I wanted to start by talking about the role of music in your life. It starts with you listening to Jill Scott and music plays a huge part throughout the book. Can you talk about your relationship with music?

My parents always listened to music—just like every other Black family, cleaning the house and listening to Anita Baker, Patti LaBelle and Sadé. My love of music really comes from my parents. As you’ve read the book, you know I love theme songs of shows. I just always thought they were so catchy and fun. 

When I got older, I was always very much into the lyrics. I’d be the person that would record a song on the radio and then keep playing it to write the lyrics out for no reason. I just found an escape in music. Like in my Fiona Apple time, if I was going through a breakup, I’d be like, “Yeah! She’s speaking for me!” (laughs)

I’ve always been into hip hop, but I think that my love of hip hop really started and was cultivated when I discovered breakdancing and graffiti. I got deeper into it once I realized that women were not recognized as pioneers in the game.  They were all underground or behind the mic, and I was like, “No, we need to figure out a way to highlight them.”

Is that what prompted you to work as a music journalist when you were in your twenties?

It definitely is. Every element of hip hop—from breakdancing to beatboxing to being a DJ to being an MC to being a graffiti artist—I was not talented enough to do any of those things professionally or even as an artist. But I didn’t see that as a bad thing, because it was like, “I’m a fan,” you know? And I think that there’s a space for fans. But what I did know how to do was write. I just reached out to a friend and was like, “I’d love to start writing more about the culture—the women in the culture, the underground culture.”  And it was when everybody was coming out with their little websites with forums in the day. So that’s what started it, being able to take two things I love—writing and hip hop—and combining them.

The reader goes on such a journey with you. We start with you as a community college student finding out you got an internship at the White House and end where you are now, running your own company. Can you talk about how you chose to structure your memoir?

I had to remember that a memoir is not your whole life. I’m educated in a lot of things, but I’m very clear when I need to say, “I don’t know how to do this.” I’ll admit that I don’t know! (laughs) It was very scary writing a memoir, because I had to pick a certain time in my life. But that’s so revealing. I had this really cool job and I went through this really excruciating impostor syndrome thing. I wanted to grab the reader in the beginning by describing what my internship and that process looked like. As soon as I did that, I was like, “Okay, now I want to take people back to the time where I first started feeling like I wasn’t worthy,” which was as a child. I wanted to set that up so people saw the different worlds. I didn’t want it to just be, “Okay, she had this thing at the White House, great. Now, let’s go through her whole career.”  I’d be doing myself and everyone else a disservice if I decided to say, “I have impostor syndrome and I had this job. I didn’t know where [the imposter syndrome] came from.” No, I knew where it came from.

I tried to structure it in a way so people saw the evolution of me through the book, so they didn’t get to the glory days of like, “I went to therapy and am now doing better, blah blah blah.” I didn’t want to skip the hard parts. I tried to put [the hard parts] throughout, and it was very important for me to put it there in the beginning.

As a reader, I definitely had the sense of watching someone learn and grow throughout the course of not only a lifetime but also the eight or so years that you focus on at the White House. What went into deciding what stories to include and what stories to leave out?

I think a lot of deciding was my own fear of how people would receive some of the things that ultimately could have been in there. I think although it’s my own truth—and I was walking my truth, I believe in my truth—I’m still not inconsiderate of people’s feelings. Even if they did me wrong, it does no good for me to put out this energy of “this person effed me over.” It doesn’t solve anything. That’s not what I’m trying to do, right? I decided to leave out those stories, but I also decided to leave out a lot of the more traumatic or triggering things. I believe that if you lived through something you’re allowed to talk about it. I don’t feel like we should be policing when people need to talk about their trauma or not. If you don’t want to read it, don’t read it. But for me, this memoir is focused on my White House time and so that’s what I wanted to highlight. I knew that people wanted to hear the fun stories and I knew they wanted to hear the insider stuff. I tried to put stuff in there that would catch the reader’s eye, make them laugh, or go behind the scenes. Something like, “she lives in this world,” but also for [readers] to say, “Wow, she was on top of the world with these amazing, fun stories, but she still felt this way.” I wanted to humanize it a little bit because if I just stuck to White House stories all the time, come on! “Oh, wow, this privileged person! Look at her writing a book about parties!” No, I wanted to be humanized, because I feel like if I share real experiences and real stories from my life then people can relate to me more. They can maybe see themselves finding more confidence in themselves and reverse this imposter syndrome that so many people feel.

One of the really poignant parts of your book is when you write about an experience you had while working at an Au Bon Pain as a teenager. For me, I was able to draw parallels to your experience as a high school student to similar experiences you would have had in later work environments.

Exactly. I think that that’s the thing. I also wanted to make sure people knew that I didn’t walk out the womb to the White House. I worked at a mall, you know what I mean? I say that because I wanted to show the different levels that exist when it comes to Black women in the workplace, or somebody who’s more bold or somebody that speaks a lot. I wanted to show that it’s on all levels. When I worked there, we didn’t have social media, so we didn’t know anybody else was going through this.

I want to get back to talking about applying for the White House internship, because that chapter specifically is so crucial to the book. You write, “I wasn’t what I would call the ideal candidate, but I was the right one.” Can you talk about what you meant by that?

I feel like I was not the person who, if you were putting [together a list of] who wants a White House Internship, like no one was coming to find Deesha Dyer in West Philadelphia, you know? Nobody was looking for this lack-of-formal-education-kind of person who had been evicted and had no money. That wasn’t ideal, right? But I say I was the right one because those qualities absolutely made me the right candidate for it. I had this community background. I was thirty-one when applying for the internship. I feel like I was right for that job. There was a mystique that surrounds White House internships and it’s just like, “Let’s get our ideal candidate because that’s what people want.” It’s the normalcy of it all. And that’s the Harvard grad or so-and-so’s daughter. No, actually, that’s your ideal candidate, but that’s not the right one, because you perhaps need somebody who’s had some life experience or somebody who has a different take on the political world. We had a Black President for the first time and a Black First Lady. So maybe you don’t need the ideal person. Maybe you need a person who will look at it and say, “This is new, this is something different, and I want to approach this in a different way because we’re actually dealing with a different President, a different First Lady and a different agenda.”

When you explore your time after the internship and you’re back in Philly, you write, “It was safer to stay in a box I knew instead of constructing one with an unknown outcome from scratch.” It seems that so much of this book is how you learned to become comfortable with taking the leap into unknown outcomes. What shifted in to allow you to begin doing that?

Honestly, I think some of it was age and maturity. At that point I had a list of things I had accomplished, really big things and really hard things. I was just like, “I have a roster of evidence that when I take a chance, it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t die.”  It’s hard—I’m not going to minimize that when you get disappointed, it’s hard. But it was fine!  Life kept going after I had mourned it or grieved it. When people ask me, “How did you get there?,” I almost felt like I had no choice. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. I had to work or I would have been homeless, you know what I mean? There was no fallback plan ever. So I was like, “Well, why not take a risk? What’s going to happen? Great, I’m not going to get the internship and still be going to school and doing what I’m doing.” It wasn’t a bad thing. I feel like I take risks because that’s one thing I’m not afraid of, because I’m just like, “Why not? What’s the consequence of me not doing this?” The consequence is I’m in the same place I was, which most of the time is not a bad place. It’s not. Once I took the risk, applied for the internship, and got it, I also became really addicted to like, “What else can I do?” I was like a mad scientist. (laughs) I was like, “Oh my God, what else can I do? Oh my God, I can get promoted. Oh my God, I can travel the world. I can go to Harvard.” It became an addiction of like, “This is kind of fun!” So that’s how I looked at it. And you know, I’ve slowed down a little bit in the risk factor, but I still do that even today.

That carries throughout the book. Without spoiling anything, towards the end you share an experience of being disappointed by something that didn’t work out. That’s such a powerful moment, because even after all your amazing accomplishments we see there are still disappointments. You seem to be saying, “There are still setbacks, and I’m still going through them.”

Yeah, definitely. I wanted to be honest and real about that because there is—again, I use the word mystique a lot—but there is a mystique of like, “Oh, I worked at the White House and I was a fellow at Harvard and I did all this stuff so the world is at my hands. Like duh, who wouldn’t hire me? Who wouldn’t want to have you as a fellow? Who wouldn’t want to give you all these opportunities?” I wanted to be honest about that because it isn’t our accomplishments that give us confidence, it’s about who we are at the foundation that can’t be shaken. Yes, I tried to build something on that foundation, which was getting a new job, right? I was like, “Okay, I know who I am,” and then it didn’t work. But when it didn’t work the house falls, but the foundation is sturdy. You have to have a foundation of who you are and your worth outside of your accomplishments, because things come and go. Things really come and go. I really wanted to humanize myself because I was like, “These people out here thinking I’m eating caviar for breakfast!” People think the weirdest things about the White House Social Secretary, because it usually is a very crème de la creme role. I’m like, “Yeah, I brought a different crème de la creme to the table.” (laughs)

When you write about taking on the role of the Social Secretary, you talk about how you made the conscious decision that you weren’t going to seek external validation, but really focus on internal validation. Can you talk about the skills that you brought to that role that allowed you to thrive?

I’ll be completely honest, I think that all started off with my community. The role that I had as White House Social Secretary was convening, gatherings, events, and making people feel welcomed. The President and First Lady—the First Lady especially—their thing was opening up the house. “How can we open it up so it can be the people’s house?” Again going back to the foundation, that is someone I was before I even knew who Barack Obama was. I always was an inclusive person. I always had gatherings, whether it was with no money or with a lot of people. I always was like, “Let’s bring people together.” I was always about that life. Once I went to the White House, I think that was a strength of mine that helped me. I think the other part was that we had a Black President and First Lady. I think that having a Black President and First Lady who were cool, who were cultured, who were organizers from Chicago, all of that gave me a confidence to be like, “I can do this job, because I feel like these are people I would have met in my life. I’ve met people like this in my life at other points in time, so this is just like we’re community-building together. We’re problem solving together like we were at a small organization.” I think I had the ability to see them as Barack and Michelle Obama from Chicago, which is how I encountered them when they first came on my television.

I never lost that.  I never lost the wonder of these two people. Even though we’re at the White House, and they were the President and First Lady, and obviously there was the diplomacy and all that stuff, I think in the end because I always saw them these are two people who wanted to change the world—the same feeling I had in 2007, when I heard the first speech right? That ability to see them in that way was such a unique thing for me, because I was able to be like, “Oh, all right, I got this. This is what I used to do. This is who I am.” There was stuff I had to learn of course, right? But I think that was the basis of why I was able to do my job so well.

You write in the book about how you did all this volunteering and community outreach in your twenties with different organizations, but you also continued to do volunteer work during your time at the White House, right? Why was that important to you to still maintain that aspect of your life even when you had this incredibly prestigious position?

You know, it was important for me because that was my family. That was my home. That was when I felt most like myself. That is where I belonged. The White House—I belonged there too, obviously. But I would go to Carpenter’s Shelter and I’d serve dinner and sit around and play checkers or play with the kids. It was a sense of normalcy for me. They didn’t know I worked at the White House, they didn’t know who I was. I was a volunteer coming in. I was also giving back for selfish reasons of making sure that I felt like I never left my community. I felt welcomed and loved and I had a great time and I was able to help serve people. It was important for me to maintain that part of myself, because I wanted to stay in touch with the community. The White House is an amazing place. We definitely welcomed in community, but to go somewhere and meet someone on the level where they are—to go in their house, to go in their home, to go in their shelter, to speak to them like a human being—that’s my gift. It was very important for me to maintain that and to never lose sight of that. And to have fun! I had a great time. You know, I had a great time. I would go volunteer with women who were formerly incarcerated. Just listening to them and hearing them made me better at my job, because it made me never forget why I’m there. I can’t change their life, but I can invite them in for a tour. How amazing is that? That was something I felt like I had to do and I loved that, you know? So that’s why it was important.

A huge part of the book is you writing candidly about your experience with impostor syndrome throughout your life. Can you talk about what imposter syndrome is? Could you share some of the strategies that have worked for you dealing with it?

So imposter syndrome is a term that basically says you feel like a fraud. It makes people feel like they don’t deserve things, that people are going to find out that they’re imposters in the workplace or their professional life. They don’t feel deserving of their promotions or opportunities. They’re always questioning, “Do I deserve this” or “do I belong?” My relationship with impostor syndrome has evolved. In the book, it basically says that now in my present body at forty-six, I’m like, “This is a sham.” It’s a sham, because who told us that we were not qualified? Any messages we got from people saying that or insinuating that or microaggressions/aggressions, those are all systems that play to keep us where we are. It affects mainly those who have been historically oppressed—Black folks, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities—we’re the ones who suffer the most from impostor syndrome, because this world is not meant for us to be in power, to be equal. I started having this realization, “Wait a minute, this is not my fault or my responsibility, because I know that I’m qualified. I just did eight years at the White House. I got hired and moved up.” Once I realized that, I had to do the deep work of reversing it. I had to get my confidence that I never knew was there. Where do I find it? Because I didn’t know. Now that I’ve moved this weight off my chest—of impostor syndrome being my fault—where do I find the confidence? I think the book really takes you through the evolution of that.

It would have been really easy for me to write the book in the present body in which I am where it’s just like, “I’m healed! Praise the Lord!” Instead I wanted to take you through the evolution, because most people are not where I am. I talk to so many people who come up to me after speaking gigs. They all are in this place of, “I don’t think I deserve it.” It does me no good to give you the ending. Let me let you see how I went through it.

One tip is realizing that it’s a sham and accepting that it was not your fault. Then going back from there and saying to yourself, “Look at all that I accomplished. Look at all that I am. I did this because of who I am. I deserve these things. I curated these opportunities.” People should look at their roster of what they’ve done and what it took to get there to make it happen. But then also going back and digging up the root of when you started feeling this way. At what point did you start feeling like an imposter? Was it when you went to college or high school? When you didn’t make a sports team? That’s stuff you have to work through. I feel like we have to go back and dig it up. Whether it’s therapy—however people want to deal with some of the things that happened in their young life—deal with that. It doesn’t have to be a big trauma, but deal with it. Then learn to walk with your head up and your shoulders back. Talk to yourself better, get people around you who think you’re a big deal. You don’t know how many people are in your corner until you remove yourself out of your own way.

