How Our Favorite Songs Can Save Us

Like Max on “Stranger Things,” we love music that provides a pressure valve for the unspoken emotions we carry.

Thanks to Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” was immortalized for a new generation of listeners to the tune of $2.3 million in streaming royalties, and topped the Billboard Global charts for weeks. It was used repeatedly and artfully throughout season four of the series, culminating in a powerful scene where Max, poised to be Vecna’s next victim, is saved from certain doom by slapping on her Walkman headphones and blasting the song on loop. During a crucial moment, the song reminds her who she is and of all the love in her life before the self-doubt inflicted by trauma could leave her open to the evil machinations of a soul-sucking entity.

The kids of Hawkins came to understand the power of music that moves us and harnessed it to empower their friend. It’s a global example of a song putting us in a certain sort of psychological and emotional state, says musicologist Nolan Gasser, a pianist, composer, and the author of Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste.

Similarly, the music we love can help fend off the scary monsters plaguing our minds.

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Almost 40 years ago, listening to artists like Bush certainly did that for weirdos like me. We weren’t cheerleaders who wore Reeboks, like Chrissy in Stranger Things. Like Max, we wore Vans before it was cool, tuned the world out by blaring what eventually became known as alternative music on our headphones, and used Ouija boards to reach out beyond our realities, demystify the scary unknown, and make sense of the “otherness” we were constantly reminded of by others.

When Kate Bush played on my Walkman, I didn’t care about my dysfunctional family dynamic, or that I made $3 per hour in a musty library shelving books for hours on end, or that I struggled to connect with like minds in my high school. Her music, and the music of other alternative artists, assured me there were others out there who questioned the world like I did, who could love like I did, who pondered and made art the way I did, using music and lyrics as a vehicle to express joy, or lust, or pain, or confusion in a way that resonated deeply with me.

Music was — and still is — the artistic language I use to process my emotions. It’s such a powerful art form because it resonates with us on many levels all at once, says Gasser.

“The soundtrack of our lives is forged by many different inputs, including the culture we grow up in and the kind of music we’re exposed to — the technical term is called enculturation,” he says. “That is the way that our brain understands that certain music is our language. Max from Stranger Things loved a song from the ’80s that was [released] at a time when she grew up. One reason it resonated with her is it was a part of her natural environment.”

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Gasser continues, “Another [thing to notice] is [that] we come to own the music we listen to in formative years, from 12 to 18, or 20. When we identify with a song or body of music during that time in our lives, it becomes a really great tool by which to claim our independence and identity. So, when Max listens to the Kate Bush song, it clearly spoke to her on almost a developmental level and how she defines herself.”

Of course, music doesn’t need to be from your formative years to provide you with a cathartic experience or, as Gasser says, “become yours.” Here’s another personal example, for instance: Seven years of intermittent, excruciating chronic pain left me in need of yet another spinal surgery — my fourth. Before doctors operate perilously close to your spinal cord, you have to sign many documents absolving them of responsibility if you, say, die or become disabled. It’s utterly terrifying.

To top it off, I literally had to put one foot in front of the other, walk into the operating theater, and plop myself down on the table, surrendering my throat to the surgeons. Luckily, they blasted music in that operating theater: “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence and the Machine rang out as I was put to sleep. I liked the song, but suddenly it hit differently, lyrically and musically. It became an anthem of strength and resilience I could cling to when I needed it the most. Years later, I can’t hear that song without really feeling it because it was the soundtrack to such a pivotal moment in my life.

Science has long supported the idea that music has a tremendous potential to heal us emotionally. “Going way back to the ancient Greeks, it was understood the power that music has [in terms of] healing and, today, what we call our subjective well-being,” Gasser explains. “A lot of it just has to do with the process of listening to music and being able to follow the music in real time. It sends off endorphins, dopamine, and positive neurotransmitters flood our brains and our systems.”

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He adds that it’s scientifically been proved that the music we love lowers our heart rate and blood pressure. “If somebody is dealing with a difficult personal issue, like a diagnosis of ill health, actively listening to music they love can be as powerful as 10 milligrams of morphine,” Gasser says. “That’s a pretty powerful pain reliever.”

Interestingly enough, sad or melancholy music can actually make us feel good even if we are unhappy and forlorn. “Going way back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, achieving a state of melancholia was almost a goal of music because it’s a safe space to experience sadness or to experience deep emotion,” Gasser says. “Sad music can be a safe place to feel deeply. Even chemically, when we listen to minor harmonies, or a slower tempo, or just a more lyrical, expressive melody, there’s a hormone called prolactin, which is released into the bloodstream. It’s the same hormone that is released during lactation, and it sends off all of these positive endorphins into the brain to release this hormone.”

The ability that music has to help us process our emotions is one of its greatest gifts, says Gasser. “When we feel deeply, not anger at the television or sadness at something that’s happening, this sort of warmth of emotion music brings on makes us feel good and actually is good for us,” he says. “And music is really one of those things that can trigger feelings deeply as much as anything else can.” Music has certainly been one of the biggest gifts of my life. The most beautiful thing? It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Michelle Monaghan Doubles Down

By Vivian Manning-Schaffel

This article was originally published at Shondaland.com in Aug 19, 2022

The actress speaks with Shondaland about what it was like to play twins in “Echoes,” what she’s up to next, and the type of role she dreams of playing.

Michelle Monaghan can’t resist a thrill. The Mission: Impossible franchise star and Golden Globe nominee for her supporting role on True Detective is often drawn to intriguing roles that have a physical challenge and an edge to them. And her latest starring role — nay, roles — as identical twins in the new Netflix limited series Echoes is no exception.

Monaghan plays Leni and Gina, twin sisters who pretend to be each other long after it’s considered cute, endlessly complicating their lives and the lives of everyone around them — especially when one of them disappears. “I loved the thriller aspect of the show,” Monaghan recently told Shondaland over Zoom. “I think I read four of the scripts when they pitched the series to me, and at the end of each, I couldn’t wait to read the next one! I couldn’t believe the twists and the turns.”

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With a warm smile, the actress says she deeply appreciated the opportunity to work on material created by Vanessa Gazy and written and produced by Gazy, Brian Yorkey (13 Reasons Why), Quinton Peeples (Runaways), and Imogen Banks (The Beautiful Lie, Offspring, Sisters). The challenge of playing two completely different personalities — and mastering the intricate nuances of each — was another aspect of Echoes she simply couldn’t resist.

“The sheer challenge of playing two different roles and two very different characters scared me initially,” says Monaghan. “It was so daunting, I can’t even tell you. I thought there’s no way I can do this. Then, of course, the answer I have in my head is always I have to do this. I have been doing this, acting, for 20 years and know enough about myself creatively that if it frightens the hell out of me, it’s absolutely something I have to embark on.”

In playing identical twins, Monaghan had to find ways to differentiate her portrayal of each woman, beginning with delving into Leni’s and Gina’s foundational psychology. “Both suffered a foundational trauma, but how they moved through that trauma was very different and manifested in different ways,” Monaghan explains. “I really leaned on that foundational trauma to inform their characteristics. That kind of technique was something I hadn’t done or utilized before, so I learned a lot professionally and personally. It was an incredible process. If you could’ve seen my script notes, my husband can attest to that! Ultimately, I’m so very proud of these two women.”

Next came the challenge of Monaghan appearing as both characters on-screen at once, to which she lauds the talents of the series’ special effects team. “Technically, shooting the scenes when the two ladies are together was far more complicated than I even could’ve imagined,” Monaghan says. “A lot of times, I was acting opposite a tennis ball. Other times, I was acting opposite a wonderful actress who stood in as not only my body double but also knew all the lines of the other character. I would then switch out of character and go into hair, makeup, and wardrobe for an hour and come back and do the other side of the performance. There was a lot of going back and forth between characters. I’ve always done stunts, and I’ve always loved them, but I’ve never had to learn both sides of stunts! So, it was learning choreography from Leni’s perspective, then from Gina’s perspective, then fighting myself, essentially.”

In researching roles that require as much nuanced insight as Leni and Gina in Echoes, Monaghan often finds that her formal education as a journalist can really come in handy. “My folks were huge current-event lovers who watched the news and read the paper,” Monaghan explains. “I grew up in a very small town of 700 people in Iowa. So, the idea of a larger world out there really did have an impact on me, because where I came from was so small and insular. I had the opportunity to study journalism at Columbia College in Chicago. I dropped out senior year to move to New York because something was going to happen for me there. And thankfully it did, but I walked out of school feeling terrible because I never finished, so I always said I’d go back to school. When I was prepping for Gone Baby Gone and I was writing, because I like to write, I realized as I was wondering who Angie Gennaro was that I was doing the who, what, when, where, why, and how! So, I took the journalism approach because I never went to acting school. I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘It wasn’t all for naught! It’s okay that I have all these college loans! It’s okay that I didn’t finish!’ So, I’m just going to keep using that technique because you really figure out the backstory for discovering a character.”

Next up for Monaghan is a Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning indie film she’s very proud of called Nanny, written and directed by Nikyatu Jusu. She describes her role as a privileged Upper East Side mom who hires an undocumented West African nanny, played by the film’s lead, Anna Diop, who, in trying to have her son immigrate to the U.S., is confronted by a dark, destructive force. “I’m so proud of this film — it’s honestly the little film that could,” Monaghan beams. “I shot it in the middle of the pandemic with a very, very low budget. Nikyatu had been working on the script for years. There’s such an intersection of genres — it’s very genre-bending actually, a psychological thriller — about the intersection of womanhood and the hierarchy of womanhood and parenthood. It really taps into a lot of things socially going on in the world right now.”

Monaghan will then shift gears a bit, appearing in the Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town, Ted Lasso) comedy Bad Monkey. “I was coming off the heels of this project going, ‘I think it’s time I do a comedy,’ and Bill Lawrence called and offered me a great role,” she says, mentioning again how grateful she is to be able to be an actress. “I feel so lucky to be at this stage in my career to be able to do something as thrilling, intense, and creatively challenging as Echoes, and then to be able to tap into some comedic skills. It was the perfect antidote. I like to find the material that I haven’t tried before and will be totally challenged by.”

When asked what her dream role would be, Monaghan states she’d love to take on yet another type of challenge for an actor — a period piece. “I love the hair, the makeup, the ’50s, the ’70s, the 1800s — I’ve never done that! It’s just a whole other world that informs your character, so I’m putting that out there,” she says.

Julia Haart, Mother of Reinvention

Julia Haart chats with Shondaland about how her unorthodox approach to life makes for a great reality you can stream.

One of Netflix’s most fascinating hits of the summer, My Unorthodox Life is centered around the life of CEO Julia Haart and her four children, best friend and COO Robert, and her husband Silvio, and how she lovingly and actively “yentas” them all as they navigate life. Haart’s dramatic trajectory from ultra-Orthodox Jewish housewife in Monsey, New York, to luxury namesake shoe-brand founder (2013), to creative director of luxury lingerie brand La Perla (2016) and now the CEO, co-owner, and chief creative officer at Elite World Group modeling agency is a dream-realized success story even TV couldn’t make up.

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Indeed, as Haart supports each of her children on their quest to reconcile their interpretation of Judaism with the lives they choose to live, her devotion to them is palpable. Further, watching Haart’s own salvation and reinvention from a conservative Jewish life to where she is now is surely bingeable — but the step-by-step details of her remarkable trajectory remain something of a mystery, with viewers so far only given crumbs along the trail that keep you coming back to the series for more.

What we know from the outset of My Unorthodox Life is that Haart has a gift for the hustle. We know she taught herself to sew and design. We know that, despite the difficulty in getting a divorce in her sect, she left her husband (with whom she seemingly has a positive relationship) after selling life insurance in secret. She found investors she needed to launch her luxury shoe brand in restaurants and at the eye doctor. A board member at La Perla reached out to be the creative head of the brand after hearing raves about Haart’s shoes. Since joining Elite, she’s repositioned the company as more than a modeling-agency chain; now it helps models monetize their brands and businesses, and Haart is also the creative director of the Elite-owned luxury fashion brand e1972.

“If you really want to change your life, if you really want to be successful, you have to want it so badly that you feel it in every fiber and ounce of your being.”

But when asked specific questions about how an Orthodox Jewish woman freed herself to face the challenges of entering the fashion game without prior experience and a background in the industry, Haart remains mum, mentioning many of the answers will be detailed in the upcoming release (March 2022) of her book Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey From Long Sleeves to Lingerie.

She hints, though, that hers is a story too long for our 20-minute phone call, during which Haart’s energy and determination are infectious. “The things that happened to me when I walked out the door,” she starts, “because I was so naive, so clueless, so afraid, so alone, and so lost … On the other hand, I was outrageously determined and completely committed. I had a design gift, let’s say, and I was hungry and driven, but those two together are very strange bedfellows. I believe in God, and I am cognizant of the fact that there are many miracles that happened in my life. But I couldn’t fail.”

Before it dawned on Haart that she had to change her life, though, things got awfully dark. In her sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, gender parity does not exist. Boys and girls do not mix for fear of impure thoughts — religious ceremonies require men and women to sit on opposite sides of the room. Marriages for women are arranged to unknown men around the age of 19. Women can’t show their hair or their legs, or present to the world in any way that might deem them desirable. Hand-holding or -shaking with the opposite sex is only permitted with your spouse and your immediate family. Technology and travel are forbidden on the Sabbath (Saturday). Exposure to outside culture is extremely limited, if not forbidden. And there is no such thing as an LGBTQIA+ community.

Haart felt so oppressed and suppressed by her life, she nearly collapsed under the weight she felt it put on her. “Those were very, very dark days,” she says. “I just didn’t want to live anymore. The dichotomy between what I was supposed to be and who I actually was was too great.”

