#745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr

27:55I don't know if I did have something to prove, but I felt like doing the work was the most important thing in the world, as opposed to doing the work and enjoying the process and being able to step back and see what it was, not just be so deeply into it. I feel like I missed a lot of years of my life because I was just in the dark room working on music seven days a week for probably 20 years. Wow. I recall that makes me think of a story from Neil Gaiman, the writer, when he, I think it was with the success of Sandman, and he was in a huge line of readers who wanted signatures and fans who wanted to tell him stories and Stephen King pulled him aside and just said, enjoy it.

28:40Yeah. And he didn't. He was too caught up in the flow. What about your 30-year-old self? What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? I would probably tell myself something that still might apply to me today. I wouldn't know it at all and I know it now. I just still snuck. second nature but um she be kinder to myself because i beat myself up a lot because i expect a lot from myself i'll be hard on myself i don't know that i'm doing anyone any good by doing yeah that's advice that i need to to give myself as well when do you tend to beat yourself up i've made somewhat of a sport of it it would seem yeah it can happen you know anytime i can come up with anything that I could be doing to further something and didn't already think of it and didn't already do it, I might beat myself up about it.

29:41Why have I not done that? Something I struggle with that I'd love to get your two cents on is related to this, which is on one hand, I don't want to beat myself up. On the other hand, I feel like the perfectionism that I have has enabled me to achieve whatever modicum of success I've been able to achieve. And I've heard stories, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but about, for instance, ZZ Top and La Futura and how they worked on it with you from, I guess, I want to say what, 2008 to 2012, something like that. But how they realized the value of you wanting the art to be as perfect as it could be or the best that it could be and taking whatever time and pains necessary to make that possible.

30:26So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because it's something that I continually struggle with. I want to be easier on myself, but I worry that if I do that, I will lose whatever magic, if there is such a thing that enables me to do what I do. I think that's a myth. And I think that your take on things is specific to you and it's not because of your, it's almost like you've won the war. And to accept the fact that you've won the war, you have broken through to now you have an audience. People are open to hear what you are interested in, what you learn, what you're interested in learning about and what you want to share.

31:01You can do that without killing yourself and that killing yourself won't be of service either to you or to your audience.

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32:38Next up, Mary Carr, author of three award-winning best-selling memoirs, The Liars Club, Cherry, and Lit, and author of The Art of Memoir, which breaks down her process, and Tropic of Squalor, her latest volume of poetry. You can find Mary on Twitter at MaryCarrLit. Mary, welcome to the show. Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me. And I appreciate you putting me at ease when I mentioned that I have copious notes in front of me. That's usually an indication that I am nervous. Not you. You do this all the time. You're going to kill it. It's going to go great. I'm convinced. Thank you. And you reassured me by saying, I make really good waffles.

33:25That's what I do. I'm like a Nona. I'm like a Nona. You've got to think of me as a Nona out here in Podcastville. Well, let's rewind the clock as a first step in podcastville. And maybe we can talk about known as in the family lineage of sorts. And I want to talk about, or have you speak to, a guy redoing your mother's kitchen and holding up a tile. Could you perhaps elaborate on that, please? Yeah, yeah. Right after my first memoir was published, we were having my mother's kitchen retiled. My sister and I were there. And yeah, and the tile dude pries off a tile and he holds it up and it has a little round toilet.

34:03And he looks at my little fluffy haired, gray haired mother and says, Miss Carr, this looks like a bullet hole. And my sister says, Mom, isn't that where you shot at daddy? And she says, no, that's where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at your daddy. So people ask me why I wanted to be a memoirist. I'm like, why would you make stuff when that's who your mother is. So for those who have no context, I'd like to provide a bit more context. Where was this kitchen or where is this kitchen for that matter? This kitchen is in Southeast Texas. It's a town that I write about to protect the mayor and the school principal and the people who didn't sign off on what I said about them.

34:47I call it Leachfield, but it's really east of Port Arthur, Texas, a small town in East Texas. I call it the ringworm belt. Which I've also heard you describe as a swampy town. So moisture, humidity, ringworm. As a former wrestler, I can say those things combine to produce ringworm. Exactly. Yes. No, that's it. And industrial, like a lot of oil refineries all around. So not Paris in the 20s, I guess is the way I would put it. Now, I'm going to hop around like Memento the movie, if I must. And I must because that is my way. And you've written extensively about your childhood. You had, in many respects, an extremely difficult, painful childhood, and will probably unwind some of that.

35:33Now, you've written extensively about it, and you've also mentioned about writing memoirs. And if this is a misquote, please call me out. Quote, I've said it's hard. Here's how hard. Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. And certainly in your book, you paint a high-resolution picture of just how painful that can be. And certainly an element might be catharsis, but it is painful. And I would love for you to speak to the catalyst for beginning to publish this type of work, write and then publish this type of work. The publishing is nothing compared to the writing, I think.

36:13Publishing for me was great because they gave me money and I didn't have any. So that was good. But yeah, I think I had a flamethrower on my ass. Can I say ass on your show? You can say ass. Not only are three-letter words allowed, four-letter are allowed as well. Oh, there we go. You know, I was a weird little kid and I was just, my mother was capital and nervous and married seven times and twice to my daddy. And both my parents drank hard. It was Texas. Everybody was armed and we were a loud combative house. So I loved my parents. I mean, that's what I should say. It's, I don't think anybody who's read anything I've written about bottom would challenge that.

36:54But it was not a safe childhood. And yes, it had its fair share of blows. I mean, I always, you know, look, I was born in the richest country in the world. My skin color is something the whole country privileges. I'm, you know, I'm a college professor. I grew up skinny and my teeth came in relatively straight and I have a lot of advantages. So whatever I went through, a lot of people, and people I grew up with and loved had it way worse and didn't make it. So I think I was haunted. I was a haunted little girl. I tried to kill myself when I was a kid. When I was still in grade school, I took a bunch of aspirin.

37:34It said pain relief, and I thought, okay, this is what I want. So I didn't have a choice. I was, in some ways, not having a choice was a lucky thing because I went into therapy very early. I managed to get, after leaving school without a diploma, I managed to weasel my way into college and had a really kind professor. And his wife kind of took me under their wing and urged me to go into therapy when I was 19. And so I was sitting in rooms talking to, you know, codependent social workers starting when I was a kid. And all of that helped. But I guess I've been really blessed with a lot of outside help.

38:15I'm a big, big fan of the mental health professional and the librarians and English teachers and those kind souls you meet along the way. So you have kind souls that you meet in person. You mentioned a few. And I want to talk more about weaseling into college in a few minutes. but I've read a lot about your reading, if that makes sense. Yeah, I read a lot. Yeah. Some might envision in their minds, the childhood you described as a family of illiterates. Nobody picked up anything other than People magazine, but that was not the case. No, the huge advantage. Yeah. Describe that a little bit. And also, if I could tag on an additional piece of that question, I've heard you describe finding and reading poetry as Eucharistic, and I would love for you to just speak to that as well.

39:07Yeah, I started reading poetry when I was a little girl, and reading is socially sanctioned disassociation. You know, if you can't, they won't let you drink or, you know, geese heroin when you're a little kid, but you can disappear down a valley of Winnie the Pooh or Charlotte's Web. And in some ways, the poets I read, I think poetry really captured me early. And my mother, who was a painter, had gone to art school in New York and was enormously well-read. There were books all over my house in a place for the nearest bookstore. The bookstores in my town sold Bibles as big as station wagons and little dashboard icons.

39:51But there wasn't a lot of literature to buy. But I found a home in the little library was a three block walk from my house and I could disappear down the snowy valley of a book and I was somewhere else. And so poetry saved my life. I mean, my best friends were poets. I think the way people worship saints and, you know, have crosses blessed, I felt that way. And if you think about the idea of the Eucharist, we weren't Catholic, we were atheists. My father was a union organizer and said, you know, church is a trick on poor people to get their money away from them. And my mother was a kind of Marxist lady who was very smart and, you know, just a loose, a little bit of a loose cannon.

40:36So we were not churchy in the Bible Belt. And yeah, you take someone, when you read a poem, you know, you put it in the meat of your body. I mean, you're a body person. I'm a body person. I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you and it changes you. It transforms you. I had this idea of being a poet starting when I was five or six years old that I wanted to be a poet. It was the strangest thing because there were no poets around. No one I knew had ever met a poet. What was the feeling that elicited that desire? Was it just the tangible brilliance in some type of wordplay? Was it a kinesthetic reaction to the aesthetics of certain poets?

41:25What was it that produced that desire? You said it better than I could, Tim. You win. I mean, it's not a joke that I use the Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat. That's literally what happened. And I sat, when I had to reach the table, I sat on this giant edition of Shakespeare my mother had that was very water-stained. And it was a book that I read very early, and I started memorizing not Shakespeare poems, but the speeches from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and Richard III. and I would memorize these speeches and say them to my hungover mother. And she liked it. It was something she encouraged.

