Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
Days of Their Lives
On this episode of Articulate Experience—three writers examine how they write about the world is informed by how they see it.
Marina Benjamin’s works combine deep research with deep reflection. It’s by looking outwards that the British author salves her own inner turmoil.
Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart didn’t expect his background as a fashion designer to help his writing. Now, he considers his visual skill an essential part of his secret sauce.
Best-selling author and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean is driven by curiosity. To stop learning, she believes, is to stop living.
- [01:49] Marina Benjamin
- [15:30] Douglas Stuart
- [28:38] Susan Orlean
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Welcome to Articulate Experience — the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers. I’m Jim Cotter. On this season finale— three writers discuss how their work reflects their worldview.
The British author Marina Benjamin is a writer of memoir with the soul of a journalist. Self-reflection, she believes, shouldn’t lead to navel gazing.
MARINA BENJAMIN: I'm incredibly aware of the reader. In fact, the older I get, the more aware I become. All I care about is the reader now.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Before the 2020 novel Shuggie Bain turned Scottish writer Douglas STUART into a Man Booker prize-winning author, he spent 20 years working in the fashion industry—experience that turned out to be surprisingly relevant to his writing.
DOUGLAS STUART: And so I began to just reapproach the book in that way and think about it as an immersive expedience for the reader and really lean into my visual skills. And, and that's when things started to hum for me, and I felt more confident and the book started to come together.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Susan Orlean is a bestselling author of 12 books and a staff writer at the New Yorker known for explorations of the world that are both clear eyed and curious.
SUSAN ORLEAN: I believe entirely in the idea that learning about the world is in and of itself existentially valuable. And so in that sense, I have a wildly optimistic worldview because how could that not be optimistic?
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) That’s all ahead, on Articulate Experience.
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MARINA BENJAMIN
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Marina Benjamin is a writer of articles, essays, non-fiction, and memoir with a distinctly journalistic sensibility. Today, she’s a Senior Editor at Aeon, a magazine devoted to big ideas and cultural analysis, and before that spent 15 years as an arts journalist and editor for the likes of the New Statesman and the London Evening Standard. An obsessive curiosity and an emphasis on deep research form the foundation of all that Benjamin writes—but her process never begins with external exploration.
MARINA BENJAMIN: it always starts with writing about something that niggles me, something that I find painful, something that's difficult. Writing is a way of doing battle with the demon, really.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Among the demons Benjamin has battled (on the page)— approaching 50 and coping with the losses and opportunities of middle age; connecting with her grandmother’s Iraqi-Jewish identity after a lifetime of denial; and, interrogating the insomnia she’s experienced since childhood.
MARINA BENJAMIN: I was one of those kids who never wanted to go bed. So it was more of a case of refusing sleep because I was terrified of all the monsters that would come out at night. And also because I didn't want to disappear. I thought that if I fell asleep that my consciousness would start running like a motor, and then where would I be? So I had a loathing of not being around.
JIM COTTER: So both ... you've also done a very serious academic exploration of what it means to sleep and the social morays around sleep and how our attitudes to sleep have changed. And they do change, and they almost change generation by generation. I remember years ago Bill Clinton bragging that everybody in the White House got up late, stayed up late and got up early and survived on two or three hours sleep. Now, of course, it's almost like lack of sleep is like smoking, it's just something one shouldn't do and one would never brag about it [crosstalk 00:01:19] ... work without having slept.
MARINA BENJMAIN: Yes. Wellness ... we're in the grip of a wellness culture that says you owe it to yourself to eat well, to sleep well, to exercise. Otherwise, there's something morally wrong with you. And the expectation that we should sleep eight hours a night is a very recent one, part and parcel capitalist expectations about the working day or the shape of the working day. So if you leave people to their diurnal rhythms, what you find is that, generally, they fall asleep as darkness arrives, and then they'll wake up very early in the morning, in the early hours of the morning, be awake for a little bit and then fall asleep again. So the two sleep phenomenon which characterize the way that people slept in the early modern period. Even bedrooms, this idea of a dark, quiet, private space is a very recent intervention. It just made me think about something I want to say about [crosstalk 00:02:19] sleepless.