She continues, “But the crazy thing is, you could convince me that I was bad — I was fully convinced that I was a bad person, that I wasn’t enough. That I couldn’t obey my husband, that I wanted to learn the Talmud [the central religious text of Judaism], which governed my entire life, but I wasn’t allowed to study it because my ‘mind was too light.’”

Then, Haart’s 5-year-old daughter, Miriam, changed everything. “She’s really the beginning and end of my exodus. I was trying so hard to be what they wanted me to be, and then this little fireball at 5 years of age says, ‘Hmm, this doesn’t make any sense. I want to do this; why can’t I do this?’ ‘Because a guy might see you and have bad luck.’ She’d literally look at my ex and be like, ‘Why is that my problem?’ And I was like, wait a minute, why is that her problem? So, Miriam gave me permission. She’s the person who gave me the courage to question, and then she’s the person who, basically, not forced me to leave — but I was going to take the easier way out in the sense that I was purposefully trying to kill myself.”

Haart says what propelled her toward her independence was her biggest fear — that her children would be as miserable as she was. “Look at Miriam, for example,” Haart says. “Miriam [who is now 21] is a bisexual. She has a lesbian girlfriend. She is the youngest teacher in Stanford history. She’s going into her senior year, but, as a freshman, she started giving a course in augmented reality. This girl, had I stayed, never would have gone to Stanford. Certainly, she would never be allowed to date a woman. She would have gotten married, like me, like Batsheva [her eldest daughter, now 28], like all of my sisters at 19, like everyone I knew in the community who managed to get a match. She would have been married to some guy that she met for three hours. She would be pregnant with baby number three, and the world would be the worse for it.”

Batsheva Haart (right) and Miriam Haart (left)

Netflix

Haart was 42 when she finally left her former life. “The first step was acknowledging and giving myself permission to say I’m not a bad person,” she says. “That’s what was the most difficult thing, honestly, because I was trying with every ounce of strength I had in my body to conform and squeeze myself into this meek, mild, obedient, silent wife.”

When it came to facing the inevitable challenges involved in transitioning from running her own brand to making her mark on established legacy brands like La Perla and Elite World Group, Haart sticks by what she tells the countless women — of all faiths — who seek her out for advice. “If you really want to change your life, if you really want to be successful, you have to want it so badly that you feel it in every fiber and ounce of your being,” she says. “You have to sleep it, and eat it, and drink it, and dream it. I was so single-mindedly focused. I loved the word ‘no’ because no just meant that I would have to work a little harder to get it together.”

Further, she continues to buck tradition, even in her professional life. Haart says “established” isn’t a word in her dictionary. “I don’t actually see ‘established,’” she says. “I’m finished with institutions — I’ve had enough institutions to last me 700 lifetimes. I’ve had enough experts telling me what is accepted, or the norm, or how it’s done. I don’t give a flying f--k how it’s done. I’m only going to look at how I think it should be done. How I think I can make it better.”

This approach has worked well for her. Haart is an innovator; she partnered with an Italian ski-boot engineer and a German company that creates a gel used by NASA to create a line of comfortable, towering heels. Kendall Jenner made headlines by wearing a La Perla dress Haart designed made from crystals and a single string. And, like so many of us, she gets her best ideas in the bathtub. “Half of my drawings come out wet!” she says.

Jenner in Haart’s design.

Getty

When it comes to her own inspirations, Haart readily admires those who constantly transform and adapt. “Look at Picasso. Look at Madonna,” she says. “How many times have they transformed themselves? Change, transformation, and invention and innovation is what makes life interesting! Let’s attempt to challenge ourselves! Let’s always be students! Let’s always take pride in what we’re learning and not just what we know.”

She’s also inspired by Gertrude Stein. “She was this incredible lesbian pre-World War II, living an open life in Paris — I think she’s extraordinary. Impressionist artists weren’t being shown in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris because they were doing things differently. They weren’t following the rules, and people like it when you follow the rules. She wrote this line when she was asked about people’s reaction to the first time that they experienced Impressionism in her home at this massive intellectual gathering. When she was asked what do people say when they first see it, and she said, ‘They come to mock, but they stay to pray.’”

I told Haart I was going to put that statement over my desk. “This, to me, is all it is,” she says emphatically. “Forget about the mockers! Forget about those voices — get them out of your head! Yeah, they’ll come to mock. But if you keep at it and don’t let anyone deter you, they will stay to pray, I promise you.”

If you’ve watched My Unorthodox Life, you’ve seen Haart work hard and play hard: She may be late for dinner with her husband due to investor calls, but her entire family (and extended family) stays in their own French chateau when traveling to Paris to watch the seasonal collections from enviable front-row seats. But for Haart, the hard work has only just begun. “I haven’t made it very far at all until I have my army of financially independent successful women who don’t have to ask permission when they buy something, and who can purchase a home on their own and live life on their own terms. I’m not even remotely patting myself on the back,” she says.

Her biggest unrealized dream? “You know, honestly, I’m a very goal-oriented person. I have this image in my head. Literally this picture. I see it so clearly; it’s in front of my eyes — I just got choked up for some reason. It’s in front of my eyes every second of every day, and it’s to create a massive army. I see thousands and thousands and thousands of women, standing together, standing up and saying, ‘It’s our turn.’ You had thousands of years to run the world, and look at the state it’s in — it’s our turn. Until I can feel that we’ve literally changed the conversation, and one day our daughters, or granddaughters, won’t even know that that conversation existed, then I’ll figure out what I’ll do next.”

Abbi Jacobson’s Grand Slam

With her new “A League of Their Own” series, Jacobson swings for the fences.

In the first scene of Amazon Prime’s new A League of Their Own series, Abbi Jacobson’s character, Carson Shaw, is seen breaking into a full sprint alongside a train. She’s just missed her ride, so Carson must hurl her bags on board before taking the leap onto the train herself — whether she has a ticket or not, and despite her disapproving husband who, along with most able-bodied, age-appropriate men of the early 1940s, is off fighting World War II. This leap of faith in herself is driven by Carson’s need to play ball, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t make it to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League tryouts to show her stuff.

Kind of similarly, A League of Their Own, premiering August 12, is Abbi Jacobson’s moment to hit a homer. She is the co-creator, co-writer, executive producer (with partner Will Graham, showrunner of Mozart in the Jungle), and star of the series, and you’ll see the former co-star and co-creator of Broad City take charge — both on the field and off-screen.

“We were having dinner one night in New York in 2017, and [Will] was like, do you want to do this with me?” Jacobson tells Shondaland, recalling the moment Graham first proposed teaming up to turn the well-loved, Geena Davis-starring 1992 Penny Marshall film into a series. “I was in the middle of season four of Broad City, and I could not say no, even though I was fully on another show and had no idea how I was going to do it.”

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Led by Carson and Max (Chanté Adams), the series takes a wider lens to Marshall’s film: It examines race and sexuality in the 1940s; depicts how the team transformed the lives of its players, both on and off the field; and throughout the first season, we see relationships of all varieties form and re-form as the women discover who they are while reckoning with their feelings about themselves, their families, and one another.

“Even from those beginning conversations of us talking about it, we knew we were not trying to remake the movie,” Jacobson says. “We love the movie! It was really about wanting to tell the stories that aren’t told in the movie, or that are hinted at or alluded to. That was really exciting to us, to shift the focus and open up the range of women that we’re talking about so it doesn’t just encompass the one lead that the film portrays. It’s about a generation of women playing baseball.”

The result — much like Jacobson and co-creator Ilana Glazer’s work in Broad City — is an honest exploration of female friendship that walks the line between drama and comedy. It’s also very much a queer show, and a show that addresses the overt racism of the time and place.

“It was very interesting, coming at it from a historical lens,” Jacobson says. “On Broad City, we were as present as we could be, talking about pop culture and political events. Obviously, we were commenting on stuff, but we had the freedom to be fluid. [In A League of Their Own], we don’t just have one queer character in this show; there are a lot. When diving into these stories of queerness and the league in the film, it’s about white women and white-passing women who got to play baseball. But women of color also played baseball — what happens when that door is shut? We were learning more about players like Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan — who Max’s character is inspired by — and about the women who were in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and whose queerness was so kept in secret. Queer people didn’t just appear at Stonewall — we’ve been around forever. What were they talking about? What were they doing? Part of the Broad City-ness [of the show] is to create spaces where they could hang out and be themselves, but also the limitations of society and the world are ever-present. It’s kind of a push-pull. Max and Carson are so connected by baseball and queerness, but a Black woman and white woman being friends in 1943 would’ve been a very unique relationship, so how do we tell that? Where can we tell that? Where is a safe space for that? There are so many questions that go into every scene.”

With that, Jacobson hopes the series will inspire those who don’t feel represented. Just recently, Maybelle Blair, a former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player and the inspiration for Jacobson’s Carson Shaw, came out at the age of 95 during a Q&A for A League of Their Own at the Tribeca Film Festival, which moved Jacobson deeply. “It’s simultaneously one of the most incredible things I’ve been able to be a part of and witness, and it makes me so sad because that’s a long life to not get to be who you are,” Jacobson recalls. “We’ve gotten to be friends with Maybelle over the years. There was a point in time, probably in 2018, when she came out to us. She’s shared so much about what it was like being queer from when she was in the league and what it was like to find it and feel less alone. To see the difference in her since she came out is incredible. She’s so much freer. I feel very lucky to be able to be openly queer and living my life now.”

While Jacobson hopes that the series succeeds in expanding this world both in a historical and fictional context, her attention to authenticity goes beyond the storytelling. A graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art, Jacobson is a trained visual artist, which manifests in the look and feel of all her projects, including A League of Their Own. “I get very intense about the visual branding of the show,” says Jacobson, whose illustrations were featured on Broad City as well as in her books Carry This Book, published in 2016, and I Might Regret This, a book of essays about traveling across the country alone, published in 2018. “Even the title sequence, the patches — I think everything about the show is the show. I was very invested in that on Broad City as well. We hired incredible department heads who are steering these huge ships, whether it’s wardrobe or set design or props, but I really like being involved in all of those aspects, and they’re such a big part of it. Music is huge. Post [production] in general is one of my favorite parts of the process.”

When asked what’s next for her, Jacobson enthuses about writing and directing a film based on a story by Lorrie Moore she just optioned. But writing another book herself might have to wait a little bit. “The book [I Might Regret This] was so personal — I felt really satisfied with that experience,” says Jacobson. “I wrote that for me. I don’t think I’m someone who’s going to churn out a book of essays regularly, but doing that was so satisfying and challenging creatively. I would love to do that again! That book had such a trajectory — it was based on a very pivotal part of my life, which is so similar to Carson in a lot of ways. I’d have to figure out what I’m saying.”

Vanessa Bayer on the First Season of 'I Love That For You'

With her Showtime series, the Emmy-nominated Bayer weaves her love of home shopping into a poignant tale of seeking fame as a cancer survivor.

Vanessa Bayer knows, perhaps better than most, how to take challenging personal circumstances and spin them into comedy gold. The Emmy-nominated actor, writer, and Saturday Night Live alum mined her own experience as a childhood cancer survivor to co-create I Love That for You, the Showtime series she co-wrote, starred in, and produced, and which just celebrated its first-season finale.

Her protagonist, Joanna Gold, still weary of her “cancer kid” youth, is a grown woman living with her parents who scrounges up the guts to audition and become a host for SVN, the home-shopping network that brought her comfort when she was a teen in the throes of her illness. When she fumbles her big debut, Joanna fibs and leans back into her “cancer kid” label for a second chance at the gig. When things start to fall into place, she runs with it.

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When conceiving of the show with her friend Jeremy Beiler, a former SNL writer and I Love That for You’s co-creator, Bayer found relatable fodder in her own experience. “I’ve always loved home shopping and watched it a lot, so I wanted to do something about that world because I just find it to be so interesting and mesmerizing,” Bayer tells Shondaland. “Also, separately, as a teenager, I had childhood leukemia, and I always really wanted to do something about that. I used to exploit it for the perks I would get from it — going into school late, not having to go to gym class, the special treatment that I got. As someone who always loved attention, I got a lot of attention from it, which I thought was an interesting take on a difficult time, but also relatable because I think we all appreciate the special treatment we get, for whatever reason.”

Bayer funneled this inspiration into her character’s plot trajectory. “This character, Joanna, is trying to move past that label and have this new job in this new city and this new life, but ultimately she’s treated like a normal person, and no one’s making any special kind of concessions for her, and that’s sort of shocking to her. So, when she gets fired, she’s like, I know this thing that’s always worked for me and always gotten me special treatment. So, that’s why she lies about her cancer coming back. I always wanted to do something with those two things, so that’s sort of where this show kind of came from. Obviously, it’s very exaggerated, but it’s a relatable feeling a lot of people might have.”

Co-starring alongside comedic juggernauts Jenifer Lewis and Molly Shannon, Bayer proves adept at finding the comedy — and catharsis — in the aftermath of tragedy. “I was 15 when I was actually diagnosed, and now I’m 40, so it’s been 25 years. I really feel like I’ve had some distance, and I have some perspective on it now that I certainly didn’t always have,” she says. “In the pilot, in the hospital room for the [actress] who plays, like, young Joanna, we used actual ‘Get Well Soon’ cards from when I was in high school. Also, I would physically be going through things from when I was sick, revisiting some of the emotions. Joanna’s journey of arrested development, feeling kind of dependent on her parents and then having to break away from that, a lot of that stuff was real for me.”

Vanessa Bayer in I Love That For You.

