had until I read Horror Stories.
It's a book that I think is, among many other things,
about identity, and it plays with time because you think
about time, and it strikes me, even though I only
(01:57):
really know you through your work and of brief conversation
and backstage, it feels like you, UM have a similar
preoccupation or obsession with with time as as I do.
And so I guess I'm wondering if we could begin
with what makes a rock star want to write a memoir?
(02:22):
Because this is not this isn't like a memoir, like
hire a ghostwriter and write a memoir, or you know,
you had other things to do. And it's a beautifully written,
really soulful, really powerful book that I would urge you
all to read. I loved it, and it feels like
it was a long time in the pressure building to
(02:44):
write it. That's what it felt like to me. That's interesting. UM,
thank you, those are very big compliments. Thank you. M.
The memories that I chose to share surprise a lot
of people because it isn't about trashing a hotel room
or meeting famous people or no puking backstage. It's it's
(03:06):
about a little of that is there, you know, somebody
somebody else puking. I was, actually, I don't want to
use the word inspired. I was catapulted into action by
what was happening in our political climate. Um that may
seem not intuitive to make that leap, but I found myself,
(03:29):
as I was watching what was happening to our country,
ever more drawn to what fundamentally mattered to me in life,
what my baseline for decency, goodness, honesty. It pulled me
into a place of having to plant a flag for
what I believed in and maybe fight in the only
(03:52):
way I could to. Uh well, I was. As I
was telling you backstage, I also found myself judge jing
a lot. I was not a judge e person until
this happened, and I found myself outraged and horrified by
what I was seeing, and that both you know when
(04:14):
something just crystallizes and you just truly feel like it's
important to say what you think life is about and
what matters and what our baseline for how we should
behave is. But at the same time, what happened was
then I turned that back on myself and I thought,
how would you be judged? You know, what what would
(04:36):
people say if they were judging you. So a lot
of my book is about personal stories that you didn't
ask for and you don't need to know. But that
would be sort of what if I were going to
leave the planet, I would want to leave behind, about
everything that I had learned and experienced in life, and
what I would want to say that mattered. As you're speaking,
(04:58):
I'm thinking about there's a course that I teach once
a year on the East Coast, and and the the
title of it is the Stories We Carry m hm.
And these feel like the stories that you were carrying,
which is I guess why I said that. It feels like,
in a way, it was a long time building up,
(05:20):
even though it wasn't something that you were necessarily ever
thinking about turning into a book. It began early in
the book. You write that you were carrying around toxic
shards of souls I've casually shattered. And I found that
so hauntingly beautiful, because we all do that, whether or
(05:42):
not we're actually conscious that we're doing that or not.
We carry around these shards. They live inside of us.
Anyone here I can say this because I'm in l A.
Anyone here with a yoga practice, um right knows that
you know, when you sort of enter the sphere of
you know, the body in a certain way. Those stories,
(06:05):
those shards, those toxic shards, those people, um, they exist,
you know, they never really go away. And you brought
them forth in this book and UM named them. Um
there's um. You know, early in the book, there's a
(06:26):
girl in the bathroom that when you were in college,
you and your friends just I mean she was this
girl was in terrible shape and you she'd been drinking.
She'd been drinking, and she was in trouble. And it's
like these these quote unquote type like small moments walking
(06:46):
out of a bathroom and not doing anything to help,
like just not knowing what to do, and then staying,
you know, with the the haunted nous and the shame
and the feeling of like should done something, and what
happened to that girl? Like that, that girl then lives
inside of you because of what you did or didn't do,
(07:07):
you know, when she judges me. I mean that that
was a circumstance in which there was a lot of
people ignoring her and that pressure that you feel to
go along with whatever is happening. It was a freshman
in college and I was so nervous everywhere I went
that I had learned to put up a front of
not looking nervous and looking like I knew what I
was doing. So I had numbed myself out. And yet
(07:31):
this one casual encounter stayed with me my whole life
and changed how involved I become when I see that
something needs to be done. So it also becomes a lesson, right,
like you know, sort of metabolizing that. So there's a
very moving passage about this elderly dog that it was
(07:54):
a neighbor of yours who it was. It was a
neighbor of the woman who cut my hair up on
Mulholland Drive, and she said, oh, if you're thinking of
adopting a dog, there's one that this famous comedian doesn't
want anymore. And the dog was just alone, was left alone.
