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A
Today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Fashion is never just about clothes, is it? It's about identity, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. For those exploring design concepts or questioning what drives our choices, Claude can be your thinking partner. Claude is the AI collaborator that helps you dig deeper into the questions that fascinate you, whether that's understanding cultural movements, exploring creative concepts, or working through complex problems. Try Claude for free@claude aifashionneurosis.
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B
Hi, come in.
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A
Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Ocean Vuong.
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B
Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here.
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A
Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes?
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B
I'm wearing a vintage Smith workwear shirt, a vintage Levi's thrifted in New York about 11 years ago. And these are the clothes that I'm most comfortable in. Most of my wardrobe is thrifted. I love the idea of finding and salvaging garments that have been lived through. There's these kind of knee braces, abrasions that are lower than my knee, and I had to hem it, you know, because it used to be here for someone who was much taller than me. So there's kind of this imprint of other lives. And I start to think, I think that's also how I work in my own writing. I think I'm more of a salvager than really a maker. But maybe that's how everything is. Everything is recycled, upcycled. We look to the past to see what we can bring into the future.
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A
I've noticed you wear jewelry always and you have an earring that dangles. And I wondered why you chose that kind of earring because it kind of draws people's attention to you. You seem like a mixture of shy and you're brilliant at holding the room.
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B
Oh, thank you. I think I like it because the swaying, you know, and it's also off centered. It's like there's a kind of imbalance to just having one. And I think that kind of discrepancy feels important to me. And the jewelry is all very personal. I think jewelry might be the most personal thing for me. This jade Guanyin is my mother's. She gave it to me right after she got terminally ill. And, you know, it was very weighted moment because I think she. We both knew that this is a inheritance, even though she just very playfully put it on me and said, oh, you should just keep wearing it when you give readings, it will. It will protect you or whatnot. But I think the subtext that we both understood was that this was a kind of keepsake that was going to. I would have to carry. And now I do. So I always wear it close to my heart when I'm doing something important. And this jewelry is made by a jeweler in Australia using Turkish techniques. Her family is Turkish Korean. Called Cleopatra's Bling. And it's a little dragon because I was born in the year of the dragon. And so she made this specifically for me and sent it to me. And so. And anything really lovely that I have are sent to me by beautiful people who've connected with my work and including this watch a friend of mine gave. This is a Soviet mechanical watch from the 70s. And it has a cosmonaut on it with the little Soviet star. I mostly have it off just because I like how it looks. I forget to turn it every morning. So I'm very performatively always checking my watch. But it's actually dead. And I think maybe that's some metaphor of my life, actually.
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A
Say. Funny.
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B
And these are Doc Martens, I believe they used to have. They came with a. The yellow line. But I use a fabric marker to color it in because it was too loud. I like. I like subdued colors. And this vintage shirt is. I love it because there's a patina around it. And it gets more and more worn as it's used in the sun. I think I associate this shirt in this color with my stepdad. You know, he worked at a place called Standardyne all my life. And we lived in this tiny little tenement apartment where there were all these rules and regulations because it was HUD housing for folks who make under a certain amount. And it was kind of social housing. So you couldn't paint the walls. You know, I was so enamored of this green, you know, it was a fantasy. We could never paint. We could never put paintings up. We had to really ask permission. They would have to come and, God check everything. And so we. Our walls were bare, but he had a thumbtack he put on. And you imagine this very sparsely adorned apartment. And he would. Every day he would hang his Standardyne uniform. And it was this light blue uniform with his name stitched in it. Ngop was his name. N, G O, C with diacritics. And he was so proud. And I didn't know. I don't think any of us realize it now. But in retrospect, it was both a uniform, but an artifact and a kind of decoration. Because when anyone came in, they would point to and Say, oh, that's your uniform. And he would be so proud of it. He said, yes. You know, I work at a company with health care. My name, my Vietnamese name is written right over my heart. And, you know, he was so proud of it. And I think I associate that with kind of work and progress. Even though I looked at his life and I thought, this is not the life I want to live. You know, he works from 3pm to 12am we never saw him. On weekends. We would look into his bedroom and see, like, a tuft of black hair out of the. The blankets. And I thought, this can't be my American life. I need to find a way to not do this.
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A
Wow.
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B
But as I grew up, I realized there are many avenues to triumph. And even though his triumph is not my triumph, I still needed to honor and respect that for him. If I were to ask him, did you live the American life that you dreamed of having escaped by boat for eight days at sea? Who knows? The things he's seen, he's never told us there. And coming here and to work for a company and his whole life. He made a screw. Standardyne manufactured a screw that went into gas pumps so that people don't steal the gasoline. So it was a very specific screw. And when that company folded and was exported, he had to make a smaller screw. He went to another company called Colt Manufacturing, which made the Colt Magnum.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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B
And so it's a much tinier screw inside the gun. Both companies are based in Connecticut, and it's. In a way, it's a quintessential American labor narrative. Gas pumps and guns. But I don't know. I think I associate this with labor and work. And I think it reminds me that the abstract nature of my work, which is about ideas and sentences which float in the air until you pin them down on the page, is actually quite laborious. I think that's why before I write, I put on boots, you know, that's.
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A
So interesting to anchor you. And I discovered your work when I'd left my copy of Thomas Bernhard on the flight from London to la. And I went to the bookshop and I said, asked the young assistant for something abstract and brilliant that was also gripping. And he went away, and then he came back with On Earth were briefly gorgeous. And it had just come out. And I fell completely in love with your writing. And you're primarily a poet, but your novels read like thrillers. And I wondered, does your adrenaline change when you're writing a novel?
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B
Oh, gosh, I think so. You know, to Me, a novel is about pacing, and it's a different kind of pacing. You know, the poem is like a guitar solo that quickly ends.
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But it's such a good description.