The book plunges you into your life, and you capture these really specific moments—whether it’s in your job interview with the First Lady or getting ready for a visit from the Pope—that make the reader feel they’re right alongside with you. What went into figuring out what details to include to make those scenes come alive?

For me what went into it was how can I not break the trust and privacy of the Obamas. I’m very intentional. I don’t talk about anything personal. That’s not my business, that’s not my life. That was really top of line for me. I really wanted to focus on my story, but my editor would tell me, “People want to smell what’s in the room.” I remember reading a book called Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford. I love that book so much. She was so vivid about her grandmother’s room and the doilies and the way it smelled. I swear to you, I felt like I was in my grandmother’s room. For me, I wanted readers to think in their mind, “I can picture this room.” It sounds so nuts, but that’s why I tried to describe everything in detail. I want you to picture what it was like, I want you to feel what it’s like, I want you to see it. If I just said “the Blue Room in the White House,” people would be like, “What do you mean? Is it blue furniture? What are you talking about?” Most people won’t go inside the White House. Most people won’t look up what the rooms looked like. I wanted people to have that feeling that they could be in the story. That really was important for me.

Something that you’ve shared on social media is how you’re part of this cohort of 2024 debut authors, where you’re all very intentional about sharing and promoting each other’s work. That seems to be another piece of the importance of community for you. Can you talk about your involvement with that group and how that came about?

It came about because I was having a hard time writing. I needed help in the sense of community. I just felt so alone and I didn’t know who to ask. I have friends who are writers and I would ask them questions, but I needed a support group. I need community, and I think whenever I try to do something by myself without community, it’s so hard. I reached out to my agency. They have an author, Karen Tang, and they said, “I think she’s part of a group.” She added me to a Slack group called 2024 Debuts. I don’t know how many people are in the group, but it’s broken down by announcements and there’s a BIPOC channel and there’s a DC/Maryland/Virginia channel and there’s an LGBTQ channel. It’s so supportive because you can ask the question, people answer, but you realize we all are going through the same thing. Part of what we do is that we try to lift each other up with the books. But we share this because it’s hard. I’ll do whatever I can to be in community. Audre Lord’s ninetieth birthday was last month. I gathered a bunch of Black women who either wrote books or are coming out with books for a dinner. We need to be there for each other because it’s really hard. Harder than I ever thought.

Wasn’t that an event where you didn’t necessarily know everybody ahead of time?

I slid into people’s DMs, child, I slid into people’s DMs. (laughs) I was just like, “I know you don’t know me,” and I would send them a link to my stuff so I didn’t seem out there. “This is my website, you can Google me, and I’m having this dinner.” I tried to focus on Black women who also were writing comics, fantasy, romance, YA and thrillers because I feel like we don’t give them as much support, because the genres for Black women steer so much in the self-help and memoir lane. There are these dope women that are doing fantasy novels, right? Let’s bring everyone together. That’s what I do.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

For me, it’s almost like CandyLand, you know what I mean? I love candy, and it’s like walking into one of the stores that has penny candy with so many selections, and they’re all satisfying. You’re like, “What can I get today?” The library’s where I got my love of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved those books because I feel like they took me to a different place, you could escape to anywhere, and it was free. I’m old enough for the Dewey Decimal System, and I remember being so excited when I would write down the numbers and go to the shelf and find that book. It was almost like a treasure hunt. For me, the libraries provided a solace. They provided me a way to escape and discover literature, and also music as I got older.  I’m dating myself with CDs, but I would check out CDs I couldn’t afford. Before I got a computer, I’d go to the Cincinnati library all the time and use the computers. It was only a half hour slot, and I would just go to the first floor, then go to the second floor, and just sign up for all of them. They weren’t connected so nobody knew that I was already on the first floor. (laughs) It really helped me just get on the computer. I had my first tech experiences at a library. It makes me sad the state of where it is now, because the librarians I’ve always encountered, including my really great friend Tim in Ohio, they just want people to read. They’re people who are there just for the love of reading. 

The post “You Don’t Know How Many People Are In Your Corner Until You Remove Yourself Out Of Your Own Way” – Deesha Dyer On Taking Risks and Tackling Imposter Syndrome first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I wanted to start by talking about your mom. She’s a writer, and she wrote a newspaper column about your family growing up. What did you take from your mom as not only as a writer but also as someone who writes about their own life?

My mom’s column started out as a local feature column that was really about other people in the community. She talked to people who had brain tumors, premature babies, liver cancer—the more inoperable and dire the better. As the weeks and years went on, she turned her gaze more toward herself and her own battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and then the cast of characters that were my four siblings and my dad. I think seeing her make herself the hero of her own story—and in so many ways, the hero of my story—was really instructive. Instead of being someone who said, “I am not my cancer, this isn’t who I am,” my mom was the person who just charged straight into illness and disability, although she wouldn’t have identified at the time as disabled. She owned her narrative, she owned her story. She made her struggle funny, silly, and noble. Even though it was a lighter feature column, she did a lot of really detailed reporting about her own prognosis, about the conversations that she had with her doctors, and particularly about being a woman in the Mountain West at that time. So many of those stories would have otherwise been dismissed— she was a woman, she was a mom, she was primarily a homemaker. But she gave such import to her own struggle and was really bold about portraying even things like her anger. No topic was off the table. She would write about my leg surgeries and my recovery from leg surgeries. She wrote about my grandma Rosie, who was in a series of nursing homes and underwent shock therapy treatment and had a condition called progressive supranuclear palsy. [She wrote about] my dad diving into the ocean in Hawaii and suffering a pretty serious spinal injury. Nothing was off the table at all.

In the guise of this feel-good column, she was still a hungry reporter who fearlessly portrayed the travails of her own body. I would try to plug into her column by writing schmaltzy poetry, much of which is in the book. In so many ways, I was bolstering her narrative and her heroism, but she was also truly teaching me how to write. She always said that I was talented, that I had important things to say.

I wasn’t like this superstar brainiac kid in school. Looking back, I faced some of what I would now call ableism. I think that kids all face it in different ways, but I couldn’t spell. I didn’t do well on tests. I started school in remedial classes and it was only because of my mom’s advocacy that I got out of those classes. In junior high, she lobbied the administration using my schmaltzy poetry to get me into the gifted and talented English track, which is of course itself really problematic now that I think about it. Like, “Oh, these are the gifted kids.” I think that she kind of turned me from “special” to “gifted” just by maternal sleight of hand. She would send some of her columns to national magazines and even get some of that published. I was able to walk around feeling like I was a published author and feeling such pride, even though for my school assignments, I would get notes that were like, “See me after class. Please rewrite this. This is supposed to be a rhyming poem and you have completely not fulfilled the assignment at all.” (laughs) But my mom was like, “Well, you know, that teacher’s just jealous of your talent. You’re one-of-a-kind. You’re original. Your writing is going to change the world. What does this teacher know?” She really had a bone deep belief in my ability to tell stories, and that was very much modeled after her practice as a writer.

The slightly more complicated tension in the book is the question of what stories get valorized and told and what stories don’t? What kinds of illnesses or bodily foibles or disabilities are celebrated and which are kept secret or hidden? I see the book really as a collection of narratives. The book starts with me quoting a paragraph from my mom’s column where she says I don’t have cerebral palsy. I really see the book as going back through my childhood and inserting my own body and my own physicality into my story and into everything else that was happening in my life. And in a way maybe tacitly saying that disability should be just as shameless and human as having cancer or having Lou Gehrig’s disease. Let’s erase that stigma and put my own body and my own lived experience into this story that has so many different layers of illness and family and queerness already layered into it. That was what I was trying to do with the book. Not just tell a story, but in my own way, correct the record to include my own perspective and myself as a character.

When she would have written the column where she said that you don’t have cerebral palsy, she definitively knew you had been, correct? You had been diagnosed as a child.

Absolutely. I was diagnosed at eighteen months and those columns were when I was in the sixth grade. She would, in a very detailed way, always tell me the story of my birth, that she had done a headstand to get me off the umbilical cord. She would even include little details, like there was a water spot on the wall across from her hospital bed in the delivery ward and it was in the exact shape of the head of William Shakespeare. At that moment, she knew that I was going to be a writer. [It was like] the birthday story that parents often tell for their kids, like “your dad was late to the delivery and the doctor was an idiot” or “the doctor was so short that he had to stand on a box to get to reach the hospital bed,” just all of those little details. It was really maternal subterfuge, and kind of dazzle camouflage, because what she didn’t say was, “You have spastic cerebral palsy because of prematurity and because of complications at delivery.” It was almost this Scheherazade-like dance that she did, where it was really more about hiding that diagnosis than it was about all of these colorful details. I mean, she was also a mom who was just telling a story, but it was very, very intentional.

Your mom springs off the page, even when she’s doing these things that you might not necessarily agree with. As a reader, you can’t help but be enthralled by her.

It’s so true, and she’s that way in life, too. She just has this charisma about her and she loves people. And she loves her kids so much. She’s just a character. She’s a classic storyteller. It’s so hard for me to kind of pinpoint the charisma or the charm of my mom just because she’s my mom, so some of it was craft and some of it was just writing what happened and what she said. (laughs) She was and is a very unconventional woman who lived a very conventional life until my dad’s death. I think people have always related to how she lived her life out loud and how she kind of called herself out on her own BS a little bit. She’s just kind of a truth teller. In a culture that prized perfection and glossy surfaces, she played the role and she didn’t, so I think that there was that real tension there. Then her life after my dad died was so surprising and just so affirming for me to see. Even though her relationship with [her partner] Alice isn’t like my relationship with my husband. They’re an older couple, they still don’t live in the same state. I think they’ll never be “live in a house with a white picket fence” kind of couple, but I think seeing that my mom was free to live a radically different life and a radically different kind of existence just spoke to the life that she’d always lived as a truth teller, as someone who was going to tell her story and kind of Trojan horse smuggle stories of grief, sorrow, and hilarity under a masthead that said “Silver Linings” with a glossy picture of her.

One thing that I was surprised by when I was reading the interview with your husband was how long you’ve been working on this memoir. You started it before you discovered your diagnosis with cerebral palsy. Is that correct?

That’s true. Yeah.

What it was like to writing your memoirs changed while you were still processing this withholding of information that your parents had done?

I started writing essays about my life in 2013 after graduating from the Michener Center for Writers with an MFA in fiction. I had these funny or interesting family stories. I sort of thought of them in the vein of “The Wonder Years.” They were lighter, they were sparkly, and they were fun. They explored my identity as a gay kid coming of age, but not as much about my leg or my disability, because anytime I tried to write about that, everything just got really hazy and the trance sort of broke. The one that I started with was the essay about meeting the actor who plays a munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz,” Margaret Pellegrini. When I was first writing it, it was really about my dashed showbiz dreams. But as I was telling that story, my leg just was beating at the door, or maybe it was just sort of spastically making itself known beneath me. I wrote that one and put it aside. I wrote the chapter about meeting the HIV/AIDS speaker who came to my seventh grade life science class. I was chugging away. I think I had maybe written some of the chapter about going with my dad to France, just sort of in various states of finished or not finished. When I found out about the diagnosis in 2014 when I was applying for private health insurance for the first time in my life, it turned the stories that I had already been working on into a reckoning with my body and my identity in ways that I hadn’t seen before. Instead of just silly romps through a happy childhood, it became a confrontation with secrecy and lies and fibs and lies of omission that had always coursed through my life.

A huge part of that was the lies that I told myself and the kind of blind spot that I’ve had about my own body. I’d always walked with a limp, I’d had surgeries on my hamstrings and Achilles tendon. I’d done physical therapy for years on and off until I was sixteen and recovering from my final leg surgery. It was a perception shift that changed the way I saw my body. It really gave me a body on the page and it gave me a personhood. It sounds kind of counterintuitive to say, but having a diagnosis of cerebral palsy actually gave me the distance that I needed to write more thoroughly and in greater depth about my life. I suddenly was in command of the facts of my life in ways that I hadn’t been before. So instead of my leg and my body just being this kind of amorphous thing that I didn’t really understand and I was embarrassed by and ashamed of, I was able to really drill down into those moments. Specifically with “The Wizard of Oz” chapter, I was able to identify why meeting a wonderful, talented, disabled actor had been interesting to me or even traumatic for me, and see it as an examination of how external ableism becomes internalized over time. It wasn’t just about a kid who has show biz dreams and is obsessed with “The Wizard Of Oz,” It was also a reckoning with my body and the way that I moved through the world and questions of did I want that spotlight on me? Did I want to play Quasimodo in “The Hunchback Of Notre Dame” or was that going to be an “indictment” of myself that I simply couldn’t take on? Or was there so much cognitive dissonance there that I was just like, “Nope, I have to give up acting entirely like, there’s absolutely no way that I can do this anymore.”

As I kept working on the book, the material got more mature and more about my sexuality. My leg kind of followed me into the bedroom, to Croatia, to being a caregiver for my dad, and to Texas where I met Lucas, the man I’d marry. I think the stories got more mature and more intricate and complicated as my life went on, and I certainly couldn’t have written the more mature older stuff If I didn’t know about cerebral palsy. It’s just really interesting that I was already writing about my body. The really cool thing for me is it let me be a journalist and a reporter about my own experience. It let me give a narrative to my body and to my disability. It was more like finding a missing piece than it was this revelation. It was like the piece of the story that suddenly made all of the rest of it make sense. Once my leg was locked into place, I was so much more free to tell these other stories and see how my family and even my sex life, or my intimate and romantic partners, all kind of connected back to my body and back to my experience on this earth.

It feels like that there’s a fearlessness to your writing in terms of no topic is off limits and that seems to be something that readers have really responded to. The book has been out for a few weeks. What has it been like getting reactions from readers?