42:13I got her attention that way. To say she was not nurturing, I mean, Lady Macbeth is probably not nurturing the way my mother was not nurturing. I mean, her disinterest in being a mother was profound. Let's just put it that way. She once said to me when I was early on, when I was getting sober, she was supposed to watch my little boy who was then a toddler when I went to an AA meeting. I came back one day and she was like, I can't keep him. He's just too, I mean, I was gone for an hour and a half. She said, I just don't do kids. And I was so mad. I said, mother, you had four children. What do you mean you don't do kids?

42:52You don't cook. You don't clean. You haven't had a job in 40 years. What exactly do you bring to the party? And she thought for a minute and she said, I'm a lot of fun to be with. Yeah, I forgot to do anything for any other living human being, but I am fun to be with, which was not untrue. So I guess I had an aesthetic sense. She played music. She played opera. She played blues. Janis Joplin grew up in my hometown or rather I grew up in her hometown since she was older. Her brother would be in my high school carpool. So there was a lot of music I listened to. And I think poetry was part of that, the form, the shape.

43:30You know what it felt like, Tim? I felt less lonely. I was a lonely person. And I would read these poems and I felt like someone understands me. Someone knows what it feels like to occupy this body. and I remember trying to tell other little kids in my neighborhood about it, about poems that I like to remember. There's an E.E. Cummings poem I once tried to tell some girls about in my school. You know, it's just spring and the world is mud luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and we and Eddie and Bill come running and it's spring and the world is a puddle wonderful and the goat-footed balloon man whistles far and we, something like that.

44:12I can't even remember it, but it's so long ago. That's pretty good for not remembering. I can remember little bits of it. But I remember these girls in my school just going, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, what about it doesn't make any sense? You know, it's about it's being spring. And she's like, well, what is the mud luscious? Like, that's not even a word. I mean, no, it's like muddy and luscious and delicious. And it's like, how is mud delicious? You know, it's like, I'm like, no, like y 'all aren't getting it. And I thought they were messing with me.

44:47It seemed so obvious to me how great this was. So I learned to shut up about it very early, you know, by like third, fourth grade, I learned just don't, you like this stuff. Nobody else, your mother likes it, your sister likes it, your daddy likes it. Nobody else is going to like it. You shut up. One expression that I think was in the art of memoir, I've read it in other interviews. And again, I'm probably going to paraphrase here, but that poetry should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Yes, I wish that were my line. Isn't that a great line? It's so good. Where is that from? Or do you recall where you learned it?

45:25Yes, I know vaguely where it's from, but I can't remember the guy's name. You can Google it. We'll find it. Early 20th century, maybe 1920s to 1950 journalist guy. So I'm sorry I don't cite it. I wish I could take credit for it. But yeah, all art should disturb the comfortable and comfort that's disturbed. And all therapy should. And most foods, you know, it's not a bad goal to shoot poor at the beginning of a day. How did you weasel into college? How did I weasel into college? Flashback, because I would imagine that there's some listeners like me who are just in their mind's eye, seeing this little girl sitting on Shakespeare and out of focus behind her head in the same kitchen are bullet holes in the tile, imagining the experience and the experiences, although truly you endured some horrific, horrific things, but wondering how does someone in that position get into college, especially when they're missing, at least based on some of my homework, for instance, 87 days of school in the sixth grade, things like this.

46:38How on earth does someone get into college? Was it your wielding of words and an essay that just unlocked it? Was it something else? I won an essay contest when I was in high school. I remember, I think it was from the National Council of Teachers of English. And I had some professors, Actually, my mother had gone back to graduate school and got me a recommendation from this teacher of Chinese history who felt me up, sexually assaulted me in his office, and then wrote me a recommendation. So maybe that helped. Actually, what I think helped when I look back on it was I opposed the Vietnam War, and I wore black armbands on moratorium day.

47:22And that's the kind of thing that where I grew up. You know, I remember my coach, the football coach, pinning me up physically, like pinning me up against the lockers by the front of my shirt and holding me against the lockers and threatening me essentially to take my black armband off. So I did things like I didn't stand up for the American flag. I mean, I don't know. I thought I was Colin Kaepernick or something. It didn't win me any friends. Let me just say that. But I later found out when I got to my school and I had to have a lot of jobs to go there because it was a private school. It was McAllister College.

47:58It's a very good school. And I later found out that the assistant principal of my high school who had thrown me out a lot for things like my skirt was too short. One time he threw me out for not having a bra on. And I said, what makes you think I don't have a bra on? And then he called in the gym teacher to look under my shirt and confirm. In fact, I didn't have a bra. So I was just, I was a pain in his ass. And I later found out that he called McAllister and told these people in the admissions office that I was a bad citizen, that I wouldn't stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance and stuff. Well, they hear this old redneck assistant principal and they hear about this little girl who's doing this and they think, she sounds great.

48:40She's perfect. She's perfect. So I actually think my misbehavior that got me in so much trouble and made him hate me so much. I once had an algebra teacher reveal to me, he really is after you. Like, you're not paranoid. Like, he wants you out of here. And so I actually think, I don't know how I got in. I don't know how I got in. It was clearly a mistake. I made a D in art, you know, my senior year. And my mother was a painter. So, I mean, all I had to do was slap art on something and I would have gotten, you know, a B. And I couldn't handle the pressure. It was too hard. So, I don't know how I got to college.

49:23But once I got to college, I've got to say, I really felt everybody else was complaining about their parents and the, I don't know, that you weren't supposed to smoke pot or whatever they were mad about. I was like, this is great. this is all these people read books and they'll talk to you about them and I made straight A's and I got a scholarship and it was just shocking to me that I might succeed at something you know what about the environment aside from people who read books and are willing to listen if it was the environment maybe there are other variables led to the straight A's was it being outside of your home environment like what was the recipe that contributed to that sort of conversion of sorts from D for defiant to straight A.

50:11Maybe you were still defiant, but you got straight A's. I wasn't defiant. I wanted to please people. I mean, I think I had a lot of jobs. I had one of those hairnet-wearing jobs at the food service where I had to go in at like four in the morning and cook scrambled eggs and wash dishes and stuff. And so I think in some ways I had to organize my time. But I had been living with a bunch of drug dealers before I went to college out in Southern California. We moved out there initially. We lived in cars and stuff. And then we got some, a couple of us were slinging dope, mostly pot and psychedelics, although one guy had robbed a drugstore.

50:49And I was hitchhiking one day from Laguna Beach to San Clemente where my friends were surfing. And I got picked up by a guy who really scared me. I thought he was going to rape me and had to jump out on the side of the road. And it's interesting because there were six of us who lived in that house when I left home. And of the six, four went to jail and two of those were dead before they were 20. And only me and one other guy, who's still my best friend, Dooney, wound up getting sober. And we both kind of made it, quote unquote, him in construction in Southern California and me doing whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing.

51:33So I was scared. I was scared by how dark things that I brought to darkness with me. You know, you get to Southern California from where I grew up and you're like, where has all this been? You know, everybody's worth a donchard and, you know, people's teeth are great and nobody's missing any digits or anything. Everybody looks so amazing and everything's so beautiful. And you're like, God, I've never seen anything like this. Golly. And so you would think everything would have been great. But as you know, when you have a lot of trauma growing up, you bring the darkness with you. So I had this idea after I was hitchhiking and I got scared.

52:14I went to jump out of this guy's car. It was a Volkswagen that had no backseat and had a bunch of garbage in it. And I pulled up on the handle of the door and it just went floppy round and round and round, like it was locked and I couldn't get out. And so the window was open, stuck open, wouldn't go up, wouldn't go down. And I stuck my arm out the side of the window and opened it from the outside and jumped out and went down this embankment on the side of the road. I was really scared. I was, you know, how those moments of trauma are. I was scared like I had been when I was a little kid and there were bullets flying around my house.

52:55And I thought, I know, you know, I'll go to college in Minnesota. And I mean, it's just, that was the other thing. Everybody in Minnesota is so damn nice. Have you ever been there? I have. I have spent time there. I couldn't. I used to make a joke about an unkind joke. I'd say, if you're not a virgin when you get here, you will be when you leave. It was just, everybody was so damn nice. Oh my God, I'd never seen such nice people in my life. And still, I got there and I did extremely well for two years and I won all these prizes. And then I dropped out. I couldn't handle the prosperity. I couldn't handle the success.

53:35It took me a while to finally start getting sober, I guess. I guess that was a lot of my problem. Which we will definitely talk about. I want to dig into that. And I also am going to ask you just to plant a seed about how those mentors initially convinced you to go to therapy. But first, I want to bounce around chronologically. Because from these origins, I've, in the process of doing my homework, read about your graduate seminar at Syracuse described as hyper-selective and you're certainly a writer and poet of great note at this point. Lots of people know who you are. Lots of people love your work.

