Fashion Neurosis with Ocean Vuong

38:24And so to me, a la Judith Butler, these are performances that are extraneous performances. Again, similar to the sentence. I don't think, you know, I wouldn't talk in the same way as my writing when I'm ordering a coffee. You know? So the conditions of literature or the novel or the poem, you know, It might be fun to do so, but I think someone might call the asylum. But similarly, the extravagance is actually the condition of the context of a photo shoot and working with other artists. That was really beautiful to me because being on that show, and of course, everyone wears lovely things on those shows, right?

39:12That's the condition. And then collaborating with my friends and curating that, but not being attached to that. That's important to me. Not saying that, oh, I am someone who wears couture and therefore I'm better than thou. That is the trap of it. But if you don't believe in it, you can move through it quite openly and then just leave it behind. Well, it was quite striking because you seemed, you looked really good and you seemed incredibly unselfconscious and at ease and at good ease within these lovely clothes. and it was a great combination. And, you know, it struck me and it made me happy to see that, you know, being a big admirer of your work and seeing you on this show and thinking, oh, yeah, that's great, you know.

40:11And in both your novels you talk about drugs And in interviews, you're described sometimes of having struggled with addiction. And in The Emperor of Gladness, High, the you character I think of as, there's this moment with these skater boys injecting heroin into their feet, and they feel the speed of the rush surging up their legs. and you described them tracing that journey with their fingers as it finishes at the top of their heads. And you can feel it happening as you read. And with both your books, I often wondered about how you got free from the power of being an active addict. Oh, gosh. I don't feel like I'm ever free.

41:05You know, 2026 would give me 10 years. And in 2016 was a relapse when I had a fight with my mom. Right. And my book was coming out. And up until that point, I had about 2012, 13, about three years. I stopped counting early on. The counting was supposed to be helpful the day, but then it starts to feel like a Jenga block, a Jenga tower. So, you know, I said, oh, the more days, the more I feel like it's going to collapse on me. And it did. And after a while, I stopped. But I try not to present myself as a sobriety guru because I don't know anything about it. You know, in the book Time as a Mother, there's a long poem called Kunstlerroman, German for the artist novel.

42:03And it describes a person walking backwards. And you're like, where's the origin of this backwards walking? And the origin at the end of the poem is a car crash. And it's kind of a metaphor for me for my own sobriety, which is that I'm not a wise guru of it. I feel like my sobriety is very incidental, that there was a car crash. I realized I didn't die. There's glass all over. There's blood. And I'm just crawling out of that wreck. And I start walking on the highway. And I kept walking and walking. And after a while, the cuts heal. I see a little thrift store. I go in, get a new outfit. and eventually I keep walking and I walk into a university I walk on stage at the South Bank Center I walk through these spaces and I still think I'm just a person walking from the car crash I haven't looked back but I don't feel like I have any fortified knowledge I didn't do the 12 steps you know i don't have the coins to me it's very precarious and and you know i still have the addict's brain i'm learning that it's very genetic you know my mother and my my grandfather i've learned who was irish you know had that quintessential alcoholic he died of alcoholism my mother struggled with it for a few years um so it's just part of the makeup um you know i'll be addicted to gel pens you can't give me enough of them you know um and so i kind of just switched gears my obsession is now curiosity yeah you know i still think there's a dopamine influencing me, right?

44:08About learning. I can feel it. Yes, yeah. Being an addict, I'm like, I can feel when an idea feels like an injection. Yeah. Boy, like when you get a good sentence, sometimes.

44:26And so I think I've just replaced my drug. And that's why I'm wary of giving any advice because I don't feel like I've, I think my sobriety is very idiosyncratic. I don't drive. I don't have access to my bank account, you know, for those reasons. My life has just been very small and it's very managed around my family. I know what I'm capable of. You know how much damage you can do. You know, I've been around, you know, I'm going to be 37 in October and I've seen enough to know what I'm capable of. And so I've very wisely made my life quite small, but I don't feel like I've truly escaped. But also in a very, you know, circumstantial, serendipitous way, I just didn't like heroin.