Jill Greenberg

Of course, being constantly referred to as the “cancer person” at such a vulnerable stage in one’s life can affect one’s outlook profoundly. “It was an eye-opening and intense experience to have at a young age. It did give me a lot of perspective about what’s really important and what’s not important,” Bayer says, adding that on some level, she always knew she’d mine her experience for art. “This might sound insane, but I think I truly was like, ‘I have to do something with this someday. I have to write a book about this. I have to do something with it.’”

Though Bayer always knew she’d find a way to make art out of her experience, she didn’t aspire to be a comedic actor until she started doing sketch comedy at UPenn, though she always loved performing and making people laugh. “I was like one of those little kids who’s always performing for people,” Bayer says. “I did the after-school theater program in middle school and that kind of stuff. I didn’t really perform in high school, but my friends were really funny, and we would sort of do impressions of our teachers. When I was in college, I auditioned for this comedy group, and that’s when I first knew that I wanted to do comedy. But before that, I just really loved comedy, and I loved watching SNL.”

Her list of comedic heroes includes SNL all-stars Chris Farley, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, and her current co-star Molly Shannon. “Working with her on this show was a complete dream come true,” Bayer says, adding that ultimately, I Love That for You is about the pivotal friendship between Joanna and Shannon’s character Jackie, the star host of SVN. “Joanna is learning about friendship and how to be a friend, how different kinds of adult relationships work, and how to nurture those relationships,” says Bayer.

With the sunset of the first season of the series, Bayer can’t wait to think up season two should she get the green light, referring to the experience of having a vehicle of her own as an incredible opportunity to learn and grow as a boss, writer, and performer. “Being in charge, I learned how to make decisions without necessarily knowing if they were right or wrong, but just knowing what I needed to do to make them. It was really incredible.”

In writing for Joanna, Bayer also learned how to draw a line between herself and her character. “This character, who is in many ways inspired by me, is not me. So, I learned how to differentiate between myself and Joanna and know that I might not do a lot of the things that Joanna would do,” she says. “As we wait to hear if we get a second season, we’re figuring out what exactly we would do, but I think we’ve always thought about the big competitor HSN, and what is that world? Would Joanna actually go there, or would she not?”

As for what Bayer is up to next, she lent her voice to DC League of Super-Pets, which comes out at the end of July. Co-starring with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Natasha Lyonne, Bayer plays PB, a pig. “I find that the people who make animated movies, and this one in particular, they’re just so talented,” she says. “It’s just so fun to be a part of someone’s vision of an animated world because they just have such incredible imaginations.” She’s also collaborating with friends on a few different things that remain unmentioned. Her guilty pleasures during her downtime? Sleeping and the Real Housewives franchise. When asked what inspires her, Bayer says TV remains her favorite art form. “Every time I got to go to the Emmys, I’m like, Oh, my God, it’s this character! And that character! Of course, I know they’re real people, but it’s just really exciting for me.”

How to Treat Your Spirituality Like a Fitness Regime

We recognize the importance of making time to keep our bodies and minds in shape, so why not our spiritual side? Here’s how and why a spiritual regimen can enrich your life — no matter what you believe in.

“Self-care” is the motivating buzzword that keeps on buzzing, used to market everything from face masks to the latest fitness craze. Under its influence, we’re relentlessly poked and prodded with reminders of ways to get better, stronger, faster, smarter, prettier, ad infinitum.

But what about our inner selves? We might look great on the outside, but all the planks in the world can’t give us the inner strength we need to give us hope and get us through tough times. Enter spiritual health and practice.

What is a spiritual practice?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “spirit” has many definitions, with the most relevant to this article being the “animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms.” As such, a spiritual practice is something you do on a regular basis to access your own personal concept of spirit — or a sense of connection to yourself or the world — whether you find it on an altar of your own making, in nature, at a nightclub, in a mosque, in a synagogue, or in a church, etc.

But given all that we’ve got going on, is it actually beneficial to make space in our chaotic lives to develop a relationship with our intuition, higher power, God, the Goddess, Allah, G-d, Buddha, or whomever or whatever we might feel compelled to call upon to work on our spiritual lives? Does having a spiritual life even make sense? And if the answer is yes, then why does this aspect of our lives so often go neglected in favor of shallower pursuits of self-improvement?

Why you may not have a spiritual practice — yet

The Rev. angel Kyodo williams, a Zen priest and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, says one common reason people find spiritual enrichment so easy to blow off is that the benefits of a spiritual practice aren’t tangible and may take time to be revealed. “It goes deeper, and there’s not like an instant payoff,” she says. “There’s not somebody that’s just going to say, ‘Now you have a great butt! Now you have a six-pack!’ It’s intangible, so it requires what some people may call faith, patience, curiosity, and an openness to allow something that is far more intangible than most forms of self-care we have evidence of.”

Another possible reason some may balk at the idea of spiritual development is its association with organized religion, but spirituality and religion are, in fact, two different concepts. “Spirituality tends to be more of an individual pursuit. In organized religion, there are rules to follow, and it tends to be much more rigid,” explains Tamara Goldsby, Ph.D., a research psychologist with the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego who studies the impact of meditation on well-being. “If one had a negative experience with organized religion in the past, one may generalize all spiritual experiences to this when, in reality, spirituality is quite different from organized religion. If one believes that the mind, body, and spirit are all connected, then it makes sense for us to integrate a regular spiritual practice, in whatever form suits us, into our lives. One does not need to follow an ideology per se to be spiritual. Connecting to a source greater than ourselves can be a powerful experience, and it reminds us that we are all part of a bigger picture.”

Why people monitor their spiritual health

As many as 30 percent of people identify as spiritual but not religious, says williams. A spiritual practice can give us a sense of agency over our own lives. “No matter what the practice, there is a very deep agreement that we make with ourselves when we have a spiritual practice,” says williams. “We take a sense of navigating our lives into our own hands rather than leaving it to chance, whether that’s by way of our relationship with a higher power through a regular, consistent practice. This agreement with ourselves is one of the most powerful things that we can do to have a sense of agency in our lives.”

How has spirituality fallen so far off our collective radar? “I think because 40 years ago, in the positive efforts and the good attempt to be inclusive, we as a society took religion out of the public square, and with it went the spiritual baby with the bathwater,” says Lisa Jane Miller, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and education and the founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City, and the author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. “We need to basically have a spiritual renaissance. We need to see each other as sacred, with ultimate dignity as souls on Earth, and we need to know each other as spiritual beings, to love and care for ourselves so that we awaken our spiritual brain and use what I call our awakened awareness.”

We need to know each other as spiritual beings, to love and care for ourselves so that we awaken our spiritual brain.

DianaHirsch//Getty Images

The benefits of spiritual health

Miller and a group of researchers have scientifically examined the benefits of cultivating one’s spiritual side, referencing a 25-year-long rigorously peer-reviewed study with findings that show how spirituality is “foundational” to recovery, moving through depression, moving through trauma with post-traumatic spiritual growth, and even potentially girding against subsequent depression. One MRI study her team conducted, published in JAMA Psychiatry and referenced in her book, revealed that individuals at higher risk for depressive illness who prioritized their spiritual lives actually had a thicker cortex in certain parts of the brain, and might be more resilient to the development of a major depressive illness.

In another study, her team examined the brains of those who told stories of feeling a deep connection to the universe, or “spirit.” Regardless of their religious or spiritual affiliation, each subject’s brain activated the same four neural correlates, or brain activity that produces a specific experience. She equates the first “loop” as something she calls “mindfulness plus,” or a spiritually driven awareness of being connected to love, guidance, and not being alone, adding that it activates the “bonding network,” or the same feeling as being held by someone caring for you.

The second neural loop shifts your perception of the world from a narrow one to the big picture. “Instead of being obsessed through a very narrow bowling-alley perception — I’ve got to get this thing I wanted, I’ve got to get that job, I’ve got to get that promotion, I’ve got to get into that graduate school — we shift, and we see a far broader range of life, an abundant life. That’s synchronicity,” Miller explains.

The third lends the recognition that we are all “whitecaps coming from one ocean,” Miller says. “We are magnificently synced and beautifully diverse, and all over different GPS coordinates.”

Miller describes the fourth neural loop as a greater sense of interconnectedness. “I could be walled-off lonely for months in my Covid apartment, and that isolation and depression is real, and still I sense, whether it’s through meditation, or prayer, or nature, I am part of the oneness.”

Interested in exploring your own spirituality? Here’s how to begin

Walk in nature

Something as simple and easy as a short walk in nature for 20 minutes can reboot the spiritual capacity of the brain, says Miller. “The very same wavelength of the awakened brain is a wavelength shared by nature; it’s alpha,” she explains. “Alpha is the wavelength from the Earth’s crust. We awaken the brain when we walk through nature.” But, Miller explains, it’s not enough to just mindlessly saunter by some trees — try to be present and engage with what you experience to feel the benefits. “Don’t just notice how pretty it is,” she says. “Think about the human life cycle. Listen when birds or animals are trying to show you something, and try to give them something back. Try to be in relationship with them.”

It’s not enough to just mindlessly saunter by some trees — try to be present and engage with what you experience to feel the benefits.

Julia Davila-Lampe//Getty Images

Research what resonates for you

When exploring spirituality, williams says she encourages people to “start dating” rather than feeling like they have to commit to one type of practice. Of her own experience, she says: “Be flexible and open. I represent one of the sort of anomalies. I didn’t follow the path of what might have ordinarily been expected out of a Black woman in America. It would be Christianity first, Islam second, maybe Judaism.”

Figuring out what type of spiritual practice works for you will be a process of trial and error. Just be willing to listen to your inner self, which in and of itself is its own kind of practice, and to explore what it is that you feel called to, williams says. “We’re very unique in terms of the structure of our internal life, and what responds to it is in many ways like love,” she explains. “We will respond to things that are beyond logic. People will explain it logically, but at the end of the day, what fulfills us and gives us gratification by way of our spiritual practice is completely ineffable. It’s beyond tangible. It’s not something that is quickly situated in a set of rules and instructions, which is why we are seeing an [upwelling] in the number of people that consider themselves spiritual but not religious. We actually want to have a connection; we don’t want to just slip on the spiritual hand-me-downs of our families and in our lineage. Which is why we should go ‘date.’ When something feels like it calls you, we can both respond, and we can say maybe this isn’t it, giving ourselves a little bit of room for questions not answers.”

Work your spiritual practice into your day

For your spiritual practice to build, consistency is key, says williams. “We have so many distractions, and it is easy for it to evade us,” she says. “Getting our attention to turn to something that has some intangible gratification for us, having a practice and being able to apply our own will to show up for it and to give it some time is one of those ways we can build it and start to actually feel the experience.” She recommends taking your contemplation or spiritual practice time in “small bites,” even if it’s just five or 10 minutes a day. Anchoring your practice to another routine part of your day (right when you get up, after you brush your teeth or work out) can help it stick. “The truth is we are habituated unconsciously to all sorts of other things; we’re habituated to watching Netflix, being on our computers, touching our phones all the time. If we want to have some kind of a balance to the other things that draw our attention and distract us in our lives, and we want to give room for the new lover that is our spiritual practice, we have to actually commit some time to it,” she says.

Change the conversation

Miller says, in exploring your spirituality, it helps to “change your conversation with life” by paying attention to signs and signals that present themselves to you. She explains: “Don’t ask what do I want and how do I get it, but rather ask what is life showing me, what can I learn and give back?” says Miller. “Be open to the dharma that we’re all on this journey. You know how people say to look for signs? People show up, books show up, and we are given gifts — oftentimes through multiple cultures, multiple faith traditions, spiritual and religious practices. Who comes to you? Why did this person speak with me now, just as I started wondering about this and that? Be open to synchronicity and the symbols in life that shift your way forward. Life is not a drop-down menu from which to order what we want. Life is an exquisite journey through which we discover a deeper nature and become more loving and become far more aware of one another.”

Goldsby says spirituality is definitely a journey, and it may take quite a while for someone to find a belief system that resonates for them — but the benefits make it worthwhile. “Think of this as a long-distance run instead of a sprint,” she says. “Important self-discovery takes time, so readers need to be patient with themselves and the process.”

How to Stop ‘Shoulding’ Yourself

Experts give some pointers on how to cultivate more grace and self-compassion so you can truly thrive in life.

A dear friend — a friend I admire for her ability to guide others — recently admitted to suffering from a bout of the “shoulds.” She pointed out that every time she told herself she “should” have done something or “should” be doing something, she was essentially flagellating and shaming herself.

Barbara Barna Abel, a media coach and the host of the Camera Ready & Abel podcast, is the friend I’m speaking of. “We get stuck into this idea of an endless list of things we should do in terms of life, career, how we live our lives, or what we believe in,” she told me. “My feeling is we get stuck in what we should feel and what we should do versus what we want to do, what makes us happy, what we’re good at, and where our passions lie.”

“Shoulds” are an inevitable part of everyone’s self-speak vocabulary, but this can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Barna Abel says the “shoulds” often feel burdensome to her because they imply obligation. “When [we’re] doing something because we feel we ‘should’ and it’s out of obligation, we also start to build resentment toward ourselves, other people, and situations that can lead to depression, a victim mentality, and all sorts of other [negative] things. When we’re doing things because we ‘should,’ we gloss over the idea of choice,” she says.

Kristin Neff, PhD, an associate professor at the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Fierce Self-Compassion, says though the “shoulds” can spur you into action temporarily, over-“shoulding” can carry negative side effects, like reinforcing fears of being unacceptable and a fear of failure. “This actually creates performance anxiety and [feelings of] failure, which undermines your ability to achieve in the long run,” she says, adding that procrastination and performance anxiety can make it harder for you to do your best, have grit, and stay focused on your goals.