Was basically just someone coming in defeated, right. I mean,
I can't speak to exactly what was going on, but yeah,
(08:17):
it was for all intents and purposes, abandoned the sweet
Newfoundland that I looked at. And my house couldn't accommodate it.
There were too many stairs, it was too old. But
like I went like three times and just talked to
it on the balcony, which sounds really sweet, but like
the real crux came when like a year later and
(08:37):
then I had asked everyone, like, where can Newfunland's go?
Does anyone want this? And I had given a fair
shot and then gone on tour and gone on with
my life. And later on someone had said, oh, I
heard about some farm for new fees or something that
could help the dog. And again I failed myself and
I didn't follow up with that. And again when you
(08:59):
said time, they're so present to me. All the things
that have happened to me are still so present, and
it's how I write songs. It's all the unsaid, undone,
un forgiven things that just became part of me. So
time really didn't pass. If anything, these past memories grew
(09:21):
in importance the longer time went on. I feel like
with your book too, that sense that when the truth
came out did flattened time. Time just everything that you'd
experienced became one present moment. Well, it's so interesting, and
I wonder whether it's like this in the songwriting. I
(09:42):
know it's like this in prose writing and writing and
writing um memoir and and also in writing literary fiction. Um.
Literature is I think, really the only form that can
play with time with the greatest effectiveness. UM. I even
(10:04):
feel film. I never feel when I'm watching film and
that's being done. I'm always aware that it's being done.
Whereas in UM, when we read, we can feel the
way that memory moves. We can, um, you know that
that flattening that you're describing, or the collapsing, the collapsing
(10:25):
of the present in the past. I mean when I
made the discovery, uh, four years ago. Um, it's almost
four years ago now that my dad hadn't been my
biological father, something I had never known. Actually I should
say I had never thought. Um. I think there's a
(10:46):
phrase in Inheritance which is the unthought known. UM, A
phrase that I come back to again and again and again,
because UM, it's a psychoanalytic phrase that that means what
we absolutely do know, what we know in our bones,
what we feel, um, you know deep. But when we
(11:07):
when we think about what a gut instinct is, it's
that kind of knowledge, but it's too dangerous to think,
so we just don't go there. UM. I think I
was living in that state. Actually my whole entire life
but then to be in midlife and to make this discovery,
I had to re remember, rethink, re understand everything about
(11:31):
what had come before. May I share what you said
up in the dressing room. Was it Andrea who asked
you or said what's your next project? And you said,
I'm not sure because I feel like I've been digging
for this story my whole life. And think of how
much you've done sort of looking for that what was
an unthought, no unthought known? But I think you know.
(11:53):
One of the intersections between us and a really interesting
question for us to explore is what makes an artist
an artist? Right? Like there's a moment in your book
where a friend of yours, Um, so you're adopted. A
friend of yours says to you, do you think if
(12:14):
you hadn't been adopted, um, you would have been an artist?
And I mean, it's an impossible question to answer. It's
like saying if I were a different you know person,
really if I I mean, you you change one thing
and everything changes, or you change um. But but there's
something about your being an observer, which was something that
(12:38):
I was very aware of reading you that from the
time you were small, you were always observing and in
order to observe. I mean, one of the things I've
often thought about is writers are outsiders. Um. I don't
think you can be an insider and write about anything
(12:59):
from the inside if you're the if you're an insider,
because you don't have you don't have any perspective on it.
You don't have that anthropological view, and so you you
were always seeing the world from that place of this
slight removed the slight distance, and you know, it's impossible
(13:21):
to know exactly what created that or what caused that,
but what what would you say to your friend in
that regard or as anything about that? It makes perfect sense.