45:29It was a drug that wiped out many of my generation. But I didn't like feeling sunken. A lot of my friends liked to fade out. But I didn't. My drug of choice was coke. It was cocaine. When it got to the crack rocks was when it got really bad. But I wanted more of the world. I always loved this place. And I wanted to be more in it. I wanted to be exhilarated further by it. But my friends wanted to be underwater. Yeah. They had so much pain in them, you know. And I think it's just that. Like, it's just that I did not like heroin as much as my friends. And heroin was much more harder to kick. And it was much more deadly when fentanyl came into the picture.

46:20Yeah, fentanyl seems to. You know, one of my best friends in 2008, he died before they knew what Narcan was. And, you know, this poor fellow just overdosed. He did it through the nose and he overdosed. And the friends around him carried him into his room and left him there. They didn't know any better. They thought they were helping him. And he overdosed overnight. And his poor mother in the morning found him. So horrific. I'm not that far. I just was lucky that I didn't like it. I liked other things, and that's it. Just the freaking luck of the draw. And I have a lot of survivor's guilt of that because I was no more creative than them.

47:11I was no more hardworking. I was no more interesting. I was no more intelligent. They were all there. They inspired me. They wanted to be artists. They had all these dreams that they, because of a pharmaceutical slaughter, they never got to play out. And that's it. I don't owe my survival to any skill. I feel like it's truly just the luck of the draw. But I suppose the key thing listening to you is that when you got out of the car crash covered in glass and blood, you kept walking. And it's that continuation, the day at a time progress, that I think takes people, is the key to freedom from that particular thing.

48:06So I remember a friend of mine saying, God, heroin is like rosemary essence compared to crack or lavender essence or something.

48:20And I always think of that whatever it is that takes you out of it is action. And the action is the most elementary kind of thing. Yeah. And it's so interesting. And because you talk about Hai not having circular solutions to the problems in his life and the book not having a circular sort of happy ending. And when he goes into the detox and it feels like he's on the road to something positive and then he finds the pills in Grazina's house and he starts taking them and it's no drama, just inevitability. And did you always know you would write this but without a happy reveal? Oh, that was kind of the North Star.

49:16You know, I wasn't interested in catharsis. And also, you know, addiction is a disease that is often tied to morality. I've noticed, you know, especially in the early aughts when I was a teenager, you know we had lunch ladies who overdose and families were so ashamed because you know we didn't have a term like opioid epidemic it wasn't seen as a disease and so they were they were they were thought of as junkies oh gosh someone's mom was a junkie this lunch lady was a junkie the whole time and their families were so ashamed that they would be cremated without ceremony and then vanished. I mean, it's interesting.

50:06The millennial generation that I belong to, we experience, we were the last generation to have a full childhood that was analog. And then in our early adulthood, the iPhone and social media came. And I think it's akin to the generation that experienced the coming of the T-model Ford. You know, imagine you're riding a horse last month, and now you're in a machine driving a car. And that's how it was for us. And so there was so much shame with this too, with this coming at the same time, that there are friends of mine whose pictures I don't have. Their pictures are only in police reports, either of their deaths, obituaries, or mugshots.

51:00And it's a very bewildering thing to not have a social media catalog of someone's face that you have to find the sort of bureaucratic paperwork of their deaths or their imprisonment to remember who they were, what they look like. If you had that at all, some of them, I have no proof they existed. I'm sure some civic court has a thing and the people I know I don't know anymore so I'm like gosh did they really exist? All I have is these fading memories so it's a very fascinating moment for me to think through that idea of what survives in us who do we carry, what do we carry but that era was full of tremendous loss and tremendous agency.

52:01When the iPhone came, it felt like you can feel the world was going to change and I'm often, you know, I go back to that moment and realize we didn't really know what was happening to us but we were getting wiped out in a kind of plague overnight. God, it's so shocking, isn't it? 600 ,000 Americans, you know. My God. I mean, I was so obsessed with On Earth, we're briefly gorgeous, and now the Emperor of Gladness is unputdownable. I've read it, and I've gone back and read bits of it, and I had to ration myself to keep it going as long as possible. And the idea, I was interested in this very young person, and Hai living with a very old person.

