Fresh Take: Genevieve Kingston, DID I EVER TELL YOU?

0:00Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands for the super athletic stuff, like running gear for cruising up the trail. Woo! And the super athletic-ish stuff, like fishing gear for chilling by the creek. Nice cast. Fitness apparel to push for higher reps. You got this! And golf balls priced so you can afford to lose one. Or a few. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. Today, I'm talking to Genevieve Kingston, a friend of mine who's an actor and an author and a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York.

0:44Her essay, She Put Her Unspent Love in a Cardboard Box, appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column in 2021 and quickly went viral. Her 2024 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You?, is just out in paperback. Did I Ever Tell You was a New York Times book review editor's choice and is currently being translated into 16 languages worldwide. It is an absolutely beautiful memoir. Genevieve, thanks for talking to me today. Thank you so much for having me. I love, love the podcast. Thank you. So this book, Did I Ever Tell You, is a story of both of your parents, particularly your mother and her love for you and her trying to prepare you as a child for something that seemed impossible to prepare for.

1:29So tell us about the story that became this book. Yeah. So my mother got sick when I was three years old. She had breast cancer and she passed away when I was nearly 12. But she spent some of those years, some of her time putting together a box of gifts and letters for every one of my birthdays until I turned 30. And for things like getting my driver's license and graduating high school and getting engaged and getting married and having my first child. So she really sort of cored herself into these preparations and decided that she was so determined to sort of be more than a memory for me, but to actively participate in my life going forward.

2:07And so it was this extraordinary gift that has really carried me through my life. And now I'm 35. All of those boxes have been opened, except one, which we can talk about. But it really felt like time to reflect on this enormous gift that she had given me as I grew up without her. It's an absolutely incredible story. And where did she get this idea? Was it something she had heard about or what gave her this inspiration? You know, she always said that she got the idea from an old fairy tale, actually, a Russian fairy tale called The Story of Vasilisa the Beautiful. And in the fairy tale, there's a little girl whose mother is dying and she gives her daughter a magic doll.

2:47And she tells her that when she runs into trouble, when she has a difficult choice to make or she sort of feels lost and uncertain in the world that she should talk to the doll and the doll will speak back and will give her the advice and the wisdom that she needs to know what to do and my mom said i just i wish so much that i could give you and your brother i have an older brother who also has a box i wish that i could give you a magic doll that could tell you what to do when you feel uncertain because i'm so sad and sorry that i I won't be there as an ally for you through your life. And so for her, this was her version of doing that.

3:23These letters that would land at different moments in our lives and hopefully help us feel supported when we didn't know what to do. Because they weren't just birthday presents. They weren't just gifts. There were letters, long letters about her thoughts about what was important in life and how to navigate relationships and how to stay true to yourself. So there were these sort of incredible nuggets of wisdom that she managed to drop through my life sort of at the time I needed to hear it. Because there were things that we couldn't talk about when I was a little girl that I needed to hear from her later after she was already gone.

3:53It makes me think of one of the letters that she left for you is when you got your first period. That's something, right? You weren't able to talk about it. You didn't even understand that as a small child. But her advice, my gosh, her advice was so good. She was such a great writer. And the advice was so clear and thoughtful. In a way, I thought it was more cogent advice than a lot of us get from our parents who are there in the room with us when we get our first period. But she had the opportunity to really be thoughtful and prepare you for these special times in ways that I thought were really remarkable.

4:28I know. Yes, that was a great example of the box kind of working perfectly, working as she'd intended it. It was only about six months after she passed away and I didn't feel, you know, eager to talk to my father about it. So instead, I could go into my bedroom and open this box. And there was this long letter, as you said, with this, I mean, really remarkable advice about romance and relationships and how to. Yeah, I mean, it really was about staying true to yourself and trying to hang on to yourself during what can be a really turbulent time as a girl or young woman. And then, of course, there was also a package of maxi pads because she was just that prepared.

5:02But no, you're right. I mean, most parents are they're parenting on the fly. You know, the first period comes out of nowhere. Oh, my God, we're already here. And you're trying to put your thoughts together in the moment. And she really had the opportunity to sit down and put pen to paper and think, OK, how do I want to frame this moment for my daughter? And she talks in the letter about how it was framed for her and how she wished it would frame differently. You know, her mother sort of said, oh, the curse and took her to the store. So she had the opportunity to really think through what she wanted to say about that important time.