I think that a lot of the freedom that I
feel as an artist to do what my mother would
consider very outrageous and completely inappropriate things is because there's
(13:42):
there's I have one foot out the door always, I
have one foot in another state. That could be anything
I could, I could have come from any kind of people,
And so that gives me a freedom to both search
for who I am, sort of like a I guess,
permission to search for who I am, but also gives
(14:04):
me that, like you said, that remove from being internal,
like I was definitely raised by a tight knit family,
but there was one foot that was still outside of
that looking back on it and looking back on my
place in it. And there's that insecurity, which I think
you went through so vividly, and it was just beautiful
(14:26):
your description of that, like who am I now? And
that feeling like the floor has just dropped out from
under you. And I just had that in a slow,
low grade way the whole time, like I was always
here and I was committed, and I belonged to my family,
but not totally. And I think that is the artist
(14:46):
side of me, that did stand outside myself, did look
for the I love it. I'm sorry. The unknown thought
or the unthought O there's unsought known is what I'm
always searching for myself. There's also this great this this
great term that I came across when I was just
(15:10):
madly researching and trying to understand, you know, whatever I
possibly could about this new knowledge. And it was a
term from adoption literature, and it's genealogical bewilderment, and I
mean it's it's it's it's so poetic and beautiful and powerful,
and I mean one of the things that's come up
(15:31):
a lot for me in the years since Inheritance came out.
Is right around the time that it came out, or
even before, I would have mostly adoptive parents come up
to me who hadn't read the book yet, or maybe
if they had, were reading it through a certain lens.
And what they thought that I was saying, or what
(15:53):
they thought I was going to say, was that nature
matters exclusively. And I remember the first time I had
this conversation. It was with a writer standing by a
pool at a writer's conference, the kind of pool where
somebody always falls in every year at this writer's conference
(16:13):
in Austin, Texas. And he he's gay, and he's a dad,
and he and his husband have three adopted kids, and
he was kind of a little bit confrontational on the
subject of nurture and nature. And I said to him,
do your kids know they're adopted? And he said, of course.
And I said have they always known? Yes, of course,
(16:35):
they've always known you ever since they you know, we
were sentient beings. I said, so, okay, So their identities
are formed around something that is true about themselves. What's
true about themselves is that they know that they're adopted.
They know that, um, there is a reason for that
(16:57):
genealogical bewilderment as they grow up, maybe not looking, you know,
like their family because there isn't a biological connection, or
feeling a little bit other or different because there is
otherness and difference and genealogical bewilderment, the sense of it's
(17:18):
a wide open world, this question of where I come
from biologically and the difference. And this took me a
while and some deep thinking to do. But the difference,
I mean, if our identities are formed by the stories
that were told from the time were very small, then
that story, the adoption story is you're adopted, and that's
(17:38):
really it's complicated, but it's a different story from being
from the truth of identity being withheld. So what happened
with me is that my parents, for reasons that made
a lot of sense in the place and time that
(17:59):
they raised me, we're never going to tell me. I
was never going to know this. They were going to
go to the grave with this, which they both did,
and I was never going to know, and no one
would ever be the wiser. And what we don't know
doesn't hurt us, right, Yeah, So my sense of identity
as a child, um, was based on something that was false,
(18:21):
and so the image I have for it is almost
like something being wrapped around um, like a husk being
wrapped around something that isn't solid on the inside, because
there was something that wasn't true. And I think, you know,
I mean, I started this podcast Family Secrets because there
(18:42):
is so much secrecy in our society and our culture
in so many different ways. And we're in this moment
now and you're a part of that where it's coming out.
And whether it's the Me Too movement or it's the
fact that DNA testing has made all all of these
kinds of secrets absolutely impossible to keep any more, this
(19:04):
is what's happening. We'll be back in a moment with
more Family Secrets. I think fighting the shame of being
human is something that I've crusaded on for a while
that you know, there's so much in our society that
(19:25):
is stuck around this idea of let's let's not say it.
I know that my parents didn't always tell me what
was going on, and that that always caused me a
lot of cognitive dissonance. And the shame is so much
more destructive than the truth a lot of times because
like you said, you're wrapping a husk or you're building
(19:46):
scar tissue around a vacuum. So there's no way to
resolve it. It's never going to heal. Yeah, I mean
just because it isn't spoken doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In fact, it's not being spoken creates a kind of
I mean, I think of my parents and myself now,
and I'll never be able to have these conversations with them.