JIM COTTER: Say it.
MARINA BENJMAIN: Well, I just want to say that the idea is, usually of insomnia, is defined by lack, by the fact that you're not asleep. And actually if you are insomniac, it's quite the opposite. Insomnia is an intense presence. So you're intensely present physically, mentally, everything is buzzing, pinging, wide awake, there. And the one who's sleeping is absent because the person that you know by day, your sleeping partner, is not there by night. They're the ones who are absent, you're the one who's present. So I think the whole thing about insomnia just wanted to turn on its head this idea that insomnia is just defined by lack. It's not lack of sleep, it's intense presence at night. It's trespass.
JIM COTTER: You do write about ... and you talk about being in mud. We all have this experience of being tired and being not fully present during the day. And this got to extremes for you, right?
MARINA BENJMAIN: Yeah. If you go for several weeks with three hours sleep a night, you're getting to the point where you know you're cognitively impaired, you cannot perform simple functions. So I wouldn't trust myself to leave the house and know that I had to check several times over, did I have money, did I have keys, did I have everything I needed, did I bring my computer? Or I'd plan a working day in the library, and I brought my computer, but I didn't bring my charger. I would find things like buying a train ticket at the tube station an almost impossibly complex task because it required staged thinking, and somehow I was incapable of that. So yeah, it's very debilitating certainly. You do feel like time does funny things. Time gets very elastic with insomnia. It pings and snaps and stretches, and you feel like you're inhabiting or moving through a different time zone. You become aware of it when you have those rare nights of good sleep and you wake up with crystal clarity in your mind. And you think, "Oh my God! Is this how most people live? Is this the kind of clarity that people take for granted on a daily basis?" Because if you're insomniac, you don't have that. Your thinking is slurred.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) An excerpt of Insomnia by Marina Benjamin
My insomnia often feels like this: turbocharged. It is not one idea that teases and prods me awake, a finger tickling me in a single spot, wriggling my mind into consciousness. It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.
JIM COTTER: Coming out of the back of having written extensively and researched and really dug deep into this, where are you in your own head about sleep? Have you found peace with the idea of insomnia, sleeplessness, that you have this pattern that's repeating itself and occasionally you get to have a normal person's night sleep? Is that all okay? Given the choice, would you sleep like a normal person?
MARINA BENJAMIN: I think the process of writing about insomnia made me feel like I understood it better, that I had more respect for it as a menace.
JIM COTTER: Still is a menace?
MARINA BENJAMIN: Well, as a ... I think by writing about it not as a health problem but as a state of mind really helped me come to a different understanding of it. I think I would say I stop short of coming to see it as a gift, but maybe made an accommodation with it so that I accepted it as part of life, as a part of my life, as a way of being. I see upsides to it, I see benefits to it. So in the book I talk quite a lot about the links for me between creativity and sleeplessness because of the way in which it allows you to access unconscious thinking and become very aware of how your mind works at night.
Would I wish it on anybody? No. Do I enjoy the occasional drug-fueled sleep that I might get? Absolutely. Even better are the even rarer sleeps where I don't need the drugs, but I'll have a good catch-up sleep after a couple of weeks of sleeping badly, and then that's wonderful. But I've made my peace with it. I get a lot done in the night when I'm awake.
JIM COTTER: There's a pattern to what you've written about. You spoke of it a second ago, that you find a demon and then you want to examine it thoroughly. Some of them aren't demons. Some of them are big influences. Your grandmother, for instance. You really wanted to explore how she became who she was.
MARINA BENJAMIN: But there was a demon there. Was the demon of otherness, growing up foreign, being different.
JIM COTTER: Did you feel that yourself. You did? Why?
