CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme Music] 

Welcome to the podcast of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where we bring you conversations and lectures from our Public Programs series featuring world-renowned scholars, leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers. In this episode, author Cheryl Strayed in conversation with Carolyn Cooke. Cheryl Strayed is known for a writing style that's at once disarming, honest, warm, and utterly genuine. Her memoir Wild is an account of her personal struggle to survive and make sense of her shattered life in the wake of her mother's death. This conversation which explores the life's, loves, writings, and secrets of Cheryl Strayed was recorded on February 3rd, 2016 in front of a live audience in San Francisco. To make sure you never miss an episode, find us and subscribe, find us and subscribe on iTunes or on visit us on our website at ciis.edu/podcast. 

[Theme Music Concludes]  

[Applause] 

Cheryl: Thank you for coming, everyone. Not that we can see you, but we think you’re there.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: Before we get started, in the spirit of “Dear Sugar,” we're going to be collecting questions from the audience for a Q&A at the end. That's probably why 80% of the people are here because they have a burning need to be into and meet Dear Sugar.  

Cheryl: I will solve all of your problems by the end of the night. [laughter] 

Carolyn: She's solved mine already, so I'm done. [laughter] At about 7:30 I'm going to remind you that you have a note card and your lap (you should) and if you have a question that you'd like to bring forward, please just fill out the note card, write your question, and pass it to the end of your aisle and someone will pick them up and deliver them to us about quarter to eight, I think.  

Cheryl: Perfect.  

Carolyn: Okay, so you'll be ready for that Cheryl? 

Cheryl: Yes.  

Carolyn: Okay, great. 

Cheryl:  I'm always ready to hear other people's secrets, especially. It's really fun. It's unbelievably fun to get people's letters like that. So, write down your questions. It doesn't have to be advice questions, obviously, but about whatever. 

Carolyn: Any kind. You could just answer anything.  

Cheryl:  Anything, yeah. One time a couple months ago, I was in Pasadena and somebody asked me what my opinion was of women wearing overalls. [laughter]  

Carolyn: What do you think?  

Cheryl: Well what I observed was that basically I love overalls because anything that's basically a curtain with pants,you know, works for me. I'm pro- overalls on women.  

Carolyn: Did you have anything to do with the scene in the movie Wild where Laura Dern, playing your mother, is wearing...I mean, she really rocks this overall jumper kind of. It's just the weirdest outfit but I think it's a moment where you see this character who's sort of trapped in this crap house with these two kids who are increasingly aware that they live in a crap house and the deck is stacked against them and she's doing dishes and singing in this overall jumper. Was that your idea? 

Cheryl: And a black tank top.  

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  

Cheryl: Do you know the answer to this or you’re really just asking that? It's so sweet. It's such a wonderful question that touches me, actually. Because there really is a story behind that. Laura Dern, played my mom. How many of you have seen the movie? 

[Crowd cheers and applauses] 

Cheryl: Laura Dern played my mom and Laura, as you know, is like this six feet tall blond who is like 90 pounds and my mom was five feet tall and brunette. Her whole life she wanted to be a tall willowy blonde person. Now I always think that if I could say one thing to my mom now, it would be Laura Dern plays you in the movie. You know? She would just be so amazed by that.  

I talked to all the actors a lot because they portrayed real people and what was so amazing to me is how much they all cared, you know, about the people that were portraying, especially Reese and Laura. Especially with Laura the stakes were really high. I cared so much about the way that my mom was portrayed in the movie. I was talking to Laura about my mom and I showed her my favorite picture of my mother, which I think you can probably find somewhere on the internet. Which is amazing that that picture is on the internet because it was taken with my mom standing in the kitchen sink and, you know, she's looking this way, a side shot, and she's wearing these denim overalls that she wore all the time and they were full of holes. She just wore these denim overalls and she always wore, all summer, she would wear underneath these overalls, a black, strapless bathing suit. In Minnesota, there's lakes everywhere. She was always like, “Wherever we are, I can always just take off my overalls and go swimming.” Another argument for overalls.  

I told Laura this story and I gave Laura what she wears in the movie. She has, if you look very closely, she has a turquoise ring on that was my mother's and it fit more perfectly and she has this brass bracelet that was my mother's in the seventies (my mother).  So she wore those both in the movie and she went to the wardrobe person the next day and said you have to find me some denim overalls and a black tube top and she wore it and that really important scene with Reese in their kitchen. That's the scene they played it at... I went to the Oscars last year [Carolyn: Uh huh], which is also really bizarre. They played that scene and it just completely blows my mind. There is my mother, I mean there's Laura Dern dressed as my mother. [Carolyn: Yeah] So, that's where it came from.  

[Laughter]  

Cheryl: Who knew we would start with overalls? 

Carolyn: Well,  I think one of the really interesting things about your novel Torch, which I remember reading when it came out in 2005 and just returned to it, and you're right, it does hold up. It's a really beautiful novel, beautiful novel [Cheryl: Thank you.] I think part of what's so beautiful about it is that it's based in true stuff. It's kind of uninventable on every page. The emotional content, the charge, the perversity. I think what I like best about it, about all your work really, is that, I think, it's rooted less in (this is so dangerous to say at CIIS, which is a school of psychology) but it's less rooted in psychology than in the mystery of human perversity. The details of the novel that make us believe this whole experience are so vivid. I mean there's the green pantsuit that Claire wears when her mother I think gets the news that she has cancer and this pantsuit was so vividly described. I'm speaking to you [the audience] directly because a tenth of the people here have read the novel, but you should.  

Cheryl: There's three people in America that have read it. 

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: It’s worth it. It's a beautiful book and a really different telling of a part of the story. There's even a bow in the hair. I do sort of feel this mother who Laura Dern really captures in the same way I imagined [Cheryl: Yeah] in the movel. As someone who's sort of counting jams and making quilts out of old shirts and selling pant suits and there's this mixture of kind of tenderness and love and sometimes it's sort of humiliation before this overpowering mother especially for the son. A lot of those things come through in Wild [Cheryl: Yeah] and do a few things that were turned, like the green Jello from the hospital. [Cheryl: Yeah] I think the movie must be interesting because you get to bring forward the things or the images that may have propelled the book in the first place.  

Cheryl: Yeah, it's interesting. It's so interesting for me to hear you say that because I haven't read Torch in so many years that I forget what's even in there. 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: The complicated thing about Torch, it's my first book and novel and it really did come from fiction. You know, I studied fiction, I have a MFA in fiction. My biggest influences are fiction writers, I would say. Sometimes people will say, “Well why didn't you write Torche as a memoir?” Well, because Torch isn't a memoir, you know, it's so fictional and yet it's driven by so many very true, very real things that essentially I was haunted by. You mentioned this green pantsuit that my mother made for me. It was such a powerful kind of symbol to me about who she was and who we were that then it appears again and Wild. So you see the green pants [Carolyn:mhmm] ]in the both Torch and Wild [Carolyn: yes] and they're both true in their slightly different format. They're both true. My mom was a great seamstress and she sewed that for me and I didn't really like it very much. I was you know, 22, who the fuck wears a green pantsuit? I wish I had that pantsuit now. I mean where did it go? It would be so cool. Have you noticed now the people are wearing, the young kids now, they're wearing the high waisted jeans as if they invented them?  