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B
Yeah. And then the novel has to kind of gallop, but it also can hold great moments of lulls. The Japanese narratologist calls this ma, Massachusetts. A moment of quiet lulling in a narrative. And again, in a lot of Japanese works, particularly Miyazaki's work, My Neighbor Totoro, for example, the perennial bus stop scenes, these scenes are deeply important in Spirited Away. It's when they're on the train and in the west, these scenes might often be cut. They're kind of empty, dead space, quote, unquote. They don't do anything. But in Japanese narratology, these are charged, pregnant moments where you can feel the characters experience what has already happened to them. So, Ma a moment of pregnant quiet. And I think a novel is a wonderful way to really showcase that. And to me, it's about galloping and resting. And prosody is something so important to me as a poet. And I think, I tell my students, I say, if you can write poems, you can write anything.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because the poet has a very special anxiety when they. You know, the fear, the greatest fear of any lyric poet is, am I writing a poem or am I writing Prosecution chopped up into lines. Am I writing prose with a lot of tabs? You know, and that's a very helpful anxiety because from there, you now have to focus on the line. What can the line do that the sentence cannot? Right. So the line has to be activated. There's now a demand for dynamism inside a handful of words, not even just a full sentence. And I think I turned to poetry because it asked more of me. You know, when I. When I was a very young writer, that was a fork in the road, you know, when I was an undergraduate. Do you write a novel? Do you write poems? And I learned right away that novel writing had these much more conservative dogmas to it. You know, we wanted novels to be lucid and the sentence to be inconspicuous, to just serve the story, almost as if the sentence should behave like a butler. And I just thought, why? Why is that? You know? And shouldn't the sentence look more like Van Gogh's brushwork? Shouldn't it be lifted away and have a kind of the indelible mark of historic personhood in it? And then I learned that there is a difference between the two modes in that in the 20th century, prose has been asked to be Mimetic. It should merely just represent life. I don't think this is a rule, but it's what prevailed. And poetry should be much more what Heidegger calls the threshold moment.
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Yeah.
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You know, poesis rather than mimesis, poiesis is when it's the. Before the rose becomes a rose. Right. At what point does the rose become a rose? When it finally blooms. But the threshold moment, the liminal moment that leads up to Roseness. What is that? And I think poetry is deeply interested in that procedural process as the event itself. Right. It centers the procedure. And I think, I thought, you know, when I was writing prose, people expected me to write sentences like, he went into the room, pulled out the chair and sat down. And I felt like when I wrote that sentence, everyone applauded it, but it didn't feel like mine. It felt like a sentence from the culture. And now, years later, it's a sentence that, like, ChatGPT could easily write.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I think why I was interested in poetry, a mentor of mine, an early mentor, a brilliant poet named Li Yong Li, said to me, ocean syntax is DNA.
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Yeah.
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And I didn't really know what he was saying. You know, it was like a sage giving you a Zen koan, you know? And one thing you should know about Zen koan is to don't think about it too much, you know, But I've been carrying that for years, and it took about 11 years. He said that back in 2012. And I really understood. It's like, oh, poetry was the perfect medium to really showcase language as a thumbprint.
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Yeah.
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Every one of us has one.
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A
Yes.
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And it's the thumbprint of the personhood. And then I thought, let me see Allah, the Trojan horse. If I can bring this poesis, this procedural thumbprint into the world of the novel and the novel, of course, you do need sentences like, he went into a room and sat down. But in between all that, you can also have incredible, inventive sentences that are sometimes, you know, they don't. They're not clear. And I guess I'm not as interested in clarity as I am in the impact of the attempt. Again, I think the impressionists really understood this, as opposed to the neoclassical invisible brushstroke. The brushstroke that's supposed to be fine and filled with verisimilitude, photorealistic. Van Gogh and Manet understood that it was some, thereafter, something else. And I think the novel writing in the 20th century never really followed through with that. I think poetry went the way of painters and novel Writing, for better and for worse, went the way of the newspaper. Economical, efficient, lucid, and completely on the serving story, rather than pointing to the conspicuous materiality of its manufacturing.
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A
It's such a. I love that idea about poetry being our DNA because it's our. It's easier. Or maybe it's not easier, but at least it directs you to your individuality and your. To find a voice. If you're looking to find a voice and you think these words are somewhere in my bloodstream, in my makeup and my. There's a molecule in there that's going to shed the light. And it's a great driver.
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B
Absolutely.
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I think. I love that. I'm going to treasure that.
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B
And driver is a great word because I think, you know, so much of our world is obsessed with style as a kind of brand. You know, you know this as much as anyone, right? In fashion, but also in art and literature, so many young writers are obsessed with establishing a style. But Having taught for 11 years, I think the anxiety of style is incredibly limiting because once they have a recognizable. And really what they're saying is not so much style. I disagree with how we describe style. I think we just. Our common, conventional definition of style is actually a series of recognizable attributes.
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Yeah.
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But I think style is much more nebulous and mysterious. I do think it exists, but exists as a driver, as desire. I think style is actually desire. It's about, what are you really after, what do you want to achieve? And then corralling and enlisting all strategies and methods to get closer to that. It's almost like style is something on the horizon that you're moving, you're driven to move towards. And whatever strategies and methods you pick up then becomes the vehicle towards that thing in the distance. And then, of course, it grows over time. With each project, with each season, with each catalog, the style starts to transform. I think very much like Bacon's work here. I mean, this is poesis. This is the threshold event. This is the. The work before it manifests into an ontological stability. And. And I think style is a lot like that. But a lot of my students and young writers, they. They start to develop an attribute. They're on their way to that desire. And then their peers say, ah, that's your thing, right? And then they stop. Oh, that's my thing. That little thing that I do. Okay, let me protect it. Let me commodify it, and then replicate it to the approval of my cohort. And what happens is that they protect that and they see it as a Kind of scarcity that they then develop over years, which then hinder actual growth. Yeah. As soon as they take the first two steps towards the horizon, someone says, you got a style, and then they stop moving. And I've seen that again and again. And I think my goal as a teacher is to just to keep that open, that door as soon as it starts to close. Thing. No, no, no. It's about the drive. I love that word so much, Bella. It's so great. Style is the driver. It's not the thing. It's the force rather than a thing.
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A
It's so interesting, you describing it as desire, because it's where the attachment takes place and then how different people look around and become attached to someone's stuff. Their appearance or their talent or their work or their hair or anything. And I love. I mean, in fashion, that's such a moment where that takes place, and it's a great description. Today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You know how certain pieces of clothing can haunt you. That vintage Saint Laurent blazer, the perfect pair of jeans that represents an entire decade's Rebellion, or the 150-year-old shoe style we're all suddenly obsessed with. Claude is right there with you. It's a thinking partner that helps you explore the deeper psychology behind what we wear and why it matters. When you're trying to understand why certain designers become cultural lightning rods, or examining how fashion reflects our collective anxieties and desires, Claude helps you trace those invisible threads. Together, you can explore how a simple hemline shift signals social change, or why certain aesthetics resurface when they do. What's compelling about Claude is how it works with your curiosity. Whether you're analyzing the cultural influences of a particular era, exploring the business behind the beauty, or working through your own relationship with style, it becomes a collaborator in understanding fashion as language, as history, as neurosis. Try Claude for free@claude aifashionneurosis and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. You came to America from Vietnam when you were two with your mother and your grandmother. And you. Your mum worked in a nail salon all her life, I believe. And you have this way of seeing the women in your life through a prism of prettiness. And in the Emperor of Gladness, there's this moment where your character Hai is looking, watching his mother through the window, and she's wearing this blue dress that he's never seen before. And there's this admiration for her loveliness And I wondered when you first noticed beauty meaning something to you.