MARINA BENJAMIN: I think, fondly enough, I grew up in Britain in the 1970's and Britain then reminded me ... or Britain now reminds me a little of Britain then, which it was quite inward looking, fairly inward looking, fairly xenophobic, fairly narrow in its conception of what-
JIM COTTER: Englishness was.
MARINA BENJAMIN: Englishness was.
JIM COTTER:What was unusual about you though? Because you seemed like the classic daughter, granddaughter of an immigrant, that you can ... more British than the British themselves.
MARINA BENJAMIN: Yeah, it's all an illusion. I was educated very well. I had a good education. I had a grammar school education. And in those days, of course, you talk to any working class writer from Britain as well, and they'll say, "If it wasn't for the fact that I got into a grammar school," that was social mobility. Well, it was a social mobility across the class barrier, but it was also a mobility from the periphery to the center. 'Cause if you were an outsider, the grammar school system would also pull you onto the inside. So that was the bridge that I was able to cross. But certainly in my primary school, people were forever teasing me, kids were always teasing me and saying, "You're foreign. Where you from?"
JIM COTTER: Right. And kids will find any
MARINA BENJAMIN: ... look for difference and magnify it. You feel it very keenly. So I think I was always dealing with an outsider status, and I internalized those questions and jibes and insults, and whatever it was, and desperately ... as a teenager, desperately wanted to be seen as British. I wanted nothing more than to belong, to be seen as English. That made my life at home very difficult because my family were always saying, "But you're Iraqi," and I said, "But I'm not. I'm not Iraqi, I'm English."
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Over time, Benjamin’s appreciation for, and curiosity about, her heritage blossomed. So, in 2004, she went to Baghdad, where her grandmother was raised, in search of the remnants of a once-dynamic Jewish community. But unlike almost every other journalist in that war-torn country at the time, Benjamin traveled alone— un-embedded, and thus without military protection.
MARINA BENJAMIN: Yes, it was an act of madness. But I also thought ... here was the rational part of it. I thought, "The borders are open now. It's the only time I can go. And I'll go now rather than wait because things might get worse." And in fact they did. So I do think it was an act of madness, and I went at a crazy time. Do I regret it now? No.
JIM COTTER: Well, you lived to tell the tale.
MARINA BENJAMIN: I lived to tell the tale. I would never have gone. And it was probably my only opportunity in the whole in my life to go back to the country that I came from.
MARINA BENJAMIN: I felt like I was reconnecting with a history that I had turned my back on for decades of my life. So there was a real sense of curiosity that drove me to explore beyond what the exiles bring with them because the exiles bring portable culture with them. It doesn't evolve, it stagnates in the new country. Whereas back in the homeland, things are changing.
JIM COTTER: I know.
MARINA BENJAMIN: And that was when I wanted to go and find out what remained, what had changed. And there was some rude shocks because the Iraqi Jews were a major ... well they were the biggest ethnic component in multi-cultural Baghdad as we rolled from the 19th century into the 20th century, and I was sure that I would find vestiges of that culture. But there was nothing. It was just obliterated. So, to find so little led me down a different path 'cause I had conceived a book of excavation that was largely reportage. But it ended up being a novelistic reconstruction because there was so very little to see, so very little to piece together.
JIM COTTER: Do you feel in some ways then that you sort of ... was British ever a consolation for the fact that you were of this culture that had been obliterated? your grandmother, or your parents even?
MARINA BENJAMIN: It went the other way, actually. I felt more Iraqi the less reality there was to that history and existence. The less of it there was to find, the more of it I decided I'd feel myself and preserve. So it became the very opposite quest ... was not to just, "Now I'm a British person, I have to go investigate my roots."
JIM COTTER: But whose Iraqi are you because you're not an Iraqi of now, and you're not a disparate [crosstalk 00:26:53]
MARINA BENJAMIN: ... don’t speak Arabic.
