Spring Books 2020
3/27/20 - Books are one of our go-to ways to stay sane, when bored, cabin-feverish or stressed out. And there are so many great authors and bookstores who need our support right now. At the moment, we're curled up with Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb and Thin Places by Jordan Kisner. Pro tip: if buying books isn't within your budget, your local public library probably uses the Libby app to get audiobooks and e-books to you, even while branches are closed.
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb
Bess is hilarious on Twitter
Thin Places by Jordan Kisner
Jordan's recent Atlantic article on reiki
Amina is also reading...
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Save Yourself by Cameron Esposito
Ann is also reading...
Glitter Up the Dark by Sasha Geffen
Look by Zan Romanoff
Bess is reading...
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Elena Ferrante in lieu of taking melatonin
Jordan is reading...
On Immunity by Eula Bliss
TRANSCRIPT: SPRING BOOKS 2020
[Ads]
(1:08)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: We really wanted to take some time on the show this week and probably in the coming weeks to highlight authors who have books out who might not get to go on book tour.
[Theme Song]
(1:56)
Ann: What a perfect moment for books. Truly a time, not that everybody has more time in this moment, but certainly in moments of feeling more isolated than normal I am always grateful to have a book at hand. And so there's sort of a dual benefit of like yes, being able to highlight great work by great authors who are maybe not getting all the opportunities they otherwise would in this moment and also talking about some things that we are reading as we hole up in our homes.
Aminatou: Right. And I think also just thinking about the -- you know, the win/win of this moment is that we get to read books by authors we love. We want to highlight them so their books get bought. But also we want to highlight our indie bookstores that need our help right now.
Ann: Oh my gosh.
Aminatou: And so I think there is truly a win/win/win all around here if everyone plays their part and I have been really, really, really lucky that my local bookstore is still shipping books and so it's nice, you know? So I would encourage everyone to really look at the indie near them or choose an indie in the country that you want to support and that's where you should be buying your books from right now.
Ann: Yeah. One thing I have been doing is sending a couple extra books to my friends with kids from an indie bookstore that is close to them to spread it around a little because I'm like who needs more entertainment options right now? The answer is children and people taking care of them so that's one thing that I have been doing. I have also been really -- I mean I'm always a fan of the Libby app which is the public library sort of digital access point.
Aminatou: Yes.
Ann: But I also want to shout-out to that because if you do not have the means to be buying a bunch of new books in this moment it is also a good time to request things digitally, to get yourself in the queue for things you want to read, and to really take advantage of how great libraries really are at offering audio books and digital books.
(4:00)
Aminatou: Ugh, I love it. I really hate this moment but I'm really, deeply appreciative of the reading community.
Ann: Absolutely. Speaking of which who did you talk to this week?
Aminatou: Ugh, Ann, I talked to Bess Kalb who is truly, truly, truly by far one of my favorite human beings on Twitter. All of her jokes are LOL funny. She is really smart and someone who always brings me a lot of joy so when her book landed on my bedside table I was very excited to read it. It's called Nobody Will Tell You This But Me. Bess is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. If you read her tweets you can already tell she's a very good writer. She's very funny. But this book, it is truly, Ann, one of the best things I've read in the past I would say year.
Bess writes about her relationship with her grandmother. I don't read a lot about grandmother/granddaughter narratives so I appreciated that. And also you will love this because we wrote a book that tried to tackle this. So the book is written in the voice of her grandmother speaking to her and so it's a true as told to Bess story and the mechanics of it all are so fascinating to me. I think it's really well-done. The story itself is both laugh out loud funny in moments and so, so, so, so deeply sweet and tender in others. It'll really make you want to call your grandma.
[Interview Starts]
(5:50)
Bess: My name is Bess Kalb and my book is Nobody Will Tell You This But Me.
Aminatou: Hi Bess Kalb.
Bess: Hello!
Aminatou: How are you doing over there?
Bess: I am thriving in end times. [Laughs] I guess.
Aminatou: I shouldn't laugh but we have to laugh so we don't cry.