54:20Lots of people love you describing the craft and process goes into your work. How do you select the students who make it into your graduate seminar, or how did you? I mean, I do it. I wish they would just give me a wand and I get to pick all my people. But interestingly, I've been teaching there, gosh, 30 years, something like that. I only teach in the fall and I go and I commute from New York City. So we do it based on the work. We do it solely based on the writing. And George Saunders, my colleague, George Saunders, has gotten so famous that he attracts a lot of people and have a lot of people who teach there are through flowers.

55:03Junot Diaz is taught there. We just have gotten up to 1 ,200 applications for 12 positions. You end up with these 12 gems of assorted colors and kinds. Yes. What is day one, class one? What does that look like? Oh, you're thinking when I teach my memoir class. Yeah. Well, I used to do this thing. Yeah, That's so funny. I used to do this thing where I would stage a fight in my class with someone who was opposite from me. So let's say, you know, like my colleague, George Saunders, who is just the sweetest guy. I can't even tell you. I was in the car with him once and there was a bug on his shirt.

55:45And I was like, George, there's a big beetle on your shirt. And he'd be like, well, he has to be somewhere.

55:54You know, I'd be like, kill it. And he's like this Tibetan Buddhist with this amazing practice, you know, just the sweetest guy. So George comes in and starts arguing with me that my classroom is in fact his classroom. This is in front of all the students. In front of all the students. And for them, it's the first day of school, and it's like having their parents fight. And I script it so that I say only nice conciliatory things. I back up, he walks forward, he's bigger than I am. And then it ends with him like throwing the papers up and, you know, telling me to go fuck myself or something. Or telling me to go hang.

56:34Maybe, I don't know if you can say the F word. Can you say the F word? F word is not only allowed, but endorsed since I grew up on Long Island. You're in good company. I feel so much better just telling me to go fuck myself. And then we ask the students to write. So let's say there are 17, 18 students in this class, 20, somewhere between 15 and 22. And they're all smart and they're all young. They were all incredibly juiced on adrenaline and cortisol because they were scared. And it's a public scene and they don't really know each other that well. And they don't know us that well. So they're all extremely alert.

57:13They're hypervigilant. And we ask them to write down what happens. And everybody writes something just a little different. Interestingly, people will describe me in very aggressive terms. Like, even though I'm the one backing up and I'm saying, well, I can clear out during the break, George, but like, I don't understand why you're so upset. And he'll say, you don't understand why I'm so, I mean, and he walks forwards and I'm backing up and my head is down and I'm doing every conciliatory gesture I can think of. And people will say, you know, she stood her ground like a bulldog or she had military strength facing off against him.

57:54And one year I did it with my student assistant who was an undergraduate, just a beautiful young track star, Betsy. And, you know, Betsy just threw her papers up in the air and was screeching at me, well, you know, she's this kid and here I am, this professor with, you know, fancy clothes in a position of power. So people would, in that class of undergraduates, assume that I had done horrible things to Betsy that had. In one class, there was a young woman, one of the ruses I set up is that I leave my cell phone on so I can start to argue with George before he comes in and then ask the students, you know, how often did he call?

58:35How long between each call? And ask them to guess things or remember things about time. And some people, he calls three times. Some people will say he called once. Some people four times. So all those details are very influenced by who they are. The young woman with sickle cell anemia will have this enormous as compassion for me because I'll say, I have to leave my phone on. I'm waiting for medical results. And she'll assume I'm waiting to hear if I have some awful ailment. And she sees George as a complete beast. And me as this woman, perhaps ill, who dragged herself to class while everybody else in the class thinks, what a diva.

59:19She's answering her phone in the middle of class. She can't wait an hour to get medical results? I mean, come on. So there are always people in class who have, you know, have those perfect memories. I remember one kid, often they're musicians. This kid was a jazz saxophone player who was very famous in Brooklyn for giving these amazing house parties. I think he made a living giving house parties for like, I don't know, years. So this kid had this amazing memory. We had a script, and he remembered the script exactly. He remembered what George had on. He remembered where we stood. He remembered that I backed up every step.

59:59And then when he wrote it, he wrote it exactly as it happened. He didn't miss anything. And he said, George was the aggressor, but I wonder what she'd done to make him act that way. I guess the purpose of the exercise is for you to realize that you remember through a filter of who you are. Memory is not a computer. It's not a perfect storage system. Obviously, even these fine minds of these young people, very alert and paying attention in their first class and wanting to get everything right and do well, misremember. And what I want them to think about is how they are not just perceiving things, but beaming the world, the landscape into being with whoever they are inside.

1:00:48It's important as a writer of anything to realize what kind of filters you're strapping on that prevents you from seeing what's going on. I would imagine that is an opening exercise that a lot of your students remember, speaking of memory, for a very, very long time. What other exercises or aspects of your teaching, it could be in any setting, do many of your students remember or have stick out for them? Would you imagine? I think a lot of practice things, a lot of, I think it's important as a writer or as in anything to develop habits. I mean, you talk about this in 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Workweek.

1:01:35You've developed a lot of practices in your life to shape your life so that you were kind of operating, you know, to constantly be growing and developing. And so things like keeping a commonplace book, just keeping a notebook where you write down beautiful pieces of language. What is a commonplace book? That is where you capture the sort of beautiful turns of phrase that you encounter? Yeah, things you read. So you might copy poems. You might copy something you ever heard on the street. there was a guy standing on my street this is like a couple of years ago when I first moved into this apartment screaming murder or suicide at the top of his lungs and everybody was walking around the street walking around him and it was early in the morning and I walked up to him and I said excuse me sir he was screaming murder or suicide murder or suicide and I went up to him and said, sir, isn't there like a third alternative?

1:02:37Like, isn't there a door number three?

1:02:42And that little encounter I wrote down, but things I overheard. Hold on, hold on. That's too much of a cliffhanger. So what happened when you said that? Well, you know what was beautiful? I went into, I was going in to get a pastry for a friend of mine who was visiting from London. I got him one. I thought he'd bring him a pastry when I came out. But when I walked into the bakery, he was looking at the sky, you know, with a curious look. You know, he was thinking, like, isn't there a door number three? Isn't there another? Gosh, what might just be a door number three? But mostly what I write down are pieces of language or things, poems that I read, paragraphs, anything.

1:03:28so that you're just constantly copying in longhand. You can't type it. You're constantly copying things that are beautiful. You're constantly guzzling beauty. You're guzzling the beautiful language so that you're kind of steeped in it, you know, like a fruitcake and good brandy. Is the value of the commonplace book and using it this way in the writing down or do you have some approach to review or... using that later. I mean, the great thing about them is that if you get on an airplane or you're going along, you sort of know what you're reading. But I've also been doing this. A poet named Stanley Kunitz, who was a poet laureate in like 1978 or something, told me to do this.

1:04:20So I've been doing this since 1978. Also, every time I give a lecture, I put the quotes I use in the lecture on index cards. And so I have like, you know, I've been teaching for 40 years. I mean, I have 40 years of index cards with quotes on them. It's oddly satisfying. I don't know what it is. It's like a sit-up you do. It's like a push-up you do. It's something you don't really, I often don't look back on. I think it's in the writing down. I think it's in the practice. And it's kind of, it's like an altar. You're making an altar for yourself every day. You know, I wanted to, might as well, use this as a segue.

1:05:01Altar. Could you speak to the importance or utility of prayer in your life? Yeah, I mean, I'm a prayer. I was an atheist my whole life, and I got sober in 1989. And believe me, I drank my share. I did my part. I remember some guy I went to high school with telling me, when my mother was still alive, I was home. And he says, you don't even drink anymore? You don't even smoke pot? I was like, no, jack-o'-lantern, I don't do that stuff anymore. He's like, why? I was like, well, it just didn't agree with me. You know, it made me do things that I didn't want to do. And he says, I just think you're a quitter.

1:05:43I just think you're a quitter. I just think you gave up. I mean, what is Smokin' Pot going to do? You're never going to rob anybody's television or anything. He said, well, that's true. That's true enough, Jack Lantern. But you have had this job pumping gas since the 11th grade. Please tell me this guy's name was actually Jack Lantern. His name was Jack. We called him Jack Lantern because of a sad tooth thing he had. And because we were not ones to stand on ceremony. And he said, I said, you have had this job since the 11th grade and you're 50 years old and you have an ambition deficit disorder by my yardstick.