JIM COTTER: Right. What Iraq?
MARINA BENJAMIN: Yeah, it's a very good question. But actually, in a way, that was one of the lessons that came out of the book for me because if Iraq had, at one point, had this multi-cultural experiment that went so badly wrong, then what was it now? What was this thing, this nation we called Iraq, if it wasn't just this botched experiment, a strange colonial experiment, a patchwork of ethnicities that were uneasily sitting at together in a nation state? What can we call Iraqi? To me, at the end of the day, it came out as being largely cultural. There was shared language, shared literature, music, food, dress, morays. Those were the things that made it a nation state. So those are the things that you find now among the disparate you can bring together. You can find a Kurd, you can find an Iraqi Jew, you can find a Muslim. You can bring them together in the same room, and they will have far more in common than they have that divides them.
JIM COTTER: And certainly more in common than if they were living on Iraqi soil.
MARINA BENJAMIN: Probably, yes, where their differences are magnified at every turn, yeah.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Marina Benjamin’s works begin from a deeply personal place and often draw on her own personal experiences. But though much of what she writes is about her, Benjamin never forgets that it’s not FOR her. No navel gazing here.
MARINA BENJAMIN: I'm incredibly aware of the reader. In fact, the older I get, the more aware I become. All I care about is the reader now.
JIM COTTER: And who is he or she or is it a single person?
MARINA BENJAMIN: It doesn't really matter who they are, actually. It's not that I'm visualizing them. It's just that I want to know, as I'm writing, that I'm connecting with them. For example, I've got very strict rules. If you're writing about yourself, the worst thing you can do is just overshare. It's like somebody showing you their holiday photographs and expecting you to be interested because it was a meaningful moment for them. How you make it meaningful to them, that's transposition from the personal into the public realm is what interests me in memoir. So it's how I make my personal obsession, how I make it resonate for other people. And so it seems to me that what you have to do is you have to touch base with what it is to be a human at some level to make it resonate with someone else.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Benjamin’s focus on craft has enabled her to not only express herself, but help others find their own voice(s). Along with the screenwriter Tina Pepler and the novelist Anna Barker, Benjamin runs True North — a group that coaches academic writers to develop a human, narrative approach to their work.
Now nearing 60, Marina Benjamin is forever hunting for new truths, insights that might transcend her own thoughts, experiences, and feelings, and tap into something bigger, something more profoundly human—something useful for all of us.
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DOUGLAS STUART
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Today, Douglas Stuart is a best-selling author and a great lover of literature. But growing up with a single mom struggling with alcoholism, he didn’t have much bandwidth for reading.
DOUGLAS STUART: No kids need an awful lot of peace, um, within themselves and in their environment to be able to read. And I didn't have that. I didn't have a home. They also didn't have it inside myself. I was bullied pretty relentlessly for being queer from about the age of six to about the age of 15 school starts to thin out to about 15 people go to find jobs. Um, but I was really bullied on a daily, on a daily basis because of that. And so I couldn't read, I just couldn't focus on a book. I was so anxious all the time, whether it was my, uh, my queerness or whether it was the addiction at home, but these what that meant as well as that, a lot of what I was was incredibly lonely and isolated. And so I had to rely on my imagination. I was always coming up with counter narratives or inventing worlds or telling myself stories in order to cope.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) In the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, previously state-run steel, shipbuilding, and other heavy industries were privatized. As the jobs that had defined the character of the working class city dried up, more than 20% of the city’s residents were left unemployed. And for men in STUART’s housing project in the East End of Glasgow, new jobs were sparse.
DOUGLAS STUART: The thing that I knew that I had to get was education because my brother and sister had done a very noble thing where they'd left high school and gone and got work at 16 because they wanted to make a wage. And they're a little bit older than me, but I could see that they were always struggling to make it to Friday to make it to payday. And so I knew that wasn't going to work. It wasn't working for them. They just had no other choice. And so no one in my family could say, stay at school, sticking at school, there's go to college, go to university. But I knew that the labor route wasn't working.