Bess: Totally. Honestly it's my motto, it's my profession and it's now my survival skill. [Laughs] But yeah, it's so hard to get over the default like "I'm good, how are you?" And it took this to break that in Americans.
Aminatou: [Laughs] This being coronavirus.
Bess: Yes, it took a little pandemic.
Aminatou: In case you live on another planet and you're listening to this show that's what we're dealing with on this planet.
Bess: Yeah, and do you have room or a way to get there?
Aminatou: Would you go somewhere else? When they start doing space tourism. I personally will not go. I'm like I am happy to stay here. I'm happy for someone else to do the exploring.
Bess: I have no desire to go to space. I would be happy to live in the sort of Wall-E trash planet.
Aminatou: That's me. I'm like I know it here. I know it here so I'm fine.
Bess: Right, right. I'd find my little green shrub and I'd hang out and watch Hello Dolly. It'll be fine.
Aminatou: Well listen, I was super excited to talk to you because your book is very good Bess.
Bess: Oh man, I mean thank you for saying that.
Aminatou: You know, so much of it is about your relationship with your grandmother who was an iconic human being. That is really understating it. You know, I think the reason it struck me so much is that I think in my own experience of reading about a lot of kinds -- about a lot of different love stories and different ways women can relate to each other I don't remember the last time I had read anything about someone talking about their relationship with their grandmother.
(7:55)
Bess: Yeah, I found . . . I didn't realize that there would be something radical about just talking about a regular woman and the way that she helped raise women. It feels like the literature especially of this kind of Jewish milieu is Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, these men who made their mundane realities literature. But Jewish women kind of aren't allowed in that canon. It's not worthy of the same kind of paper and space. So I felt like this is just my life. This is the woman who helped raise me and I wanted to commit her to the pages if she mattered. It's really nice to hear that she mattered to you.
Aminatou: You make a really interesting choice like writing in the voice of your grandmother and so I'm just curious if you could talk more about deciding to do that. Also just how does that feel to write in the voice of someone you know so much?
Bess: I actually started writing in the voice of my grandma three days after she died in 201 7 when I was tasked with delivering her eulogy at her funeral. I started and scrapped four or five different drafts that seemed kind of hifalutin or trite or cliched. In talking about death and talking about the departure of a loved one I find that language suddenly becomes very formal and very rote and there was no way to really express what I was feeling about her.
So at two in the morning the night before her funeral I just started writing as her, like what she would say at her funeral joking about how Jewish everyone was all of a sudden. She would look at what we're wearing and she would not approve of what I was wearing.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(9:45)
Bess: And the whole life that had just disappeared off the face of the earth was all of a sudden very present again. And so for me writing in her voice was both a way to communicate her story accurately and also an exercise in reconnection with someone who I had lost. So it was this therapeutic experience to write and I'm so glad that it's becoming a therapeutic experience for people to read. It's now just sort of literary group therapy and it's cheaper than real therapy.
Aminatou: We don't have very good conversations about grief in general. You know, it's when someone dies you're supposed to go hide away and then when society is ready for you everyone will pretend that nothing happened, that you're not in pain.
Bess: Yeah.
Aminatou: And I think that, you know, the fact that you write in just this really clear-eyed voice and, you know, it's funny and it's sad and as much as you are really shining a light on the kinds of relationships women have with each other there is also something about the fact that young people are not good about talking about their grief and this is a really good entry point into that conversation.
Bess: Well thank you and also I didn't have the tools to express how I was feeling at the time. In fact the moment that I found out that I lost one of the loves of my life, my grandma, is in the book. It came after I was paddle boarding outside of an Airbnb and I have . . .
Aminatou: Amazing sentence.
Bess: Which is just the most dipshit millennial activity to do. And I'm also not like an athlete. I was not paddle boarding well. It's not like I was a sort of Hawaiian surfer; I'm just like an ungainly Jew wearing an SPF 50 turtleneck in the sun and it was just sort of the indignity of the situation.
