#745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr

Tim Ferriss
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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane. Think about and past 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.

I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode.

Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together, and for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim blog combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Rick Rubin, nine time Grammy winning producer, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, number one New York Times bestselling author of the Creative a Way of being, and host of the Tetragrammaton podcast. You can find rick@tetragrammaton.com where are we right now?

Rick Rubin
We are sitting in a sauna. We are sitting in a very hot barrel sauna. And I was told that was one of the conditions for having this conversation. And it's such an impressive barrel sauna. It's indoors, that I wanted to get the specs for it when I first saw it.

Tim Ferriss
And you have a heater that has to be, what, four times the size of the off the shelf heater that would go into such a heater. Yeah, it's a much bigger heater than for the size of the room. I'm sitting on the floor because I have such little confidence in my ability to withstand heat compared to you. But we do have the alternate, which is the bath just outside of this door. And you and I have gone back and forth, of course, quite a few times with this type of cycling.

But what is right outside of this door? Metal tub filled with ice. It is a metal tub, about 4ft, three and a half feet off the ground, full of ice. Looks like if you were to say, what, a horse trough times two, something like that. Something like that.

It's got to be maximum low fifties, something like that. I think it's about today, it's probably about 38 degrees. Oh my God. All right, so we have two mics on the floor I'm hoping won't explode or melt down. We have the h four and the h six, and we have water, ice, heat.

Nothing could go wrong. I'm looking forward to it. Rick, I was hoping perhaps we could start with a discussion of your physical transformation. And I'd love for you to perhaps just describe to people. I mean, you're in my mind, the picture of fitness in a lot of ways now, and we've been paddle boarding before, and you summarily whoop my ass every time we go out.

I'm always impressed. There are a lot of things contributing to my lack of competency and fear there. But where were you and how did you end up undergoing this physical transformation? Because you've lost how much weight at this point? How much fat are you saying I lost?

Rick Rubin
At the peak moment, I lost between 135 and 140 pounds. And I always thought I was eating a healthy diet. I was vegan for 20 something years, all organic vegan. Really very strict with what I ate. Doing that, I got up to 318 pounds.

And I read a book by a guy named Stu middleman who ran a thousand miles in eleven days. And I remember reading that and just thinking, wow, it's like I can barely walk down the block. This guy ran a thousand miles in eleven days. And it just seemed so inspiring. So I read his book, and in the book he talked about a guy named Phil Maffetone, who I'd never heard of before.

And he said, in Stu's book, he gets to the part where he said, well, I met this doctor, Phil Maffetone, and he changed the way I trained, and he changed the way I ate, and he changed all these things. And then all of a sudden I was able to do all these things. It said, okay, I want to find Phil Meffetone. I found him online, I sent him an email and he was living in Florida. And I asked if I could become his patient.

And he said that he had just stopped treating patients and retired from being a doctor. It's like, that's terrible news. But the reason he decided to stop being a doctor was he decided to become a songwriter. I said, oh, it's interesting. I'm involved.

Tim Ferriss
Funny you should mention that. Yeah, I'm involved in songwriting and the music world. Maybe we can trade. Maybe I can help you with your songwriting and you can help me with my health and fitness. And he liked the idea.

Rick Rubin
And we ended up meeting a few months later, met several times and became friends. And then he eventually ended up moving into my house and lived in my house for about two years, I did everything he said and I got much healthier. My metabolism got turned on. The hours that I was sleeping shifted for most of my life. I stayed up all night and slept most of the day.

When I was in college, I never took a class before 03:00 p.m. because I knew I wouldn't go. And this was at NYU. At NYU. So I'm used to living a night lifestyle.

I remember even in high school, I missed the first three classes of school so many times that it was really an issue. But it was just I had learned to be a late night person and it kind of suited the music life. Like, it worked well with my life. And one of the first things that Phil suggested when we got together was I slept with blackout blinds, and I usually didn't leave the house until the sun was setting. And he said, from now on, when you wake up, I want you to go outside.

As soon as you wake up, open the blinds and go outside, naked if possible, and be in the sun for 20 minutes. And when he said it, I remember thinking it'd be the same as him saying, I want you to jump off this ledge. It sounded like the most terrifying, based on the way I lived my life. That just sounded terrible. Right.

Tim Ferriss
What time was he recommending that you wake up? Well, by the time we started, it kept moving down. It went from 03:00 to probably noon to eleven to nine. And it just sort of happened naturally. And he knew that if I immediately went in the sun, that naturally my body would want to start waking up earlier and going to sleep earlier.

Rick Rubin
It was the first time ever that my circadian rhythm was kicking in. I never knew that there was such a thing or knew what that was. So he got me to connect to that, and I did everything he said, changed my diet, started eating some animal protein. I was, as I said, a devout vegan. So eggs and fish were the first things that I would eat.

And even then, I never liked eggs and I never liked fish, so I ate them more like medicine. And slowly I got healthier and healthier and healthier and more and more fit. But I was still very heavy, and I was heavy for a long time. What age were you when you brought him into your house? Or how long ago was this?

Yeah, I'm gonna guess I was probably late thirties. And how, if you don't mind me asking? Yeah, like ten years ago. Ten years ago, 1012 years ago, something like that. So you changing your diet?

Tim Ferriss
What were some of the other things that he had you change. He had me do 20 minutes of low heart rate exercise, aerobic activity. Every day, he had me start wearing a heart rate monitor, and my heart rate I would get into. For me, walking up a flight of stairs would be an aerobic activity, an anaerobic activity. So I had to work hard to stay in the anaerobic space or the aerobic space.

Rick Rubin
You mean in the aerobic space on. The side below that? It's getting hotted. Take off all your gloves. My hands burning holding the mic.

Tim Ferriss
I tried to wrap them in napkins. I remember you did mention those might get hot, but. Sorry, I digress. So, to stay within the aerobic threshold, you had to work very hard? Yes.

Rick Rubin
And again, my health changed, but I still stayed very heavy. And after two years of time, I had probably lost a little bit of weight, but not much. But I was much healthier and much more alive and much better than I was before. And after that period of time, Phil said to me, anyone else who made the changes you made? Out of everyone he's ever dealt with, 99% out of 100 people.

99 out of 100 people would have dropped all their weight. For some reason, there's something else going on with you that's holding onto the weight. So I just accepted that that's how it was. But at least I felt a lot better. My life was a lot better.

I was a lot happier. And then a mentor of mine whose name is Mo Austin, he's a guy who ran Warner Brothers records for 35 years. He worked for Frank Sinatra. Real inspiring guy in the music business. He suggested I went out to lunch with him one day, and he said, you know, rick, I'm really worried about you.

I know you watch what you eat, and I know that you walk on the beach every day and exercise, but you're really getting big, and I'm worried. So he said, I'm going to get the name of a nutritionist, and I want you to go to my guy, and I want you to do whatever he says. I said, okay, fine. And I knew it wouldn't work, because I knew that my whole life I had a weight problem. My whole life, I've tried every diet, and nothing ever worked.

But I would do anything for most. So I went again. Open minded, but not believing it would work. Willing to try, but not believing it would work. The nutritionist put me on a high protein, low calorie diet, and I'd never done a low calorie diet before.

And over 14 months, I lost 130 pounds, 135 pounds. That changed everything. And I will say, if I didn't do the work with Phil first, I don't believe that the diet would have worked. It was sort of a combination of things in order. It was like the metabolism got turned on.

I started being in tune with circadian rhythm. I was stimulating my aerobic system every day. I built a base, and then with the right diet, was able to drop the weight quickly. What are things that get in the way of artists producing their best work? Concern about what other people think.

Competition, wanting to do better than someone else. Self doubt, ego. What manifestation of ego? If someone thinks that everything they do is great, they might not be willing to edit themselves enough or work hard enough at. If I could write ten great songs, five minutes each, and those are the best songs, and I'm just going to record them and put them out, then those might not be as good as the ones that you develop over a longer period of time.

For example. That might be an egotistical artist who thinks everything I do is just great. When you have the opposite, when you have an artist who is doubting themselves, how do you help them through that? What do you recommend? Just speaking personally, I have continuous self doubt as a writer.

I think most artists do. That's more. The more typically self doubt is the case. I think if your goal is to be better than you were, if you're competing only with yourself, it's a more realistic place to be. If you say, I don't want to write songs unless I could write songs better than the Beatles, it's a hard road.

But if you say, I want to write a better song tomorrow than the song I wrote yesterday, that's something that can be done. And if you write a better song than you wrote yesterday every day, then you continue to get better and better and better. And it really is small steps and trying not to think too much, because so much of it is more of a. The job is, it's more emotion and heart work than it is head work. Like the head comes in after to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it.

But the initial inspiration comes from a different place. And it's not the head, and it's not an intellectual activity, it's more inspiration. So the key first is to really do whatever activities you can to tune into inspiration and things like meditating help, and diving into art in general, doesn't have to be even your modality. I mean, going to museums and looking at beautiful art can help you write better songs. Reading great novels, reading great works of art, seeing a great movie could inspire a great song, reading poetry.

So I would say being in submerging yourself in great art and the more you can do to get out of the mode of competition where you're looking at what other people are doing, if you're wanting to be better than them or be inspired by them, the only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time, which is a great thing to do. You know, like if you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way to work through, to find your own voice to matter today, then listening to what's on the radio now and thinking, I want to compete with this. So it's more like stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what's going on at the moment. Speaking as someone who is not very well versed with music, I don't feel highly literate when it comes to music. I enjoy music, but hanging out with you and Neil Strauss, certainly I feel like I'm lacking perhaps vocabulary and a lot of references.

Tim Ferriss
Are there any for people who feel like they're in my shoes? Are there any particular albums you could offer as a starting point? Not the end all, be all, but just as a starting point for appreciating good world class contemporary music? Meaning not necessarily could be classical music, but are there any recommendations for you? I would just start by listening to the greats, which you can look at, like if you look at search online for Mojo's top 100 albums of all time or Rolling Stones top 100 albums or any trusted sources top 100 albums and start listening to what are considered the greats.

Rick Rubin
It's a good place to start. So I'm not sure I ever told you, the first time I ever saw the name Rick Rubin was actually on the inside of an audio cassette. It was the first heavy metal album I ever bought, which was rain and blood. Oh, that's a good one. And I just remember that's a really good one.

Tim Ferriss
Not having is pre Internet, of course, and I was just told by my friends, you have to, you will love heavy metal. You should listen to heavy metal. And I asked what the hardest heavy metal was that could possibly be found. And rain and blood came to the lips of those. I asked, and I just remember listening to, I think it's angel of death, the first track on that, and going, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?

And just fell in love with that band. But how did you go from hip hop to, say, Slayer? It's stylistically so different, it would seem. But how did Slayer come about? Because I was coming about it with no technical skill.

