From Troubled Past to Writing Success | Rob Henderson

When you're writing Memoir the question isn't who am I but who am I in this story how do you do this break it down people like to make themselves look good perhaps look better than they really are so you're going to go into a memoir a little bit suspicious what you're saying is the more trepidation you have about sharing something the more that you should put that in your Memoir I decided to bring the reader in with me and do All I could to resurface those old memories from living in a slum apartment in La

placed into foster care divorces separations remarriages Financial catastrophes so how do you go from that to 300 whatever pages of a memoir this is something I've only recently realized [Music] was Rob Henderson is the author of troubled which is a memoir about what is like to grow up in the foster care system and what his life was like how we Got from that to then going to Yale and Cambridge and enrolling in the military if you want to learn to tell your personal story how to write a memoir then this episode is for you well

you're going to learn how to do is how to go back into your past how to excavate the depths of what you've been through and put your experiences on the page in a way that's therapeutic for you and captivating and entertaining for others so if you're somebody who wants to get Better about personal writing writing your own experiences you're going to love this episode with Rob Henderson so Rob why did you decide to write this book we'll get going with some momentum here by the time I got to college um I started to interact with

a lot of different people and and over time I would divulge pieces of my life to them and I would see the look of shock and sometimes horror on their faces and gradually I came to recognize That there is an entire segment of society the segment of society the whatever you want to refer to them as the elite the future ruling class what have you that really has no firsthand connection to uh the places where I grew up the kinds of people that I interacted with up until um I arrived D at Yale and so

at some point I I made this decision you know first or second year of college maybe someday I'll write a book probably middle age maybe later sometime in the Distant future but forces aligned and you know different kinds of interactions occurred I met different kinds of people and decided um to write this book much sooner than IID anticipated and I was nervous about it because you know writing a I mean I think started writing the book I was 29 or 30 and it I felt a little um you know it's it's it's immodest to write

a book at such a young age right and I remember I had this conversation with a professor At Cambridge Cambridge England when I was doing my my PhD and I was telling him yeah I'm writing this book but I'm having these doubts and these uncertainties and it's just like am I too young to write a book like this and he you know in his very Posh British accent he was like oh come on you know writing a book it's such a young age it's it's an American tradition you know like he was telling me you

know people people like uh ter West over and JD Vance and so many others Barack Obama wrote Jes for my father I think he was in his early 30s and so a lot of people yeah uh do write Memoirs at a young age especially if they've had unique life experiences so I decided um yeah to just go for it and in hindsight I'm glad I did it this way because you know as you get older memory is already imperfect regardless but you know when you try to recall those childhood memories as you get older Becomes

harder they become fuzzier and less specific and detailed but you know I was still young writing this book and I could recall with a lot of clarity and vividness just what my Early Childhood was like and I also had the benefit of having my friends you know when you're very old a lot of your friends are dead and you know I've talked to people who've written their own autobiographies and Memoirs and they're like yeah my it was hard to find those sources for to Corroborate different memories but for me my friends are young my younger

sister um My adoptive sister who I write about I spoke with her and yeah we could kind of see do we share the same Recollections of what occurred and their memories are also very fresh too so there were benefits I think also to writing a book like this at such a young age so tell me this what did you learn in the process about writing Memoirs like what do you know now that you Didn't know when you started I thought I was ready for it right away because I had written so many personal essays um

on my newsletter I'd written a couple of personal essays in the New York Times and other outlets and I just thought you know a book will be like that but longer um and once I sat down and realized you know whatever the the book contract said 80 85,000 words that's 300 something pages and I'm like oh that's like 300 pages is very different from a thousand Words or 3,000 words um and I I was paralyzed for I think the first six months and I started to ask other memoirists for their advice reading books about writing

and over time I came to learn that a memoir is not just a a loose heap of anecdotes of just here's this thing that happened to me here's this other thing um and then and then and then and then you get to the end right Rather a memoir is supposed to center around a specific theme um what are what do you want the reader to get from this story what does each story you're telling communicate and how do they all tie back to that one specific theme or maybe two specific themes so would that be

this foster care family and social class which is on the cover were those the three themes those were the themes specifically family but family foster care social those are all Kind of tied up with one another um and I wanted to communicate that you know we talk a lot about class social Mobility what are the predictors of success and with this book I wanted to talk about family instability and fragmentation deterioration how a lot of this of course there are material factors here economic inequality poverty all of those things matter but I wanted to communicate

that yes that was a part of my life but what was really sort of Weighing me down as I was growing up was the repeated instability moving to different homes divorces separations remarries Financial catastrophes um often adults making uh poor decisions and then later as a result of that making poor decisions myself I have this line early in the preface that when adults let children down they learn to let themselves down and that was true In my case it was true in the cases of many of my my friends as well and so at some

point during that sort of six-month period between signing the deal and actually sitting down to write the book I came across this line um when you're writing Memoir the the question isn't who am I but who am I in this story H and I thought about that for a long time and I realized that I was approaching the book entirely wrong I thought I was Going to write this kind of retrospective account oh back when I was a kid here's what happened and here's some research and here's some statistics kind of you know people who

may be familiar with some of my other writing or my substack they know that I like to draw on research and psychology and sociology and that's how I thought this book was going to be um the adult rob you know there's this idea of um the voice of innocence and the voice of Experience in Memoir so the voice of innocence is you're communicating the story from your perspective at that specific age you're an innocent person totally blind to why these things are happening and the context surrounding it you don't even know why you're making the

decisions you're making and then the voice of experience is you're looking back in hindsight now you know oh I did that because of this or this person did that because I did this and you have That context and that's how I thought I was going to write from the voice of experience but instead I realized I had to write from the voice of Innocence because I wanted to bring the reader in with me I looked online and asked around for Memoirs like this are there Memoirs written by foster kids who've had unusually successful outcomes there

are very few of them most foster care Memoirs are written by foster parents who talk about Their experience raising kids but there aren't many from the perspective of the children and so it's possible that this will be you know sort of one of the very few that a reader will ever encounter maybe the only one and so I decided to bring the reader in with me and do all I could to resurface those old memories from when I was with my mom um living in a slum apartment in La um the feeling that I had

the only Two memories of being taken from her by the police placed into foster care um seeing her in handcuffs uh the emotions that came up when I would have to move to different foster homes every few months um and not just the feeling of instability and inner turmoil from being moved but also seeing my foster siblings taken and and so I was writing each chapter from that perspective okay I'm 3 years old Here I'm 6 years old here I'm 9 years old here and trying my best to recall what it was like to be

a kid during that time and I found it was actually like easier than I expected a lot of those memories were fresher um than I would have predicted of I can still recapture that how did these words Foster Care Family social class how did they serve as a kind of prism and a razor that you used in the editing Process to say if it doesn't connect to those things I'm going to cut it yeah yeah I mean I yeah I wanted to Center the entire story around these themes around family around class social mobility and

yeah there there were stories that were you know the the original manuscript was maybe 100,000 words and I ended up cutting whatever 20% of it something like that and initially right you want to you Want to write more than you need um you know it's much easier to build a sculpture from a giant block of ice than to take a little ice cube and turn it into something right and so I just poured everything you know every story that I could remember every single meaningless pointless interaction I ever had with my friends that for whatever

reason I I remembered that was kind of my well if I remember it it must mean something was This like a dock yeah yeah yeah yeah I had like like a master dock of like everything and it and then through the editing process does this center around these themes you know does this pointless interaction matter you know because I think I tell maybe one or two very um you know kind of amusing but also um uh you know foolish stories of me drinking when I was a teenager and I had way more than two I

mean I had maybe I I Could probably call a dozen of those but do I need to tell all 12 stories for the reader to get the idea that yeah I was a stupid kid who would drink and drive and get into trouble andace my friends on the freeway or whatever um and you don't need to tell that story four or five and what's funny is like even even then like even though I paired it down to just those two I still sometimes will see these reviews and they're like yeah I got a little rep