And then hearing that my grandmother had died hours before I was doing that, then picturing myself doing that while my grandmother was dead not knowing, it made me feel -- as idiotic as I looked I remember one of my first reactions was to text one of my best friends and my former writing buddy at Kimmel. I texted my friend Jeff Loveness "My grandma died" and he knew how close we were. He had actually been on speakerphone when she would call and I was at work and I would start laughing and he would make a motion. I would put her on speakerphone because nobody would believe what she would say until they actually heard her.
(12:15)
I just saw his three dots appear and disappear a few times in the phone and I remember thinking oh god, I feel so bad for him because I just put this on him and there's no way to -- like whatever he's going to say I already forgive. And of course he's an amazing human so he actually had this beautiful, empathetic . . . and I remember feeling bad for him knowing how difficult it would be because I just put death on the table and it's sort of the silencer.
And in writing the book it took me like 200-something pages to say how it feels to lose someone because I think like it doesn't have a script and it doesn't have a . . . there's no rubric for dealing with the bereaved. I think in taking you along the story of my life with my grandma as a reader you'll understand how it feels for me to have lost her. It's like in order to really understand loss you have to understand exactly what somebody meant to the person who lost and so that's what this book does.
Aminatou: What were the easiest parts to write and what were the hardest parts to write?
Bess: Well I'm a comedy writer by trade and I write jokes every day so writing the funny parts, writing the dialogue was definitely the easiest part for me because at this point it's second nature and it's like my well-sharpened tool. And it's also very easy to write for a character that you know really well that I can almost plug-and-play my grandma into any situation and I could know how she would react. I feel sometimes like an AI bot, like I have the full algorithm of my grandma in my head. I've listened to enough of her that I could churn out her reaction to something that she never experienced.
(14:20)
And so that ended up being I wouldn't say easy but definitely the second nature part. And then the part that I resisted and even told my editor at the beginning, I was like "Maybe this could even be a funny book of lots of dialogue and voice mails right?" And she was like "No, you have to dig deeper." And I think the hardest part for me was writing the last section of the book After Me because it imagined my grandma's voice knowing she was dead. And so it was her grappling with her own loss while talking to me about it, while joking throughout.
And so it was like a -- it took a lot of disassociation and projecting in a way that would feeling kind of rattled at the end of a writing day. But even though it was hard emotional work I think I'm glad I did it because it made for a better book and it also made me cope better with my own grief.
Aminatou: I don't know, I'm just getting really emotional because I think you wrote a really lovely love story. Before we go what else are you reading right now?
Bess: Oh man, I had to really change my tune with books about four days ago when the world ended. Right . . .
Aminatou: So you are not reading Severance? No?
Bess: I'm not. [Laughter]
Aminatou: An amazing book but very apocalyptic.
Bess: Yeah. I am working my way through Topics of Conversation which I love. I think it's a really ingenious narrative tool to use to write. I read three books at once depending on what I'm feeling. There's usually like a non-fiction in rotation, a novel, and a pilot light slow burn of Elena Ferrante. There's always like a My Brilliant Friend for when I need to fall asleep. That's my melatonin and Xanax now that I'm breastfeeding and can't really take either of those. And I just got Gary Janetti's book which I love, I think he's very funny, the book Do You Mind If I Cancel?
(16:25)
Aminatou: I have that on a reading pile somewhere but on your recommendation I will move it to the top of the pile.
Bess: Yeah it's pretty funny. He's definitely as funny as he is on Instagram as a writer.
Aminatou: Funny writing is really hard.
Bess: Yeah.
Aminatou: You can always tell if the person is trying too hard.
Bess: Yes.
Aminatou: Which is always my fear with people who say that they're comedians. I'm always like oh no, oh no, what is this going to do? And then some people like you just do it. And so I was like maybe one day you can teach that secret sauce. What's the secret?
Bess: I don't know, I'm a fraud. I'm writing in the voice of a character. I think it's much harder for someone like the greats like David Sedaris who can just be funny as himself and in his own voice. I hide behind a man character, Jimmy Kimmel, when I'm writing jokes for TV and I hide behind my grandma when I'm writing jokes for books. I don't know if I can actually be a funny writer, if they're just like "Do your best, Kalb. Here's a microphone. Go."