Rick Rubin
It's not like I knew about hip hop or I knew about heavy metal. I was a fan of music and I loved heavy metal and I loved hip hop. So it was more that coming at it from this appreciation and as a fan, knowing what I wanted to hear, knowing that, especially in the case of Slayer, Slayer were an underground metal band who had two albums out on an independent label and were kind of considered the heaviest band in the world. And when we signed them, there was this terrible fear that Slayer, now doing their first album for a major label, they were going to sell out. Get watered down.

Yeah. Which happens all the time. And then the album that we made, rain and blood, was much harder and worse than anything that anyone ever heard before. And it really did come from that. You know, I liked extreme things and they were extreme and I wanted to maximize it.

I didn't want to water down the idea of watering things down for a mainstream audience. I don't think it applies. I think people want things that are really passionate. And the best version of that they could be, and often the best version they could be, is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience, where, you know, if you put out a record and half the people who hear it absolutely love it, and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you've done well because it's pushing that boundary.

If everyone thinks, oh, that's pretty good, why bother making it? It doesn't mean much. Lost in the slipstream of time. Almost as soon as it comes out. I'm going to do a round of ice, if that's all right.

Tim Ferriss
Absolutely. All right. Let's do some more ice and we'll be back. Okay, we are back. Do you have a book or books that you've gifted often to other people?

Rick Rubin
The first one that comes to mind is the Tao Te Ching. It's the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te Ching. What's great about it is it's 81 short pieces that could be, if you look at them as poems, that if you were to read the book today, you would get one thing from it, and if you pick it up in two years and read it again, it would mean something entirely different. And always on the money, always what you need to read at that period of time. So it's a magic book in that way that it always fits.

Tim Ferriss
I actually took. This is bringing back a memory. I took an entire class on the Tao Te Ching at Princeton when I was an undergrad in east asian studies, and it seems on some level that that book does what you do for musicians, meaning it sort of reflects back truths that they were not aware of themselves or they could not verbalize themselves. Any other books come to mind? Another one that's really nice is a book about meditation called wherever you go, there you are, which is by John Cabot Zinn.

Rick Rubin
It's a great book. If you've never meditated and if you've been meditating for 50 years, if you read this book, either way, you'll care more about meditation, become a better meditator and just give insight into why we do it and what the benefits are. When you are working with an artist who believes they cant do something or is just hitting that wall, what are some of the ways that you help them get past that? Usually ill give them homework, a small, doable task. I give you an example.

There was an artist I was working with recently who hadnt made an album in a long time and was struggling with, struggling with finishing anything and just had this. It was a version of a writer's block, but it was a, I don't know, hard to explain what it was, but I would give him very doable homework assignments. That almost seemed like a joke, you know, like tonight, I want you to write one word in this song that needs five lines that you can't finish. I just want one word that you like. By tomorrow, do you think you come up with one word?

And usually you'd be like, yeah, I think I can do one word. And then just very quickly, by breaking it down into pieces, like I learned from laird and chipping away one step at a time, you can really get through anything. Yeah. Breaking it down into the beach, we. Had a zip line and a zip line, a, you know, the beam that you balance on.

Tim Ferriss
Oh, a slack line. Slack line. And Laird was pretty good at it in the beginning, but had never done it before. And he would work for hours. He would just be there hour after hour after hour, falling off and getting back on.

Rick Rubin
Falling off and getting back on. And then, of all of the group of people, he was by far the first one who was able to do it. And it wasn't because he just naturally was gifted at it. He knows that anything he sets his mind to learn to do, if he focuses and just continues to not mind falling off and not thinking, he's supposed to be good out of the box. Learning to be able to do it, that's how you learn things.

I also will say that after having the weight problem that I had for so long and then finally finding the solution and making the change, it really makes me believe that anything's possible. We can learn, we can train ourselves to do absolutely anything. It's really just getting the right information. If we get the right information, we can learn to do anything. Whatever it is.

Now, it doesn't mean we can necessarily be the best in the world at something, but we can be our best. At that thing, the best version of. Ourselves, and do things that never dreamed of as possible for us. What advice would you give? And I'll ask this for a couple of different ages.

Tim Ferriss
Ill start with your 20 year old self. What advice would you give your 20 year old self, if any, try to have more fun. Why do you think you werent having as much fun as you could have at that point? I think I was more driven and I dont know, I want to say almost like I felt like I had something to prove. I dont know if I did have something to prove, but I felt like doing the work was the most important thing in the world, as opposed to doing the work and enjoying the process and being able to step back and see what it was, not just be so deeply into it that I feel like I missed a lot of years of my life because I was just in dark room working on music seven days a week for only 20 years.

Wow. I recall it makes me think of a story from Neil Gaiman, the writer, when he, I think it was with the success of Sandman and he was in a huge line of readers who wanted signatures and fans who wanted to tell him stories. And Stephen King pulled him aside and just said, enjoy it. Yeah, and he didn't. He was too caught up in the, in the flow.

What about your 30 year old self? What advice would you give to your 30 year old self? I would probably tell myself something that I, that still might apply to me today. I wouldn't own it at all then. I know it now.

Rick Rubin
I just still. It's not sick in nature. But she'd be kinder to myself because I beat myself up a lot, because I expect a lot from myself. I'll be hard on myself. I don't know that I'm doing anyone any good by doing.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's advice that I need to give myself as well. When do you tend to beat yourself up? I've made somewhat of a sport of it, it would seem. Yeah, it can happen, you know, anytime I can come up with anything that I could be doing to further something and didn't already think of it and didn't already do it, I might beat myself up about why, you know, why have I not done that? Something I struggle with, that I'd love to get your two cent on and is related to this, which is on one hand, I don't want to beat myself up.

On the other hand, I feel like the perfectionism that I have has enabled me to achieve whatever modicum of success I've been able to achieve. And I've heard stories and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but about, for instance, Zztop and La Frutura and how they worked on it with you from, I guess I want to say, what, 2008 to 2012, something like that. But how they realized the value of you wanting the art to be as perfect as it could be, or the best that it could be, and taking whatever time and pains necessary to make that possible. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, because it's something that I continually struggle with. I want to be easier on myself, but I worry that if I do that, I will lose whatever magic, if there is such a thing that enables me to do what I do.

Rick Rubin
I think that's a myth, and I think that your take on things is specific to you, and it's not because of your it's almost like you've won the war. And to accept the fact that you've won the war you have broken through to. Now you have an audience. People are open to hear what you are interested in, what you learn, what you're interested in learning about, and what you want to share. You can do that without killing yourself, and that killing yourself won't be of service either to you or to your audience.

Tim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals for your team faster and for free.

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Next up, Mary Carr, author of three award winning bestselling memoirs, the Liars Club, Cherry and Litt, and author of the Art of Memoir, which breaks down her process and Tropic of Squalor, her latest volume of poetry. You can find Mary on Twitter arycarlit. Mary, welcome to the show. Hey, Tim, thanks for having me. And I appreciate you putting me at ease when I mentioned that I have copious notes in front of me, and that's usually an indication that I am nervous and not you.

Mary Karr
You do this all the time. You're gonna kill it. It's gonna go great. I'm convinced. And thank you.

Tim Ferriss
And you reassured me by saying, I make really good waffles. That's what I do. I'm like a nona. I'm like a nona. You gotta think of me as a nona out here in podcast.

Let's rewind the clock as a first step in podcast, Bill, and maybe we can talk about Nona's in the family lineage of sorts. And I want to talk about, or have you speak to a guy redoing your mother's kitchen and holding up a tile. Could you perhaps elaborate on that, please? Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Karr
Right after my first memoir was published, we were having my mother's kitchen retiled. My sister and I were there. And. Yeah, and the tile dude pries off a tile, and he holds it up, and it has a little round toilet. And he looks at my little fluffy haired, gray haired mother and says, miss Carr, this looks like a bullet hole.

And my sister says, mom, isn't that where you shot at daddy? And she says, no, that's where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at your daddy. So people ask me why I wanted to be a memoirist. I'm like, why would you make stuff up when that's who your mother is.

Tim Ferriss
So for those who have no context, I'd like to provide a bit more context. Where was this kitchen? Or where is this kitchen, for that matter? This kitchen is in southeast Texas. It's a town that I write about to protect the mayor and the school principal and the people who didn't sign off on what I said about them.

Mary Karr
I call it Leachfield, but it's really east of Port Arthur, Texas, a small town in east Texas. I call it the ringworm belt.

Tim Ferriss
Which I've also heard you describe as a swampy town. So moisture, humidity, ringworm. As a former wrestler, I can say those things combine to produce ringworm. Exactly. Yes.

Mary Karr
No, that's it. And industrial, like a lot of oil refineries all around. So not Paris in the twenties, I guess, is the way I would put it. Now I'm going to hop around like memento, the movie, if I must. And I must, because that is my way.

Tim Ferriss
And you've written extensively about your childhood. You had, in many respects, an extremely difficult, painful childhood and will probably unwind some of that. Now, you've written extensively about it, and you've also mentioned about writing memoirs. And if this is a misquote, please call me out. Quote, I've said, it's hard.

Here's how hard. Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. And certainly in your book, you paint a high resolution picture of just how painful that can be. And certainly an element might be catharsis, but it is painful. And I would love for you to speak to the catalyst for beginning to publish this type of work.

Write and then publish this type of work. The publishing is nothing compared to the writing. I think publishing, for me was great because they gave me money and I didn't have any, so that was good. But, yeah, I think I had a flamethrower on my ass. Can I say ass on your show?

You can say ass. Not only are three letter words allowed, four letter are allowed as well. Oh, there we go. You know, I was a weird little kid, and I was just. My mother was capital n nervous and married seven times and twice to my daddy, and both my parents drank hard.

Mary Karr
It was Texas, everybody was armed, and we were a loud, combative house. So I loved my parents. I mean, that's what I should say. I don't think anybody who's read anything I've written about them would challenge that. But it was not a safe childhood.

And, yes, it had its fair share of blows. I mean, I always you know, look, I was born in the richest country in the world. My skin color is something the whole country privileges. I'm, you know, I'm a college professor. I grew up skinny, and my teeth came in relatively straight, and I have a lot of advantages.

So whatever I went through, a lot of people, and people I grew up with and loved had it way worse and didn't make it. So I think I was haunted. I was a haunted little girl. I tried to kill myself when I was a kid. When I was still in grade school, I took a bunch of aspirin.

It said pain relief. And I thought, okay, this is what I want. So I didn't have a choice. I was. In some ways, not having a choice was a lucky thing, because I went into therapy very early.

I managed to get. After leaving school without a diploma. I managed to weasel my way into college and had a really kind professor, and his wife kind of took me under their wing and urged me to go into therapy when I was 19. And so I was sitting in rooms talking to, you know, codependent social workers, starting when I was a kid. And all of that helped, but I guess I've been really blessed with a lot of outside help.