Repetitive these these teenage Antics um there are um passages in the middle of the book where I'm talking about my experience in the military and honestly like day-to-day military life is like mind numbing boring like it's just like vast stretches of nothing with periods of like very high Ops Tempo very fast pace but I didn't want to take the reader through like all of that sort of minutia of here's how do how you make Like a bed with perfect corners and here's how you fold your like what basic training is actually like is just so

yeah but yeah that what you just said here's how you make a bed with perfect Corners what's really interesting what you unintentionally just did was you shared an anecdote in one sentence and you don't need to take somebody through whole thing but just the fact you said here's how you make a bed with perfect Corners you actually just communicated so much about what it's like being in the military and I think that's a lot of the art of good writing and making something come alive is you don't need your anecdotes to be a whole chapter

it can just be one sentence or one phrase or one little thing here good go yeah yeah and then just you're right and then the reader can infer right oh like that was what life was like is like this minutia around bed making and so yeah I Think I glossed over kind of the mundane realities military training and maybe one or two pages but yeah I could have stretched I think the original draft Yeah I must have stretched it on for eight or nine pages and really like you just gloss right over it right like

that's sort of the like the magic of Storytelling I distinctly remember you know I I have like movie references and pop culture references in the book from when I was a kid the 90s the 2000s and I Remember in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base like just how you know like wake up at 4:45 go to physical training the whole thing and I remember the back of my mind thinking like the training montages and movies go by so fast but in real life training is just endless right it's like like eight weeks in real

life versus you know 45 seconds in a movie and yeah and it's like that with writing you know I have to communicate very quickly here's what uh Training was like here's what day-to-day life was like but you know give the reader a sense of it and move right along and so that's something else that that I learned is that you have to make it interesting to the reader while also trying to be true to the actual experience there's something here too around around time and time dilutes in a memoir so you have things like that

with exactly the example you just shared then a movie the training is 30 45 seconds Even though it's actually eight months long but it's funny in my head your move from Los Angeles to Red Bluff you get on the airplane you're going up it's like this long drive with these new parents you really stretch that out because that's an important moment and so it's the expansion and the contraction that's where you can emphasize certain things too yeah yeah that's a good point yeah because it was it was a big move for me the other thing

that you were conscious About was not making yourself look too good taking out stories that made you look like wow I'm Rob Henderson tell me about that well I mean so again you know I I have some stories in the book about you know the same kind of theme or interaction but I had to pair it down and so violence was pervasive like fist fights wrestling all these kinds of things and you know getting punched you know breaking fingers breaking bones and there were you know I think Most of the fights in the book I

lose but in real life I wanton some fights too but I'm like do I need to tell that story of winning some fight what does it communicate what's the point and so and funny enough you know the the fights that made some kind of difference in my life or um had kind of supported the general point of the book these were fights that I lost and those were the ones that stood out to me and so those were the ones I told of yeah getting Beaten up or getting um sucker punched or getting jumped or

all those kinds of things those were those often occurred when my life was sort of unraveling or spiraling out of control um often when I like win fights that's usually when um you know I was I was managing to contain my energy or my um impulses toward toward uh acting out or risk risk-taking behaviors um there were other things too so in in the final foster home I lived in Um I tell a story in the book of how I nearly drowned and you know drowning doesn't look like it does in the movies you know

people think of drowning and like oh you're splashing and flailing and screaming for help what real drowning typically looks like is treading water like you're just trying to keep your head above and trying to like gasp for air and you don't have enough oxygen to start calling for help and this is actually How a lot of kids die drowning like a crazy number of kids each year drown in swimming pools because people don't know what drowning looks like um and so I'm treading water and I'm trying to like frantically grab the side of the pool

my foster mom sees me and she you know takes her time getting the pool rake extends it out she's she has a cordless phone and she's like kind of talking to her friend as she's pulling me out and I'm like frantically trying to breathe She pulls me out and um you know for me this was like this very scary moment but for her it was you know she she was uh not not the most sort of nurturing and warm Foster mother um and I tell other stories these interactions that I had with her but later

about let's see so I was seven then so I was N9 n and a half uh after I was adopted I was at this party and so I I told this story in the original version of the book and I took it out and this is one Of those things where it made me look too good so I had to drop it it was my younger sister's friend's birthday so we were at her friend's parents house her family house was like her sixth birthday something like that and me my sister a bunch of other little

kids were surrounding the birthday cake we see all these presents admiring all the gift wrap presents what's inside of these what you know what did she get and it was a pool party and there was a Swimming pool and in the distance one of my sister's friends the little girl she was in the pool kind of treading water and people were ignoring her and this was I mean this was the late '90s probably parents then were a little less attentive than they are now this was was like you know parents were drinking beer and barbecuing

and kind of loud music they were doing their own thing and they're like oh you know the kids can handle themselves and um but I knew what Drowning looked like because I had drowned and I recognized that kind of you know that that kind of um uh paddling movement that she was doing sure and so I ran over and I pulled her out of the pool and um you know it was funny because at the time we didn't even make a big deal we didn't tell anyone I just pulled her out and like are you

okay and she's like yeah I think I'm okay and like okay just went back to the birthday cake and like you know as a Little kid those aren't like profound moments but um in hindsight uh you know that was like a big moment for me of just like yeah because I told my sister that and and she was shocked by it years later I told her that story and so I put it in the book originally and then I thought to myself why is this in here what is how does it Center on these three

themes is it about me what does it communicate and ultimately I came to the conclusion That you know I put it in there because of my own ego you know I tried to maybe stretch this connection with oh I drowned and then I learned this lesson and helped someone else or but that's not what I was thinking as a nine-year-old kid um that's not what was going on and so I ended up dropping it let's talk about stories how did you think about what kind of stories were story worthy worthy of sharing and how did

you think about the pacing of Specific stories um so first I just told every story like I mentioned I literally put down every single story I could possibly remember and then going through it again I reread it um tried to fill in the details and then I lingered on it and if it me it made me feel something then I would keep it and it wasn't it's not necessarily a rational process of well this is bringing up these emotions and these feelings and these ways in this order it was more so a gut feeling Of

like I'm feeling something um often it was just fear of like this kind of self-consciousness of like this makes me look bad or I feel very vulnerable revealing this about myself and the stronger that feeling was the more likely I was to keep it in and so that's a great Insight the more scared Yeah the more vulnerable you feel the more trepidation you have about sharing something the more that you should put that in your Memoir the greater the Feeling of possibly being judged or looked upon as weak or pathetic um powerless defenseless and so

yeah the intensity of those emotions correlated with the likelihood of me retaining the story in the book The other thing was it was kind of a darwinian process writing this book where of course like I would give it a first pass as after I put all the stories down I would go through okay do I like this story or not like but like Is this story um consistent with the themes of the book should I keep it in how does it make me feel and then I started sending it to different writer friends author friends

people that I knew who were accomplished in some way in writing and I would ask them to give me some feedback um ask them some questions and if they gave if if more than if two or more of my writer friends came back With the same piece of feedback then I would almost always incorporate it you know because it's it's very messy there's a lot of noise with these kinds of things writing to some extent is subjective you can send the same piece of writing to two very qualified and talented editors and get completely opposite

um pieces of feedback um but I figured you know if I send this thing out to 10 writers and of those 10 two of them say hey you need to cut this this Doesn't make sense or can you say a little bit more about this or you know these stories aren't intersecting properly that usually meant like okay I need to do something about this so it was just that process of asking people um did you get bored where did you get bored and if two people said this story them I would just cut it if

two people said this story is excellent then I would I would retain it even if by the time I got to the editing stage with my Publisher I would I would battle to keep it um and so yeah it was just that sort of process of trusting myself but also trusting that um you know that idea of of uh that interrater reliability of multiple people giving the same kind of advice I would follow and the pacing tell me about that so I knew in advance that this I didn't want it to be like a misery

