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K.J. Aiello "The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell" (ECW Press, 2024)
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- [00:01]
KJ Baelo
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts
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Holly Gattery
in time for this class.
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KJ Baelo
I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
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Holly Gattery
Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
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KJ Baelo
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Holly Gattery
Oh sorry.
- [00:18]
KJ Baelo
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order.
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Holly Gattery
Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
KJ Baelo
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts new year, new me. Cute. But how about new year new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush start the year off right. Download the Experian App based on FICO Score 8 model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian
- [01:01]
Holly Gattery
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- [01:26]
KJ Baelo
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Holly Gattery
Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I am your host Holly Gattery and I am excited to be joined today by KJ Baelo to talk about their fantastic book the Monster in the Mirror, Mental Illness, Magic and the Stories We Tell or which was published by ECW Press. KJ is a mentally ill, award winning writer based in Toronto. Their work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, the Walrus and this magazine. They are still waiting for their very own dragon. Sadly this has not happened so their cats will have to suffice. KJ I am going to talk about this book but I have been reading a lot of Peter S. Beagle right now and I am too waiting for my own dragon. So welcome.
- [02:18]
KJ Baelo
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That's fair. I hope, I hope the dragon arrives soon for you. I feel like we all need one right now.
- [02:24]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I recently discovered the movie Flight of the Dragons too. I don't know if you remember that one. I think it's from the 80s but it was, it was like, it was a defining movie of my childhood. So, yeah, this book was such a wondrous exploration, moving, powerful. I loved it. From COVID to the last page, everyone listening a little bit more about the Monster in the Mirror. Just to help situate you before I dive in with kj. Growing up, KJ was fascinated with the magical stories of dragons, wizards, and fantasy, where monsters were not what they seemed and anything was possible. These fictional worlds were both a bomb and an escape, a safe place where the reality of KJ's struggle with mental illness would cease to be a burden and transform into a strength that could win battles and vanquish villains. A unique blend of memoir, research, and cultural criticism, the Monster and The Mirror charts KJ's life as they try to understand their own mental illness, using the lore of the Lord of the Rings, the haunting of Hill House, and many more as both guides to heroism and agency, as well as cautionary tales of mental illness, stereotypes of fear and violence. Who is allowed to be mad versus sane, good versus evil, weak versus strong, and who is allowed to tell their own stories In a system where so many are pushed into the margins, The Monster in the Mirror explores our perceptions of mental illness directly in a way that is challenging and tender, empathetic and knowledgeable, offering a path to deeper understanding and more compassionate care. Kj, my first question about you is this book feels so wonderfully rangy. It is like going on some kind of heroic journey. When I say heroic journey, I mean the books being mirrors. It forced me to confront a lot of things about myself that I'd never thought of in the terms that you discuss them in the book. And we're going to get into that, but I'm wondering specifically where this book started for you.
- [04:28]
KJ Baelo
So I think this book started in two different ways. The first one was that I was taking one of the first creative writing workshops I was taking back in, I think, 2018 or something. And it was with a business here in Toronto called Firefly Creative Writing. And they're kind of the workshops that I never expected. It's just sort of there's no way to do this wrong. Write to your heart's content. We're here to support you. And I feel like that's a really great place to start for a lot of writers. And the question, the prompt that the writing instructor asked us was, what do you want to give yourself permission to in your writing practice? And she said, first thing that comes to mind. And I wrote down to be okay being a child again. And I was, when I wrote It. I felt like this sort of, you know, my throat tightened a little bit. I'm like, no, no, no, pull it together. Pull it together. Okay? And I think what I was meaning by that was returning to something that I had left behind a long time ago when I was a kid. And that was fantasy. It was belief in, you know, the impossible, belief in the what ifs and, you know, more tangibly, fantasy novels and my own fan fiction, because I wrote fan fiction when I was a kid. I don't know what writer hasn't written fan fiction. So I think that was one part of it. And then the other part was. And I don't know how many people have seen Game of Thrones, your audience here, but little spoiler alert. Season 8, Episode 4 the Belles. There's a scene, one of the main characters, she becomes insane. She goes insane, quite literally, and she basically burns down an entire city called King's Landing because she's gone insane. And that just really made me angry because it wasn't fair to her, what happened. And I don't like this idea that mental illness and violence are inextricable because it's not true, and mental illness is. Or insanity is a punishment, and it's evil. And I got. I probably unreasonably angry. I was just seething. So I started rage writing. And then these two parts of me started to come together into this book. And, you know, readers will notice there are. It is like two conversations happening at the same time. There is my own story, my own narrative in the memoir, vignettes, and then there's my own thoughts and opinions and conversations that I'm having with the reader about fantasy. So they were being written separately at first, and then I started to see how they were coming together, and that was that. The same as, you know, me rage writing about Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, as well as me returning to something that I loved and left behind. And that was an integral part of me. And that's the kid who believed in magic.