(20:07):
But the air in our house was thick with this. Um.
And as a writer, I mean I inheritances my tense book.
All of my my novels were about family secrets. Um.
They were about the corrosive power of family secrets in
one way or another. Um. If you had asked me
(20:28):
to explain why this was my theme, Uh, you know,
I had this kind of pithy thing that I that
I have to say about theme, which is that it
is just a fancy literary term for obsession. And we
don't and we don't choose what obsesses us. And you know,
writers don't like to look under the hood too much
about what's really going on. It's like, you know, that's
where the magic happens. You want to mess with that.
(20:49):
So I just kind of bopped along with family secrets
being my theme. And then I started writing memoirs and
I was a novelist. Why was I writing memoirs? And
that's where I think the digging, you know that I
was talking to Andrew upstairs. I think that's where it began.
Was just this sense of there's something, there's something there,
and you are receiving feedback that there was another nous
(21:11):
about you. You were receiving feedback all the way along
the line that that hinted. I felt maybe it's the
way you wrote it, but it felt like no. I was.
I was absolutely constantly receiving the feedback was you don't
look Jewish. There's no way you're Jewish? You know? Now?
Is is Shapiro your husband's name? Uh? You know, just
(21:31):
but constantly, I mean really like every day, um. And
yet that's feedback. But if you're kind of entrenched in
a desire to, in a need to not know, you
can ignore that feedback and contort yourself around not knowing.
(21:51):
I mean, what would happen to me when somebody would
say to me, as they did every day every day,
you know, you don't look Jewish? I would say a
raised kosher, you know, observant family, went to yeshiva, spoke
fluent Hebrew, two sinks, two dishwashers, you know, like recite
my you know, my, my, my Jewish cred. Yeah, like
(22:15):
sort of basically getting in people's faces about it, like
what's what's your problem? Like this is what Jewish looks like,
why can't you go there? Yeah? I mean really a
little bit like I mean it would I found it
like it offended me, um, but it was true. And
what people were saying when they were looking at me
and saying that was something that they saw because they
(22:37):
had no skin in the game. And so that's that's feedback,
I wonder. And I don't remember if you touched on
this in your book what your mother was processing when
these comments were happening. So let's go back to that too,
Is that too, No, not at all. Let's go back
to the unfought known, because I think that there's a
way in which when we are told that something really
(23:02):
is a secret and can never be revealed, like air tight,
which I think my parents. You know, back in the
early days of reproductive medicine, there was a lot of euphemism.
There were there was an outright deceit in a way.
So I believe that by the time my parents were
(23:24):
um bringing home a baby, they had my mother more
than my father, had pretty much decided that it had
never happened. You're gonna build that house right on the
foot of the denial. That's right, that's right, And that
becomes a kind of UM. It's like a kernel of
(23:48):
something that's true, that's somewhere lodged way deep, deep, deep
deep in the psyche, but is not going to UM.
It's not going to emerge with a kind of clarity.
It's gonna leak go all over everything. UM. And that's
how I think of it, as like there was this
like toxic leakage that was always there. Which is interesting
(24:09):
because my mother I always got the sense that said,
over and over again, if you ever want to find
your biological parents. You know, her brother was a lawyer's
or attorney, so she said, you know, we'll go through Mark.
But there was I could tell that that was not
something she really wanted per se to happen. There was
(24:30):
this sense because ultimately we are our parents children, it
doesn't matter where we come from. I mean, when I
was little, I used to imagine the way I processed
being adopted was I would make up stories, like I
thought we lived in Cincinnati when I was very young,
and then we'd have these huge thunderstorms, and in my mind,
(24:50):
I thought those were my parents coming to check up
on me. So I'd like, I don't know why I
did that, but that's one of the things that I
thought of. And then recently, I have a god's sister.
My parents chose godparents for me who had adopted their
child from the same adoption agency. So I sort of
(25:12):
had to go that way to find out what my
adoption agency was. And then when I looked googled it online.