[Laughter]  

Cheryl: I was like what’s going on? They’re wearing the jeans I wore when I was in high school. Do you guys know what I’m talking about? Is anyone wearing those jeans right now?  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: You hipsters. You guys didn't make those up, just so you know.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: We're still pretty deep in the skinny jeans here.  

Cheryl: No, back me up. Do you guys know what I’m talking about? [Audience agrees] Okay, it's happening. You just haven't noticed it yet. Okay, we're just sort of behind the times. There's this hip bagel place near my...Me and my husband were like, “Why are all these girls wearing the LEE jeans that come up to your [unintelligible].  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: I don't know what's going on and I think it's cool. I think they think it's cool.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: I think that’s because of you. [Cheryl laughs] I mean you're so cool.  

Cheryl: That's right! They remembered that I wore LEE jeans in high school. Now, we've got to get back to that pantsuit. I wore this as a way to say to my mother, “I love you so much. See, I'm wearing this thing you made for me.” You know how you go to visit somebody in your life, they gave you a necklace and you're going to wear that necklace. [Carolyn: right.] You're going to show them that you appreciate the gift they gave you. In the book, I don't know which book, I say—maybe it's in this essay, “The Love of My Life”—I say I wore it as a penance and offering, a Talisman to sort of protect us against what was going to be true. So I wore this day that we found out she was going to die. That day is so vividly with me that I can remember everything about that day. So it just keeps reappearing and reappearing in my work, I guess.  

Carolyn: Well, it's interesting. I love that you're bringing up the difference between fiction and, I wouldn't even call it a memoir, it's just this beautiful, brutally real, vivid stuff that's not confessional particularly. It's incredibly vulnerable in Wild. In “Dear Sugar,” I think you're telling so much of your own life story, you're making yourself vulnerable. I think the “Dear Sugar”  columns together can be taken as a kind of a performance piece about the art of writing, about sort of the role of empathy, the role of vulnerability, the relationship between the reader and the writer. I wonder if you could talk as some of those written a novel, has written a memoir, has overseen and been part of developing the script for the movie, and as a kind of postmodern feminist advice columnist, what's the difference between those forms? Is it a big difference? Are you a different person in each of those roles?  

Cheryl: It’s so complicated, we could spend a month on this. 

Carolyn: You’re so right.  

Cheryl: It's just such a big question and there are two opposing answers. The first one is that I always when I teach writing I teach prose writing and whether you want to be in my class writing a novel or a memoir, I could care less. The same principles apply to both forms and you always have to have skin in the game and you always have to make yourself or your characters feel like real people and you always have to do all of these same things. Like I said, I trained as a fiction writer, but then I started writing stories that  just happened to be absolutely true. I don't need to say that they are the same because obviously with Torch when I ran into some sort of trouble I could say, “Well, maybe we should have her get pregnant or maybe he could get stabbed in the throat or anything can happen.” In Wild it was like what happened to me and how do I use it? What do I pay attention to? What do I show you? What's interesting to me is a lot of people when I'm teaching memoir or talking to people about the memoirs, I always say to them you think you know the story because it's your life, but you're mistaken. You do not know the story and you don't know this story until you've written them. Because writing requires you to ask deeper questions, to face more complicated truths, to notice things that you forgot to notice. The endeavor of using your life as material for literature requires all of that stuff. In the same way that you would construct a fictional character.  

So much stuff about a fictional character, as you know. I've been your biggest fan for many years. I first met Carolyn in 2001 when I was just a little baby graduate student at [inaudible] Writers’ Conference and she was this exalted Fellow with this beautiful collection of stories that I admired so much. What you have to do is really make those people feel vivid and alive. When you experience your own life, you experience it as somebody who's vivid and alive, but that doesn't directly translate to the page. You have to do all of that work of craft. I had to do that in these different forms, and of course each form taught me new. Memoir taught me how to do that sort of deep work of looking, understanding that I don't even know the plot of my own life. [Carolyn: Right.] “Dear Sugar” was such an experience. I always say like I've learned more as a writer writing the “Dear Sugar” column that I did either in Wild or Torch because it was for the first time that I was actually speaking directly to one reader. One person wrote me a letter and I wrote them a letter back. That's what that exchange was and to do that in such a way that I give it the full force of my life and the full force of my writing. In some ways, I felt like that direct exchange allowed me to tap into a kind of higher register than I've ever dared to tap into with either book, with my other my previous books, because the conceit with both Torch and Wild is I know you're their reader. I'm telling you this story, but I can pretend that you're not there. With “Sugar,” it was the exact opposite. I'm going to tell you the story and you are sitting right there and I'm looking you right in the eye. What was interesting about that, of course, is I wasn't looking at anyone, nobody knew who I was, and I didn't know who anyone was. [Carolyn: Right. Right] Yet in the midst of that term “Anonymous Exchange,” I was perhaps more revealing than I've ever been before.  

Carolyn: Yeah, I wondered about that. It feels reading the “Dear Sugar” columns that, first of all, they’re so authentic. I wouldn't say, the word isn’t irreverent, their really profane and the advice is unexpected and it's so true that it's like a punch in the gut, you know, every time. 

Cheryl: Thank you. 

Carolyn: It's fantastic advice. 

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: Really great advice. I wondered if you were able to access that quickly. I mean, I don't know how you write. But for me, you know, it's sort of a process of sitting painfully in front of my computer. You know, it's sort of agony. It's kind of an agony I've grown to love but it's really hard but, you know, writing emails like a hundred emails a day or answering problems for students. It's like I just know [Cheryl: Yeah.] I can sit there, It's right there. I felt reading “Dear Sugar” that you had this kind of access to this higher register. Is that true or did you agonize over these letters?  

Cheryl: I agonized always but I usually would write them. It wasn’t the same as writing an email. I mean, I know what you're talking about. It was like sitting down to write an essay every time. I didn't mean for that to happen, it sort of happened by accident. When I started writing the hcolumn nobody was reading it and so who gives a fuck, you know. I was like, “I don't know what you should do.”  