1:06:25So no, but he would say, Jack and Larry, he'd say, don't call me that no more. I'm like, what do you want me to call you? Like, that's your name, dude. That's been your name since you were 15. That's your name. What does prayer look like for you? What is praying? I think it started off, I think poems are my first prayers. The ones that I read, like I said, I felt less lonely. So I started praying not out of any virtue. I didn't believe in God. I had no religious training whatsoever. When I was a little girl, you know, people would say, would talk about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I thought they were kidding.

1:06:59I thought they don't really believe this horseshit. I mean, I figured out pretty early on, you know, by the time I was like six or seven, people were serious that they prayed when people weren't looking at them. I couldn't believe it. It was shocking to me. And daddy would say, well, you know, folks ignorant, you know what you're going to do. So I had not a religious bone in my body, but I did notice when I tried to stop drinking that I couldn't, like that I tried to stop drinking for two or three years. And I tried by myself and I tried drinking only beer and I tried drinking only alone. I tried drinking only with other people and I tried drinking only wine.

1:07:38I tried drinking with food. I tried drinking, you know, weekends. I mean, I just somehow I had crossed some line where I just couldn't stop drinking. And I went to get help and I went to sat in church basements and I hated everybody I saw who was sober. I just hated them. They just seemed like, you know, the guys selling incense at the airport. I just didn't like them. They just didn't look fun. And I just, they were so nice too. It was like getting to Minnesota. They're hi, you know, welcome. I'd be like, oh God, I hate these people. And finally, the last time I drank, the last night I drank, I had gotten together for like, it was the longest amount of time sober I'd had since I was 15.

1:08:21And I'd gotten together 90 days sober by going and, you know, sitting in church basements and talking to people who were sober. And I got a 90 day chip. And then I had to give this talk. I had to give a poetry reading at Harvard. Sorry to interrupt, just since I don't know how much familiarity when you say 90 day chip, is that some like literal token that you were given? It looks like a poker chip. And so like you get one the first day you go and then you get one at 30 days and 60 days and 90 days. So this was for me an epic accomplishment. I mean, there was no time that I ever ran the hundred yard dash in that was as important to me as that 90 day chip.

1:09:00And I was happy that I was sober. I felt better. I was sleeping better. My kid was better. Everything was better. And I had to give this poetry reading at Harvard College, and I was nervous. I'd never given a reading without drinking. The reading went okay. I was teaching at a bunch of places, including one class there, and I went out with some of my students. And the next thing I know, it's three o 'clock in the morning, and my car's spinning out on Star Drive in Boston, and I'm going towards this concrete. And I somehow didn't crash the car, and I somehow got home. And so at that point, everybody had been saying, you know, got to get on your knees and pray.

1:09:40And there was this great heroin addict, recovering heroin addict, Janice at this halfway house where I did volunteer work. I drove people to meetings, basically, and would pick people up and drive them to meetings. A lot of disabled people. And Janice said, just get on your knees. And I'm like, Janice, you know, what kind of God wants me to grovel and go, oh, God, you're so great. Ooh. And she said, you don't do it for God, you asshole. In that Boston accent, you don't do it for God, you asshole. I'm like, well, who am I doing it for? She's like, you're doing it for yourself. Just get on your knees.

1:10:16Just say, help me stay sober in the morning. Get on your knees at night and say, thank you for helping me stay sober. And so I'd be like, okay. So I'd get on my knees, help me stay sober. At night, I'd say, thank you for helping me stay sober. Well, some weird things started to happen. I mean, sometimes I would literally shoot the finger at the light fixture because I just thought, I hate this. You know what's terrifying about praying is the loneliness of it. I always tell people, young women I sponsor, you show more faith praying when you have never prayed before than any nun. To sit in that silence with all your fears and all your self-doubt is so scary and hard.

1:10:59If you have a big loud head, like I do, and like I have a big inner life and mine never has anything good to say, it thinks it can kill me and go on living without me. Something started to happen. I would have these moments of quiet. And the only way I can describe it is it was south of my neck. it was like in the middle of my chest. If I was living my life with my head, like yammering at me like a chihuahua all day and do that, stomp that stupid bitch, put that down, pick that up, go over there. I mean, it was just eat this, don't eat that, call him, I hate him. You know, like just these moments, like in the middle of my chest would be like this broad expanse of quiet.

1:11:46And I remember one particular day, our little shitty car broke down. My kid was a toddler and he was, I had to pee. We were on the road. I didn't break down. I had a flat and didn't have a spare, a working spare. It was rush hour. We were on Memorial Drive, we were trying to get home. And I just, in that moment, what I normally would have done, you know, I would have been there, you know, like throwing the jack around and trying to get the car jacked up and in a state of indignant fury that I didn't believe in God, but I believed that there was fate that had doomed me to misery and that the guy with the Jaguar would always get my parking place right before I pulled in.

1:12:26And I believed I had a head that had memorized the bad news and spewed it out all day. And I remember that day, it was the sun was setting. I just got out on the side of the road, I got Dev out of his car seat and the sun was going down and he was looking at me afraid that I was going to be like angry. And I just sat there and he said he was hungry and I didn't have anything to eat in the car. And I'm sitting there and I said, let's just look at the sunset a minute and then we'll go, we'll walk and we'll get some help. And we were just sitting there looking at the sunset and this truck pulls up with these Goomba guys from this 12-step meeting.

1:13:09And they have ginger ale, they have a jack, they have a way to tow my car, they give Deb potato chips. And it was just like, you know, all I have to do is just find some space in my body and just wait for a minute. And so I started to notice things happening when I wasn't bent over the day like a dog over like a bone that was about to be stolen. You know, like that when I could just I could just like sit there for a moment. And so I began to get a space in my body and I began to get I began to hear not the voice of God. I would call it, I would have some leanings. I would be thinking, I should have just killed myself.

1:14:04Literally, this is what I'd be thinking. I should have killed myself. My husband would marry some nice girl who wore barrettes, and my son would have this great mother, and his life would be better if I weren't there. And I would hear this voice in my head that was like, you need a sandwich. Why don't you get a sandwich? Why don't you make yourself the biggest sandwich you can make? and I'd be like, ooh, great idea. Like I just started to have these small good ideas that were not like anything I'd ever heard when I was afraid before. Yeah, then I had all these crazy spiritual experiences and like one of the things, I had this great sponsor, Joan the Bone.

1:14:44God, I loved her. She was so great. She was the kind of girl who lived in Alaska and would go to the bar when it was like 50 below in a tutu. I mean, she was just like a badass. And she was a Harvard social theorist, too, I've got to tell you. She was just all that. Joan the Bone. Joan the Bone. All that and a bowl of biscuits. Yeah. Sounds like a mobster. What's the origin of the name? Do you have any idea? I just called her that. That was my nickname for her, Joan the Bone. I see. I see. Joan the Bone. And Joan would tell me things like, I was such an ingrate, she'd say, you have to make a gratitude list.

1:15:20And so she'd call me and say, what's on your gratitude list? I would say, I have all my limbs. She'd say, no. Okay. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to make a gratitude list every day this month for every letter of the alphabet. And you're going to call me and read it to me. I said, shut the fuck up. I'm not going to do that. She's like, yes, you are. Or else, you know, like I won't talk to you anymore. I'd be like, okay. So I just started trying. I just started trying instead of sitting there with my arms crossed and my lower lip stuck out and my baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I just started trying shit that people who were happier than me suggested I should try.

1:15:57It was so simple. And so one of the things I said to her, she said, you've got to pray for what you want. What are you praying for? I said, I pray to stand it. Yeah, not to kill myself, not to stand it, just to get through the fucking day. That's what I'm praying for. And she said, okay, well, you've got to pray for what you want. What do you want? I said, I made$9 ,000 this year. I would like some money, please. She said, well, why don't you pray for money? I'm like, you can't pray for that. She's like, well, why not? I said, okay. So I would literally get on my knees in the morning and say, keep me sober.

1:16:31I would like some money. I'm not even making this up. And I would get on my knees and say, thank you for keeping me sober. I would still like some money. Three weeks later after I started, this is a true story and you can look it up. I get a phone call from a guy who says he's from this foundation. He's giving me$35 ,000 that I'd never applied for or asked for, that somebody just put me up for. And I so thought it was, I thought it was my friend George playing a trick on me and say, you know, fuck you, George. And I hang the phone up and the guy calls back and he asked me on, you know, the speakerphone, you can hear people laughing maniacally.

1:17:10So I've never gotten money from prayer again. And then Joan Levin says, well, you must believe that there's some sort of God. I was like, no, because they were meeting to give me that prize before I had stopped drinking and started praying. And she said, Jesus Christ. And I would also talk to her all the time. I'd say, how can there be a God? Because look at the Holocaust. She's like, God didn't do the Holocaust. People did the Holocaust. Like, what are you mad at God for? People did that. God didn't do it. That has nothing to do with God. So that's how my prayer life started. It's a bizarre story.