Memoir I didn't want people to just like come away feeling down um so one thing that I did right away in Chapter one was I basically started at the end or I talk about my Yale graduation right away and that was essentially to communicate to the reader that this story is going to have a happy ending but we're going to have a lot of difficulty and obstacles and setbacks and pain to get through before we get there and you know I've seen reviews and multiple people multiple people have Mentioned this that I'm glad you did

that because if we started write from when you're being taken from your mother I don't know if I could have gotten through this book so they knew okay there's going to be this ending how does how does it happen um and so then for each chapter I tried to structure it in that way of like high low high low of tell this story that's kind of a downer but then the next story try to tell something entertaining or amusing to get The reader to laugh or emotional variant exactly so each chapter has to have a

few of those emotional Optics down swings and so on and then um and then from chapter to chapter I tried to have that where like maybe one chapter is particularly um you know induces this kind of feeling of low mood in the reader but the next chapter will bring the reader up a little bit and so I tried to do that within chapters and Then kind of across chapters too uh and it was hard I mean I don't know how successful I was at that but I didn't want to be um entirely um sad or

entirely happy I wanted to have that yeah that emotional varience and I think that also sort of introduces some novelty and introduces a bit of um what uh diversity I suppose in in the reader experience is you're writing something like this and you're going Through many different years right you're telling a memoir that happens over 25 30 years how do you think that the voice changing you know you're you're 5-year-old kid and now you're 12 years old and now you're at Yale and Cambridge you're completely different person like you're you go from hey I don't

like to read at all to wait oh my goodness I can read things and these letters actually are supposed to part a story and then you're like a gamebridge Student so how does the voice change throughout throughout the piece well yeah I tried to tell each chapter from that perspective and so over time the language it starts out very in that kind of plain style very straightforward very unsophisticated um and then each chapter becomes slightly more complex and then by the end I'm just speaking with like the voice that I have now the way that

I normally write but it was difficult at first you know I I had to go back and Think okay how was I thinking about the world when I was seven or eight years old um how did my friends and I speak how do we communicate what's an example of this like what is something that you would say when you're seven eight that like you definitely wouldn't say now and how does that show up in the book yeah I mean one thing that that comes immediately to mind is just that uh the story I told when

my My adoptive parents um they sent this video cassette Uh to my final Foster mother to show me and it was their way of introducing themselves to me um and so she popped this cassette into the VCR and the first thing they say is hi Rob or hi Robbie or something and I'm looking and I'm shocked I'm like wow it's true like people in TV can see us just like we can see them and I tell that story in the book of when you're a little kid a lot of little kids have this feeling of

like okay we can see them can they see us are They watching me the way that I'm watching them and yeah I I tell that that that story in the book this is how style and substance can work together where you have the substance of what you're saying and obviously you're trying to communicate what you went through as a kid but this is where style comes in hey what words did I use what was the passage of time like hey I'm a short kid like what are the sorts of things that I would see and

almost Inhabiting that childish mind really adds texture and Life to what it is that you're saying Beyond just I was in this foster care system and then I dealt with this thing if you can really inhabit who you were at that time and it's funny because at the beginning of the book you you're like this is what I did so don't get mad at me for saying things that I wouldn't say now oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean you know the words they're like the the words that we would Use yeah today would be

considered offensive or insensitive or what have you but those I mean those words are still th what's funny is that I I sent this book to a school teacher um who herself is an author and somewhere in the book I say you know back back then you know when I was in high school kids would throw around this word gay as a synonym for bad oh that's so gay yeah and people and I said that's what kids used to do That's what I wrote and she wrote me back saying uh kids still do that I'm

like oh okay I didn't know that um now to be fair she's a teacher at an inner city high school where you know maybe they they don't have the sort of you know the gential manners of upper middle class parents who like are so sensitive about language but yeah she was telling me you know maybe things haven't changed as much as I thought but I did want to communicate to the reader like I know This language is bad and offensive and what have you but this was like every day you know and that was something

I wrestled with too was do I want to communicate this how much do I want to sanitize what life was like back then in terms of the language the violence the drugs the bad decisions and I decided to just put it in there yeah is there ever a time where honesty is not the way that you want to go so far at every juncture you've said I've just been more honest More true is there ever time where you don't want to do that I think when it comes to other people maybe um so when it

came to myself I tried to be as honest as I could and I'm sure there were areas where I fell short you know self-deception being what it is maybe I I there's probably even more dirt that I could have dug up but I just didn't but when it comes to writing about others I wanted to be fair I wanted to be um you know I didn't want to like make people Look worse than than they would have been okay with and so I think that is those are those are harder decisions um when it comes

to your experience of them your memories of them um I think it's good to be as honest as possible but then when it comes to sort of of rendering judgment or um trying to make some kind of character evaluation of another person I think it's better to just refrain from doing that I think for myself I would comment here and there Like this was a bad decision or I'm embarrassed about this but for others I wouldn't um have made that kind of um meta commentary what's the story in here that was the hardest to include

in the final book you were like I can't do that I I I I can't ship it and and why how'd you get the courage to fight through that uh the story that was the hardest um there were so there are two that come immediately to mind so one was the the chapter where I went to rehab because I've never talked about that or written about that in any other uh capacity I've never written an essay I've never posted anything on my newsletter that was completely new for a lot of people and I think unexpected

um and then the other that was really hard for me to put down on the page was that the scene in the movie theater parking lot with my mom and her partner Shelly and their kind of separation and breakup um yeah because I I think that even it was hard for me but it was also hard because I knew like it would be hard for my mom to relive that through reading it and my sister was there too and that was like a very um emotionally challenging moment for for all of us um and so

yeah I just didn't want to you know put anyone through any more pain than they had already had experienced at that time but it was for me a very vivid memory and it was one of several things that occurred in short Succession that led me to enlist in the military so I had to put it in there um but you know there were moments where I was like is there any other way that I could communicate this without telling that story and um at the end I had I had to keep it in one of

the things with your alcohol struggles that really struck me was that my senses that you weren't able to process what you had been through there's this beautiful question and Answer where you get asked why did you feel comfortable expressing your anger but no other negative emotions and you say because I didn't want to move again I thought that if I cried or showed other signs of pain then maybe they'd put me in another home yeah and what I take from from that is that you were just suppression suppression suppression both suppression with others but also

suppression with yourself and now you're writing a memoir and you have To do exactly the opposite this like radical vulnerability yeah yeah I remember that because at some point what I what I think happened was that those the relocations And the emotions got intertwined and I kind of confused cause and effect there as a little kid where what I I'm I moved and then I cried but at some point I thought oh I'm crying and that's why they're moving me right and that Somehow stuck with me even as an adult those two things such that

you know I I just suppressed it you know the sadness the the um emotional turmoil and yeah I it took a long time I think for me to you know I I describ this sort of uncovering all of that and how I managed to deal with it weirdly through drinking where almost regardless of what I was feeling the drinking became the excuse where if I was happy I would drink and then I could say oh I'm Happy because I'm drinking uh oh I'm sad well I'll start drinking and that'll sort of control the the emotions

and anything bad that happens as a result I can blame the alcohol and I I never had to sort of address my feelings directly um and and really I mean we the substance abuse and the interest in finding different ways to chase you know chemical buzz it started I mean I I talk about how I started drinking beer in the foster homes when I Was five and then we started drinking tequila when I was nine and then cigarettes and as a kid it was it was hard to deal with those feelings and so I you

know what's around me how do I how do I forget oh okay I'll take these pills and drink this alcohol this is something that I struggle with which is writing my own personal experience and two things the first is Excavating The Depths and bringing that stuff out that's one thing but then the second Thing is knowing what's interesting and what's not interesting to me it's like well it's my experience I went through it of course it's interesting and I have a very hard time making a value judgment on what to keep and what to remove

what's going be interesting what's boring how did you think about both getting the stuff out and then knowing what to keep and what to cut yeah uh yeah the excavation I don't want to say it was it was easy but it was That like the vomit draft of just pouring it all out there everything every detail every meaningless interaction just get it down on the page first you can figure it out later so that rehab chapter it it's so in the book it's very streamlined but originally it was this big bloated mess and then you

know to your earlier point about the the language changing over time in the book it was funny I I I I battled with my editors on this question Of because I remember I would send them the early chapters just to get a little feedback from them what are you guys thinking about and how how does this look and the early chapters the very common response was this language is too simple H um it's too unsophisticated like can we Elevate the pros a bit and you were like no no that is literally the opposite of what

