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Dan Kennedy (1:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com with the holidays almost here, you don't have time to go to the post office. There's traffic and parking. It's going to be packed with everyone mailing holiday gifts and packages, so use stamps.com instead. With stamps.com you can buy and print official US postage right from your own computer and printer, and it's easy and convenient. Plus, stamps.com will give you a digital scale. It automatically calculates the exact postage you need for any letter or package. You can print the postage directly onto envelopes, labels, plain paper, and then you just hand the mail to your mail carrier. With stamps.com you'll never have to go to the post office again. Right now there's a special offer for listeners of the Moth podcast, a no risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer that includes a digital scale and up to $55 free postage. Don't wait. Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in moth. That's stamps.com and enter moth. Okay, you guys have been angrily demanding that we release an app. Now you've been politely inquiring is really what you've been doing. Well, here's the thing. We have an app now. The Moth app is here for iOS and Android. Listen to all your favorite stories and enjoy the Moth app Okay, so the story that you're about to hear today is by Dana Goodyear, and it was told live in New York a couple months ago at the New Yorker Festival. The theme of the night was Personal Histories, and the show featured stories about life at the famous magazine.

Dana Goodyear (2:52)

I got to the New Yorker in 1999. I was 22 years old, and I immediately recognized what a special place it was. Nobody made eye contact in the halls. Nobody spoke in the elevator. Nobody spoke above murmur at all, if it could be avoided. The first time I remember a writer directly addressing me other than to ask me to do a little bit of research, was one day Malcolm Gladwell stopped in front of the partition to my cubicle and said that he never again was going to use the word I in one of his stories. The writer that he most admired at the magazine, he said, had never used I. And this was the standard for elegance in writing for a New Yorker writer. The section of the magazine that I wanted to write for, the talk of the town, actually had an explicit rule that you couldn't use I. So contributors would do all kinds of maneuvers to avoid using I. There were amused bystanders and amateur investigators. And when I got my first stories published, I resorted to an even more wallflowerish alter ego and used somebody. So in my pieces, when somebody says something or does something, that's me. I moved out to Los Angeles, and I started writing about food and the emerging food movement there. And after a couple of stories, David Remnick called and said, okay, you can keep doing this. This is fun. We like it. But you need to be a presence in these stories. And I thought that was wonderful. I had real direction and real permission to do something. And it also made a huge amount of sense to me because food writing is, you know, the job of the writer is to provide vicarious pleasure for the reader. And I really belonged in the stories in a way. But doing that would mean undoing all the ways in which I taught myself to be publishable in the New Yorker. So not only did I try to avoid I, but I when reporting, I tried to be sort of the person without qualities. So I would arrive, you know, without any preferences, without any opinions, never taking a sip of water, never going to the bathroom. I mean, I just was you, you know, neutrality herself. And so I had to really work on it. And I started to write about some of the crazier aspects of foodieism. And I was writing about raw milk smuggling operations and people eating insects and every kind of organ meat you can Imagine. And I was starting to put myself in the stories. And it was fun. It was hard, but it was fun. And however, I still didn't tell the magazine when I became pregnant with my second child, for quite a while I was in California. They weren't going to know what was going on with me. And I didn't want those assignments to dry up. I wanted to keep doing this crazy stuff. I also didn't tell the people that I was writing about for as long as I could get away with it. Because we've all seen what happens when a pregnant lady eats in a restaurant. You know, it's very destabilizing. But for a pregnant lady to be doing some of the stuff that I was doing was really. I felt that it would just intrude on the story so much and people would talk about nothing but that. And of course, I was there to be writing down what they were talking about that was related to the food. So I kept it quiet. And, you know, when you're writing about food, you can be 20 pounds overweight and nobody notices. So it was how I found myself four and a half months pregnant, sitting down to lunch with a bunch of adventurous diners eating ox penis soup and a dessert of frog fallopian tubes. They were none the wiser. By this point, I was working on a book about these experiences, and I realized that the book was due soon and the baby was due, and I needed to find a place for this narrative to land. There was something going on which I had sort of nervously been tracking out of the corner of my eye in the food movement. And that was everybody was trying to do something more outrageous and more outrageous and more outrageous. And so the final taboo of cannibalism was actually something that people were starting to talk about. Anthony Bourdain said at a food festival that he would taste human flesh. He may have been joking, but he said it. I was hanging out with these women in New York who were making cheese out of human breast milk and doing lacto way pickling out of human way. And as an exploration of the limits of locavorism, there are no cows in Manhattan anymore, so you have to bring milk with you. Get the idea? I interviewed a woman who was part of a sort of extreme eating club who told me with great bitterness that when she'd had a kidney removed, the hospital wouldn't let her take it home because she had wanted to cook it and eat it. And even Daniel Patterson, whose restaurant in San Francisco has two stars from the Michelin Guide described for Me making a Bolognese out of his wife's placenta. And of course, he's a chef and you don't serve something without tasting it. It was for her, but he tasted it. So there I was, nine and a half months pregnant, and I realized that for a very limited time, I had a small window of opportunity here. If I was going to explore this, I was going to have to eat my placenta. It was a question. Could I eat a human organization? Could I insert myself this far into the narrative? Could I be such a hack? That was the real scary question. Four days after my child was born, the doorbell rang. There was a very cute, neat woman standing there. She had on a flared skirt with black polka dots on it and red sandals that were rubber. She was carrying a two gallon bucket of bleach, a sheath of knives, and a red Le Creuset steamer. She was a professional placenta cook. She disinfected my kitchen. She removed from the fridge the organ which had been thawing there, and she set to work. My husband walked in the room and though I had tried to prepare him for this, he was nonetheless unprepared. He looked quite disturbed. I didn't blame him. I was looking at this thing. It was disturbing, it was glistening, it was livid. It was the most, just the most intimidating piece of meat I've ever seen. And at this point, I had seen and eaten so much. And I just, you know, I thought with real horror about what I was contemplating doing. And the exploitation of myself that it represented was actually a bigger problem for me than the meat itself. So Sarah, the placenta cook, was doing her thing and she picked up the placenta and she sort of slid her hands under a membrane and opened them out like this. And she sort of said, guys, right here, this is where your baby lived. And it was an incredibly transforming thing to say. All of a sudden, this frightening piece of meat was something else entirely. It was the home where. It was the place where our baby grew from being a few cells to being a miniature person. And it was actually beautiful. And my husband felt that too. He took my hand and we sort of looked at this space that she had created with her hands. And I felt grateful that I had gotten us to this crazy place, actually, because we otherwise never would have seen that. Incredibly, it felt like a real privilege to. To see that space. And it also felt so private. And it felt like. And it felt like it was our child's privacy too. It wasn't just too private for me to write about, for myself. It was for her sake. So I decided that I couldn't. This was too far. This was too far into the story. I could not write about it. I won't ever write about it. I know that I will continue to struggle with this question of how much of me belongs in my writing. But in the meantime, I did come up with a little rule for myself, which is that I can write about eating and I can write about myself, but I can't write about eating myself.