- [07:33]
Holly Gattery
That's such a gorgeous answer. And I think it's why your book was so moving and powerful to me and why I know I'm going to revisit it and revisit it. And, you know, I. I've lived with mental illness my whole life, neurodivergence, whatever. But the. One of the ways in which I got sober, for instance, and really took. Tried to take control of my agency over my life again, was returning to the state of belief that I held in childhood, where I would believe in a world where things were possible that I couldn't grasp right away. And it. It really helped me as the world can feel hopeless, so hopeless, if we're left to things we can see and feel and, you know, things that have, you know, proof. Because right now, the things that are being proven over and over again aren't incredibly positive. And they don't. They don't always make me want to, you know, stick around to see what finds out when comes next. No. But, you know, I. It can feel very hopeless. But if I return to the state of my childhood where there was a healthy dose of enchantment, I find that it helps. And it's not like I walk around in this kind of whimsical fairy dust haze, although I love that. But I think that, you know, kind of microdosing a re. Enchantment of the world is one of the best things I've ever done for my nun. Yeah. Yeah.
- [09:03]
KJ Baelo
I love the. Like that reminds me of. It wasn't me who said this. I have to, like, totally not take credit, but. And I don't know who said it, maybe, you know, some anonymous from a long time ago. But what is true and what is real are not necessarily the same thing. Right. So what is true to me and what seems like what is true to you is embracing this. This magic, this whimsy, and feeling it, truly feeling it in, you know, your day, in your body, in your mind. I do believe in, you know, there's something special, something magical in this world. And I don't necessarily believe in magic, but I do believe that there are intangible things in our world that maybe we're not meant to understand. But there's something about that that I can hold on to that helps get me through my days, particularly right now when everything feels awful. So I do think, you know, what is necessarily what we consider to be true, because truths and what's true and what's real, that changes over time. Right. So I think that there's something there, and I think that it is important for everybody to return to or to reimagine a world where there can be a little bit of magic for all of us.
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Holly Gattery
Yeah, that's such a great answer. My next question for you is about the structure of this book. So I touched on it a little bit when I was telling our audience about the book, how. And there's memoir and there's also cultural criticism and there's research, but I loved the structure. But I also love the visual presentation of the structure. So, you know, you'll be talking about Game of Thrones or doing a really fascinating cultural examination of the haunting of Hill House, which is something I've never watched because I've been terrible to watch it. I'm so scared.
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KJ Baelo
It is scary to watch it then.
- [10:49]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, yeah, I. I saw. I'm not even gonna say the name of the movie, but I saw a horror movie in the early aughts, and I've never seen a horror movie again because I didn't see the first three months. So I thought, you know, maybe this isn't for me, but I was really fascinated in you discussing it. And then. So there. There's those sections which are in kind of one font that feels like this could be just me, a slightly bigger font, and then there's one. And then when you have your memoir where you're talking about your childhood and your experiences with rage and mental illness and your. Your family, that's in a different font, and it feels like a little bit of a smaller font. Although that, again, could just be the font and maybe it's not small at all. But I really love that. I loved how these. These different parts of the book, the cultural criticism and the memoir of are, I felt like beautifully weaved together and didn't. Weren't separate. They were complementing each other. They were talking to each other, they were singing to each other. And I was wondering about how you balance that as a writer.