I'm a big, big fan of the mental health professional and the librarians and english teachers and those kind souls you meet along the way. Trey. So you have kind souls that you meet in person? You mentioned a few, and I want to talk more about weaseling into college in a few minutes, but I've read a lot about your reading, if that makes sense. Yeah, I read a lot.

Yeah. Some might envision in their mind's eye the childhood you described as a family of illiterates. Nobody picked up anything other than people magazine, but that was not the case. No. The huge advantage.

Yeah. Describe that a little bit. And also, if I could tag on an additional piece of that question. I've heard you describe finding and reading poetry as eucharistic, and I would love for you to just speak to that as well. Yeah, I started reading poetry when I was a little girl, and I, you know, reading is socially sanctioned disassociation.

You know, if you can't, they won't let you drink or, you know, geez, heroin when you're a little kid, but you can disappear down a valley of Winnie the Pooh or Charlotte's web or. And in some ways, the poets I read, I think a lot of times, I think poetry really captured me early. And my. My mother had. Who was a painter, had gone to art school in New York and was enormously well read.

There were books all over my house in a place for the nearest bookstore. The bookstores in my town sold, you know, bibles as big as station wagons and, you know, little dashboard icons, but there wasn't a lot of literature to buy. But I found a home in the. The little library was a three block walk from my house, and I could disappear down the snowy valley of a book, and I was somewhere else. And so poetry saved my life.

I mean, my best friends were poets. I think, the way people worship saints and, you know, have crosses blessed, I felt that way. And if you think about the idea of the Eucharist, we weren't catholic. We were atheists. My father was a union organizer and said, you know, church is a trick on poor people to get their money away from them.

And my mother was a kind of marxist lady who was very smart and, you know, just a loose. A little bit of a loose canon. So we were not churchy in the Bible belt. And, yeah, you take somewhat. When you read a poem, you know, you put it in the meat of your body.

I mean, you're a body person. I'm a body person. I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you, and it changes you. It transforms you. I had this idea of being a poet, starting when I was five or six years old, that I wanted to be a poet.

It was the strangest thing, because there were no poets around. No one I knew had ever met a poet. What was the feeling that elicited that desire? Was it just the tangible brilliance in some type of wordplay? Was it a kinesthetic reaction to the aesthetics of certain poets?

Tim Ferriss
What was it that produced that desire? You said it better than I could, Tim. You win. I mean, it's not a joke that I use the riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat. That's literally.

Mary Karr
Literally what happened. I sat. When I had to reach the table, I sat on this giant edition of Shakespeare my mother had that was very water stained, and it was a book that I read very early, and I started memorizing not Shakespeare poems, but the speeches from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, Richard III. And I would memorize these speeches and say them to my hungover mother. And she liked it.

You know, it was something she incurred. I got her attention that way. She was a very. To say she was not nurturing. I mean, Lady Macbeth is probably not nurturing the way my mother was not nurturing.

I mean, she. Her disinterest in being a mother was profound. Let's just put it that way. She once said to me, when I was early on, when I was getting sober, she was supposed to watch my little boy, who was then a toddler, when I went to an AA meeting. And I came back one day, and she was like, I can't keep him.

He's just too. I mean, I was gone for an hour and a half. She said, I just don't do kids. And I was so mad. I said, mother, you had four children.

What do you mean you don't do kids? You don't cook, you don't clean. You haven't had a job in 40 years. What exactly do you bring to the party? And she thought for a minute, and she said, I'm a lot of fun to be with.

Yeah, I forgot to do anything for any other living human being, but I am fun to be with. Which was not untrue. So I guess I had an aesthetic sense. She played music. She played opera, she played blues.

Janis Joplin grew up in my hometown, or rather, I grew up in her hometown, since she was older. Brother would be in my high school carpool. So there was a lot of music I listened to. And I think poetry was part of that. The form, the shape.

You know, what it felt like, Tim? I felt less lonely. I was a lonely person. And I would read these poems, and I felt like someone understands me. Someone knows what it feels like to occupy this body.

And I remember trying to tell other little kids in my neighborhood about it, about poems that I liked. There's a ee cummings poem I once tried to tell some girls about in my school. You know, it's just spring, and the world is mud luscious. And the little lame balloon man whistles far. And we.

And Eddie and Bill come running, and it's spring, and the world is a puddle wonderful. And the goat footed balloon man whistles far and we. Something like that. I can't even remember it, but it's so long ago. That's pretty good for not remembering.

I can remember little bits of it, but I remember these girls in my school just going, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, what about it doesn't make any sense? You know, it's about it's being spring. And she's like, well, what is the mud luscious?

Like, that's not even a word. I'm like, no, it's, like, muddy and luscious and delicious. And it's like, how is mud delicious? You know, it's like. Like, no, like, y'all aren't getting it.

And I thought they were messing with me. It seemed so obvious to me how great this was. So I learned to shut up about it very early, you know, by like, 3rd, 4th grade. I learned, just, don't you like this stuff? Nobody else.

Your mother likes it, your sister likes it, your daddy likes it. Nobody else is going to like it. You shut up. One expression that I think was in the art of memoir. I've read it in other interviews.

Tim Ferriss
And again, I'm probably going to paraphrase here, but that poetry should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Yes, I wish that were my line. Isn't that a great line? It's so good. Where is that from?

Or do you recall where you learned it? Yes, I know vaguely where it's from, but I can't remember the guy's name. You can google it, we'll find it. Early 20th century, maybe 1920s to 1950, journalist guy. So I'm sorry, I don't cite him.

Mary Karr
I wish I could take credit for it, but, yeah, all art should disturb the comfortable and comfort that's disturbed and all therapy should. And most foods. You know, it's not a bad goal to shoot for at the beginning of a day. How did you weasel into college, if you could flashback. Because I would imagine that there's some listeners like me, who are just in their mind's eyes seeing this little girl sitting on Shakespeare and out of focus behind her head in the same kitchen are bullet holes in the tile, imagining the experience and the experiences.

Tim Ferriss
Although truly you endured some horrific, horrific things. But wondering, how does someone in that position get into college? Especially when they're missing, at least based on some of my homework. For instance, 87 days of school in the 6th grade, things like this. How on earth does someone get into college?

Was it your wielding of words and an essay that just unlocked it? Was it something else? I won an essay contest when I was in high school. High school. I remember.

Mary Karr
I think it was from the national Council of Teachers of English. And I had some professors. Actually, my mother had gone back to graduate school and got me a recommendation from this teacher of chinese history who felt me up, sexually assaulted me in his office, and then wrote me a recommendation. So maybe that helped. Actually, what I think helped, when I look back on it, was I opposed the Vietnam War and I wore black armbands on moratorium day.

And that's the kind of thing that, where I grew up, you know, I remember my coach, the football coach, pinning me up physically, like pinning me up against the lockers by the front of my shirt and holding me against the lockers and threatening me, essentially, to take my black armband off. So I did things like I didn't stand up for the american flag. I mean, I don't know. I thought I was Colin Kaepernick or something. It didn't win me any friends, let me just say that.

But I later found out when I got to my school and I had to have a lot of jobs to go there because it was a private school. It was McAllister College. It's a very good school. And I later found out that the assistant principal of my high school, who had thrown me out a lot for things like my skirt was too short. One time he threw me out for not having a bra on.

And I said, what makes you think I don't have a bra on? And then he called in the gym teacher to look under my shirt and confirm, in fact, I didn't have a bride. So I was just. I was a pain in his ass. And I later found out that he called McAllister and told these people in the admissions office that I was a bad citizen, that I wouldn't stand up for the pledge of allegiance and stuff.

Well, they hear this old redneck assistant principal, and they hear about this little girl who's doing this, and they think, she sounds great. She's perfect. Perfect. So I actually think my misbehavior that got me in so much trouble and made him hate me so much, I once had an algebra teacher revealed me. He really is after you.

Like, you're not paranoid. Like, he's. He's really. He wants you out of here. And so I actually think.

I don't know how I got in. I don't know how I got in. It was clearly a mistake. I made a d in art, you know, my senior year, and my mother was a painter. So, I mean, all I had to do was slap art on something, and I would have gotten, you know, a b, and I couldn't handle the pressure.

It was too hard. So I don't know how I got to college. But once I got to college, I've got to say, I really. Well, everybody else was complaining about their parents and the. I don't know that you did.

You couldn't. Weren't supposed to smoke pot in your room or whatever they were mad about. I was like, this is great. This is. All these people read books, and they'll talk to you about them.

And I made straight A's, and I got a scholarship, and it was just shocking to me that I might succeed. At something, you know, what about the environment? Aside from people who read books and are willing to listen? If it was the environment, maybe there are other variables led to the straight a's. Was it being outside of your home environment?

Tim Ferriss
What was the recipe that contributed to that sort of conversion of sorts from deeper defiant to straight a? Maybe you were still defiant, but you got straight A's. I wasn't defiant. I wanted to please people. I mean, I think I had a lot of jobs.

Mary Karr
Like, I had one of those hair net wearing jobs at the food service where I had to go in at like four in the morning and, like, cook scrambled eggs and wash dishes and stuff. And so I think in some ways I had to organize my time. But I had been living with a bunch of drug dealers before I went to college out in southern California. We moved out there initially. We lived in cars and stuff.

And then we got some. A couple of us were slinging dough, mostly pod and psychedelics, although one guy had robbed a drugstore and it was. I hitched, was hitchhiking one day from Laguna beach to San Clemente where my friends were surfing. And I got picked up by a guy who really scared me. I thought he was going to rape me and had to jump out on the side of the road.

And it's interesting because there were six of us who lived in that house when I left home. And of the six, four went to jail. And two of those were dead before they were 20. And only me and one other guy, who's still my best friend, Duney, wound up getting sober, and we both kind of made it, quote unquote, him in construction in southern California and me doing whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing. So I was scared.

I was scared by how dark things that I brought the darkness with me. You know, you get to Southern California from where I grew up, and you're like, where has all this been? You know, everybody's orthodontia and, you know, people's teeth are great and nobody's missing any digits or anything. They. Nobody's.

Everybody looks so amazing and everything's so beautiful, and you're like, God, I've never seen anything like this. Golly. And so you would think everything would have been great. But, you know, as you know, when you have a lot of trauma growing up, you bring the darkness with you. So I had this idea after that, I was hitchhiking, and I got scared.

I had to went to jump out of this guy's car. It was a volkswagen that had no backseat and had a bunch of garbage in it. And I pulled up on the handle of the door, and it just went floppy, round and round and round, like it was locked. And I couldn't get out. And so the window was open, stuck open.

Wouldn't go up, wouldn't go down. And I stuck my arm out the side of the window and opened it from the outside and jumped out and went down this embankment on the side of the road. I was really scared. I was. You know how those moments of trauma are.

I was scared like I had been when I was a little kid, and there were bullets flying around my house. And I thought, I know, you know, I'll go to college in Minnesota. And, I mean, it's just. That was the other thing. Everybody in Minnesota is so damn nice.