I know this sounds like a cliche thing to say, but it’s been so incredible. I guess this sounds grandiose and I don’t mean it this way, but what I’ve learned even in just the past week is how much people need stories of disability and queerness out there in the world. People need to feel seen on the page. I think they like to be spoken to honestly. Once I was able to bring my vulnerability to the page, people bring their vulnerabilities to the page. Whether you’re gay and disabled or not, everybody grapples with shame and family secrets and the legacy of storytelling. I’ve been really moved by people’s openness and unflappability. I mean, I definitely have gotten a few one star reviews on Goodreads which I do not look at anymore, but I’ve learned a lot in the last few days. (laughs)

I guess it makes me sort of believe in people’s goodness that they want to engage. People need to laugh about their families and their bodies. We take such joy in our bodies, in our families. I think so often in the conversation today, with so much peril that queer and disabled people face, we so often forget the joy part of it. We forget the pride part of Pride sometimes, just that it’s really fun to be alive. It’s fun to tell stories. It’s fun to have a body. I think, if I could put it in one sentence, it’s just rediscovering some of that queer joy and disabled joy.

I’ve also just been incredibly moved by how the disabled community has embraced me and the book. My body is so particular to me and I’m so new to speaking about disability in any kind of a public way, where anyone would even half listen to me. I’ve been struck by the level of grace and the level of intelligence that folks living with disability have shown me.  It really makes me want to keep learning and keep paying it forward.

If I had to respond as to why the book has been met that way, I think it’s just that the world is hungry for stories of disabled people who are flawed and funny and complicated and have a million other things going on, and are just true, full characters on the page. So many of the narratives that I grew up with were after school specials or stories where gay or disabled characters— and to be clear, that’s just my lens or my way into this—died at the end. They were there to serve able bodied characters on their journeys of self-discovery. They weren’t sexual. Even in books I loved, like A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Or, you know, the stories of disability ended when you turned eighteen. It’s like, “Okay, well, you’ve had all your leg surgeries. You’re done. We raised you, go off in the world.” What I noticed is those junior high, high school years are actually the easy years. Even in college— although I had a complicated college experience—are the easy years because you have so much institutional support. I think that the real coming of age for me, as a later bloomer and a person who didn’t have all the answers, a person who was still reckoning with who he was in the world, that coming of age came so much later. Just telling a coming of age story that didn’t end when I was eighteen—or twenty-one, or even thirty—but kind of continues on to this day was a really powerful revelation for me to have and hopefully for other readers out there who have a similar experience.

You make the point that when you come out, whether as gay or disabled, you’re coming out for the rest of your life.

It never ends, but it’s good. I think that the coming out process can really just be a coming into process, coming into yourself, coming into your community. I think coming out is a perfectly descriptive way to put it, but I also think that it can be so much more about what you’re stepping into, rather than, you know what you’re coming out of. I mean, Dorothy wasn’t, like, coming out of her aunt and uncle’s house, she was stepping into Oz! (laughs) I think that little perception shift where there really is a queer, disabled world waiting to claim you and who wants you out there with them. When I was first coming out as gay, especially in my younger years in Utah as a teenager, I just thought playing ping pong with a straight guy who loved Keith Richards was the best I was gonna do. I actually am still friends with that guy. (laughs) We went to a couple of concerts a couple of weekends ago and I gave him the book. But I think now knowing that there really is a Technicolor world out there for people who are different in a range of ways to explore is just really exciting. I think that’s maybe a bit why it’s scary for the Ron DeSantises of the world and why there are book bans. It’s like trying to stuff Dorothy back in her house, and she’s like, “I’m not gonna go back in the house. I’m already way down the yellow brick road.”

A big part of your book is about Utah. Can you talk about writing about Utah as someone who would be an outsider in many ways, chiefly because you’re not Mormon.

I think as a kid, I was able to pass as Mormon because I looked like a prototypical Mormon kid and I shared so many interests with my Mormon friends and classmates. I love musicals. I love Disney. I got into a whole debate with people this weekend over whether or not I was a quote unquote Disney gay as a kid. (laughs) I mean, I literally had a trophy case full of Disney dolls. They did this series of Disney villains as Barbies back in the day, so I have Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil still in the plastic wrap, kept in mint condition for all of time. But I think what Utah does, and I kind of say this in my interview with Lucas too, but Utah just skips the gay topic sentence of saying we’re a gay society where gay people exist, therefore I love Disney or therefore, The Princess Bride is my favorite movie. There’s so much love and community in Utah.

When I was growing up, there also was so much repression, and it really wouldn’t have been safe to be an out gay kid. Thank God, I think that’s changed. I think it’s easy to gloss over the impact being marginalized has on gay people because so much has changed in just the past five or ten years. But I look at a relationship like my relationship with [my ex-boyfriend] Kevin. He very much had wanted to be Mormon or wanted to be a good Mormon at times in his life. When you’re marginalized for your entire life, it actually does start to have psychological consequences and I think that gay people are susceptible to being shunned and gaslit. I think the darker side of Utah can really be, if you don’t fit the mold, what then?

I didn’t ever feel like I’m in a position to write anthropologically, or in a sweeping Joan Didion way, about Utah as a place, just because that’s not the sort of writer I am. I haven’t done the homework to make that happen. But I am proud in the book that the Utah-ness of it all really does bubble forth. I think about Gail, my boss at the DOMA Alliance. She’s such a Utah character. She’s irrepressible, cheery, ditzy, determined, but also, weirdly one of the fiercest allies that I had in my life at that time. She’s not Mormon, but her partner was raised Mormon. No one is that far from Mormonism in Utah, in a variety of ways.

You write so honestly about your own foibles and imperfections, and also about the moments you come up short with different people in your life. How did you that layer of self-reflection make its way into your book?

I think I had published the France essay in Tampa Review. At that time, I used my French teacher’s real name and my friend’s real name. I hadn’t changed a thing. I’m still friends with the character Robin and I was Facebook friends with this French professor, who really did have such a funny, kooky, special relationship with my dad, in his own way. I asked my former teacher, now mentor, Elizabeth McCracken, “Elizabeth, how do you deal with writing in the age of social media where you’re so connected to all these people from your past?” And she just said, “It can’t all be transcendence.” It was just so true. When the you on the page is on a journey, you don’t have all of the growth and the epiphanies. You gain them through the course of the book.

When I was writing essays, it was all about the killer ending and the epiphany at the end. I think when it’s a chapter in a book, inherently you want the epiphany to come at the last page. At MFA school we used to call it the complexity of afterthought. That was what made a short story a short story. It was sort of like the blank space after the last page was where you as the reader had the epiphany. Just allowing, especially as a disabled person, to be flawed, to not always say the right thing, to exhibit internalized ableism and homophobia and hopefully, by the end of the book, come to some kind of a place where you have some perspective on all of that stuff. Not to say that those things aren’t still things to think about or struggles for me, but to just try to be honest about what that journey was. I think the alternative would be to perpetuate this myth of isolation, like, “Oh, well, I was the only disabled person that I knew.” Well, that’s not true. I had a bunch of disabled kids in physical therapy, there were disabled kids in my acting troupe. I was actually in a world filled with disabled people, and so how did I treat them? How did we understand or misunderstand each other?

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

This is an interesting bit of family lore, there’s a library in Pocatello that bears my last name. It’s the Marshall Public Library in Pocatello, Idaho, My grandparents gave money to make it happen a million years ago. I had the chance to actually go up to Pocatello two summers ago, right after I’d sold my book, and visit the Marshall Public Library. It was such an incredible space. They had all of my dad’s yearbooks from the 70s. I mean, they weren’t his yearbooks, they were his graduating class. I was able to pull them from the shelves and take pictures of all these pictures of my dad that no one in my family had seen in maybe forty years. They were pictures of him writing an article on a typewriter in his journalism class or being a member of this or that club. Just even as repositories of our own history, libraries are such an important resource.

When I was young, I did not understand the Dewey Decimal System. Looking back, I think it was very much related to some of the cognitive symptoms of cerebral palsy. It was just so foreign to me, how you could possibly find a book on the shelves, even in the era of the nineties where it was somewhat past card catalogs. At the public library in Holiday, Utah, you could type in the book title and author into a computer and then have like a blinking green screen, but it was too intimidating. I didn’t understand how to ever find books. Once I was a little bit older, I was able to put things on hold at the library. It really was this hack, where suddenly I could use the library because all I had to do was type it in my computer at home. I could take the time to figure out how to spell, I could do it at my own pace, and waiting for me there would be this cache of CDs, DVDs, and books of all kinds that I was free to read. It just let me read so much more widely and so much freely than I had when I was like a Barnes and Noble kid and everything was expensive. (laughs)

I would say I would say became an avid library user in my college years. I put a bunch of things on hold during the breaks and it let me be a very avid gay reader. It really did let me just explore all kinds of writers. I’m  a total library freak. It’s been so fun to see how the library has evolved, where now we have Libby and some of those other digital services. It’s never been easier to get your hands on library books. It’s a cliche to call libraries a safe space, but they truly are. I guess what I’m trying to say with the decimal system thing is, I think libraries are more accessible content-wise than ever, because you have digital options. You can put things on hold. It really is amazing to see just the level of curation and attention that librarians give books.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Greg Marshall On Writing Fearlessly And Rediscovering Queer Joy first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

 The book is a memoir yet reads like a novel, where the character Maddie Twist guides us through her childhood and young adulthood. Can you talk about how Maddie Twist was the ideal character for you to tell your story?

I’d like to start by saying that I’ve been working on this book for— oh my goodness, I started it back in the late seventies. Over the decades, I would write a little bit and then put it away. This went on for years and years because, if you’ve read it, you understand that it was a very hard story to tell. Finally it came to the point where I really wanted to finish it. I’ve written a couple of other books and I’m always searching for the right voice to bring me into the journey of the book. With my memoir, I needed cover to go into the battle zones of my youth. I came up with the character of Maddie Twist as a type of Trojan horse, because it was a really hard story to go into.

[With the origins of] Maddie Twist, it was Maria Magdalena, which was my grandmother’s name. It was Madeline—my mother wanted to call me Madeline, but she named me Adele instead. Twist also came from my mother. She was thought of by the Italians on my father’s side of the family as Kitty Twist, which was based on a Jane Fonda character. So it was an amalgamation of a lot of creative things from my childhood that coalesced into creating this character to give me the armor, so to speak, of going into the war zones of my childhood.

The experiences that you write about are so raw and painful, but as I was reading, I felt like you really had such a clear perspective on your childhood and the people involved that you were able to write about them with a lot of compassion.

Well, that’s something I learned through years of therapy. This is going to sound a bit woowoo, but I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of alchemy. I’ve always thought of alchemy as not like the physical elements of changing base materials into gold, but in a spiritual sense of being able to take what might be cruelty and darkness and discern the light in the darkness, to be able to transform that into something illuminating and something positive. For instance, my mother’s schizophrenia. She could be very cruel but at the same time, she could be incredibly imaginative and creative. Had she not been that imaginative, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to live the life I’ve lived, to take the chances and the risks I’ve taken that have made me who I am. It’s an interesting thing, being able to look at people with compassion, even though they’ve been cruel. It’s kind of digging into the systemic reasons of why people are cruel in our society. And that’s another conversation altogether.

There are so many allusions to literature and different authors from the start, it’s clear that reading played a key role in your life. Can you talk about where and from who you developed your love of reading?

My mother read a lot. She would swing from reading trashy novels like Valley Of The Dolls [to reading] poetry. She read Byron and Keats and Shelley. She read the Greek philosophers and the myths. Thank God for that because I was living in a working class milieu where people just didn’t care about literature or poetry. I was fortunate to have that in her. Books played a central role in my life because it was a way for me to escape the traumatic situations of my childhood and, in a way, be involved in a magical thinking that took me into new worlds that were enchanting, [although] not always good. I mean, I loved Edgar Allan Poe, but the darkness of his poetry mirrored some of the confusing feelings and darkness that I was experiencing as a child. So there was a relating to it. I was really fortunate that my mother was a reader.

It seems that poetry plays such a big role in your life. One of my favorite lines from the book is “poetry protects me like a shield against the nitwits.” Can you talk about that?

I grew up in a very working class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Like I said, none of the kids that I was going to elementary school with ever read poetry. I didn’t have anything in common with those kids. It was kind of like I was living in this little fantasy bubble with my mother and, sometimes, my father. It was a world that was so unlike anything else. When kids were cruel, for instance on the playground, poetry was my shield. It was a form of protection in a way, to say that there is something else besides this. What I see outside of myself on this playground and the insults and the cruelty, there is another world. That world came from poetry and it was mine. It was like a foxhole for me.

The book also makes clear the key role that music in your life. Where did you develop your love of music?

My mother was a dancer in musical theater when she was young, and she also taught dance at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. She absolutely adored music. It’s an interesting trajectory on my maternal side of women without fathers. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had my mother out of wedlock. The father was unknown. I have often thought that my mother may have been the child of rape, because my grandmother was very poor and played piano in speakeasies during the Depression to support herself and my mother, which was an incredibly dangerous thing for women to do at that time. My mother grew up in speakeasies with my grandmother, holding on to the piano leg, while my grandmother played stride and honkytonk piano. In a sense, music was in the blood, it was in the bloodstream.

My grandmother, who was of Irish origin, just imbued such a love of rhythm and music in me. We used to play cards together at night. She taught me how to beat rhythms with the cards on the table. To hell with gin rummy, we were more into playing beats together.(laughs) It’s something I grew up with on my maternal side, and I’m very grateful for that.

Your mom seemed to have such an interesting career in musical theater. She worked with Joel Grey, correct?

I don’t think she worked with him. They met in that musical theater scene in downtown Cleveland, which was very vibrant at the time, and they started dating. The irony is that I ended up playing him as a drag king in cabaret with my drag queen friends as a young woman. (laughs)

It seems that musicals provide a through-line in the book, like how Maddie is constantly being forced to sing songs from “Oliver!” but never the songs that she wants to sing.