- [11:58]
KJ Baelo
There's a couple questions in there I'm gonna. First of all, I really like that you asked about the visual presentation, because I feel like at my launch, somebody had asked me this wonderful person, Phil Morgan, he's a writer. Author here, I think, in. He's still in Ontario. And he'd asked me about the differentiation, like, what was the decision? What was the philosophy behind the two fonts? And all I could say, because I was on a stage and I was nervous and I said, I don't know, that's what the typesetters decided. That's what the publisher decided. I knew I wanted it to be separate because it needed to be visually distinct, but I didn't have a choice about the. The fonts or, you know, the typesetting or, you know, that sort of thing. So. But this is also, I think one of the great things about really great editors having a really great team at a really great publisher like ECW Press, is they take into consideration all of these little details that all of it goes into telling the story as best as it can be told. And that is also the visual representation. So I'm glad you asked that. And, Phil, if you're listening, that is the answer I probably should have given you. And the second part, Holly, what was the second part of the question? How did I weave them together?
- [13:20]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. And balance them as it felt. Very balanced. Very different voices, very different presentations. But they at no point seemed at odds with each other. They seemed to be different and complementary.
- [13:32]
KJ Baelo
Yeah. That was one of the hardest things about writing this book, because I was writing as two completely different people. The first of all was, you know, sort of the KJI Lou here today, how I'm having a conversation with you. And I wanted to, you know, in the more quote, unquote here, the academic parts of it, the critique, I wanted it to be accessible to, you know, even folks who have never, say, watch the Haunting of Hill House or never read Dragonlance or anything like that. I wanted them to be able to understand how everything interconnects and how. How foundational stories are to our identities. So I think that that was me just sort of having a conversation. And I kept that in mind the entire time I was writing those sections, the memoir vignettes in the different font, the different setting that was. Those are actually the easiest parts to write. People are always assumed. That was the hardest. And it was so easy, they just fell out of me. But I embodied who I was at the time of what was happening at that time. So the very first vignette where the book opens up, I was in kindergarten. It was really easy for me to drop into that kid again. I mean, thank you for 10 years of therapy. This is what. This is what 10 years of therapy does for people is they help them write books. So that was. Both of them were quite. They were very different, but they were so satisfying as well to be able to write them. But when I was. When I was writing them, I was always cognizant of trying to keep it all together in one conversation. So the memoir vignette had to illustrate what I was talking about in the critique parts. Right. The conversation I'm having with the readers. So they were able to see the connectedness. They were able to see how these themes that I'm talking about actually play out in real life and how they did for me. Right. So it's sort of like, here's your, you know, not proof, but like the evidence that I'm presenting to you. And then here is how it. You see it in action in real life, if that makes sense.