Have you ever been there? I have. I have spent time there. I couldn't. I used to make a joke about.

An unkind joke. I'd say, if you're not a virgin when you get here, you will be when you leave. It was just. Everybody was so damn nice. Oh, my God.

I've never seen such nice people in my life. And still I got there, and I did extremely well for two years, and I won all these prizes, and then I dropped out. I couldn't handle the prosperity, you know, I couldn't handle the success. It took me a while to finally start getting sober. I guess.

I guess that was a lot of. My problem, which we will definitely talk about. I want to dig into that. And I also am going to ask you just to plant a seed about how those mentors initially convinced you to go to therapy. But first, I want to bounce around chronologically, because from these origins, I've, in the process of doing my homework, read about your graduate seminar at Syracuse, described as hyper selective, and you certainly a writer and poet of great note at this point.

Tim Ferriss
Lots of people know who you are. Lots of people love your work. Lots of people love you. Describing the craft and process goes into your work. How do you select the students who make it into your graduate seminar?

Or how did you. I mean, I do it. I wish they would just give me a wand and I get to pick all my people. But interestingly, I've been teaching there, gosh, 30 years, something like that. I only teach in the fall, and I go and I commute from New York City.

Mary Karr
So we do it based on the work. We do it solely based on the writing. And. And George Saunders, my colleague, George Saunders, had gotten so. Has gotten so famous that, you know, he attracts a lot of people and have a lot of people who teach their Arthur flowers.

Juno Diaz is taught there. We just have gotten up to 1200 applications for twelve positions. You end up with these twelve gems of sorted colors and kinds. Yes. What is day one class one?

Tim Ferriss
What does that look like? Oh, you're thinking when I teach my memoir class, yeah, well I used to do, I used to do this thing. Yeah, that's so funny. I used to do this thing where I would stage a fight in my class with someone who was opposite from me. So let's say, you know, like my colleague George Saunders who is just the sweetest guy, I can't even tell you, I was in the car with him once and there was a bug on his shirt and I was like George there's a big beetle on your shirt.

Mary Karr
And he'd be like, well he has to be somewhere, you know, I'd be like kill it. And he's like this tibetan Buddhist with this amazing practice, you know, just the sweetest guy. So George comes in and starts arguing with me that my classroom is in fact his classroom and this is in. Front of all the students, in front. Of all the students and it's for them, it's the first day of school and it's like having their parents fight.

And I script it so that I say only nice conciliatory things. I back up, he walks forward, he's bigger than I am and then it ends with him like throwing the papers up and you know telling me to go fuck myself or something or telling me to go hang maybe. I don't know if you can say the f word. Can you say the f word? F word is not only allowed but endorsed.

Tim Ferriss
I grew up on Long island, you're in good company. I feel so much better just telling me to go fuck myself. And then we ask the students to write. So let's say there are 1718 students in this class, 20 somewhere between 15 and 22 and they're all smart and they're all young, they were all incredibly juiced on adrenaline and cortisol because they were scared and it's a public scene and they don't really know each other that well and they don't know us that well so they're all extremely alert, they're hyper vigilant and we ask them to write down what happens and everybody writes something just a little different. Interestingly people will describe me in very aggressive terms like even though I'm the one backing up and I'm saying, well I can clear out during the break, George.

Mary Karr
But, like, I don't understand why you're so upset. And he'll say, you don't understand why I'm so. I mean, he walks forwards and I'm backing up and my head is down and I'm doing every conciliatory gesture I can think of. And people will say, you know, she stood her ground like a bulldog, or she had military strength facing off against him. And one year I did it with my student assistant, who was an undergraduate, just a beautiful young track star, Betsy.

And, you know, Betsy just threw her papers up in the air and was screeching at me. Well. Well, you know, she's this kid, and here I am, this professor with, you know, fancy clothes in a position of power. So people would, in that class of undergraduates, assume that I had done horrible things to Betsy that had, in one class, there was a young woman. One of the ruses I set up is that I leave my cell phone on so I can start to argue with George before he comes in and then ask the students, you know, how often did he call, how long between each call and ask them to guess things or remember things about time.

And some people he calls three times. Some people will say he called once, some people four times. So all those details are very influenced by who they are. The young woman with sickle cell anemia will have this enormous compassion for me because I'll say, I have to leave my phone on. I'm waiting for medical results, and she'll assume I'm waiting to hear if I have some awful ailment.

And she sees Georgia as a complete beast and me as this woman, perhaps ill, who dragged herself to class while everybody else in the class thinks, what a diva. She's answering her phone in the middle of class. She can't wait an hour to get medical results. I mean, come on. So there are always people in class who have.

You have those perfect memories. I remember one kid often. They're musicians. This kid was a jazz saxophone player who was very famous in Brooklyn for giving these amazing house parties. I think he made a living giving house parties for, like, I don't know, years.

So this kid had this amazing memory. He got. We had a script, and he remembered the script exactly. He remembered what George had on. He remembered where we stood.

He remembered that I backed up every step. And then when he wrote it, he wrote it exactly as it happened. He didn't miss anything. And he said, george was the aggressor. But I wonder what she'd done.

To make him act that way. I guess the purpose of the exercise is for you to realize that you remember through a filter of who you are. Memory is not a computer. It's not a perfect storage system. Obviously, we even these fine minds of these young people, very alert and paying attention in their first class and wanting to get everything right and do well, misremember.

And what's more, what I want them to think about is how they are not just perceiving things, but beaming the world, the landscape, into being with whoever they are inside. It's important as a writer of anything to realize what kind of filters you're strapping on that prevents you from seeing what's going on. I would imagine that is an opening exercise that a lot of your students remember. Speaking of memory for a very, very long time, what other exercises or aspects of your teaching it could be in any setting? Do many of your students remember or have stick out for them, would you imagine?

I think a lot of practice things. A lot of. I think it's important as a writer or as in anything, to develop habits. I mean, you talk about this in four hour body, four hour workweek. You've developed a lot of practices in your life to shape your life so that you were kind of operating, to constantly be growing and developing things like keeping a commonplace book, just keeping a notebook where you write down beautiful pieces of language.

Tim Ferriss
What is a commonplace book, that is, where you capture the sort of beautiful turns of phrase that you encounter. Yeah, things you read. So you might copy poems. You might copy something you overheard on the street. There was a guy standing on my street.

Mary Karr
This is like a couple of years ago when I first moved into this apartment, screaming murder or suicide at the top of his lungs. And everybody was walking around the street, walking around him. And it was early in the morning, and I walked up to him and I said, excuse me, sir. He was screaming, murder or suicide. Murder or suicide.

And I went up to him and said, sir, isn't there, like, a third alternative? Like, isn't there a door number three? And that little encounter I wrote down, but things I overheard. Hold on, hold on. That's too much of a cliffhanger.

Tim Ferriss
So what happened when you said that? Well, you know what was beautiful? I went into. I was going in to get a pastry for a friend of mine who was visiting from London. I got him one.

Mary Karr
I thought I'd bring him a pastry when I came out, but when I walked into the bakery, he was looking at the sky, you know, with a curious look, you know, he was thinking, like, isn't there a door? Isn't there a door number three? Isn't there another? Gosh, there might just be a door number three. But mostly what I write down are pieces of language or things, poems that I read, paragraphs, anything so that you're just constantly copying in longhand.

You can't type it. You're constantly copying things that are beautiful. You're constantly guzzling beauty. You're guzzling the beautiful language so that you're kind of steeped in it, you know, like a fruitcake in good brandy. Is the value of the commonplace book.

Tim Ferriss
And using it this way in the writing down, or do you have some approach to review or using that later? I mean, the great thing about them is that if you get on an airplane or you're going along, you sort of know what you're reading. But I've also been doing this. A poet named Stanley Kunitz, who was a poet laureate in, like, 1978 or something, told me to do this. So I've been doing this since 1978.

Mary Karr
Also, every time I give a lecture, I put the quotes I use in the lecture on index cards. And so I have, like, you know, I've been teaching for 40 years. I mean, I have 40 years of index cards with quotes on them. It's oddly satisfying. I don't know what it is.

It's like a sit up you do. It's like a push up you do. It's something you don't really. I often don't look back on. I think it's in the writing down.

I think it's in the practice. And kind of. It's like an altar. You're making an altar for yourself every day? You know, I wanted to.

Tim Ferriss
Might as well use this as a segue alter. Could you speak to the importance or utility of prayer in your life? Yeah, I mean, I'm a prayer. I was an atheist my whole life, and I got sober in 1989. And believe me, I drank my share.

Mary Karr
I did my part. I remember some guy I went to high school with telling me I was, when my mother was still alive, I was home and he says, you don't even drink anymore. You don't even smoke pot. I was like, no, Jacqueline, or, I don't do that stuff anymore. He's like, why?

I was like, well, it just didn't agree with me, you know, it made me do things I didn't want to do. And he says, I just think you're a quitter. I just think you're a quitter. I just think you gave up. I mean, what is smoking pot going to do?

You never going to, like, rob anybody's television or anything? He said, well, that's true. That's true enough, Jack Lantern. But you have had this job pumping gas since the 11th grade. Please tell me this guy's name was actually Jack O'Lantern.

His name was Jack. We called him Jack O'Lantern because of a sad tooth tooth thing he had and because we were not ones to stand on ceremony. And he said, I said, you have had this job since the 11th grade and you're 50 years old and you have an ambition deficit disorder by my yardstick. So, no, but he would say, jack, Larry. He'd say, don't call me that no more.

I'm like, what do you want me to call you? Like, that's your name, dude. That's been your name since you were 15. That's your name. What does prayer look like for you?

Tim Ferriss
What is praying? I think it started off, I think poems are my first prayers. The ones that I read. Like I said, I felt less lonely, so I started praying not out of any virtue. I didn't believe in God.

Mary Karr
I had no religious training whatsoever. When I was a little girl, you know, people would say, would talk about Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. I thought they were kidding. I thought, they don't really believe this horseshit. I mean, I figured out pretty early on, you know, by the time I was like six or seven, people were serious, that they prayed when people weren't looking at them.

I couldn't believe it. It was shocking to me. And daddy would say, well, you know, folks ignorant, you know what you're going to do. So I had not a religious bone in my body. But I did notice when I tried to stop drinking that I couldn't like that.

I tried to stop drinking for two or three years. And I tried by myself. And I tried drinking only beer. And I tried drinking only alone. I tried drinking only with other people.

I tried drinking only wine. I tried drinking with food. I tried drinking, you know, weekends. I mean, I just. Somehow I had crossed some line where I just couldn't stop drinking.

And I went to get help and I went to sat in church basements and I hated everybody I saw who was sober. I just hated them. They just seemed like, you know, the guys selling incense at the airport, I just didn't like them. They just didn't look fun. And I just, they were so nice, too.

