Introducing Origin Stories

0:00Matthew Shaer:You have one new message. Translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney+. You could say that again. Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot. Now we party. This is incredible! Wow, I am clear in the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney+.

0:29Stephanie Foo:Hey, listeners, Rebecca here, and I have a recommendation to share with you today. Origin Stories is a fantastic new podcast hosted by veteran journalist Matt Scher about how the creative works you love got made. On each episode, Matt speaks with the creator behind a book, movie, TV series, podcast, documentary, magazine article, you name it, about how they do their work. And it gets deep. Y 'all know we believe in doing the homework here at Zero to Well Read, and Matt has obviously always read the book or seen the film or listened to the show, whatever he is talking about. That is much rarer than it should be in this day of podcast interviews, and I really appreciate it.

1:08Stephanie Foo:He knows what he is talking about when he sits down with these folks. The conversations are intimate, interesting, they're always insightful, and we're excited to share his interview with Stephanie Fu about her stunning memoir, What My Bones Know, with you today. Listen, enjoy, then head on over to Origin Stories and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

1:28Matthew Shaer:In front-loading this and in making the diagnosis front and center, you're kind of doing a version structurally or storytelling of what a lot of TV shows do where you flash forward to something that we're going to be building towards and then you rewind and move forward. There's an event that happens. You get a fragmentary glimpse of it, and then you rewind and let people get to that point. Why it works so well here is that you are almost telling people how it all fits together.

2:00Stephanie Foo:And the reason why we all do it, from White Lotus to my book, is to set up stakes. Because nobody's going to be invested in the story unless you have stakes. and I didn't another thing was that I've read so many trauma memoirs where it feels kind of trauma porny it's just horrible thing after horrible thing happening and I wanted to make it clear that this was different and this really had a thesis statement which is like we are going to investigate this specific thing complex PTSD and everything around it and so it was very intentional to say, hey, this is what the story is going to be about.

2:41Stephanie Foo:And then in the author's note, yeah, we're going to go back and spend some time with my childhood trauma, but then we're going to come back to the present. It was very important to me to keep the part about my childhood trauma to 50 pages or less, because this is a book about healing from complex PTSD. It isn't about experiencing it. And I didn't want it to be very triggering for readers because people who have complex PTSD have a really hard time reading stuff like that. And actually the first draft of that section of my trauma only was 20 pages. And my editor, I had a back and forth with her about it being like, it has to be short.

3:24Stephanie Foo:And she was like, no, well, people do have to understand what you went through to some degree to be able to empathize with you for the whole rest of the book. So you do have to expand on that a little bit. And so that was our compromise was the 50 pages.

3:38Matthew Shaer:I like to take notes when I read books or to highlight sections. And I'm just going to read this section, which I found so remarkable and honest. People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse, therapists, strangers, partners, editors. You're telling us the details of what happened to you, they'd write in the margins, but how did it feel? The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I'd say it probably felt fucking bad. That is a level of honesty that I don't think most people who cover similar topics are able to muster.

4:17Stephanie Foo:That first 50 pages, I probably wrote like 25, 30 drafts of it. That was really hard. And every time I would give a draft of that to somebody. They would say, it feels distant. I don't know how you're feeling in this moment. It feels so dissociated. I'm having a hard time connecting emotionally to the childhood version of you. And eventually, one of the things that I learned at This American Life was if you're coming up against something and your readers or whoever are having sort of a visceral reaction to it, the best thing is not to hide away, but just to get in front of it. And to me, that line was getting in front of it as best I could.

4:59Stephanie Foo:This is why this reads like this. Let me just tell you the truth. And after I gave that draft to my editor, she was like, yeah, this is it.

5:07Matthew Shaer:I have to read this one aloud too. Like this was such an amazing quote about journalism. You're talking about what journalism can do. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful, something controlled. Later, you have all these tools, right? You understand what journalism is. When you're a kid and you're going through this, you didn't have those tools. You have some diaries. You're able to look at videos. Although, as you admit, the videos are a very specific version of the childhood Stephanie. It's not what was actually happening.

5:41Matthew Shaer:So did you have to dig and research? What was that process like?

5:47Stephanie Foo:I dug as much as I could in that I actually interviewed my mom's best friend from when I was a kid. I remember calling my neighbors, trying to ask them what they remembered. I asked my friends. My two best friends have been friends with me since I was nine. I really tried to fact check the shit out of it because I didn't want to be making anything up. I don't have that many childhood photos because my parents threw out most of them when they abandoned me. But I would take the ones that I had and I would just stare at them looking at all the tiny little details from like the napkin rings on our kitchen table to our family calendar in the back and just try to summon memories.

6:33Stephanie Foo:I had to grapple with this dichotomy of how can I make people want to keep turning pages, but also feel good about not making my trauma really entertaining. It felt weird to try and take the worst things that ever happened to me that shouldn't have happened to me and try to make them real juicy on the page because it wasn't juicy or fun to live through. If you've made it this far, I assume it's because you really like what you just heard. So the good news for you is that there are already more than a dozen other great interviews that you can hear at Origin Stories. Find it wherever you're listening to your podcast right now.

7:19Stephanie Foo:Just type Origin Stories into the search bar, click follow, so you'll stay up to date with all of their new episodes, and be sure to give them a rating or review on whatever platform you're using. It lets the showrunners know they're doing a great job and helps other listeners find their way. Thanks again to our friend Matt Sher over at Origin Stories. Thanks to you for listening.