Aminatou: I have full confidence in you but now I'm like convinced that maybe David Sedaris is just writing a character that's David Sedaris. Wow.
Bess: I hope so. That'd make me feel a lot better.
Aminatou: Well David Sedaris is a lovely human. You are a lovely human. Thank you for writing a great book and, you know, I know that it feels like the apocalypse right now but I think your book is actually very of right now because I'm trying to focus on people instead of focusing on issues and so I think that for that alone something that really just helps you to mine your feelings about relationships in your life is we probably need that during coronavirus time so thanks.
Bess: Totally. Yeah, if nothing else I hope this encourages people to call their grandma.
Aminatou: Well my good grandma is dead and my bad grandma is still alive.
Bess: Oof.
Aminatou: And when I finished reading your book I was like should I call the bad grandma? Then she did a bad thing and I was like I feel very affirmed in not calling the bad grandma. [Laughs]
Bess: Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be as literal as that. Just examine the connections between people you love.
Aminatou: Totally. Bess thank you so much. I hope you have a great rest of the week and where can we find your work?
Bess: Oh you can find my book wherever books were sold. On IndieBound is where I suggest you buy it. Support local bookstores. Keep their lights on. This is a really tough time for them. On my website, besskalb.com, you can see everywhere to buy the book as well as various online presences that I have.
Aminatou: And I just have to give a plug to your Twitter account, @bessbell, because it keeps me sane every day so thanks for your tweets.
Bess: And it makes me insane to do so there you go. [Laughter]
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Ugh, Aminatou, Bess. Grandmothers everywhere. Yes. [Laughs]
Aminatou: I know. Shout-out to my good grandma. Not a shout-out to my bad grandma.
Ann: Wow. I am going to go call Grandma Jewels immediately. Thank you for this reminder and prompt. And yeah, I cannot wait to read this book, love an ambitious narrative voice.
Aminatou: Let's take a break, Ann.
[Ads]
(22:50)
Aminatou: Okay, we're back from break. Who did you talk to?
Ann: I had a lovely conversation with the journalist/essayist/writer Jordan Kisner who has an essay collection out now called Thin Places: Essays From In-Between. And I had read some of her work in various magazines before picking up this book but there are a lot of themes uniting the essays in this book. Many of them are about religion and spirituality. They are about being in a collective society and what that means and a lot of them are about like how we search for and make meaning with other humans. And maybe this is sort of my more analytical brain, I really like the idea of a big, abstract concept that is then boiled down to these really specific stories. So these essays are about like raves for Jesus but also about like a naturally-occurring forest phenomenon in Utah and being able to unite really distinct subjects with this kind of like underlying perspective about what it all means is I think one of the hallmarks of a great essay and so I really enjoyed this collection.
It was also great for me in this moment because it was something I could kind of pick up and put down. I like having something in my reading rotation -- I don't know if you're like this -- where it's either short stories or things that feel like it's not one unbroken narrative, right? I can kind of dip in and dip out.
Aminatou: Oh I need that at all times. At all times.
Ann: Yeah, so here's Jordan talking about her essay collection.
[Interview Starts]
Jordan: My name is Jordan Kisner and I'm a writer of essays and magazine features and most recently a book, a collection of essays called Thin Places, and my pronouns are she/her.
Ann: Jordan thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Jordan: Thank you. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Ann: So maybe an obvious number one question but what is A Thin Place and why is this the idea that you chose to unit all the essays in this collection?
Jordan: A Thin Place is borrowed from a piece of Celtic mythology. I heard about it in an interview on a different podcast, The On Being podcast with Krista Tippett. There is an aphorism in Celtic mythology that says the division between this world and the next world is never more than three feet but that in the thin places it's even closer than that and the veil can sort of drop between what we feel to be the world we know and the next world or the imagined world or the holy world depending on what kind of descriptors or adjectives you want to use for it.