Then it turned out to be established in eighteen eighteen,
and it was originally called the New Haven Orphan Asylum.
And there's this campus with these big brick walls and everything,
(25:33):
and it just it started this whole other identity. Now
I'm like this gothic tragic figure in my mind, you know. Like,
but that's how you can transmute, Like my identity can
shift depending on what the details are, and each new
item is really not really relevant. I'm still my affectations
(25:54):
are my mother's, you know, my father's temper. It's all there.
I am my parents child immutably. But that identity question,
which is so fascinating. I had freedom and you weren't
given a choice until you discovered what that was. And
I wanted to ask you about that, like, did you
(26:17):
feel that it was sort of betraying your parents? Too?
Question it so much? Well, I would be. I would
begin by saying, I found out accidentally, right like I wasn't.
I wasn't going in search of I think that there's
something here and I'm gonna go find it. I recreationally
took a DNA test because my husband was taking one.
(26:40):
So it began with sort of this accident I could
so easily has spent my whole life never knowing. I
had a couple of moments where I felt that I
was betraying my father, and one was when I met
my biological father. Um, I felt almost like all my
(27:00):
my father died when I was twenty three, and all
my life, UM, I have carried him with me. I
feel his presence. Um, you know, an irony because for
the for the people who were thinking that I was
saying nature is all that matters. My mother was someone
who I did not feel close to, and she is
my biological parent. I checked. I made an elderly cousin
(27:24):
actually go do a DNA test because I was so baffled.
I trying to piece it all together. But she was.
And my father, who was not, as it turns out,
my biological parents, is the person who was most formative
of me, who had a profound kind of soul connection
with and I would feel his presence. And when I
first found out that he hadn't been my biological father,
(27:47):
I briefly lost it. And I think I lost it
because of course it's coming from me and that chain
had somehow been broken. I lost, Yes, I had lost
him again. I was grieving him again, and I was
wondering what he had known and all of that. So
when I met my biological father, I had this feeling
(28:10):
of you know, we have magical thinking about the people
who um have passed, who we love, and I think
many of us do. And my magical thinking was that
my father could see what was going on in my life,
because when he died, I was a mess. It was complete,
total mess, and he that's his last you know, that
would have been his last kind of memory or knowledge
(28:31):
of me. And then I grew up and I kind
of made something of myself, and I had had this
idea that he could see that. But if he could
see that, then he could also see everything else. You
can't like have magical thinking in one way. So I
was like, he could see that, then he can also
see that I'm marching into this restaurant in Teenack Teenack,
New Jersey and meeting the man who was the sperm donor,
(28:52):
like the secret, the thing that he never wanted anyone
to ever know. So that there was that, and then
the and the other piece. I was upstairs signing books,
and there's a picture of my dad and me, the joyous,
beautiful father daughter picture and the young father in that picture.
If he could have you know, talked about collapsing time right,
(29:14):
if he could have imagined a future where that picture
would be on the cover of a best selling you
know book, and his his thing that he held as
so private and secret, would be in the world. I
thought about this a lot, because some people make these
discoveries and their parents are still living. Um. I thought
(29:34):
a lot about what that would be if my parents
were still living. I know one thing, there would be
no book. I wouldn't have written this book with my
father living um and my mother. Maybe because I was
I tended to be more willing to throw her under
the bus. I just did. I did because our our
lives together were so um. Yeah, but I want to
(29:57):
I want to go. I want to vote for you do.
I just want to say something. When you said that upstairs,
what I thought was before I even cracked her book,
my first thought was how much he looked like your
father in that picture. That's exactly what my read was,
which is so funny because that's just your joy and
your glee and the connection that you have with him.
So I just wanted to say, and that's it though,
And that's you know what I mean. I I now
(30:19):
feel like I come from three people, you know, not
many people can say that particular thing, right, and and
and I think that I wonder if that's true for
you as well. You come from you come from four people?
And I sometimes think, you know, even if I could
find my mother, I probably couldn't find my father. I've
(30:40):
made up so many stories about what their deal was.