[Laughter]  

Cheryl: Then I was like, “Okay, I am going to just really try.” But then people started paying attention and especially once I wrote some really big ones, told stories from my life. Then that's what everyone expected. I could never just be, “I think you should do this, that, and the other thing.” Most advice columnists, that's what they do, because that's what an advice column is, right? [Carolyn: Right.] But I was ready to ask this. I will say though, it was always hard. I will say like almost all of those poems were written in the 12 hours before they were published, like 95% of them. There's hardly one of them that was written... I mean, the ones that weren't written right before they were published were all written like within a week they were published. I would usually be just completely up against it and I would stay up all night. Until Wednesday night. I put my kids to bed and stay up all night long writing and I would be finishing it by the wee hours in the morning [Carolyn: Mmm.]. Then I would wake up with my kids, my kids would get up, and then I would read it a couple more times and then I would send it to the editor, Isaac, the editor at The Rumpus and he was put up on the website at noon. Often I would be like, you know, right up until and and it was mostly because I was busy and also just reluctant to write because writing sucks [Laughter] and because it's so hard but what I did do is I would think about the letters. So before I began an answer, what I would do is I would think which letter am I going to answer this week. I would let it roll around in my brain and then I would have an idea. I would have an intuitive sense that a certain story needed to be told in response to this question. Usually I didn't know why that story needed to be told, so I would just trust and this has become a technique I use all the time. It's just like trust that. Trust the part of you that knows even though it doesn't know. Trust the unknowing. [Carolyn: Right. Right.] You know, that's what the intuition is, right? That's where the fertile ground is for me. So to say well, I don't know why I'm going to tell the story about this when this person’s asking about that. I'm going to tell it and then write it and then whatever happens when I'm writing it will you know, the connection will reveal itself and it almost always did. I would write over and over and over and over again over those 12 hours that I worked on it. It all happened in very close proximity, which is not the advice I give to other writers. 

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: Right. Right.  

Cheryl: That's not a good way to get yourself to write. [Carolyn: No. No.] It's usually disastrous to do that because then you're an idiot. You wrote something stupid and everyone saw it. I think that, for whatever reason, that form did like, you know, I wouldn't ever do that with other kind of writing. I can't explain it. It's just, I guess I just did.  

Carolyn: Yeah. I have a couple of examples because they're so interesting. Maybe this is a moment to remind you [the audience], if you have a question, it can be any kind of question and the answers are unexpected too, so I think someone will be collecting the cards in five minutes or so. So you still have a little time to organize them.  

In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, Steve Almond notes one of the columns that put you on the map and to share that story to give people an idea. I think the podcast has to have the beep feature.  

Cheryl: It's a podcast, we can say whatever we want.  

Carolyn: On we can, all right. Okay. [Cheryl: Yeah] I don't know anything.  

Cheryl: Are we recording this?  

Carolyn: High-waisted pants, podcasts. I feel like a dinosaur.  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: We're going to do some high-waisted jeans tomorrow, you and I.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: That’d be great. I probably still have them, you know. In one of the early comments, someone called “WTF” writes a letter saying “What the fuck? What’s it all about? What the fuck.” And your response begins “My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and  I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn't want to do it. Knew it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.” I think with that response you immediately establish with the reader a vulnerability that's so exceeds by a hundred thousand, [Cheryl laughs] exponential points. What the reader is asking, his stupid little [Cheryl: Right. Yeah.] existential question is just blown out [laughter] of the way on your willingness to reveal [Cheryl: Right.] and empathize on a human level. I've never heard of an advice columnist doing that, which is why it's hard for me even to think of it as advice but more as sort of a way of being in the world if you dare. I mean you're sort of like that but were you always like that? 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: Yeah, you know, I’ve always been that way which has been sometimes troublesome to people. It maybe makes some people feel uncomfortable or embarrasses them. You know, my mother would always say to... her friends would come over and they would say you can only ask them each three questions, you know, because I would always be doubting. If there was a couple I would try to corner each of them separately and be like, “Why do you love your wife?” 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: “Why do you really love her?” I would say that. I would ask them at seven or eight, you know, and it's totally what I've been interested in my whole life. Like what's really true. [Carolyn: Right.] Not who are you but who are you really? What are you really thinking? Why do you do what you do? When I did that “WTF” answer, I mean I was absolutely terrified, absolutely terrified to publish that. I remember very much almost deleting that question because it's not a question and then what I realized was well, what if part of what I want to do here as an advice columnist is to give an answer that's not an answer and to answer questions that aren't questions. What if we just go underneath all of that and just tell true stories? [Carolyn: Right.] I think that what that guy was saying to me when he said to me. “WTF, WTF” is that in some ways it was like he was a jokester and that everything is just a joke. [Carolyn: Right.] I just wanted to say “Everything is not a joke and you are not a joke and I am not a joke and we're not going to joke here in this “Dear Sugar Column.”” In some ways for me too, I was telling myself, this is actually serious what I'm doing. [Carolyn: Yeah] I want to do this seriously. Even to this day, I still have to ...people when they don't read the “Dear Sugar” column but they know that I've have this advice column. I mean even some friends of mine will be like, “Oh, that little thing that you did.”  Because they think they know what an advice columnist is. [Carolyn: Right. Right] Which is not not even a literary form. [Carolyn: Right.]  Because it’s this side kind of thing that we read in the back of the paper next to the bridge. I mean not that anyone reads the paper anymore. Remember with the highwaisted jeans and the newspaper?  

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: “Dear Abby.” Mhm. Yeah. 

Cheryl: Yeah, “Dear Abby.” I wanted to just try to really push the limits of that. That entailed pushing the limits of everything. [Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah] Also, I do think for me, the absolutely most cathartic stuff in my life has been about story. People telling me their stories, me telling my own, and then that exchange. I love that about everything. I mean, that's the power of art. I think that's the power of books. It’s that wonderful quote from Jhumpa Lahiri that Brita read, [paraphrasing] if you tell me who you are really, something transformative happens almost always. Almost always. Because you stop talking about the weather and you start talking about what it means to be human, for better or worse. Sometimes my kids will be like...we were at dinner a couple nights ago and I was telling them “Do you guys realize that maybe in 100 years from now, that maybe the whole planet will just be completely destroyed and humans won't exist because of climate change?”  

[Laughter]  

Cheryl: My son's like “Can we never just have a fun conversation?” [Laughter] “Does it always have to be stuff like this?” It's like that same old thing. So we do get to have fun sometimes 

but not very often.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: I think we were talking earlier about the balance of darkness and light and Wild is both a really dark book about coming out of a wild grief that included a lot of, for lack of a better word, hideous casual sex and... 

Cheryl: Some of it was fun.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: Some of it looked fun, some of it didn’t look fun. 

Cheryl: The movie made it look so much worse than it was. 

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: In the book it looks more fun. 

Cheryl: I never did have sex with two men in an alley.  It’s the movie, not my life. In the future, perhaps.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: But the feeling of the darkness mixed with the lightness, that there's horror and there's humor. I think your irreverence about the sort of tropes that are supposed to cause us to judge and to feel that we're in an area of trauma. I mean, certainly the letter, your response that I just read, is incredibly traumatic and probably just triggered like 50 people here, but I think what you're doing is addressing frontily the trauma that we all have and inviting with a kind of radical permission to engage about our experience and not just to be horrified or to have the usual kinds of responses to sad news or horrible news, or terrible self-destructive things, but to find the humor and the heart where we don't always expect them. I think to be able to do that, you have to be someone who's able to almost entirely reserve judgement all the time. That must be the one thing advice columnist, they don't all do that, but you do as an advice columnist. You'd never… 