(25:30)
And I was very taken with this metaphor at the time. It's full of wonder and awe maybe, there's an experience of wonder and awe, but also it can be very frightening. You know, when people write in old stories about encounters with angels they're terrifying right? Often when the next world or something -- two worlds we think of as very separate merge it can be amazing but it can be very frightening. And I think in the time I was starting to work on this book I was having this experience of feeling like there were a lot of things about myself and my life that I had thought were true that were no longer true or things that I felt like I had been able to place total faith in that had come apart.
And so I felt unmoored and a little terrified and a little awed by how quickly all that seemed to be happening. I started looking around for other people who seemed to have experienced also the disruption of -- an intrusion of a kind of loss of faith or a new world that was being visited upon them.
Aminatou: You had said that when you learned this term it sort of connected a couple different things that you were already working on or had already written. I'm wondering about how you then move forward to find other things that evoked this feeling in you or that fit the theme.
Jordan: I was looking around and seeing that all over this country there were models of people who are coping with the intrusion of some new reality onto a framework that they had thought was absolute. So for example I heard about these Mormon women in Utah who were so upset by the Trump election that it led them to completely reassess their own relationship to what they thought their faith and their church was asking them to do politically and they decided to sort of form this group that was going to very politely overthrow the Utah state government.
And I saw elsewhere in California which is where I'm from this town that had originally been a scene -- you know, where movies had shot in like old Hollywood, the wild west. It's the valley that we think of when we imagine the wild west has now been completely desiccated because the water was rerouted from a once very verdant valley to Los Angeles and now it's one of the biggest dust bowls in the world and yet the people there persist in living in this new reality.
(28:05)
And so I just started looking around for stories like that where people were kind of having to confront some evaporation of a solid truth that they thought was there and it turns out that in the United States right now there's a lot of that because we're in a time of political and social upheaval and so there are a lot of people who are having to really reexamine their what you might call secular faith systems, the things they really, really believed were true.
Ann: Ugh, I feel like this is sort of the perfect moment for us to talk about your essay about obsession and about obsessive compulsive disorder and the ideas that you raise in that essay about whether there are actually boundaries between ourselves and others. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your own experiences with obsession kind of led you to this essay and where you went from there.
Jordan: Sure, of course. This was one of the first essays I worked on in this collection and there was something about it that I needed to get out on paper and I couldn't figure out what it was and so it took me a long time to write it. I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder when I was I think a young teenager, maybe 14 or 15, and the way that I experienced it at the time and still occasionally experience it when it's troubling me is I felt like I was having these thoughts pop into my head that were very frightening and upsetting to me. And they didn't totally feel like my thoughts. It felt like someone dropped a thought bubble in that was from somewhere else in the ether and I would think oh, geez, god, where did that thought come from? And it was very frightening.
(29:45)
And so one of the reasons that it turned into obsessive compulsive disorder is I then sort of developed these ideas of okay, well if I can rationally talk myself out, if I can prove that that thought isn't mine and I don't really think it and it's not true then it'll be okay.
And so I would develop these sort of patterns of having to rationalize my way around this experience of having some kind of intrusive thought that didn't feel like mine. And so in this essay I research the history of obsession and obsessive compulsive disorder and then more precisely try to examine what we talk about when we talk about like our mind or our thoughts. What does it mean when there's a disorder or a disease that can make you feel like there are thoughts in your head that aren't yours? And there are actually a number of mental illnesses that are characterized by some experience like that.
And it got me really, really fascinated about the way that we as a society try to draw distinctions between, you know, what's you and what's not you? And what's inside you and what's outside you? And where do you and your mind and your body start and stop? And I wound up getting to read a lot of really, really interesting books and thinkers on that.
So for example I read Eula Biss's book On Immunity which is a brilliant book that she wrote when she was trying to navigate the debates about whether or not to vaccinate children when she had a young child. She talks a lot about herd immunity and the fact that it's often a -- it's a little bit of an illusion that we have -- that our bodies are sort of closed systems and I wanted to think about the way sometimes our minds actually, we want them to be closed systems but they don't always feel like closed systems. Sometimes that can manifest as an obsessive compulsive disorder experience and sometimes it can just manifest as mirror neurons or falling in love with someone or that we are much more porous creatures than we are comfortable thinking we are.