A propensity toward a “should” mindset can come from early neural imprinting within fear-driven cultures, says neuroscientist Tara Swart, author of The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain. “Cultures can mean family, society, school, or religion. Even in adulthood, the ‘shoulds’ are about the things you had to do to survive without punishment, which can be literal or be shame, guilt, or humiliation.” Telling ourselves we “should” be doing this or “should” be doing that subconsciously brings up the shame or guilt that would have been the punishment for not behaving as expected during childhood, says Swart.

Though the word “should” in self-talk can seem — and sometimes is — innocuous, it can also signal that we’re being hard on ourselves, and that’s something to be aware of. Negative self-talk can lead us to perceive the world as an “unsafe and punitive place with scarce resources,” says Swart, which can feed into a victim mentality rather than a sense of agency over our lives, and keep us from taking healthful risks.

Positive self-talk can help change your perception of "shoulds."

Ponomariova_Maria

Science recognizes the harsh impact negative self-talk can have on our psyches, outlook, and health. In 2018, Neff, who has conducted tons of research about the power of self-compassion, examined how self-compassion affected academic performance for college students. It was associated with “reduced self-presentation concerns and increased student communication behavior,” implying greater class participation. “Self-compassion allows students to see themselves clearly, accept their mistakes and imperfections, and take action to correct mistakes,” reads the conclusion of the study.

Another randomized field experiment conducted by different researchers found that children with negative competence beliefs would often achieve below their potential in school. They also looked at whether engaging in positive self-talk would benefit the students’ mathematics performance. The researchers found that kids who weren’t all that confident but engaged in encouraging self-talk performed better and effectively “severed the association between negative competence beliefs and poor performance.” It seems they gave themselves permission to succeed by learning positive ways to self-reassure.

Negative self-talk can even take a physical toll on us if we aren’t careful. Swart says it reduces the DOSE hormones: dopamine for reward, oxytocin for bonding, serotonin for mood, and endorphins for the feel-good factor. “It leads to increases in the stress hormone cortisol, which puts our brain in survival mode and doesn’t free up resources for higher brain functions like regulating emotions or overturning biases, including those we have against ourselves,” she explains.

Neff says negative self-talk is often linked to depression and anxiety. “Self-criticism activates the sympathetic nervous reaction, which is your fear response (or your fight-or-flight response), and self-compassion activates the sympathetic response and calms it down,” explains Neff. “If you find a depressed person, they’re almost guaranteed to be very self-critical. A lot of anxiety is caused by constant self-criticism, and anxiety undermines our ability to perform if you’re totally activated.” An activated fight-or-flight response isn’t great for you physically and can contribute to health issues like high blood pressure.

So how can we best coach ourselves through a case of the “shoulds” like Barna Abel did?

Get to why you’re shoulding

Barna Abel says, situation permitting, her first step in quelling the inner “shoulds” is to check in with herself and ask what would it look like to let go of what she thinks she should do and actually start to do what she wants to do. “It’s just stopping and being honest with yourself about your resistance. A lot of times, what gets stuck in the ‘shoulds’ are things that we’re not good at. There are things you may have been putting off because they aren’t things you really want to do, or are things that you may find difficult,” Barna Abel says. Then, actually plot out your options. “Ask yourself: If I knew I couldn’t fail, success was assured, and money was no object, what would happen? This gets you to open up in terms of possibility and alternate solutions,” she adds.

Neff also recommends taking a beat to examine your motives. “A self-compassion break is like hitting the reset button on a computer,” she says. Acknowledge that you’re struggling in some way and validate your own feelings. “Whatever you’re feeling — be it shame or disappointment — voice the negativity and acknowledge the pain with mindfulness,” she says.

Give yourself compassion and grace.’,

Olga Zakharova

Remember our common humanity — and that humans make mistakes

“Compassion, in Latin, means to suffer with this inherently connected compassion,” says Neff. “Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone is imperfect. Tell yourself there’s nothing wrong with me for having this issue. Tell yourself you’re not the only one.”

Give your words a positive spin

Swart suggests getting to the root of what drives your “shoulds” — and making the opposite thought your mantra. For example, swap “I should be famous/employed/rich by now!” for “I am exactly where I’m supposed to be in my life and will continue to work toward my goals.” For another way to redirect negative self-speak, Neff recommends asking yourself if you’d use the same language you use to chastise yourself and direct it at someone you really care about. If the two don’t match, write down what you’d say to your loved one and try saying it to yourself.

Show affection toward yourself

“Physical touch is one of the ways to change the nervous system — it actually helps you calm down and reduces cortisol,” says Neff, who adds that a simple self-soothing gesture, like putting your hands on your heart, is a surprisingly simple and effective way to help you calm down and feel kindness toward yourself.

In closing, Barna Abel says that redirecting her “should” self-talk freed her up to be even more productive. “Letting go of resentment is very personally empowering,” she says. “It really starts to switch the energy from ‘should’ to choice.” And who wouldn’t enjoy more choice?

Courtney Maum’s New Memoir Reminds Us It’s Never Too Late to Find Our Passion

“The Year of the Horses” details Maum’s journey through depression and describes how reconnecting with her childhood love of horses helped her reconnect with herself.

The early pages of Courtney Maum’s new memoir, The Year of the Horses, deftly describes her experience with depression as “an abandoned case shuddering around the black wrap of a baggage belt.” Like tons of women attempting to juggle the demands of a career, a husband, and a young child, she simply didn’t have the time or energy to reckon with her sadness until a wellness-visit questionnaire brought its potential severity to her attention. What unfolds in the following pages of her memoir is an artfully written and deeply relatable account of slogging through what Maum refers to as the “Swamps of Sadness” until reclaiming a long-suppressed passion from childhood — horses, in her case — sparked an unbridled joy we can so easily forget to feel.

Maum is an oft-published essayist and author, and her work includes four novels — Notes From Mexico, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Touch (a New York Times editor’s choice and NPR Best Book of the Year selection), and Costalegre — as well as Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book, which helps scribes do just that. The Year of the Horses is Maum’s first turn at a full-length confessional, and now that the book is out in the world, Maum hopped on a call with Shondaland to discuss her inspiration, her process, and what it means to get personal so publicly.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: You’ve published six books now — a few novels and a book to guide aspiring authors toward publication. What made you decide now was the time to write about your own life?

COURTNEY MAUM: It was a fractured moment because I started it in the wrong genre. I’m not above writing an entire novel and realizing it just needs to be an op-ed. That’s sort of what happened. I started this as a novel, and then I thought, oh, my gosh, I think this is actually just a personal essay. So, I wrote an essay for The New York Times about the experience of learning to play polo, joining a team of mostly teenagers, and being part of a sport that really scared me as a 40-year-old. It was actually the correspondence that I got, mostly from women around my age or older women in their 40s to 60s who said the essay inspired them to go back to ballet or try synchronized swimming — something to prioritize themselves and put their own joy first. So, it was the kindness of strangers, really, that made me think, gosh, maybe I’m on to something. That’s when the seed of the memoir was planted. I was still struggling at that point with my mental health, so I kind of had to get out of the darkness before I could really sit down to write it.

VMS: It can be really hard to articulate what it is that you’re in until you can step away from it, or at least step out of it for a couple of (metaphorical) minutes. What were some of the challenges that you faced in turning the lens toward your own experience? Did you find it intuitive? Or challenging?

...I’ve always felt that if I’m not taking a risk on the page, the writing is not really worth it.

CM: I assumed it would be so different from writing a novel, but that hurt me a little bit in the beginning. I was writing things chronologically and ended up with the driest first draft. It was actually my wonderful editor Masie Cochran who said, in some sense, you have to fictionalize this. What she meant was to get the secret sauce in there, to describe settings the way you would in a novel and meet your reader on the page. For example, there’s this sort of Goldilocks section where I’m trying to find the right barn for me — not just for my personality but mostly for my pocketbook. In reality, I think I went to nine different barns. I thought, because this is a memoir, I need to be totally factual. Instead, my editor said we need to do the Goldilocks thing and narrow it to three. These conversations with my editor gave me the confidence to use the same story skills I always used when writing novels. You’re turning the lens on yourself, but it helps to think of yourself as the narrator. So then, I started doing things like changing my husband’s and my daughter’s names to give them more privacy, but also because I could not write about them with their real names. I started thinking I really need to revisit my childhood, so I’m going to try a double-timeline approach with timeline A in the narrative present, and timeline B is my childhood, and kind of put a quest in, which is a very standard structure for novels. The writing, and revision, and excavation, all of that seems really similar. Where it really became different was in the prepublication stage, having to share the material with people who are in the book, legal considerations — all of that is a totally different animal than novels.

VMS: There’s the whole experience of sharing deeply personal aspects of your own life too.

CM: It’s easy for me because I’ve always felt that if I’m not taking a risk on the page, the writing is not really worth it. I try to do that with fiction also. I have this funny way of writing where I put a word in parentheses if I know that it’s not true enough. On a different day when I have a different kind of energy, I’ll go back to all my parenthesis words and excavate until I can find the truest word or impression. Once I kind of really saw the shape of the memoir and understood what I was trying to communicate, it became a joy, and it was very fluid. But then I had to start sharing it with readers.

There were certainly some things that I shared that my husband was none too pleased to have gone into print. That began a couple of months of conversations, not just with him but with some other people in my family, where things got really interesting. My husband’s recollection of certain events did not match mine. I wanted to honor his perspective but also mine, so ultimately what I ended up doing in the book was including everybody’s perspective. You’ll see, especially in the beginning of the book, I decided to leave all my childhood memories and interpretations and assumptions as they were when I was a child, because even if I got some things factually wrong, they were true to me when I was kid. Toward the middle and end of the book, you’ll see me just flat-out saying I had a discussion with my mom about this, and I got it wrong, or this is how my husband remembers this. I put everyone’s perspectives in without that final touch of I know I’m right. Everyone’s right, even if I don’t agree with my husband or my mom — their memory is their memory. It took a lot of courage to share this with people, but ultimately it resulted in a much more honest book.

VMS: In the book, you interview an author, who said: “I don’t write for catharsis. I don’t write from or through a place of anxiety. I write when I am calm.” You then said you write to keep moving through the “Swamps of Sadness” (the swamps that claimed the horse in The Neverending Story). Did you find the process of writing something so personal cathartic? How has it healed you?

CM: That’s an interesting question. I definitely have agendas with my books, especially with fiction. My first novel was really an attempt to understand infidelity, and the inability to forgive people after an infidelity, because my whole family tree had been kind of broken apart by infidelity. I often wondered what it would look like if they tried to forgive each other. My second book was standing on a soapbox screaming about what on-demand culture has done to our humanity. On a psychosomatic level, when I’m writing, it feels [like] catharsis, but to me it’s really a battle to understand my relationship to the world, and the effect of whatever is going on in the world on myself, and also on women. For me, The Year of the Horses is kind of a call to arms for women to stop telling people they’re fine. We’re asked to bear too much right now. It’s not OK. It’s not fair. Not only should we be angry, but let’s let the ball drop a little bit. Let’s start being selfish instead of always being applauded for being selfless. This is not about self-care — it’s not about Korean face masks at night. It’s about setting aside real time for something, whether you actually want time to try to write a memoir yourself, or maybe you really want to start roller skating — whatever the hell it is — and just prioritize yourself before other people. So yeah, in a certain sense there is something cathartic about this book that is healing some of the anger — obviously not all of it because we keep having reasons to be mad — but the anger of being a woman through the Trump regime and everything that came after it.

VMS: I feel like your book was a story of the radical act of joy in reconnecting with and reclaiming a formative passion that was stunted, and being able to see it through as an adult. How does reconnecting to that joy help you?

CM: I love this question! I know that this happens for so many working women. At some point in our lives, our passion starts to become the thing that we’re probably going to make a profession out of. It starts off as a passion, and you approach it with love and curiosity, but if you have success in that realm, it turns into a profession, and it becomes monetized. In my case, ever since I was 7 years old, writing and reading have been my absolute safest place. Paradoxically, when I started having success and actually realizing my deepest dreams of being published, my little safe house became a glass box. It was no longer a private place. This was a fortunate problem to have, but all of a sudden, I’m working under book contracts, I have editors and deadlines and people expecting things for me, and sales targets to meet. What the horses gave me back was an innocent place free of competition or expectations of success because I’m not going to, you know, be a professional rider. With my writing, I’m in a much healthier place where I have been able, partly from working with independent presses and getting off the commercial train for a little bit, to recapture that magic. It is my job. It is how I earn a living, and I intend it to stay that way, right? But where’s my pure childhood joy? Partly it’s in writing, but now I have the barn. No one’s expecting anything from me. It’s an innocent relationship, just pure.

VMS: Once you became a writer, you described interviewing a horsewoman and weeping immediately thereafter. Was that a visceral reaction to rediscovering the thing that would bring you back to yourself?

CM: Well, it should’ve been, you would think, because I had such a visceral reaction to that, but no, it was years later. It took me a long time. I was just completely convinced that I wouldn’t be able to afford it. I was a freelance writer — I’m still a freelance writer — and I just had it in my head that this was something from my past, when Courtney had a daddy on Wall Street who paid for everything. It felt like a value thing too. I was an artist and certainly didn’t have any examples of people in my tax bracket riding. Once I committed to going back to it, you find your way in. They call us barn rats, people who work off their lessons. I’ve traded press releases and web copy for ring-time riding lessons. You have to understand and know that kind of underground access is available, but I didn’t know that at that time. The flip for me — there’s this scene in the book — was at a 2-year-old’s birthday party. I was really in my head, and this handsome man came in and said, I can’t hug you or anything; I just came from the barn. I got the name of his barn and the number of his trainer, and I think I called her from the party, and that was it. There was no going back. I have not stopped since then.

VMS: It’s like a switch that flips that just changes everything. You weave horse mythology, science, and other really artfully thought out references into the text to draw important connections to horses. Was that something that you set out to do?