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B
Oh, thank you for that. Gosh, what a generous reading. I think for the women who raised me, you know, they were women who came from a patriarchal country and arrived at a patriarchal country who then gave birth to all sons. My four aunts and my mother gave birth to seven boys.
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A
Gosh.
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So it's a very. It's almost like a Shakespearean drama. Right. And so, you know, there's a. There's almost like an accidental and yet very deliberate matriarch that we grew up in. And I think for them, beauty was more than decor, it was medicine.
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Yeah.
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You know, I watched these women, you know, their greatest pleasure was on Monday because they worked through the weekends. You know, nail salon work, service work for beauty is very interesting because you have the, the, you make the most money when people are on vacation. So you work on July 4th. You know, you work through the weekends. And so you very much like restaurant work your days off for Mondays and Tuesdays. And on Monday and Tuesday, you know, with a fistful of tips, my mother would take me to Goodwill and, you know, the. Depending on the tag, the color tags, it was 50% off. And it was like a treasure trove for them. And it was. When I saw these women have the most agency, they were curating their own beauty. And I realized that, you know, again, desire is actually a personality. What they chose for themselves, what they were drawn to, was autobiographical. And I learned how they adorned themselves as a kind of relief, as a kind of medicine. And the fascinating thing was that for whatever reason, they kind of decided they were over men and they never dated again. There was these group of women with very troubling relationships with men, often physically and emotionally abusive, and they kicked them all out. And they raised their children, all boys, and they never introduced another man into the household. And so they were adorning themselves with beauty without the male gaze.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, and I'm just so touched.
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A
Yeah, I'm so touched by that because.
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B
I'm like, gosh, I was like, what? I didn't know that. I didn't have the language to know that. And I wonder if I really knew it or if I only understand it retroactively because I have the term male gaze. But I saw them just use beauty as self medication. And the joy they had when they put these old five dollar dresses and they spun around and they, they played in this place of where a lot of poor people go, which is, you know, a place where other people throw out Things, people who died and donated their entire belonging to this place. And some would say, you know, they were playing in trash. But I don't think that's a denigrating term. I think that's exactly. Again, they were junkyard artists. And I think that's what I do, too. I'm interested in the Victorian sentence, which is not a very popular sentence. The Victorian sentence is a very baroque sentence full of subordinate clauses and embellishments. Interestingly enough, it was used by men in the Victorian era. Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, Hawthorne. This was the. The mode of male achievement because it followed oratory, it followed speech. And so to have a sentence full of detours and metaphors that delays the independent clause is to keep an audience hooked, right? So it was a rhetorical strategy that was celebrated as a masculine achievement. And then after World War I, when such Baroque sentences seemed naive and silly, you know, how can you reach for the Romantic sublime after world, after mustard gas and trench warfare, the sentence got Ala Stein and Hemingway much more laconic and concise. But interestingly, in order to disabuse the Anglophonic world of the Victorian sentence, we attached it to. To women. It's now called flowery prose, purple prose, florid, unrestrained, hysterical prose, hysterical fiction a la hysterectomy, like so. It's interesting that there's a gendered strategy of throwing something away. In order for a group of men to render a set of tools defunct, they had to attach it to women. There's a misogyny in moving in, in stylistic taste making or literary evolution. And as a, you know, my BA was in 19th century American literature. And I thought, wait a minute, this is, you know, like, why should we listen to the rules made by a bunch of men in the early 20th century in these tiny rooms, these critics, where we were never in that room. No, no, no. I'm going to go back to the junkyard of the 19th century and see if that sentence can serve me now.
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A
That's so good.
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B
In a way, it's like literary drag or what the women were doing, you know, And I. I don't know. I just. I'm. This is very new thought for me. I just been thinking about this for the past two years. But I think watching them see beauty as medicine was so full of agency. And I think I really learned about how to be an artist through those moments in thrift stores with my grandmother and my aunts.
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A
Because what I found so moving reading that bit was, you know, you just talked about them not having the male Gaze. But as the mother of a son, his gaze and his appreciation when he was a tiny little boy, and he would say these wonderful things. I just put my hair in a ponytail. And he'd say, mom, your hair. And it was just the most loving feeling, and it was thrilling as well. So it's so interesting that they didn't have husbands, but they had sons who provided this incredible love and this lack of judgment.
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B
Yeah. And it's interesting, right? Oh, it's such a beautiful anecdote, because I think. I think what your son was seeing was what a lot of me and my cousins saw, is that, oh, whatever made makes my mother happy is what makes her beautiful.
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A
That's so good. That's so interesting. And you talked about when you were a child answering the telephones in the salon and listening to the women talking, and then when their husbands left, how their voices changed and their language changed. And I wondered if you thought being so attuned to that change in how those women spoke to each other was part of your survival strategy or part of your gift for noticing and documenting things.
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B
Oh, my gosh. I was just so fascinated by the registers, by their ability to just sit and chameleonize and. And, you know, a lot of times, husbands would come and would drop them off, and then when the men left, their voices changed octaves, their cadences were different, and they started to. And I started to realize that there's no one thing to any person. What is an authentic self? What is a center. All these women had different modes, and speech was a way of shifting our environment. We changed the different spaces we entered. Our speech patterns changed. And when women talked to each other, they laughed more easily, which was interesting to me. But also it was racialized, too, because my mother served a predominantly black and brown community. And it was interesting to see, in a rare moment in the nail salon, a black woman talk to an Asian woman as they're collaborating around beauty. Because my mother would consult with these women. What do you want? What do you like? And an interesting thing happened again and again. And I didn't understand it then, but, you know, these. These black women who work in offices, you know, as secretaries, they worked at dmvs, they school teachers, they would say this thing. I kept noticing. They would say, should I really want my nails to be long? But they don't like it that way. Should it be long? Should I have this many colors and sequins on them? You know? But I don't know. They don't like it that way. I'm Worried they won't like. And there's always this day.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I start to realize, oh, it was whiteness.
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A
Yes.
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B
The standard of asking these women to tone it down, to be modest, to move towards minimalism as a kind of professional decorum. And of course, my mother would say, no, you should go. You know, and also, the more surface area my mother got to do, the more she got to express herself.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, we can call her a nail technician, but she's an artist.
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A
Yeah, totally.