It's almost like like adoption porn, you come up with
Like twenty one birthday, I came slinking downstairs, waiting to
find out that, you know, like my trust fund that
was supposed to be there, just like sat at breakfast
and I stared at my mom for a while and
she's like, and I'm like, you know what she did?
(31:04):
This is such a jerky move. So I said, well,
I just wondered, you know, I'm I'm twenty one. I
thought maybe there would be something that you would want
to tell me. And she looked at me. She just
sat back and she said, if there were, what would
you do with it? And so like it prolonged. I'm like,
it's just like a test, you know, but length there wasn't.
(31:25):
So so I want you to read a passage um
that particularly. I thought it was really powerful from your
book about what we're talking about here. So I guess
we're talking about my adoption. I never know how much
importance to give it. Is it a minor detail in
my biography or does it define me? When I look
(31:47):
at old family photographs, do they really pertain to me?
Are those my ancestors? Or am I playing at nostalgia.
However much I wish to belong to any one person
or group, that urge is almost always counteracted by an
awareness of being different, as though there's a barrier around me.
(32:09):
Thin is a layer of ice on an eyelash that
prevents full integration. I keep people at arms length and
in their separate categories, even those with whom I have
long term, committed relationships. I remember when my father sent
me the original copy of my birth certificate for the
(32:29):
purpose of gathering passport paperwork, or because I'd lost my
driver's license. I want to add yet again, um it
arrived in a Manila envelope. When I held the yellow
document in my hands and looked at the time and
date punched out on an old school typewriter, I burst
into tears. I was It was overwhelming to touch the
(32:54):
last artifact that connected me to a mother I never knew,
a young woman for whom, whatever reason, couldn't raise me.
I saw a vulnerable infant changing hands, and I wept
for the agonizing decisions of everyone involved, for the snap
shot of a fleeting moment of wholeness before I carried
(33:16):
in my heart this broken piece of glass, which I've
been careful not to disturb lest it cut me. I
cried because I recognized a feeling I must have once had,
but could no longer summon, No matter how quietly I sat,
or how happy I was. It makes for great art,
though I'll say that we'll be back in a moment.
(33:50):
I was thinking again of the collapsing of time as
you read that. Everything about that was right there in
that yellow birth certificate. Injibly, I saw her, I saw her,
for a brief moment, the real her, the young woman,
and I was a mother at that point, I should say,
so it hit home very deeply. My My family says
(34:14):
that I held my son too closely when he was born,
but I had this overwhelming need not to let him
feel that separation which I must have experienced because I was,
I guess two weeks old when I they had me
in the hospital. I guess for two weeks and for
a newborns as a mother, I can look back on
(34:35):
that and think that's an unthinkably long time, you know.
And so I just wherever I could put him, I
couldn't put him down. I think early motherhood and motherhood
parenthood perhaps in general, makes you evaluate or compare. But
(34:57):
you know that line about it makes for good art. Okay,
I'm sure I had a happier life. I'm sure that
this was like this was someone who wasn't ready to,
and there would have been I'm sure it was a
selfless thing, but the sacrifice would still be extreme. It
would still be incredibly hard to give up a child
(35:19):
and she's out there somewhere knowing that I'm out there somewhere,
and that's that's a tough thing. Oh that's really interesting, actually,
I mean, so you think that's one of the reasons
I've never actually sought out my biological parent. One of
them is just that I have enough to deal with
it the holidays. I can't handle anymore. Really, But um,
(35:41):
just this, this, this like it could be something she
never told another person, And I was very aware of
that reading your book, thinking about that from that point
of view, and that's just a sense I had. You know,
it's really probably not even fifty fifty that she would
want to have to own that. It's interesting too, because
(36:05):
as long as you don't search, or you know, I
have that desire, it remains a mystery that are are
ye well, And as long as it remains a mystery, um,
there's there's so much nuance and so much possibility. Even
the trust fund, Well, what did you do with it?
(36:27):
If you had it? Those seconds were like, Um, you
said something really um beautiful when we were talking on
the phone yesterday, UM about you? You equated it to music.
Do you remember what you said? It was about um,
like one note versus accord? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
(36:48):
it's there's what was it in the context of the turn?