Cheryl: I'm not sure “Dear Abby” did that. Did she? I think it's interesting because we do think of advice columnists as people whose job is to essentially have an opinion, right? What I always tried to do was have an opinion that wasn't connected to being judgmental. I use this phrase in one of “Dear Sugar” columns, it's “unconditional positive regard” and I think that that's a really helpful guide to me. As you know, now I have this “Dear Sugar” podcast, there have been some letters that I thought gosh, this is kind of hard. Sometimes even saying that phrase to myself, “unconditional positive regard,” it sort of reminds me that's the vantage point with which I’m going to view every person who writes to me. When I let that spill over into my actual life too, it makes things so much more joyful. Because you're not saying that you don't ever say to somebody, “I think you made a mistake” or “I think you're thinking wrong about this” but you're saying “I'm on your side and I hold you in unconditional positive regard, that no matter what you say to me about who you are or what you've done, or what you're thinking, I'm not going to have a negative opinion of you because of that.” I think that's so great [Carolyn: Right.] and I think so much of telling stories, by way of “Dear Sugar”  or Wild or any of your books, our books, what you're ultimately doing is I'm going to show you through this one person, whether it be a fictional character or you, the narrator, and I'm going to tell you as much the truth about myself as I can bear to tell. Most of us, if we did that, if I brought each of you on stage and made you do that, we locked the doors, we’re going to be here for a week, the thing that would scare you about that is that if we really knew who you were, we wouldn't like you. We would judge you, we would see your flaws, we would see where you don't, that your sort of external self that you're showing the world is in contradiction to the internal reality. What I found over and over again is when you do that, which was what we do in writing, I mean writing is essentially, you get to be inside somebody else's mind and body, right. When you do that, the result is almost always other people saying, “That's what I want too and I would have never known it. I would have never known it if I just looked at you and made my judgments about you based on what I can see.” This even happens about mundane things. I don't think writing about my grief over my mother is so taboo or extraordinary, but I can tell you people all over the world have written to me and said, “I felt so alone in my grief until I read what you wrote about your mom.” [Carolyn: Yeah] What that tells me is not that I wrote so well, but that we have a cultural problem about how to talk about grief. The fact that it's a revelation, what I had to say about my grief is a revelation tells me that we've failed to talk honestly about grief. [Carolyn: Right.] I think that you can apply that to any number of subjects. 

Carolyn: Right. I have an example. [Cheryl: Okay.] From Wild, you're remembering your mother when she's ill with cancer, and right.  

Cheryl: This is a barrel of laughs [Carolyn: I know.] the sort of things you’ve chosen. The choices. 

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: I'm sorry. I know. I know 

Cheryl: It feels like a therapy session for me. We are going to revisit the darkest moments of your life, Cheryl.  

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: I know, this is really dark, I’m sorry.  

Cheryl:...On stage at the sold out Herbst Theater, okay. 

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: I didn't think about that. This is so moving, it’s such a moving passage because I think it's exactly what you're talking about. It’s about grief that we don't express. So, can you bear it? 

Cheryl: I can bear it.  

Carolyn: Okay. I don't know if you could bear it, but here it goes. “I dreamed of her incessantly, the mother is dying of cancer. She's in the hospice. In the dreams I was always with her when she died. It was me who would kill her again and again and again. She commanded me to do it and each time I would get down on my knees and cry begging her not to make me but she would not relent and each time, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured gasoline over her head and lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt road that passed by the house we built and then ran over her with my truck. I dragged her body caught on the jagged piece of metal underneath until it came loose and then I put my truck in reverse and ran over her again.”  

And when I read that I actually just wept, I mean because I felt not that you were killing your mother, but it was so true about the way the body and the mind absorb reality. I think it speaks to what you were saying earlier that we don't know our stories until we write. I can't imagine that you kind of had that all figured out, that this is an expression of my grief or it's sort of a psychological... It's just what happens, I think.  

Cheryl: Yeah, I mean that that happened to me so much, for so many years. I really would visit the dream of not just killing my mom but really viciously murdering my mother. I suffered so much from that because not only did I have to experience that in such a visceral way, that killing of my mom, but I also had to wake up and think, “Man. I'm so fucked up. I'm so fucked up that I'm having this dream, these dreams, over and over and over.” [Carolyn: Right.] How would my life have been different if somebody, actually the day my mom died, as my mom was dying, was actually telling me the truth. You know the thing about grief, what we tell people who are grieving, we console them, but trying to sort of tamp down their sorrow, [Carolyn: Right.] Sort of put a blanket over it to comfort them. There's nothing comfortable about losing somebody who feels essential to you. There's nothing comfortable about it. I would have so much rather had somebody come to me and say, “You might spend the next three years dreaming of your mom every night, that you're choking her to death or stoning her.” All of those things and that I would have finally met somebody who then spoke truth to me. You know? When people say “Well time will heal this wound,” I know they mean well, but I much rather would have somebody say you will suffer for the rest of your life because that's actually the truth, that's actually the truth. If you really love somebody, truly, deeply, madly and they die, you will suffer their loss for the rest of your life. That doesn't mean you can't move on and thrive and be happy and do all kinds of stuff but there's still that core of suffering and you have to find a way to carry it with you, which is an opposition to so much of how we try to console people with grief. So the consolation service should be isolation, exacerbation, a sense of this really is just me. I really am alone in this. I think that, for me personally, the thing that gives me the most pride is just knowing that I've spoken, by just simply speaking out of that voice of grief, for so many people who relate to that, who’ve had that feeling. Have any of you in the room, are you any of you relating to what I'm saying?  

[Audience: Yeah.] [Applause] 

Carolyn: Yeah, I think the reason it made weep was that it made me feel like less of a freak in the world [Cheryl: Yeah.] even though I know I'm not a freak. [Cheryl: Yeah.] It's a kind of permission to be human [Cheryl: Yeah.] and really a gift, I think.  

Cheryl: Thank you.  

Carolyn: Your work is full of stuff like that. It's just full of stuff like that. I don't know, what haven’t we talked about that you want to talk about? Pretty soon you're going to be giving advice. 

Cheryl: Well, you did mention we've been so dark and heavy. One of the things that I definitely played with a lot in both Dear Sugar and Wild, is that as serious as those things were I was writing, I also wanted to be funny. I tried really hard to be funny in Dear Sugar, I didn't always succeed. When I took over the column, that was my biggest evolvement and who was running it before, he's so funny. That was my big worry. One of the things that has really come to me as a writer in my later years is just how important humor is in your work and in some ways that allows you to go deeper into those emotional places. See, that's the thing about funny, there's nothing much to say about it.  

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: I think the ordeal in Wild itself, I mean the naivete of [Cheryl: Right.] Cherly.  

Cheryl: Just being an idiot, like I was. 

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: It’s so hilarious. It’s so hilarious, the idea that the backpack will somehow absorb whatever you pack because you got it at REI. [Cheryl: Right. Yes.] Of course, it wasn’t able to. 

I think the way you're willing to—that's another thing I love about your work that is a little more in the light— is that you're able to be self-deprecating without being self-loathing. I think so often it's hard for women to be self-deprecating about their heroin use, say, [Cheryl: Right.] [Laughter] without veering into self-hate. [Cheryl: Right.] I thought you handled that really well.  

Cheryl: Thank you.  

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: Even the binge sex and the brief dalliance with herioin, they were what they were.  