It was like getting to Minnesota. They're, hi, you know, welcome. I'd be like, oh, God, I hate these people. And finally, the last time I drank, the last night I drank, I had gotten together for, like, it was the longest amount of time sober I'd had since I was 15. And I'd gotten together 90 days sober by going and, you know, sitting in church basements and talking to people who were sober.

And I got a 90 day chip. And then I had to give this talk. I had to give a poetry reading at Harvard. Sorry to interrupt, just since I don't have much familiarity. When you say 90 day chip, is that some, like, literal token that you were given?

Because it looks like a poker chip? And so, like, you get one the first day, you go, and then you get one at 30 days and 60 days and 90 days. So this was, for me, an epic accomplishment. I mean, there was no time that I ever ran the hundred yard dash in. That was as important to me as that 90 day chip.

And I was happy that I was sober. I felt better. I was sleeping better. My kid was better. Everything was better.

And I had to give this poetry reading at Harvard College, and I was nervous. I'd never given a reading without drinking. The reading went okay. I was teaching at a bunch of places, including one class there, and I went out with some of my students, and the next thing I know, it's 03:00 in the morning, and my car spinning out on store drive, Boston. And I'm going towards this concrete.

And I somehow didn't crash the car, and I somehow got home, and. And so at that point, everybody had been saying, you know, got to get on your knees and pray. And there was this great heroin addict, recovering heroin addict Janus, at this halfway house where I did volunteer work. I drove people to meetings, basically, and would pick people up and drive them to meetings. A lot of disabled people.

And Janice said, just get on your knees. And I'm like, Janice, you know, what kind of God wants me to grovel and go, oh, God, you're so great? And she said, you don't do it for God, you asshole, in that Boston accent. You don't do it for God, you asshole. I'm like, well, who am I doing it for?

She's like, you're doing it for yourself. Just get on your knees. Just say, help me stay sober in the morning. Get on your knees. And I say, thank you for helping me stay sober.

And so I'd be like, okay. So I get on my knees, I help me stay sober. And at night, I'd say, thank you for helping me stay sober. Well, some weird things started to happen. I mean, sometimes I would literally shoot the finger at the light fixture because I just thought, I hate this.

You know what's terrifying about praying is the loneliness of it. I always tell people, young women, I sponsor you, show more faith praying when you have never prayed before than any nun. To sit in that silence with all your fears and all your self doubt is so scary and hard. If you have a big, loud head, like I do, and, like, I have a big inner life, and mine never has anything good to say. It thinks it can kill me and go on living without me.

Something started to happen. I would have these moments of quiet. And the only way I can describe it is it was south of my neck. It was, like, in the middle of my chest. If I was living my life with my head, like, yammering at me like a chihuahua all day and do this, don't.

That stupid bitch put that down. Pick that up. Go over there. I mean, it was, just eat this. Don't eat that.

I hate him. You know, like, just these moments, like, in the middle of my chest would be, like, this broad expanse of quiet. And I remember one particular day, our little shitty car broke down. My kid was a toddler, and he was. I had to pee.

We were on the road. I didn't break down. I had a flat and didn't have a spare, a working spare. It was rush hour. We were on memorial.

Driver trying to get home, and I just. In that moment, what I normally would have done, you know, I would have been there, you know, like, throwing the jack around and trying to get the car jacked up, and in a state of indignant fury that I didn't believe in God, but I believed that there was fate that had doomed me to misery, and that the guy with the jaguar would always get my parking place right before I pulled in. And I believed I had a head that had memorized the bad news, spewed it out all day. And I remember that day. It was.

The sun was setting. I just got out on the side of the road. I got Deb out of his car seat, and the sun was going down, and he was looking at me, afraid that I was going to be, like, angry. And I just sat there, and he said he was hungry, and I didn't have anything to eat in the car. And I'm sitting there, and I said, let's just look at the sunset a minute, and then we'll.

We'll go, we'll walk, and we'll get some help. And we were just sitting there looking at the sunset. And this truck pulls up with these goomba guys from this twelve step meeting, and they have ginger ale, they have a jack, they have a way to tow my car. They give deb potato chips. And it was just like, you know, all I have to do is just find some space in my body and just wait for a minute.

And so I started to notice things happening when I wasn't bent over the day, like a dog, over, like, a bone that was about to be stolen, you know, like that. And I could just. I could just, like, sit there for a moment. And so I began to get a space in my body, and I began to get. I began to hear.

Not the voice of God, I would call it. I would have some leanings. Like, I would be thinking, I should have just killed myself. Like, literally, this is what I'd be. I should have killed myself.

My husband would marry some nice girl who wore barrettes, and my son would have this great mother, and his life would be better if I weren't there. And I would hear this voice in my head that was like, you need a sandwich. Why don't you get a sandwich? Why don't you make yourself, like, the biggest sandwich you can make? And I'd be like, oh, great idea.

Like, I just started to have these small, good ideas that were not like, anything I'd ever heard when I was afraid before. Yeah. Then I had all these crazy spiritual experiences. And, like, one of the things, I had this great sponsor, Joan the bone. God, I loved her.

She was so great. She was the kind of girl who lived in Alaska and would go to the bar when it was, like, 50 below in a tutu. She was just, like, a badass. Like, she was just. And she was a Harvard social theorist, too.

I've got to tell you, she was just. Joan the bone. Joan the bone. All that and a bowl of biscuits. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss
Sounds like a mobster. What's the origin of the name? Do you have any idea? I just called her that. That was my nickname for Joan the bone.

I see. I see. All right. Joan the Bone. And Joan would tell me things like, I was such an ingrate.

Mary Karr
She'd say, you have to make a gratitude list. And so she'd call me and say, what's on your gratitude list? I would say, I have all my limbs. She'd say, no. Okay, here's what you're going to do.

You're going to make a gratitude list every day this month for every letter of the Alphabet, and you're going to call me and read it to me. I said, shut the fuck up. I'm not going to do that. She's like, yes, you are. Or else, you know, like, I won't talk to you anymore.

And I'd be like, okay. So I just started trying. I just started trying. Instead of sitting there with my arms crossed and my lower lip stuck out and my baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I just started trying. Shit that people who were happier than me suggested I should try.

It was so simple. And so one of the things I said to her, she said, you've got to pray for what you want. What are you praying for? He said, I pray to stand it. Yeah.

Not to kill myself, not to stand it. To stand it. Just to get through the fucking day. That's what I'm praying for. And she said, okay, well, you got to pray for what you want.

What do you want? I said, I made $9,000 this year. I would like some money, please. She said, well, why don't you pray for money? I'm like, you can't pray for that.

She's like, well, why not? I said, okay. So I would literally get on my knees in the morning and say, keep me sober. I would like some money. I'm not even making this up.

And I would get on my knees and say, thank you for keeping me sober. I would still like some money. Three weeks later, after I started, this is a true story, and you can look it up. I get a phone call from a guy who says he's from this foundation. He's giving me $35,000 that I'd never applied for, asked for, that somebody just put me up for.

And I so thought it was. I thought it was my friend George playing a trick on me and says, you know, fuck you, George. And I hang the phone up, and the guy calls back and he asked me on, you know, the speakerphone, you can hear people laughing maniacally. So I've never gotten money from prayer again. And then Joan the bone says, well, you must believe that there's some sort of guide.

I was like, no, because they were meeting to give me that prize before I had stopped drinking and started praying. And she said, jesus Christ. And I would also talk to her all the time. She'd say, how can there be a God? Because look at the Holocaust.

How do. She's like, God didn't do the Holocaust. People did the Holocaust. Like, what are you mad at God for? Did that.

God didn't do that has nothing to do with God. So that's how my prayer life started. It's a bizarre story. I like bizarre. So ignatian exercises, does that mean anything to you?

Yes. Yes. I became a Catholic. I became a Catholic and I do something. I practice a kind of spirituality called ignatian spirituality, which, when you become a Jesuit, you go away to the jesuit place, or the Jesuit making place.

You do a quote, you go to jesuit school, and then they give you these 30 day exercises. And the purpose of the exercises is to find God in all things. So, like this election, I just turned around to look at my screen to see if we had a new president. So this election, for instance, just a. Side note, somebody just sent me a text before we started recording and said, the entire country has electile dysfunction, which I thought was pretty clever.

Why didn't I think of that? Oh, my God. That was so great. That was a clever turn of phrase. Yes.

Oh, my God. No, it really is. Finding God in all things. Finding God in all things. So that means, you know, like when the car breaks down, instead of thinking, you know, your cruel fate, you know, has come to hurt you.

So what you do, actually, Tim, is in the morning, I do a prayer and meditation thing for 20 minutes where I do, like, centering prayer for maybe, I don't know, five, six, seven minutes. And then I read a scripture, and I meditate on the scripture. And then I have a bunch of people I pray for. I have a list of people I pray for and things I pray for. Then at night, I do something called the examine of conscience, where you.

It's not like going over your day, making a list of good things that happened or whatever, and then repenting for the bad things. It sounds like that, but it's not that. What it is is you kind of press play on the recorder of your day. So you think, I woke up, and so what did I do? Where was I?

What mindset was I in? And you close your eyes and you try to review your day, literally like you're watching a movie. And where you see moments of grace or luck or even something, you know, a good sandwich, something yummy to eat. You're supposed to savor those moments and occupy those moments. And it's a very body oriented exercise.

You're supposed to smell. What do you smell? What do you hear? What do you taste? How do your clothes feel?

You're supposed to really recreate that moment in a sensory way and thank God for the grace or the gift of that. And then you kind of press play again, and you see moments where you turned away from God or you, your best self didn't act, and you say, I want to do better next time, instead of snapping at the robo call voice, snapping at Siri because she doesn't understand me. I love me for myself alone, you know, to just, you know, tomorrow I'd like to be more patient. Help me to be more patient. So what it does is it made and those moments of gratitude.

And I also keep kind of a lister journal of those things and a prayer journal a daily. I don't keep a journal journal, but I keep a daily prayer journal. And I just will kind of highlight some of those things, like, for me today, right now, Steve Krenacki's haircut, which I know he does himself. I don't know. The guy who delivers the big map thing on MSNBC.

I just like the guy. I just like him. Every time I see him, I feel like I'm spending the night at my girlfriend's house, and he's her nerdy brother who's, like, secretly hot. I had this flash of panic, so I was like, oh, fuck, here's somebody important. I'm not saying it's unimportant, but I'm just saying, oh, God, there's another name that I have to pretend I know because I'm on the podcast.

He's the guy who delivers the darn, you know, what the electoral map says on MSNBC. So if you're a liberal, you're, like, a nut, and you watch this the way other people watch other things. So he's this really nerdy kind of math goop guy who wears, like, khakis and a really, like, a clip on tie and has this really bad haircut, and I just have a complete crush on him. I just crush on him. I don't even like young men.

I don't. I really don't. You have to have some, you know, you have to have a. Some hair coming out of yours for me to want to date you. But this guy just does it for me.

