Episode 77: Transcript
Episode: 77: The Stories that are Helping Us with Our Collective Trauma
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of Victories Greater Than Death, a brand new young adult novel coming in April.
Annalee: [00:00:13] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, a new book about recent discoveries in archaeology about abandoned cities.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:24] So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about trauma. We're all pretty fucking traumatized by the past year that we've just lived through and really the past four years. And we all believe in our hearts, absolutely, that storytelling can help us to deal with trauma. But, what kind of stories actually do help us to get through traumatic times and to recover from traumatic times? And is there a difference between the stories that we create and the stories that we consume in order to cope with trauma?
[00:00:52] Later in the episode, we're going to be joined by the amazing Sarah Gailey, the author of a brand new novel, The Echo Wife, and they're going to be talking to us about how they deal with trauma and their work. So let's get started.
[00:01:05] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:32] So, Annalee, do you feel like you crave different kinds of escapism or different kinds of storytelling, when you're living through something like a pandemic, and a political meltdown?
Annalee: [00:01:45] I definitely do. And I think there have been different phases, because a lot of us went through grieving and trauma when Trump was elected, and was scaring all of us and our friends. And like, there was actually, after Trump was elected, there were a wave of suicides among queers and trans people, people who were afraid they'd lose their health care. And it was really upsetting. And I think there was this sense that we all just had to kind of tamp down our feelings and put our foot to the, I don't know. Put our pedal to the metal, or nose to the grindstone. The point is that we all had a lot of work to do. We had to go to protests, we had to be there for our friends, we had to try to wake up our legislators. And it was a time of kind of, I felt, like wearing a battle suit around my feelings. And so I wasn't consciously as much seeking out comforting entertainment. I feel like I was, in some ways seeking out entertainment about like action and doing things despite terrible odds.
[00:03:01] But then during the pandemic, and then since the more recent election of President Biden, I've been in my feelings a lot. I’ve been needing really different kind of entertainment. I don't want stories about people killing each other. I don't want stories about emotional disasters. I've been like, I want Bridgerton. I watched Bridgerton. I watched The Crown and even The Crown was a little bit too much because it was too real.
[00:03:35] But I find myself seeking out stuff that is not going to ruffle any of the feelings that I have about current events. I don't want anything about like people suddenly dying, or people in a civil war. I just, I want, like, I've gone from a person who slurpped up Lovecraft Country and was galvanized by it to someone who's like, all I want is Bridgerton, like I said.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:02] Yeah, and I still think, actually, something like Lovecraft Country, or some of the other entertainments that have come out in the last three or four years, like Get Out and a bunch of other stuff like that were really helpful and helping, especially, those of us who had been relatively comfortable in our privilege. But also just helping us as a country to cope with the extent of systemic racism and the extent of the violence inherent in the system. Sorry, I just quoted Monty Python by accident. But you know, I do that a lot.
Annalee: [00:04:33] They weren’t wrong.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:36] Yeah, but did not mean to trivialize how important Get Out or Lovecraft Country or any of those other things were. But you know, I mean, I do feel like, especially in the last year or so, my definition of escapism has changed drastically. I was saying to you the other day I feel like, not long ago, I would have considered something like Game of Thrones escapist.
Annalee: [00:04:57] Sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:57] It’s another world. It's like, there’s dragons, there’s magic. There's… Arya Stark is getting to be a badass assassin. It’s like, woo! You know?
[00:05:06] But now when I think about escapism I'm like no, Game of Thrones is not escapism Game of Thrones is like, in some ways too close to reality for me. I want, for me, it's been like Summer Camp Island. I watched every episode of Summer Camp Island, which is a show that I'm now obsessed with. And I'm like, why are there more episodes of Summer Camp Island? And Hilda and Teen Titans Go! I’m basically just watching kids cartoons. And stuff that's on the level of kids cartoons. Like I watched every episode of The Baby Sitters Club, like twice, just because that's… And even those things, even Baby Sitter’s Club, I was like, this is a little too intense for me at times. God, they're being kind of mean to each other, I know if I can handle this.
Annalee: [00:05:45] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:46] So, I just, you know, I really need stuff like, unless I'm really kind of bracing myself that I'm gonna watch something that's going to remind me of unpleasant realities, because it's important to be mindful. Otherwise, I just want stuff that's going to be comforting, and that’s going to be happy and cheerful and kind of cute, like we talked about in the cuteness episode, I guess. You know, I think that that's actually very medicinal right now.