Cheryl: Right, because they are what they are. I do think that women are particularly good at just going around their whole lives and being like “Oh, this terrible mistake I made.” I don't regret all that promiscuity, some of it was fun, some of it was not fun, some of it was educational.  

Carolyn: It was.  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: Really, right? You never forget the lessons you learn the hard way. You never you never forget those and I think that they're so valuable. Sometimes people will be like, “Well, now like don't you wish that you had known not to bring so much stuff and get the right kind of foods?” No, not really, actually, because one of the great things about that experience of going backpacking by myself was that I had to suffer the consequences of every decision I made [Carolyn: Mmm.] and also was when things went well, I was the one who made that decision. I was the one who made it go well. [Carolyn: Right.] If little things didn't go well I was the one who had to contend with that. I think there's something, well I know, there's something incredibly valuable about that. I think most people, at one point or another, have to go through that kind of crucible. What came into my mind when I was just saying that was I remember anyone who's ever given birth to a child knows that there's just this thing where I'm the only one who can get this baby out of my vagina.  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: It’s so crazy, that feeling, of  “Oh my fucking God.” There's nothing, you just have to do it. I mean, it's like a thing, you know that has to... and I think that's why we have women who are biological mothers will often say “Oh, that was the most spiritual experience of my life.” It was because a fucking head came out of your vagina. 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: You had to do that thing, even if it ends up coming out of other places, it’s still you that had to contend along with this very urgent question. So backpacking was like that too. [Laughter] Or traveling alone or in finding that you're in a pickle or any number of things that we end up at the end of the day being alone with. I think that those things, even if you make mistakes along the way, those are the things that teach you what you need to learn, [Carolyn: Right.] Life isn't about always protecting yourself, always doing all the research, and knowing everything in advance.  

Carolyn: In our MFA programs, we have a 3-unit course that takes artists to Burning Man for that reason. We’re the only university in the country that does that. 

Cheryl: You guys take people to Burning Man? 

Carolyn: We do. We take it upon us to bring them to performance and general art.  

Cheryl: That’s great! 

[Crown cheers] 

Cheryl: I want to go to Burning Man.  

Carolyn: You can come with us. The reason we do this is exactly to replicate this experience of sort of life as an artist, it’s about going into an indifferent, hostile desert unprepared.  

Cheryl: With a lot of crazy hippies.   

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: You have a lot of crazy and weird things that you might need. You have to prepare, you have to bring everything including your water and your pack is heavy and it's crazy and you enter this realm and you have your ordeal [Cheryl: Yeah.] and you're unprepared for it, no matter what you've brought and you are humbled, no matter what you do. You make something, however small. [Cheryl: Yeah.] I think those experiences are great and that's just a small way we can do it together. Maybe you wouldn't call it an academic setting but it's an incredibly rigorous [Cheryl: Yeah.] practice.  

Cheryl: It's what I replicated. What I realized while writing Wild is that what I had done with my hike is what we have done throughout time, throughout all ancient time, what you guys are doing with the Burning Man thing is essentially make a rite of passage. [Carolyn: Yes.] Make us a sort of ceremony or a rite of passage. For whatever reason, it's sort of been really unhealthy for us as a society that we sort of left that behind. All of those traditions that have gone across so many cultures and lasted for so much time, they always have these things in common. That you're outside of your comfort zone, you often have a physical trial that you have to endure, and you're deprived of the things sometimes even that you think you need. You have to find a way to survive in this moment, in this new context. It's almost always great, I mean unless you die, it's really great.  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: Right? [Carolyn: Right.] Right? Think about that. This is why we do it in youth. I think we should do it again [Carolyn: Yeah.] in life. I want to do something like this again at a certain passage in my life.  

Carolyn: Like what would you do? 

Cheryl: I think that this passage. Because I am a mom. I think when my kids go off into the world in a decade or so, that will coincide with the time of my life that I'm shifting into something new. I’ll be 47. I'll be moving out of raising the kids and into another era of my life that is a little more independent and free—and promiscuous. 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: I’m teasing. My husband’s not listening to this podcast, is he? Again, going back to the self. Sandra Tsing Loh, speaking of Burning Man, wrote this book called Mad Woman in the Volvo. Did any of you read it? [Crown applause] She was happily married and had two kids and she was like 49 and she went off to Burning Man and suddenly had this like wild sex Tasmanian affair with this guy at Burning Man. They both left their spouses and broke up their lives and married each other and she realized it was that she was going through menopause that made her go crazy. [Laughter] Anyway, I'm not I'm not explaining very well but she wrote this very funny and interesting books that all starts with like sex at Burning Man. It was essentially a rite of passage for her. One of the things that she says, is that your she researched menopause and what she learned was that when you go through menopause what you've return to hormonally, what women return to, is what they were hormonally at  age 11, before they started menstruating and so forth. So you return to this kind of girl, wild girlish self for a moment. Maybe that's when I'll have my rite of passage when I’ve got the kids out of the nest, stop having my period. [Laughter] Sound good? 

[Applause] 

Cheryl: What about you? Are you due for a little right of passage?  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: Yeah another conversation. [Laughter] Can you talk a little bit about who you're reading? What work inspires you these days and what … 

Cheryl: What are you guys laughing about? [Laughter] There’s some joke down here in the audience. Okay, what inspires me? nothing. 

Carolyn: I hate “inspires.” I mean, I think about all of the really terrific nonfiction that's being written right now, so I have an agenda of my own with my question. I feel sometimes it’s so exhausting to think of writing a novel. [Cheryl: Right.] Almost anything can be said now and I think a lot of the reason for the novel has been historically that a lot of things couldn't be said, a lot of things women couldn't say, a lot of stories that couldn't be told because we were so careful [Cheryl: Right] You've sort of been part of destroying all that. Anything can be said. I wonder what do you read as novelists and what nonfiction writers, what prose writers, what prose is exciting to you?  

Cheryl: Well, you know, one of the things that's happened in these last few years, is that my reading life has been so essentially hijacked or taken over by always reading for a purpose. Reading to judge a contest or reading because I judged a prize, or reading because I'm observing a book. Even if I enjoy that kind of reading, I've got a different relationship to it. It's attached to an expectation. It's attached to something I have to do, rather than just that kind of free, you know, you're reading a book you’re like “What's interesting about this?” So I'm stepping back into that right now. A memoir that I read recently that I just really loved and admired is Bettyville by George Hodgman's. Did you read that book? There's so much good  writing and with good nonfiction. I was really taken by... have any of you read Bettyville?  It came out I guess last year. One person has read it? [Laughter] It's a quiet memoir about a man who goes home to live with his mother who's very old and not doing so well and it's essentially just about his... I love those stories that are where the writer really does do that thing I just described where we are actually inside the mind of somebody else. There's no other form. I think that obviously music can do great things and film can do great things but you know, the thing that literature can do is is interiority like no other art form. Another book that I really loved recently with Catherine Lacey's novel. It's a debut novel. I don't know who Catherine Lacey is. [Carolyn: Mhm] She's this young woman who I like her work. It's called Nobody Is... one of those titles that I can never remember the name. [To the audience] Nobody what? Nobody's Ever Missing! It's a really good book, isn't it?  