(31:54)
Ann: Right. And then by the same token there is this very strong desire to feel like we are porous creatures right? I mean we're in this moment of intense physical separation from people and it has been really fascinating to me to watch pretty much everyone I know and care about try to very concertedly assert the fact that yes, we are physically separate but we're extremely connected mentally and emotionally.
Jordan: Yeah. This is a really interesting time to be -- I'm re-reading Eula Biss's book right now and it's a really interesting time to be reconsidering how we conceive of ourselves as singular organisms and then as singular organisms that are part of a larger organism. And right now of course because of this horrible COVID-19 and coronavirus outbreak we're seeing in a really dark way the way that we are not -- that we are all very much part of a large, connected organism physically.
And like you're saying I -- like I'm getting . . . I'm having more phone calls with people I love and Facetiming more with people I love than I ever do on a normal week. And so it's interesting to see the way that humanity tries to kind of compensate by up-regulating the good and the nourishing spiritual and emotional ways in which we're all connected while we're also trying to combat and mitigate the sometimes damaging ways that we're all interconnected in these sort of physical, immune-related ways.
Ann: Right. And in fact you have an essay later in the book about one of the ways this -- there's sort of a . . . I hesitate to call the natural world a metaphor for this but the way this plays out in sort of the biological, natural world as well in this forest in is it Utah, is that right?
Jordan: Yeah.
Ann: So maybe you can talk a bit about that.
(33:50)
Jordan: Yeah. This was another example of kind of looking around in the world and seeing a pattern, seeing like a concept that I had been mulling on and finding it manifested in some really physical way. So there is this tree, the largest-living organism is a tree that it's a stand of aspens so it's one tree but also thousands and thousands of trees which is kind of a nice . . .
Ann: A stand meaning like a grove? Sorry.
Jordan: Yes, so a stand of aspens means that they are all a single organism but it looks like a forest. So aspens, this particular kind of aspen, a quaking aspen, they're all over North America and all over the world and one thing that's fascinating about them is they share their roots. They have one connected root system that then manifests as thousands and thousands of trees. So it looks and feels like you're walking through a forest of many, many different trees but in fact it's all one living thing.
And what is useful about that to the organism is that one corner of the forest can burn down and the resources of the tree will then be sent to making a whole bunch of new outcroppings, new outgrowths elsewhere on the other side that's not damaged. And it's just an example of the way that this tension between this singular and the whole, between the individual and the whole, is not just a human thing; it's something we see mirrored in nature all over the place. I just kind of fell in love with this tree. Its name is Pando, it's called Pando, and it's incredibly old. It's like the very . . . it's theoretically immortal. That's one of the other things I thought was really cool is because of the way that it functions, because it is this gigantic collection of individuals forming one large individual, it can in theory live forever because it can keep sending up new trees and new trees and new trees as others die off.
(36:10)
Ann: It's interesting that seems not dissimilar from some of the language used by this kind of new wave of like hip, evangelical Christians that you also write about. It feels very evocative for me even of my pretty traditionalist Catholic upbringing of we're all one body or we're all connected through God.
Jordan: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean I think that the thing you might be referencing is one of these churches I write about is an evangelical church that was founded in New York and they were, as is often the model, starting what they call planting actually. They use tree and agriculture metaphors. They were planting other churches which is to say opening other smaller outposts of the same church all over the city and all over the world. And the idea was that every one of them would have the same "DNA" but kind of manifest in some new local context appropriate to its environment.
I don't know. I think that's a really common way that humans like to organize by recognizing that there can be some kind of overarching order or connection while also admitting individuality. I think that's a very comforting idea. And so you see it manifest all over the place if you start looking for it.
Ann: Right. And I think that's also at the heart of just overall some of the appeal of religion. I don't know, as you write it anyway, your personal -- the way you've been personally drawn, like moments when I am attracted to the idea of there being a God or when I feel closest to like a concept that many people describe as God it's because of this moment of connection. I don't know, maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
(37:50)
Jordan: Yeah. So one of the experiences that drove this book was that when I was a kid I was kind of accidentally sent to bible camp. My parents were not religious, I was not raised in a religious household, but they sent me to camp not quite understanding that it was bible camp and I was converted at bible camp and came home a born-again Christian much to their surprise.