52:50And the idea of that's a kind of, in theory, a dull idea. But living with Grazina, it's nonstop. And when she has these terrors from her past of fleeing the war from where she was from, and Hai is so imaginative in maintaining her dignity and kind of creating these role plays. And there's this moment where he comes back from work exhausted and he can see her going into this terror with her dementia. And then how did you come up with this idea of turning it into a sort of like a play that was a way of rescuing her from this terrible panic of where am I? Well, I think every novelist has a kind of North Star that they try to use elements that they're familiar with or that they want to use to implement towards it.

53:57And I think for me, the North Star that I was trying to reverse engineer was get these two characters who are 60 years apart to have an equal level of agency and dignity. And that was kind of the challenge of the novel. So I knew that the keystone of the novel would be the scene where they were both naked. Yeah, that was incredible. And I just thought, gosh, how am I going to make this plausible? Yeah. It's just a strange, wild thing, right? Two people face-to-face, six years apart, with no clothes on, looking not at each other as even gendered or aged or even historic beings, but simply as humanity, staring at one another.

54:48And so I had to orchestrate them clawing towards each other, towards equal footing. and their relationship is lopsided in power on both sides. Gershina has a home, Hai does not. She is pulled by dementia, which is memory without choice, whereas he has a choice with his memory. And so he then follows her. The person who has no choice is the one that gets the merciful offering of reality. He moves towards her reality. And who's to say that her reality is wrong? She's feeling it. It's hers. So he chooses to abandon the present to follow her. And meanwhile, she has stability. She has a roof over her head.

55:44But then we start to see that, is she also a storyteller? how much of her dementia is embellished to keep him in company with her. Yeah, yeah. Because life in America as an elderly person is so isolating and so lonely. You're seen as a tool that now defunct, not contributing to society, is tossed away. Your own family wanting to put you into a home, close you up so they don't have to see you. and so she's trying to extend her own life by keeping him there. So they both are moving through this invisible chessboard. They both want something of each other and finally they get to this moment and I won't spoil it but they're both looking at each other completely naked and that is the most equal they have ever been is that there is no more shame.

56:43There is no more sexuality. There is no more gender. It's just these two beings with nothing, nothing left to lose who are facing each other as their only hope. And that's what I wanted for them. But the novel is challenging because how do you dial all the tiny dials to get characters to that moment so that it doesn't feel forced, that it feels true to themselves? And that is the great work of it. But that was my keystone of the novel. So thank you for recognizing that. No, it's such a moment of, I've never read anything like that. And it was a really calming moment in just their relationship, just this kind of, well, this trust and how you constructed that.

57:38It's completely amazing. And there's one of the many brilliant things she says, 82-year-old, is it Grazina? Grazina. Grazina, she says, to be alive and to try and be a decent person, not to turn it into anything big or grand. That's the hardest of all. And I think this seems to describe you pretty well. And there's a lot of sadness in being so thoughtful about people. and you say, I wanted to write about kindness without hope. And I wondered, how do you deal with sadness? Gosh, you know, it goes back to your brilliant question about the novel having an addict who gets more addicted and he doesn't free himself of that.

58:27Because, again, when we talk about someone with cancer, there is a kind of virtue. It's also an illness, but one battles cancer virtuously. And one succumbs to that battle. It's a virtuous battle. She or he or they tried so hard. But when someone succumbs to addiction, there's a kind of moral corruption to that. It's like, oh, they were an addict. They were a bad person, that they deserved it in some way. And society still works that way. So I wanted to show that there is actually an incongruent relationship between worsening addiction with morality and kindness. In my experience, it's actually people who get worse and worse in their addiction who actually understand how valuable kindness is.

59:31It's almost a splitting. The more the addict moves down the road of addiction, the higher their level of understanding kindness grows. And it's an inverse trajectory. And I've rarely seen that depicted or understood. And so I purposely wanted him to get worse, to say that, you know, it doesn't just because you're losing this battle doesn't mean that you're corrupt or you're a bad person, that your life should be thrown away or it justifies the loss of your life. because it's actually addicts who really know how valuable generosity is. Yeah, so true. If you've ever met them, and as all my friends who go through it, they just know what the rock bottom of the world is.