[Audience member: “So good] 

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: I love that book. It's really good and she goes around New Zealand, you get to go places.  

[Laughter] 

Cherly: So that was really fantastic. Many years ago, I read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. [Carolyn: Mhm] You've read that book? [Carolyn: Yeah.] Have any of you read that book?  

[Crown cheers and applauses.] 

Cheryl: You know how you read a book when you're like 19 or 20 and then you get old and you're like, “Oh that book probably sucks because I was so stupid when I read that book and I’ve been framed.” Then you go back and you're like, “Oh my God, and it was so good.” I mean, it's still really good.  

Carolyn: I remember a scene I think from that book where Edward Abbey is camping sort of like Cheryl Strayed. He's finally got his stove working. 

Cheryl: He totally copied me.  

[Laughter]  

Carolyn: Yeah! Yeah, and he makes a giant steak on his camp stoves and drinks the whole bottle of red wine, eats a hissteak and as he's finishing his steak, a bear comes lumbering up to the campsite and Edward Abbey gets up to shake the bear’s hand.  

[Laughter]  

Cheryl: Was this the movie of Desert Solitaire?  

Carolyn: No, it’s in Desert Solitaire. He’s just sort of drunk but it’s like he... 

Cheryl: I think he was just sort of drunk was the key moment.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn:  It’s sort of like this scene and I don’t remember in the book but in the movie Wild, that little fox that comes up to the tent and Cheryl runs out. [Cheryl: Yeah.] Instead of being terrified by the fox, she's like, “Wait, don't go!” [Cheryl: Exactly.] as the fox is running away.  

Cheryl: Yeah, that was an interesting part of the movie, actually, because those of you who have read the book... did some of you read the book? 

[Crowd cheers] 

Carolyn: Wow. 

Cheryl:  I'm curious to know, I'll be curious to answer some of your questions, but 

that translation, you know, obviously the book is mine and that was my vision and everything that I wrote was what I decided on. Then the film, you know, it's in another artist’s hands. Even though I was involved in a different way, then I also really step back and let Jean[-Marc] have to have your vision. and so Jean-Marc Vallée, the director, he really wanted to use the fox. Especially, a slightly different way than it was written about in the book, [Carolyn: Right.] a more sort of Supernatural fox.  

Carolyn: Yeah. Was it a real fox in the movie? Is it hyperrealistic?  

Cheryl: You know, that's it's so interesting the things that people think about [Laughter]. Yeah, that was really a fox but a lot of people think that it wasn't. For some reason that I don't I'm not sure exactly why they don't think, but I will say the fox was weird in real life, the real fox. I think that’s what you’re picking up on [laughter] because it’s true. Also, there was a real snake and it really actually bit somebody in the movie too. It bit its handler. It didn't have its little venom pouch inside anymore, but it made the person bleed, which is kind of cool. I've always wanted to be bitten by a snake, like a little bit, just to have the story [Laughter]. You want to have been bitten by a snack, you don’t want to be bitten by a snake. Has anyone here been bitten by a snake? [To audience member] You’ve been bitten by a rattlesnake? Wow, that's cool! [Laughter] See, you’re fine, and you have this story [Laughter].  The fox, because it's a wild animal and not meant to be in movies...Did you notice in the movie, it had its head tilted like that? Remember that? That's what made it look weird and it's trainer was just out of the frame, doing something with a wand or the stick or whatever wand the fox would follow this. So that's why I look weird. I've never told anyone that [Laughter]. I don't know why I'm telling you that now.  

Carolyn: Well it's interesting because it's that kind of encounter with the wild that at times we expect it to be frightening and it's adorable or sweet or tender [Cheryl: yeah]. At times we expect it to be neutral and it's brutal and indifferent. 

Cheryl: Yeah. Well in real life, the fox, what actually happened to me was this experience I had a couple times on the trail, which is that the fox was not afraid of me and the fox just had this sort of great authority. The fox was in his or her home and I was the visitor and the fox was a little bit curious and just came walking by me,stopped, looked at me, I looked at it and was startled. Usually we're so used to wild animals running from us. [To audience member] Except you who got bit [Laughter]. That it didn't run is scary, that it stood its ground, not in an aggressive way, but just in a way like I'm here you're here. What was really interesting about that moment for me as a person and then later when I was writing about it, here again I decided to write that scene intuitively, meaning I'm going to tell you what happened. I look at the fox and the fox looks at me, I feel amazed by this moment and then the fox walks away and as the fox walks away, I suddenly just yelled after it, “Mom! Mom!” I wrote that scene because that's what happened and then the book comes out and everyone's like “Was the fox your mom? What does the fox symbolize?” What I realize is my real answer is I don't know. I don't know what the fox was. I know what happened with the fox and what the fox provoked in me. Then later, when I had to answer this question so much, what I figured out was that my mom is dead and yet my relationship with her, in some ways, continues. In some ways it's completely ended and in some ways it continues. When you have a relationship with a dead person, what you have to have is a relationship with somebody who lives in another realm or another world. A realm that, frankly, I don't even believe exists. I don't believe my mom is actually like a spirit watching over us. I don't believe in heaven. I don't believe any of that but I believe somehow that I have to have a relationship with my mom that exists in another realm. In some way having that connection with that wild animal that was both about connecting and being in separate realms. It's like I crossed into something that we don't normally get to cross into, right? That's what I think the fox was and that's why it felt like my mother because I had to reach across the divide that was impossible to reach across but I caught a glimpse of it. Just like every once in awhile I catch a glimpse of my mother in real life.  

Carolyn: How do you catch a glimpse of your mother in real life? 

Cheryl: Just sometimes, you know, I said I don't believe my mom's a spirit watching over us, but sometimes,I don't, but sometimes I'll feel, suddenly, the presence of my mother. Even though I don't believe in her actual existence, even as a spirit, but I believe that I can feel the presence of my mother in my life in ways that I can't explain.  

Carolyn: Yeah, I understand. My father died when I was three and I've always felt that literally there was a part of him in me and I'm maybe the least spiritual person in the room. 

Cheryl: There is literally a part of them. There's like 50 percent. [Laughter] I hope there’s no scientists in the room.  

Carolyn: I mean the very living part of a person, I knew.  

Cheryl: Like in a soul way. I get it.  

Carolyn: I think that leads into our first question. It’s actually a really wonderful question. [Cheryl: Okay.] [Read audience question]“A few pages into Wild, I was already crying. I felt your story touched me so deeply because it was in part my story. The love and loss you express for your mother spoke to my soul. So thank you. My question is do you have advice for me as a newly pregnant woman, raising my child without my mother's presence.” Mmm. 