I'm tried to I fought them on that and I said you don't understand what I'm doing yet but you Know maybe then that's when I said okay well let me you know once I send the later chapters you'll kind of understand you know how I'm telling the story was this at the time did you not have the note about this is how I'm going to do it because it wasn't an issue for me because you told me at the beginning of the book this is how I'm going to write the thing did they not have

that information have that yet I didn't know well at that point I think I did know But I hadn't told them it hadn't sort of sunk in and and really become a like concrete strategy yet it was just this thing that was existing in the back of my mind right and but I told them that this was the plan and I could tell they were a little apprehensive okay send us the other chapters you know once once we have a bit more we can see what we can do and then and then it was funny

because then I would send them the later chapters and The advice was the opposite make it simpler make it simpler yeah yeah and I down the language exact exactly like you know especially the chapters at Yale C and then they were like oh you know like you you know you may you may lose the reader with some of these sentences with some of the the language choices or the word choices and and actually it was funny for for those I did listen to them because I didn't I I wanted the reader to follow along I

didn't want them To uh think that I was being purposely abstruse or something and so when whenever they asked me to to simplify the language I would try to do so but if they tried to ask me to elevate it I would almost never do it um you that was one goal with this book um was so that like a curious 12-year-old could pick it up and understand it and I have had that experience now where little kids will tell me they read the book and sometimes you I don't know if it's Necessarily appropriate for

kids but it is comprehensible to kids and and my mom read it you know my mom didn't go to college and she read this book and she said yeah I appreciated that I was able to understand this book from start to finish um you know I didn't write it to impress other people with phds well it's funny because even the you have the citations at the bottom of of every page M at the beginning of the book no citations at the end of the book Sometimes you have three or four on one page so even

just in the increasing number of citations we can see how your thinking changes how you change and like you're literally an academic now with citations at its core but as a as a four-year-old kid a seven-year-old kid no there's nothing to say you're just telling your story yeah that was a kind of a tight rope that I had to walk of trying to communicate to the reader okay so here's this kid mired in squalor And chaos and instability so how does he go on to enlist in the Air Force and then get into y then

get a PhD like how do I tell that story in a way that's like believable to the reader too right because it's that's one of the things about sort of telling telling even real life narrative stories is like if you don't communicate it in the right way people won't believe you even if it really happened and so I had to tell this story in a way that the reader can Follow along and understand at each step okay this I I understand this I accept it it's believable and now I understand how he got to where

he is now and yeah that was that was kind of um I had to make these kind of strategic choices throughout the Book of you know revealing to the reader that I had difficulty early on in school I didn't know how to read when I was in second grade eventually I did become this curious kid I read a lot but that Habit kind of waxed and waned that underlying potential was always there um so that by the time I do start to become more academically focused the reader can see that and understand it and believe

it rather than I barely graduated high school and then I get to Yale and there's no connective tissue in between that can be very jarring I think so I had to find ways to to insert those stories about myself in the book I don't want to let you off the hook For getting into how you excavated the really difficult emotional experiences yeah yeah I mean it was I I lived it you know the better part of four years writing this book where yeah I I I put everything down and I would try to you know

I had different strategies for how I would attempt to resurface memories I listen to the music from the air I had the Spotify playlist from the 90s I like I order smells like King Spirit by Nirvana the best one and yeah I ordered the same food and like drinks you know like I I bought Dr Thunder from Walmart that I hadn't done in I don't know 15 20 years um eating yeah going out eating generic cookies and you know you know I wouldn't eat a lot but I would smell them you know I'd open the

package and and I would just try to immerse myself in it as best I could wow and yeah all these memories would start to to come back to Me so you're saying is you activated your other senses yes exactly yeah I mean that's I mean that's interesting like smell in particular seems to have like the strongest connection with with um memory long long-term memory yeah and and sort of retrieving those those old uh Recollections and yeah like you know I remember I had this you know when I was stationed in Germany my ex at the

time bought me this scented candle and I Bought that same candle trying to remember what was what was my life like you know in 2012 2013 when I was this 21-year-old kid living in Germany um stationed uh at Ramstein Airbase so yeah it was tough man it was like so during the process of writing I would bring up these memories do all these little tricks and strategies and approaches and then I would take naps in the middle of the afternoon and I'm I usually don't take naps I'm not a nap person but after A stretch

of writing suddenly I would just pass out I would just fall asleep for an hour and then come to and and you know do something else but you know at the time it was funny I you I attributed it to like because this was kind of during the lockdowns during covid and I that was what I was I'm like oh you know we're all sad we're all depressed because we're all locked inside and that's why I'm sleeping um but really what was probably going on is just the Level of emotional difficulty and pain of reliving

all of these things and yeah it would just be emotionally exhausting and it was a different I mean just amazing because writing is you know you think you're just sitting down at a computer and typing just writing you're just thinking and I was writing this book at the same time I was writing my PhD thesis and the and I would alternate Monday really took it easy EXA and and I I would like I would be so grateful like Oh tomorrow is a PhD thesis day not a book day because that kind of writing said no

one ever right because that kind of writing is more natur it comes more naturally and easily later chaps of this B were easier to write the chaps because it's deted sociological like said footnotes more academic in the style but those early memories man it was just like I would dread it sure yeah yeah oh my goodness tell me about this in one of your Substack pieces you wrote sometimes I'd wake up at 3:00 a.m. because a long dormant memory would resurface I dashed to my computer and start typing before it faded away yeah yeah I

mean cuz I I'd made the the mistake of waking up in the night remembering something and like I'll definitely remember this when I wake up and I never did and so I learned my lesson and yeah anytime something came to i' I'd have these yeah these memories of you know just just um things I hadn't thought about in years of yeah like you know that that uh story in the book of of you know vomiting at the Jack In The Box drive through I hadn't thought about that and you know I was kind of it's

like shameful right and so I did you know a lot of your like you know and this is like verified corroborated in psychological research that you know memories that we're ashamed of or embarrassed about or make us look bad we try to forget those those Kind of get put in the recycling bin of our mind but through doing everything I could to bring those memories back at you know some part of my unconscious mind was searching and going through these semiconscious swirls of memory and you know when I was asleep sometimes they would come up

and yeah I would you know rumaging through them and uh then I'd sit at my computer at 3:00 a.m. and just type down a few sentences and yeah the next morning I'd Wake up and fill in all the blanks and try to remember what else I'd call up an old friend do you remember that time we were at Jack In The Box what do you remember and yeah try to try to put it all together so yeah it was it was a really uh in a lot of ways it was a really unpleasant period of

time writing this book and it was funny because when I started I I kind of approached it as like I'm a full fully grown man I was in the Air Force you know I'm about to get A PhD I'm like you know everything in my life is good everything's great this is like the most comfortable financially secure I could have ever hoped for so I can go back and kind of tell this story and no these it was you know the wounds were fresher than I thought and the feelings were all still there and dayto

day you know you don't most people don't spend their day sitting around thinking about their childhood but if you do that like Yeah and and so you know it's funny like in a way I think I'm I'm glad I wrote it because it's there and I don't have to think about it right because I've sort of it's been sort of cognitively outsourced into the book and if I want to revisit it I can but I don't have to think about it anymore um and yeah I can't imagine ever writing a book like this again um

there are kind of professional memoirists who seem to write essays about themselves quite Regularly very good but I yeah I can't do that that was like the one and done here's the story and uh and it's probably for the best honestly um I think good stories in general are driven by conflict and the first 30 years of my life 25 years there was a lot of it but you know no one wants to read about my life now it's pretty boring now so you know it's uh yeah it was the right time to write it

and then maybe the right time to stop Doing anymore of these types of books what' you learn about writing dialogue what makes for good dialogue writing dialogue doesn't actually sound like conversation conversation is much messier than dialogue but dialogue can't be too clean either otherwise it doesn't sound believable um and so yeah it was you know there were there were conversations I had as a little kid with this therapist that I had to see um this woman Janet and I had to come you know Remember the language of this you know 40s something year old

woman and then communicate the dialogue of my you know 10-year-old self and remember what that sounded like and the kinds of Beats of those patterns of conversation um those were actually some of the more challenging Parts was was the dialogue actually um so I went through those over and over you know what was this person like how did they speak um does it does it feel real will The reader believe it do I believe it and even my own language over time changing and evolving and maturing so yeah yeah yeah those were those were challenging

um to because it's also not entirely true right like those are probably the least accurate in some ways right because everything else you remember oh the this happened and this the sort of interactions occurred and um the sequence of events but then who actually Remembers word for word what someone said even last week right right but I had to sort of even if it wasn't factual it had to be truthful it had to be faithful to the spirit of that interaction of a kid and a therapist or a kid and his friends and and to

yeah does it actually seem to get at something that that has to that that requires dialogue and not some other form of Storytelling sure yeah so you're talking about Janet your Therapist and I want to just read it back and forth and then we can talk through it Janet is your therapist and you write Janet remains silent I Shrugged the teacher told us the guy who shot him was probably on drugs or drunk or whatever she told the class it was sad or like tragic that he died so young that is terrible can you tell