1:17:44I like bizarre. So Ignatian exercises. Does that mean anything to you? Yes. Yes. I became a Catholic. I became a Catholic and I do something. I practice a kind of spirituality called Ignatian spirituality, which when you become a Jesuit, you go away to the Jesuit place or the Jesuit making place. So you do a quote, you go to Jesuit school and then they give you these 30-day exercises. And the purpose of the exercises is to find God in all things. So like this election. I just turned around to look at my screen to see if we had a new president. So this election, for instance. Just a side note, somebody just sent me a text before we started recording and said the entire country has electile dysfunction, which I thought was pretty clever.

1:18:37Why didn't I think of that? Oh my God, that's so great. That was a clever turn of phrase. Yes. Oh my God. No, it really is. So finding God in all things. Finding God in all things. So that means, you know, like when the car breaks down, instead of thinking, you know, your cruel fate, you know, has come to hurt you. So what you do actually, Tim, is in the morning I do a prayer and meditation thing for 20 minutes where I do like centering prayer for maybe, I don't know, five, six, seven minutes. And then I read a scripture and I meditate on the scripture. And then I have a bunch of people I pray for.

1:19:17I have a list of people I pray for and things I pray for. Then at night I do something called the examine of conscience where you, it's not like going over your day and making a list of good things that happened or whatever, and them repenting for the bad things. It sounds like that, but it's not that. What it is, is you kind of press play on the recorder of your day. So you think, I woke up and so what did I do? Where was I? What mindset was I in? And you close your eyes and you try to review your day literally like you're watching a movie. And where you see moments of grace or luck or even something, you know, a good sandwich, something yummy to eat.

1:19:59You're supposed to savor those moments and occupy those moments. And it's a very body-oriented exercise. You're supposed to smell. What do you smell? What do you hear? What do you taste? How do your clothes feel? you're supposed to really recreate that moment in a sensory way and thank God for the grace or the gift of that. And then you kind of press play again and you see moments where you turned away from God or your best self didn't act and you say, I want to do better next time. Instead of snapping at the robo call voice, snapping at Siri because she doesn't understand me and love me for myself alone, you know, to just, you know, tomorrow I'd like to be more patient, help me to be more patient.

1:20:55So what it does is it made those moments of gratitude. And I also keep kind of a list or journal of those things and a prayer journal, a daily, I don't keep a journal journal, but I keep Daily Prayer Journal. And I just will kind of highlight some of those things. Like for me today, right now, Steve Kronacki's haircut, which I know he does himself. I don't know, the guy who delivers the big map thing on MSNBC. I just like the guy. I just like him. Every time I see him, I feel like I'm spending the night at my girlfriend's house and he's her nerdy brother who's like secretly hot. I had this flash of panic.

1:21:37So I was like, oh, fuck, here's somebody important. I'm not saying he's unimportant, but I'm just saying, oh, God, here's another guy that I have to pretend I know because I'm on the podcast. No, he's the guy who delivers the darn, you know, what the electoral map says on MSNBC. So if you're a liberal, you're like a nut and you watch this way. Other people watch other things. So he's this really nerdy kind of math goop guy who wears like khakis and a really like a clip on tie and has this really bad haircut. And I just have a complete crush on him. I just crush on him. I don't even like young men.

1:22:13I don't. I really don't. You have to have some, you know, you have to have some hair coming out of yours for me to want to date you. But this guy just does it for me. I just like him. I just like him. So wait a second. Tie that together for you. Does that have anything to do with the prayer journal? Yes. Or were you just confessing that? No, no. I have a crush on this guy who's on TV every day, and it tickles me to see him. It's kind of a little thrill. It's a little thrill to see him. It really is. It's so stupid. But it's also, it makes me feel like a child. It makes me feel like I'm in junior high school.

1:22:49And so there's something innocent and sweet about it. Also, the fact that he's so dorky, I like. I just like that. So you have a prayer journal. You have the commonplace journal. Do you have any other journals? No, that's it. The prayer journal, I don't really, I only write, like actually write, and it's mostly kind of looks like a list. Do you know what I'm saying? It's mostly like a list of things like the lady at my drugstore, my pharmacist, who they were all out of the pneumonia vaccine. I get pneumonia a lot. And she went out of her way to call me and say, you know, I got you the pneumonia.

1:23:29If you can come in right now that we had a cancellation, I, you know, I can do the just kindnesses, moments of kindness, but also moments of presence and awareness of God. A lot of people feel it in nature. I feel a little bit in Central Park, which is all the nature I have? I am currently in Austin, Texas, which is home base for me. Shut the front door. Yeah, I've been here for three years. I live in the Republic of Austin slash the Republic of Texas. One of my favorite t-shirts, not everyone's going to get this, but is a shirt with the Texas flag, which says most likely to secede on it, which I quite like.

1:24:14Yes. So I'm in Texas. How did you wind up down there? Would argue that I'm not in Texas. Yeah, I know, right? Listen, do you have a weapon? If you have a weapon, you belong. I do. Well, God, it's good for you. What do you have? Can I ask? Can we talk weapons? As far as weapons? Yeah, sure. I have a 7mm Win Mag hunting rifle. I have a Glock 34, which is a 9mm handgun. I know what a 9mm gun is. You kind of know what a 9mm gun is. I'm not explaining it for you. I'm explaining it just like getting on your knees, not for God, it's for you. I'm explaining to the listeners. So nine millimeter Glock 34, I have an M &P 45 and a few other - Do you hunt?

1:25:00Firearms that I don't use much. I hunt, but infrequently. And that started in 2012. I always had a very negative association with hunting. I just given my exposure to it. Kind of a great thing. Yeah. I had a very negative association because I saw very irresponsible hunting on Long Island. And then in the process of working on The 4-Hour Chef and learning to forage, I felt it was incumbent upon me to hunt and if I were to consume animal protein. So I had my first deer hunt with an incredible hunter and conservationist named Steve Rinella. And that really completely shifted my lens on how ethical and responsible hunting could be.

1:25:50Now, in Texas, you have the whole spectrum from responsible to machine gunning hogs from helicopters, which I do not partake in, although people could argue it's an invasive species, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, so I do hunt infrequently, probably, you know, let's just call it once every year or two. You know, those javelina hogs are fun to shoot. I'm sorry to say it. I'm embarrassed to say it, but I've shot a javelina hog. So I'm anti-gun, but pro hunting. So does that make sense? It does. I mean, I'm just imagining these kind of backwood kiwis in New Zealand hunting hogs with knives walking into the woods barefoot, which is a real thing.

1:26:32I know one guy who did that. So you can be pro-hunting while being anti-gun. I think that's possible. No, but I mean, if I were to hunt, I would hunt with a gun. But it's funny, one of my best friends is a young writer named Phil Lamarsh. He's one of those guys who stocks his freezer with bow and arrow kill venison. He called me this week and said a very interesting, he just killed a deer. And he said, you know, the longer I hunt, you know, the only thing I hate about it is the killing. I think there's a lot of shared sentiment to that by a lot of hunters. Yeah. I mean, the most reverent people I know about the natural world are practicing.

1:27:15Many of them are practicing hunters. True fact. Well, I want to use this to tie a bunch of things together in the most awkward fashion possible. That's okay. Because I've been trying to force fit a segue somewhere, so I might as well do it here. Yeah, do it. And that is to hear your description or explanation of how some of your wordsmithing came to be. Part of what I enjoy so much about your writing is that you have this, let me get this right, time critic Lev Grossman said in his review of Lit, Carr seems to have been born with the inability to write a dishonest or boring sentence. That's high praise.

1:27:55Now, the least boring sentences for me, and God, I wish I could remember it, but you take this, what seems like this sensitivity to language and poetry to create sentences using cat shit sandwich metaphors and so on, which also seems to me, and maybe this is, you tell me if this is warranted or not, but to be a very kind of Texan thing also, it kind of makes me think of like a trial lawyer in God knows where in Texas, right? Who gets up and just demolishes some slick trial attorney from Los Angeles in a complete mismatch, right? I mean, just dismantle someone with these really clever turns of phrase.

1:28:42Where does that come from? Or how did that develop in you? Because I do think it is one of your superpowers. Well, I think growing up in Texas, it's a storytelling culture. You know, Texas idiom is poetry, as far as I'm concerned. And I had two great practitioners. I'm a seventh generation Texan. I'm a mother's side and fifth generation of my daddy. So my daddy was a great bar room storyteller. I mean, he was a labor union organizer for the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Local 1242. And he was just funny as a crutch and told these amazing kind of tall tales like out of Mark Twain. But he also spoke in poetry like he would say, like a woman with an ample behind, he'd say, she has a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag.