Annalee: [00:06:11] I think so too. And I think when we're talking about trauma and stories, we also have to make a distinction between personal trauma, you know, traumas that maybe one individual experiences and what that makes them want to do in terms of reading books, or playing video games. Versus what's going on right now in the United States, which I would call collective trauma or historical trauma, where a bunch of us are going through it together. And I do think that's a different feeling. It's better in some ways to be going through collective trauma, because you have solidarity, and you can talk to your friends about it. And everybody's like, yeah, I know what pandemic brain is, for example.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:51] Right.
Annalee: [00:06:51] But then, at the same time, it makes it harder, because you're surrounded by it. And so there's no escape from the trauma in your everyday normal life. And so I wonder if like, during times of collective trauma, if we actually need even more potent kinds of escapism, and that if we were just coping with an individual trauma, whatever that was, if there would be like, just a different path, in terms of self comfort. Because at least if you've had a personal trauma, you don't kind of go out into the world and see that trauma written on to everyone else's face. I mean, you do a little bit if you're really suffering. But you know that it's your projection as opposed to like, nope, they're all going through it too. So we're all fucked.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:38] Yeah, well, it actually you raise an interesting point about being able to see it on everybody else's face. Because I think that there's a case to be made that when you're suffering from supposedly individual trauma, often, other people out there have suffered from that same trauma, but we don't talk about it. Especially a certain kinds of trauma that are stigmatized, and so it's like, well, I've been horribly messed up by this thing that happened to me. And maybe half the people I know also have been messed up by it, but we're not going to talk about it or acknowledge it, or in any way communicate about it. Because it's this thing that's a taboo or something, especially with, like I said, certain types of trauma that, “It must be your fault,” or it must be… I don’t know.
Annalee: [00:08:21] Yeah, well, and that's part of trauma is that we aren't able to talk about it. And that kind of makes. That makes a terrible event a traumatizing event.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:31] I think, yeah, it contributes for sure.
Annalee: [00:08:33] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:33] Basically, pop culture, like what we think of as mainstream pop culture is kind of the synthesis of all of our collective psyches or all of our collective desires and needs as people. And so when you have a trauma that is being suffered by everybody, by the entire world, literally, then it is going to be reflected in pop culture in really profound ways. And, I mean, obviously, we haven't really, because of the lag time and because things have to be processed for a bit. We haven't really yet started to see the pop culture that's going to come out of COVID. I think we're just at the very start I mean, I guess, Taylor Swift is cranking out a new album every five minutes but the rest of us are taking some time to kind of process what we're going through. I think what we're desiring from pop culture is already different and it's reflected in what's popular on Netflix, and what people are excited about. Like you said, Bridgerton, Lupin, obviously. A lot of stuff that's just really kind of sweet and kind of like Lupin deals with systemic racism, but it also has this hero who's like, just this awesome gentlemen thief, and it's hard to feel depressed watching him because he's just so great.
Annalee: [00:09:44] He can get out of anything.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:45] He can get out of anything, that whole thing.
Annalee: [00:09:48] Any terrible thing. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:49] That's like the whole point of him is that he can't be trapped.
Annalee: [00:09:54] Yeah, that's the fantasy. And I think that was why The Mandalorian became such a huge hit. Even though you know, other recent Star Wars titles haven't necessarily blown up the way The Mandalorian did, but it was people who were in a horrible situation. But the main character, The Mandalorian, he always has another trick up his sleeve, or he literally has like another gadget on his armor that he can use to get out of it. And also he’s really pure of heart. It’s weird, because he's kind of a bounty hunter at the beginning but then it turns out that he's really got a soft spot for this vulnerable child, and he wants to help the downtrodden. And it’s something that's very easy… It's easy on the soul, when you're feeling traumatized to have a character where you trust them, that they're going to do the right thing. And their conflicts are going to be really simple. It’s not gonna be like, I'm grappling with some—. Of course, the Mandalorian is grappling with horror from his past, but he's solved it in this way that's so such a balm. That he's doing good in the world and he's just like a super ninja.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:07] Yeah, so I wanted to play a clip here, actually, from Steven Universe Future, which was the kind of miniseries I guess you'd call it, that was a sequel to Steven Universe, most of which appeared in 2020, I think. And this is when Steven basically goes to the doctor for the first time and he's talking to Connie's mother, basically, who tells him about PTSD.
SU Future Clip: [00:11:26]
Connie’s mother: You seem to have made a series of miraculous recoveries. But that doesn't change the fact that you experienced trauma. You've recovered physically, but have you recovered mentally?
Steven: You think there's something wrong with my brain?