DOUGLAS STUART: And so instead what happens is actually I'm turned towards textiles. Textiles is incredibly Proud manufacturing, you know, traditional tradition in Scotland. We make such broad varied cloth. If you think about woven tartan, you think about knitwear, uh, waterproof cotton. We make all these different types of cloth. And so it was a good place for an artistic kid
JIM COTTER: To go creativity and industrial. Exactly.
DOUGLAS STUART: But someone who needed a trade, someone who needed to be employed at the far end of it. And so that's what took me into textiles.
JIM COTTER: Have you ever thought about the fact that if you had had an opportunity at that point, not necessarily to go to college, but to have the opportunity to be a right, to be left alone to right. How different your life might've been?
DOUGLAS STUART: don't, I, I mean, I don't regret anything in my life and I'm grateful for, for everything. That's, that's come through it and, you know, at 16 when you're orphaned and you're living by yourself and you're trying to finish high school, you're just trying to get your exams done, you know? Uh, and you're the first person in your family to do that. Then you have to follow any yes. In your life, anybody that encourages you and pulls you towards the next thing you have to go do it.
DOUGLAS STUART: Sometimes to be able to stop just to stop, to pause for a moment in life and to lift your head and to look at a horizon and think I'm going to get there can be quite luxurious. A lot of people stuck in poverty cannot take that moment. They have to just keep going.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) In the year 2000, STUART followed opportunity 3000 miles away from home— to New York City. There, he would spend the next two decades working for Calvin Klein, The GAP and eventually Banana Republic as a senior designer. But STUART soon craved more creative self-expression than commercial fashion could provide. Around 2008, he began writing what he’s called “scraps of memories” of his early life that would become the 2020 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain.
DOUGLAS STUART: Fashion, um, is a really hard industry to be involved in. I think from the outside, perhaps people think it's all about creating something beautiful and expressing yourself and just being around delightful people and delightful clothes. Actually. It's an industry like any, and so it can be very cutthroat, it can be very demanding. Part of the reason why it took me 10 years to write my novel is because I would start at eight o'clock in the morning and leaving at 10 o'clock at night was a good day. Fashion never ends. There is no conclusion to what should be coming next. But after 20 years in the fashion business, I realized that very little of it endures Clothing doesn't last in the same way that literature does. It also doesn't touch people in the same way. And so I began writing Shaggy Bane actually at the height of my fashion career, uh, because I felt very unfulfilled. I felt like I just kept creating clothing and people would buy them and, and then they would move on and, and nothing was lasting. Nothing was really, uh, being taken to heart. And so I felt very unfulfilled.
JIM COTTER: The good thing, I guess, about you getting to, to exercise that, that great visual, uh, capacity was that when you came to make literature, you were making incredibly visual literature. And I think that that's not so much that, you know, there's a lot of people are good at, at, at describing things, but you have things take place and then it's almost like you stand back from they happen. And then you tell us in great visual detail and in ways actually the people who were immersed in the word, the world of words from the beginning, I think that that might be part of your secret sauce. Is that, do you think that might be the case? Yeah,
DOUGLAS STUART: I certainly, it took me awhile to lean into my strength and the visual arts, uh, when it came to my writing. And at first, when I started to work on the first few drafts of Shuggie Bain, I was, I was emulating all my favorite writers. I was trying to be Toni Morrison and Cormack McCarthy and James Kellman. I was faking it till I made it. And I was a really poor copy. And I, I fell, um, oftentimes I was intimidated away from the page, you know, I would put it away and I would push it away because I thought I'm just not a writer. And then I realized that I'd been spending my entire life, uh, processing the world, visually thinking about how things look, how things touch. Uh, texture is so important to me, uh, even sort of smells and Sones. I really do think about the world through all of my senses. And so I began to just reapproach the book in that way and think about it as an immersive expedience for the reader and really lean into my visual skills. And, and that's when things started to hum for me, and I felt more confident and the book started to come together.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Readers meet the fictional Shuggie Bain as a teenaged orphan living alone in Glasglow in the year 1992. The story gradually reveals what happened to his mother, Agnes—the circumstances that led to her alcoholism—the addiction that lead to her death.