CM: It was a learning process. My first draft was mostly chronological diary stuff, so that was a decision after reading my first draft and asking myself how to make it less boring. I know from reading memoir that I really appreciate when we swivel to things happening in the larger world, when the narrator gives us a little breathing room and also when we learn something that both draws deeply into someone’s personal narrative while also educating us about larger things happening in the world around them. It was pretty early on that needed to happen. I think it’s a very meaningful way to write a memoir because it’s inclusive.

VMS: Your book is a celebration of “horse girls.” How are horse girls unique?

CM: I don’t have the adjectives! They are so amazing. They’re so fierce. They’re so determined and passionate and very often feminists — even if they don’t think that they identify as feminists. These are truly women who know that women can do anything. Once you’ve gotten a 1,400-pound beast to leg yield, you can take on the world. Also, the thing that I love about horse girls of a certain age is that these women are 100 percent prioritizing themselves. They’re usually using their own resources to carve out a lot of time to dedicate to something that probably only makes sense for them.

VMS: What’s the most valuable nugget of advice you impart to your students that you wish you had known before writing books?

CM: I guess what I say most often to people is don’t trick yourself into thinking success only looks like one thing. We’re taught to believe, in the literary realm, that success looks like a literary agent, editor, book deal, traditionally published book. Things are so wild and competitive right now, and we had so many incredible tools at our disposal, success might look like taking the reins yourself, self-publishing a book, and controlling the narrative and the way the book is presented to the world. Traditional publishing is incredibly fortunate and an exciting thing, but it is not for the faint of heart. We are, for very little money, expected to be social-media managers, our own PR representatives, our own brand ambassadors, event planners, copywriters, and the authors of these books while also working on whatever the heck is supposed to come next. A lot of people can’t do that without losing the love of craft. So rarely is there actual money, so what the hell is the point? If it’s going to break your joy for writing to try to do it the commercial way, start a new podcast, and prove them wrong. The gatekeepers are not always right. Follow your gut and your joy.

How Leigh Newman Redefines the Wild, Wild West

With her collection of fantastically gritty stories, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” Newman reveals the many faces of Alaska. She talks craft, process, and inspiration with Shondaland.

Writer and editor Leigh Newman’s deft, intelligent storytelling vividly illustrates how life can at once shape and maul a person, and how the tales that express these experiences can nevertheless be told with humor. Her home state of Alaska is more than a backdrop for the gang of complex characters she’s created in her writing — it’s a character in and of itself, confronting each human being on their journey to or within it with its wily, willful nature.

Though Newman is now based in Brooklyn and Connecticut, Alaska is ultimately where she calls home. It’s where she flew in float planes to remote cabins to fish for salmon, where she learned how to shoot a bear if she needed to, and where she learned about what it means to survive and thrive in the wilderness. Her 2013 book, Still Points North, a memoir that mined Newman’s life in Alaska, earned the finalist honor for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and today she balances book writing with several day jobs: She teaches at New York University and works as an editor at large at Catapult Books and as the editor in chief of a new imprint, Zibby Books.

But Newman still found time to translate her Alaskan existence into a new collection of short stories, Nobody Gets Out Alive, which has been named a most anticipated book of 2022 by Vogue, Lit Hub, The Millions, and Oprah Daily. “I will say I have never worked harder on anything in my life — bar none,” Newman tells Shondaland. “I put it all out on the line.”

Newman recently hopped on a call with Shondaland to discuss the inspiration behind Nobody Gets Out Alive, her process as a writer, and the true nature of Alaskans.

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VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: How did this book begin for you? You published a few short stories first.

LEIGH NEWMAN: The first story I wrote was “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” I had written a memoir and was sitting there trying to write a novel, real hard. I would get up to somewhere around 70 pages and would just go, “I can’t do it. I don’t believe these people or the scenario.” I realized I had published a bunch of stories right after grad school — we’re talking like 2004 or 2006 before I switched to almost exclusively nonfiction writing — but I did not know how to find my way to an end. I would always sort of panic. One problem was I was not writing about Alaska. When I first got out of college, I wrote Alaskan short stories, like in 1994, and then I don’t know what happened. I dropped it. I was trying to figure out who I was and trying to find somebody who loved me. I mean, I do not come from writerly folk. My grandmother was a Native American woman who lived on a reservation and was literally illiterate. I was just trying to make money, and then I would write in the evenings in the ’90s, in my 20s.

I guess I’m very impressionable. I looked around me, and people were writing about the suburbs and stuff — I never lived in the suburbs! When I wrote my memoir about Alaska, that was a real breakthrough for me. I knew this next project or the stories would be about Alaska, but I’d never really figured out how to write a story, and that always made me frustrated. So, I just set my sights on writing a good story. Writing a story felt doable. You know what I mean? It was 20 pages, not 500 pages. It seems achievable when you’ve got two kids and are single parenting.

VMS: The scope of a novel is a huge thing to chew off.

LN: It’s also easier. When you write stories, you’ve got to start over, and over, and over again each time, developing all these characters. I didn’t know that, or I would have stuck with a novel. I read every book of stories I could get my hands on and forbid myself to read anything else. I read them, I guess, the way screenwriters approach screenwriting: How do they organize time? What are the different models? It’s all pattern recognition like music, right? I know I had sentences, but I didn’t have form. I knew I had place. I was looking at everybody who’s written a short story in the past 30 to 50 years. I wrote one story called “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” which was later published in Harper’s. There was this one moment when I was in this remote cabin, and I realized I had to pick up all the stuff that was at the end and move it to the first third of the book. It’s like cracking a puzzle; you just start tinkering and see all these possibilities. With “Howl Palace,” I always wanted to have a story where the ending did something totally different, like you were building up to something, and you divert. I always knew I’d wanted to do a flashback, but at that point I’d already written six stories. So, I just tried it, and it worked. A lot of what writing is is being vaguely aware of opportunities and putting them in your mind for when the opportunity is right.

VMS: Do you outline? Or do you just sit down and channel these stories?

LN: I don’t outline anything. I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I’m an extremely instinctual writer. I don’t believe in being erudite. That doesn’t mean I’m not a craftsman or an artist, but I’m not a philosopher, and I probably wouldn’t be very good at chess, because I’m not strategizing, necessarily. I’m just in a moment. The stories are kind of happening to me. The only way I’m able to start a story is with some really interesting line. I can’t even start until I have the voice. When I have the voice, I have the person. When I have the person, I have the situation.

VMS: You just go where the story wants to take you.

LN: That’s right. I don’t want to plan it. There’s something that’s got to be alive in a creative process as you’re writing; otherwise, you get bored and drop out, or at least I do. If I already know what’s going to happen, what’s the point of writing it?

VMS: I think it’s also fascinating with the way you weave characters in and out of one another’s narratives in the periphery. As you’re reading, you’re like, “Katrina? Is that the Katrina from before?” It’s just so gently revealed in the narrative; it’s never announced. Was that a conscious choice?

LN: I wrote the first story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” and was really fascinated by Janice, so I wrote a story for Janice. She popped up in a story called “Slide and Glide” at a dinner party, and so did her husband. I would think about the characters, and by that point I was so in love with them that I would want to give them another story that was all their own. A lot of it had to do with me wanting to create this fictional lake where everybody lived in suburban Anchorage. I grew up on a lake just like this with float planes in the backyard, helicopters in the backyard, and everybody flying in and out of what we would call “town,” Anchorage. It’s only a city because it’s Alaska and we have no other big city. When you have a small town and a lake where everybody lives, that creates a little world, right? A world where people have these big houses, and there’s a certain kind of bravado by outdoorsmen and their going in and out of the wilderness and suburbia. They go to Target to buy all their supplies so they can go on a big, huge sheep hunt on a mountain. It’s a very specific world, and when you live in it, everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s in each other’s business — this person has an affair, and it affects this marriage, right? Or this person gets in a fight with that other person, and that affects everybody’s business on the lake and what happens to their kids and how they grow up. There were a lot of, like, crazy parties and shenanigans! I was too young when the pipeline was being built, but all the parents used to talk about doing piles of cocaine, and all this money, and hot tubs. These were people that had never had money before. They came to Alaska, and it was like a gold rush of oil money, and they built these big houses. The kids were running wild and getting the ducks drunk. Obviously, that’s very cruel, but at the time in the ’70s, it wasn’t. These big, strong, macho dads who were pilots and dentists were flying us out to the wilderness where there was no cell phone. If something went down, which it frequently did, you were on your own.

VMS: Some of your characters get stuck on a remote site. Did you ever get stuck for a long spell?

LN: Way more than once. These stories are [true]! If your refrigerator is full of experiences that you’ve had, you can just sort of pick the feeling. One time, my dad flew me and my grandmother out — she was a really, really good outdoorswoman and really good fisherwoman. My nana and I used to fish in our underwear! We were hundreds of miles from any kind of civilization or help, and my dad decided that something was wrong with the plane. He decided to risk it and fly back to Anchorage to get it fixed. I must’ve been 6 or 7. He did not come back! He left us with a cooler of pop, two fishing rods, and two shotguns in case we got attacked by a bear, which was a very real possibility. We just kept fishing, and fishing, and fishing, but it got later, and then after a certain point, you know, in a float plane, you can’t fly after the sun goes down. I think we ended up out there for 12 hours. Luckily, the sun doesn’t go down until 1:00 in the morning. He eventually came and got us in the middle of the night.

VMS: Alaska is such a powerful backdrop for your narrative — obviously, it’s your home, and you love it. Your book is like a love letter to it.

LN: I’m so glad you said that because it is exactly the language I had in my own mind. I was writing a love letter to my childhood, to the real Alaska. When I’ve seen TV shows, these people are not Alaskans. Alaskans go to the dentist. They’re not buying a tug and the tug doesn’t work. They’re very aware of, like, surviving and being careful. They tend to be very, very smart — so smart, they can’t get along with people in the Lower 48. And a lot of them are self-made, very entrepreneurial, and the women dress beautifully. I’m always embarrassed when I go home to Alaska, because I look like I fell out of a garbage can. The ladies come out with a cashmere outfit and beautiful lipstick because they love to go out to a beautiful dinner. I wanted to show men and women that were real and complicated, not just the frontier narrative. I wanted to write about the women, mostly. That was a very conscious thing because it always ends up being just men’s frontier stories. I wanted to have some parts of native culture too, but not speak for that culture.

VMS: In “Valley of the Moon,” you write, “Like most people in Alaska, we come from dirt and sorry circumstance,” and I thought that was such a powerful line.

LN: Our family was a little different. My mother actually came from sorry circumstance but sort of raised herself up into a fancy lady. By the time she had made it to Anchorage, everybody thought she was the classiest lady in town. She was impeccable. I posted a picture of us when we were living in a camper van. My dad was a little bit of what he called “a goddamn independent.” He had gone to Berkeley and to Johns Hopkins. He believed in education and got himself a good one. But a lot of the families around us were self-made. I was always hanging around my dad and all his friends, listening to everybody tell stories. The dads would always be over there with cigars, and some Roman candles and some whiskey, and they’d be shooting the shit, and I loved to listen to it. It’s always imprinted on my brain, and that’s a lot of the voice I write in.

VMS: You write from a child’s POV also.

LN: I wanted to write in every voice. I wanted it to be a world with every kind of person in it. I was focusing on the stories of the women of Alaska because it’s hard there. It’s literally a man’s world. That has not changed, the kind of sexism, the struggle for identity, work, and respect, and those things are a very real thing. At the same time, women in Alaska are hardcore. I remember my stepmother pointing a gun and shooting a hedgehog. They’re there for the adventure too. But domestic violence is very real thing, and sexual assault, and rape just plain out. I’ve seen so many strong and exciting women go out for a glass of wine, and we’ll end up in some situation where some drunk guy comes over and berates us or won’t walk away. Mountaineers or state senators or totally famous lawyers will literally shrink because the consequences will be severe. I forget because I don’t live there full-time, and I’ll be like, “Get away from us, you idiot!” and my friends are like, “Shut up and sit down; the guy’s drunk. He probably has a firearm on him, he’ll meet us in the parking lot, and something not good is going to happen.” That’s a real thing. Like what do you do when you’re queer in a world full of men? A lot of our lives are negotiating these things, pulling it together, and getting over them. It’s not exceptional to go through all this s--t — this is what life is. How you rebound will define the quality of your life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s (About) Time for Alexandra Billings

The formidable talent chats with Shondaland about her new memoir, “This Time for Me,” and exploring what it means to put it all out there on the stage and on the page.

An accomplished stage and screen actor, singer, AIDS and LGBTQ+ activist, and renowned acting teacher, Alexandra Billings has kicked down countless doors to get where she is. The first trans actor to conquer roles like Mama Rose in Gypsy and Mrs. Linde in A Doll’s House, Billings, in conversation, exudes a familiar warmth through a megawatt smile and a maternal mentor vibe. It’s the feeling she’s inspired time and time again with pivotal characters like Davina on the Golden Globe, SAG, and Emmy award-winning series Transparent, and as a real-life teacher — Billings is an assistant professor of acting at USC — who nurtures young talent.

With a penchant for musical theater from a very young age (her father was a music teacher and the musical director of the L.A. Civic Light Opera), Billings transitioned from the Chicago drag scene to the Chicago theater scene before taking to the big and small screen in both transgender and non-transgender female roles on How to Get Away With Murder, Grey’s Anatomy, and the feature film Valley of Bones. She was also the subject of a 2009 Emmy Award-nominated PBS documentary, Schoolboy to Showgirl: The Alexandra Billings Story.