5:32And her working on these boxes, her working on these letters for you, it was not something she hid away from you. It wasn't a great secret. She was doing this preparation in front of you, right, during the years between her diagnosis and her death. So tell us about that, what that was like to have this happening in your house. Yes, absolutely. So we had, I don't know if anyone can relate to this. We had one of those dining room tables that was like never clear. It was always covered in projects. And, you know, you can clear away a little space. Maybe to sit down and have dinner, but we probably just ate at the counter most of the time.

6:02And for a big chunk of my childhood, I can remember at various times it being covered with these packages that she was in the process of putting together. So her papers and her fountain pen and all of these little boxes and these two chests that she was slowly filling with these packages. and it was happening right there in the open. And it was this important thing that she was so focused on and it was clearly really important to her. And I know that she explained it to me, but I sort of didn't want to understand because I was still engaging in some child-ish magical thinking, thinking, well, you know, everyone says this, but she won't really ever die.

6:43This won't really happen. And there was a part of me even that felt frustrated with the level of care and attention that she was giving to this future version of me when I was right there wanting her attention in the moment, you know, because this was work. This was something that she would sort of say, look, I have to do this right now. We'll play later. And at the time, I even felt resentful of the boxes a little bit because I didn't yet understand what they would come to mean to me and how grateful I would be to have them. It seems to me like the act of her preparing like that, her preparing for her absence in front of you, it was in a way also preparing you for a life without her.

7:19As you're saying, a world that as a child, you're still maybe engaged in some magical thinking that you can outrun or avoid somehow. She just made it visible and brought it into your daily life in a way that I think is really remarkable. And tell us about when your grandmother died, because I thought the way that that death was handled too was sort of, was also very different from how most families would handle times like that. Yeah, no, it's the thing I think about a lot, especially since the book came out, and even since the essay, I've had the privilege of speaking to readers who have had questions about maybe they're going through something like this in their own families, and they're wondering what the best way is to deal with these impossibly difficult situations.

7:53My grandmother was a wonderful woman. We were very close. We lived down the street from her and she passed when I was five. I remember her very vividly. And she also died of cancer. And my mother had already been diagnosed. That was already sort of in our world and in our vocabulary. And the morning that she passed away, our mother came back from our grandmother's house and told, sat my brother and myself down and said, this has happened. And then she said, would you like to go see her? Would you like to go see her body before she's cremated. And she gave us the choice. And we both said that we did.

8:22And it was a very profound experience as a young child to see death for the first time. And I don't think that that's necessarily the right choice for everybody or for every family. But to be given the opportunity to have that kind of closure, to see this person who you've loved and to see that loss instead of this person just kind of vanishes was profound for me. And I'm very grateful that we that opportunity. Again, it doesn't mean it's the right thing for everyone, but I think that that was quite an important moment in our family. And I now retroactively feel that this was another way of her sort of preparing us for her own death, trying to make it feel more familiar, more tangible and less kind of shadowy.

9:02When she sat down with you to tell you that she was sick, you write so beautifully about your own reaction. You're writing from it both from the perspective of who you are as an adult, of course, but also who you were then. You recreate your childlike mind so well and that you, I think it's knock-knock jokes that you tell. You're desperately trying to change the subjects. So tell us about that time and what you remember about that. Yeah. So we would have these family meetings where we would discuss my mother's health. You know, we'd talk about kind of, they were very open with us about the process of her illness and how things were going and what our timelines were looking like.

9:36They were really hard conversations, of course, and my brother and I reacted to them completely differently. he would sort of shut down and essentially like fall asleep on the couch to sort of opt out you know kind of symptom overload and i would get hyper and loud and run around and tell jokes and try to change the subject and just distract from the topic at hand because it was so difficult to hold space for this painful truth and so it's something i do tell folks when talking to their own children about tough things that children respond in really odd way and it can i think probably quite disconcerting and frustrating as an adult to sort of say, why can't they take this seriously?