- [15:53]
Holly Gattery
It does. And I mean, there are two things that came up when you were talking. First of all, as someone who has never seen Haunting of Hill House or some of the other cultural touch points you mentioned, again, because I'm a scaredy cat. I'm kind of a sponge. I already terrorize myself. I don't need a movie to do it for me. But there was one point where I was so deeply invested in you, explaining the. The how the movie deals with mental illness and the character of the little girl saying, I was here the whole time and being ignored. I was close to tears. And then at one point, I'm sorry, spoilers. Everyone who has never seen the movie where they were talking about the bent neck lady, and I was like, oh, my God, it must be the little girl. And you were taking us there. You were leading us there. And when you were like, it turned out to be her, I was like, that makes so much sense that I felt so vindicated about everything. I was like, I have to watch this movie. I was thinking this, you know, as I was reading the next morning, I got up and I was like, no, you're not gonna watch this movie. But I'm really glad I got to experience it through your lens, which was just lovely. And then there's an other thing that you said about 10 years of therapy helped you. Okay, I love that, because this is just a personal thing for me. But I'm a firm believer that the best memoir, the best personal essays, creative nonfiction, cannot be your diary entries. They cannot be therapeutic in any way, shape, or form. That is what you go to therapy for, and then you do the healing, and then you do the creative work after. Or, you know, maybe there's parts of the healing that you can bring into the creative work. But I don't know if you've ever read someone who usually it's not published by a publishing house or necessarily a magazine, but maybe they've published it on a sub stack or on any kind of social media where you're like, yeah, you should have just, like, kept that in your journal and not. Not publish this, because it's just. It's a journal entry, which are. You know, it's embarrassing for everybody. And this is like, I constantly do embarrassing things, so I understand this is rich coming from me. But. But I thought of when you're talking about that, something that Vicki Lavelle Harvey said, who wrote a wonderful memoir called the Erratics about her mother's narcissism. And in a CBC interview, she said something to the effect of. I'm paraphrasing that memoir for her cannot be cathartic. The catharsis has to happen before you sit down to the very practical task of writing about something. And maybe I'm really reading into what you said, but I was wondering about your thoughts on that statement.
- [18:40]
KJ Baelo
That is, I, I really like having this conversation and I feel like we probably don't have enough time for me to really give you my entire. The entirety of my thoughts on this. But so I do create. I'm a creative writing instructor as well as I do coaching on the side. And I do find that there is a difference between writing the journal entry, right, writing the diary, versus cathartic writing and the writing. This book was incredibly cathartic for me. That was the drafting. The first draft was. I was writing for me. It was filled with passion, it was filled with me. And I was, I, I was not writing it with a thought of people reading it. Even though it had sold on Proposal, I knew it was going to be out there into the world. I just wrote it for me. The revisions process, I was revising for my readers, so I was taking out. There was a lot of rage writing in there, let me tell you. I was also holding back in the, the memoir sections. I was holding back. And you know, when I was talking to my editor, it was Jen Suk Fong Lee. If you have not read any of her books yet, everybody stop right now. Go get her books, go read her books and then come back. We had a conversation. I think it was about like halfway through when she was reading the second draft and we had a phone call and she's like, we need more you. It's like, no, you don't. You do not need more me. She's like, yeah, we do. And what she meant by that is I needed to go deeper. I needed to go to those places where. And I'm going to try and describe it for the audience, for the non writers that you're writing and you feel like you're falling and your tummy is clenching and you're sweating and the tears are coming down and at the end of it you're like, oh my God, I think I just died and came back to life going to those places that I'd never written before. There are things in here that I never told anybody except for, you know, my husband and my therapist. Um, but that was also so cathartic. There's a, a therapeutic practice called. What is it called again? Where you, you integrate. It's integration and that's integrating the adult self with the child traumatized self. And bringing those two halves together into a whole person, and I feel like that's what this book does. So I don't necessarily think that you should not write for catharsis. I think you absolutely, if you do feel catharsis in it, I think that you are onto something. You should not write a journal entry. However, a lot of creative nonfiction, a lot of memoir writing, can start as a journal entry because you're getting the nuggets, you're discovering. Maybe there's a theme in here, maybe there's a remembrance and like, oh, I can pull that out and I can make this into an essay. That sort of. So I think it's a very complex Writing is complex. Writing is fun. I say that with all sarcasm. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
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- [22:38]
KJ Baelo
Ask your doctor about evglis and visit evgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-LilyRx or 1-800-545-5979. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close
- [23:05]
Holly Gattery
twice as many deals.
- [23:06]
KJ Baelo
When you find the One, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream.