I just like him. I just like. Wait a second. Tie that together for you. Is that.

Tim Ferriss
Does that have anything to do with the prayer journal? Yes. Or were you just confessing that? Oh, no, no. It's.

Mary Karr
It's. I have a crush on a ton. This guy who's on tv every day, and it tickles me to see him. It's kind of a little thrill. It's a little thrill to see him.

It really is. It's so stupid. But it's also. It makes me feel like a child. It makes me feel like like, I'm in junior high school, and so there's something innocent and sweet about it.

Also the fact that he's so dorky. I like. I just like that. So you have a prayer journal. You have the commonplace journal, right?

Tim Ferriss
Any other journals? No, that's it. Those are the two. The prayer journal. I don't really.

Mary Karr
I only write, like, actually write. And I. It's mostly kind of looks like a list. Do you know what I'm saying? It's mostly like a list of things.

Like the lady at my drugstore, whom. My pharmacist, who they were all out of, you know, the pneumonia vaccine. I get pneumonia a lot. And she went out of her way to call me and say, you know, I got you the pneumonia. If you can come in right now that we had a cancellation.

You know, I can do that. Just kindnesses, moments of kindness, but also moments of presence and awareness of God. A lot of people feel it in nature. I feel a little bit in Central park, which is all the nature I have. I am currently in Austin, Texas, which is home base for me.

Shut the front door. Yeah. I've been here for three years. I live in the Republic of Austin. Republic of Texas.

Tim Ferriss
One of my favorite t shirts, not everyone's gonna get this, but is a shirt with the Texas flag, which says most likely to secede on it, which I quite like. Yes. So I'm in Texas. All the way down there would argue that I'm not in Texas, but of course. Yeah, I know.

Mary Karr
Right. Listen. Or do you have a weapon? If you have a weapon, you belong dog it. Good for you.

What do you have? Can I ask? Can we talk weapons, as far as weapons? Yeah, sure. I have a seven millimeter wind mags hunting rifle.

Tim Ferriss
I have a glock 34, which is a nine millimeter. I know what it is. I know what a nine mil. I don't know what a nine millimeter gun is. Not explaining it for you.

I'm explaining it just like getting on your knees. Not for. Not for God. It's for you. I'm explaining to the listeners.

So, nine millimeter glock 34. I have an M and P 45 and a few other. Do you hunt? Firearms that I don't use much. I hunt, but infrequently, and that started in 2012.

I always had a very negative association with hunting. Just given my exposure to it. It's kind of a great thing. Yeah, yeah. I had a very negative association because I saw very irresponsible hunting on Long island.

Rick Rubin
Yeah. And then in the process of working on the four hour chef and learning to forage, I felt it was incumbent upon me to hunt and if I were to consume animal protein. So I had my first deer hunt with an incredible hunter and conservationist named Steve Ranella, and that really completely shifted my lens on how ethical and responsible hunting could be. Now, in Texas, you have the whole spectrum from responsible to machine gunning hogs, from helicopters, which I do not partake in, although people could argue it's an invasive species, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes.

Tim Ferriss
So I do hunt infrequently, probably. You know, let's just call it once every year or two. You know, those javelina hogs are fun to shoot. I'm sorry to say it, I'm embarrassed to say it, but I have shot a javelina hog, so I'm anti gum. But pro hunting.

Mary Karr
So does that make sense? It does. I mean, I'm just imagining these kind of backwood kiwis in New Zealand, hunting hogs with knives, walking into the woods barefoot, which is a real thing. I know one guy who did that. So you can be pro hunting while being in a tie gun?

Tim Ferriss
I think that's possible. No, but I mean, I would. If I were to hunt, I would hunt with a gun. But I'm. It's funny.

Mary Karr
One of my best friends is a young writer named Phil Lamarsh, who's an amaz. He's one of those guys who stocks his freezer with bow and arrow, kill venison. He called me this week and said a very interest. He just killed his idea. And he said, you know, the longer I hunt, you know, the only thing I hate about it is the killing.

Tim Ferriss
I think there's a lot of shared sentiment to that by a lot of hunters. Yeah. I mean, the most reverent people I know about the natural world are practicing. Many of them are practicing hunters. True fact.

Well, I want to use this to tie a bunch of things together in the most awkward fashion possible. That's okay, because I've been trying to force fit a segue somewhere, so I might as well do it here. And that is to hear your description or explanation of how some of your wordsmithing came to be. Part of what I enjoy so much about your writing is that you have this. Let me get this right.

Time critic Lev Grossman said in his review of Lit, Carr seems to have been born with the inability to write a dishonest or boring sentence. That's high praise. Now, love here. The least boring sentences for me and God, I wish I could remember it. But you take this, what seems like this sensitivity to language and poetry to create sentences using cat shit sandwich metaphors and so on, which also seems to me, and maybe this is.

You tell me if this is warranted or not, but to be a very kind of texan thing, also, it kind of makes me think of, like, a trial lawyer in God knows where in Texas, right? Who gets up and just demolishes some slick trial attorney from Los Angeles in a complete mismatch, right? I mean, just dismantle someone with these really clever turns of phrase. Where does that come from? Or how did that develop in you?

Because I do think it is one of your superpowers. Well, I think growing up in Texas is. It's a storytelling culture. Texas idiom is poetry, as far as I'm concerned. And I had two great practitioners.

Mary Karr
I'm a 7th generation Texan on my mother's side and fifth generation of my daddy. So my daddy was a great barroom storyteller. I mean, he was a labor union organizer for the oil, chemical, and atomic workers local 1242. And he was just funny as a crutch and told these amazing kind of tall tales like out of Mark Twain. But he also spoke in poetry.

Like, he would say, like a woman with an ample behind. He'd say, she has butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag. And for him, that was a compliment. There was nothing insulting about that. That he used to call me.

I'm a little skinny thing. He used to call me a gimlet ass. Pokey, you need. You need some taller on that ass. You need.

You need. You got you a gimlet ass. I don't even know what that is, but I knew it wasn't good. A little flat, but. Or he would say, it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

You can scan that, by the way. It's raining like a cow pissing on flat rock. Wait, what do you mean by scan? Real quick? I mean, like.

Like, Shakespeare is iambic pentameter, or my first love poem that was ever written to me. I saw you on your horse today. Your eyes like eggs. Your hair like. Hey, that's like.

It's iambic pentameter. It's da da da da da da. That's. It doesn't matter what it is, but you can hear it when I say it, right? That it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, and that you hit that flat rock, it creates, for one thing, it creates a whole landscape in which cows piss on flat rocks, and people stand around and marvel and go, my goodness, looky at that.

And then you attribute that to the rain. It's a metaphor. It operates way beyond the bounds of propriety. It's not how you talk in church. You're not supposed to talk like this.

So the minute you say this and somebody laughs at it, you have them. They're in your boat. They have transgressed. But by laughing at your joke. Well, Daddy was just the master of a story, but he was also a poetic imagery.

I mean, to me, that poetry. I grew up. I was steeped in it. My mother, who was an enormous reader who read everything, chinese history and russian novels and philosophy, and just read everything, was just the master of. You know, I remember when she was dying, she had all these old men who were always trying to marry her, which why.

But she's dying. She's actively dying. And one of these old boyfriends has come to see her at the hospital in Houston. And the nurse bends over and says, miss Carr, your husband's here to see you. And she says, well, he must look like shit.

He's been dead 20 years. And, you know, I mean, she just can't stop herself from saying, like, the most horrible thing you've ever thought. And so I think between the two of them and just growing up in Texas, the idiom, the language I grew up with is epically beautiful. And the need to not be boring when you speak, you know, people will, I'm a stomp a mud hole in your ass. That is so much better than I'm gonna whip your ass.

It's just like, yeah, right? Or my friend Dooney got in a fight once with a guy in a bar, and the guy said. And he told the greatest story about it. It was actually the guy he decided to stab. He went out in his truck and got a knife and came back with, like, a swiss army knife.

And he starts chasing this guy who was a state congressman, by the way. I won't tell you his name, but he starts chasing him around this bar. Well, to brandish a weapon in a place where alcohol is served as a mandatory, I think, ten year sentence, 710, some big. You know, it's not that it's frowned upon. And he's chasing this guy around, and what if somebody says to Danny at one point, that's a little bitty old knife you got there?

He said, well, notice he don't want to get stabbed by it.

And then he runs out, and then we hear the siren. So here comes. Here comes. Whoo. Duney runs out.

He gets in his truck, and one of those mall cops, security guys, runs out. And Dunny says, he stands in front of my truck, in front of my headlights. He's got a belt buckle that will pick up HBO. And he holds his hands up and goes, halt. Halt.

And Dooney just puts it in first gear and hits the guy.

I mean, he doesn't hit him hard, but he knocks him down and then leaves and gets pulled over and is convinced he's going to prison for brandishing this weapon, for trying to hit this guy. But anyway, it turns out he had to call the guy to apologize. The guy's daddy knew Doonie's daddy. And he said, all he wants you to do is apologize. And Dunny's like, apologize.

You know, I'll blow the guy, like, kidding. I don't want to go to jail. Of course I'll apologize. But here's the punchline of the story. And this is what makes Doonie still my best friend since I was 15.

So he calls the guy up, and the guy answers phone. He goes, and Doonie goes, I am so sorry, man, about last night. I am so sorry. The guy says, you almost killed me. And Doonie says, man, I'm so sorry.

I didn't know it was you. You.

Don't you want to say that, though? The next time somebody happened, I didn't know it was you. The next time you do some horrible. Things, I get in a really stupid argument with my girlfriend. That's what I'm going to use.

Don't you want to say, I didn't know it was you, honey? I don't know. Only in the state of Texas do you have that story. It's just got all the elements of a Texas story. How could I not love it down there?

I mean. Oh, my God. Let's talk about revision. Okay. Revision.

I'm a big reviser. I'm a big reviser. You're a big reviser. But so you have said, you know, anyone who's read a rough draft of anything I read is just shocked at how bad it is. It's terrible.

Tim Ferriss
And what does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very. Hopefully doesn't sound like a really naive question, because I know that there's a. There are many, many aspects to revision. I'll lead with just a bit.

This is from writermag.com, comma. But car says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes. Can I make this sentence less boring, more interesting, prettier, more colorful? More true. So that's a teaser.

What does your revision process look like? Because I've read that you threw out something like 1200 pages throughout 1200 pages of lit. Yeah. Finished pages, too. That's not draft.

Mary Karr
And that was written over about, I want to say, five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been, well, first off, they were about, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract.

I mean, they, and so I finally, my agent called me and said, you know, you're going to have to. I said, you know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don't shut up and leave me alone. It's just going to take me a minute. So anyway, so I'd sent them, I don't know, I'd sent them like 100 and 3140 pages.