Oliver Twist in a way ties in with that that perspective of being orphaned, except that I never wanted to play victim. There are millions of abandoned kids all over this country. One thing I can say as an abandoned kid is that the last thing you ever want to do is treat a child like they’re pitiful, because pity is extremely shaming. Even though we can be feeling incredibly lost, many of us have resilience and we don’t want to be treated like a pitiful object. We need love and caring and compassion. To be pitied makes one feel ashamed, and it’s shaming enough for a child to have been thrown away by their parents.

It’s eye-opening reading the book in terms of how the how the kids are treated, and whether or not all that much has changed in those kinds of systems since then.

Unfortunately, there are good foster parents and there are really bad foster parents, and I think that continues to this day. It’s an overburdened system. People that work as counselors and caseworkers in that system are overburdened because there’s such a huge caseload. One of the main ideas in the book is that you have to imagine a new life. Everything starts with imagination. If you can imagine a new life for yourself, you can create a new life for yourself. If my mother had not imparted that to me, I don’t know where I’d be.

I’m probably being a little inarticulate, but I want to stress that even though there’s some really dark elements in this book, I think my searching for the light as a child and finding that light was the key to my survival. I could easily have been brought down by it all. It’s the curiosity of constantly searching for that light [that saved me], be it through the goodness in other people, through music, or through literature and poetry.

That seems to tie back to when you mentioned magical thinking before, and how important magical thinking was to you throughout your entire childhood.

And magical thinking gets a bad rap. (laughs) As I said, I’ve spent years and years in therapy. My therapist once said to me, “You know, magical thinking worked for you as a child, but if you bring a blown-up life raft into an elevator at William Morris, people are gonna think you’re nuts. (laughs) You have to grow up and understand how to be a part of a society without the defenses and the magical thinking of your childhood.” I agree with that to a certain extent, but I also believe in the power of visualization, creating what you want in your head, and then making that come true.

The book is also a queer coming of age book as you’re figuring out your identity. The last part of the book, when you’re working at the Salvation Army and going to the clubs is such a vibrant picture of queer life in the early 70s. Can you talk about how you approached portraying that time?

It was such an enchanted life that we had. We were outcasts in terms of society, but we really created a sense of family and celebration when we were in the clubs and when we were in our homes. Getting together with each other was—gosh, how do I explain it? It was very different than it is today. And I think that it’s important for LGBTQ+ people today to understand our history too. The time I’m writing about was a time when you could be murdered. I was beaten terribly for seeing another girl in junior high school. We went through hell for decades, which continued into AIDS activism, to fight for the right for LGBTQ people to be who they are today.

What are you working on musically right now?

I had such a very hard trajectory in music because of being an out lesbian. It was incredibly difficult in the 80s. Nobody was out when I was making music. Ellen DeGeneres wasn’t even out at that time. I encountered a lot of hostility after having been in the post-punk scene, where women were incredibly free and equal and could be whatever we wanted. There were no gender expectations on us whatsoever. Going into the commercial music business where it’s like “control control control the women,” it was not for me. I have had a lot of heartaches in the music business. It’s taken me a long time to want to reapproach and I’m doing it one song at a time. I recently released a very political song called “American Elegy.” I’m releasing another song that’s more on dance hit called “Savage As the Wolf,” which is coming out on piece biscuit records in April. So I’m doing it one song at a time, very tentatively.

And finally, what role that library has played in your life?

The Cleveland Public Library was a big escape for me. I would often go to the Cleveland Public Library downtown, which was an amazing place to hang out and just get lost in all of the different rooms. Because I didn’t go to university or study I always felt a bit like Jude the Obscure, you know, longing for Christminster. (laughs) The public library ended up being my place to feel like I was getting a proper education, not only because of the books but also the architecture and the feeling. It was the same feeling of being in a church. The air in a library is imbued with curiosity and knowledge and wisdom. I feel the same thing when I go into beautiful churches all over Europe, that idea that the actual air’s imbued with the holiness of people praying. Libraries have a very important place in my life.

The post Adele Bertei On Entering The Battle Zones Of Her Youth first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

You write a lot about your great grandmother Cillie, and at one point you write, “like the other mothers in my life, Cillie modeled for me how to make a way out of no way.” Can you talk about what you learned from Cillie as a parent?

She was someone who I always felt just a very strong sense of unconditional love. Her home, her style—everything was so graceful. As a kid, I found her house to be this magical place and found her to be just seamlessly kind. It’s only later, as I’ve grown up and gotten older, that I learned about her struggles to hang on to the house, the kinds of ways that even her migration from New Orleans to Chicago has these kind of unspoken tensions that were probably racialized and also about class. What I learned from her was, first of all, the importance of always providing this sense of being loved and also liked by an elder,  the importance of really investing energy and smarts into providing a home. Also, that home can be not just for the people who are immediately around you, but also for the folks who are coming from the South or folks in the family when people were down and out. I didn’t feel or see the labor that it took and that was a real grace, in terms of being a child and not being aware of the work that it took to provide that. So part of that “making a way out of no way” was her creating this sense of abundance and stability that actually was a group effort.

I’ve learned that, as a parent, I haven’t been able to completely follow that role, because part of being a parent is also just being more of a human being with flaws. I think because she was my great-grandmother, we saw her several times a year, but we weren’t in her household all the time. She provided a kind of dream space of possibility for me. As a parent, I’ve really tried to create that lovingness and stability, but also I’m more willing to show the human side. If I’m struggling, I try to talk about that with [my daughter] Cece.

I think what was just so great about Cillie, too, is just her sense of confidence. When I’m reading about Black women’s history, in some histories there’s sort of a sense of only the struggle, but not always of the confidence and the grace. That’s something that sometimes gets left out when historians are trying to map the difficulties of living in this country, especially during the era that she was alive.

When you discuss your grandmother, Gwendolyn, you write about how you envision her when you write and that you write what you imagine she would want to read. Can you talk more about her?

She was someone who she always called me her twin, which was pretty wonderful. I have an old picture of her, which is from before I was born, I think it was my mom’s high school graduation. She has this really winsome, almost sort of spacey look. She was someone who really struggled from day to day. She dealt with poverty, had a household of kids, and was really a hard worker. But in this particular photo, you can really see on her face that she has this kind of creativity and winsomeness that I sometimes feel in myself too.

When I write, I think about the fact that she loved to tell stories. She loved knowing facts, and she was just hungry for information. The fact that she sometimes stole or liberated books from the school that she cleaned was indicative of the person that she was. She was always just trying to find information wherever she was, like watching PBS, clipping things from the newspaper, or vigilantly reading her Reader’s Digest. She was just hungry for information. I think about who she could have been if she had been born at a different time and under different circumstances. She was an intellectual, and maybe what Robin D.G Kelley calls “organic intellectuals.” She was really someone who loved to think about and share ideas. She was very creative and imaginative, but just by being in her house, I was also aware of how sometimes that space to create wasn’t one that she was allowed.

When I write—and this is also coming from my training as an academic and trying to change my own language to make it more accessible and more direct—I think about people like my grandmother, who was a wonderful and unique person and part of a community of people who were intelligent, excited, and imaginative. I think about how could I write and tell stories where they would see themselves? I really wanted my grandmother to have a story where she could see herself. She isn’t with us now, but she was alive for my first book, which was Becoming Cleopatra. I was still learning how to write, but I wish I had written more directly then for her to read. I did some interviews with her before she passed away. I’m really glad that I got some of those stories, but it would have been great to have them in print for her. I wish that I had, because I know she loved books and really valued writing and publishing things.

Were the interviews part of something for a project or was that just something for you?

That actually got me going for this project. I had the idea of writing about my great grandmother’s house, about the idea of home and the house with the boarders. When I was interviewing my dad, I was expanding that idea to also think about making a home. I wasn’t sure what form it would be. I’d taken a film class and I thought maybe I would make it a film. I interviewed him on video and made a short film, but it was hampered by the fact that Cillie’s house had already been torn down. A lot of the places in the neighborhood were gone, even from my own childhood. I think that working on that project primed me for writing this book. Some of the early drafts of chapters about my grandmother and also about Cillie were part of me thinking through what that could look like. As I started thinking of myself as a mother, I realized that this is where these stories can go and that this is part of the same story. So the film that never was, the oral history, turned into this book. (laughs)

You write so movingly about how you and your wife have formed your queer life and how that isn’t necessarily reflected in how pop culture presents queer life. Can you can you talk about that?

Absolutely. Especially in my early single days, I was a big fan of “The L Word,” and growing up, “Tales Of The City.” [It started me] thinking about the idea of LGBTQ life partly as reinventing yourself or distancing yourself from family, or just seeing yourself as more singular. I think that, despite the fact that “The L Word” revolves around these characters who are connected in some ways, the warmth of everyday life that I was feeling, especially in my present day community, just wasn’t really reflected. I think about the fantasy of going to search for your community and your life somewhere else, like going to Oz or San Francisco. At different points in my life, I’ve attempted that as well. But really, what I ran into was the inescapability of reconciling [with family]. I mean, not everybody is able to reconcile with their blood family or to find models of how they want to be. I totally get the privilege of that, but I also feel like who I am was shaped by that history and I have these loving examples. So my own strategy has been to see myself as a product of these “making a way out of no way” people, including the women, as well as the product of struggle. Those are the things that I value: loyalty, making a home, hospitality, generosity, a kind of fluidity of space, and a kind of tenuous hold on property. We definitely own property, we own our house. (laughs) But just the idea that that’s not the end all and be all, but rather to see it as a way of helping create a place of welcome for other people. Those are things that I learned really from my own family.

I hadn’t seen images where people are really thinking multi-generationally about their queerness and thinking about how it can look different. I think also that the dominant images are mostly white images. There are a few examples, like “Noah’s Ark” and “Pose,” but especially the images of [LGBTQ] women are predominantly white, with some exceptions. Also this idea that you earn your visibility in our culture by being financially successful as defined by these particular terms and being heteronormative, being as close to the nuclear family as you can be.

Annie’s also coming from a family experience that’s not as positive at all times and definitely had some conflict. Her struggle to make peace with her family and to keep relationships with them was a lot of work. That also was really inspiring to me and made it all the more important that the family that we would create with Cece would be one where our blood family could be included. [It would be one where] we would try to bring together chosen family and blood family—even if it’s not completely seamless at all times—and try to integrate everybody. That’s what we’ve tried to do.

I was really fascinated by your writing about your mom, who probably wouldn’t have self-identified as queer, but she nevertheless created and cultivated a queer family of her own. Can you talk about that?

I would love to talk about that because my mom [introduced] the idea of total acceptance of lots of different kinds of people and ways of being in the world. That has always been true of her. She got involved in a church in her neighborhood, what is now known as Boys Town, that had a really strong AIDS ministry. I think she actually chose it and got involved in the ministry because her best friend had passed away from AIDS. She really committed to doing whatever she could to bring consciousness and support people and be a source of love and connection. It was really in the air, and also part of the fabric of her church and neighborhood, to be involved in gay life.

What was a revelation to me as I was thinking about making family is the way that I thought of my mom more as like a friend of gay men, but not as part of a family where she is an equal participant in this culture. Part of the language of chosen family really allows for all these different roles. It’s a little different than the image of the “’F-word’ hag.” I don’t want say the word, but you know what I mean? That was the image that might have been operating in the 80s into the 90s when she was doing that work, but I think the image of chosen family is much more allowing for a different formation of connection and ways where she was really central. That was consistent with my mother throughout our lives, that she had lots of different kinds of friends. She was often a mother figure or sister figure to her friends. She was very familial with folks that she worked with or other friends that she met through her activism, and really liked bringing them in, bringing them home. That model of making your friends and your co-workers your family is something that I can remember from the beginning..

She had this group of friends who were also her co-workers. They called themselves “The Raiders” and they would go to reggae clubs in Wrigleyville. They had a Christmas jammie party where they would like stay over and it was really very fun. It’s also just freeing to know that my mom had fun, even as a mother. Sometimes her role was to give advice and to help solve problems, but she also listened to music with her friends and hung out.

One thing that I was really struck by was how you were conscious of giving space for your daughter to tell her own story. Can you talk about like your mindset was as you embarked on this project?

Sure, absolutely. Thinking about the film and my great grandmother’s household, I had been wanting to write about family for a while. Then the experience of becoming a mother was so intense. Sometimes I didn’t know what to do with just the anticipation and also processing the fact that this is a child that another family has lost. We’re gaining this wonderful kid, but I know also that there’s a family that doesn’t have her in a direct way in their lives anymore. That’s a really difficult thing. Just figuring out mothering, what to take and what to leave behind in terms of my own family, working as a team [with Annie], all of those things, I needed a way to document it. The process of writing it down helped me deal with the intensity of the feelings of it, so I started writing. First, just journaling, but also writing things down so I could figure it out. My writing group, which is still my writing group and had been my writing group before we embarked on parenthood, is made up of people who are mostly my age and a little older. Most of them have raised children. As I was writing—and I might not have been doing it consciously—I would share drafts of things and get advice. It just felt less alone to think about things.

Some of the things that I write about are also really joyous. In the same way that I’m a compulsive picture taker—especially when Cece was young—I had to actually slow down, because I was missing things because I was so busy trying to take pictures. I just wanted to document that joy and try to slow it down a little bit. So the space of the page has been helpful for me to reflect, think about my feelings, and also come to terms with some of the difficulties and the struggles of being a mother and adoption as well. So yeah, I think I moved from writing, telling stories—sort of to figure them out—to connecting them to things I was writing, and realizing that I could make a connected story about the different generations and home and struggle.

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

A huge role, for sure. I am a library nerd.  I was kind of raised in the library because my mom’s first job was as a librarian at a community center. When we were in Nashville, there was a community center that also had books, but they were books that people could take and not necessarily give back. It was called Read and Rap. My sister and I would hang out there after school. I got the idea from there that books were there for the taking—I still haven’t quite gotten used to that. (laughs) So libraries have been really important. I think the Read and Rap experience not only gave me a sense of the plenitude of books that are there for me, but also that there’s a social justice part of creating a space for everyone to be welcome and to be part of the library. That was definitely the idea behind Read and Rap, that there were different kinds of learning—including books—that took place there: games, conversations. I’ve never quite shaken the idea that a library is an important part of a community and that often books are a way in to talking about what kinds of things that people care about the most.