1:00:28And they're some of the kindest people because they know the proximity of suffering. And the proximity of suffering is also the proximity of empathy, being surrounded by that milieu you know how special that is so i think i really wanted to show and also someone losing their mind someone who is elderly who can contribute to society does also mean that they're just deserving of their own you know demise you know it's it's a very American thing, I must say. You know, America is one of the only cultures that does not have a dignified mythos for the poor, or the down and out, or the ill, right? Whereas, you know, you think of Les Mis, Victor Hugo, right?

1:01:27There's a kind of dignity, there's a kind of knowledge that poverty is. Of course, you can slip into a romanticization. But think of Tiresias from the classic Greek, right? A beggar, an intergender beggar who's blind, who also has the power of clairvoyance. And so their position as a bodily social outsider, economic outsider, instills in them a kind of nobility, a power that actually is against time. They now are so outside of society that they are outside of time, and they can see the future, Tiresias, as a reoccurring figure. But America, the poor in America, the elderly, the ill, the addict are seen as corrupt.

1:02:22They have aligned morally with a kind of evil that they deserve, that it's their fault, that the loser deserves their lot. And there's even a kind of despicableness to their condition. And it's interesting that the rich are somehow morally, they deserve what they have, they are morally superior. And it's a fascinating thing that I'm trying to think through. but the novel is a way to kind of enact some of that dichotomy and that aporia. Yeah, God, I'd never thought of those differences between European, you know, descriptions of having less or, you know, not being rich. And, you know, even in Russian novels, everyone has their marvelous dignity and their discoveries and their spiritual resilience or not, or it's not kind of cling-wrapped and thrown in the lavatory or whatever.

1:03:30Right. And folklore all over the world. You know, Vietnamese folklore, African folklore. Like the one who is, you know, the outsider usually has some sort of power. You think of this indigenous Native American folklore too. Yeah. You know, two-spirited folks are the ones who, again, like Tiresias, has some kind of agency. But America has completely evacuated the poor and the ill in their mythology. It's fascinating. Support for today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I'm not exactly an early adopter, rarely fast out of the gate with new tech. but you don't have to be a tech person to be curious about AI.

1:04:17So I teamed up with Anthropic to try Claude. I'm building a real budget for fashion neurosis. It includes paying people, planning seasons and not guessing cash flow. I opened Claude, dropped in last year's costs and sponsor forecasts and asked it to help me think, not write for me. It turned my chaos into a zero-based plan with clear buckets, production, post and marketing. It modeled best and worst case revenue. It helped me build a monthly checklist for invoices, payroll, renewals plus 10 % rainy day reserve. It even flagged sneaky line items like platform fees and insurance. And if you want to see what it can do for you, you can try Claude for free at claude.ai slash fashion neurosis.

1:05:14And you're friends with Bjork and she interviewed you for Bomb magazine and she says in The Emperor of Gladness, there are so many incredible descriptions of inhaling, tasting and smelling fast food, almost fetishizing and celebrating the aesthetic of trash. And there's a lot of warmth in how you describe the food in the novel. And are you into food? Oh, yeah. I mean, I love that. Well, food is so symbolic of class and culture. And, you know, the greatest thing you can do to know somebody is ask them what they like to eat. because then it would be like, oh, where they're from, what they do, what they're close to, how they grew up, their relationship to food and cooking.

1:06:06And I have Björk to thank for introducing me to licorice powder. Oh, wow, yeah. This wonderful Icelandic delicacy. And God, it's like a poetry dust. You sprinkle it on anything and it will change. Believe me, it will change the food. I like the sound of that. It lifts it all up. And she is such a, talk about, you know, someone who is so devoted to poiesis, a process. She inspires me to no end. And it's a great honor to just have her be aware of my work. But, you know, fast food particularly is interesting, having worked in it, written about it. It's a kind of sinister beauty that industrialization in America has achieved to do something so fine-tuned, to chemically induce a product like a McDonald's french fry, so that it can be replicated without break consistently through time against all odds.