Connie’s mother: Not wrong. It's that adverse childhood experiences or childhood trauma can have a lasting impact on how your body responds to stress. This can affect your social, emotional, and physical development. When humans are in crisis, the brain releases the hormone cortisol, your heart races, your muscles tense. I wonder if your body is reacting to a gem equivalent of cortisol. Steven, do you remember anything bad in your childhood that particularly stuck with you?
Steven: I guess, I kind of freaked out when they canceled my favorite ice cream. And then I got attacked by a giant bug monster. And I got trapped in a bubble and almost drowned. I lost control my body and turned into a blob of cats. I almost turned so old, I died. Amethyst almost died. Pearl did die. Garnet got destabilized right in front of me. I woke up with a black guy in prison on a spaceship, I—
Connie’s mother: Steven, this is serious.
Steven: But that was just the early stuff.
Connie’s mother: I think all these experiences have been subjecting your body to a harmful amount of stress and that's affecting your ability to respond to new forms of stress in a healthy way. You’ve been dealing with genuine threats from such a young age, your body is now responding to minor threats as if your life were in danger.
Steven: But why am I only swelling up now?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:58] What I love about that clip, first of all, is that it's such a great kind of primer on the mechanism of trauma, like it actually gets very deep, very kind of scientific about where trauma comes from, and why Steven in particular would be super traumatized. And it's a show for kids, but it's giving you this really kind of like intense science education about this topic that, you know, I learned from some stuff from that moment and I've adult who's been dealing with trauma in various ways for years.
[00:13:28] But also it's like Steven Universe and Steven Universe Future, to a large extent, are chief among the things that I would have said, were comfort food, during the kind of apocalypse. They’re right up there with Summer Camp Island in terms of stuff that I'm just like, I can just feel safe watching this. And indeed Steven Universe Future does end in a very comforting way. But I think that it's interesting to see how some of these kind of comfort narratives can also really get kind of deep and intense about trauma, while not re-traumatizing you, and I'm curious what you think about that.
Annalee: [00:14:06] That’s a great example of a story that is itself intended to be kind of a helpful spot on the road to recovery. The Steven Universe world is such a sweet and kind world. And yet, it's also acknowledging that maybe you need to be in that world because you've been traumatized. So like I said, I think this is pretty unusual to actually have a meta moment in one of these stories where people are like, actually, yeah, I'm pretty upset. And you, the viewer, might be too.
[00:14:39] So that's a great segue to our next segment when we'll be talking about how the writing process can help us deal with trauma and also just about stories that acknowledge the trauma that may have inspired us to go to those stories in the first place. And we'll be joined by Sarah Gailey.
[00:14:54] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] Hi, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us.
Sarah: [00:15:10] Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:12] It's so great to just hang out with you again. It's been so long.
Sarah: [00:15:15] I know.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:17] So I wanted to ask about writing about trauma, realistically and sensitively. I know that, I'm just gonna, slight sidebar, when I was working on The City in the Middle of the Night, you and I had a long phone call about this, about how to write about trauma in stories. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. How do we deal with our trauma in our work? And how do you get like the response to trauma and the diversity of responses to trauma right on the page?
Sarah: [00:15:43] Oh, gosh, I mean, that's such a beautiful question. And it's such a big one, because everyone's response to trauma is different. I honestly feel that just acknowledging the diversity of responses is one of the biggest steps to helping normalize trauma responses. I mean, this is like, kind of all that I write. Everything that I write ends up being about trauma, because it turns out, I'm only interested in one thing.
[00:16:09] So many of my conversations with people, both inside and outside the writing community are just about processing trauma and trauma responses and how you incorporate the impact trauma has on you into your day to day life. And I feel that that brings so much strength to a narrative, having trauma not be an event that you move past, but instead an event that changes and shapes everything.
Annalee: [00:16:29] What's the relationship between trauma and storytelling?
Sarah: [00:16:34] I mean, I feel so strongly that storytelling itself is a response to trauma and a way of processing trauma. One of the kind of interventions that I really firmly believe in for a lot of people, and in a lot of cases is narrative intervention therapy. Immediately after trauma, it's really helpful to allow a trauma victim to express what happened to them in the form of a story and to help them build a narrative because the human brain is really, really great at processing stories and at acknowledging, okay, that story's over and so I can be outside of it now. Instead of the idea, I'm still immersed into it, and it's still happening to me. I'm still immersed into it, that's not a language.