10:12Or why are they causing all this mayhem? A child has such a small vocabulary to describe such a huge inner life. And their reactions may look very different from what seems appropriate or how an adult would respond. And it doesn't mean that we're not taking it in, right? That the child isn't taking in what's being said. But stress looks different on different kids. And yeah, I mean, I look back and I feel sort of embarrassed for this. It's just so inappropriate, but it's what I had in the moment to deal with this. You know, it's the worst thing you can imagine as a child. I'm talking to Genevieve Kingston.

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13:17Nice cast. Fitness apparel to push for higher reps. You got this. And golf balls priced so you could afford to lose one. Or a few. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. Genevieve, over and over again when I was reading this memoir, I thought about we don't talk enough about death. We've talked a little bit on this podcast about how to support kids whose parents have died But we haven't really talked about how to support kids whose parents are dying And in your case that was a years-long process that your mother was given a year and then another year and then another year And watching a parent get slowly more sick and less able to be with you That that's a whole other thing that kids need support around And so tell us what you remember about that time, how you felt and who helped and how they did it.

14:12Well, I think that one of the greatest gifts that my mother gave me, both my parents, but in addition to this incredible box, was she really gifted me with her own female friends, her circle of friends of women. Some of them had children. Many of them didn't. Some of them were married. Some of them weren't. This whole sort of host of female role models who became trusted figures in my life and stayed with me long after she was gone. I sort of inherited them. And I think that that is one of the most powerful things that a parent who's dealing with illness can do for their children is to give them other trusted adults to rely on.

14:50So that when they're, even if they're, you know, even if they are not terminal, but when they are ill and less able to be present with their children, that there are other trusted adults who can step in and who can give that child the support and the listening ear that they might crave. because you're in a tough spot when you're a kid who is going through something that probably maybe none of your peers have experienced. Can't relate to it and they don't have the language to help you process it. And so other adults, kind, trustworthy adults are key. Teachers were incredible for me because I was an academic kid, but not all kids are.

15:23So, you know, if someone has a friend who is going through this, their family's going through this, being that adult, having your home be with your kids, being another place that that kid can come to and sort of feel like they're part of a normal family for a minute is invaluable. And also, like you were saying before, the idea that they're not supposed to behave a certain way, you're not supposed to behave a certain way. It's just that I guess it can be in the room with you, the truth of it. And then the kid can be a kid. The kid can talk about it, not talk about it. Right. It isn't that this child needs to be invited into your home for long, meaningful talks.

15:53This kid can be jumping in your swimming pool and not talking about it for an afternoon. Yeah. No, the best thing is like to be like, oh, yeah, there's just always an extra place at the table for you if you happen to be, you know, feeling just like one of the feeling like part of the family, like you can drop in and out. And exactly. It's not that you're necessarily wanting to talk about it deeply, but also knowing that it's mentionable that talking about your sick parent or saying that they had chemotherapy today isn't going to cause the conversation come to a crashing halt and everyone's going to go, God, we talk about this, but that's a normal part of life that you're allowed to talk about.

16:24Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So just sort of normalizing it, not overly like. Because it is normal for you. That's your whole life as a kid. Right, right. Did your mom, just like she prepared these letters and these gifts, did she also, you think, prepare this circle of friends or did they just understand the assignment? She absolutely prepared them. Now, my mother left nothing to chance. And in the book, sort of the extent of her preparation sort of slowly revealed itself to me as I'm growing up. And also even as I'm writing the book, I'm discovering new things. No, these people were given specific and individual assignments.

16:56So one person might have been said, make sure that Gwenny, that was my childhood nickname, nurture her interest in the arts. Make sure that that spark stays alive and keep reminding her that that's something that she's good at and that is important to her. Someone else might be tasked with something to do with my kind of spiritual upbringing or someone else might have an assignment that's about academic. I don't know, all these different sort of facets of life. And, you know, over and over again, I would find out that someone said, oh, yeah, no, your mom sat me down. And she said that it was important that I needed to kind of oversee this.

17:28So, no, she gave people she. And, you know, when someone gives you an assignment like that, you take it pretty seriously. I think it's a kind of a mystical, you know, for sure. It becomes a kind of a sacred duty. And everyone has come through for me in extraordinary ways through my life. This memoir, kind of like a quest, because it's a beautifully written book. It's a beautifully structured book where you're opening each box and learning things. But as you said, your mother, she didn't force you to go on this journey. But then all along the journey, there were people that said, like, oh, I've been waiting for you.