me a little more about what you just said Rob about people being here and gone I don't know why I said that I had a hunch about Where she might go with this I didn't want to have that conversation whenever she asked me anything too personal I'd either ignore her or give short answers and she wouldn't push so what I think is really interesting there is her comment your comment and then your analysis in between that and then if you look at the punctuation here we'll put it on the screen she told the class it

was sad comma or comma like comma tragic comma so even the punctuation is very Different with you you can almost feel the the trepidation the fits and the starts and with her it's a lot cleaner it's more adultish and you can really see the the personalities come out in the voice and the punctuation there yeah yeah I I I remember this and a lot of kids are like this right I was in that you know how old was I 10 maybe 11 you know you're kind of in that awkward prepubescent phase of especially when you're

interacting with adults that Uncertainty that feeling of um self-consciousness of you want to be seen as mature but you know you're this small little kid and so yeah I started with the sad and then switched to tragic because I wanted to tell her you know I I can use this word but if I had started out was saying the teacher said it was tragic that wouldn't have been that wouldn't have been true to the voice of a 10-year-old kid but it is that moment of okay I'm remembering what the teacher Said and I'm trying to

you know look more adult-like to my therapist and so I switch from sad to tragic to communicate to her that I remember this um and yeah right she she comes off like much more mature and she is very much that kind of the one with the um influence and the uh you know the sort of higher status in that interaction right she's the adult there so right and you were talking about calling your friend about throwing up in The Jack in the Box parking lot and talking to different people like your sister what were those

conversations like were they structured did you how forthright were you about what you were working on what what made those work um yeah they they knew I mean now I'm in this weird situation where like my high school friends will like text to me like you popped up on my YouTube algorithm kind of thing and it's like weird you know because you're Telling a story about me yeah yeah sometimes sometimes yeah now my my sister has read the book cover to cover I was very forthcoming with her up front as soon as I signed this

book deal I could tell she was a little uncomfortable with it and you know but I sent her you know some of the chapters and the rough draft of the manuscript and yeah she I think she had a difficult time at first for a lot of Reasons one was just I think she was unprepared for that first chapter where I'm talking about my experience in foster care and we're close like my sister and I were very close and I've never actually told her sort of beat by beat here's everything that happened you I've kind of

told her in Broad Strokes what it was like and she knows but like it's there's a difference between knowing and then seeing sort of vividly the details that was really hard on her Um but no I think she comes out looking pretty good my mom had some difficulty with it too but she's she ultimately accepted that like this this was a book that I had to write well in the acknowledgements it sounds like you had a conversation with JD Vance what was that like what did he teach you about writing Memoirs yeah so toward the

end of the Final Chapter I Think it is or the penultimate chapter I describ how I had this oped that was placed in the New York times and his his wife read it so Usha read that and emailed me and said she really enjoyed it she sent it to JD and then yeah we set up a phone call some weeks later and by that point you know literary agents were contacting me and I was thinking maybe I would possibly take on a book project and yeah JD basically told me you know don't Don't rush into

anything take your time do you get along with these agents what are their you know does your vision align um he told me that your idea for what the book will be will almost certainly change once you get started that happened yes that did and and it was funny because we almost had the same trajectory so he told me that he wanted hillbilly LGA to be mostly sociological like this kind of detached um almost academic work where He's describing the patterns and pathologies of Appalachia the white working class and so on and he said you

know but I would bring in some maybe some stories from my childhood to kind of illustrate these broader points but then eventually turned into the reverse where it became a very personal Memoir but he would bring in you know a bit of the sociological data and ethnography and so on I had the exact same experience where I wanted it to be more Of a uh an analysis of class and social mobility and with some stories interspersed and then it became a very personal Memoir why do you think that happens so I can't speak for J

I think for me people but especially young men I think are uncomfortable with personal narrative for a lot of reasons I think one is just again it feels immodest like is anyone really going to care about my personal story um that's that's one and then maybe one layer deeper is I don't Want to confront all those feelings and emotions and fears and vulnerabilities and bringing all of that out into the Limelight and it was a very different kind of writing that I was not used to I was unprepared for like what like the structure and

the narrative that Memoir demands of like you have to tell you know each each sort of vignette within a chapter has to be a story each chapter has to be a self-contained story and then each chapter has to be part of a Broader story and that was just way more demanding and exhausting than I anticipated and I didn't want to do that I wanted it to be like I'm comfortable with this kind of academic style this writing this you know references and footnotes and citation and that kind of thing drawing on statistics and Survey data

but ultimately um you know what was the point of the book is to communicate to people what this is really like right And there's there's a limit to abstractions and the kind of regimented methods of academics and Scholars versus biographies and Memoirs and stories personal stories they're just more immersive and so you know however much the social sciences bring under their sway however however detailed the accounts of historians and Ethnographers they're never going to fully capture kind of what everyday life is like for an actual human being right like you can read about some historians

account of what Rome was like versus like actually reading a biography of someone like it's much more immersive and it gives you a deeper feeling of what life was like at that time and so yeah at a certain point I realized I had to I had to tell my personal story in order to make these broader points what Did you learn from Tara Westover yeah I mean educated was a fantastic book um I mean it was better than my book uh in terms of its quality and its style I'm just like that's maybe one of

the best Memoirs I've ever read it is one of the best Memoirs I've ever read and I yeah I remember being intimidated a little when I spoke with her um but she turned out to be very nice so I've met her twice so I had a phone call with her and then she delivered a talk at Cambridge so she's a graduate of of Cambridge she spoke at modelin College one of the things she told me was kind of continuing on this point of personal narrative versus abstracted academic style writing I asked her you know I

don't know how to approach this should I tell my story or should I be more detached and she says that if you bring in data and statistics in the middle of a story You're going to lose the reader and she told me you're going to and she used this term I distinctly remember she said you're going to break the spell for the reader break the spell break the spell yeah and and I think that was perfect because if you read her book you are Spellbound because her writing is so beautiful and so immersive you know

at that point I'm thinking to myself oh suddenly she's bringing in statistics about living in a survivalist commun or Something yeah it would have shaken me out of this immersive experience so she told me you know you really have to think about what you want to do if it's going to be personal memor it has to be personal um I didn't fully uh Embrace that advice there are periods where I do introduce you are an academic exactly but I tried to resist it uh and the other thing she told me that I found interesting and

this is I've more or less found it to be true Is you want to draw people and characters sufficiently so that the reader can kind of recognize their patterns but you also want in order to sort of retain the reader attention also point out um stories where they deviate from those patterns so you expect the person to behave one way but then they surprise you and behave a different way and so I remember that as I was trying to recall okay my friends you know they were very predictable in a lot of ways But my

most unpredictable friend was Tyler where there are periods where you can't tell is he is he mostly a good guy does he just have this chip on his shoulder what kind of person is he uh so I tell the story in the book of how you know he he just gave me money for gas just didn't even ask any questions pulled out 28 bucks handed it to me and never asked me to pay him back um but then later he kicks this dog off a cliff and so there's you know it's it's I Tried to

sort of introduce those moments of surprise both for other people but then also for myself there were periods where you know you're not necessarily entirely sure which way I'll go so that was important I think and then finally she told me um because she wrote a lot about her family and educated and I asked her how hard was that for you and how did you approach that and she said the things that you think will Possibly upset people won't and the things that you think are completely innocuous and meaningless those are the things that are

going to get under people skin and I didn't really know what she meant by that but then once I wrote the book and yeah you know that I mentioned earlier my sister you know uh and I sort of debating back and forth about was she 17 was she 18 completely to me meaningless thing but for her it meant something like the Things that I thought might upset my mom for example telling all of these stories and everything she was she was fine with it um yeah it was very surprising uh you know the number of

houses that that she and shelle purchased I think I remembered it being three in total she insisted it was four those little things right but then when it comes to you know the drama in the parking lot or uh where we were when she told me that she was gay those those are The things where she's like come on you know she needs me to yeah so yeah yeah yeah those yeah that was a very helpful those two conversations I had with okay how' you think about ending a memoir what is important I want to