Annalee: [00:17:16] We know what you meant.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:20] You know, it's interesting, because every story has bad things happen to the characters, unless it's literally just a story about we ate tea and cakes, and then we ran out of tea. But then we got some more tea and everything was fine. And that's like—
Annalee: [00:17:32] That could be traumatizing.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:35] That’s a perfectly serviceable story, but most stories have something scary or something bad or something upsetting happens. And I often think that a lot of what delineates different genres of writing, of storytelling, is really just how upsetting those events are supposed to be. In a spy thriller, you jump off a building, you get shot at 100 times, you get punched in the face 1000 times, and then you go and have a martini, and you're like, jey, I'm having a martini! Woo! That’s my impersonation of James Bond. That was my James Bond impression. But you know, wow, martini, dude!
Annalee: [00:18:16] Now I’m hooking up with the bad guy!
Sarah: [00:18:17] Oh my gosh, James Bond is here?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:20] [crosstalk] James Bond. Dude. So anyway, I think that this is something that's sort of a function of tone in a way. I don't want to get too sidetracked about that, but it's a function of tone. That, if you have a story that's got like a happy bright tone, horrible, upsetting things can happen and we're just like, whoa, that was upsetting. And we're now carrying on. And it's a real balancing act to have horrible things happen and acknowledge them without the story becoming just like a downer, or scary or whatever.
[00:18:50] I was gonna ask, if something happens to you in real life, that's really upsetting. Like, say, your entire family gets eaten by a giant rock monster in front of you. I'm trying to pick an example that's not, you know, a real life example. Just, I don't want to re-traumatize everybody. But so you watched your entire family get eaten by a rock monster, in front of your very eyes. And you're like, okay, so do you write a story about a rock monster? Do you change the rock monster into a giant lizard? Do you change your family into your coworkers? How do you make this into a story that you can, A) stand to write without just sobbing constantly, and B) that is going to be a story rather than just an autobiography?
Sarah: [00:19:38] Yeah, on a personal level I, and this is kind of the way that I talk to people about it when we're discussing how to safely write about trauma. I prefer to sort of transform trauma in narrative, both because I want to be able to write about it without scouring my own brain with a Brillo pad every day and also because when you finish writing a story right, it kind of goes out of your hands and into the hands of readers. And it's really difficult as a writer, even if I had written like a tea and cakes story, really difficult to see readers being like that tea sounds gross. That's not how you're supposed to dip your cakes in the tea. Like, that's hard. And if writers were like, hmm, the way that this character responded to their family being eaten by rock monsters, seems silly to me. And, why didn't they deal with it differently? Boy, that would be a whole other level of hard. So just on a very personal level, I prefer to kind of transform my trauma and wrap it up in cheese, and then a layer of frosting and then stuff it inside of a chicken and roast the chicken and be like, okay, now you eat the chicken. Instead of the trauma itself. [Crosstalk]
Annalee: [00:20:45] The chicken of my trauma.
Sarah: [00:20:47] Eat my trauma chicken.
Annalee: [00:20:47] Writing advice right there.
Sarah: [00:20:54] I also think it can make it a little bit easier on a reader. In my experience, readers are really upsettingly good at picking out the pieces of story that are about the writers life. Anytime I do a book event, someone raises their hand and says, hey, so I noticed this tiny detail on page 25, and does that relate at all to your relationship with an ex who treated you badly? And I'm like, how did they know? They always know. They can sniff it out. And so I find that transforming trauma, to put it into the narrative makes it a little easier on readers to, like, take the story as a whole. And eat that whole chicken without getting little pieces of trauma stuck in their teeth. And also for them to see themselves in it and say, oh, wow, I can map this on to something that happened to me. Instead of reading about the very common everyday occurrence of families getting eaten by rock monsters, I'm going to read about this group of coworkers getting eaten by giant lizards. And, huh, that makes me feel like maybe I can process my own family getting eaten by rock monsters a little easier.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:56] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Annalee: [00:21:57] Yeah, one of the things with trauma, too, especially because we've been talking about kind of historical trauma and collective trauma with the political situation in the US, the pandemic. Sometimes those are traumas that aren't easy to pin down on just an individual rock monster, right. Like it's systemic rock monsteriness. And it's hard to write… it’s very hard to have a catharsis and write it in a novel where you're fighting something that's systemic, and something that's diffuse. And it may be something that's deeply traumatizing and creates personal trauma. But I find that it's effective if that diffuse trauma gets boiled down into something simple that you can then fuckin kill, and stab it 100 times and watch it bleed and kind of dance around and be like, yay. Not that I have any feelings or thoughts about that.