1:29:32and for him that was a compliment there was nothing insulting about that that he used to call me i'm a little skinny thing he used to call me a gimlet ass pokey you need you need some taller on that ass you need you need you got you a gimlet ass i don't even know what that is but i knew it wasn't good a little flat butt or he would say it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock You can scan that, by the way. It's raining like a cow, pissing on flat rock. Wait, what do you mean by scan, real quick? What do you mean by that? Shakespeare is iambic pentameter, or my first love poem that was ever written to me.

1:30:13I saw you on your horse today, your eyes like eggs, your hair like hay. That's iambic pentameter. It's da-da-da-da-da-da. It doesn't matter what it is, but you can hear it when I say it, right? That it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock and that you hit that flat rock. It creates, for one thing, it creates a whole landscape in which cows piss on flat rocks and people stand around and marvel and go, my goodness, looky at that. And then you attribute that to the rain. It's a metaphor. It operates way beyond the bounds of propriety. It's not how you talk in church. You're not supposed to talk like this.

1:30:56So the minute you say this and somebody laughs at it, you have them. They're in your boat. They have transgressed by laughing at your joke. Well, Daddy was just the master of a story, but he was also a poetic imagery. I mean, to me, that poetry I grew up, I was steeped in it. My mother, who was an enormous reader who read everything, Chinese history and Russian novels and philosophy and just read everything, was just the master of, you know, I remember when she was dying, she had all these old men who were always trying to marry her, which, why? But she's dying. She's actively dying. And one of these old boyfriends has come to see her at the hospital in Houston, And the nurse spins over and says, Miss Carr, your husband's here to see you.

1:31:51And she says, well, he must look like shit. He's been dead 20 years. And, you know, I mean, she just can't stop herself from saying, like, the most horrible thing you've ever thought. And so I think between the two of them and just growing up in Texas, the idiom, the language I grew up with is epically beautiful. beautiful. And the need to not be boring when you speak. You know, people will, I'm going to stomp a mud hole in your ass. That is so much better than I'm going to whip your ass. It's just like, yeah, right. My friend Dooney got in a fight once with a guy in a bar, and the guy said, and he told the greatest story about it.

1:32:36It was actually the guy he decided to stab. He went out in his truck and got a knife and came back with like a Swiss Army knife. And he starts chasing this guy who was a state congressman, by the way, I won't tell you his name, but he starts chasing him around this bar. Well, to brandish a weapon in a place where alcohol is served is a mandatory, I think, 10-year sentence, some big, you know, it's frowned upon. And he's chasing this guy around. And what if somebody says to Danny at one point, that's a little little bitty old knife you got there. You said, well, notice he don't want to get stabbed by it.

1:33:13And then he runs out, and then we hear the sirens. So here comes the sirens. Here comes the sirens. Then he runs out. He gets in his truck, and one of those mall cops, security guys, runs out. And then he says, he stands in front of my truck, in front of my headlights. He's got a belt buckle that will pick up HBO. and he holds his hands up and goes, Halt! Halt! And Dooney just puts it in first gear and hits the guy. I mean, he doesn't hit him hard, but he knocks him down and then leaves and gets pulled over and is convinced he's going to prison for brandishing this weapon, for trying to hit this guy.

1:33:56But anyway, it turns out he had to call the guy to apologize. The guy's daddy knew Dooney's daddy. and he said all he wants you to do is apologize and do it's like apologize you know i'll blow the guy like i'm kidding i don't want to go to jail of course i'll apologize but here's the punchline of the story and this is what makes duney still my best friend since i was 15 so he calls the guy up and the guy answers phone he goes and duney goes i am so sorry man about last night i am so sorry. And the guy says, you almost killed me. And Dooney says, man, I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was you.

1:34:37Don't you want to say that though? The next time somebody happened, I didn't know it was you. The next time you do some horrible thing. Next time I get in a really stupid argument with my girlfriend, that's what I'm going to use. Don't you want to say, I didn't know it was you, honey? I don't know. Only in the state of Texas do you have that story. It's just got all the elements of a Texas story. How could I not love it down there? I mean, oh my God. Let's talk about revision. Okay. Revision. I'm a big reviser. I'm a big reviser. You are a big reviser. So you have said, you know, anyone who's read a rough draft of anything I read is just shocked at how bad it is.

1:35:14It's terrible. And what does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very, hopefully it doesn't sound like a really naive question because I know that there are many, many aspects to revision. I'll lead with just a bit. This is from writermag.com, but Car says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes. Can I make this sentence less boring, more interesting, prettier, more colorful, more true? So that's a teaser. What does your revision process look like? Because I've read that you threw out something like 1 ,200 pages. Threw out 1 ,200 pages of lit. Yeah. Finished pages too. That's not draft.

1:35:49And that was written over about, I want to say five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been, well, first off, they were about, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean, they, and so I finally, my agent called me and said, you know, you're going to have to, I said, you know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don't shut up and leave me alone. It's just going to take me a minute. So anyway, so I'd sent them, I don't know, I'd sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I'd thrown out 1 ,200 pages.

1:36:28And let me tell you when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked. I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn't want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days and I watched, you know, Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows. And I ordered a lot of curry. I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo. I was one of the people I call. It's like, you know, the nuclear button, you know, who's like just one of the great novelists who also happens to be a friend of mine.

1:37:07And I said, Don, I think I'm writing. He's like, what are you crying about? I said, I think I'm writing a bad book. And he said, well, who doesn't? And I thought about that and I thought, God, he's right. Tolstoy's written bad. I mean, people I read, you know, every writer I know has written a bad book. Okay. So maybe it's just supposed to be a bad book, but it's the book that's standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened. Basically, what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time. I think one example I give in The Art of Memoir is that when I'm, my mother is driving me to college.

1:37:52And I think the sentence I started with was something like, Mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers. I can't remember. Might have said puke and drunk on screwdrivers. I somehow was able to remember being in that car. The thing about my mother's yellow station wagon was that it didn't have an air conditioner. So at that time, you could buy an air conditioner that's strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet.

1:38:40And it was icy, icy cold water. And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas. and she was drinking vodka, driving, drinking vodka and orange juice and eating these, watching her eat a peach. You know, when you're 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There's just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you're 17. You just think, my God, woman, shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it's not going anywhere. You know, Now, but the smell of the peaches and being in, and suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of 100 Years of Solitude.

1:39:27It was her book, but I had started reading and she said, read it aloud to me. And I remembered reading that book and driving. And I remembered, you know, you grow up around these kind of Texas dirt farms. I mean, there's plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, But then you get to the Midwest and it's just so organized. It's just there aren't the rustic cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch. You know, it's these rows and rows of corn and these big cinnamon colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking, I could be a writer.

1:40:11I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn't do well at school, that I would fail. I've been such a screw up. I'd been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail and I didn't. Because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in here. She came to pick me up wearing a leopard. She had leopard skin pajamas. It was July 4th. And she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar.

1:40:54and those leopard skin pajamas on this hot night in Coons County, Texas. And here sits this judge behind us, this liver spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he's ever eaten on his tie when she came to pick me up. And he said, I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. And she said, oh, you old fool. I mean, it was just like, oh, my God, mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated. So anyway, yeah, I think it's memory. I do an exercise. I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spieta, a wonderful young novelist I teach with.

1:41:36And she's teaching an undergraduate class. And I said, you know, I want to do this right. There are 90 kids in the class. I said, I want to do this writing exercise. She said, well, the writing, you know, it's been uneven. And I said, trust me, everyone will write well. and you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother's cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little. And try to close your eyes and smell that because, you know, smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory.

1:42:14and it's stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts. You try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want. What are you yearning for and what's keeping you from getting it? Maybe it's a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer or what's going to keep you from getting it? It's my big-footed sister who, as Daddy said, nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. You know, she's going to get all the oysters and I won't get any.

1:42:52And so it's really more about trying to occupy a former self. Because I think, as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers, the body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things, too. So the body keeps the score. And if you go excavating for these memories, sometimes there are costs associated with that. Yeah. I've read that while you were working on the Liars Club, that you'd suddenly fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon as if you'd driven all night and you would sob, you'd really suffer. What did you do to cope with that pain? And I should just say, you and I were chatting before the recording about trauma a bit.

1:43:45And I've recently described some of my childhood sexual abuse. And the podcast that I did related to it didn't seem to exact a horrifying toll. But the process years before of trying to write about it and getting a very, very rough draft brutalized me. Of course it did. just left me paralytic for, God, more than six months in some ways. I'm so sorry. Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I'm horrified by the experience and also fascinated by it in a way because I don't know why those two things should be so different. And I'd just love to hear you expand a bit on the price that you've paid or your experience with dredging up a lot of these memories or recalling them, putting them down.