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B
And also, she can make more money. So it was interesting to see these women conspire against, like, a predominant, you know, white society towards beauty on their terms. And that was interesting, too, because they would. They would giggle and. And. And, you know, Ed. You know, urge each other on. And it was kind of this moment of collaboration, not just between two women, but between two women of color in a space that was really safe for them, where men were not there and whiteness was not always in the room. And again, I didn't know how rare and special that was, being just a little boy doing his homework and listening to all of this God.
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A
Fascinating. Yeah. And you're a Buddhist, right? Am I right in saying that? And you. You come across as a very humble person in your demeanor. And you also have a glamour and the body language of a superstar. And on the Stephen Colbert show, you wore this beautiful shirt and these cool clothes, and you didn't shy away. You embraced it, which to my mind is another aspect of humility. And I wondered how you choose what you wear.
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B
Oh, my gosh. This is such an insightful question. And it really. Oh, gosh. The way you tie Buddhism to it is so important because it is a. You know, it might sound ironic that it is a Buddhist ethos that allows me to embrace these ideas of glamour as a kind of ephemeral performance. You know, that that shirt is a Peter Doe shirt that my friend Peter Doe sent to me. You know, all nice things. I have people much more fashionable than me give to me.
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A
So gorgeous when you came in and.
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B
And the pants were comme des garcon, like, thrifted, you know, from the real Real Shout out, the real real in. In Greenwich Village. And, yeah, I got it up steal. It's like 60 bucks. And it was the perfect fit. You know, pants are usually too big for me, so most of the time, I wear women's pants. And. But I think to me, I don't. I'm not attached to the idea of me Ocean Vuong being glamorous, but I'm Attached to mapping myself onto the conditions. You know, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about this, that our lives are like clouds. A cloud looks robust and real and palpable, but it doesn't come out of itself. It comes out of conditions. The right condition has to arise for a cloud to become visible. Air pressure, you know, moisture, sunlight, seasons, winds. So life is like that. Our bodies come from our parents. It comes from ancestors. But also condition moments, like being on that show, you know, it was about the brief moment of glamour. And so utilizing what I had to kind of meet that condition was very important to me. And then not being attached to that, realizing that that moment of glamour is just a cloud, and then it goes away, and then you're back to yourself. That. That you're not attached to a sense of superiority, but that you're meeting the condition where it's at. Yeah, similar to a lot of my photo shoots. You know, people say, gosh, they're so glamorous and extravagant, but I'm collaborating with an artist. The photographer does that, the stylist. You know, I have things that I would never do, but a lot of times I would just say, what? What's your vision? Yeah, where do you see me? And I'll say no to what I don't want to do, but I really want to follow your artistry. And so to me, a la Judith Butler, these are performance that are extraneous performances. Again, similar to the sentence. Yeah, I don't think, you know, I wouldn't talk in the same way as. As my writing when I'm ordering a coffee, you know, so the conditions of literature or the novel or the poem, you know, it might be fun to do so, but I think someone might call the asylum. But similarly, the. The. The extravagance is actually the condition of the context of a photo shoot and working with other artists. That was really beautiful to me because being on that show. And of course, everyone wears lovely things on those shows. Right. That's the condition. And then collaborating with my friends and curating that, but not being attached to that, that's important to me. Not saying that, oh, I am someone who wears couture, and therefore I'm better than thou. That is the trap of it. But if you don't believe in it, you can move through it quite openly and then just leave it behind.
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A
Well, it was quite striking because you looked really good, and you seemed incredibly unselfconscious and at ease and at good ease within these lovely clothes. And it was a great combination. And, you know, it struck me, and it made me happy to see that, you know, being a big admirer of your work and seeing you on this show and thinking, oh, yeah, that's great, you know, and in both your novels, you talk about drugs, and in interviews, you. You're described sometimes of having struggled with addiction. And in the Emperor of Gladness High, you're the. You character I think of as is. There's this moment with these skater boys injecting heroin into their feet, and they feel the speed of the rush surging up their legs. And you describe them tracing that journey with their fingers as it finishes at the top of their heads. And you can feel it happening. As you read, and with both your books, I often wondered about how you got free from the power of being an active addict.
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B
Oh, gosh, well, I don't feel like I'm ever free. You know, 2026 would give me 10 years. And in 2016 was a relapse when my. You know, I had a fight with my mom.
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A
Right.
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B
And my book was coming out. And up until that point, I had about 2012, 13, about three years. I stopped counting early on. The. The counting was supposed to be helpful the day, but then it started to feel like a Jenga block, a Jenga tower, you know, I said, oh, the more days, the more I feel like it's gonna collapse on me. And it did.
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A
Yeah.
- [41:43]
B
And after a while, I stopped. But I try not to present myself as a sobriety guru, because I don't know anything about it, you know, in the book Time as a Mother, there's a long poem called Kunstleroman, German for the artist novel. And it describes a person walking backwards. And you're like, where are they? Where's the origin of this backwards walking? And they. The. The origin at the end of the poem is a car crash. And it's kind of a metaphor for me, for my own sobriety, which is that I'm not a wise guru of it. I. I feel like my sobriety is very incidental, that there was a car crash. I realized I didn't die. There's glass all over. There's blood. And I'm just crawling out of that wreck, and I start walking on the highway. And I kept walking and walking, and after a while, the cuts heal. I see a little. A little thrift store. I go in, get a new outfit, and eventually I keep walking. And I walk into a university. I walk on stage at the South Bank Center. I walk through these spaces, and I still think I'm just a person walking from the car crash. I haven't looked back, but I don't feel like I have any fortified knowledge. I didn't do the 12 steps. I don't have the coins. To me, it's very precarious. And, you know, I still have the addict's brain. I'm learning that it's very genetic. You know, my mother and my grandfather, I've learned, who was Irish, you know, had that quintessential alcoholic. He died of alcoholism. My mother struggled with it for a few years. So it's just part of the makeup, you know, I'll be addicted to gel pens. Give me enough of them, you know, and so I kind of just switched gears. My obsession is now curiosity.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah.
- [44:04]
B
You know, I still think there's a dopamine influencing me. Right. About learning. I can feel it.
- [44:11]
A
Yeah.
- [44:12]
B
Being an addict, I'm like. I can feel. Feel when an idea feels like an injection.
- [44:16]
A
Yeah, Boy.
- [44:18]
B
Like when you get a good sentence sometimes. And. And so I think I've just replaced my drug. And that's why I'm. I'm wary of. Of giving any advice, because, yeah, I don't feel like I. I think my sobriety is very. I don't drive. I don't have access to my bank account. You know, for those reasons. My life has just been very small, and it's very managed around my family for those. I know what I'm capable of.