read your ending mom's friends were worried that their son isn't talking as much as other six-year-olds they like many parents were concerned with how smart their kid is should we be reading to him more they asked me I thought of how lonely I felt Trying to teach myself how to read as a foster kid yeah I replied but not because it will expand his vocabulary read to him because it will remind him that you love him mhm yeah ending a memoir is weird because you're still alive you know your life is still going um I

remember when I saw terara speak at Cambridge a few years ago and she was about to deliver this talk based on her book and she made this joke which at the time I didn't fully understand but I Kind of understand now which was um you know she was like basically saying like if you haven't read the book They're going to be kind of spoilers which is a weird thing to say about someone's actual life right um and so yeah there's this like there's an artifice to it of like taking real events and putting them in

like this story format and so there has to be an ending even though like you know as soon as I clicked you know the the the final full stop period and then Got it from my desk and life goes on and I'm still doing things so how do I end it in a way that's satisfying that's true to the themes of the book and yeah for some reason um that story um stood out it came to mind maybe because I had immersed myself in this book for so long and thought about its themes for so

long and you know somewhere in the back of my mind unconsciously I was searching for anecdotes or stories or something that Would you know conclude this in a satisfying way and that story just jumped out at me and and it one of you know it's it's funny like and you're a writer so you know this where like there's a lot of self-doubt a lot of like is this actually how really oh I never struggle with that yeah a lot of like just anx like you know you're just plagued by this like does this even work

am I like does it make sense to me is it going to make Sense to other people the ending was the like maybe the only time in this entire book yes like I have the ending I did it and as soon as I wrote it like I so in my mind I'm like that's it but like let's see how it goes when I write it on the page and then I wrote it I'm like oh oh thank God I have it like oh I have the ending did that was it I was like and it

was like you know just um you know kind of that lightning in a bottle just completely Good Fortune finally Struck me and it just happened to be at the end there where I had it I had the right line I had the right ending and and then I realized like as soon as I typed it I'm like oh that's it this is this book is done at least like the rough draft of this book is done well the one of the core ideas in the book is that Elites place a lot of value on how

much money you make mhm and how educated you are and what you're saying is hold on That's not nearly as important as coming from a good family and being loved and having stability MH that whole thesis is comprised in this final sentence MH but not talk about reading but not because it will expand his vocabulary read to him because it will remind him that you love him that's what I take from that that the vocab the expansion is all the money all the education stuff this is fundamentally about relationships and About love yeah yeah that's

right and that kid is going to you know every kid in those sit you know when they're being read to by their parents they're not thinking oh this is going to help me to get into college or this is going to help me win the school spelling be you know they're just thinking like I want my my mom or my dad or whoever to read to me and that's all it is it doesn't it doesn't get much more sophisticated than that and you know from the the adults Perspective especially Highly Educated people their whole thing

is like optimizing every decision to get their kid into college and it's funny so I sent an early uh version of the book to a friend of mine in in the UK and after he read it he told me this this story so he and his brother both went to Oxford um kind of the British version of that sort of American striber culture thing and he was telling me how when he was growing up his parents every Single decision was optimized for like the the yes no binary is this going to help this kid get

into Oxford yes or no yes or no uh you know piano lessons private tutors whatever and and they were successful in that that like yes both of the boys got into the school they wanted um but now he tells me he has a very frosty relationship with his parents and he told me you know I can't help but wonder if maybe our childhood had been less about ambition and Striving and more loving and more nurturing and maybe we wouldn't have gone to this fancy University maybe we would have gone to you know a mid-tier place

but I'll bet I would be looking forward to Christmas a lot more had we been raised differently you know because of how cold and you know even as a kid even if you don't consciously even if you're not consciously aware that that's what your parents are doing you can feel it that they're doing this for this These instrumental calculated reasons and not necessarily because um they have your emotional Security in in mind how did you think about writing the preface because the preface is really rooted in statistics it is building off anecdotes and research papers

facts and then you go right into hey here's young Rob what's the point of a preface what made that successful or not successful that was really more of a compromise in some ways so H when I sent those early Chapters to my editors they were basically saying that like okay you're jump you know you're you're kicking us right into the story but like what does this all mean why why should we care and I remembered Tara's advice like cuz they wanted me to bring in statistics and research and kind of intersperse in that first chapter

and I resisted it um and so the compromise was and and also because I know I don't know the actual statistics on this but a lot of readers Don't read prologues and prefaces and introd they just go straight to chapter 1 and so I figured okay well even me I I saw it I was like do I want 50 you know I was like flipped a coin you know like heads the preface all right I'm going to read the preface well what a lot of readers do and I do this sometimes too is I'll I'll

jump to chapter one start reading maybe I'll just finish the book and if I'm left wanting more then I'll go back and read the preface um and so That was yeah this was the Compromise of okay well if if it's important for me to like establish myself as okay I'm going to introduce the adult Rob the way I think about the world now the the perspective of the voice of experience I'll bring in the statistics I'll tell you a you know I'll give you like a sort of taste of my life and I use that

device of introducing myself through my three names and the origins and my right um parental figures but then describe Okay well I have these credentials and these degrees these letters after my name but this book isn't necessarily going to be about that it's going to be about the name itself and the story behind it and yeah I bring the statistics from James Heckman and other researchers indicating the importance of you know if you're going to have children and you want them to be successful there are these predictors in place and so that was basically it

of Sort of bracketing the story of okay the preface and maybe the final two or three chapters are kind of research heavy you know those final three chapters it's it's a little a bit of a blend of like personal story and statistics but the preface is um more academically driven and that was basic Bally to reassure the reader that like I'm not just some guy talking about my childhood that there is a point to all of this that I do um know what I'm talking about when it comes to Child instability not just from a

personal perspective but from an academic one as well there's a lot of people who hate on academic writing for good reason yeah for good reason but what have you taken from academic writing that you actually incorporated into this Memoir and that you're like wow I'm really glad I know that hm okay uh you're like man I don't know I got to say something nice about academic Writing um you know I okay academic writing generally does get a bad rap um and I think deservedly so but I did sort of just through um you know through

through doing a PhD you just learn how to do research pretty well um if you're in a good program and so I knew okay if I wanted to find a piece of information I knew um kind of where to go how to find the right references which which journals are reputable how do you do this break it down yeah okay I Mean I mean if you if you literally go in cold like I just want to learn about um you know the predictors of graduating college you could just punch like keywords into Google Scholar and

then on Google Scholar itself it'll tell you how frequently a paper's been cited which is an imperfect but rough measure of like do academics take this paper seriously or not if it's been cited a lot you can click on it you can sort of skim the abstract And you know depending on how deep in the weeds you want to go you can go through the meth methods and the results but usually start with the abstract um and and then also the age of the paper you know because a lot of research it turns over very

quickly you want to find the the the most fresh studies possible and so then you start to okay you look at the author names okay um search the author names look at their academic web pages have They done anything more recent um what are their most recent papers who have they collaborated with look at their collaborator see what they've worked on and then you'll just sort of have this chain of associations based on a couple of papers from Google Scholar and then you could start to build a picture of okay so here's this kind of

body of work that's been done have there been any sort of review Papers written maybe in the last 5 to 10 years that summarizes It because that can be a huge help versus just going to each individual study okay I'm going to site these eight studies versus citing this one review paper um and usually when it comes to review papers you're going to look for more established academic so you can even do things like look at the age of the person so if the person's still in a PhD program or a postdoc most likely they're

doing sort of fresh and original Research um which can be very helpful but if you want that sort of Deep dive review look for senior Scholars who have kind of stepped away from you know being in the lab or doing doing sort of on the ground work and more sort of doing this kind of holistic summary of everything that's been done because they're senior and because they've been in the field for decades they know themselves which papers are um useful and reliable and so on um and so that's that's sort of one Way to do

it and yeah through that process I knew okay these papers are valid and I have you know I know I I just did the salon the other day with a bunch of psychologists online about this book like academic psychologists and um that was you know weird like this book isn't for them but I did you know I'm I still have this PhD I still have this feeling of like I I don't want to disappoint them and I want to do justice to the research too too those status Circles still matter they still matter yeah and

um no I was I was happy to say that like they did feel like this book was accurate it was faithful to the research and that um yeah yeah there was only one who like quibbled with some minor you know decisions but overall um yeah I haven't had any any um Professor academic push back on any of the broader claims that I've made so yeah yeah I think it's helpful and then also the other thing is and this is more just Sort of um unrelated maybe to the specifics but more so the the habits of