[00:22:57] But I do think that that's a lot of what animates horror narratives and why horror narratives are so cathartic. I mean, when I was dealing with my own trauma from my childhood, I did it by watching horror movies. And I spent like 10 years pretty much only watching horror movies. And it was really… it was cleansing, because it was like, these were monsters. And they were monsters that you could identify. And everyone agreed they were monsters, usually, which is another thing because if you're being like abused by your dad the way I was. Everybody’s like, but he's your dad. He loves you, right? And it's like, actually, no, it turns out he has 17,000 tentacles, and he’s covered in pustules, can we all agree he's a monster now? And that's a very, I think that's an effective way of telling the story of trauma.
Sarah: [00:23:46] I think that this really connects well with what Charlie Jane was saying about James Bond, too. I think that genres identify kind of, they almost build different fantasies of trauma for us. Right, the horror genre identifies a fantasy where oftentimes everyone agrees that a monster is a monster and you get the catharsis of the monster, even if like in the Grady Hendrix's amazing Southern Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires. The whole community keeps on saying he's not a monster, he's not a monster. But in the end, you still get I don't think this is a spoiler, because it's like a horror genre book. People all end up agreeing the monster is a monster and taking it down. And that's a beautiful fantasy for people who have endured a lot of people not acknowledging their trauma, the same way that the spy thriller is a beautiful fantasy of a world where it's possible for traumatic things to not have an impact on you and to just let them slide right off of you if you're cool enough, intrinsically.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:40] Yeah. And actually, it's weird because there are times when I'm reading… this happens to be more with books, weirdly, than TV shows and movies. With TV shows and movies, I can kind of just be like, okay, this character has plot armor and has like emotional armor. Nothing can touch this character and it's fine. And there's just a certain amount of suspension of disbelief and if an actor is good enough, they can just make you believe in what they're doing. I never watched the show 24, but my impression of the show 24 is that basically a million terrible things happen in one day. And this person is like, oh, well, that was a day. I don't know. Like, I've never watched the show, but I just am, like, doesn't… does he like, does he poop?
Annalee: [00:25:16] I mean, it is called 24, right? It’s 24 hours.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:19] It’s like, oh, it was only three hours ago that my family was eaten by rock monsters, and now this other terrible thing is happening, and oh well. It’s a day. When I'm reading a book specifically, and something really horrible happens to a character. And the character just kind of shrugs it off. To some extent, it doesn't even matter what genre book, if it's a character that I feel like I'm supposed to be invested in, and they just don't react to their family being eaten by rock monsters. Or they're just like, they have one page of like, oh, that was really bad and now I'm going to go off and have a milkshake and think about the boy I have a crush on. That actually, I find that weirdly traumatic to read. I find myself feeling traumatized by their lack of trauma response to stuff that happens, weirdly. Like I feel like the fact that it doesn't even affect them at all, even if they have a weird, inappropriate effect, response, like they can't stop laughing or something, like any kind of response. But you know, the fact that it’s nothing, it just makes me feel like I'm, when I read a book, specifically, it just kind of throws me out of the narrative, but also just makes me feel weirdly traumatized.
Sarah: [00:26:28] I mean, I don't want to bring everything back to ableism and capitalism all the time. But I feel like socially, we have a big investment in telling people that their reactions to trauma are outsized or unreasonable, because if we acknowledge that those responses are common and reasonable, we would have to provide care which like, ew, no, we don't want to do that. That doesn't make us money. I think that narratives well, there is the exciting concept of like, what if I didn't have to be traumatized by things happening to me? I think that there's also a lot of meat on the bone of, if you show people that traumatic events don't traumatize characters that they identify with and think of as reasonable and as good people, then maybe you'll have an easier time telling people that traumatic thing that happened to you shouldn't affect you. Go back to work. Stop bothering me and asking for care.
Annalee: [00:27:25] Yeah, so it's sort of a toxic fantasy in a way.
Sarah: [00:27:29] I also find it really kind of, like a little activating and upsetting when I see a character going through, especially going through things that I have gone through in my life that have like, changed the shape of my life and identity and that characters like oop, Wednesday.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:44] I know, it just feels weirdly invalidating. And it just, as somebody who, I personally have worked really hard to kind of acknowledge and come to terms with my own traumas. And after having been in denial in the past about them, it just kind of bugs me. It actually upsets me when I feel like it's not being acknowledged.
[00:28:04] So changing gears slightly, like, especially given that right now, we're all basically just carrying huge amounts of trauma in our bodies, and in our hearts. And Sarah, I love what you wrote about this in your newsletter a little while ago, I thought that was just fantastic. How do you write a story in which people are traumatized and traumatic things happen without just re-traumatizing the reader in a way that's maybe not helpful? How do you make the reader feel safe experiencing these scary things?