- [44:57]
A
Yeah.
- [44:57]
B
You know. You know, what. How much damage you can do. You know, I've been around, you know, it's. It's. I'm. I'm going to be 37 in October. October. And I've seen enough to know what I'm capable of. And so I've very wisely made my life quite small, But I don't feel like I've truly escaped. But also in a very, you know, circumstantial, serendipitous way. I just didn't like heroin. It was a drug that wiped out many of my generation. But I didn't like feeling sunken. You know, a lot of my friends liked to fade out, but I didn't. My drug of choice was coke. You know, it was. It was cocaine. That was when it got to the crack rocks, was when it got really bad.
- [45:49]
A
Yeah.
- [45:50]
B
But I wanted more of the world. I always loved this place, and I wanted to be more in it. I want to be exhilarated further by it. But my friends wanted to be underwater.
- [46:03]
A
Yeah.
- [46:04]
B
They had so much pain in them, you know, and I was. I think it's just that like, it's just that I did not like heroin as much as my friends, and heroin was much more harder to kick, and it was much more deadly when fentanyl came into the picture.
- [46:20]
A
Yeah, fentanyl seems to.
- [46:23]
B
You know, one of my best friends, in 2008, he died before they knew what Narcan was. And, you know, this poor fellow just overdosed. He did it through the nose and he overdosed. And his. The friends around him carried him into his room and left him there. They didn't know any better. They thought they were helping him. And he overdosed overnight. And his poor mother in the morning found him and it was so. I don't see it. I'm not that far. You know, I just was lucky that I didn't like it. I liked other things and that. That's it. Just the freaking luck of the draw. And I. I have a lot of survivor's guilt of that because I was no more creative than them. I was no more hard working, I was no more interesting, I was no more intelligent. They were all there. They inspired me. They wanted to be artists. They had all these dreams that they. Because of a pharmaceutical slaughter, they never got to play out. And that's it. I don't owe my survival to any skill. I feel like it's truly just the luck of the draw.
- [47:40]
A
But I suppose the Keith is thing, listening to you, is that when you got out of the car crash covered in glass and blood, you kept walking. And it's that continuation. The day at a time progress that I think takes people is the key to freedom from that particular thing. So I remember a friend of mine saying, God, heroin is like rosemary essence compared to crack or lavender essence or something. And it's. I always think of that whatever it is that takes you out of it is action. And the action is the most elementary kind of thing.
- [48:35]
B
Yeah.
- [48:36]
A
And it's so interesting because you talk about Hai not having circular solutions to the problems in his life and the book not having a circular sort of happy ending. And when he goes into the detox and it feels like he's on the road to something positive. And then he finds the pills in Graziner's house and he starts taking them. And it's no drama, just inevitability. And. Did you always know you would write about. Write this, but without a happy reveal?
- [49:13]
B
Oh, that was. That was kind of the North Star. You know, I wasn't interested in catharsis. And also, you know, addiction is a disease that is often tied to morality. I've noticed you know, especially in the early aughts when I was a teenager, you know, we had lunch ladies who overdose, and families were so ashamed because, you know, we didn't have a term like opioid epidemic. It wasn't seen as a disease. And so they were, they were. They were thought of as junkies. Oh, gosh, someone's mom was a junkie. This lunch lady was a junkie the whole time. And their families were so ashamed that they would be cremated without ceremony and then vanished. I mean, it's interesting. The millennial generation that I belong to, we experience we were the last generation to have a full childhood that was analog. And then in our early adulthood, the iPhone and social media came. And I think it's akin to the generation that experience the coming of the T model forward. You know, imagine you're. You're riding a horse last month, and now you're in a machine driving a car. And that's how it was for us. And so there was so much shame with this too, with this coming at the same time that there are friends of mine that. Whose pictures I don't have. Their pictures are only in police reports, either of their deaths, obituaries, or mug shots. And it's a very bewildering thing to not have a social media catalog of someone's face that you have to find the sort of bureaucratic, you know, paperwork of their deaths or their imprisonment to remember who they were, what they look like, if you had that at all. Some of them, I have no proof they existed. I'm sure some, you know, civic court has a thing, but. And the people I know, I don't know anymore, you know, so I'm like, gosh, did they really existed? Or all I have is these fading memories. And so it's a very fascinating moment for me to think through that idea of what survives in us. Who do we carry? What do we carry? But that era was full of tremendous loss and tremendous agency. When the iPhone came, it felt like you can feel the world was going to change. And I'm often, you know, I go back to that moment and realize we didn't really know what was happening to us, but we were getting wiped out in a kind of plague overnight.
- [52:18]
A
So shocking, isn't it?
- [52:20]
B
600,000Americans, you know, my God, I mean.
- [52:25]
A
I was so obsessed with on earth were briefly gorgeous. And now the emperor of gladness is unput downable life read it, and I've gone back and read bits of it, and I had to ration myself to keep it going. As long as possible. And the idea I was interested in this very young person living with a very old person. And the idea of that's a kind of, in theory, a dull idea, but living with Gratzina, it's non stop. And when she has these terrors from her past, of fleeing the war from where she was from. And Hai is so imaginative in maintaining her dignity and kind of creating these role plays. And there's this moment where he comes back from work exhausted, and he can see her going into this terror with her dementia. And then how did you come up with this idea of turning it into a sort of like a play that was a way of rescuing her from this terrible panic of where am I?
- [53:47]
B
Well, I think every novelist has a kind of North Star that they try to use elements that they're familiar with or that they want to use to implement towards it. And I think for me, the North Star that I was trying to reverse engineer was get these two characters who are 60 years apart to have an equal level of agency and dignity. And that was kind of the challenge of the novel. So I knew that the keystone of the novel would be the scene where they were both naked.
- [54:24]
A
Yeah, that was incredible.
- [54:25]
B
And I just thought, gosh, how am I gonna make this plausible? Yeah, it's just a strange, wild thing, right? Two people face to face, 60 years apart, with no clothes on, looking not at each other as even gendered or aged or even historic beings, but simply as humanity staring at one another. And so I had to orchestrate them clawing towards each other towards equal footing. And their relationship is lopsided in power on both sides. Gergina has a home. Hai does not. She is pulled by dementia, which is memory without choice, whereas he has a choice with his memory. And so he then follows her, right? The person who has no choice is the one that gets the merciful offering of reality. He. He moves towards her reality. And who's to say that her reality is wrong? She's feeling it. It's hers, right? So he chooses to abandon the present to follow her. And, you know, meanwhile she has stability, she has a roof over her head. But then we start to see that is she also a storyteller? How much of her dementia is embellished to keep him in company with her? Because life in America as an elderly person is so isolating and so lonely. You're seen as a tool that now defunct. Not contributing to society is tossed away. Your own family wanting to put you into a home, close you up so they don't have to see you. And so she's trying to extend her own life by keeping him there. So they both are moving through this invisible chessboard. They both want something of each other. And finally they get to this moment. And I won't spoil it, but they. They're both looking at each other completely naked. And there's. That is the most equal they have ever been, is that there is no more shame.