Fresh off a turn as Madame Morrible in Wicked on Broadway, Billings Zoomed with Shondaland a while back from her home in Los Angeles to chat about her page-turner of a memoir, This Time for Me, which takes you along on her journey of self-discovery with sensitivity, raw openness, and honesty. You understand how it feels to be misgendered as a child; what it means to suffer abuse; what it means to survive addiction; what it means to be diagnosed with AIDS when it was basically a death sentence; what it means to survive; what it means to recognize the love of your life at 14; and, above all, what it means to choose life and live it to the fullest.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: I sank right into your book! I can see how your story will help so many. How did you decide now was the time to write your memoir?

ALEXANDRA BILLINGS: During the pandemic, my spouse said I should write my life down. I talked to my friend Joanne Gordon [who is credited as a collaborator on Billings’ memoir], who was my teacher and is now part of my family, and said, “You and I work so well together; I’m just going to write stuff.” She said, “You write on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all the time — just write like you do, and we’ll put it together.” So, that’s basically what I did; I just wrote stories, and she put it all together, because it was a mess. She made it linear, cohesive, and she corrected stuff. Otherwise, it would be a jigsaw puzzle. She was instrumental in the shape of this book.

VMS: In terms of the narrative, did you plan on it being sequential? Did you mess around with the approach?

AB: It’s meant to be read from beginning to end, but it’s so big. I wrote it so you could go to any essay and just read the essay, put it down, and pick it up a couple of weeks later, and read it again. That’s the way my brain works, in the abstract. That’s the way I read. I married someone who reads a book from beginning to end. I just don’t do that. If it’s not I Love Lucy, I’m just bored.

VMS: You’ve dealt with a lot in your life — physical and emotional abuse as a child, and violence during sex work and in the throes of addiction. Was the process of parsing through all those painful moments healing or cathartic for you in any way?

AB: No [laughs], it was a terrible experience! I used to talk to Larry [Kramer, the playwright and AIDS activist who wrote The Normal Heart; Billings played Nancy Reagan in Kramer’s political sendup Just Say No] all the time about this. Larry was a prolific writer. Even though the writing process was painful for him, there was a sense of catharsis. That didn’t happen for me, to be honest. It was very difficult to do. Then I had to do the Audible and had to say it all over again! I am happy I did it. Do you know what’s interesting? I think what’s happening — I think; I don’t know — is that the catharsis is happening now. Piece by piece. It’s bizarre that I’m able to physically look at my life in this thing.

VMS: It’s in print and out of your body now.

AB: And you can hold it. It’s very metaphorical that I can hold my own life in my own hands. When people ask me about it and I talk about things that happened, I’m not weeping or falling apart or shattering into a million pieces. So, I think the catharsis is maybe coming now.

VMS: You buried so many of your friends and loved ones when AIDS first hit in the mid-to-late ’80s, before receiving your own diagnosis in the mid-’90s. What do you wish younger people understood about what it was like to survive that time?

AB: Fascinatingly, I think we have an entire generation right now that really understands global trauma. We have people behaving very badly, and then we also have people shutting themselves up in their own houses, still afraid to go out. Just show someone a mask, and they have a visceral reaction to it, whatever it is. Whereas it used to be very difficult for me to go, “We kept a lot of bodies in trucks,” I can now say, “Remember when we saw that news item when we put bodies of the dead in ice trucks? Multiply that by 10, and that’s what we were going through.” So now, I don’t have to explain as much as I used to, strangely, because we all have a mutual dialogue of trauma.

VMS: The parallels now present themselves in a way the world at large understands.

AB: What’s really important to understand is when Covid happened and the white, cis, heteronormative patriarchy got sick, we had a vaccine in a year. When the queer and the trans people got sick almost 35 years ago, we still don’t have any of that. That needs to be said loud and clear.

VMS: You’ve suffered a lot of trauma, which led to addiction. Being on the other side of that now, how does sobriety serve your art?

AB: When anything happens to me in my professional life, no matter if I say yes or no to it, there is a sense of gratefulness that I’m even being asked. It’s only when people behave badly that I get very shocked. I’m 60 years old, and I’m still shocked when people behave badly! But I always try and go in very grateful with my feet on the ground. Sobriety has given me the sense of balance to practice that.

Alexandra Billings at the Equality California Los Angeles Equality Awards 20th Anniversary event.

Amanda Edwards//Getty Images

VMS: The way you fell into acting was amazing. One of your friends, Chili, encouraged you to audition for Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which led you toward an acting career. If you could go back in time and meet yourself while you were working in drag at Club Victoria, or even as a young actor in Chicago theater, what advice would you give yourself?

AB: I think I’d say, “You’re right. Keep going. Don’t listen to those people. They don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re fine.” The big thing for me, and it’s still true to this day, is we don’t have any representation. Trans people don’t have anyone that we can point to and say, “There I am.” When you don’t see yourself represented in the artistic world, you don’t see yourself represented in any other world. Art is the reflection of the human experience, so if we don’t see ourselves, or hear our stories, or hear our voices, other people don’t, which is why there are over 100 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in our country right now, and at least half of them are targeted toward trans people. The reason that’s true is because they don’t know who we are. Some trans people say they hate us — I don’t think they hate us — I think they don’t know us. You can’t hate what you don’t know. They may not understand us, see us, or get us, but that’s why we have to create more opportunities. My whole life as a young actor, I took anything. I learned that when I was a kid. My dad was important in my young life. I cleaned the stage, helped people put on their makeup, made posters — I did everything in the theater. I’ll do anything — I don’t care what it is. Because what matters is we create more dialogue for everyone so that all of us can have a conversation.

VMS: In the book, you describe your relationships with people like Larry Kramer and some pivotal conversations you’ve had encouraging you to push forward and advocate for more visibility. As you now have your own production company, what are you working on that reflects all that you’ve learned?

AB: The book for me begins and ends in very specific moments in my life. It begins with my professional career at what I thought at that point was the pinnacle, which is receiving this award (the Golden Globes’ Best Television Series — Comedy or Musical, for Transparent), and it ends with my students. The journey for me was becoming what I thought fame and fortune would bring me, to becoming a student of the human experience. The whole book is about me gathering these teachers in my life, just like Dorothy does as she gathers teachers as she goes down the yellow brick road. In the end, Glinda tells her she had the power to go home all along, and Dorothy’s like, “What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?” Glinda says, “If I did, you wouldn’t have believed me.” In my opinion, I had to experience all of these hurts so freedom would make more sense to me. For me, it’s all about how best can I gather all of the lessons, including Larry’s, and repeat them in my head. It’s not just about the famous people I’ve met in my life; it’s people you’ve never heard of who have also been my guides.

VMS: I think your book is ultimately also a love story about Chrisanne, your wife! (They met in high school, at 14.)

AB: When you’re like 10 or 15 years in, we realized we weren’t paying attention to each other. We knew we had to figure it out. We had to see each other more clearly. As young married people, it’s a very different marriage than when you’re older married people. I’m trans, she’s cis, there’s a gender thing between the two of us anyway, we have conversations about it all the time, so our lives in that way don’t follow the normal marriage path. As you know from reading the book, I’ve done some pretty stupid things in my life, but the smartest thing I’ve ever done is marry that human being.

VMS: Tell me how teaching has changed your life. You went back and got a master’s!

AB: It was horrible! The program that I went through was very specific. It was a pedagogical program where master teachers taught other teachers how to teach. It was fabulous! It changed my teaching exponentially. It brought me technique, it brought me a foundation, it gave me a language I never thought I would ever need or have. It allowed me to explain this thing that I do in a very cohesive way. When I went in, I’d already been teaching for 30-plus years.

VMS: What nourishes you the most about teaching?

AB: My favorite thing about teaching is when I get in the room, a student comes up to me, asks me a question, and I have absolutely no idea what the answer is! [Laughs.] Not a clue! Every part of me goes, “You’re a phony; you’re going to be found out; run, Alex!” I have to stay with them, and I have to see them, not teach the room, but I have to teach the person in front of me and see them in a way I was never seen in any classroom. I then begin to learn how to be kinder, more compassionate, and quick. I have to be able to say to myself, even if I don’t know the answer, it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” It’s okay to say, “Let’s find out together.” It’s okay to say, “Let’s keep exploring.” It’s okay to live in the question. You don’t have to have all of the answers. Nobody’s got all of the answers. Those are my favorite moments — when they teach me.

VMS: Do you have a dream role that you want to play?

AB: Oh, yes! I’ve been saying it for a year now, so I’m just going to keep saying it: the first transgender Mame on Broadway. Somebody needs to make that happen. I love that score, I love the story, and I also believe that Mame is certainly a character that could be transgender. Her brother, her whole family alienates her from a young age; she has all of these eclectic, beautiful, fabulous friends from all over the world; she dresses impeccably, and she’s constantly in drag, constantly switching her wigs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and she innately understands the sense of chosen family. This is what cis women always have a problem with: When that little boy walks into Mame’s life, she has this big life — why all of the sudden is she the mother? Any marginalized human understands immediately why that’s true. Chosen family is the heart of that show. When that little boy walks into Mame’s life, Mame sees herself and goes, “That’s it. I see you. Let’s hang out.”

VMS: You wrote: “The rules erased me. I had no place in art or education or history or casual conversation.” Hollywood has come a long way but still has so far to go in terms of trans visibility and representation. What change would you like to see?

AB: I would love to see transgender stories where their transness is secondary to the plot. I’d love to see younger trans people star in shows. I’d love to see more shows that are educational, or with trans, nonbinary kids. I’d love to be able to walk into Hollywood and have this white patriarchy say, “We really need to work. Do you know where we can get some work?” It would be great if all the white men were sort of banging on our door going, “Please, we need to be leads in shows.” That would be great. When marginalized people, Black women, Latinx humans, people who are living in wheelchairs, people who can’t hear or see — when all of those marginalized humans are running Hollywood, I’ll be happy.

VMS: After people read your book, what do you hope they come away with?

AB: I hope they understand that this journey is filled with gifts that are surprises. That gifts don’t always come in the most neatly wrapped packages. It’s not about the end result, that it’s about the journey. The joy for me was the real surprise even through the tragedies, because I lost people. An end-of-life care nurse wrote a beautiful book I once read from cover to cover with stories about all of these people she helped pass through this world into the next. One of the things she said at the end was just know that at no time did anyone she helped transition ever say, “Gee, I wish I’d stayed more at the office,” or “Boy, I wish I had worked longer hours, away from my family.” Nobody ever said that. The thing that most people said was “I wish I had called my son” or “I wish my wife and I had talked more.” Or “I wish I had gone on that trip around the world.” Do the thing that brings you the most joy. You don’t need to be frivolous or irresponsible, but do the thing that brings you the most joy because, in the end, all of us are going to leave the planet through the same portal, whatever it is that you believe. So, why not leave with a joyful noise?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Poly Styrene Still Deserves to Be Heard

With the punk rock pioneer now immortalized in her daughter Celeste Bell’s biopic, “I Am a Cliché,” here’s why you should get to know Poly’s music and her story.

“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think, ‘Oh, bondage, up yours!’
One-two-three-four!”
— X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”

Though her late-’70s punk band, X-Ray Spex, released but a handful of infectious singles and two albums, including the seminal Germfree Adolescents, lyricist, singer, songwriter, and feminist Poly Styrene’s influence springs eternal through the countless artists she’s inspired, both during her life and after her passing. An impassioned dervish in braces and Day-Glo, Poly — who designed all of her clothing and the band’s logos and album covers — understood full well what branding yourself meant before there was such a thing as branding yourself. And she did it all with no regard for the male gaze.

Like many prophetic artists, Poly’s tumultuous life was driven by her sensitivity, creativity, and the complex, heartbreaking, and triumphant experiences she endured to make her mark on the world. The first woman of color to front a successful rock band in the U.K., Poly was born Marianne Elliott-Said in the late ’50s to a Scottish-Irish mother and a Somali father. She was raised in the gritty Brixton section of London and, because she was biracial, was cruelly and consistently made to feel like an outsider from a very young age. At around 19, she assumed the identity of Poly Styrene, formed X-Ray Spex, and busted into the British punk scene, her unique voice amplifying cerebral poetry that tackled postmodernism, sexism, and consumerism.

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Tragically, it wasn’t long before the frenetic punk life triggered and worsened her symptoms of bipolar disorder, leading to a series of nervous breakdowns and hospitalizations that led Poly to opt out of the music business in her mid-20s, soon after her daughter, Celeste Bell, was born.

Poly Styrene died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 53, but Bell has become the gatekeeper of her legacy with Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, a powerful, award-winning documentary she co-wrote, co-directed, narrates, and appears in.

Using ample archive footage of Poly, Bell retraces her mother’s footsteps to tell her story, while punk and post-punk luminaries like singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry, journalist Vivien Goldman, designer Vivienne Westwood, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and Bikini Kill/Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna lend their voices to connect the dots of Poly’s influence and experience.

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Ruth Negga almost eerily assumes the voice of Poly, reading excerpts from the singer’s journals and lyrics. The actress joined the project after literally running into Bell in the street. “We ended up chatting and had some drinks. It was really great because it turned up that she was a fan of my mum,” Bell explains. “She found my mum to be an inspirational character. We needed a voice different from mine to include all my mum’s diary entries and represent her voice, and the first person that came to my mind was Ruth.”

The film was the natural evolution after Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story, a book Bell published in 2019 with fellow writer Zoë Howe. While rifling through her mother’s archives and ephemera, Bell realized there were many people who might relate to various aspects of her story. “Being biracial at a time when there were very few biracial children and it was really frowned upon, my mother experienced a lot of direct racial abuse and violence, and it was very, very difficult,” Bell tells Shondaland on a call from London. “She had this feeling of being an outsider and kind of an outcast in society. When you feel like that, obviously it can be traumatic, and it was — but it can also fuel some anger. My mom was able to channel her anger, but she also had this wonderful, unique perspective of society because she was kind of on the outside. Her writing with social themes really set her apart from the other punks of that generation. She was kind of on another level in terms of her lyrical output.”