Cheryl: Yeah, well I can tell you that I'm sorry, it never stopped being sad that when you have a child and you've lost a parent and that child never gets to meet that parent. It's again, it's like that thing if somebody just said “You're going to suffer all your life about this.” It's in some ways, let's not pretend that it's okay that your child isn't going to know your mom. It's painful and yet there are all these ways in my own life that my mother's love lives on most probably in my life via the ways that I love my kids. I love my kids the way my mother loved me which is with just such, you know such a sort of deep full throttle, high velocity [Carolyn: This much. Laughs] Exactly. My kids would tell you. That's a beautiful, powerful thing. Maybe that’s the real part of when you lose somebody, the real part that they still exist. There's one category, doing that through having kids, but in another way, just writing about, creating them from that loss. Creating something, making something beautiful from the ugliest thing in your life, that is deep, deep old wise Mama, ancient priestess healing. If you can make something beautiful from the ugliest things in your life, it's so tremendously life-giving. I have completely dedicated my life to trying to do that with my writing and I feel that that has given me so much when it comes to that mother loss. Just creating, whether it be people, really cute little people, or books.  

Carolyn: Makes great advice too. 

Cheryl: Make beautiful things out of the like beautiful things.  

Carolyn: Okay, next question. “I'm a feminist man who loves women and that gets me in trouble.[Laughter] How does a man balance his strength with a woman's when surrounded by remarkable women, like in this building?” [Laughter] 

Cheryl:  Wait a minute, wait a minute. What was the question? [Laughter] 

Carolyn: How does one balance his strengths with a woman's when surrounded by remarkable women, like in this building? How do I find someone I share that power with and share that power and balance with me?  

Cheryl: Okay. [Laughter] This is so nice, I’ll say to this feminist man, if you're single I bet I can hook you up tonight.[Laughter. Applause] I bet we could find somebody in this room for you! I think it’s such a conflict. It's just an impossible question to answer. You're going to have to help me answer this. I mean my idea, my sort of theory of love is to give it. Give it what you have and accept and accept what you are capable of receiving. I think this idea of power in a relationship is really connected to these old ideas about what a woman should be or a man should be or what one partner should be or this partner should be. These power dynamics, whether they're in heterosexual or homosexual or whatever the coupling is, this idea of that you're a role rather than an individual. I think once you've detached yourself, like so many feminists have aspired to do, whether we end up doing it or not, detaching yourself from this idea of what are these old terms, these old ideas about who we are that don't serve and don't reflect who we really are. Once you can actually do that, it isn't really a question of how do we balance our power. When I think of my relationship with my husband, we've been together like 20 years, he doesn't have to say “Well I'm going to try to be less powerful than you or I'm going to you need to be less powerful for me.” We both say “Okay, let us be powerful together.” A part of being together, part of deciding to stay together and be a couple is that you create more together than you could alone. Right? What do you think? I don't know.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: I don't know. I mean, sometimes I think it's hard to be a feminist male in the room with a lot of really powerful women who are...I don’t know, I’m not an advice columnist.  

Cheryl: Is it?I wish my husband was here. My husband is totally a feminist. I don't know that he experiences it as ‘hard.’ It also depends on which phase you’re in, of your feminism. [Laughter] Sometimes, when people first become feminists there’s a lot of anger. Right? A lot of energy, that  could be challenging, at the beginning. Right? Don’t you think?  

Carolyn:  I’m just thinking even the word is so contested now. A lot of women and men in this audience have trouble with the train of the word. 

Cheryl: Does anyone have trouble with the word feminist? 

[Crowd says “No.”] 

Carolyn: No? Oh my God. 

Cheryl: Now, you wouldn't say no if you did now.  

[Laughter] 

Carolyn: When you teach, I think a lot of young women in their 20s and 30s don't identify,  particularly with ‘feminist’ because it carries so much baggage. Seventies and whiteness. 

Cheryl: You know, it’s the jeans 

Carolyn: Yeah, exactly.  

Cheryl: It's coming back. It's in. [Applause] It’s the high-waisted jeans and feminism. The new thing. Twenty years ago,people in my generation did not call themselves feminists very easily. I'm amazed at how mainstream that term has become, actually, and maybe it’s just on Twitter. Aren’t you seeing this? Do you guys agree with this idea that it’s become much more natural for young women to stay there feminist and men too? Yes?  

[Crowd members say “Yes.” “Everyone”.] 

Cheryl:  And old women and old men. Anyway, I think that you have to just take a chill pill, feminist man. [Applause] Love and be loved. Give and take. Talk about everything and have lots of sex. [Applause]  

Carolyn:  He's going to do fine [Laughter] and I'm a little worried about this next one.  

Cheryl: We’re starting a podcast next week.  

Carolyn: I want to go to this one because I think it's important. “I'm so in love with my partner that I feel like we've almost become one person. I realized that I've lost parts of myself to our relationship, but I don't know if that's a bad thing or just what happens when you bring two lives together. Bits get lost.” 

Cheryl: How long have you been with your partner?  

Carolyn: 28 years. 

Cheryl: 28 years. I think one of the questions I have for that person, I think that if you're at the beginning of a relationship, there can be this incredibly intense merging which is really beautiful and powerful. And, that's a quick follow-up question, where are you in your relationship? Because what I found though is, obviously you can't become one and then have that sustain itself over time like that. Have you found that over time, you merge, you come apart. [Carolyn laughs] What you're feeling might just be the super intense mega sparkle superglue love thing, which is so awesome. Don't worry about it. I think, because it won't last, [Laughter] so enjoy. Enjoy yourself. Even if the relationship lasts, this sense of “I don't know where I am and she begins and I end,” that will pass. One day you will wake up and you'll think I'm going to go eat a taco by myself [Laughter]. Right?  

Carolyn: It’s true. The particulars of the self have a way of poking up. “You share so much of yourself. Do you ever worry that you'll run out of stuff, stories and experiences to share PS. I love you.” 

Cheryl: Aww. Thank you. Yes. No, I've totally run out of stories. It actually is the thing. A lot of people really have encouraged me to keep writing the Dear Sugar column. I do the podcast now, but it's a totally different thing. Obviously it's not a literary experience. It's a conversation with Steve Almond. A lot of people were like, “Please go back to writing the Dear Sugar column.” When I stopped writing the column, I really didn’t stop, I thought it was going to be a hiatus but even then I knew that I wasn't going to write it for very much longer if I went back. The reason I didn’t go back was because suddenly everything exploded in my life. Even if I had gone back it would have been just a few more months and it was because of, not so much that I ran out of stories, but I've heard of spoken my piece. I sort of said everything I can say about the problems of being human and that after a while I start repeating myself and making some of the same points [Carolyn: Mmm]. There is this thing a little bit where most writers do write from their wounds. They write about the hardest, ugliest things that have happened. I'm sure that I'll return again and again to some of the subject matter I’ve already written about but there is a sense that I've had as a regular lately that I just think well what next and what stories do I have left to tell? Also, what is worth telling? A lot of people have said to me “Gosh, you should write about this whole experience you had in Hollywood and with fame” and all of that sort of stuff. It's really interesting because I always have to feel like I have something to say about something before I can write about it. So I don't feel ready to write about this experience I've had but maybe ten years out I will. So part of this that we forget is that we're always making new stories. Always new things are happening to us and sometimes to be ready, to be open about them requires the passage of time. One of the things people feel like I share so much of my life, I do, and yet they're all these parts of my life that I haven't learned about actually and I haven't written about for reasons that have to do with privacy, with not wanting to hurt certain other people in my life, not feeling ready to tell certain stories about my marriage, or my mothering, my friendships ,and my siblings, and all of those things. Rest assured, all the fucked-up things that are happening to me now, [Laughter] 20 years from now, you'll read all about it.  