And my editor at the time estimated that I'd thrown out 1200 pages. And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked. I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which I didn't want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like, two days and I watched, you know, doctor Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows, and I ordered a lot of curry.

I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo, one of the people I call. It's like, you know, the nuclear button, you know, who's like, just one of the great novelists who also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, don, I think I'm writing him. He's like, what are you crying about?

I said, I think I'm writing a bed book. And he said, well, who doesn't? And I thought about that, and I thought, God, he's right. Tolstoy's written bad. But I mean, people I read, you know, every writer I know has written a bad book.

Okay? So maybe it's just supposed gonna be a bad book, but it's the book that's standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened. And basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time. I think one example I give in the art of memoir is that when I'm, my mother is driving me to college.

And I think the sentence I started with was something like, mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers. I can't remember. Might have said puke and drunk on screwdrivers. I somehow was able to remember being in that car.

The thing about my mother's yellow station wagon was that it didn't have an air conditioner. So that at that time, you could buy an air conditioner that's strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right and I was sitting in the, you know, shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet, and it was icy, icy cold water. And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas, and she was drinking vodka.

Driving. Drinking vodka and orange juice and eating these. Watching her eat a peach. You know, when you're 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die.

There's just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you're 17. You just think, my God, woman, shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it's not going anywhere, you know? But I.

The smell of the peaches and being in. And suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of 100 years of solitude. That was her book, but I had started reading, and she said, read it aloud to me. And I remembered reading that book and driving. And I remembered, you know, you grow up around these kind of Texas dirt farms.

I mean, there's plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, but then you get to the midwest, and it's just so organized. It's just there aren't the rusted cars in the yard and the refrigerator and the porch, you know, these rows and rows of corn and these big cinnamon colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn't do well at school, that I would fail. I've been such a screw up.

You know, I've been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids, and there was a bunch of dope, and some of them went to jail, and I didn't because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in. She came to pick me up wearing a leopard. She had leopard skin pajamas. It was July 4, and she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar and those leopard skin pajamas on this hot night in Coons County, Texas.

And here sits this judge behind this liver spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he's ever eaten on his tie. When she came to pick me up and he said, I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. And she said, oh, you are old fool. Oh, my God, mother, get me out of here.

Sucking up is underrated. So anyway, yeah, I think it's memory. It's. I do an exercise. I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spieta, a wonderful young novelist I teach with, and she's teaching an undergraduate class.

And I said, you know, I want to do this right. There are 90 kids in the class. I said, I want to do this writing exercise. She said, well, they're writing, you know, it's been uneven. And I said, trust me, everyone will write well.

And you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother's cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little. And try to close your eyes and smell that, because, you know, smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory, and it's stored way back in the. That snake brain hypothalamus we have. That is where all the trouble starts. You try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want.

What are you yearning for and what's keeping you from getting it? Maybe it's a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer, or what's going to keep you from getting it? It's my big footed sister who, as daddy said, nothing ever got between her a bag of groceries. You know, she's going to get all the oysters, and I won't get any. And so it's really more about trying to occupy a former self, because I think, as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers.

The body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things, too. So the body keeps the score. And if you go excavating for these memories, sometimes there are costs associated with that total hardship. Yeah, I've read that while you were working on the Liars club, that you'd suddenly fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, as if you'd driven all night and you would sob.

Tim Ferriss
You'd really suffer. What did you do to cope with that pain? And I should just say, you and I were chatting before the recording about trauma a bit, and I've recently described some of my childhood sexual abuse, and the podcast that I did related to it didn't seem to exact a horrifying toll, but the process years before of trying to write about it and getting a very, very rough draft brutalized me. Of course it did. Just left me paralytic for God, more than six months in some ways.

Mary Karr
And I just sort of. Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I'm horrified by the experience and also fascinated by it in a way, because I don't know why those two things should be so different. And I just love to hear you expand a bit on the price that you've paid or your experience with dredging up a lot of these memories or recalling them, putting them down, and why writing seems, at least in my experience, to be so different from some other forms of expressing these things. Well, I mean, because you're alone.

I mean, that's, for me, where the prayer and the God comes in. I do have a sense now that I didn't have back in the day. I mean, when I. By the time I started writing Liars Club, how old was I? I don't know, 35.

I've been in therapy for 16 years. And I had also had a prayer practice for, you know, a meditation and prayer practice for some years. I hadn't converted. I wasn't a Christian. I didn't.

I was a Catholic, but I was about to become Catholic, and I was very active in recovery programs, and I had a sponsor, and I also had, based on all of those efforts, I had done a lot of the processing and recovery. I had flown down to Texas when I was 23 years old and got my mother drunk on margaritas and told her, you know, you tried to kill me with a butcher knife. And it's not because I was a bad kid and it ruined my life. And what the hell was wrong with you? What was going on with, you know, I had done a lot of that work before, and I tell people, when they tell me they want to write a memoir about some horrible stretch of childhood or some awful period of trauma, maybe they don't.

Maybe they don't right now. So I think I had a sense of, you know, when I was drinking, my idea of medicating myself or anesthetizing myself. That was all I knew how to do. That was what my parents told me to do. That was all they knew how to do, was try to drink it away.

My daddy was in the battle of the bulge. I mean, he went in at Normandy, and he came out at Buchimall. I mean, that's plenty of trauma. Plus, being married to my mother would have been simple. There's only one person with a weapon, as opposed to the Nazis.

So, yeah, I think I'm a big fan of a hot bath. I'm a big fan of nutritious food. I'm a big fan of cardio, even now. I mean, I'm 65. I don't do five dance classes a week, but I get up in the morning and I walk 4 miles, and then I do pilates three or four times a week, and I take a dance class a couple times a week, and all those things keep me in my body.

And when I'm in a lot of pain, I take care of myself. When I was drinking, I felt like I had this screaming baby that I was holding, and I was screaming at it all the time to shut up. So, yeah, I think I still have even writing anything now. I find very. I'm not dealing with anything like that.

I'm so much. But I'm also. I'm so much happier now than I've ever been in my life. I mean, I'm 65 years old. I've never been so happy in my life.

I've never been less good looking, had less social power, had, you know, any of the things that you would think would make me happy, joyous and free. And I'm just. I wake up every day really feeling lucky to be alive and feeling loved and feeling like. Like not every day. I mean, I wake up plenty of days, and I'm, you know, mad as an old stomp piss ant.

But most of my days are pretty lit up, and it's a lifetime of practice. So I tell a lot of my students, my young students, you know, want to write about sexual assault or trauma of various kinds. Well, maybe. Why don't you get some treatment for this first? Why don't you treat your heart first, treat your body, treat yourself with a lot of care, and see if this is what you want to write about right now, something you can write about maybe five years from now or something.

You know? What advice would you give yourself about therapy if you were talking to your 19 or 20 year old self? And how were you first convinced to go to therapy? I remember you mentioning that long ago. You know, I didn't have to be convinced.

I mean, here's the other thing. Yeah, no, and there weren't a lot of people saying, gee, I wish you'd stop drinking. I mean, I led a pretty isolated existence the way a lot of people who grew up the way I grew up do. I mean, my idea of telling somebody how I felt, I remember right before I stopped drinking, I remember I was teaching sort of all over the academic ghetto around Boston. But I remember specifically one day at Tufts, I was copying something for a class, and I was.

Had dropped my kid off, like, vomiting out the side of the car before I dropped him off at daycare. I mean, and then I drove to tufts, and I was xeroxing something, and somebody said, how you doing, mary? And I was like, you know, I want to blow my fucking brains out. And that was my idea of telling somebody how I felt, making a glib, sort of awkward, socially awkward statement to somebody I hardly knew. And I've been in therapy then for a while, but I was also drinking every day, everything I could get my mitts on.

Tim Ferriss
So what is good therapy to you? Because therapy is a term that's extremely broad. It's kind of like saying medicine, right? Yeah, exactly. There's so many different specialties.

What has proven to be good therapy for you? You know, I think it totally depends on the. On the person. I mean, the best for you, the best therapist I ever had, I think. I mean, for me, the difference in therapy and recovery, I think in therapy, I'm the baby and they're the mommy, and that model sort of, especially when I first started, I just felt like I needed a lot of nurturing, and I had great therapist.

Mary Karr
You know, my first therapist, when I look back on things he said and did was insane. He would have been fired. He told me to go down after he'd been seeing me nine months and confront my homicidal, suicidal mother about all this horrible stuff she'd done to me. And I did it. And he said, I won't see you until you do it.

Tim Ferriss
Wow. I mean, nobody's ever penny in for a pound. Yeah, I know. I mean, I look back on it, I was like, he was crazy. Nobody's ever.

Mary Karr
I had a great therapist when my son was a baby who was a psychologist, PhD psychologist, and who really helped me try to learn how to be a mother when I hadn't had one. And all the feelings that come up around what you didn't get when you were a child, when you have a child, the protection and stuff. It's funny, my son watches me with his daughter now and just says, I don't know. Sort of gives me nothing but a stroke. And I said, let me just tell you, I was not this good with you.

Like, I was crazy about you and I loved you, but I didn't have what I have now. Now that I have with her. That's just. I don't even break a sweat going in there. I can do this stuff.

It's funny, I was in. I babysit one or two days a week. I was in prospect park this week, and I had taken her across the park in a stroller, and a thunderstorm broke out. I mean, pouring rain. And.

I've never shared DNA with somebody this good natured as this baby. This baby coos, smiles, laughs, never cries. I mean, sleeps, eats, is just the best natured kid. I used to babysit in high school and college, so I've taken care of a lot of babies, and she's just the easiest kid. I get across the thing.

It's pouring rain, and she starts screaming, crying like she's being beaten. And I take her out of the stroller, and I hold her, and she calms down. I go to put her back in the stroller, and she just starts screaming, crying again. Well, it's 2 miles across, across a muddy field in the pouring rain, and I've got a stroller and a bunch of crap, and I've got this, you know, 27 pound unit, screaming unit, and I just had no problem doing it. And when I was 40 years old, 35 years old, it would have been like being beaten with a hose.

I just thought, you know what? Daddy was in the battle of the bulge. This is not that hard. You know, I just had the physical energy, even at my age, that I didn't know I had to do it. And I got back to the house and I went to fold up the stroller.

There was four inches of freezing water in the bottom of the stroller that I've been putting her in, and she was soaked through to her skin. Yeah, there was. She was perfectly reasonable to be, you know. Now I understand. I could have just emptied it out and put her in the streller and wrapped her up in a blanket, but that.

I didn't know what it was, but I just thought, well, I'll get her home and it'll be fine. You know, I didn't feel like, oh, my God, oh, my God, I'm a terrible mother, and I'm going to wind up trying to stab her with a butcher knife, which is how I felt when my kid was that age. You know, I didn't know that I wasn't going to be my mother. I wasn't. I didn't know that.

So scary. That is scary. Yeah. Super scary. And, you know, it sounds like, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that you've learned in some form or fashion, or maybe many forms and fashions, to wear the world like a loose garment.