- [23:14]
Holly Gattery
I agree a hundred percent. And that's why I'm saying to, to everyone who's thinking, you know, I'm upset at my ex boyfriend, ex girlfriend, ex wife, whatever. I'm gonna, it's not some tweets anymore, but I'm gonna pass. Post some passive aggressive diary like entry. I'm. So don't write it for yourself. Maybe one day that will turn into something else. But yes, I, I fundamentally agree. I didn't find that the editing and revisions of my memoir were cathartic at all. They were incredibly frustrating. But I'm sure that in the earlier drafts, which that experience is a little bit lost to me now because it was so long ago, I'm sure there was a nugget of catharsis somewhere in there. And I, I, you know, I think we could write for one reason and we might publish for different reasons.
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KJ Baelo
Yes.
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Holly Gattery
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's. I, But I'm always interested in it because I'm not necessarily speaking about writers who have published memoirs by often finds, like you, I sometimes mentor or teach people or workshop with people who are just coming to memoir and getting them to realize that that first draft they wrote is not like, that's. Yes, there's something there and we're gonna try to work on that. But we're not sending this off.
- [24:28]
KJ Baelo
Yeah, no, we don't do that there. Definitely. I think that I teach, I always try and instill this in my students that if you are writing your story, you need to make sure that there is enough psychological space between you as the author, as the person with authority over this story, and you as the person experiencing that. Because not only do you have to, you have to really tunnel deep into the emotions, what you were feeling at the time in your thought process, which can be difficult to start with. But you also have to have a mastery over the craft and you have to be able to give your reader this sort of, you know, fly on the wall perspective of it that comes with, with time, that comes with self reflection that you are able to explain why. Also why some people do just crappy things. You have to understand that you can't write. You know, I could have gone to some places in my book that really trashed some awful people in my life, but I didn't because I needed to understand why are these people doing what they do? Because I want my reader to understand why people do what they do. And that doesn't mean that you need to forgive people, but understanding can go a long way in I. I think actually stopping intergenerational harm.
- [25:51]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. What you're saying reminds me of that very. I believe it's pretty famous quote by Anne Lamont. You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Yeah, I, you know, and I believe that, but I also. I believe I try to embody grace and compassion. So. Yes, and. But also, I mean, this is my next question for you. You write about your family. You write about your mom and, you know, her mental. Her mental health. And I was wondering if. To me, it feels like there's so much compassion in. In this, in this portrayal of your mom and your relationship. It felt so finely tuned and beautiful and complex and at times muddy, but I mean, muddy in the best possible way. I mean, in the real way that. That we feel these relationships with our parents and the people closest to us. And I felt like you were being honest, and I also felt like you weren't pulling any punches, but I also felt that there was an immense, immense amount of compassion in there, too. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that approach.
- [27:03]
KJ Baelo
Yeah, well, I pulled punches. It definitely did. I will. I always. People like, oh, you wrote so kindly. I'm like, oh, I could have wrote and written a lot of other things anyways. I was very, very generous because I was generous with the woman, my mother, the person. As a mother, I have my feelings like, not, not me being a mother, I'm not a mother. But as the. My mother being that role in my life, I could not come at it from that perspective because I would be too angry. I do not speak to my parents. I don't speak to my family. And that was my choice. But I needed to find that compassion for the woman, right? She. She did not want to be a mother. She did not want to be a wife. She married my father at 18 years old, and she told me so she could escape her abusive house, her abusive household. My mother is the product of an affair, right? Her father was incredibly abusive. And then she. She and her mother ran away when my mom was like three years old. So my mom has skeletons in the closet, and she never got the help she needed for them. And that's also her fault, too. She should have gotten help. She should have gotten help for her kids, help for herself in order to be a better mother, to be the best mother she could possibly be. But I needed to, I really wanted to understand why she did what she did and why she was the way she was. Because I think that's also sort of like a closing of a chapter for me. Right. Because you know, when you go non communication with your family, it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life was cutting my family out of my life. I never want to feel that pain again. And I did not make that decision lightly. So I think understanding both my mom and my dad as individuals rather than as my parents was really helpful for my healing because I do, I still carry grief. We haven't spoken in 15 years. I still carry grief for that. But I am okay with it now because I know them now as individuals, very flawed individuals. So that's where I came at. Writing about my family was as people. Not as my family, but as people and why they did what they did and that they, they also deserved better. They deserved better and they never got it. But that's also not my fault or my responsibility as their daughter.