17:59She told me you might be coming. And sure, I'll tell you everything you want to know. So tell us about that. Yes, I think that's key, what you said, that she didn't force it on me. This box is such a beautiful idea. And I could also imagine it becoming a burden if it was an assignment, if it was something you must do. But instead, it was really an offering. I think she sensed that there would come a time when I would want to know more about her and her life than I would be interested in at the age I was when she was alive. And so she created that opportunity. When I became sort of on the cusp of real adulthood, I really felt hungry for more information about her.

18:35and I was seeing a therapist at the time who said, well, you know, I know the therapist that your mom saw for years. Maybe we could call her up and see if she'd be willing to talk to you at all. And I said, oh my gosh, you can do that. She said, well, you know, there are confidentiality laws, but let's just see what she has to say. And immediately she said, oh, yes, your mom said, if you ever came asking, I should tell you anything you want to know. And I was just sort of gobsmacked. Like there she was 10 steps ahead of me. Of course, you might get in touch with Linda at some point and want to know.

19:01but it wasn't Linda when one is you know 20 get in touch it was see if she comes and looks for you and if she does then you'll know she wants to know this information and I think the more I think about it the more in awe I am of what she managed to pull off to sort of sprinkle herself into my future in this incredibly generous way was she always I mean you don't really remember her I guess from a time when this wasn't part of your life together but if she was still alive would she be known for being like the perfect birthday party planner? Was this sort of who she was even before this happened?

19:33You know, it's hard to say. And we did have these incredibly epic birthday parties, which I spent some time describing. That's right. You do talk about those. These absolutely bananas. Birthday parties where everyone had to come in costume and she spent weeks making these decorations and it was all a little much. But and I don't know how much of that came from the fact that every birthday party might be the last one and how much of it would have been the case anyway. I really don't know. But what I do know is that she was a very determined person in every aspect of her life. And so as a former principal wrote of her, that which she intends, that she accomplishes.

20:09And she was this person who enacted her will upon the world pretty forcefully and successfully. And that didn't always make her an easy person. My brother and I got the softest parts of her, but people described her as fierce, fiercely intelligent, fiercely determined, fiercely engaged with the world. She was a person of strong conviction, high standards for herself, high standards for others. She was tough, but she turned her determination onto this, I think, very worthy undertaking. And I'm so grateful for that. I remember the story, one of her friends told you in the book that if you ever told her, say, about like, oh, your boyfriend's kind of no good, say, and you're kind of complaining about your boyfriend.

20:47And she said, I think you should break up that the next time you came to visit her, even though she was very sick, she would remember and she would sort of call you to task if you hadn't improved your life. Right. Exactly. Right. So honestly, we decided this. What are you doing? And you always knew where to find her because, you know, toward the end of her life, she was sick. And so she was in bed a lot. And so she did become the kind of like village elder that people would come in with their problems because she loved the distraction of talking about other people's lives. And but yeah, no, she'd follow up and she'd say, well, don't come complaining to me about this if you're not going to do anything.

21:14I feel certain this would have cause tension between us when I was a teenager if we'd gotten that far because you want your mom to just listen to all your problems with an endless sympathy, you know, and she would not have been that mom. It's interesting to think of how our relationship would have grown and changed. I like to think we would have been friends and allies, but I feel certain we would have gone through our rocky patches because she was just such a strong, strong personality. And it's something I spend time thinking about in the book is for me, she gets to remain the kind of perfect archetypal mother figure.

21:42And of course, nothing's ever that simple. She is complicated. I'm talking to Genevieve Kingston. Her memoir is called Did I Ever Tell You? And we'll be right back. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands for the super athletic stuff, like running gear for cruising up the trail. And the super athletic stuff like fishing gear for chilling by the creek. Nice cast. Fitness apparel to push for higher reps. You got this. and golf balls priced so you can afford to lose one. Or a few. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it.

22:21Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be enclosed space, year-round fun for the whole family, that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name. Let's say it together on three. One, two, three. Great Wolf Lodge. You got it, Amy. My kids loved Great Wolf Lodge when we went. You probably already know that it has a huge indoor water park with a wave pool, lazy river, a bunch of massive water slides. But then your pack can hit the other attractions because wait, there's more. Great Wolf Lodge has adventure packed attractions like Magi Quest, a live action game kids can play throughout the lodge.

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