Sarah: [00:28:35] It's such a hard line to walk. And I think especially with the way that a lot of the writing community has taken to finding validation in readers expressing that they're feeling big emotions about a book, but the readers will express that by saying this book hurt me or made me cry. I think a lot of us in the writing community for a long time took that to mean, okay, my goal is to make my reader cry, which, like, the goal is to make your reader feel big stuff, you can make them cry and a lot of ways, but maybe don't do it by being mean to them.
[00:29:06] My kind of approach to this because again, everything I write is about trauma 110% of the time, is to try and keep my goal audience in mind. And my goal audience is the person who I have been who was hurting and needed to read something. So when I'm writing about, say, abuse dynamics in a relationship, I think, what do I wish that the person I was when I was in a relationship that hurt me could have read, to help them see themselves in the narrative, see the possibilities of how the world could treat them and find a way to a future where that pain wasn't still happening. And to me, that doesn't necessarily mean writing a narrative in which abuse gets wrapped up very tidily, or a hero swoops in and saves the day, but instead of narrative in which the person experiencing the abuse is centered, humanized, and treated with compassion and understanding by the narrative, even when the decisions they make as a result of what's happening to them are bad.
[00:30:12] And I try to bring that to any traumatic narrative I'm writing, which again, is every narrative, I'm such a one-track writer. Just trying to trying to center the experience of the person who's going through trauma, whatever that experience looks like, even when it's messy, and treating it with the same narrative respect that I would bring to someone who's making all the right choices.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:32] Yeah, I think that's really important. I feel like for me, it's like, partly about just having nurturing in there, having a feeling that, yes, there are scary things happening, but we're also gonna take care of each other, we're gonna nurture each other. There's gonna be people who are there for you and it not being just trauma.
Annalee: [00:30:51] Yeah, that's what I love about Sarah's novella Upright Women Wanted, which I have already told you how much I loved it. And I'm just one of a billion people who felt the feelings of that book. And it definitely doesn't shy away from trauma but we get this incredible group of people who are like, basically, I think the heroes of every queer nerd in the universe. They're like cowboy librarians, kind of. Queer cowboy librarians with a range of gender identities on the frontier, shooting them up, you know, and it's amazing. When I was reading it, I had that feeling of the soothing you get when you're recovering from a trauma, like, the novella delivers that feeling. And I think it's through the relationships, because it's people who have had terrible relationships or betrayals, and now they're like, oh, here's people who maybe I could trust.
[00:31:51] I wonder when you were writing that if you were thinking that if you were like, I want to give people something that's a balm?
Sarah: [00:31:59] Ooh, that's such a tricky question, because I have to crawl all the way back in my brain to the before time.
Annalee: [00:32:04] Yeah.
Sarah: [00:32:06] Which exists like a dimension away. So I started out writing that I was like, I'm gonna write a fun pulp narrative, and it's not gonna be big emotions. And then that never works. I’m like Charlie Brown kicking the football every time I approach a new book like that. And I ended up wanting to write a love letter to queer community. And I think one of the beautiful parts of queer community is that a lot… I don't want to generalize, but a lot of the queer community is made of people who have been harmed, especially people who've been harmed by family and by community before. And so there's a sense when you first enter queer community, of maybe a little hesitation and suspicion, right? I think we often have this fantasy of finding a group of people who will immediately open their arms, and soak us up with all our trauma and pain, and immediately take care of us. And I wanted to instead kind of give the reader this view of a community that will say, okay, can we trust you? Can you trust us? Can we care for each other in sustainable ways, even when we're messes, even when we're angry, even when we hurt each other in the ways that we're hurting, because that's what real community is about? And I'm so honored and thrilled that that felt like a balm, because that's exactly what I want and that's what queer community has been to me. And that tells me that I did a decent job of rendering that on the page, that feeling of, you don't have to be suspicious of this care because it comes with kind of the everything bagel seasoning of emotional reality that people who've endured trauma bring to the table.
Annalee: [00:33:42] I'm excited about… now we have bagels and chicken. We're almost ready for like—what’s for dessert in our trauma story?
[00:33:52] Actually, speaking of dessert, I wanted to ask both of you a question about writing and writing through trauma. Charlie Jane, you have a book of essays coming out later this year that's about kind of writing to deal with troubling times, trauma, lots of stuff. Sarah, as you admitted, you write a lot about trauma, although in many different ways. Like let's be clear here. It's not like it's a one-track thing. It comes up in many different contexts in your work. And so I'm wondering, how is your writing process, a way of dealing with trauma? So not about like, don’t think about the readers, whatever. Just how when you're in your head, how is that helping?