Remember it was in the context of knowledge, you know,
like like to to know. Well, anytime there's an hiphany
anytime you get any kind of insight into whatever it
is you're searching for. And I'm a big proponent of complexity.
(37:09):
I think that as uh as a species, we need
to come to terms with things being complex. I think
we're really living in systems, overlapping and layering systems, and
I don't think we think like that. I think we
still think in binary terms right wrong, black, white, good, bad,
all these kind of oversimplifications of what's really going on.
(37:30):
And for me, when you gain some kind of insight
on on your identity on the take, for example, having
empathy for my parents and what the adoption would have
been for them, and how fragile that sense of what
if she leaves us, what if she doesn't like us,
or what if we're doing the wrong thing or what
is her nature. But any kind of deeper insight, it
(37:53):
goes from being a fact to being a chord of knowledge.
There's the low part of it, there's the middle a
part of it, there's the high, keening, yearning part of it.
There's just a complex, deeper knowing, which I'm a junkie for.
Like that. That's what I'm in the game for in
anything I do in my life, is to have that
(38:14):
expansion of a fact into a truth. Yeah, there's something right,
I'm gonna see if I can find it. Right. At
the very very very end of your book, you write, Um,
horror stories is music not data. The haunting melodies I
hear over and over again in my head, and I
(38:37):
loved that. Um, just that language of music, not data,
because what's data? I mean data is just think of
how often you live in data? Though we all do.
We take it's it's a difference between knowing what it
would be like to be stranded at sea and actually
being stranded at see like a real truthful understanding, And
(39:02):
no matter how much you try to have the understanding
and you think of yourself as a deep and thoughtful person,
there's no substitute for actual knowing. And I think your
book is such a beautiful portrait of the journey from
data to knowing and what was data can be false too,
that's true. So I mean I spent my life creating
(39:27):
narratives to make sense of what I thought I knew,
Like what I was trying to make sense of. My
father was sad because my mother was angry because you know,
we were the family system that we were, you know,
(39:48):
because and I would write about it. I mean, when
I go back and I look at my earlier work,
it's all there, Um that those you know, those that struggle.
I was. I was trying so hard to make sense
of something that didn't make sense. And the way that
we do that is we tell stories. That's how we
(40:08):
just human beings from the time that we were cave
people scratching hieroglyphics on you know, on on on cave walls,
that's what that's what we were doing. And um, that
was my attempt. And one of the sort of stunning
things to me, and especially in the early months as
I was trying to understand and sort of put put
things back together again, was that I was, you know, like,
(40:32):
was all that wrong? You know? And what I came
to realize, is it wasn't wrong. It just wasn't the
whole truth, you know, it was a piece of the truth.
It was true that my parents were unhappily married. It
was true that they were older. It was true that
I was their only child. It was true that they
had conflicts in their religious beliefs, you know, with each other. Um,
(40:55):
you know. It was true that I was this very fair,
blonde child that didn't look you know people. All these
things were true, but they weren't the chord. They were
data points. And and I think to go back to
like if you know your friend's question, if if you
hadn't been adopted, would you have become an artist? Those
(41:18):
are um, you know, whatever, those whatever, those pieces are,
they are what create the obsession, create, you know, the
the searching, the you know, the artist. As you know,
there's something that I can't figure out, that I can't
get to, and the only way that I can get
to it is by following the line of words or
(41:41):
by you know, writing a song. Um. That is that's
that's the way that you know, And that's why I
love the idea of a chord. Isn't that how we know?
You know, whatever we think of as God, isn't that
how we know? Love? Isn't that how we know? Like
it isn't data, it is. It's a board and we
all have to right our way toward faith and belief
(42:05):
in something that is intangible. And I love that. I
love that. Yeah, and it becomes the past. It becomes
you know, the way through a lifetime, you know, a
lifetime of of making work, of making art. You know.
I've I've been thinking about one of the reasons why
I have no idea what's next is because I don't
(42:27):
ever want to imitate myself. I don't ever want I want.