Tim Ferriss
I'd love to know if you agree or disagree, because based on my reading, well, okay, so at your first confession, absolutely not. No priest said to you, wear the world like a loose garment. What does that mean to you? Well, I mean, I think it's not, you know, the problem isn't whatever your mind is telling you. The problem is.

Mary Karr
The problem is the fear. And for me, the solution to fear is curiosity and presence. And I can't be terrified and curious at the same time. And so when I was walking the baby across the field, just all I was was physically uncomfortable. I mean, I was thinking, gee, can I shove this thing?

And hold her mood, you know, and get everything and get all this stuff. How am I going to do? You know? And so I went crossways across Mudfield. So I'm shoving the stroller and carrying her.

I didn't know physically if I could do it. I was sort of dubious. I was thought, maybe I can't do this. But all I had to do was do it. I thought, well, if I get tired, I'll sit down, it'll rain on me a minute, then I'll get up and go again.

Like, that's what we'll do. But I don't know. Here's the way I put it. I tell people, it's like I have a trick knee. It's like, most of the time, I walk fine, I run fine.

I can, you know, squat more than my body weight and do advanced Pilates for an hour and ten minutes, and I'm tough as a boot. But there are days that I don't feel that way, or there are moments where I get my knee goes out, and I fall on the ground. All I have to do is honor those moments. All I have to do is I have a heating pad. I have a weighted blanket.

My kids have a pit bull I'll bring to stay with me while an idiot is my little comfort animal. You know, I call people. I still have a sponsor. I still have a therapist I don't talk to all the time. But I didn't have to be convinced to go into therapy, I knew I needed it, but when I first started it, as you know, it was just so damn painful.

And I just. For those of your listeners out there, if you're having a hard time, I just want to say it's like you lance a boil and the infections draining off, and if you can just get by that, it's going to tell you that it's endless. But it's not endless. There's a bottom to it. So did you ever smoke?

You never did? I was never a smoker. Yeah, you're just such a jock. You're such a specimen. You're such a specimen, too.

Tim Ferriss
Well, we're all specimens. It depends on how we look on the autopsy table. But the. The, uh. I was born premature, so I have respiratory issues on my left lung, and that was part of it.

So I had a lot of breathing issues growing up to begin with. And secondly, I was. Sports saved me. So sports kept me out of a lot of trouble. Yeah, I.

Mary Karr
You know, I was sports, and then I quit when I was like, I quit, but I'm much more of a jock now than I was then. You know, I wanted to ask about smoking. I was going to ask you about smoking, because when you quit smoking, there's a phenomenon that happens. It's also when you quit drinking, but somehow it's more intense when you smoke. You'll have a craving for a cigarette, and the craving is as intense as it was the first day you quit.

It's as overpowering. But if you just keep note of how long the craving lasts and how many of them there are, they're as intense, but they're not as long and as frequent. So it's the same thing about suffering. When you first start therapy or you first lance that boil and you're unearthing some of the painful things you grew up with, it's as intense the first day, and you just feel like, oh, my God, I'm in the burn ward, and I just got snatched out of the fire, and every ounce of me hurt, and I want to run screaming down the street like my hair's on fire, and it just won't last as long as it did the first time. And so for your listeners, if you know, if you're just, you know, looking at hard things that you grew up with or you're trying to quit smoking, trying to quit drinking, trying to recover from trauma, I promise you I will send you money.

If this is not true, that it will get easier, it's not linear, and there will be those days when it's as painful as the first day, and you'll think, but I'm no better than I was. But you are. You just. It doesn't feel that way. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss
Excellent advice. Just a few more questions. I'm having so much fun. I could go forever. But I.

Mary Karr
You've got a lot to do, dude. Do I? Do I, though? I don't know. I mean, do you live?

Tim Ferriss
Well, I spend most of my time downtown for recording and then live in the burbs. Outside of that, I love it in Austin and expect to be here for quite some time. I wanted to move here right after college. I didn't get the job, and there was those morons. They screwed up.

Yeah, well, you know, possibly. I also think that that could have been in everyone's best interest. Really. I think I make it quite terrible employee in most circumstances. Me too.

But at the time. And I didn't expect this to lead here, but at the time that I was not given the green light to get an offer from trilogy software way back in the day, it seemed like a death blow. This seemed like the end of the world because I had put a lot of eggs in that basket. I didn't want to do anything that was recruiting on campus, really. Otherwise, I listened to and watched your syracuse university commencement speech.

Mary Karr
Wow, that's so nice of you. And then I read a transcript, and I think this is from the speech, unless it was sort of mistranscribed, but here's the paragraph. Almost every time I was super afraid it was of the wrong thing and stuff that first looked like the worst, most humiliating thing that could ever happen almost always led me to something extraordinary and very fine. So my question is, could you give us an example of that that comes to mind? It could be something humiliating.

Tim Ferriss
It could be a favorite failure. But anything that turns out, when I. First did a kind of moral inventory and recovery that they encourage you to do, I had a lot of resentments against God. When you say they, this is in a twelve step program. Yeah.

Mary Karr
And Joan the bone. You know? Joan the bone, right. Like, one of the things I really resented God for my son, who was just this little beautiful, blonde haired, blue eyed and a tank of a boy, a natural kind of athlete. When he was little, he was sick all the time.

I mean, he would get a cold and he would get these sinus infections. His fever would go to, like, 105. We'd rush him to children's hospital in Boston. It was terrifying. We're always rushing to emergency rooms because his fever was so bleeding.

High and just so terrifying. And so I never slept. I never slept. And I was depressed. I was probably postpartumly depressed.

And I was drinking by then. I had started. I decided drinking would help me take care of a sick child. Great idea. Mir is like the bad mom in the after school special.

And so what? And I remember so when it came time to du ignatian spiritual exercises. You're trying to find God in all things. Where is God in that? Where is God in a sick baby?

I'll tell you secret. When I actually looked at my life and the decisions I was making, I would have kept drinking if I'd had one of those playboy babies that, like, sleeps 12 hours a night and never is sick and just, you know, coos and cuddles and, like. And. And I had been able to. I would have kept drinking if I had had my granddaughter, who's like, the easiest, like, twelve hour night sleeper, eats everything you give her, laughs at everything you do.

I would have kept drinking. I could not physically drink the way a real alcoholic needs to drink and take care of a kid who was sick all the time, couldn't do it and work and make a living. I couldn't do all those things. It was too hard. And so I don't think God sent pathogens into my infant son's body.

I don't know how any of this works, but when I ask where God is in this, my own physical discomfort forced me to get sober. So my sister died this summer, very suddenly, of pancreatic cancer, in less than a week. Sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry, too. You know, we were not in touch.

We had a terrible childhood, and we had not been really in touch for seven years, and that was my choice. And I remember saying to my therapist, isn't it going to be terrible when she dies? She said, yeah, it's going to be terrible anyway. And although it's horrible that she's dead, there's nothing. I feel my love for her.

I don't have to defend myself against my love for her the way I did when we were estranged. I can cherish and remember all the times we were there for each other, all the ages we were in each other's lives. And I would give anything for her to be alive. But I still think our not being in touch was the best thing for both of us. You know, I don't regret that.

And there's this amazing gift to me of being in touch now with her son and her husband and her stepchildren. And I would give anything if she were alive. But there are gifts in this suffering that are real spiritual gifts I practice when things happen that I find very disappointing. My son had a film coming out, his first feature film coming out at Tribeca Film Festival, and it's a global pandemic. And so there is no Tribeca film festival.

And he's raised somehow all this money and put years worth of work in and moved heaven and earth. And you know what? The film's being released. He's got a great distribution deal. He just won best director at Frightfest.

And, you know, it's unfolding just the way it needs to unfold. It's getting curious about where the light is. You know, just being curious about where the light is. Getting curious about where the light is and the all powerful reframe. And it is really incredible what can happen, as you said, when you really get curious.

I have to say this, Tim, because I have to say it. I just have so many young people who come to me about sexual assault, so many young men who have come to me, my students, young writers, young poets. And you're being open about this on this podcast has just been such a gift to all these young men. Thank you. So good for you.

So good for you. So a horrible thing that happened to you that's being used to help a lot of. Give a lot of people hope, and it's going to prompt a lot of healing. I hope so. And I've seen.

Tim Ferriss
Seen a lot come out of the woodwork, and it's been simultaneously. And I know you've experienced this, certainly. It's been simultaneously appalling, rewarding and brutal in a way. I mean, it's all of those things. There's a lot of pain and beauty in it.

And, you know, I'll just mention that of my closest male friends, and there really aren't that many. I don't collect friends like a little porcelain teacups or whatever people collect. I have a fairly smallish circle, and I would say 30% of my closest male friends reached out to me after that podcast to describe their own experiences with sexual abuse that I know nothing about. And these are people I've known for a very long time. So I hope there's healing.

Mary Karr
Of course there is. We're living. Look, we're not curled up on the backwards of mental institutions, and we both could be. Yeah, very true. Well, Mary, we're going to talk again, and I want you to ask one more question, which sometimes is a dead end.

Tim Ferriss
I'll own that if it is. Okay, then. But we'll see where it goes. The question is, if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach billions of people, however many, you want a word, a phrase, a question, a quote, a poem, anything, what might you put on that? God, that's so hardcore.

Mary Karr
Oh my God, that is really. God, that's a little. It's aggressive. It's aggressive. It's hard to.

It really is. It's a little javelin of hogs as a pack of javelin hogs running out of the bushes at me. And it doesn't have to be the one and only. This could just be the first billboard. The first billboard, you know, put down that gun.

You need a sandwich.

You need a sandwich and a hot bath. No, I know what I would put. I would put 90% of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath. That's what I'd put. I love it.

Tim Ferriss
I love that. Well, Mary, this has been so much fun. I've really, really enjoyed this. People can find you at your website, marykar.com. that's Mary karr.com, twitter arycarlit lit.

Is there anything else you'd like to say? Suggest, ask? Request? No. Just like let's all heal.

Mary Karr
Let's all heal as a country. No matter how different we think we are, we're all suffering souls and we all want to heal this riven country of ours. So that's what I'm wishing for all of us and wishing everybody a lot of love and light today. And a big nice cigar.

Tim Ferriss
Hear, hear. Look for the light. Thank you, Mary. Take care. You go.

Mary Karr
Do you? I will. And to everybody listening, we'll link to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes at Tim Dot blog podcast. And until next time, time. Thanks for listening.

Tim Ferriss
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter. My Super Short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.

Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim blog Friday. Type that into your browser Tim dot blog Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep I have been using eight sleep pod cover for years.

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#745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr

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1: Introduction to Guests

2: Rick Rubin's Health Transformation

3: Mary Karr on Writing and Trauma

4: Mindfulness and Meditation

5: Coping Strategies and Personal Growth

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