Sarah: [00:34:32] I write the story that I wish I could have gotten to live, right? So often, the thing that I'm writing is like, alright, let's pluck a Sarah Gailey from the past and drop them into this new narrative and be like, alright, all that bad stuff happened to you? What if it happened a little bit differently? And what if you were a different version of yourself who could survive it differently? And sometimes that goes well, and sometimes it doesn't, but just getting to acknowledge that the trauma I've lived through Isn't inevitable and isn't the only way things can go. I mean, that idea hurts a lot at first because it's like, oh no, how come it didn't go differently for me? But it can become such a healing, safe thing to be like, oh, right. It's not inevitable. That pain doesn't have to happen to everyone all the time, everywhere.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:19] Yeah, I think that, for me, how I deal with trauma in my writing has kind of changed over time. I feel like I've kind of gone on this journey from being like an absurdist writer to being an escapist writer. The way I approached storytelling, and especially when I approached telling stories about stuff that was like, close to my heart, or close to my past experience, when I was starting out, was to just kind of reductio as much ad absurdum as I could and just like get it… Just, you know, my family was eaten by rock monsters, then turn the rock monsters into mountains and have them be mountains who are a Mountain Goats cover band and have them be like… I just like make things as weird and silly and exaggerated and kind of over the top as possible. And what I found over time was that that was good for dealing with certain aspects of horrible life stuff. But that the act of exaggerating and kind of making more ridiculous and absurd sometimes just made things worse, and also that it made it harder to identify with the characters sometimes, because everything is ridiculous and exaggerated and weird and silly. And there's not that kind of core of like emotion and like healing. The healing was the part that I often couldn't get to with that approach.
[00:36:29] And so I've kind of, as I've gone on, I think I've gotten more into escapism and more into honoring the fact that part of what we deal with, what we want from books and stories and stuff is to get away from our lives and to have a happier or at least more manageable or more understandable version of reality. And so, in the young adult books that I'm writing now, I'm definitely still kind of processing a lot of stuff. And in fact, they ended up being about this era that we're living through in a lot of ways, but through a lens of like, not just weird, exaggerated, silly, over the top, but also, it's gonna be okay. We're here for each other. We're all friends. There's something awesome waiting for you if you can just get through this and you can be awesome. You can be around awesome people. You can be the version of yourself that you wanted to be all along. And just that kind of stuff, which I feel like lives more in escapism than in absurdism, if that makes any sense. That's kind of how my processing of trauma through writing has kind of changed over time, I guess.
Annalee: [00:37:34] Have you, Sarah, have you changed your approach to trauma in your new novel The Echo Wife? Do you feel like there's a little bit of a different… it’s not a Western, there's no hippie—no hippos.
[00:37:48] There's no hippos. Or maybe there's no hippies either. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. So you could tell me that there were hippie hippos and—
Sarah: [00:37:57] You're gonna make me spoil the big plot twist ending where on the last page, the final sentence is, “By the way, all of these characters were hippos all along.”
Annalee: [00:38:03] That would be amazing. [Crosstalk] I made a clone hippo of you.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:10] I really want a hippie hippo novel now where they're just like, hey man. Let’s just drop out and like wade through the mud, man.
Sarah: [00:38:20] I can do a little [crosstalk] where I do generational hippo stories. It's like the cowboy one and then the WWI one, and then we'll go right into the ‘60s and ‘70s with the Nixon era hippos.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:32] Janis Joplin hippo.
Sarah: [00:38:33] Perfect.
Annalee: [00:38:34] I'm ready. And I'm ready for the cyber hippos who are like, all—
Sarah: [00:38:39] Oh, aren’t we all?
Annalee: [00:38:38] Very online. Okay, so, seriously, do you find that that you have a different approach?
Sarah: [00:38:49] Absolutely. As I'm sure a lot of your listeners already know, but I always try and say this in case people don't. Publishing is a weird process because you write a book, and then it comes out like, two, three years later. And in the time since I wrote The Echo Wife, I've written an amount of books that I'm not gonna say the number because it will reveal my unhealthy relationship with work. But in every single book, I write, my relationship to expressing and exploring trauma changes. In the Echo Wife, I mean, that whole book is about a refusal to acknowledge the way that trauma shaped you. And too much acknowledgement of the way that trauma shapes other people. And then having those two ideas confront each other in a very visceral way. The main character, Evelyn Caldwell is a brilliant scientist who meets her clone and the clone was created by Evelyn Caldwell's, now ex-husband, as an answer to every way that he finds her lacking. Everything about her that was shaped by trauma that he doesn't like he's put into this new clone, which itself traumatizes the clone. It's about two different forms of trauma, meeting each other, head-to-head and having to kind of examine each other and say, huh, how can I possibly accept you while still not at all acknowledging myself? It’s very autobiographical.