- [29:39]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I, I, I admire that you made that choice because you didn't as didn't have to. You could have just viewed them as parents and it would have been a different book.
- [29:51]
KJ Baelo
It would have, yeah.
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Holly Gattery
Yeah. And I mean, they were there. There's there a scene that made me tear up when your mom shoved your face into a head cheese sandwich. I was furious. I was furious. But as a mother who lives with mental illness, I have four children. I felt compassion. And I only felt compassion because you gave me the space to feel compassion. It would have been, it would have been easy to fall into the stereotypes you actually very viciously fight in this, against, in this book of mental illness and evil and good versus evil. And you could have said my mom is. You painted your mum as evil and your father as distant and you know, and not engaged. And you know, there's so much that you could have done and you didn't. So I found it incredibly admirable. I also just found that it made a much more compelling story. So I do want to ask you more questions, but I'm thinking now maybe we could pause and you could read to us from your book a little excerpt.
- [30:48]
KJ Baelo
So I'm going to start with this small Excerpt from Chapter 2, the Beginning, called the Druid and His Daughter. And it is about my granddad who served in four armies actually. And there is some descriptions of war, violence in here and alcoholism. There's a box that rests on the top shelf of the bookcase. Under it the yellow glow of the small lights illuminates the antique books. A jade giggling Buddha. A Japanese dish. The Encyclopedia Britannica. The box could be mistaken for a shoebox. Same size, same shape. It's made of dark brown plastic, strong enough to contain a lifetime. Now containing the ashes of my granddad. The lid is sealed. On the side of the box is a small inscription. Gjs. I've only ever seen photographs of my father's father. There's one that is in sepia tones, creased at the edges. In it, GJS is standing in front of an armored bridge layer balanced upon a military tank, a machine that could flatten a man like a pancake. My mother said he told her a story once of a comrade who got stuck in the backfire while inside one of those machines and was pulled through the tank's 2 meter long barrel like a piece of spaghetti. Maybe that's why GJS drank a 40 a day. My mother said the photograph was taken in North Africa before he served in the French Foreign Legion. She said GJS had served in four armies, enlisting in each with a different identity at a different age, an almost entirely different man reliving the same life over and over again. Running from being a husband, from the possibility of fatherhood, from the nightmares that haunted him. Quiet ripples at GJS's secret less than honorable discharge floats under the surface of my father's face. My mother says drinking and driving a tank is frowned upon in the army. Maybe he'd seen too many body parts fluttering a confetti of flesh. My mother says he liked to tell stories when he was a third into the jack, his soft sing song Welsh voice telling how his mate shit himself when they'd backed their angry juggernauts into the ditches outside Hong Kong. He told her the inside of the tank smelled like sweat and vomit. In the photograph he is shirtless, squinting in the harsh desert sun. His body is small, lithe and toned. His features are sharp and even through time and muted earthen tones. I can see that his eyes are haunting, haunted. He's wearing cargo shorts, army issued boots that are scuffed and worn, boots that had walked across fields of blood and rage. Thick wool socks slouch just under his knees. I think he's handsome in his sweet, gentle way, and I can see my father in him. His looks contrast with a furious machine behind him. My mother says I have his mouth, a mouth you could wash forever, she says. But he didn't talk much. His mouth is silent now, and I've Never heard his voice. I wonder if it's the same gentle tenor as my father's. A soft voice that can capture a room or hum a Welsh lullaby with the same soft ease. His son, my father, inherited his need for silence, for observing both painfully shy, with the iciest blue eyes that came from the deep northern wilderness of the Black Mountains. I know we are the same grandfather, father and daughter. The same retreating voice, the same mouth. GJS died in his sleep while my mother was pregnant with me. My father was 26 years old. His ashes now rest on the bookcase. And sometimes when I'm alone in the living room, I look up at him and whisper. Hi, Granddad. Mom says we wouldn't have liked each other. She says I'm as stubborn as he was, and because of that, we'd be at each other's throats. I still like to believe that maybe we'd be thick as thieves. I wish. The box and GJS straddle the world between the living and the dead. He's both present and forgotten. His name hasn't been uttered in years. I wonder if my father is searching for him when he takes me into the forest, looking for the fox's den or the hawk's nest. Or when he teaches me how to string a bow or roof a house or gently whisper seedlings into soft green life. I wonder if he's thinking of his father when he's tipping the developing tray back and forth in his dark room. Red light casting a blanketing glow around us as the salty, acrid, scented, developing chemicals begin to reveal a photograph of a stag antlers that same sepia in the sunlight. I wonder if I make my dad happy like he tried to make his dad. I wonder if we will be best friends forever.