1:44:38and why writing seems, at least in my experience, to be so different from some other forms of expressing these things. Well, I mean, because you're alone. I mean, that's for me where the prayer and the God comes in. I do have a sense now that I didn't have back in the day. I mean, by the time I started writing Liars Club, how old was I? I don't know, 35? I've been in therapy for 16 years. And I'd also had a prayer practice for, you know, a meditation and prayer practice for some years. I hadn't converted. I wasn't a Christian. I didn't, I was a Catholic, but I was about to become Catholic. And I was very active in recovery programs and I had a sponsor.

1:45:26And I also had, based on all of those efforts, I had done a lot of the processing and recovery. I had flown down to Texas when I was 23 years old and got my mother drunk on margaritas and told her, you know, you tried to kill me with a butcher knife and it's not because I was a bad kid and it ruined my life. And what the hell was wrong with you? What was going on? You know, I had done a lot of that work before. And I tell people when they tell me they want to write a memoir about some horrible stretch of childhood or some awful period of trauma, maybe they don't. Maybe they don't right now. So I think I had a sense of, you know, when I was drinking, my idea of medicating myself or anesthetizing myself.

1:46:20That was all I knew how to do. That was what my parents told me to do. That was all they knew how to do was try to drink it away. My daddy was in the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, he went in Normandy and he came out at Bukemole. I mean, that's plenty of trauma. Plus being married to my mother would have been simple. There's only one person with a weapon as opposed to the Nazis. So yeah, I think I'm a big fan of a hot bath. I'm a big fan of nutritious food. I'm a big fan of cardio. Even now, I mean, I'm 65. I don't do five dance classes a week, but I get up in the morning and I walk four miles. And then I do Pilates three or four times a week.

1:47:08And I take a dance class a couple of times a week. And all those things keep me in my body. And when I'm in a lot of pain, I take care of myself. When I was drinking, I felt like I had this screaming baby that I was holding and I was screaming at it all the time to shut up. So yeah, I think I still have even writing anything now, I find very, I'm not dealing with anything like that. I'm so much, but I'm also, I'm so much happier now than I've ever been in my life. I mean, I'm 65 years old. I've never been so happy in my life. I've never been less good looking, had less social power, had, you know, any of the things that you would think would make me happy, joyous, and free.

1:47:57And I'm just, I wake up every day really feeling lucky to be alive and feeling loved and feeling like, not every day. I mean, I wake up plenty of days and I'm mad as an old stomp pissant, but most of my days are pretty lit up and it's a lifetime of practice. So I tell a lot of my students, my young students, want to write about sexual assault or trauma of various kinds, well, maybe why don't you get some treatment for this first? Why don't you treat your heart first, treat your body, treat yourself with a lot of care and see if this is what you want to write about right now. Something you can write about maybe five years from now or something, you know.

1:48:46What advice would you give yourself yourself about therapy if you were talking to your 19 or 20 year old self and how were you first convinced to go to therapy i remember you mentioning that long ago you know i didn't have to be convinced i mean here's the other thing yeah no and there weren't a lot of people saying gee i wish you'd stop drinking i mean i led a pretty isolated existence the way a lot of people who grew up the way i grew up do i mean my idea of telling somebody how i felt i remember right before I stopped drinking, I remember I was teaching sort of all over the academic ghetto around Boston.

1:49:24But I remember specifically one day at Tufts, I was copying something for a class and I had dropped my kid off like vomiting out the side of the car before I dropped him off at daycare. I mean, and then I drove to Tufts and I was Xeroxing something and somebody said, how are you doing, Mary? And I was like, you know, I want to blow my fucking brains out. And that was my idea of telling somebody how I felt, making a glib, sort of awkward, socially awkward statement to somebody I hardly knew. And I've been in therapy then for a while, but I was also drinking every day everything I could get my mitts on.

1:50:03What is good therapy to you? Because therapy is a term that's extremely broad. It's kind of like saying medicine, right? Yeah, exactly. There's so many different specialties. What has proven to be good therapy for you? You know, I think it totally depends on the person. I mean, the best therapist I ever had, I think, I mean, for me, the difference in therapy and recovery, I think in therapy, I'm the baby and they're the mommy. And that model sort of, especially when I first started, I just felt like I needed a lot of nurturing. And I had great therapists. therapist you know my first therapist when i look back on things he said and did was insane he would have been fired he told me to go down after he'd been seeing me nine months and confront my homicidal suicidal mother about all this horrible stuff she'd done to me and i did it and he said i won't see you until you do it wow i mean if nobody's ever done any in for a pound yeah i know I mean, I look back on it.

1:51:08I was like, he was crazy. I had a great therapist when my son was a baby who was a psychologist, PhD psychologist, and who really helped me try to learn how to be a mother when I hadn't had one. And all the feelings that come up around what you didn't get when you were a child, when you have a child, the protection and stuff. It's funny, my son watches me with his daughter now and just says, I don't know, sort of gives me nothing but a stroke. And I said, let me just tell you, I was not this good with you. Like I was crazy about you and I loved you, but I didn't have what I have now that I have with her.

1:51:52That's just, I don't even break a sweat going in there. I can do this stuff. It's funny. I was in, I babysit one or two days a week. I was in Prospect Park this week, and I had taken her across the park in a stroller, and a thunderstorm broke out. I mean, pouring rain. And I've never shared DNA with somebody this good-natured as this baby. This baby coos, smiles, laughs, never cries. I mean, sleeps, eats, is just the best-natured kid. I used to babysit in high school and college, so I've taken care of a lot of babies, and she's just the easiest kid. But I get across the thing, it's pouring rain, and she starts screaming, crying like she's being beaten.

1:52:35And I take her out of the stroller, and I hold her, and she calms down. I go to put her back in the stroller, and she just starts screaming, crying again. Well, it's two miles across a muddy field in the pouring rain, and I've got a stroller and a bunch of crap, and I've got this, you know, 27-pound unit, screaming unit. And I just had no problem doing it. And when I was 40 years old, 35 years old, it would have been like being beaten with a hose. I just thought, you know what? Daddy was in the Battle of the Bulge. This is not that hard. You know, I just had the physical energy, even at my age, that I didn't know I had to do it.

1:53:19And I got back to the house and I went to fold up the stroller. there was four inches of freezing water in the bottom of the stroller that I've been putting her in. And she was soaked through to her skin. Yeah, she was perfectly reasonable to be, you know, now I understand. I could have just emptied it out and put her in the stroller and wrapped her up in a blanket, but I didn't know what it was. But I just thought, well, I'll get her home and it'll be fine. You know, I didn't feel like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm a terrible mother and I'm going to wind up trying to stab her with a butcher knife, which is how I felt when my kid was that age.

1:53:51You know, I didn't know that I wasn't going to be my mother. I wasn't, I didn't know that. So scary. That is scary. Yeah, super scary. And, you know, it sounds like, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that you've learned in some form or fashion, or maybe many forms and fashions, to wear the world like a loose garment. I'd love to know if you agree or disagree. Because based on my reading... I wouldn't say that. Well, okay. So your first confession. Absolutely not. No. Priest said to you, wear the world like a loose garment. What does that mean to you? Well, I mean, I think it's not, you know, the problem isn't whatever your mind is telling you the problem is.

1:54:31The problem is the fear. And for me, the solution to fear is curiosity and presence. and I can't be terrified and curious at the same time. And so when I was walking the baby across the field, just all I was was physically uncomfortable. I mean, I was thinking, gee, can I shove this thing and hold her moose, you know, and get everything and get all this stuff? How am I going to do, you know? And so I went crossways across the mudfield, so I'm shoving the stroller and carrying her. I didn't know physically if I could do it. I was sort of dubious. I just thought, maybe I can't do this. But all I had to do was do it.

1:55:16I thought, well, if I get tired, I'll sit down, it'll rain on me a minute, then I'll get up and go again. Like that's what we'll do. But I don't know. Here's the way I put it. I tell people it's like I have a trichne. It's like most of the time I walk fine, I run fine, I can squat more than my body weight and do advanced Pilates for an hour and 10 minutes. And I'm tough as a boot. But there are days that I don't feel that way or there are moments where I get my knee goes out and I fall on the ground. All I have to do is honor those moments. All I have to do is I have a heating pad. I have a weighted blanket.

1:55:55My kids have a pit bull I'll bring to stay with me while an idiot is my little comfort animal. You know, I call people. I still have a sponsor. I still have a therapist I don't talk to all the time, but I didn't have to be convinced to go into therapy. I knew I needed it, but when I first started it, as you know, it was just so damn painful. And I just, for those of your listeners out there, if you're having a hard time, I just want to say it's like you lance a boil and the infection's draining off. And if you can just get by that, it's going to tell you that it's endless, but it's not endless.