1:07:14even against biodegradation, so that someone like Elon Musk can experience it. A billionaire can experience a French fry or a Coca-Cola. And in the same way, someone who has no home can experience it. I think this is why Andy Warhol really loved Campbell's and Coca-Cola, because it promised the most democratic thing to level experience through industrial production. And yet it's a sinister beauty because it's so damaging to health and it's all based on an illusion of sustenance that is actually a kind of poison. And I think that is the greatest. That to me is the most American thing. I will promise you democracy while I slowly kill you.

1:08:16So I think there's a kind of intoxication to it that I wanted to showcase. I didn't want to just write a polemic. It would be too easy to just say fast food is horrible. Because there is something to it. When I was a kid, the greatest luxury of being a nail salon kid was in the middle of July is when things are slowest. Everybody's on holiday. Everybody's kind of like going away. And so the nail salon becomes very silent. And so we usually close for a week and then we take road trips. And the road trip was such a luxury. And we would just kind of go aimlessly around the eastern seaboard and we would travel and fly through this space.

1:09:11And I just thought, gosh, when you're going through America and then my family was so happy to see a McDonald's because America was so strange. You know, it's a strange thing. I wrote this book, Emperor Gladys. It's about a mother and son in this little town. And the son tells his mom, I'm going to school in Boston to be a doctor. Meanwhile, he stays in the same town, and they never see each other. And I think on one hand, some people could say, how is that possible? This town of 30 ,000 people or so, one main drag. How can a mother and son not see each other? But I promise you, my mother and my stepdad, their life as laborers were so small home grocery store bank work home grocery store bank work they never stepped into a park we had a local park i've never seen them walk in the park in my life to this day you know and and and i think it's a it's a part of the working poor that I think a lot of folks don't realize is that how, I mean, Marx talked about this, right?

1:10:35The alienation of the working class away from leisure, from their own pleasure. And it's so true. So that when we finally went on a road trip, America was so startlingly strange that we sought the fast food restaurant to reorient ourselves. I mean, it was the most comforting thing to walk into a Burger King in the middle of New Jersey when we were lost you know this is before GPS my mother would know English and then have a Whopper and and it tastes exactly like the one in your hometown yeah it's such a beautiful thing sinister beauty like I said and I um I like the self-effacingness that comes with a love of style.

1:11:25And you mentioned about style being closer to desire. And I wondered if you had a style icon. Oh gosh. I don't know. A style icon. I have modes and moments. My style is influenced very regionally. And I didn't know how regional it was until I left and started to become a global traveler. But I live in Western Massachusetts. And so, you know, that style is very queer, rural, agrarian. It's a lot of thrifting. It's a lot of cutting and crude embellishments, blundstones. You know, and my friends joke because we live in what was once called the lesbian capital of the world. Is that Amherst? Northampton.

1:12:26Oh, right. In the same Pioneer Valley, as people call it. And, you know, I believe, last I checked, we had now, the lesbian capital world has transformed into having the highest amount of trans folks per capita. we were one of the pioneers of trans health and now with brutal anti-trans legislation we have been a kind of a safe haven for folks so a lot of migratory trans communities have come but my friends joke and say Ocean, you're embodying the ultimate lesbian aesthetic and I'm very proud of that whether that's true or not I wear that with deep pride. Blundstones, red wings, work wear, overalls.

1:13:18This company, Smith, was founded in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century, and they made overalls. And now the overall, at least where I live, it's a kind of very queer symbol. It's very quirky and beautiful. And again, asymmetricness, the one earring. You see a lot of folks take one strap off, flick it to the wind, show a little shoulder with some floral tattoo. I'm too chicken to go into the tattoo world. So I think I'm really inspired by the New England that I grew up. It's a mix between a lot of factory work, a lot of farm work, and a kind of queer salvage of that work, you know, your Carhartts and your Dickies and what have you.