- [56:43]
A
Yeah.
- [56:44]
B
There is no more sexuality. There's no more gender. It's just these two beings with nothing, nothing left to lose who are facing each other as their only hope.
- [56:55]
A
Hope.
- [56:56]
B
And that's what I wanted for them. But the novel is challenging because how do you dial all the tiny dials to get characters to that moment so that it doesn't feel forced, that it feels true to themselves? And that is the great work of it. But that was my keystone of the novel. So thank you for recognizing.
- [57:20]
A
No, it's such a moment of. I've never read anything like that. And it was a really calming moment in just their relationship. Just this kind of. Well, this trust and how you constructed that is completely amazing. And. And there's one thing. This. One of the many brilliant things she says, 82 year old, is it Gratina?
- [57:50]
B
Grijina.
- [57:51]
A
Grijina. She says to be alive and to try and be a decent person, not to turn it into anything big or grand. That's the hardest of all. And I think this seems to describe you pretty well. And there's a lot of sadness in being so thoughtful about people. You say, I wanted to write about kindness without hope and I wondered, how do you deal with sadness?
- [58:17]
B
Gosh. You know, it goes back to your brilliant question about the novel having an addict who gets more addicted and he doesn't free himself of that. Because again, when we talk about someone with cancer, there's a kind of virtue, it's also an illness. But one battles cancer virtuously and one succumbs to that battle. It's a virtuous battle. She or he or they tried so hard. But when someone succumbs to addiction, there's a kind of moral corruption to that. It's like, oh, they were an addict, they were a bad person, that they deserved it in some way. And society still feels. Feel works that way. So I wanted to show that there is actually an incongruent relationship between worsening addiction with morality and kindness. In that, in my experience, it's actually people who get worse and worse in their addiction who actually understand how valuable kindness is. Yeah, it's Almost, you know, a splitting. The. The more the addict moves down the road of addiction, the higher their level of understanding kindness grows. And it's an inverse trajectory. And I've rarely seen that depicted or understood. And so I purposely wanted him to get worse. To say that, you know, it doesn't. Just because you're losing this battle doesn't mean that you have. You're corrupt or you. You're a bad person, that your life should be thrown away or it justifies the loss of your life. Because it's actually addicts who. Who really know how valuable generosity is.
- [60:19]
A
Yeah.
- [60:19]
B
You know, if you've ever met them and, you know, as all my friends who go through it, they just know what to the rock bottom of the world is. And they're some of the kindest people because they know the proximity of suffering and that the proximity of suffering is also the proximity of empathy. Being surrounded by that New Year, you know, how special that is. So I think I really wanted to show. And also, someone losing their mind, someone who is elderly, who can contribute to society, does also mean that they're just deserving of their own demise. It's a very American thing, I must say. America is one of the only cultures that does not have a dignified mythos for the poor or the. The down and out or the ill. Right. Whereas, you know, you think of Les Mis, Victor Hugo. Right. There's a kind of dignity, there's a kind of knowledge that poverty is, of course, you can slip into a romanticization. But think of Tiresias from the classic Greek. Right. A beggar, an intergender beggar who's blind, who also has the power of clairvoyance. And so their position as a bodily social outsider, economic outsider, instills in them a kind of nobility, a power that actually is against time. They now are so outside of society that they are outside of time. And they can see the future Tiresias as a reoccurring figure. But America, the poor in America, the elderly, the ill, the addict, are seen as corrupt. They have aligned morally with a kind of evil that they deserve, that it's their fault, that the loser deserves their lot. And there's even a kind of despicableness to their condition. And it's interesting that the rich are somehow morally. They deserve what they have. They are morally superior. And it's a fascinating thing that I'm trying to think through, but. But the novel is a way to kind of enact some of that dichotomy and that aporia.
- [62:59]
A
Yeah. God, it's I'd never thought of those differences between European, you know, descriptions of having less or, you know, not being rich or. And you know, even in Russian novels. And everyone has their marvelous dignity and their discoveries and their spiritual resilience. Or not. Or it's not. It's not kind of cling wrapped and thrown in the lavatory or whatever.
- [63:31]
B
And folklore all over the world, you know, Vietnamese folklore, African folklore, like the. The one who is, you know, the outsider usually has some sort of power. You think of this in indigenous Native American folklore too.
- [63:45]
A
Yeah.
- [63:46]
B
You know, two spirited folks are the ones who, again, like Tiresias, has some kind of agency, but America has some kind. Completely evacuated the poor and the ill in their mythology. It's fascinating.
- [64:02]
A
Support for today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I'm not exactly an early adopter, rarely first out of the gate with new tech. You don't have to be a tech person to be curious about AI. So I teamed up with Anthropic to try Claudia. I'm building a real budget for Fashion Neurosis. It includes paying people, planning seasons and not guessing cash flow. I opened Claude, dropped in last year's costs and sponsor forecasts and asked it to help me think. Not right for me. It turned my chaos into a zero based plan with clear buckets, production, post and marketing. It modeled best and worst case revenue. It helped me build monthly checklists for invoices, payroll renewals plus 10% rainy day reserve. It even flagged sneaky line items like platform fees and insurance. And if you want to see what it can do for you, you can try Claude for free at Claud AI Fashionneurosis. And you're friends with Bjork and she interviewed you for Bomb magazine. And she says in the Emperor of Gladness there are so many incredible descriptions of inhaling, tasting and smelling fast food, almost fetishizing and celebrating the aesthetic of trash. And there's a lot of warmth in how you describe the food in the novel. And are you into food?
- [65:40]
B
Oh yeah. I mean, I love that. Well, food is so symbolic of class and culture. And you know, the greatest thing you can do to know somebody is ask them what they like to eat, you know, because I know it to be like, oh, where they're from, what they do, what they're close to, how they grew up, their relationship to food and cooking and. And I have Bjork to thank for introducing me to licorice powder.
- [66:10]
A
Oh, wow.