A lot of this book was written in the library. Because our lives are so busy, the library on campus was a place that Annie and I would often meet before our days would get started, after we dropped off Cece. We would write together sometimes with another friend of ours, Julie. We called it “The Library Club.”  We would just go and sit with our computers and write. My experience post-motherhood has been a sense of urgency about writing, but also that I had to be more strategic about finding the quiet time to do it. Sometimes that means leaving the house and making an appointment, so the library has helped me out a lot with that as well.

The post Francesca T. Royster On The Joys of Chosen Family first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Your book begins with such a lovely depiction of your mother and stepfather, Can you talk about them? What were they like?

It was like a storied childhood, but you know, not one of the great “haves.” We were “have-nots.” We lived in Philadelphia, so growing up as a kid, being aware of my environment, it was like, “Okay, I’m here as a stepchild at the age of four-years-old.” This man comes into my life—this man my mom knew, she was a young mom, she was in her twenties. This guy comes into my life, and all of a sudden, my life becomes ideal, in that I become this everyday kid walking to school, coming home and having lunch, having a little brother that’s born. We go along for about four or five years, and my dad dies. I did not know at the time that he had adopted me, so when I found that out, that was just unbelievable. Instead of John Raymond Howard, I was John Raymond Scott. For a little kid, you get to eight, ninth, tenth grade, we all want to belong. Even though my father had passed, I could make a reference to my father, Sylvester Scott, and my mother, Vivian Scott, so that was good. And then I had my little brother, Marvin Bernard Scott. There we were, without my father, and we quickly became latchkey kids. I went from the expectations of a kid growing up and playing outdoors to now being responsible for my baby brother, because my mother had to go to work. When my mother became employed, the care of my little  brother was under my aunt and me. It just changed the game. I just remember things in my life that made me happy, and one of the things I felt that saved me and brought me forward as a person—because I was very tall—was playing basketball. So basketball became my refuge, but it also became my life. That little brown ball saved my life.

You grew up playing basketball in Philadelphia, where you frequently crossed paths with such players as Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain. What was it like playing basketball with these legends at such an early age?

I was taught humility early on by playing against those guys. (laughs) You grow to be six-foot-eight in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and you’re just a guy, because across the street at the other school, at Overbrook High School, is Wilton Norman Chamberlain. I met him when I was fourteen and he was sixteen. He was two years older than me, but he was a year ahead of me in school. I was always looked upon as the guy that was supposed to compete against Wilt, and there was no such thing. There was no such creature on the planet. I think William Felton Russell—Bill Russell—got as far with that as he could. Kareem got a little bit of it, because Wilt was still playing at the end of his career and the beginning of Kareem’s career. But for me in high school, at six-eight and Wilt was like a seven footer—when you say that, people look at it in terms of height. No, I mean he was a seven footer in height and talent. (laughs) To see that development in him and be part of that was great.

Philadelphia was a great emporium of basketball. We were turning out All-Americans, Guy Rodgers, Hal Lear, Wayne Hightower, Walt Hazzard, Wali Jones. We were turning out outstanding players but we all came under the shadow of Wilt. There was never going to be a basketball player born in Philadelphia that was better than Wilt, and so far there’s not been. I keep looking. I’m in my eighties and I don’t see it. (laughs) It just doesn’t happen. We thought we got close one year with Rasheed Wallace at Grant’s High School. We said, “Oh this could be the second coming of Wilt.” And Rasheed was a great player, but he was not the second coming of Wilt. There just has not been someone born that has taken that role.

Then you talk about Elgin Baylor. I saw Elgin Baylor as a twelve-year-old when I visited Washington D.C. I’m watching this guy that is playing basketball in a way, for a twelve year old, that I’d never seen anyone play before. I stoked that away and went back to school. I went to high school and graduated, and picked my college, the University of Portland in Oregon. I go out to Oregon, and there number one rival is the University of Seattle. And who’s the great player at the University of Seattle, but Elgin Baylor? Now I’ve seen this guy never miss a shot, never lose a game! (laughs) So that’s where I make my debut. That’s why I say, “God gives you humility, whether you think it’s there or not. He will give you humility.” I went up against two of the greatest players in the history of basketball. The other two names I would add to that would be Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell. Those were the four guys the current NBA is built upon. They were just outstanding people, but also incredibly talented players.

Your book shines a light on work that Oscar Robertson did in unionizing the NBA and improving working conditions for NBA players. Can you talk about Oscar? What was he like?

One of the proudest periods of my life was in the middle sixties when Oscar formally hired an attorney and formed the NBA Players Association. Your life is built on snapshots, all of our lives are. I remember the snapshot of sitting in the room. I was on Oscar’s Labor Relations Board, the union. I’m sitting in the room. I think I was with Oscar, Walt Bellamy, Archie Clark, Don Nelson. All players, but Oscar is our leader. He’s brought in the attorney, he’s had the meetings where we galvanized ourselves and then said, “Can we get a meeting with the owners?” The owners agreed, in 1966, to meet with us. This is huge. We go into this room, and there are these owners, the great promoters of the NBA, which was Eddie Gottlieb, Ben Kerner, Arnie Hoeft from the Baltimore Bullets. The millionaire in the room at that time was Jack Kent Cooke, who owned the Washington Redskins and the Los Angeles Lakers. We’re sitting in the room with these gentleman, and they ask Oscar to make a presentation. Oscar makes his presentation, and Sam Schulman, the owner of the Seattle team, said, “That was a great presentation. We have to get this done.” I remember Jack Kent Cooke saying to Eddie Gottlieb, “This was a fine presentation by these young men.”

My buttons were popping, but it was all Oscar Robertson. This was 1966. By 1970, we had certified ourselves as a players’ union, and that’s when we elected the new officers with the larger certified union in Puerto Rico. Oscar led that with our attorney Larry Fleisher. Oscar put his career on the line to go against the owners and say, “This is what our players deserve.” He filed the suit. Just as he was filing the suit, I was leaving the NBA and going to the ABA, but I followed it very closely. I got involved again with the players’ association when I came back in 1972 as a coach with the Detroit Pistons. Oscar was still leading the charge. He was a phenomenal, phenomenal man. Personally, I think he sacrificed his career. The owners are never going to see you as on their side, so all the jobs—the coaching jobs, general manager jobs—all that stuff passed Oscar.

I just talked to him a month ago. We were talking about how the NBA is progressing. I said, “The regret that I have is that you never got to achieve those great levels that the NBA achieved, and yet you’re the guy who put his neck on the line and got us there.” Think about that. He may have been one of the greatest basketball players ever, and yet he put his neck on the line. He was not so concerned with his game and his success, he was more concerned with the players and what they achieved in basketball.

He comes across as such an amazing person in the book.

Just as an aside, I’ll tell you again how amazing he is. A lot of people don’t know, Oscar Robertson’s daughter suffered from kidney disease. She needed a kidney. She walks around today living with her father’s kidney in her. That’s the depth of the man. I have so much admiration for him.

Going back a little bit, you were hired as a teenager by Haskell Cohen to work and play basketball at the famous Catskills resort, Kutsher’s. What was your time like there?

You just got the biggest smile on my face. That was such a great part of my life, because I had known Haskell since I was sixteen. Haskell Cohen worked for Parade magazine and he worked for the NBA. He brought me in as a sixteen-year-old—again, a six-foot-eight kid. He would come to Philadelphia and take me to the games. He had me in the NBA office in New York on the eighty-fourth floor. He was someone I was really connected to. He said to me when I was eighteen, “I want you to be a bellhop in Kutsher’s, because for the last two summers we had Wilt Chamberlain.” We went up to Monticello, New York. It was one of the greatest things ever to be around other All-Americans. I was with Al Butler, York Larese, Lee Shaffer, all these great players.

There was a basketball league. That’s where they started the big All Star game for the NBA. In 1958, the year after I was there, Maurice Stokes collapsed with encephalitis. Jack Twyman, who was twenty-three years at the time, was in Cincinnati. He happened to be a team mate, and he just started taking care of Maurice. Somehow he and Haskell got together. They colluded, it became the Maurice Stokes All Star game, and we raised money for Maurice Stokes at that game. All of the guys would come in from the Lakers, from Cincinnati, the Pistons, the Knicks, the Philadelphia Warriors. We got to celebrate and have this holiday.

The guy who was at the head of all of it with Haskell was Red Auerbach. I got to touch shoulders every day—every day—with Red Auerbach. He would show me pointers and different things. And he said, “If you become eligible after you graduate from college, I’m going to draft you. You’re a good player.” I was like, “Holy Toledo! Red Auerbach’s saying that?” But he said it to other people. He spoke to Earl Lloyd and that’s how I became a Piston, because Early Lloyd was the chief scout for the Detroit Pistons. He said, “If Red Auerbach is going to draft this guy, we should take a look at him!” (laughs) He came to Philadelphia, he came to my home. You didn’t hear of NBA scouts going to people’s homes! He came to my home, met my mother. It was almost like a college recruiting thing. Then we drove together up to Allentown where I was playing—because I had dropped out of college—and he saw me play. He told my mother, “We’re going to draft him.” In those days you’d go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody says that.” And that had happened! The Knicks came to see me play. The Cincinnati Royals came to see me play. So there was an awareness, but I thought I was going to be a Celtic with Auerbach, because that’s who I’d met at Kutsher’s. When I went to college in Oregon, that was the last guy connected to the NBA that had talked to me about being in the NBA. The NBA, at that time, was not a paragon of integration. You didn’t grow up as kids thinking that if we were good basketball players, we’re going to be in the NBA. That was just not the case. When it was brought to me, I was like, “Oh, okay.” I wasn’t poo-pooing it, but I wasn’t building my life around it either. Well, I get drafted by the Pistons and the story just goes from there.

Your story about being drafted is amazing, especially considering the pomp and circumstances being drafted now versus how you found you had been drafted.

(laughs) That’s one of my real joyful moments that I’ll have forever. Going to the Bronx to play a basketball game on the subway, and I picked up a newspaper—the evening newspaper, which I think was The New York Post. I’m reading through to see about the draft and I say, “Oh, no big surprise. They drafted Walt Bellamy out of Indiana.” He certainly was a cause célèbre and a great player. He should have been drafted number one. Number two, they drafted Tom Stith. Well I’m in New York, Tom Stith went to St. Bonaventure. He’s from Harlem—he’s a great player, an All-American. Then third, they drafted Larry Siegfried, from Cincinnati, who played with Jerry Lucas on that great Ohio State team they had down there with Havlicek and Bobby Knight. Come the fourth, I saw my name, Ray Scott. Ray Scott? I screamed! The people on the subway were startled. What I did—cause I’m from South Philly so I figure things out pretty good—I looked around like, who screamed like that? To this day, those people don’t know that it was me. (laughs) That was my pomp and circumstance.

But the story got better, because Earl Lloyd had me fly out to Detroit. It was like the arrival of a first round draft pick. That strikes me, there was no pomp, no circumstance. He took me to a club, he took me to dinner. We came back, and I remember asking him, “I didn’t get dessert at dinner. Can I get dessert? An apple pie a la mode?” He said, “Get dessert? You’re the number one draft pick! You can do anything you want. You can order a whole other meal.” (laughs) That was a big welcoming. I’m going like, “I’ve arrived. I’m really somebody.” I signed my contract the next day. I get twenty five thousand dollars for two years, and a thousand dollars of that contract is a bonus. Think about it. In 1961, flying back home in May or June, whatever that month was, with a thousand dollars in your pocket, when we would scuffle just to have two quarters in our pockets. Now today, those guys go home with bonuses of ten, fifteen million dollars wired to their accounts. But that was the way it was. There were a few guys in the NBA making what we would call big money. I would imagine Bob Cousy, Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar, Elgin, Bob Pettit, the usual suspects. But it was not a wealthy athlete’s league.

You had an amazing career as a coach but also you had an amazing run coaching your kids when they were growing up. That was such a fun part to read in your book.

That was absolutely a joy, because now I’m trained. Those girls got the best of Ray Scott as a coach, because I knew what I wanted to teach them, I knew how I wanted to teach them. That was just the happiest five years of coaching of my life. I couldn’t wait to get off work and get out to coach my girls. I would leave the office sky high. I brought in an assistant coach for my girls’ team, because I wanted to make sure that they had someone else to speak to, that they had someone they felt they could rely on too. I so enjoyed that. I was so happy in that five year period of coaching my girls, and I got to coach my daughters too. When they were at the high school, [my wife] Jennifer said, “You’re working two jobs.” (laughs)

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

I grew up in a library. The library on Broad and Christian in South Philly was a haven. We learned to take out library books and get them back in on time. Then we had a main library in Center City Philadelphia that I went to do my homework on Sunday afternoons. I cut my teeth in libraries. That’s where I did my book reports. I think I got an A in a book report for The Corsican Brothers. That was one of my great reads. I read the classics and I did book reports on the classics. You’re thinking the book report might be for the teacher, but actually my book reports had to be for my mother. She wanted to make sure I read my classics, so I did The Three Musketeers, The Corsican Brothers, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Man Without a Country, Les Miserables. They were just great books. I just loved to read. I took care of my little brother. It was just cool. We were from the era where we were poor but we didn’t know we were poor, because we were surrounded by love and a good education. I had my father who adopted me for a short period of time. I still revel in that happiness of that time, that little four or five year period we had.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post “That Little Brown Ball Saved My Life” — Ray Scott On His Compelling New Memoir and Groundbreaking Career in the NBA first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

How did you first hear about Freddy Mayer?