Talk about being ahead of her time and on another level — songs like “I Am a Poseur” could be construed as a psychic prediction of today’s obsession with social media:

“I am a poseur and I don’t care, I like to make people stare
I am a poseur and I don’t care, I like to make people stare
Exhibition is the name, voyeurism is the game
Stereoscopic is the show, viewing time makes it grow
Grow, grow, grow, grooow
I am a poseur and I don’t care, I like to make people stare
I am a poseur and I don’t care, I like to make people stare
My facade is just a fake, shock horror no escape
Sensationalism for the feed, caricatures are what you breed
Breed, breed, breed, breeeed”

Remember, this song was written in the late ’70s. “There were these really important themes relevant to today,” Bell says, aptly describing her mother’s lyrics as “dystopian fiction in 2-to-3-minute punk rock songs.” She continues, “My mother was creating a whole world, and Poly Styrene was a character. She was able to make predictions about where things would end up, and of course her predictions were really accurate. She was one of those people who could pick up on trends and see where they were going. Maybe in another life, she would’ve been a trend forecaster, whether they were trivial things like fashion or when it was geopolitics and scientific advances.”

Though Poly was a punk pioneer, Bell says her mother was more of a hippie at heart. “A lot of her ideas about natural living, going back to the land, those are the things that really informed her to a large extent. A lot of her critique of consumerism came from those early experiences where she was in communities rejecting the norms. She was not ‘anti’ anything. She was just observing what was happening and remarking on it. But she didn’t have any solutions. She really disliked preachy lyrics.”

Poly Styrene

Falcon Stuart

As seen in the film, the brittle punk scene and music press could be cruel, dismissive, and abrasive to Poly, and a series of difficult events prompted her to step out of that world almost as quickly as she’d entered it. “When my mum was a little girl, she dreamed of being famous, but the dream is always different than the reality,” Bell explains. “Being in the limelight and having all that attention just wasn’t for her. She wasn’t suited in terms of her personality. Ultimately, my mum was a very genuine, real person, and she found herself in a very superficial, unreal world. She was so sensitive and had a tendency toward anxiety, and early bipolar disorder was manifesting in her teenage years. People started to deal with her as this character she created rather than the person that she was. That created a deep disconnect for her mentally.”

After a mental-health crisis (when Bell was little), Poly opted to hearken back to her hippie roots by releasing a folk album, Translucence, and moving with Bell to a Hare Krishna sanctuary in England called Bhaktivedanta Manor. “I think she was just overloaded and saturated and fed up with punk,” Bell remarks. “I think she felt like she lost herself during that period. The only way she could piece things back together was to leave the spotlight. At that point, she decided to make an acoustic album because she wouldn’t have to tour or perform live. She wanted to do a studio album that she didn’t really promote. Obviously, it didn’t do well, but my mum was quite happy to retire at a very young age.” Sadly, mental breakdowns and bipolar disorder continued to derail the artist for many years, making it difficult, and at times impossible, for her to raise Bell. Toward the end of her life, Poly found a regimen that seemed to work and regained some equilibrium, even releasing another album (Generation Indigo) and performing her songs with Bell (who once fronted a ska-punk band in Madrid) at one point before cancer took her life.

For X-Ray Spex fans and other human beings alike, I Am a Cliché has much to say about what it means to move through the world as a sensitive artist who wears her soul on her sleeve. It also has much to say about what it means to move through the world when moving through the world is challenging. Bell gave a lot of careful thought to what she would share about her experience as the daughter of someone with, at times, severe mental illness.

Poly Styrene and Celeste Bell

Tony Barratt

“I was as open as I could be. I think it’s really important because often we feel great sympathy in society for those who suffer from mental illness, but the children of the people who suffer, their stories are often neglected,” Bell says. “It’s very difficult for them to speak out about their experiences because it can be really unbelievably challenging for children to have to deal with parents that may not be able to look after them properly. It’s something that we should be talking about, but it’s a really tricky subject. So, I think it was important to be honest about those challenges.”

Now that the film is out in the world, Bell says she’s been getting warm and appreciative feedback from both new fans of her mother’s music and the children of parents who suffer from mental illness. Though we’ve come a long way, she wishes there was a greater societal understanding of the realities of bipolar disorder. “From my perspective, just purely in my case, I think there is probably not that much understanding about how severe and disabling bipolar disorder can be. We need to see all mental illness as a disability. My mother could never hold down any kind of regular job — that would be completely unfeasible for her. We’ve gotten very good at talking about mental illness, but there’s a lot of practical work that needs to be done to make sure we aren’t neglecting these people and letting them fall through the cracks of society.”

As emotionally challenging as it was, Bell found the process of making the film cathartic. “It’s been five years of my life — a long time!” she says. “If I spent that long in therapy, I would’ve resolved a lot of things. On a practical level, one of the things I had to do was collect my thoughts and write about my experiences. If you’ve had challenges in your life and you can’t speak to a therapist for whatever reason, writing everything down is a great practice.”

The Many Voices of Sarah Jones

The Tony winner chats with Shondaland about the SXSW premiere of her film “Sell/Buy/Date,” the importance of discussing sex work, and what it means to “do the work.”

With a Tony and an Obie already under her belt, multitalented multi-hyphenate Sarah Jones is now making her SXSW debut with the premiere of her new film, Sell/Buy/Date, which she stars in, co-wrote, produced, and directed and is based on her 2016 pre-pandemic, sold-out off-Broadway show of the same name. Referred to by Jones as an “unorthodoc,” Sell/Buy/Date uses interviews and monologues as it follows her and the handful of multicultural characters she so deftly brings to life (among them an 85-year-old Jewish bubbe, a white sex-work-studies major, a “dude” driver called Rashid, and a half-Puerto Rican, half-Dominican women’s rights advocate) on a journey to better understand how sex work is impacted by stigma, race, power, criminal justice, sexism, and class.

The film is quite an undertaking considering these are tremendously layered and complex topics. As such, the approach Jones takes in making Sell/Buy/Date — which boasts Meryl Streep as a producer — as depicted in the film itself, is also layered and complex. For context, in real life and in the movie, Jones experienced some very real social-media backlash when, after word got out she’d be bringing Sell/Buy/Date to the big screen, sex workers began expressing concern that their voices wouldn’t be considered in the making of the film.

In the end, though, Jones sought to ensure that Sell/Buy/Date does make these crucial voices heard. After earnestly processing her almost-cancellation in the film, Jones, her crew of characters, and a few familiar faces along the way (like Broad City’s Ilana Glazer) embark on a mission to talk to sex workers of various cultural backgrounds and life experiences. The finished product is, indeed, an enlightening “unorthodoc” that takes a sensitive, meta approach to both sex work and cancel culture.

Just before boarding a flight to premiere the film, Jones spoke with Shondaland about the ins and outs of bringing her vision to the big screen.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: When did you first understand that you wanted to be a writer and performer?

SARAH JONES: I was probably preverbal! It’s always been like knowing my own name. I have a sense of wanting to tell stories and a sense of almost urgency about it. I have one very specific perspective that only I have, just like writers who have inspired me since I was little. This is probably taken from a really butchered Rilke quote, but you write because you must. You write because if you don’t, you feel like you’re not even alive. I think I’ve always felt that way.

VMS: It’s just how you came into the world. Some people are tall. Some people are short. Some people are writers.

SJ: Some people are tall writers!

VMS: Some are short! I watched a performance online that you did years ago at The Moth. In it, you said all the characters that you channel were inspired by people you know. When did you realize you could mimic accents so impeccably?

SJ: Again, I have to credit childhood. Basically, I have no training except my wonderfully eccentric, multi-character, multiracial — I should have said multicultural, but multi-character is probably more accurate — family. Growing up was like living in the theater with a larger-than-life tableau of these figures who were forces of nature. That’s the best way I can put it. I heard someone say recently, “I’m a strong flavor.” My family is nothing but strong flavors, and it happens that those flavors are like Pickapeppa Sauce, which is Jamaican, or like gefilte fish [a Jewish delicacy]. They’re strong! I just couldn’t help but marinate in all of those flavors, and they all came alive within me.

VMS: In that performance at The Moth, you tell a story about how a couple of cops saw you and a friend out walking on the street in Los Angeles and assumed you were sex workers. Then a British accent comes out of your mouth and derails them. Do you use accents in your work to influence the food for thought you’re serving?

SJ: I feel like you’re picking up on the Pickapeppa in here! And the horseradish! That’s it! When you think about the world we live in, there’s a musicality to how we all sound in the different languages that we’ve all picked up, whatever our backgrounds. When I was growing up in New York, there was even more of a sense of distinct accents and people who are descended from them. I think it’s akin to kids who grow up in a home where they hear music played all the time, and it just starts to become a part of how they hear. For me, everything is a multilayered story, and the accent is sort of a portal into so much more about who we are, migration, and where we’re going. So, yeah, I can’t tell a story without thinking about that layer of music. Human music!

Jones as three different characters in Buy/Sell/Date.

Sarah Jones

VMS: With Sell/Buy/Date, you and your array of characters dig deep into the varied perspectives women have about sex-work legalization or “decrim” (decriminalization of sex work) and its potential impact on white women versus Black and Indigenous women and women of color. What inspired you to tackle this important issue?

SJ: There are so many reasons. That Moth story that I told about being pulled over walking while Black, as they say, with a friend who is a Latinx Mexican American woman from L.A., who lived out here all her life. She was like, “Yeah, girl. This is what we go through!” You can’t set foot out of your car because there’s this implicit idea that we are sexualized, probably differently and more so than other women. You’ll hear the language: Latin women are sexy, or spicy. Black women are oversexed, or whatever.

For me, growing up with a mom who has white privilege [Jones is biracial] was sort of confusing because she would have a different experience walking down the very same street than I would. I had to start to process from really early on what this meant for me, for my white friends and relatives, and for my Black and brown friends and relatives. In a larger conversation that we’ve all been having for the last couple of years since the death of George Floyd and the uprisings and all of it, I think everybody’s more primed than ever to tell the truth about how white supremacy is a real thing. We have to look at it. We have to look at how all of these factors come together so that women of all backgrounds have continued to have to fight for their most basic dignities. Has anyone heard about Roe v. Wade? Here we are, and if you add the layers of racism and class, and what I think of as the violence of class oppression, it’s really awful in a society where there is so much to have people who have so little, especially if they’re girls and women, femmes, and nonbinary folks. When you kind of put all of that into a combining force of our society, it’s not just gender. It’s not just race. It’s not just class. It’s not just the sexual orientation or identity. When you mash this all up, we really have to account for that. If we’re going to be out there protesting in the streets and demanding rights for everyone, we have to get more nuanced and more clear about how that impacts the conversation around the sex industry.

VMS: In the film, you point out the myriad ways we’re culturally conditioned as women to accept and contribute to the exploitation of women, with some surprising tidbits. I never knew that Barbie was inspired by a sex worker!

SJ: Right? Crazy! The Lilli doll — that’s what she was called at first — was based on a woman who was a sex worker. The truth is, I want to live in a world where girls, when it’s age-appropriate and we’ve got enough love, support, nurturing, and self-esteem before we leave our homes, truly have the freedom to choose whatever we want without feeling coerced or without finding ourselves in a situation where there’s a power dynamic and we can’t get out. I want to see everybody free and able to make choices. I think the challenge is, if we’re honest, I don’t know anybody who has true freedom of choice. In the film, my hope is that if we pull back and realize, wait a minute, it’s not about the sex industry being exploitive or empowering or whatever. The question is, is this world too exploitive and empowering for them?

Jones while filming.

Danielle DeBruno

VMS: Your film also took a meta approach in considering cancel culture and how artists have to tell stories responsibly by doing the work. How did that affect you after having already done this as an off-Broadway play?

SJ: Totally! I mean, first of all, how many variants deep are we at this point into the pandemic? I remember at the start of the pandemic, going on Instagram and using that as my platform to literally sort of greenlight myself to be able to talk about the challenges of being born into a particular context. I had the experience of being challenged. What are you allowed to talk about, and what are you not? We’re in a moment in which I worry that because I’m not as West Indian as somebody else, I don’t have a right to tell that story. I’m not as Jewish as somebody else. I’m Dominican adjacent, I have cousins, but I’m not this enough, or I’m not that enough. Do I need to trot out my 23andMe in order to verify all of these people who’ve been part of my life for so long? Am I allowed to share from my perspective on those experiences anymore?

Sex work is a topic that can be really painful for women to talk about. Women who agree on everything else, when it comes to this topic, there can be this disconnect and confusion. Who’s the arbiter of who’s allowed to tell what, where, and how, and why? I just wanted to tell the truth about my own fears, about how some of those fears came true, and about how ultimately, for me, this is a movie that’s about a human experience we’re trying to really unpack. Where is there harm? Where do women need more freedom, more choices in life, to not be criminalized, to not have people moralizing and slut-shaming us?

The film is very much about my love for all of my sisters. Whoever identifies as a woman, that’s who I care about. When there’s this other debate about who is allowed to say what, I think we can sometimes really get lost. I’m not saying there isn’t room for a culture that demands accountability of people, especially after so many decades and centuries of only a couple of people having the bullhorn and getting to dominate all the narratives. But I would say, for me, I just thought to tell the truth. As much as I didn’t want to share some things that are extremely personal to me, some things that I’ve never shared before, I realized that this is a larger conversation around women and our power and our sexual freedom, and how can we make sure that we’re not just letting cis, straight, white, male voices tell the story?

VMS: Could cancel culture potentially impact creativity because people will be afraid to tell stories if they’re not only, strictly their own?