- [66:11]
B
Yeah, this wonderful Icelandic delicacy and God, it's like a poetry dust, you know, you sprinkle it on anything and it will change, believe me, it will change the food. It lifts it all up. And she is such a talk about, you know, someone who is so devoted to poiesis of process. She inspires me to no end. And it's a great honor to just have her be aware of my work. But fast food particularly is interesting. Having worked in it, written about it. It's a kind of sinister beauty that industrialization in America has achieved. To do something so fine tuned to chemically induce a product like a McDonald's french fry so that it can be replicated without break consistently through time, against all odds, even against biodegradation, so that someone like Elon Musk can experience it. A billionaire can experience a French fry or a Coca Cola. And in the same way someone who has no home can experience it. I think this is why Andy Warhol really loved, you know, Campbell's and Coca Cola. Because it promised the most democratic thing to level experience through industrial production. And yet it's a sinister beauty because it's so damaging to health and it's all based on an illusion of sustenance that is actually a kind of poison, you know, And I think that that is the greatest. That to me is the most American thing. I will promise you democracy while I slowly kill you. So. So I think there's a kind of intoxication to it that I wanted to showcase. You know, I didn't want to just write a polemic. It will be too easy to just say, you know, fast food is horrible because there is, there is something to it, you know, When I was a kid, the greatest luxury of being a nail salon kid was in the middle of July is when things are slowest. Everybody's on holiday, everybody's kind of like going away. And so the, the nail salon becomes very silent. And so we usually close for a week and then we take road trips. And the road trip was such a luxury. And we would just kind of go aimlessly around the eastern seaboard and we would travel and, and fly through this space. And I just thought, gosh, when you're going through America. And then my family was so happy to see a McDonald's because America was so strange, you know, it's a strange thing. I wrote this book, Emperor Gladys. It's about a mother and son in this little town. And the son tells his mom, I'm going to school in Boston to be a doctor. Meanwhile, he stays in the same town and they never see each Other. And I think on one hand, some people could say, how is that possible? This town of 30,000 people or so, you know, one main drag. How can a mother and son not see each other? But I promise you, you know, my mother and my stepdad, their life as laborers were so small. Home, grocery store, bank work. Home, grocery store, bank work. They never stepped into a park. We had a local park. I've never seen them walk in the park in my life to this day, you know, and I think it's a part of the working poor that I think a lot of folks don't realize. Is that how. I mean, Marx talked about this, right? The alienation of the working class away from leisure, from their own pleasure. And it's so true. So that when we finally went on a road trip, America was so startlingly strange that we sought the fast food restaurant to reorient ourselves. I mean, it was the most comforting thing to walk into a Burger King in the middle of New Jersey when we were lost. You know, this is before gps. My mother would no English and then have a Whopper. And it tastes exactly like the one in your hometown. Yeah, it was such a beautiful thing. Sinister beauty, like I said.
- [71:20]
A
And I like the self effacingness that comes with a love of style. And you mentioned about style being closer to desire. And I wondered if you had a style icon.
- [71:34]
B
Oh, gosh, I don't know. A style icon. I have modes and moments. My style is influenced very regionally, and I didn't know how regional it was until I left and started to become a global traveler. But I live in western Massachusetts and so, you know, that style is very queer, rural, agrarian. It's a lot of thrifting, it's a lot of cutting and crude embellishments. Blundstones, you know. And my friends joke because we live in what was once called the lesbian capital of the world. Is that Amherst, Northampton, in the same pioneer valley, as people call it. And you know, I believe last I checked, we had. Now the lesbian capital world has transformed into having the highest amount of transformation, folks, per capita. We have a. We were one of the pioneers of trans health. And now with brutal anti trans legislation, we have been a kind of a safe haven for folks. So, you know, a lot of migratory trans communities have come. But, you know, we, my friends joke and say this is, you know, ocean. You're. You're embodying the ultimate lesbian aesthetic. And I'm very proud of that. Whether that's true or not. I wear that with deep pride. Blundstones red wings, you know, workwear, overalls. This company, Smith, was founded in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century, and they made overalls, you know, and now the overall, at least where I live, is a kind of very queer symbol. You know, it's very quirky and beautiful and, you know, again, asymmetricness. You know, the one earring. A lot of. You see, a lot of folks take one strap off, flick it to the wind, show a little shoulder with some floral tattoo. I'm too chicken to go into the tattoo world, but. But. So I think I'm really inspired by the New England that I grew up. It's a mix between a lot of factory work, a lot of farm work, and a kind of queer salvage of that work. You know, your car hearts and your, you know, dickies and what have you.
- [74:13]
A
And if you fancy someone and don't like what they're wearing, does it kill your attraction?
- [74:20]
B
It doesn't kill it, but snuffs it a bit. You know, it's just like, oh, gosh, you know, what else could I start to think as an artist? Like, what else can. Can you wear? Can we have a different wardrobe? But. But no, I. I like to meet people where they are. I think that's kind of how I'm very laissez faire about culture and people. You know, I'm never like a culture, cultural warrior. I never understood that. I think it's a very straight white man thing to, like, rally against something, you know, oh, the. The culture is going against my beliefs. I must restore order. Like, I don't. I like to say, well, look, you know, we have tick tock, we have social media. What will the poem in TikTok look like? What will it look like with these technologies, with these things? And same with style, you know, why does this make this person happy? I want to learn that. Whether I like it or not, I still want to learn that. And I think, to me, if you wear a curtain and that makes you feel good, then that's legitimate to me. And I would defend. And to the end, you're right to feel good because of what you're wearing.
- [75:45]
A
But it's a different thing from having a visceral kind of eek screaming to a halt like that thing they're wearing. It's really complicating my feelings. And I wondered if you had anything in particular.
- [76:02]
B
I can see you. This would be very.
- [76:05]
A
Glow over it, like trying not to have any prejudice.
- [76:09]
B
This is a. This is a very millennial theme, but I think it's about time we do away with Crocs. Please.
- [76:15]
A
We were just talking about that.
- [76:16]
B
The widgets. Don't, don't. Save it, kids. Gen Z. I know, you know, someone had a lovely theory about Crocs because, you know, when Crocs came about when we were teenagers, they were like the grandpa shoes, like our grandpa grandparents wore them to. To work in the garden. And somewhere along the line, you know, Gen Z took it as a kind of new badge of honor. But a. A stylist that I was talking to at a party in New York said it has a lot to do with Gen Z's fear of cringe that the. And I don't know if this is correct or not, but it was an interesting theory that they, you know, Crocs sweatpants and hoodies, that kind of purposeful, deliberate je ne sais quoi. I can't try too hard because I'm afraid of being judged. So I'll deliberately wear something ugly.
- [77:14]
A
Yeah.