Carolyn: There's a question about what you're too scared to write.  

Cheryl: I’m too scared... There are stories that I could tell that are just really, really rich and ripe for literature that I wouldn't tell because they would hurt people's feelings and so I won't write those stories. I won't write those stories. It’s not worth it.  

Carolyn: I'm not sure I understand this question. “Reading Tiny Beautiful Things” was an emotional roller coaster. I often wondered what happened next.” I think the writer means in the story of the people. [Cheryl: Yeah.] “How do you cope with sending responses to a person whose story has touched you without knowing how their story ends?” [Cheryl: Hmm] Do you ever wonder if you gave sort of tough advice. Oh, like the advice you gave to what's-her-name, Elissa B or something. 

Cheryl: Elissa Bassist. Yeah.  

Carolyn: That was a famous one. [Cheryl: Yeah.] Did we ever find out if she survived your advice?  

Cherly: Well, Elissa, is one of the few, is one of the only letter writers whose name is actually on the letter, her real name. She's somebody I can track. I met her after I wrote that column and she's doing fine. She lives in New York and is writing and writing like a motherfucker [Applause]. First of all, the first piece of that question is does it feel hard sometimes to put out my reply and then not knowing what's going to happen and also on the podcast. Yes and no. What I always think is I hope we were helpful or I hope I was helpful in my response and then in about a half the cases people do come back to me. They'll write to me again. Some people, I've tracked them over many years. They come to my events. There's this guy...The column in Tiny Beautiful Things “Like an Iron Bell,” this guy Johnny, he wrote me and those of you who know that column. He's like, “I'm sort of in this relationship and I'm sort of in love and I don't want to say I love her because she's going to get all crazy and serious.” I was like, “Don't be such a pussy. Say you love her.” [Laughter] I didn’t write that, but basically did.  

Carolyn: You kind of did.  

Cheryl: I write that letter and a year passes and Tiny Beautiful Things, the book, came out. More than a year passes and I was at an event, at a book signing. You always know that the people, the most interesting and strange and sometimes scary people, are the ones who keep at the back of the line because they want to be the last one you talk to. [Laughter] They don't want to be rushed. I noticed this cute, bearded guy keeps getting into the back of the line and he gets up to me and he's like, “Hi.” He says, “I'm Johnny” and I was like, “Hi, Johnny. How are you tonight?” And he's like “No, I'm Johnny.” I was like, “Oh my God, Johnny.” He's like, “I want you to meet my girlfriend.”  She’s like, “He read your column and got in his truck and drove to me and said he loved me.” Then I saw them get engaged and then they're married and everything's going swimmingly for Johnny. All because of me.  

[Laughter] 

Cheryl: And other people, I've had other stories like that. I've met the guy, I wonder if he's even here tonight. Is anyone here who wrote me a letter? The guy who wrote the letter to me in the column “The Ghost Ship that Didn't Carry.” It’s about should we have a baby or not. He showed up with his daughter on his hip, [Crowd: Aww] which is cool. All kinds of things like that have happened. Beautiful. [Carolyn: Mmm] Cool things. Nothing gnarly and ugly. Nobody who's said, “You completely screwed me up,” because they've all committed suicide. [Laughter] They couldn’t speak to me. Nobody said “That was really bad advice.” That doesn't mean that I haven't given bad advice. I just mean that I've not heard any bad stories. Have I messed anyone up in this room? 

Carolyn: I think It's amazing advice. I mean, it's such great advice and I think how do you know what you know? I think the answer is maybe in the things we talked about and in your books, the way you perceive the world is just so sharp and true. What were you going to say?  

Cheryl: But you know it too. I mean what I know is that you know it. You know the same thing I know. If you're willing to be honest with yourself about what you know. I think that that's what I always try to do in a letter. Sadly, I think this does get lost on the podcast a little bit but in my letters when I was writing the letter, write responses, I would often use the language that was given to me by the letter writer [Carolyn: Mmm.] to show them what they already know. I would always say this is what you told me. I'm showing you what you said. [Carolyn: Right.] This is connected to this very first point I was trying to make, which is when you're writing about yourself, if you think you know what you know, but you actually don't know. What you know, but you don't know. I sound like Donald Rumsfeld now. 

[Laughter] 

What's interesting, writing is one of the few things that requires you to find out the unknowable in your life. It asks you, if you're doing it right, and asks you to delve into the territory, which is the unknowable that is willing to be known if you did. I guess that happens in therapy and that happens in writing. I think that one of the things I tried to do in those Dear Sugar letters is to say to people, is the answer is within. It’s not me stowing some truth or some wisdom on you. You possess the wisdom. When I came out as “Sugar,” in San Francisco actually... Was anyone at that coming out party on Valentine's Day? Yay! One of the things I talked about was my kids. When they were a little bit younger, I would always read to them. I still read to them. You get these storybook abridged versions of a lot of great books, but I would often read them the whole book. When I was a kid, I never read the whole book of The Wizard of Oz, I only saw the movie. My kids watched the movie and I’m like, “We're going to read this whole book.”  So we read the whole book. It's a really interesting book, the whole Wizard of Oz. 

Carolyn: Multiple volumes. 

Cheryl: Yeah. It's very dark and terrible and interesting so many bigger things happened to Dorothy. [Carolyn: Right.] I was so struck by the thing that happened at the end and I felt this is an expression of everything that I think I was trying to do with Sugar, trying to say as “Sugar.” In the book, it's not red ruby shiny slippers and silver silver. Dorothy is wearing them. She goes through all these trials and tribulations in the book. At the very end she runs into Glenda the Good Witch and Dorothy is just like, “I'm never going to get home. I'm just completely screwed and I'll never get back to Kansas.” Glenda’s like, “Oh, why didn't you mention it? You just have to click your heels together with those shoes.” [Laughter] Dorothy was like “Holy cats! Who knew? Thank you! Thank you for bestowing this magic power on the shoes, Glenda the Good Witch. Glenda says “No, no Dorothy. You always had the power. You just didn't know it. It was there all along.” That's the beauty of the rite of passage. You are not actually going out there to find power, that somewhere else. You're actually going out there to find the power you already have. [Applause] It’s true. I think it’s so much about whenever we are lost or confused or we don't know what to do or we don't know the way forward, it's within. It's being brave enough to seek that wisdom within and then live out what you find there. To click those silver shoes together, is the way to get home. The ones you're already wearing.  

Carolyn: Well, it's just been such a pleasure having this intimate talk. 

Cheryl: Thank you. Thanks guys. 

Carolyn: 1400 people. Thank you!  

[Applause and cheers] 

You've been listening to the podcast for the California Institute of integral studies. If you liked what you heard find us and subscribe on iTunes or listen on our website ciis.edu / public programs 

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You've been listening to the podcast for California Institute of Integral Studies. If you liked what you heard, find us and subscribe on iTunes or listen on our website at ciis.edu/podcast. 

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