And it just made so much sense to me at the time as a vocab -- you know, the vocabulary that Christianity as it was articulated to me then offered just made so much sense as a way of organizing and understanding what to me seemed like the obvious luminosity of the world. I think I write in the book I just was naturally reverent and so I was very ready to be handed a set of ideas and words and language to frame that. And then I became . . . I just fell out of it as a teenager because I realized -- I decided to read the bible and I realized a lot of what the teachings were didn't really work for me. I didn't really believe in it.
And the kind of coming into faith and then coming back out of faith was frightening and upsetting at the time. I didn't like having the experience of losing a way of understanding the world. It was the first big time that that happened to me at like maybe 14 and that experience of having your world kind of changed by a new way of understanding it then having that understanding fall apart again felt like something that as I got older saw repeat and repeat and repeat. I looked around and saw that happening to people who were religious and people who weren't religious.
There are a lot of ways in which sometimes for example the experience of being a healthy person who then becomes incredibly ill, you know, Sontag talks about us all having dual passports in the land of the sick and the well and that can feel like a way of knowing the world that then falls apart for you.
(40:00)
Something that I am interested in and noticed while I was writing this book is that people become very drawn in religion and in other ways, in other avenues, to organizing principles and particularly organizing principles that as you're saying help you understand where you fit in relation to other people and humanity and some kind of sense of greater whole. And sometimes that's CrossFit and sometimes that's cleanses and Goop and sometimes that's church and sometimes that's politics. And I think that's really fertile ground for writers and artists to look at where people are investing that need and energy in finding community and figuring out where they belong.
Ann: Jordan thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Jordan: Thank you so much for having me. So, so good to talk to you.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: Ugh, Jordan Kisner that was amazing. I am really excited to read this book.
Ann: Yeah. One last plug for your local indie or library because, you know, I want them to have these books and I want us all to have these resources far into the future.
Aminatou: Well here is what I picked up from the bookstore recently, or got delivered from the bookstore recently.
Ann: Ooh tell me.
Aminatou: I re-read Wow, No Thank You, Sam Irby's book of essays. I have to say it really has made the pandemic go by faster so I cannot recommend it enough and Sam will be on CYG very soon. And I also finished reading but then went to listen to and I'm really annoyed at myself that I didn't think about just listening to it first but the read was also incredible Cameron Esposito's memoir Save Yourself which is truly, truly lovely. You know, Cameron just has a knack for a lot of really powerful self-reflection and thinking about all of the systems that you live within and really analyzing your place in the world and so I just really appreciated that.
(42:05)
Ann: I'm reading two things, one work of non-fiction, one work of fiction. The non-fiction book is called Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary which is by Sasha Geffen. It's all about the ways people of different sexual identities and gender expressions have really changed the way we listen to music and the music that is like mainstream and popular. I love, again as a dip-in/dip-out, like a music history book is A++ because it is also changing what I listen to. I'm like going back to music that I was sort of familiar with and hearing it in a new way thanks to this book so I love that.
And the fiction I'm reading is a YA novel called Look by pal of the podcast Zan Romanoff and I have to say it is sort of in the style of Mary H.K. Choi's Emergency Contact. It's centered on digital communication or the experience of how do you portray yourself and see others on the Internet through this really very sweet and relatable story. And I'm just like there is something so comforting to me about reading YA or reading a really immersive YA novel in this moment as well. I'm just like I'm really at the end of my workday just relaxing into a couple of chapters of it feels incredible. So two strong recs for you that are out right now, authors that could definitely use your support.
Aminatou: I love that and I love that you're a reader Ann. I will see . . .
Ann: Oh my gosh, I love that you're a reader. Sorry. [Laughter] Stop. I love that I'm taking this like the biggest compliment ever. Like oh, thank you for calling me a reader.
Aminatou: We are nerds. I'll see you on the Internet, boo-boo.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.