- [77:14]
B
And I'll Persona. Personalize it with these widgets just enough to show my personality. But the idea is that there's a kind of uniform, antithetical fashion that. That is not deliberate or aware or sincere. And so if I'm deliberately ugly, you know, then I can almost. It's almost like making fun of myself before anyone else can. And that felt. It made a lot of sense. I had a lot of compassion for it because they grew up, you know, they had the iPhone when they were 8 or 9, and they grew up in a kind of surveillance culture. You know, we had this thing as Millennial called planking.
- [77:56]
A
What's that?
- [77:57]
B
Where you would just lay down, face down, anywhere. And that was kind of like a silly thing to do. And I guess in retrospect, it's quite cringe. But we all did it because, you know, growing up to be silly or embarrassing in the 90s, you are the brunt of the joke of your classroom. At worst, your school, but that's about it. But now if you're silly or embarrassing, you could be filmed and within a week, an entire country for which you've never been could be laughing at you. And then you could become a meme, which is the ultimate dehumanization of yourself. You, Your personhood has been extracted into a kind of language, a symbol for someone else's conversation, which ultimately strips you of all of your personhood and humanity. And now you become a conduit, a technology of meaning for somebody else. The meme is the most violent, symbolic thing I think, in. In the 21st century linguistics. And you know, so of course, why be idiosyncratic? Why do something strange? Why the safest thing is just wear sweatpants and crocs. Anyways, this is a theory. I think there's something to it. But I have great sympathy with. You know, I've had the great luxury as a professor to educate only Gen Z my entire career of 11 years. Years. I've taught Gen Z from the very oldest of them to the very youngest of them now. And we're about to move into Gen Alpha, so they say. So it's been really informative to me to educate just a generation below me and to see them move through some of these very real struggles and how that manifests and articulates as fashion.
- [79:54]
A
So interesting that describing all these other ways of dehumanizing people, flinging this net of all these different nets and then render them not your equal and then you don't have to care for people. And it's sort of. And it seems to dull down the idea of caring for, you know, just looking out for each other. And that seems very pervasive. And I suppose that's the. Where, you know, art and literature, anything to do with culture comes in because goes against that and it wakes people up to each other. And I, I read that you, your plan is to only write eight books. And I have to say that made me feel distraught as your work described describe so much of the feelings I have that I find hard to handle. And do you ever change your mind about the things that you've decided?
- [81:00]
B
Of course, you know, you transform. I think that's the hope. You know, I, if I'm very lucky, I can get to eight works. I mean, I've written four and I feel knocked flat. Like, I feel like the way I'm sitting on this couch now, I feel like just as horizontal as I can be, you know. But that would be, that's the fantasy, I think, to be able to. And it's an arbitrary number after the Eightfold path. But the fantasy is to one day do one's work with such care that one can look at it and say well done. And one can have a life maybe moving into a different medium. But to finish, I don't think any medium can be exhausted. But to lay down your work. And again, this is a very Buddhist idea. Everything about Buddhism is about ephemerality. And I don't want to be attached to the idea of being a writer. It's very seductive to be so lauded for one thing. And then it becomes. You become Attached, the ego becomes attached to this idea that I am writer, writer, writer. And I, I need to, I look forward to the day that I can disabuse myself. I can take that outfit, if you will, out and again go back to being naked and still have my body. And what will I feel? What would I look like, like if I still had my life while taking away something I've spent so many decades on and leaving it behind. It's a very important practice, which is why monks shave their heads. Yeah, I see they've left these. They disrobe. Right. Taking idiosyncrasy away that you've been so proud of and taking on something else. And so in a way, stopping writing is a kind of destroyer robing for me and taking on another pair of robes. To me, it's a very spiritual practice that I hope I have the strength and the effort to do.
- [83:12]
A
I suppose I spent a lot of my life in self denial. Feeling that was powerful and that was what kept me on the road, moving forward and, you know, kept me, drove me. But it's a kind of always walking against pressure. And you know, I think of your, you know, I think of sort of being in the world as being some kind of a warrior. And you seem to be a warrior in your writing. And I like the idea of you continuing. But I understand what you're saying, of course. But also I found that it's been wonderful to have these fixed views and change my mind. And I like the idea of you writing more than eight books.
- [84:09]
B
Yeah, I love the idea of the warrior. I do feel, I do feel much stronger than I thought I ever was. It's so strange getting older and you realize, gosh, there's something different. My teacher, Sharon Olds, told me this. You know, she's 82 now and wow. She's a poet who is a pioneer writing about the body, about pleasure, about disgust at a time when women were not supposed to, you know. She would send her early poems about desire, about motherhood, to journals and they say, you should try the Ladies Home Journal or Good Housekeeping. This is not serious work.
- [85:03]
A
God.
- [85:04]
B
And when I was her student, I asked, I said, gosh, Sharon, is. Is so hard. How do we do it? How do we get it right? And she, without batting an eye, she says, it is hard. It won't stop being hard, but you'll get better at hardness, you'll get better at your relationship with difficulty will grow and you will be stronger. And it was so wonderful to hear it even as I didn't Believe it. At the time, I said, how could this ever get easier? And lo and behold, that was, you know, over a decade ago. And I do feel. I don't know if I feel like a warrior, but I do feel strong in a warrior like, sense. It's hard to know what I'm fighting, but I do feel really fortified.
- [85:59]
A
Yeah.
- [85:59]
B
And I think. I think that's because a lot of people say to me, gosh, Ocean, you're so vulnerable. You're so strong in your vulnerability, charismatic, and blah, blah, blah. You're in these moments of the cultural centers. How do you go about it? And I say, I don't do it. I don't feel strong because of I'm charismatic or I have any innate ability, but it's because I feel fortified. It's not charisma, it's fortitude. I feel fortified by the people who raised me, by my mentors, by my friends. I was able to live a life wherein I. I do feel confident in that I did right by the people I love. And I never, for. I made a lot of mistakes, but I never foresaw, forsaked their faith in me. I never betrayed their faith in me. And that is. I think that I'm very proud of that. And that has made me very strong. And I think that's. Maybe that's what people see when they see a strong vulnerability or charisma is actually because I know when I walk into a room, I have been vouched for by the people who I love. My grandmother, my mother are walking in that room with me. My teachers, my friends, my community, my family are all in that room with me. And in bodily, one is very vulnerable because we have soft bodies. But in ideas and in the work at hand, I feel quite invincible because of them.
- [87:45]
A
That's wonderful. I'm glad to hear it. Thank you so much, Ocean Vong, for being on Fashion Neurosis. It's been so lovely and such a deep pleasure to talk to you after reading everything you've written.
- [88:00]
B
Thank you. Thank you so much, Bella. It's been a very idiosyncratic pleasure.
- [88:26]
A
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