- [35:17]
Holly Gattery
Thank you so much for that gorgeous reading. And it leads perfectly into my next question for you, which is about something I really enjoyed, about your writing style, and that's how visceral it is. So we are talking about mental illness, mental health. We're talking about neurodivergence, these ideas that can seem a little bit cerebral, perhaps, but your writing is very much rooted in physicality, whether it's you stabbing a kid with a pencil. You have to read this book to understand this, of everyone. But I'm sorry. I felt like it was deserved.
- [35:49]
KJ Baelo
I'm not gonna say she didn't deserve it.
- [35:51]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. I was like, fair enough.
- [35:54]
KJ Baelo
And she was okay.
- [35:55]
Holly Gattery
I did. She was fine. But, you know, I. I don't know. I. As a. As a mother, I was like, yeah, Some people, some people need to be stabbed with a Benzel. And it. I don't know if I'd helped her ultimately or checked, Checked her, but I mean, this probably says more about me than anyone else and how, how I see the world and perhaps a little bit how deranged I am, but I'm. I'm fine living with that. And then there was, you know, talking about the, the tank smelling like sweat there. There's, you know, talking about the wind hurting to breathe because it's so cold outside. In another part of your book, you know, we're talking about, again, these cerebral concepts. To some, to some people, some readers, this might seem like something that they really cannot grasp. Maybe they haven't had these experiences, but it's everything. Your style is so rooted in just the body. I'm right there with you. Whether it's some terrible kid commenting on your nose, whether it's feeling that bowel quickening shame. I mean, I'm right there. And I was, I was hoping you could talk about this style that you have, whether maybe it's something that you've developed and you consciously think about or perhaps it's just the way that you think.
- [37:06]
KJ Baelo
I have never been asked that question before. I didn't know that about me. Okay. But now that I think about it, mental illness for folks who have never had a mental health crisis or live with mental illness or neurodiversity. A lot of folks who are autistic, I think, and probably, they're probably nodding their heads in that. A lot of our lives are lived in sensing our bodies. The first thing that I notice when I'm becoming unwell mentally is it's in my body. And I think as somebody who. I'm not a particularly talkative person, my, you know, baseline state is just to sort of watch people. I think a lot of writers are probably like that. But I feel things in my body a lot. And I think in writing observations and writing, somebody who is just always watching people and looking at the world and feeling so much, it only makes sense to write in the body. And I think the only way to truly understand someone living with mental illness is to understand what it feels like. And I'm not talking, you know, oh, I'm feeling sad or I'm feeling crazy or whatever. It's, oh, my body is so tight and I cannot stop shaking and sweat is running down my back and, you know, I can't breathe. And yeah, so I think that, yeah, maybe my writing is very much rooted in the physical because I think that I have had to live in the physical for so long. And I know that a lot of, there are a lot of people who are the same. I'm sure you probably feel something quite similar, Holly, living with your own mental health struggles not. It is. And you know what, like you think of it neurophysiologically too, um, we are a holistic system. Our entire body is attuned to what we are feeling because our emotions and our body, the senses that we, you know, bring into our body are all informative for us. We need to know, we need to feel anxiety because that informs us when something is wrong. It's just when that anxiety interferes with our daily activities. So the, the dsm, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual tells us that's when it becomes a, a pathology. So, you know, it, it only makes sense neurophysiologically, neurocognitively, as well as, you know, literary and creatively and experientially that it's in our body. I hope that's a good answer.