I had never heard of Freddy before a couple of years ago. I was having coffee with a source for my last book, Eli Rosenbaum, who has been at the Justice Department for many years investigating Nazi war criminals. I had seen an obituary on a person I had never heard of who had just died in Europe who had saved many, many Jews. I was embarrassed not to have known of this person who had done such heroic things and frustrated with myself that these people could live and die in anonymity. I asked Eli, “Who am I going to wish I met before they die who’s still alive today,” because so many of their generation dying every day. He said, “Well, there’s a guy you should meet named Fred Mayer.” He told me a little about his story, what he had done in the war with the OSS, and that there was a movement in a survivor’s group to get him the Medal of Honor. I went out to see him in West Virginia.

He was in remarkable shape, both physically and mentally. We spent hours talking about the war, his espionage mission, his upbringing in Germany, and made plans to meet again soon. Sadly, two months later he passed away. I had the chance to write his obituary for The New York Times, where I was a reporter for the Washington Bureau. I decided fairly soon that it was such a compelling and little known story to most people that it had the makings of an important book, so I decided to write it.

What about Freddy’s personality and background made him the perfect candidate for this mission with the OSS?

I talked afterwards to one of the surviving members of the mission who put it very well: “He was born without the fear gene in his DNA.” He just took incalculable risks. He was obviously driven by this deep-seeded hatred of the Nazis, because he and his family were forced to flee Germany when he was just sixteen-years-old. He saw the anguish that caused his father, in particular, who really resisted leaving Nazi Germany for years after Hitler took over. His father believed—somewhat naively in hindsight—that because he was a decorated World War I officer that the Nazis would never come after him. Even as the Nuremburg laws were having a direct impact on him and Jews around him—they were losing their rights and freedoms by the day—he still hung on to the belief that he would be okay. Freddy saw the toll this took on his father even after they fled to Brooklyn. His father would say he was never the same.

Freddy seemed to have a genius for problem solving in the moment and adapting to any situation thrown his way.

He really did. First of all, he was mechanical. That helped him in Basic Training when it came to problem solving and occasionally bending the military rules—jumpstarting a Jeep, even stealing a Jeep when he needed to. He faced this whole series of obstacles on the mission itself in Austria, beginning with having to get down from a height of 13,000 feet on a glacier that they had parachuted onto and missing some of their equipment, including a set of skis that was supposed to help them ski down.

He overcame one obstacle after another and managed to talk his way into and out of any number of situations. He got hold of a Nazi officer’s uniform and snuck into this Nazi officer’s club. He managed to get vital intelligence from a drunken engineer who had just been at Berlin working on the fortification of Hitler’s bunker. He talked up the train engineers at a yard outside Innsbrook to find out intelligence on the train lines and munitions that were headed to Italy; that led to the bombing of one very important train line with artillery that was supposed to replenish the Italian front. He switched disguises midway through his mission and became a French electrical engineer. He was able to provide cables back to the Allies in Italy revealing that one of the factories was basically at a standstill in producing these jet planes that were seen as really vital to the Luftwaffe. That was critical to knowing what Germany couldn’t do, as well as what they could do. It was one scene after another where he would get intelligence and pass messages back to a second member of the mission who would cable them back through Morse code to Italy. It proved vital for the OSS.

Can you talk about this other member of the mission, Hans? What was he like?

He came to idolize Freddy, even though he technically outranked him in OSS. He really followed Freddy’s lead, first from the United States where they were in training together outside Washington D.C., then on to Africa where they were sent waiting for assignment. He came to trust Freddy with his life. Long after the mission he would say he wasn’t doing anything daring or courageous, it was Freddy who was taking all the risks. It was true to some extent that Freddy was even more in harm’s way, but Hans was in quite a bit of danger himself. He was hiding out in an attic outside Innsbrook surrounded by Gestapo for more than two months. Had he been found out, he certainly would have been killed on the spot. He took enormous risks himself. He did that without knowing what had become of the rest of his family in the Netherlands, where he had fled. His father was a businessman in the Netherlands, and like many people surrounding him had come to fear Hitler’s rise from a very early point, years before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in ’39. He sent his twin sons, Hans and his brother Luke, to America months earlier. He had to stay behind with his wife and their younger son for financial reasons and difficulties getting visas, with the hope that they would be able to get out soon. He would write them these heartfelt letters to America asking about their lives, school, and telling them about what had become of them after the Nazis invaded.

Hans’ role in this mission is pretty incredible, considering he was able to get a working radio to function from his hiding place in an attic.

It took them so long to get a working wireless radio. That was his main job, as the radio man, but it malfunctioned for days on end. [It took] so long that the OSS based in Italy had basically given up on them as dead, because they were ordered to cable back immediately after landing in Austria. The OSS had not heard from them for nearly a week. At that point there was some manpower issue to man the line by which the cable was supposed to come over and they had given up on them. There’s a scene in the book where the commanders are pulled out of the movie they were watching on rec time and told that they had got a cable from Freddy saying, “Don’t worry, we’re okay.” Shouts of jubilation erupted in the movie theater.

You also talk about the people who made up the cutout system that assisted the mission. Who were these people and what did they do?

There were about a dozen or so anti-Nazi resistors who were really integral to the success of the mission. A lot of the credit for that goes to the third member of the OSS team, a Nazi defector by the name of Franz Weber. He was born and raised in a small town about two miles outside of Innsbrook called Oberperfuss. The model for some of these parachute missions was to develop small teams and find a Nazi defector who knew the area, act as almost a tour guide, and connect them with locals. Unlike in parts of France, where you had a fairly strong contingent of resistors on the ground, in Austria and Germany it was believed—correctly, for the most part—that you were dropping into overwhelmingly hostile territory. There was not going to be a greeting party saying, “Lets help them fight the Nazis and collect intelligence.” Franz was vital to that. Freddy went undercover into the POW prison and identified Franz as someone who would come to truly turn against the Nazis. This was a crapshoot by admission of many of the OSS officers. In a number of the other missions it was disastrous, where Nazi defectors who were working with the US would either simply flee once they got on the ground, never to be heard from again, or sometimes actively turn against the Americans violently. It was an incredible risk to put any trust at all in a Nazi defector.

In this case, it worked almost exactly the way they had envisioned. Franz had known some people in this town who he believed were opposed to the Nazis, although there were very few in the countryside. These were farmers for the most part whose livelihoods had been decimated by the Nazi rule in Austria. He immediately connected with one of them; that set in motion connections with a whole series of people, many of them women, including Franz’ own fiancée, who were under somewhat less suspicion by the Gestapo and could take more evasive maneuvers without coming under scrutiny. They were critical in passing messages back and forth; acting as lookouts; and putting Freddy, Hans, Franz up in hiding places in attics around town.

One of Franz’ sisters worked in a hospital and was able to get the Nazi uniform that Freddy used to make himself into an officer. A soldier in the hospital had died and she was able to sneak out the uniform. These were individual acts of bravery driven, I think, by a mix of true anti-Nazi sentiment, family loyalty, and personal interest. It was this hodgepodge of motivations. There were also a few people who were driven strictly by money. They could get paid off.

In the end, the further out that the network became and the more people they roped in, there were greater risks of being exposed. With every successful step, Freddy became a bit more brazen. By the end, he was cabling back to Italy that they should send a trunk of guns and explosives because he was prepared to take Innsbrook. He got a bit too big, and that led to his eventual capture and torture. The Nazis beat the crap out of him, waterboarded him for a number of days at Innsbrook.

That whole section was horrifying to read, but it’s also amazing his ingenuity negotiating the peaceful transfer of Innsbrook.

“Just incredible chutzpah,” as he said at one point of his own instincts. Even as a captive of the Nazis he thought he could leverage the situation: making promises, offering deals that he had no authority to make. Somehow in the end it worked. It turned into the bloodless surrender of Tyrol, in what Americans had feared was going to be the last bloodbath of the war.

In your opinion, why does Freddy and Hans’ story resonate after all these years?

I think first of all their plight as immigrants certainly echoes in some of the policy divides we have today over refugees. For me it resonated with the plight of people trying to escape the genocide and almost not doing it. There’s a quote that I used to end the book from Freddy, where he’s asked about coming to America, going back to fight the Nazis, and what he wanted people to remember. He said that he hoped that people would realize that they did their best to repay their debt to America. I think that’s still true of many of those coming here today to escape persecution and violence. For me, that is the biggest takeaway that we’ve often forgotten: the heroism and the obstacles that people from the war and the Holocaust faced and somehow overcame.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post “Just Incredible Chutzpah”—Eric Lichtblau on the Real-Life Hero at the Heart of His New Book first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Your book starts with Mary Oliver’s poem “The Uses of Sorrow.” Why was that poem such an apt beginning for your memoir?

First and foremost, I love Mary Oliver more than life itself. She’s one of my very favorite poets. I felt like the whole lesson of this book, which can sound very dark, has also in fact been a gift to me for what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown. I think almost anyone who’s had a complicated childhood and had some legacy of secrets or deception, when you finally feel comfortable enough to sit with it, look at it, and shine a light on it, it’s life-altering.

Your mother confided in you about a kiss with her husband’s best friend in 1980. Why do you think your mom enlisted you as her confidante? 

Honestly, this is where it’s guess work and not factual. One of the surprising, unexpected outcomes of having explored this period of my life is that I’ve developed a lot more compassion for my mother. I had to put myself in her shoes and [reflect on] that saying, “it’s really hard to know everyone’s full story and not feel forgiveness and compassion.” She had a tremendously hard life. I think she was very, very lonely in ways that I probably didn’t understand as a young girl. I think this thrilling, exciting moment happened—she had fallen in love and had this kiss—and for whatever reason, I was the person [she told]. I’m sure she had too much to drink, and there I was. I was a people pleaser, I was terribly attached to her, and she had a rapt audience in me.

In reading about her, she seems like such a glamorous, larger-than-life figure. Can you talk about what your mother was like in 1980?

She was all that, and I’m sure some of that is I was fourteen and entirely in her thrall. She was an astonishing cook. She’d studied at the Cordon Bleu, worked in the test kitchen at Time-Life, and written all these cookbooks. She had a food column for the Boston Globe. She was constantly throwing parties and she loved to have fun. She was a great storyteller and a great hostess. To be her child was to watch a lot of action happening.

I love the detail that she always traveled with her pepper grinder.

Can I tell you, I just found that pepper grinder only in the last year? She asked me to look for some stuff in her apartment in in Cambridge and I found this little silver pepper grinder.  Now the leather case is decayed, but it was so wonderful to find it. As you’re writing a memoir, every time you actually verify a memory is very heartening. (laughs)

In the book, you describe a necklace that plays a huge role in Malabar’s life and also your relationship with her. Can you talk about the necklace?

This is part of my mom’s sad history. Her parents were married to each other, divorced, married to each other again, and divorced again. I think she must have been about seven or eight-years-old when her father re-proposed to her mother. I will say as a child of divorce—I don’t know why—but we all secretly wish that our parents would be together again. No matter how unhappy the marriage is, you just want that for your own life as a child. So here she witnesses her father present her mother with this glamorous collar of a necklace, just bedecked with jewels. Over the years, the necklace took on this mythic proportion for her. My mother conflated love and possessions. She was an only child and was lonely. I think the necklace just captured her imagination.

In a strange way—because she was a very educated woman and knew a lot about art and art history and certainly about value—she gave this necklace such power. She would constantly tell me it was unappraisable, which of course we all know nothing’s unappraisable, right? While her father gave it to her mother easily and her mother gave it to her easily, I think my mother wanted to give it to me for her whole life on some level, but almost never could. She would dangle it and take it back and dangle it and take it back.  There was this big moment—and I don’t want to give any spoilers away—but I had always assumed I would wear it on my wedding day, which had been promised to me. Of course, one guess who wore it on my wedding day. (laughs)

When your mother embarked on this relationship with Ben, what role did you play?

You only have one set of parents and you only know one childhood, so this—what I’m sure sounds completely crazy—experience seemed normal to me. All of our childhoods are normal to us. This affair was carried out in plain view; these were couple friends. My role was kind of as a teenage chaperone. I was able to suggest things. After every meal I suggested that we go for a walk—a constitutional, was what my mother called it. The two spouses would never join because they were both in ill health. We would go skipping out the door, often singing, walk up this country road, and then my mother and her lover would slip off into a guest house that my mother often rented in the summers. I would wait for them while they were visiting. Of course, you can see from the other’s perspective how innocent it looked. I was there, which in hindsight makes me feel very guilty and ashamed, but there you have it.

During this time, what was your relationship like with Ben and his wife Lily?

They were my parents’ friends, so I didn’t really know them that well. Ben learned very early on that I knew about the affair and didn’t seem to have any concern that I knew about it. I became very close to him. I was part of this very adult conspiracy. I’m horrified by it now, but at the time it was actually great fun. It was certainly more interesting than anything that was going on in my fourteen-year-old life. I enjoyed Lily and I liked her, but I didn’t know her in the same way at all. I was also seeing things through my mother’s lens, which was not always a flattering picture of her lover’s wife, of course.

Early in the book, you write “in our family being right trumped being truthful.” Can you talk about what you meant by that?

This goes across the board in my family. If someone insisted the sky was pink, there was not a lot of give, there was not a lot of, “Well, really it looks more like this.” It was very important to win or be right, and that just somehow trumped the truth. Both my parents were very skilled arguers and both had tempers. You just didn’t question it. I think as a result, when my brother and I were growing up, we tried to hold firm to whatever we said: “No I wasn’t at such-and-such a place.” You were just going to stick to it somehow.

It seems like that would be very difficult in a family where everyone’s so intelligent.

It took a long time to—I don’t know the right way of putting it, but to develop a moral compass. I think it’s one of the key things that one does as a parent. I’ve certainly learned this as a parent myself, and yet I don’t think anyone ever sat down with my mother and talked to her about her gifts and her weaknesses and how to manage them in life. Certainly no one ever talked to me about it. It was watching by example, and so as a result you had to do a lot for yourself. It takes a long time to unlearn stuff that just seemed like the norm in your family.

This whole legacy of deception and secrecy didn’t just start with my mother’s generation. Her father, she discovered, had a secret other family, and her mother had a similar affair. It seemed like in this way, this was just going on and on. Part of that was why it became so urgent for me to write the book once I even started thinking about having children. You realize, “This is part of my past—the past is always going to be there, it’s prologue—but I need it to stop. I don’t want it to continue to the next generation.”