I mean, I I'm a seeker and I'm a I'm
a searcher, and I actually think I do think for
myself that these unanswered questions that I could not apprehend
or touch is what made me an artist. I mean,
I'm I'm glad that I had the capacity, the ability,
(42:50):
the gift, whatever you wanna call it, to be able
to actually actualize it and do it. But that's searching,
not I say to my students sometimes, you know, if
you went outside right and you just you know, did
man on the street interviews with people, and you know,
you sir, do you do you ponder your internal life
all the time? Is this something that you think about?
Do you lie awake at night and consider, you know,
(43:12):
you're you're you know? And a lot of people say,
I feel like it's a Woody Allen movie that I'm describing.
But a lot of people would say, no, I just
you know, it's like those that couple in the Woody
Allen movie, the you know, I'm just shallow and he's
handsome and we're good whatever that, But it's not not
everybody actually walks around with the need to express in
(43:34):
that way. I can't argue with that. So so let's
go back to I mean, you said it was the
political climate, and that makes sense to me, But why
why a memoir? Why not pour it into song? Well, hilariously,
my manager is sitting right there, and he was part
of the impetus because he was I was on tour
(43:57):
with the Smashing Pumpkins and this is during the must
have been I guess I'm about to do your voice
right in front of you right now, But um, Prince
had just passed away. It was the day Prince died,
and I was playing a show that night and we
were having a conversation about something else, but then it
(44:18):
all became about Prince and we had lost Bowie and
that had affected me very profoundly. And he goes, He's like, Liz,
you know, you don't know how much time you've got.
You know, you could be gone tomorrow. You don't you
have no idea, And like is this is this? Like
are you making the work that you would want to
make if it's the last thing you ever did? And
(44:42):
it stopped me because no, I thought I had like
dozens of chances left, And it just completely changed my
outlook and I thought I had better be making the
work to the best my ability that I would be
okay leaving. But like, what did I have to say?
(45:04):
What did I What had I learned in my you know,
almost fifty years at that point, Like what had I learned?
What did I have to give back to my son,
to other young women and just two people in general?
Like did I have something to give? Did I have
something that I could you know, make the world a
better place than you found it? And I didn't have much,
(45:27):
but I had my own experience and my own insights,
and I had the ability to go from a place
where the public perceives me as higher, you know, like, oh,
your life must be better, and to be able to
just open it up and be like nope, see like
exactly as pathetic as we all are. And I had
the ability to do that. And I did had the ability,
(45:49):
thank god, from songwriting two turn it into a sort
of a small take those painful things like a grain
of sand and a noyster, sorry to use a very
tired metaphor, and make it into a beautiful jewel that
people can read and say like, yeah, I've felt that,
or you know, there's one story about me going through
(46:10):
a breakup and going I was. I felt like such
a raw nerve. It was such a bad breakup. He'd
had a baby with another woman behind my back, and
I found out about it after the child was already born,
and he'd been asking me to marry him. He'd wanted
for us to become pregnant, and I was so devastated
that going to Trader Joe's was like a huge outing
(46:33):
for me, and it took like all my and I
felt like everyone was looking at I felt like I
had like a loser like across my face, you know,
and it was so hard pushing I can still feel
pushing that cart in there, having overdressed, you know what
I mean? Like, so I had the ability to give
that to people, and that's what I chose to do.
(46:54):
That's what I felt like I wanted to do with
the pain in my life was make it both funny,
make it okay at the end, and just say like
it's all of us. You also do something really with
the those shards, you know, those those toxic shards of
those memories of UM, the people uh that you felt
(47:16):
that you had failed in one way or another, of
UM honoring honoring them in a way, you know, like
when when you said that, your manager said to you,
if if you know, if if you have limited amount
of time left, what what do you want to leave behind.
It's almost like settling a debt. There's kind of an
existential debt that feels like it's being settled here. UM.
(47:40):
That has nothing to do with whether these people would
ever read these portraits and go with like, you know,
I was I was that person, I was that girl.
It's it's UM a kind of UM way of making
something whole, yeah, trying, yeah, trying to make something that
can't quite be made a whole. But it to be
made beautiful is the way I looked at it. Yeah.
(48:21):
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