JIM COTTER: was there any sense in which you were retelling a parallel version of your, of your own experiences? Obviously I know with a lot of fiction on it, but, but doing so with more, um, what's the word I'm looking for agency that as, as a novelist, as a fiction writer, you were able to control what happened in ways that you might, what you weren't able to when you were a young boy.
DOUGLAS STUART: Yeah, that's right. You know, Shuggie Bain is a work of fiction, but it does deal with an awful lot of trauma that I experienced my own life, whether that was growing up poor, I was raised on government benefits. I lost my mother as you know, uh, when I was 16 to addiction, she suffered with it my whole life and deciding not to write a memoir, but to write a work of fiction, allowed me to, uh, tell the story that we, I needed it to be told. I, I understood that as a young boy to write a memoir, you only understand half of the situation. We only understand our mothers as our mothers. And really, I, I knew that my own mother, that the character of Agnes pain at the heart of this was a very complex woman. She was many, many other things other than just a mother.
And, and if I chosen to write a memoir, I couldn't write about the complexity of this woman. She has so many facets. She's a daughter, she's a, a lover, she's a wife. She's a, uh, you know, she's a full to the women on the hosting scheme that lived next to her. And I wanted to show her as complex as all of that.
JIM COTTER: You've described it as a love story and you understood the torment that your mother was going through. Was that at the time, or was it after the fact and similarly with Shuggie, I mean, are those fair parallels for both of your understandings? Yeah.
DOUGLAS STUART: Um, Shuggie Bain is certainly a love story for me. It deals with a lot of different things, but it is also the culmination of my life's work to understand the struggles of my own mother. And one of the reasons why I chose fiction. And one of the reasons why the book became incredibly healing for me to write is when you have to write fictionalized characters, even if they do things that you don't agree with, or you don't like, you have to understand their motivations and where they're coming from. And so the 10 years that it took me to write this book actually was an opportunity for me to have a conversation with my mother. My mother died when I was 16, I went to school one morning. And when I came home, she wasn't, she was no longer with us. And she had struggled with addiction, my entire show too. Didn't it wasn't that every single day contained alcohol, it was that it was really on the landscape of my youth. You were always worried about it. It would always return. It was always coming back. It was there almost, um, even when it wasn't there even its absence sort of hinted at the fact that it might, it might return. But
JIM COTTER: I mean, I, I understand this presents a very traumatic way to grow up. It's an, you know, the storm is coming and you don't know if the shutters are going to hold.
DOUGLAS STUART: Uh, it's, there's a very, um, it's a really traumatic way to grow up. It's traumatic on lots of different levels. First of all, you worry about yourself and what am I coming home to, but not only, uh, sort of will your mother, will your father be drinking, but what kind of drinking are they doing? What kind of alcoholism, what kind of alcoholic would they be today? You know, there were days when my mother would drink and the character of Agnes bean drinks to have a good time to escape. She becomes the life of the party. There were other times it would be to make her modeling or to bring out some anger in her. Anger was a very difficult thing for, for mothers of my mother's generation to, to access because they weren't allowed to sort of bring that out there. There was some, uh, there could be repercussions if they took their angers out to the streets. So they, uh, they took their, you know, they really sort of help people to account. And so alcohol would bring that out of her. And then other times it was sadness. And so not only were you, what would your parent be drinking, but then what kind of drinking was it? And there was all those kinds of fears. It was quite, um, it was almost like a sort of domestic terrorism in a way.