writing so one thing a PhD teaches you is that you have to write every day because you a PhD thesis is essentially a book and if you don't sit down every day and get those few hundred words down on the page at the end of your four five six year program you're not going to you're not going to get your degree um and so just building in that habit of everyday sit down and write and so that Helped to sort of inculcate that in me that I got to write something whatever it is the 300

words the two crappy Pages a day the you know whatever the target word count is for that day and that week and that month I have to meet it and in some ways they're very similar um a thesis and a book uh because you you also do a vomit draft for a PhD thesis as well and you just give it that first pass and then later on go through and like check check your citations and your References and make sure that the language is appropriate and everything um so yeah I was sort of learning both

of those things concurrently but there's there is some overlap the most important thing like with anything is just building that habit sitting down and writing right it seems like something really important happened for you at the warhorse writing seminar MH at Columbia and here's what you write I wrote a rough draft of a personal essay Reflecting on my upbringing but didn't let anybody read it mhm and the way that you write about it is that there was this sense of guardedness it's like oh my good I can't have anyone can't have anybody read that so

how do you go from that feeling that fear that closedness to 300 whatever pages of a memoir I noticed both in my life and then in the process of writing the book that the guardedness was often self-defeating This feeling of like I have to protect myself I'm not going to tell anyone how I'm feeling or why I'm acting this way or what's going on inside me and then that would sort of Express itself through behaviors through externalizing through thrill seeking or other forms of impulsivity but then once I just started talking about it that's when

things slowly started to turn around for me um you know first first I mean really I kind of tried to communicate it through Those interactions with Janet where I often did feel better speaking with her but the the period leading up to it was always Dreadful but then afterwards I always felt better and then in rehab the same kind of thing this kind of Shame and embarrassment this feeling of humiliation that I had to check into this treatment facility but then once I started going and interacting and talking about my my feelings and my internal

State and my um You know that sense of Shame and all those things then I started to connect some dots and become more honest with myself about why I had lived my life the way that I had and what I wanted for my future and then yeah but but you know it's it's one of those like it's one of those things where like in in movies and in stories there's always like oh and then you change overnight and now you're this new person it wasn't like that even by the Time I got to Yale I

was kind of a different person than I was in the military versus when I was in high school but I still had that those lingering feelings of do I really want to talk about myself do I really want to bring this up do I really want to share my point of view um it never goes away um completely but I guess one this is only this is something I've only recently realized was there's also maybe this is Something I'm wrestling with this possibility that through being in these kinds of elite College environments where people do

love talking endlessly about their misfortunes and their you know how they're so baguer and how tough their lives are and so on and it all just disgusted me when I saw it because so so much of it felt artificial or performative and I want I wanted to resist it like oh that's what they're Doing I don't want to be part of that but you know at some point I realized you know if I wanted to communicate why it was so absurd what they were doing I had to talk about my own experiences and say well

this is how a lot of kids are living this is how a lot of young people live their lives and it's very different from being in um gated College you know gated Residential College so um some of it may have just been sort of a reaction to what I was seeing uh on Campus as well you're talking about the importance of hard work of consistency and you cite this paper about an Insight bias in creativity and that there's two ways to think about creativity the first is you have this idea it's like the muses come

and boom there we go and then the other kind is a kind of persistence day in and day out day in and day out and the paper that you reference says Hey the day in and day out kind of creativity is actually extremely Undervalued yeah yeah I I read that paper and it it captured a lot of my experience with writing where especially once I started a newsletter um you know I had to get something out on Sunday regardless of how good it was that was kind of my task for myself because around that point

I had made this decision that I wasn't going to be an academic and I wanted to start writing more for the public and yeah Every day I or every yeah every day I'd sit down try to get something for the book for the thesis and then later for the newsletter and it really is kind of this grind I think a lot of people romanticize the creative process maybe a little too much where you think of you know like the image of a writer is like you know Hemingway or Orwell in Paris withco pipe yeah the

cafe and all of these brilliant insights are coming give espresso and AC and I will write the Great paragraph yeah ex yeah exact and it just comes to them just through the process of being the writer and really what creativity looks more like is just you know someone in like a you know their gym shorts or their bathrobe just like you know struggling and getting down a million horrible ideas and you know launching the occasional good one and yeah writing 50 newsletter posts and maybe 10 of them are actually sort of really worthwhile and stand

the test of Time but you just have to put in the Reps right like with anything else and so yeah I think that the persistence piece of the creativity puzzle I think is right that you know maybe maybe there are a few very gifted people who you know great greatness and Brilliance strikes them in the moment but I think you have to just sort of be ready for that for it to strike you and the way you do that is just by sitting down every day or every week or whatever it Is and just starting

to write you often don't even know what you think until you start writing and then maybe a little bit of that Brilliance will will catch you is you you were writing the Memoir did you have like you know on Netflix shows there's the hook at the end of the episode and then after it goes like previously on 24 did you think about doing stuff like that in in troubled a little bit I mean there are a Couple of chapters where there are like sort of very obvious Cliffhangers where um you know I ended one of

the chapters right after Shelley was shot uh there was another chapter where um I'm meeting the police at my sister's father's house things like that um it wasn't something I consciously set out to do but as I was writing I did notice oh that's that's the right point to end this and to bring them into the next chapter so not every chapter has those kinds of Cliffhangers But some of them do and that just happened through the process of writing where I recognized oh that's a nice place to stop this and and then move on

but overall like the structure of the book in terms of the way that the chapters are laid out those were set out in advance more or less I think it started out originally as 10 chapters and then it became 12 but more or less I knew okay this is going to be the chapter where I talk about foster care This is going to be the chapter where I talk about the adoption this is going to be the chapter where I'm living with my mom and Shelly this is the you know military chapter rehab chapter so

on and so on and that worked out pretty well I think to sort of capture each slice of my life when you read Memoirs now and you're like this is an awful Memoir an awful Memoir like this thing just deserves to go right in the dumpster and be lit on fire what are the writers Doing that now that you've written one you know and you wish that you could just be like you need to know this then your Memoir wouldn't be so terrible I mean you know it is like it's like you know all the

cliches are right the show don't tell you know I read some you know there was a bad Memoir I read a while back where it was really just like the person talking about how cool he was and how good he was with women but he never really like explained it or uh or Illustrated it with an interaction right he just talked about it and and patted himself on the back and you know that that's you know I could write this book like oh I had a really tough childhood I lived in foster homes but that's

very different from bringing the reader in and illustrating okay here's the here are the memories here are the specifics um and so yeah that's like a very obvious one show don't tell um yeah I think The how vulnerable you're willing to be as well um you know it's a major theme don't write a memoir if you're not willing to yeah really be vulnerable well there's there's that kind of uh there's there's that problem between the author and the reader of a memoir because we all know that generally speaking people like to make themselves look good

perhaps look better than they really are and so you're going to go into a memoir a Little bit suspicious a little skeptical how honest can this person really be and I think at least in the the early chapters before the book If the book is any good and it grabs you those early Chapters at least at first you're going to be like okay well is this person being truthful does this feel right are they giving a better account of themsel than uh than is believable and so yeah I I have my kind of um guard

up I think or My yeah exactly I kind of monitor for that as I'm reading Memoirs now and I think you can usually tell in the first chapter how honest someone is being especially you can see this with uh with bad Memoirs where they start bad mouthing someone else almost right away um it's like a hit piece yeah yeah yeah exact where they're trying to uh settle grudges a lot of people try to do that I uh I had this conversation with with Tucker Max um and he I think him in the Acknowledgements too where

he talks about what is it writing from your scars not from your wounds you know where you're writing from yeah maybe you have these sources of pain um but they've more or less healed they've left a mark but you've you've sort of moved Beyond it but you're writing about how you got those and writing from your wounds in contrast is you still feel hurt you still feel resentful you still feel like the person who did this is Still um you know you still want to condemn them and blame them in some way and so you

start trying to like settle that Grudge through your writing and that I think comes out and people can be very blind to so some Memoirs can be very blind to the fact that that's what they're doing right from your scars not your wounds that's a that's a good oneliner yeah will you reference this quote from George Orwell which says autobiography is only to be trusted when It reveals something disgraceful disgraceful a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats

