Intuition gets a lot of good press these days. We would all be better served by dropping into the deep currents of knowing, driven more by a sense than by facts or evidence parsed and overworked by our overactive brains. I agree!
And also — there are some instances in life when our intuition totally whiffs it. Sometimes we don’t have the experience or sufficient information to catch all the dynamics around us. This is particularly true in childhood. We may feel something is off, but then make up wildly inaccurate stories as we try to fill in the gaps.
In her art, Anna Konkle has carved out an artistic niche amid these high dramas and hazy truths. She and her friend Maya Erskine created, wrote, and starred in the wonderfully cringy Hulu series PEN15, a middle school comedy inspired by Anna and Maya’s real experiences in early adolescence. Their costars were all actors going through puberty, and even though Anna and Maya were in their 30s when the show was filmed, they played themselves. (Stream it here.)
Anna has a new memoir, called The Sane One, that’s largely told in scenes of dialogue in which she replays conversations between her and her parents to examine their fighting, their divorce, and her being caught in the middle. She also really narrows in on her relationship with her dad—how she used to side with him during arguments but then grew up and started wondering if he was the bad guy, abusive even, a creep who was dangerously dismissive of women’s boundaries. She writes about their five-year estrangement and their reconciliation shortly before his death.
This week on Death, Sex & Money, Anna and I talk about all this and the challenges of unpacking morally ambiguous family memories.
Regular readers know I get to spend my summers under the open skies of the Mountain West. I crossed into Montana last weekend for The Old Salt Festival. It’s part music festival, part conference workshop, part camping, part wood-fired cookout, and 100% a celebration of the people coming together to support new sustainable models of land management and food production.
I got to interview Old Salt Co-Op co-founder Cole Mannix on stage and will share that down the line. (In the meantime, please admire his very cool vest in the top-right.) I also got to meet Wendell Berry’s very funny daughter, Mary Berry, director of The Berry Center, and road trip across Montana with my friend Carol Bell, whom you may remember from this episode about her and her son, the late musician Luke Bell. (That’s Carol and me standing in between the ‘D’ and the ‘I’ in the top left.)
All in all, a great way to mark the Summer Solstice.
You can learn more about the Old Salt Co-Op and browse their selections of regenerative meat here.
I am a fan of The Small Bow, the podcast and newsletter about recovery in all the different ways we define it, and I got to talk with AJ on the new video podcast version of their show. We talk about all sorts of things, including a scary moment in childbirth for me and the inspirations for Death, Sex & Money that I found in a recovery meeting. Watch here.
I have subscribed to Maria Popova’s The Marginalia longer than almost any other newsletter, and last Sunday’s edition was a definite keeper. She included this excerpt from an Ursula Le Guin essay defining maturity: “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.”
Have you stopped buying self-help books because AI chatbots are helping you cut to the chase faster? Tim Ferriss suspects so. He shares details of his own softened book sale numbers and takes a guess at what will survive. “You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats.”
Search Engine delivered a fascinating study of social gatherings and finding your people in their latest episode, “Why Doesn’t Anyone Come to My Parties?” My 10-year-old overheard it while I was making dinner and declared it the least boring podcast she’d ever heard.
Until next week,
Anna
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6/23 Was Dad Being a Creep? And Other Childhood Memories to Decipher
6/16 Spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt on Bad Interviews, Fame, and Parenting
6/16: DSM Plus: This Meditation Will Help You Find the Courage to Open Up
6/9 Something Rotten at Stanford
6/2 DSM Plus: A Hands-On Retreat Where Men Learn to Flirt (and More)
5/26 The Parent-Child Anxiety Trap
5/19 A Brat Pack Star Remembers How to Have Friends
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