SJ: We’re in a moment in which you can be tried by public opinion on a platform owned by people who are doing far worse! But there is this kind of public square where it does feel — I think I even say this in the film at one point — like one false move, and you’re dead. But cancel culture exists for a reason. There’s a whole majority of our society that is not rich, powerful, cis, straight, white men with all the mouthpieces. If you think about it, we’ve always had a cancel culture — it’s just the rest of us were always automatically canceled.

I see this as a correction, maybe it’s an over-correction at times, but you will never hear me say that cancel culture is destroying everything. I would make the argument that everything has been destroyed for a long time because only certain people had access. Now there’s this very messy, extremely uncomfortable, and I think at times, yes — deeply unjust I would call it — sort of an overcorrection that says we haven’t had any kind of voice in this larger screaming match for so long. Now we get to call out every single chance we get, and I get that; I really do.

VMS: Meryl Streep executive produced your film. How did you first connect with her?

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SJ: Meryl and I connected through human rights work. I was part of a women’s rights organization that came into existence, in part because Amnesty International was doing amazing human rights work, but it kind of was forgetting women. So, I connected with Meryl through her humanitarian side, which is kind of like saying the wet part of the ocean — she is a humanitarian at her core. In my heart, I believe the reason she’s so brilliant at everything she does and we all love her characters so much is that she sees and understands what it means to be a human being. It was like a weird miracle. I remember getting a call in my office — I think we had landlines; that’s how long ago it was. My assistant at the time was like, “Meryl Streep is calling.” I was like, “It’s spam! What kind of New Yorker are you?” Anyway, it really was Meryl! The next thing I knew, she offered to amplify my voice with hers, which is one of the best uses of allyship that I can think of, and she really helped me find my way into my own work back then.

VMS: The dream! What’s your process as a writer? Do you write every day, or do you just go nuts and vomit on the page when it moves you?

SJ: I would say that writing this film is exactly what my work has always been. We jokingly call it an “unorthodoc” because it’s stuff that’s been percolating in my mind since I was a little kid — the characters, knowing that I wanted to tell multiple facets of a story that felt really powerful and important and involved my family. It’s not at all fiction, but also there’s a little element of heightened reality or getting to write some of it based on real events. It basically wrote itself through me. I feel like every morning I would wake up, and the script would grab me, get me out of bed, get me dressed, and plop me down in front of my computer. I have a wonderful writing partner who, you know, co-wrote the story with me, David Goldblum. It’s important for me to say, in the most feminist way I can, this is not a “chick movie.” The whole point of this movie is I want everyone of all backgrounds, all genders, to watch it and feel connected to it as a human being, and to learn something that they don’t know about other people and themselves. That’s my dream for it. In a way, getting to write part of it with a cis, straight, white male dude who I really trust, and is also on his own journey about all this stuff. It was like an incredible writing process. I think my process is always evolving, and this was mostly me getting out of the way.

Nicole Lapin's No-Nonsense Advice on How to Make Your Money Work for You

The money expert talks to Shondaland about her new book, “Miss Independent,” and breaks down everything from investing to inflation to crypto.

Nicole Lapin didn’t come from money, nor did she always handle it like the consummate pro she is today. Like so many of us, the best-selling author and seasoned money correspondent, who has been seen on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Entertainment Tonight, had her share of financial challenges and wrestled with credit-card debt. That’s precisely why she set out to empower readers of her recently released fourth book, Miss Independent: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Start Investing and Grow Your Own Wealth, which is chock-full of easily employable money hacks and strategies that can help us break down the mental blocks that can drain our resources. She got on the horn with Shondaland to talk about her new book and share some practical, actionable tips we all can use to hang on to more of what we make.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: What’s your favorite thing about helping others with their finances?

NICOLE LAPIN: I’m the least likely person to do it! I didn’t come from money. I figured out how to make my own money and make it grow while attending the School of Hard Knocks. It became my mission to take the jargon out of this world because it has so often been an impediment for women in particular to get our financial lives together. Money is a language, just like anything else. I figured it out the hard way, and I wanted to give out the cheat code for everything I wish I knew before I started. So often, women stay in crappy, toxic jobs or unfortunately abusive relationships, or they’re too scared of being able to support themselves. Ultimately, financial independence means the freedom to have your own back and live the life you love on your terms, so that’s what motivates me to do what I do.

VMS: What inspired you to write Miss Independent?

NL: It’s Rich Bitch part two, essentially. The goal with that, my first book, was to help women get their basic personal financial life together. Miss Independent is about how to grow wealth and start investing because, unfortunately, you can’t budget or save your way into wealth. As high as your base salary gets, it’s never going to grow long-term wealth. The only thing that will is investing, and I think the macroeconomic forces of the pandemic definitely inspired me to focus on this topic more and dig into it. There wasn’t a book at this level that speaks in real English without jargon. So, I felt motivated and called to do that because the only thing that has mattered for the last few years at the forefront is health and wealth.

VMS: What are some of the biggest misconceptions involved in building wealth?

NL: I think one of the main misconceptions is that getting finances together, especially within a family unit, is a guy thing. I talk in the book about how there have been studies with young boys and girls where girls associate “scarcity” and “anxiety”-type words with money, and boys associate words like “ambitious” and “knowledgeable” with money. The truth is, there’s nothing that a guy knows that we don’t; they just talk about it more and are more confident about it. A fifth grader can do the math that is required to grow wealth. I started as a poetry major and grew up in an immigrant family, so if I can do this, anyone can do it.

Another [misconception] is that you need a lot of money to grow a lot of money. The truth is you don’t, but you do need the most time possible to take advantage of this idea of compound interest that has so often been used against us in the financial system with credit cards and mortgages. We’ve seen interest rates grow out of control and be used against us, but we can actually use that very same force in our favor. The earlier you start, the less money you need to take advantage of interest that grows on top of itself, where your money is working for you. We work so hard for our money, and I think it’s time we return the favor.

VMS: You mentioned the idea of scarcity — there’s so much talk about the “scarcity mindset.” Do you believe that there’s such a thing and that it can be disabling?

NL: The greatest enemy is between our ears. It’s a journey for all of us to tell the mean girl or mean guy inside our heads to take several seats. There’s not a point where she ever goes away. I still have her! I think it’s about reframing that and also realizing that — not to get too philosophical — this idea of stoicism plays in a lot to how we approach finances. The basis that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. I see that a lot, especially with women approaching their finances. They think it’s so much worse than it is. I suffered from that too. I would let my credit reports sit on my counter and not open them up. If you don’t step on the scale, it’s not real, right?

VMS: How can people get to the root of that fear? Just by facing the music and looking at what it is?

NL: My philosophy around this is a combination of forgiveness for your former self and tough love for your future self. We didn’t learn this in school, and a lot of us didn’t learn it in our family upbringing. We could cry about that, but it’s not going to pay the bills moving forward. I forgave my former self for what she didn’t know — she did the best she could with the information she had. But moving forward, I’m a grown-ass woman. I can put my big-girl pants on and not bury my head in the sand. There’s plenty of information out there — a gazillion books and podcasts and articles. I don’t think knowledge is power; I think action is power. It’s up to each individual when that day is going to be, and as far as I’m concerned, today is as good a day as any.

VMS: How can people get to the root of that fear? Just by facing the music and looking at what it is?

NL: My philosophy around this is a combination of forgiveness for your former self and tough love for your future self. We didn’t learn this in school, and a lot of us didn’t learn it in our family upbringing. We could cry about that, but it’s not going to pay the bills moving forward. I forgave my former self for what she didn’t know — she did the best she could with the information she had. But moving forward, I’m a grown-ass woman. I can put my big-girl pants on and not bury my head in the sand. There’s plenty of information out there — a gazillion books and podcasts and articles. I don’t think knowledge is power; I think action is power. It’s up to each individual when that day is going to be, and as far as I’m concerned, today is as good a day as any.

VMS: What are some of the biggest misconceptions you encounter when people talk about and consider investing?

NL: That you have to look at stock charts all day long, which is not true. I don’t look at stocks all day long — I set up a system once, and I set it and forget it. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of our time, has said the greatest investment Americans can make is low-cost S&P 500 index funds, which is basically a vehicle that tracks the entire growth of the market and is diversified in and of itself, versus picking individual stocks because if one goes in the pooper, the whole thing goes in the pooper. He even put that in his will for his own wife to put a majority of his money in there. When people think there is a way to make even more than that, it’s very hard to do that. My suggestion is to not check all the time. Put your blinders on, set up a system that’s not fun and sexy, and it might not be investing in the coolest new crypto or Zoom or Peloton stocks. I say index funds and chill, especially when people are going crazy. Typically, you do the opposite of what groupthink is, especially when people are selling. You can buy more because it’s on sale, and in the history of the world, we’ve not recovered from a single recession or depression. Those are some of the big misconceptions, that you have to put in a lot of work to start investing. You don’t.

VMS: In your book, you refer to something called “lifestyle creep.” How can it sabotage our ability to save money?

NL: It often happens when we make more money, and our nice-to-have things become our need-to-have things, and then we actually don’t end up saving more money. We just increase our spending. At the end of the day, it’s not what we make, but what we keep that matters most. I know this isn’t what you necessarily want to do when you get a raise; it’s probably best to stick to the lifestyle you had before and then put the majority of it into assets, versus more liabilities, that will grow for you over time. And so I’m not saying deny yourself a morning latte. I’m drinking my morning latte right now!

“The truth is, there’s nothing that a guy knows that we don’t; they just talk about it more and are more confident about it.”

VMS: My next question was the latte-factor question! Do you think there’s anything to that?

NL: You know, the whole “skip the latte” thing doesn’t work because a financial diet is a lot like a regular diet — if you don’t allow yourself small indulgences, you’ll binge later on. Planning for those extras is really important, but keep it in the plan.

VMS: During these volatile times, should people reconsider their investments?

NL: Volatile times are when people can actually make the most wealth. “Buy low, sell high” is true, but it’s hard to do — you don’t know where the low is, and you don’t know where the high is. So, it’s really important to not try to time the market and volatility. There’s always going to be volatility. That’s how markets work — you don’t get off the roller coaster in the middle of the roller coaster. I’m about long-term investing not trading. There’s really no quick fix here, and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I really like to keep it basic. If you want fun, exciting things, watch a Shondaland show! Over time, historically, the market has yielded 7 percent, inflation adjusted. The way to do that, by not trying to time it, is dollar-cost averaging. If [you have] $12,000 to invest, you don’t put it in today. You put in $1,000 every month so you’re getting the average of what the levels are going to be. Nobody has a crystal ball, and trying to time it is just going to create a lot of anxiety. Try to take the emotion out of it, and create a system and a process for it.

VMS: What do you wish more people knew about saving for retirement?

NL: I wish that more people knew that 401(k) is not going to save the day in retirement. It’s really scary that somehow it’s been billed as almost like a pension — your 401(k) is not a pension. It’s great to invest in a 401(k), and if you have an employer match, please do that, but it’s actually not enough, and you pay taxes on it when you take it out. Whoever did the marketing for 401(k), I would like to hire them for my book because they’ve made it look like it’s the only option, and it’s going to replace your income in retirement, and that’s just not how it works. It’s a profit-sharing program. Pensions have gone the way of the Blackberry, but they were safe and intended to replace your income when you retired. This is not the same thing. We’re seeing the first generation of folks retire only with a 401(k), and it’s not enough.

VMS: Do you have thoughts about the real estate market? Is it a good investment? Do you think it’s still a good time to buy?

NL: I love this question! Oftentimes, people let the interest rate or the tax tail wag the financial dog. You should not do anything because of interest rates or a tax write-off. They are interesting perks potentially, but that should never be the driving force of it. I think that if it’s right for you and your circumstances, buy right now. If you have no debt, you have your emergency fund in order, and you’re going to stay in a place for a long time, maybe. People have a misconception that a house is a good investment. A primary house is not a good investment — end of story. The largest studies that have been done over time show that housing adjusted for inflation, it’s basically flat. If you have emotional issues around owning a home like you were housing compromised, that’s as good a reason as any, but don’t lie to yourself about it. When you buy a house, there are a lot of things that you don’t get back, like moving costs. You’re on the hook for everything. I’m not a housing expert in the construction sense, but you could use your money to make more money by putting it to work in the market. People get house poor. If you lose your job, you can’t go to the grocery store with your mortgage.

VMS: Thoughts on inflation?

NL: There have been a lot of headlines about inflation going bananas. Historically, inflation has been growing at 3 percent, and what you make in a bank account is 1 percent or less than 1 percent. You’re losing your purchasing power by leaving your money in a checking account — a lot of women, particularly, leave their money in a basic checking account. In Miss Independent, I list from lowest to highest risk where you can put your money. The lower the risk, the lower the reward, but a lot of these vehicles are liquid. Bonds that are issued by the government — if the government of the United States doesn’t give you your money back, we have bigger problems!

VMS: Everybody’s talking about crypto. What are your thoughts?

NL: I don’t believe you should put more than 1 percent of your net worth in crypto. It’s not my favorite investment, to be honest with you. That’s a whole other conversation!

VMS: What three money tips can you share with our readers that they may not already know?

NL: All of your bills are negotiable, so try to negotiate your credit-card APR, cell phone, cable, and medical bills twice a year. The worst they can say is no, but most vendors would rather take something than nothing. Two, take a look around the web for any unclaimed money you might have. Most states have a website dedicated to unclaimed funds from child bank accounts or whatever. Or check unclaimed.org. Free money! Finally, if you own a home, when paying the same amount of your mortgage as you normally would, divide it in half and pay it twice a month instead of once. You’ll shave off thousands of dollars over time because you’re sneaking in an extra payment.