1:56:32There's a bottom to it. So did you ever smoke? You never did. I was never a smoker. No. Yeah. You're just such a jock. You're such a specimen. You're such a specimen, Tim. Well, we're all specimens. It depends on how we look on the autopsy table. But I was born premature, so I have respiratory issues on my left lung. And that was part of it. So I had a lot of breathing issues growing up to begin with. And secondly, sports saved me. So sports kept me out of a lot of trouble. Yeah. You know, I was good at sports and then I quit when I was like, I quit. I'm much more of a jock now than I was then.

1:57:13Why did you ask about smoking? I was going to ask you about smoking because when you quit smoking, there's a phenomenon that happens. It's also when you quit drinking, but somehow it's more intense when you smoke. you'll have a craving for a cigarette and the craving is as intense as it was the first day you quit. It's as overpowering. But if you just keep note of how long the craving lasts and how many of them there are, they're as intense, but they're not as long and as frequent. So it's the same thing about suffering when you first start therapy or you first lance that boil and you're unearthing some of the painful things you grew up with.

1:58:00It's as intense the first day and you just feel like, oh my God, I'm in the burn ward and I just got snatched out of the fire and every ounce of me hurts and I want to run screaming down the street like my hair. on fire. And it just won't last as long as it did the first time. And so for your listeners, if you're just looking at hard things that you grew up with, or you're trying to quit smoking, trying to quit drinking, trying to recover from trauma, I promise you, I will send you money if this is not true, that it will get easier. It's not linear. And there will be those days when it's as painful as the first day and you'll think, but I'm no better than I was, but you are.

1:58:46You just, it doesn't feel that way. Yeah. Excellent advice. Just a few more questions. I'm having so much fun. I can go forever, but I... You've got a lot to do, dude. Do I? Do I though? I don't know. I mean... Where in Austin do you live? Well, I spend most of my time downtown for recording and then live in the burbs outside of that. I love it in Austin and expect to be here for quite some time. I wanted to move here right after college. I didn't get the job. And there was - Those morons. They screwed up. Yeah. Well, you know, possibly. I also think that that could have been in everyone's best interest.

1:59:26Really? I think I make a quite terrible employee in most circumstances. Me too. But at the time, and I didn't expect this to lead here, but at the time that I was not given the green light to get an offer from Trilogy Software way back in the day, it seemed like a death blow. This seemed like the end of the world because I had put a lot of eggs in that basket. I didn't want to do anything that was recruiting on campus really otherwise. And I listened to and watched your Syracuse University commencement speech. Oh, that's so nice of you. And then I read a transcript. And I think this is from the speech, unless it was sort of mistranscribed.

2:00:13But here's the paragraph. Almost every time I was super afraid it was of the wrong thing. And stuff that first looked like the worst, most humiliating thing that could ever happen almost always led me to something extraordinary and very fine. So my question is, could you give us an example of that that comes to mind? Could be something humiliating. It could be a favorite failure, but anything that, as it turns out. When I first did a kind of moral inventory and recovery that they encourage you to do, I had a lot of resentments against God. When you say they, this is in a 12-step program? Yeah.

2:00:46And Joan LeBone, you know. Joan LeBone, right. Like one of the things I really resented God for, my son, who was just this little beautiful blonde hair, blue eyed, and a tank of a boy, a natural kind of athlete. When he was little, he was sick all the time. I mean, he would get a cold and he would get these sinus infections. His fever would go to like 105. We'd rush him to Children's Hospital in Boston. It was terrifying. We're always rushing to emergency rooms because his fever was so bleeding high. And just so terrifying. And so I never slept. I never slept. And I was depressed. I was probably postpartumly depressed.

2:01:35And I was drinking. By then I had started, I decided drinking would help me take care of a sick child. Great idea, Mir. It's like the bad mom in the after school special. And so what? And I remember, so when it came time to do Ignatian spiritual exercises, you're trying to find God in all things. Where is God in that? Where is God in a sick baby? I'll tell you a secret. When I actually looked at my life and the decisions I was making, I would have kept drinking. If I'd had one of those playboy babies, you know, that like sleeps 12 hours a night and never is sick and just, you know, coos and cuddles and like that.

2:02:20And and I had been able to I would have kept drinking. If I had had my granddaughter, who's like the easiest, like 12 hour night sleeper, eats everything you give her, laughs at everything you do. I would have kept drinking. I could not physically drink the way a real alcoholic needs to drink and take care of a kid who was sick all the time. Couldn't do it and work and make a living. I couldn't do all those things. It's too hard. And so I don't think God sent pathogens into my infant son's body. I don't know how any of this works. But when I ask where God is in this, my own physical discomfort forced me to get sober.

2:03:03So my sister died this summer, very suddenly, of pancreatic cancer in less than a week. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry too. We were not in touch. We had a terrible childhood and we had not been really in touch for seven years. And that was my choice. And I remember saying to my therapist, isn't it going to be terrible when she dies? She said, yeah, it's going to be terrible anyway. And although it's horrible that she's dead, there's nothing. I feel my love for her. I don't have to defend myself against my love for her the way I did when we were estranged. I can cherish and remember all the times we were there for each other, all the ages we were in each other's lives.

2:04:03And I would give anything for her to be alive, but I still think our not being in touch was the best thing for both of us. You know, I don't regret that. And there's this amazing gift to me of being in touch now with her son and her husband and her stepchildren. And I would give anything if she were alive. But there are gifts in this suffering that are real spiritual gifts. I practice when things happen that I find very disappointing. My son had a film coming out, his first feature film coming out at Tribeca Film Festival. and it's a global pandemic. And so there is no Tribeca Film Festival and he's raised somehow all this money and put years worth of work in and moved heaven and earth.

2:04:51And you know what? The film's being released. He's got a great distribution deal. He just won Best Director at Fright Fest and it's unfolding just the way it needs to unfold. It's getting curious about where the light is, just being curious about where the light is. Getting curious about where the light is and the all-powerful reframe. And it is really incredible what can happen, as you said, when you really get curious in the face of fear. On air, Tim, because I have to say it. I have so many young people who come to me about sexual assault, so many young men who have come to me, my students, young writers, young poets.

2:05:36And your being open about this on this podcast has just been such a gift to all these young men. Thank you. So good for you. So good for you. So a horrible thing that happened to you that's being used to help a lot of, give a lot of people hope, and it's going to prompt a lot of healing. I hope so. And I've seen a lot come out of the woodwork, and it's been simultaneously, and I know you've experienced this certainly, it's been simultaneously appalling, rewarding, and... brutal in a way. I mean, it's all of those things. I mean, there's a lot of pain and beauty in it. And I'll just mention that of my closest male friends, and there really aren't that many, I don't collect friends like a little porcelain teacups or whatever people collect.

2:06:31I have a fairly small-ish circle. And I would say 30 % of my closest male friends reached out to me after for that podcast to describe their own experiences with sexual abuse that I know nothing about. And these are people I've known for a very long time. So I hope there's healing. Of course there is. We're living, look, we're not curled up on the backboards of mental institutions and we both could be. Yeah, very true. Well, Mary, we're going to talk again and I want to ask one more question, which sometimes is a dead end. And I'll own that if it is. Okay, then. But we'll see where it goes. The question is, if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach billions of people, however many you want, a word, a phrase, a question, a quote, a poem, anything, what might you put on that billboard?

2:07:28That's so hardcore. Oh, my God. That is really, God, that's a little. It's aggressive. It's aggressive. It's hardcore. It really is. It's a little javelina hogs. There's a pack of javelina hogs running out of the bushes at me. And it doesn't have to be the one and only. This could just be the first billboard. The first billboard. You know, put down that gun. You need a sandwich.

2:08:00You need a sandwich and a hot bath. No, I know what I would put. I would put 90 % of what's wrong with you could be cured by the hot bath. That's what I'd put. I love it. I love that. Well, Mary, this has been so much fun. I've really, really enjoyed this. People can find you at your website, marykarr.com. That's marykarr.com. Twitter at marykarrit, L-I-T. Is there anything else you'd like to say, suggest, ask, request of the listeners? Let's all heal. Let's all heal as a country, no matter how different we think we are. We're all suffering souls, and we all want to heal this riven country of ours.

2:08:44So that's what I'm wishing for all of us and wishing everybody a lot of love and light today and a big, nice cigar.

2:08:54Hear, hear. We're here. Get curious. Look for the light. Thank you, Mary. All right, April, you take care. You go do you. I will. And to everybody listening, we'll link to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel.

2:09:32It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

2:10:10If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. I have been using 8sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. 8sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod4Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second.

2:10:46First, Pod4Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heat wave or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive i am always more heat sensitive pulling the sheets off closing the windows trying to crank the ac down this solves all of that pod4 ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience and for those snore heavy nights the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.

2:11:23Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99 % accuracy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code TIM to get$350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That's 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash TIM, and code TIM, T-I-M, to get$350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

2:12:03This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement.

2:12:41And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market.

2:13:22It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes.

2:14:00So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports. So professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.

2:14:39That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.