1:14:12And if you fancy someone and don't like what they're wearing, does it kill your attraction? um it doesn't kill it but it it it um it snuffs it a bit you know it's just like oh gosh you know what else could I start to think as an artist like what else can can you wear can we have a different wardrobe but um but no I I like to meet people where they are I think that's kind of how I'm very laissez-faire about culture and people. I'm never a cultural warrior. I never understood that. I think it's a very straight white man thing to rally against something. Oh, the culture is going against my beliefs.

1:15:00I must restore order. I like to say, well, look, we have TikTok. We have social media. what will the poem in TikTok look like? What will it look like with these technologies, with these things? And same with style, you know. Why does this make this person happy? I want to learn that, whether I like it or not. I still want to learn that. And I think, to me, if you wear a curtain and that makes you feel good, then that's legitimate to me. And I would defend to the end your right to feel good because of what you're wearing. But it's a different thing from having a visceral kind of eek screaming to a halt like that thing they're wearing.

1:15:53It's really complicating my feelings. Yeah. I wondered if you had anything in particular. I can see you. um this would be very glow over it like trying not to have any prejudice this is a this is a very millennial thing but i think it's about time we do away with crocs please we were just talking about the widgets don't don't save it kids uh gen z i know you know someone had a lovely theory about cross because you know when cross came about when we were teenagers they were like the grandpa shoes like our our grandparents yeah wore them to to work in the garden and somewhere along the line you know gen z took it as a kind of new badge of honor but a a stylist that i was talking to at a party in new york said it has a lot to do with gen z's fear of cringe that the the and i don't know if this is correct or not but it was an interesting theory that they you know crocs sweatpants and hoodies that kind of purposeful deliberate je ne sais quoi i can't try too hard because i'm afraid of being judged so i'll deliberately wear something ugly yeah and i'll personalize it with these widgets just enough to show my personality but the idea is that there's a kind of uniform, antithetical fashion that is not deliberate or aware or sincere.

1:17:31And so if I'm deliberately ugly, you know, then I can almost, it's almost like making fun of myself before anyone else can. And that felt, it made a lot of sense. I had a lot of compassion for it because they grew up, you know, they had the iPhone when they were eight or nine and they grew up in a kind of surveillance culture you know we had this thing as millennial called planking what's that where you would just lay down face down anywhere and that was kind of like a silly thing to do and I guess in retrospect it's quite cringe but we all did it because you know growing up to be silly or embarrassing in the 90s you are the brunt of the joke of your classroom at worst your school but that's about it but now if you're silly or embarrassing you could be filmed and within a week an entire country for which you've never been could be laughing at you and then you could become a meme which is the ultimate dehumanization of yourself.

1:18:40Your personhood has been extracted into a kind of language, a symbol for someone else's conversation, which ultimately strips you of all of your personhood and humanity. And now you become a conduit, a technology of meaning for somebody else. The meme is the most violent, symbolic thing, I think, in the 21st century linguistics. And, you know, so of course, Why be idiosyncratic? Why do something strange? Why the safest thing is just wear sweatpants and Crocs? Anyway, this is a theory. I think there's something to it. I have great sympathy with, you know, I've had the great luxury as a professor to educate only Gen Z.

1:19:30My entire career of 11 years, I've taught Gen Z from the very oldest of them to the very youngest of them now. And we're about to move into Gen Alpha. so they say. So it's been really informative to me to educate just a generation below me and to see them move through some of these very real struggles and how that manifests and articulates as fashion. So interesting that describing all these other ways of dehumanizing people, flinging this net of all these different nets and then render them not your equal and then you don't have to care for people and it seems to dull down the idea of caring just looking out for each other and that seems very pervasive and I suppose that's where art and literature anything to do with culture comes in because it it goes against that and it wakes people up to each other and I I read that you your plan is to only write eight books and I have to say that made me feel distraught as your work describes so much of the feelings I have that I find hard to handle and do you ever change your mind about the things that you've decided um of course you know you transform I think that's the hope you know I if I'm very lucky I can get to eight works I mean I've written four and I feel knocked flat like I feel like the way I'm sitting I'm laying on this couch now I feel just as as um horizontal um as I can be you know but um that would be that's the fantasy I think um to be able to to and it's an arbitrary number after the eightfold path but But the fantasy is to one day do one's work with such care that one can look at it and say, well done.