yeah yeah I came across that quote very early in the process like I said I was trying to research how to write a memoir getting pieces of advice from other authors articles and so and I've always been a fan of fan of Orwell I read 1984 in Animal Farm in high school and read a Bunch you know I still read his essays and still try to um you know I identify um value from from George Orwell and yeah that quote struck me man and it plagued me all throughout the writing process that lingering idea in

my mind like you know am I giving a an honest account of myself am I looking too good and then that that idea of like any life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats it's so true that's so true well well well you said something interesting Like am I telling the truth yeah am I making myself look good but what really resonates about that is that your own internal perception of your life is like and like a lot of Truth is speaking to the cognitive experience of those defeats over and over and over

yeah yeah and it it feels that way I mean you know the when I look back on my life I I remember the defeats the setbacks the obstacles the pain it's it looms so much larger than a lot of the successes and The accomplishments and you know some readers have written me and they've they've they've noticed this where I go into detail in terms of the setbacks and the obstacles and the difficulties but then later in the final couple of chapters when things start to improve in my life I kind of gloss over it right

like I spend quite a bit of time like my my process of getting into Yale and that experience in part because I wanted to Communicate to the reader like if you if you're the first person in your family go to college it it is an obstacle course like how do I put an application together how do I like how do I take the SAT those kinds of things and and then later I get into Cambridge and I just gloss over it but get like a PhD application is at least as difficult in many ways as

a bachelor's application um for a selective college but I'm just you know for me it's once I got into Yale my life was set and I don't really think of those memories as being quite as important and critical to my life as those earlier memories but yeah some readers did tell me like well you told us how to get into college I want to know how to get into a PhD and I'm like to me it's just not nearly as as interesting or important because Orwell was right you don't really view your life in that

way you review them as the series of defeats setbacks difficulties This focus on those things exactly yeah if I'm the chancellor at Yale give you a call and say hey Rob we really want to do a seminar on writing Memoirs okay next semester how do you structure the curriculum what are the core things that you got to teach that the students really need to know oh man I mean we would focus on mining your own history your own past what has happened to you um understanding that Memoir is not as I mentioned a loose Heap

of anecdotes just This you know this happened this happened this happened identifying those most Vivid memories what are the memories that make you feel something what are the memories that have lingered with you what are the memories that you're ashamed of what are the memories that you're proud of and yeah getting getting those down on the page um in a way that is truthful to the story accepting I think to some extent Whenever we tell stories about ourselves there's always that element of being an unreliable narrator because you know we don't have footage of everything

that happened it's not uh you know a perfect testimony you know you're not writing uh the Warren Commission report you're writing your own life and there's going to be right blanks and and and details that escape your memory so you're just going to have to accept that in advance um Um and yeah we would I think we would focus a little bit on sort of narrative structure and storytelling in general that For Better or Worse right you can't just tell a series of anecdotes they have to center around a theme they have to communicate something

and that's the difference between Memoir and autobiography autobiography is kind of beginning and end with all of the details filled out in between dates and towns and specifics and no one wants to Read a person's autobiography unless you're Winston Church Hill or or some yeah exactly some iconic Larger than Life figure or celebrity but if you're an ordinary person who's maybe lived a little bit of an unusual or extraordinary life you got to write a memoir and Memoir is centered on themes and underlying motifs and Universal um topics that anyone can relate to on that

question were there any moments when you felt ah no one's Going to be able to relate to this ah the total dress B mark for this idea is too small I felt that the entire time really yeah yeah because so I'm writing this book and I'm thinking like as a right like so no one knows anything about foster care is anyone really going to connect to this story at all because it's so outside of people's purview um so outside of like you know most people haven't been to foster care most people haven't been in the

military most people Haven't been to some you know expensive college so are these like how people can't relate to anything yeah that's kind of what I was thinking as I was going through it of like okay I'm going to tell the reader what it's like but are they going to care it's outside of their area of of Interest perhaps but then I found and this is maybe um you know maybe this is to some exent a cliche too that idea of the more personal something is the more Universal Those experiences in foster care being adopted

this workingclass town that I grew up in all of these little interactions in isolation maybe they're not especially interesting but taken all together um in the aggregate a lot of readers did get something from it even if they don't necessarily remember the specifics of the story they do it does bring up feelings for them or it reminds them of their own lives and that's something That surprised me too is that even readers who did come from relatively in terms of material uh abundance yeah they came from maybe upper middle class families but you know someone

in their family experienced addiction or there was some kind of abuse or some family tragedy or secret or something I'm reading a story about you you're I don't know maybe four six years old and then I start mapping that onto my own experience and then I start thinking About my own life and by walking through those years with you it gives me a prism into memories that I had forgotten for my own life yeah yeah I think that's right that once you once you read about someone else's life life and it's vulnerable and um and

vivid enough naturally you'll start to think about yourself and your own memories and um you know in a lot of ways this is kind of a Coming of Age story so a lot Of young people will write me and they're sort of at that point in their life where they're wondering what they're going to do next and I'm telling these stories of being a teenager and being uncertain and being scared and not knowing where I'm going to go but that is the story of a lot of young people a lot of teenagers maybe not quite

to in this same sort of degree of severity or or precarity but still you know when you're 18 you have to do something with Your life what do you do next and this is that kind of story yeah well Rob congrats on the Memoir thank you just all the work that went into this all the emotional toil that's really what stuck with me here the emotional toil of of doing something like this and great to have you on the show thanks David we're talking about the craft of writing here and one thing I've noticed is

that in the world of food so much of what I read is overdone and overwritten I think of Cookbooks I think of elaborate descriptions on bougie restaurant menus and I don't know about you but all that has deceived me into thinking that writing about food has to be complex in order for it to be successful but I've come to realize that's just not true you don't need fancy language to write about food common language works just fine and for an example I want to look at John Steinbeck and his book his Masterpiece East of Eden

and as I read this Paragraph I want you to notice the Simplicity of the language here okay it goes like this the apple pie was golden and fragrant its crust delicately Brown and sugar crusted with the faintest hint of cinnamon wafting up the apples inside were tender but not mushy each bite offering a balance of sweet and tart that made my mouth water the warmth of the pie coupled with a scoop of melting vanilla ice cream made each mouthful A Little Piece of Heaven evoking memories Of long and lazy Autumn afternoons first of all that

is beautiful writing and second of all I'm hungry I want that apple pie because this paragraph is alive isn't it and the words are so simple there's nothing pretentious there's nothing pretentious about it but what's going on here let's break it down Steinbeck's description Comes Alive because it's so layered what he's doing is he's appealing to multiple senses there's sight there's smell There's touch there's taste there's all four and you can see the golden the delicately Brown and sugar crusted crust you can see it you can practically touch the warm pie the scoop of melting

vanilla ice cream and then you can taste the faint scent of cinnamon that's wafting up the tender but not so mushy apples you can taste all of that and it's the collection of these very descriptions the diversity that he has going on here that's what's giving this Paragraph life and then there's the pacing Steinbeck wants you to linger on the details he wants you to slow down and save for the paragraph with the same kind of presence that you'd bring to a delicious slice of apple pie and I want to look at how he does

that with structure and with punctuation so we look at this paragraph there's three sentences and the whole paragraph is a single fluid continuous thought that Goes from top to bottom every sentence roughly the same length what does that do is it gives every sentence equal waiting there's no one place that he really wants you to focus within those three sentences there's a total of seven commas and what those are doing is they're just serving as gentle pauses gentle pauses gentle pauses because Steinbeck is asking you as the reader to just slow down and feel the

deliberate and unhurried Pace that he's describing Right here when he's talking about these long and lazy Autumn afternoons he just wants you to peace out relax it's sort of like being on a hammock you know and then finally there's the sequencing which pulls you into the intimacy of the moment it's like a slow Zoomin shot in a film where he's starting from far away and just moving closer and closer and closer and closer adding suspense to the moment how is he doing that he's going from eye to mouth to Mind so how can you apply

this to your writing well if there's one takeaway I want you to remember it's this there's no need to show off with super duper fancy $100 words you don't have to do that you can have an uncommon effect on your reader by using common language to describe a common experience just like Steinbeck and I do a writing example like this every single week if you want to check them all out go to writing examples.com and when you get there you Can enter your email write at the top of the page and if you do I'll

just send you an email whenever I publish one it's about once a week and then you can just learn all about the craft of writing