- [39:45]
Holly Gattery
It is. And I mean, I, of course, when I was reading it, I was like, yes, yes, yes. Because it's not something, you know, when I, when I'm having a not great time, I'm trying to think of the best way. I don't want to have to say a breakdown because it doesn't really feel like a breakdown. But when, when something's happening that is taking off the level that I work very hard to keep myself on. It's, it's everywhere. It's not like it's this experience that's happening in the ether, it's happening in my body. I, I, I usually lose weight very quickly. Like I can drop up to £10 in a week. When it's happening, when I'm, you know, it's, it's an incredibly physical experience. And I really love seeing that in the book that I didn't feel like I was wading through some myths and I couldn't relate to the actual physicality of what's happening because, I mean, I experience everything very physically. I mean, I have a body. It's difficult for me not to. And I understand that not everybody is going to experience mental almost the same way, but the way you write it is very familiar to the way I experience. So I absolutely appreciated that. And you know, I found it very admirable the way that you brought it to the page. My final question for you is about what you are working on now. And I do want to just throw out a plug for KJ's incredible show, the Book Cook, where you have interviewed a lot of wonderful fantasy writers. So feel free to say a few words about that as well as you'd like, in addition to what you are working on now, if anything.
- [41:19]
KJ Baelo
Oh, what am I not working on now, Holly? Come on, you know me now. Like, geez, how much time do we have? So I've got a couple things. I feel like all of us writers, we, we, you know, have multiple hats. Right? So I have, I have a couple of book projects on the go. Hopefully some good news soon, but I cannot say much more. I'm also working through. I'm in the supervisory semester of my mfa, so my last semester, trying to wrap up my thesis, which is also a novel. And yeah, I, the host, I started this wild podcast. I was couch rotting one day last year. I think it was about this time last year. I'm like, you know what I should do? I should start a podcast. And now here we are. I've had some wonderful conversations with the most incredibly talented, beautiful people, including, you know, Holly Gaddry right here. And it's so funny because my friends, I, I feel like everybody has, you know, sort of their writerly shenanigans, group chats. I, I probably people are nodding right now. And in mine, one of my friends said, can you imagine if you actually got Rebecca Yarros? And you know, fast forward like a year later, I, I interviewed Rebecca Yarros, which was such an incredible experience. So that's going strong. Season two comes in the beginning of April. Yeah. And trying to survive winter. I feel like that we need to acknowledge that and trying to survive winter because I think a lot of people are trying to survive winter.
- [43:01]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I haven't been out of my house in over 40, so which is, which is very sad, but considering I feel like my full time job is Dog Butler, just letting my dogs in and out of the house, I feel like this is where I'm needed. You know, wiping their paws, making sure they're happy. But yes, I, I do long to get outside and lift my face sunward and roll around on dry ground at some point. And I feel like that's so far off. So I feel you. And I want to thank you so much, kj for being on the show, for talking about your really wonderful book, the Monster in the Mirror, Mental Illness Magic and the Stories We Tell. It is available, listeners, wherever books are bought or borrowed. And kj, I can't wait to have you back on the show to talk about whatever miraculous book you write. Next.
- [43:49]
KJ Baelo
Thanks, Holly. And one more thing. The audiobook is narrated by me, so.
- [43:55]
Holly Gattery
Well, there are. That's a what? I love that. And I love audiobooks because they're so wonderfully accessible. I have listened to so many audiobooks while traveling. So thank you for mentioning that. Yeah. So everybody have a wonderful day. KJ cannot wait to have you back on the show.
- [44:10]
KJ Baelo
Thanks, Hollywood.
- [44:25]
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