At one point, as an adult, your stepmother tells you, “You can read your way into a whole new narrative of yourself.” What were the books for you that helped you write this new narrative?

Honestly, I became a serious reader because of my stepmother. I hadn’t been one of those kids who had a flashlight under the blanket, which is a little odd given that I was the daughter of a New Yorker writer and my mother was a food and travel writer. I read, obviously. I was educated and I had gone to good schools, but I hadn’t fallen in love with reading in that way. I can remember meeting her and her starting to press these books into my hands—whether it was Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, or Jim Harrison—and just discovering the way in which you can get lost in stories. Reading is such a deeply empathetic task, because you’re putting yourself in a character’s shoes.

The books that specifically moved me and helped me shape and think about my own memoir were largely memoir. I love Elizabeth Alexander for the poetry of her prose. I love Mary Karr for the authenticity of her voice. There was a line in Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and the Story that probably helped me more than anything else. It’s a book essentially on how to write personal narrative. At one point, she’s talking about Mommie Dearest and why it doesn’t work. In addition to the usual “don’t settle scores in your memoir,” she has this line, “In order for the drama to deepen, you must show the loneliness of the monster, and the cunning of the innocent. I remember reading it and thinking, “That’s what I need to do here.” I know everyone can sympathize with me when I was fourteen. I was the child and this thing sort of befell me; the part that I was really interested in was why for so many years, even as I was trying to separate, I kept leaning in rather than leaning out? I think that’s the more interesting part of reclaiming my life in some ways.

Finally, what role have libraries played in your life?

I love libraries. What’s funny is I’ve always been more of a library person on the Cape than anywhere else. On the Cape, my local library is Snows Library in Orleans. It’s where I took my children to read, and it’s where I read as a child. I remember how proud I was when I got my first little library card and I would take out my Nancy Drews. It’s just one of the few democratic, wonderfully public places that is open and available to everyone. I can’t say enough great things.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post “All of our Childhoods are Normal to Us”—Adrienne Brodeur on her Powerful Memoir first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

For people who might not be familiar, can you talk about what exactly the Numbers are?

I like to tell people that the Numbers are exactly like the lottery. They existed for decades before the states started to actually take it over, and they’re essentially a precursor to the legal lottery. They worked pretty much the same way that you would think about going to a corner store and buying a lottery ticket today. It was one of the many games you can now play. It was the one that required you to choose a three-digit number, in any order you wanted, and hope that three-digit number was the actual winning number. Now you have a zillion lottery games to play, but back then, and in the beginning of legal lotteries, there was just this one type of lottery game to play. We in the community called it the Numbers. When the states took it over, they basically called it the Numbers too.(laughs) They picked it up whole cloth.

We get such a full portrait of your mom. What made her so well suited to be a Numbers runner and handle all the challenges it demanded of her?

Well she certainly had a way with numbers, as we called it back then. Now I would say she had a real affinity and a mathematical mind that enabled her to handle this business that required all kinds of math and calculations with ease. But it wasn’t just that, because many people probably had that ability. What made her able to be successful was that she could couple that with an incredible a command for respect. People really respected my mother. She also was extremely fair and understood her responsibility to be reliable. Those are really important skills in a business that’s unregulated; reliability, integrity, honesty, and fairness were all natural attributes of hers. So imagine combing all of those. She was really well suited for this profession. (laughs)

Reading the book, you also get a sense of how complex the relationships with the people who played the numbers and how much she valued those relationships.

People had to, as I said, both trust her and respect her. But also, it had to be reciprocal. She had to respect her customers in that she never looked down upon them. She always believed that they had a right to privacy, so she didn’t discuss one customer’s bids or their winnings with another customer. People needed to know that would be the case. Something as simple as saying, “I respect you. You won this particular day’s lottery. You’re getting your money immediately, the next day before noon.” All of that was her way of saying not only can you trust me but I respect you.

You did extensive research on your mother’s life as a Number’s runner and banker. How did your perception of your mother change after doing all of that research?

I already admired her, as is evident in the book. Even as a child, I knew my mother was unlike any of my friends’ moms. I knew that she was running things, I knew that she was in charge, that people looked up to her, and that she commanded respect. Already I knew she was different. This was the feeling I had as an adult going into the research. I just wanted to honor her, and I thought the better I understand the context, the better I could share this admiration with the readers.

Then, lo and behold, I learned about the history of lotteries. I learned about a side issue, the cultural and social landscape of Detroit for Negroes and African Americans in the years my mother was building her business and raising her children. Suddenly my admiration for her leapt to great heights, because now it’s not just that my mother did this cool thing, gave us this lovely middle class life. My mother was pushing against incredible odds and opposition, separate and apart from simply trying not to be exposed in this underground business. That in itself was a feat.

I didn’t know how hard that was until I learned how many times authorities busted these gamblers, as they called them, illegal gamblers, and made these concerted organized efforts to really stop this underground lottery, to stop the Numbers. I started out as a novelist, so my imagination ran amok thinking about what that pressure must have felt like. I didn’t know any of that as a child; I didn’t inherit her anxiousness. She kept that out of our understanding, away from us.

Detroit is this incredible backdrop in the book and we see how Detroit changes from the 50s to the 90s. Can you talk about Detroit and the role the Numbers played in the city?

Detroit is known to many people for the obvious things, the auto industry and Motown. People have a sense that Detroit was thriving in the sixties, having its heyday. That was true, but many people were still struggling. A lot of blacks were still facing incredible discrimination even within the auto industry, so not everyone was doing well. The Numbers really provided this informal economy that allowed these communities to do better than they would have otherwise. The best way to understand that is to think about these dollars turning over many times within the community. Small businesses got to thrive, people got help going to college, and folks were able to get home loans from mostly Numbers men, as we called them. “Oh he’s a numbers man,” which meant he was a big guy in the community. They believed in putting that money back into the community. I love pointing out to people, “Did you know that the NAACP was barely afloat until Numbers men stepped in and really helped them?”

Your mother seemed to be ahead of her time in terms of how she approached parenting. Can you talk about how she viewed her role as a parent? 

Again you don’t know how unique your own mother is until you’re out in the world and comparing notes, and you’re witnessing how others speak of or have relationships with their parents. I could go on and on but I’ll just highlight a couple of things. First, my mother didn’t believe that you could spoil your children by treating them well. She didn’t see that as a negative, something that you had to ward against. A lot of parents were a little punitive or held back from their children because they thought that was the right thing to do. My mother believed in indulgence. She thought you should know that you deserve it. Now coupled with that was a complete requirement on our parts that we be respectful. Her adage was, “You are better than no one but as good as anyone.” People used to criticize her for all the things she did for her children and she had to create this rule. Her rule with her friends was, “I can discuss anything with you but not what I do for my children. That’s off the table.”

Having four daughters, the other big thing for her was to help us understand our self-worth as women, that it did not come from men. She lived that example. My mother had many things— credit cards, property—all in her maiden name. As a child of the seventies coming up amidst this new awareness of women’s lib, I just loved that. She gave my sister and me these diamond rings when I was ten and my sister was fourteen. Her whole thing was, “You need to understand what it is you need from a man, and that is respect. You now have a diamond ring. You do not need to get excited about a man giving you a diamond ring, because you already have one. Now get excited about how he treats you. End of story.”

You see in the book that she has this exhausting job and how much she does for her friends and family. Yet your mother also seemed to be ahead of her time in how she understood how important self-care was for parents.

That’s also something I came to understand more fully as I got older. My mother wasn’t self-sacrificial. She didn’t think that made any sense. Her favorite statement to us was, “If I don’t have shoes, that’s a problem for you. Because how am I going to take care of you if I’m barefoot? And by the way, I might as well have beautiful shoes.” We didn’t see a self-sacrificial mother, which I know goes against the usual characterization of mothers, black mothers in particular.

She’s such a larger than life figure—wearing mink capes and taking amazing vacations—but at the same time she leads this very everyday life.

A very domestic life, in a lot of ways. One of the benefits for her of being in the Numbers was she got to be home when her children get out of school. She thought that that was a major advantage. It was what we would now what we’d call a home-based business. (laughs)

Luck is a huge theme that runs throughout the book. What role did luck play in her life?

My mom believed in cultivating luck. She thought you had to actually expect and invite luck for it to appear. She had some actual rituals that she performed. She would burn lucky candles. She would keep her distance from people whose luck never seemed to go their way. She thought, “Well that’s contagious.” (laughs) She really believed that. She thought that luck had so much to do with giving. We hear this now, but she believed it then, but she thought the more you give the more you receive. She just believed that and she taught us that. My mom used to say to me, “Get those old clothes out of your closet because then you’re making room for new ones. If you don’t get rid of those, where are the new ones going?” It was such a practical piece of advice, but I understood it far more philosophically later. That was a thing about her with luck, cultivating it and also understanding that its core element was about giving in order to receive. The third thing that was really important to her was she felt that she was the definition of luck. They say that luck is simply preparation meeting opportunity. She never said that, but she lived it, and that’s what I witnessed.

In your acknowledgements, you thank several authors like Tayari Jones and Louise Meriweather for their assistance with the book. Can you talk about what role these and other authors played in helping you get to the finished product?

Well, both of them I consider friends. But before I knew who they were, and I’ll start with Louise Meriweather. This woman’s book changed my life. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s literally true. My mother made sure that I received that book at a critical point in my childhood. Now I know it was absolutely no accident that my mother brings home a novel called Daddy Was A Numbers Runner and gives it to me. Never said anything about it, no conversation. But what happened was, I saw myself in a book for the first time, a book that really honored a parent who was doing the same thing mine was doing. That not only made me feel as I had a friend in literature, that Francie and I were alike, but it also validated my experience. The other thing it did was it made me want to be a writer. After that I was undone. I wanted to do the same thing. It shaped my life, it shaped my literary life, and it shaped my personal life. Fate is a beautiful thing. A zillion years later, I’m in New York and I have an opportunity to meet her. We developed a friendship because she loves my work and I tell her what her work has meant to me. We’re still friends. She just celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday.

With Tayari Jones, she reminds me so much of my mother, and I don’t say this to her because I’m much older than she is, but I’ll tell you how. First of all, I don’t know anyone smarter. But it’s also the generosity. Eight, nine years ago, she was saying, “I’ll read that for you and give you some feedback. Do you know about this contest? Let me recommend you to these folks over here because I know they’re looking for some writers.” She has the same philosophy, whether she articulates it that way or not. She doesn’t have luck. She earned it. She was prepared for it. She’s been so generous as an author, as a person in the literary space. She’s the best literary citizen I’ve ever met. In my early efforts with the proposal for this book she said, “Let me read it. I’ll give you some feedback.” She gave me some instrumental feedback that helped me understand what the narrative thrust should be for the story. I can’t thank her enough.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

Detroit has a beautiful downtown library. It’s right next to the Detroit Institute of Arts, in this great location, Woolworth Avenue, in the heart of everything. I used to go there as a child. I’d take the Hamilton bus downtown to this library where they still have marble stairs. You walk up the stairs and your feet echo. I have all these great memories between that and the local branch that I could walk to. I’m just filled with memories. One of them actually happens to be about Daddy Was A Number Runner. I first saw it at the library. I didn’t pick it up. I was too afraid. “Oh my God, this thing that I’m supposed to keep secret is on the cover of a book!” I wasn’t sure what to do. Was it a risqué book? But it didn’t matter because literally within two weeks it was on my own bookshelf. But the first place I spotted it was at the Detroit Public Library. Fast forward, I was on book tour, and I got to do my main even at that same library, where it was packed with people there to celebrate this book The World According to Fannie Davis. At that event people stood up and said, “I knew your mother. She did this for me.” Someone else would stand up and say, “Oh yeah, Miss Fannie used to do this for me.” And these were people I didn’t know. It was a full circle experience and it was in one of my favorite places in the world. Yeah, that was a good day.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post “You Don’t Know How Unique Your Own Mother is Until You’re Out in the World” — Bridgett M. Davis on Her Heartwarming Memoir first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Your book opens with a quote from Bruce Springsteen, “The first eighteen years really shape you forever. It’s like a glass of water filled with mud. You can pour clean water in until it appears clear, but there’s still mud there.” Can you talk about why that spoke to you as a way to begin your memoir?

I felt that was just a really good metaphor. There’s something about your development from zero to eighteen—when you’re in a single place, a single town, at a particular time—that’s impressed upon you. It’s like girdling a Bonsai tree. It shapes you. It moves you into the direction of the person you become. I don’t think you ever leave that. Certainly you become someone different; I’m not in any way related to the person I was, but that girl lives in me. That sort of rebellious, awkward, troublemaking, bigmouthed girl, she’s still there.

I loved how you talk about the qualities that got you in trouble as a kid were the qualities your mom really valued late in life.

To her credit, she recognized that, but it took me a long time to embrace and understand those values. It took me until I was seeing a counselor in my late twenties who said being critical is a good thing. I was like, “Oh okay.” (laughs) I didn’t understand that critical analysis was a tool. I had to figure out how to use it, because I tended to be a bull in a China shop. I had to mature with that skill and learn how not to always be critical. (laughs)

Your mother is such an amazing character in the book, particularly how she would attack problems and solve them, like when she enlists you and your siblings to install a pool. Can you talk about her?

She was really a fantastic role model. She has this boundless energy. She was very creative, athletic, and skilled. She took on these projects without any knowledge. She would just read a book and get the project done. She did things that people told her she couldn’t do. That message that you can just do these crazy things, or try at least, really came through. At the same time, she would never have called herself a feminist, but she was a protofeminist. She just missed that generation. She was a little bit older than the second wave feminists.

She was very self-sufficient. She went back to school and earned her own keep. She’s been like that all my life. She still runs circles around me with her energy. Honestly, I’m more like my dad, I like to lie around reading a book. (laughs)

It seems like you have so much clarity and compassion for the choices that you, your friends, and your mom made. What was it like revisiting the events of your childhood from this adult perspective?