[00:40:04] And in the books I've written since then my approach has continued to change, it's continued to evolve into more of one of acceptance and kind of radical self-examination and self-care and loving the traumatized self as much as possible. Which I mean, it's almost… I feel like there's a very clear through line through everything I've written that hopefully, will be evident to people when all these books eventually knock on wood, are on shelves. Of just moving from trauma as an indelible mark on someone to trauma as a transformational mark on someone to trauma as something that can be fully incorporated into the self in a healing way. Or no one will see any of that, and I will look very silly.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:49] I wanted to ask you about something you said earlier, which is that you don't want to write about moving beyond trauma that you want to write about, like, just living with trauma.
Sarah: [00:40:57] Yeah, I think there's, there's a big fantasy that I also have had for a long time and am trying really hard to let go of that we'll be able to leave trauma completely behind. That your family can get eaten by rock monsters, and you'll get over it. This is something I hear so often when I talk to friends that I'm able to talk to them about and then I go to my therapist, they say the exact same stuff. That like, shouldn't I be over it by now, that was so long ago? All this other stuff has happened in between. I've talked so much about it. I've grown so much. I've dealt with so many things as a person, shouldn't I be over that bad thing that happened? And the truth is that trauma, in many ways, I mean, it rewires us, it changes our neurochemistry, it changes the way that we respond chemically to the world and there can be healing, there can be, kind of reframing, there can be a way that you can help your brain chemically change how it responds to the trauma triggers. But that change is still part of you.
[00:41:57] I really wish and long for a world where people who've experienced trauma don't feel this pressure to have moved on and this idea that they have to get back to a way that they were before as opposed to a way that they can be in the future that is a more whole and fully realized version of themselves.
Annalee: [00:42:19] Well, that's very cool. And I do think that that's part of the goal of storytelling, too, is to give people that ability to talk through the trauma, make it part of the story, and then it's always part of the story. And then there's new stories, or you reread the story, but it's always, it's always in there. And it's part of the shape of the story. And so it's really what you do with that and not so much getting rid of it or not acknowledging it or repressing it, which I think we all know what happens when you do that. Anytime you repress a trauma, it comes back as rock monsters.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:56] Pretty much.
Annalee: [00:42:56] An even worse rock monster.
[00:42:59] We're gonna wind up now. So, Sarah, why don't you tell everybody where they can find you on the internet. And in real life?
Sarah: [00:43:07] I will. Well, I'm not going to tell people where they can find me in real life because because I don’t want them to come to my house.
Annalee: [00:43:10] Well. Yeah, don’t go to your house, but I meant, like—
Sarah: [00:43:12] I love you, listeners. But no.
Annalee: [00:43:13] Physical things that they can have that have come out of your brain.
Sarah: [00:43:20] Your listeners can find me online on social media. I'm primarily on Twitter, and I'm getting better at Instagram. I'm at @GaileyFrey, both of those places. That’s G-A-I-L-E-Y-F-R-E-Y. They can also, and I hope they do, subscribe to my Substack sarahgailey.substack.com. It has evolved into this newsletter about community and I'm doing this big series right now on invitational world building. That's going to be super fun, all year round. And they can also find my books anywhere books are sold.
[00:43:53] My first novel, Magic for Liars is available right now as we're recording. And as of February 16th, my second adult novel The Echo Wife will be available, again, anywhere books are sold. I highly encourage your listeners to preorder from their local independent bookseller which they can find at indiebound.org or to order online from bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers throughout the United States and the UK.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:16] Yay. Thank you so much.
Annalee: [00:44:18] Thanks so much for joining us.
Sarah: [00:44:19] Thanks so much for having me.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:22] And I just want to thank everybody for listening and for supporting the podcast. If you want to support us more, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're on Twitter as @OOACpod. And if you like the podcast, please do leave a nice review at—or any kind of review, really, just like you know, just leave a review. I could just be like a bunch of letters at Apple podcasts and anywhere else that podcasts are reviewed. And thank you so much to our heroic and brilliant producer Veronica Simonetti and to Chris Palmer from the music. And thanks once again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks.
[00:44:57] Bye!
Annalee: [00:44:57] Bye!
[00:44:58] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.