1:21:42And one can have a life maybe moving into a different medium. But to finish. I don't think any medium can be exhausted. But to lay down your work. And again, this is a very Buddhist idea. Everything about Buddhism is about ephemerality. and I don't want to be attached to the idea of being a writer. It's very seductive to be so lauded for one thing and then you become attached. The ego becomes attached to this idea that I am writer, writer, writer and I look forward to the day that I can disabuse myself. I can take that outfit, if you will, out and again go back to being naked and still have my body.

1:22:29And what will I feel? What would I look like if I still had my life while taking away something I've spent so many decades on and leaving it behind? It's a very important practice, which is why monks shave their heads. Yeah, I see. They've left, they disrobed, right? Taking idiosyncrasy away that you've been so proud of and taking on something else. And so in a way, stopping writing is a kind of disrobing for me and taking on another pair of robes. To me, it's a very spiritual practice that I hope I have the strength and the effort to do. I suppose I spent a lot of my life in self-denial, feeling that was powerful and that was what kept me on the road moving forward and you know kept me drove me but it's a kind of always walking against pressure and you know I think of you you're right you know I think of sort of being in the world as being some kind of a warrior and you seem to be a warrior in your writing and I like the idea of you continuing but I understand what you're saying of course but also I've found that it's been wonderful to have these fixed views and change my mind and and I like the idea of you writing more than eight books yeah i love the idea of the warrior i do i do feel um i do feel much stronger than i thought i ever was you know it's so strange getting older and you realize gosh there's something different my teacher sharon olds told me this you know she's 82 now and She's a poet who is a pioneer writing about the body, about pleasure, about disgust at a time when women were not supposed to.

1:24:47She would send her early poems about desire, about motherhood to journals. And they say, you should try the ladies' home journal or good housekeeping. This is not serious work. God. And when I was her student, I asked, I said, gosh, Sharon, this is so hard. How do we do it? How do we get it right? And she, without batting an eye, she says, it is hard. It won't stop being hard. But you'll get better at hardness. You'll get better at your relationship with difficulty will grow and you will be stronger. That's wonderful. And it was so wonderful to hear it, even as I didn't believe it at the time.

1:25:34I said, how could this ever get easier? And lo and behold, that was, you know, over a decade ago. And I do feel, I don't know if I feel like a warrior, but I do feel strong in a warrior-like sense. It's hard to know what I'm fighting, but I do feel really fortified. Yeah. And I think that's because a lot of people say to me, gosh, Ocean, you're so vulnerable. You're so strong in your vulnerability. Charismatic and blah, blah, blah. You're in these moments of the cultural centers. How do you go about it? And I say, I don't do it. I don't feel strong because I'm charismatic or I have any innate ability.

1:26:29but it's because I feel fortified. It's not charisma, it's fortitude. I feel fortified by the people who raised me, by my mentors, by my friends. I was able to live a life wherein I do feel confident in that I did right by the people I love. And I made a lot of mistakes, but I never forsaked their faith in me. I never betrayed their faith in me. and that is I think that I'm very proud of that and that has made me very strong and I think that's maybe that's what people see when they see a strong vulnerability or charisma it's actually because I know when I walk into a room I have been vouched for by the people who I love my grandmother my mother are walking in that room with me my teachers my friends my community my family are all in that room with me and in in in bodily one is very vulnerable because we have soft bodies but in ideas and in in in the work at hand i feel quite invincible because of them ah that that's wonderful i'm glad to hear it and thank you so much ocean bong for being on fashion neurosis has been so lovely and such a deep pleasure to talk to you after reading everything you've written thank you thank you so much bella it's been a it's been a very idiosyncratic pleasure

1:28:25Today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every conversation we have reveals something unexpected about fashion, identity and culture. If today's discussion left you with questions you can't shake about someone's fashion influence, a cultural moment or why certain pieces feel so charged with meaning, Claude can be that thinking partner who helps you follow those threads wherever they lead try Claude for free at claude.ai slash fashion neurosis