You can see through the book there’s a layer of research, and that helped me understand why I did some of the things I did. When I learned about the neurology of the brain and that the pre-frontal cortex—the part of the brain that’s responsible for moral reasoning and understanding long-term consequences—doesn’t really develop until later, I had just little a more compassion for kids who fall through the cracks or do stupid things. Even now when I see a story on the news about a teenager who does one thing that puts their life off track, I feel it.

One thing that was really hard was reading my diaries, which I hadn’t read for literally decades. I don’t even remember writing them. I started to write the book in 2014 after my father died, and I read them straight through. Something overcame me physically where I felt like that girl again. I had this sense of hyper self-consciousness and awkwardness and feeling like I didn’t fit in the world. It overcame me and stayed with me for a couple of days. I was this fifteen-year-old girl in this fifty-something year-old body. It was very weird. It passed, but it made me understand how sad I was back then.

It’s striking to hear about the visceral response you had to your diary.

I felt sad. “Oh that poor lost girl.” At the same time, as I mention in the book, I kind of wanted to slap her. “Why are you doing these things?” That rage transformed slowly into compassion and a sense that for teenagers, the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood can be really rough.

I wanted to give voice to that teenage girl and to include those diary excerpts to show how young and naïve fourteen and fifteen year-olds are. We tend to think of them as older and more mature. When you look at teenagers they look older. Even with my students, I teach freshmen and sophomores, they’re eighteen or nineteen, but they’re young still. They’re not mature yet, they’re not there yet. They’re savvy, this generation, but really there’s a false image out there of the sophistication of teenagers.

You also write about a guy you worked with at the gas station who ends up playing a large role in your life. Can you talk about him?

He was a really smart, intellectual guy who somehow—and I never found out the real story—had dropped out of college or been kicked out. He was pumping gas as this interim thing until he got his life back on track. He seemed so much older and wiser, but he was probably twenty-one or twenty-two. He read books. He talked about philosophy. At the time, there was no conversation like that with my druggie friends. We didn’t talk about anything. It was just all about drugs. That’s why I fell into a despair, I wasn’t even recognizing myself.

He rekindled that sense of my intellect in me, my interest in the world. He came into my life for a brief time as an odd teacher, and then he left. He benefited me, even though he was a very unlikely person to do so. He was very ordinary. He wasn’t a guru. He was somebody who took the time to talk to me as if I was as smart as he was. I wasn’t, but he treated me that way and I think that helped a lot.

Walpole contains a maximum security prison that plays a significant role in your book. What kind of role did it play in your life?

At first it was a scary and fascinating place. As I understood more about what the prison was and as I constantly drove by it, it became a symbol and a place of intrigue. I didn’t realize until I was writing the book how much passing through those concrete walls [the people in my life did]. Not just shopping in the Hobby Shop, but a lot of my friends’ parents or siblings had worked in the prison. My mother had worked with prisoners on work leave across the street. It was more of a permeable boundary than it seemed. But it really was just this specter at the edge of town.

My main goal for putting it in the book was to show how the prison in the seventies was filling with people who were committing the same crimes as the people were outside the walls, so my mother’s binary really broke down. The demographic of the prison was becoming more African American, more minority, and younger. That was because of the drug laws, but in town there was all this drug dealing going on with relative impunity. I wanted to show what we all know about prison, it’s a false dichotomy of who’s inside and who’s outside.

You put a lot of what was going on in your own life into historical context, diving into the country’s rising divorce rates and Watergate scandal. Why was this kind of research important to you?

In almost all of my nonfiction—my essays and my first book—I dive deep into research, partly because I love it, but it’s also how I learn about myself. For example, my mother’s shoplifting. What I didn’t even understand as a kid was the whole economics [behind it]. I didn’t understand about the huge inflation—that as her money was being halved by divorce, the price of meat doubled. I always knew she started shoplifting food, but knowing what was happening in the culture—both the shoplifting by so many people from that decade and that inflation made it very hard to put food on the table—made me understand her actions a little better. In 1975 the FBI said that shoplifting was the fastest growing crime. It really was a cultural thing. It wasn’t just my mother falling from her moral stance. It was a lot of people, either by necessity or a sense of entitlement or because they just could.

The research led me to understand my personal stories, but also to connect one family’s story with something larger to show that it was part of a phenomenon. Things that are happening in the culture affect us, like Nixon breaking in. Leaders affect the way culture acts. I think the country has a mood and an ethos and I think it changes with the leadership. The culture was in a very bad mood after Watergate and Viet Nam. It trickles down to kids. Even if we don’t intellectually understand it, we feel it. We model it too.

And finally, what role have libraries played in your life?

It’s interesting, because my dad used to take us to the library almost every Saturday. He would just let us loose in the children’s section, which was in the basement of the library. I would pull books off the shelf and find them and come up with a stack of eight or nine or ten and take them home. He would get Betty Boop and Abbot and Costello films and and we would watch them. It was a huge part of our lives to be at the library. It was a real treat and fun to go.

I worked in a library when I was in college at UMASS-Amherst. I did the same thing when I was shelving books, I’d just pull books off the shelf and look at them. I made a lot interesting discoveries that way, just randomly. Libraries have always been my favorite places and really important to me. I just love libraries and hope they continue to thrive.

This interview has been edited for context and clarity.

The post Unlikely Mentors and Cultural Malaise: Maureen Stanton on her Powerful Memoir first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book starts with Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey. Obviously you go through a huge journey of your own through the memoir, but why was it important for you to kick off your story with that poem?

That poem was so important to me in so many ways. I had long loved the poem and right as I was in the middle of finishing and selling my third novel, Visible City, the person who is now my editor, Lauren Wien, asked me to make some changes. We were going back and forth and I ended up telling her what was going on in my life, that I was perched at this place where it felt like I was about to jump off a cliff. I kept waiting to hear if she was going to make an offer on Visible City, and one day in my inbox, instead of an offer, I had this poem that she had sent me. I just felt like this is an editor who understood so fully the moment I was in and knew the right poem for it, who knew, yes, this describes it.

When you change your life there are no instruction manuals, no one who can show you a map, no one who can tell you how to do something. I felt like that poetry was a place where I could find some sense of guidance, that I could hold on to this poem as I was jumping and these words could catch me, that they could understand that you sometimes step off that ordered version of how it’s supposed to be.

One thing that was so moving in your memoir was when the other Orthodox women start using you as a resource to share experiences in their own marriage, and you talk about how you have to forge your own path, because the trail disappears behind you along the way.

I feel like we turn to each other to say, “How do you do this?” just to feel like someone else is doing it. I think naming it is very empowering and helps you realize you’re not the only one who feels a certain way. Even when you see other people make changes and do things, I think you have to do it on your own. There’s always the feeling whenever I’m about to do something
physically scary when I think, I just have to go. I think even when there are supportive people around you, there’s that moment of doing it by yourself.

One of the experiences I’ve had in starting to write about this is the number of people who have emailed me sharing their own story of leave-taking of one kind or another. There is that sense of commonality and connection when you leave, that you know you’ve set off on your own.

What has that experience of communicating with readers been like? In the book you talk about having to defend your writing about how you portray the Orthodox faith when your first books came out.

For me it was really like trial by fire. My first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, was the first thing I had ever written and it was thrilling that it was going to be published. Months before the book came out I started hearing—mostly from my family, who were all in Memphis—that people had heard that I had written a book and that it was nice or it was not nice, it was good or bad. Those were the operating questions. It was very hard for me because I had always been raised to be sweet and good and please people and not to speak my mind and not speak too forcefully and not to speak too loudly. It was my first moment of realizing if you wanted to create freely or if you wanted to say what you think, there is reaction. I think it took me a long time to understand that that was one of the prices to pay for being a writer.

That has followed me. I think my second novel as well, there was that sense of “is she negative or positive?” Those were the words used to judge the writing, not “what is the book saying?” Of course it’s so much more complicated than that. I feel like fiction usually doesn’t want to operate in that grid—is it either nice or not nice? I felt like that grid was being applied to me as a writer in the orthodox world.

In writing this book about orthodoxy and my leaving it, I’m still aware of reaction. I’m doing my best not to be, mostly by not reading comments. (laughs) I do feel a sense of connection with lots of readers. The memoir began for me after an essay I wrote in The New York Times about my Orthodox divorce ceremony, the get ceremony. It was the first time I was publicly putting out there that I was no longer part of that world. And I had just hundreds of emails, overwhelmingly nice and supportive, mostly people just sharing their stories. People saying, I am from a world so far removed from yours but I feel the same way.

Recently a piece of the book ran as a “Modern Love” column in The New York Times and I had the same experience. I was flooded with emails from people across a religious spectrum. I got emails from people within the Orthodox communities who loved and understood the piece. I had an email from a Mormon man who told me he was getting divorced. He gave the essay to his parents because he thought it would help them understand the changes he was going through. I got a Facebook message from a woman in a Southern Baptist community who was getting divorced who felt like the responses to her shattered her faith because she was seen as someone breaking the rules.

Those moments remind me of why I am a writer. They remind me that when you put your story in the world, you make yourself vulnerable. In novels, at least there’s a place to hide. In memoirs, it’s just you out there on the page. I guess it creates the possibility of connecting with people who might live in a very different world than I do or in a very different tradition or in a very different place, but they find those connecting points in the story. It’s what moves me most as a writer right now.

So after writing novels your entire career, what was it like writing a memoir?

At first I couldn’t even say I was writing a memoir. I was like, I’m writing an essay that’s very very long. (laughs) I felt like I would break out in hives every time I said the word memoir. Even now I think of myself as a novelist. I love the freedom of writing fiction, the sense of creating a new world, the feeling that In your different characters you can think about so many different things and travel different places.

With fiction, the hard part was always, “What happened? Who are these people? What did they do?” With memoir, it was a different question. I knew what happened. I knew the people. I knew my protagonist all too well. (laughs) But I didn’t know what was at the heart of this story. I had to turn that lens I was used to turning on characters onto myself. It got emotionally harder to be willing to go there and find myself.

I also learned a lot from reading. I decided before I started writing that I was going to read memoir. And so I spent the first year working on the book just constantly reading memoir and taking notes and always asking myself the question, “What can I learn from this book?”

I learned a tremendous amount about structure and craft. Being so immersed in reading memoir, I felt a sense of kinship with the writer. I felt like all these books were chronicling some sort of change or transformation. It made me feel less alone. It made me feel like there are so many people who go through these questions or journeys or changes or struggles. I felt very attached to what I was reading.

And what were those books that you were reading?

I loved Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath. I love Rachel Cusk in general, she writes like no one else. I love Annie Shapiro’s Devotion, which is gentle, wise, and has this expansiveness of spirit. I read a lot of memoirs about leaving religious worlds. I love a book called All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish writer. Carlene Bauer wrote a memoir called Not That Kind of Girl about leaving an evangelical Christian community. I love Karen Armstrong, who wrote two memoirs about leaving a convent. I loved Drinking: A Love Story, Glass Castle, and Wild. I love Lou Areneck’s memoir, Cabin, about building a cabin in the woods with his brother. Also Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing about spending a year secluded in a country in a cabin. I would just read from one memoir to the next. Now I’m slowly returning to fiction. I feel like I haven’t read a novel in so long. I’ve missed a lot. (laughs)

The book reads like a novel, where we bounce around in time and there’s a lot of suspense in terms of how things will turn out. What was it like approaching your life through a novelist’s eyes?

At one point I realized the same things I knew as a novelist I needed to make use of in my memoir. I didn’t want it to feel episodic. In novel writing, the part that really engages me the most is the question of structure. How do we build this novel? I draw these pictures for myself of arcs all over the place—it feels like I’m building a building. In a memoir I’m saying the same thing, I’m building a story.

Another thing I’d ask is, “What is the best way to tell this story in a novel?” I’d ask that question in a memoir also. So I knew I couldn’t tell it chronologically, it didn’t feel interesting enough. But the timeline was the piece that drove me crazy. I had the present, the far past, and the near past. I’d write scenes on notecards and spread them across the living room floor and tell my kids, “Don’t you dare walk in this room right now.” I’d have the cards all laid out to have the central arc, plus the flashback arc cutting into the central arc. That part was definitely the most challenging technically. It was the part that would keep me up at night. I felt like I was a builder. How am I going to splice this board into this other board and craft it together?

Throughout the book, you reference different authors—like Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, and Cynthia Ozick—in relationship to certain periods you were going through. How has literature helped you understand your life?

For me being a reader has always been central. Growing up we were a family of readers. We were one of those families where everyone would drift away from the dinner table because everyone was reading. Reading books was a way for me to leave the small world I lived in. I always felt there were two realities at once—the place I was and the place my mind could go. I think because I so often felt constricted where I was that the ability to travel in my mind was all-encompassing.

I think the other way fiction was really important to me was that I felt like I grew up in a world where things might be thought but weren’t said. There was always this feeling that there was an under layer. There was always this sense that you were being taught one thing and there was this attempt to package a kind of contentment—no questions here, we were all happy, and we all believed. But every once in a while you could catch sight of the fact there was some kind of underworld. For me one of the pleasures of reading is you get access to that inner world. In reading and novels, there’s of course course people leading more complicated lives than on the surface. Reading novels was the first place I had confirmation that yes, the world is much more complicated and people are much more complex and messy than these outer presentations.

What role has the library played in your life?

Books were always crucial as a child. We would always go to the library in Memphis. I live in Newton now, and the library here feels like a respite. I spend a lot of time writing at the library. It’s just a place to go to when I’m not quite sure what to do with myself or I need a quiet place or I need to get out.

My nine-year-old daughter is a very avid reader. The idea that we can go to the library and she can get all the books she wants is this amazing concept that this world is here for you, just take it. I always have that sense of something waiting to be discovered. The library in Newton is one of those few places where if you get there five minutes to nine, there’s a line of people at the door waiting to get inside. It’s just a given, it’s like the grocery store and the library. It’s one of those main things that’s always at the center of our lives.

The post You Have To Do It On Your Own: An Interview with Tova Mirvis first appeared on Public Libraries Online.