-JIM COTTER: You ever have conversations with her where you said, I'm just a little boy, you have to fix this. Like, was there ever a beseeching with her? Just like, I can't do this. I'm you're the adult here.
DOUGLAS STUART:
I was a kid. I had so many conversations about, you know, I wish you would stop drinking. If you love me enough, you would stop this. If you know, and I actually, I spent much of my youth trying to alter myself to, to try and be the thing I thought my mother needed. Do you need to meet to be quiet or do you need me to be less of a burden? Do you need me to be better at school? Any of these things in order to affect her drinking? One of the biggest revelations of my adult life and the thing I had to come to terms with as my mother's addiction, had nothing to do with me. It really had nothing to do with me. And have I sort of carried myself in the world how I was as a kid.
JIM COTTER: How old were you when you found that out?
DOUGLAS STUART: Oh, that's, I'm still, that's still a work in progress really. I'm still really, I understand it some days. I don't always feel it. Um, and so I'm still processing that myself. I think that's a trauma. I'll carry with me my whole life.
JIM COTTER: You were just a little boy though.
DOUGLAS STUART: I know.
(Excerpt of Shuggie Bain, read by the author)
Agnes didn't want to think about that night because it made her feel like a fool. No, she had packed the Catholic suitcases. Again, these Brocade cases that were now carrying it away way, the same ones that had brought her here to her mothers. She looked down on the green cases and ripped the old Miguel and label in to after Agnes had left the Catholic Brendan McGovern had tried to do the right thing by her, even after she'd stolen away in the night, he had honed it or to her mothers and made promises of what he would change to have her back. Agnes had stood there and the shadow of the tower block with their arms folded as her husband offered to rearrange himself so completely into whatever she wanted, that he would not have been recognized by his own mother. When it was clear, she wouldn't take him back. He had, he had asked the parish father to talk with Wally and Lizzie and guilted into returning. Agnes would not be told. she would not go back to a life she knew the edges of.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Stuart considered Shuggie Bain to be a love letter to his mother and to Glasgow, but it isn’t always a flattering one. In his stories, he depicts love, humor, and generosity alongside homophobia, sectarian violence, and domestic abuse. And he’s not planning to look away from it anytime soon. His second novel, 2022’s Young Mungo, tells the story of two Glaswegian boys in rival gangs.
DOUGLAS STUART: And so young Mungo is not a sequal in any way, but it feels like part of a cycle or part of a series. I think Shuggie and Mongo could know each other and they're, they're almost fighting a very parallel fights in a way. But for me, I'm trying to just create the most incredible tapestry I can of uh, of the working class, people of Glasgow. And so I think I'll always be revisiting it.
JIM COTTER: Do you, do you ever feel like he will have permission to write? I don't know, in New York canal.
DOUGLAS STUART: Yeah. There's, there's a New York novel in my future. I'm dying to write about the fashion industry in the nineties, uh, and to really pull back the veil on that and share what it was really like. Um, but right now I've these characters won't leave me alone. So I've got to spend some time with these, uh Glaswegians.
Thousads of miles away from home, compassion connects Douglas STUART like a thread to Glasgow. Over the years, he’s used it to weave a life his mother would’ve been proud of— one where he sees with eyes of forgiveness, of love.
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SUSAN ORLEAN
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of 12 books and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Observant, with a sharp eye and a wry sense of humor she sniffs out the facts, searching for truths that are stranger than fiction.
SUSAN ORLEAN: I love nothing more than dropping a fact in that's absolutely a hundred percent a useful fact, but just that it's existence will make you smile or chuckle or sit back in surprise. I mean, that's the best joke for me.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Orlean has found plenty to giggle about in her nearly 40 years as a journalist— writing about everything from the elite competitors in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show to he intricacies of the Los Angeles public library system. But despite her long track record of success, she’s never quite made friends with the blank page.
SUSAN ORLEAN: There are a couple of stages early on. The first one is I love this idea. It's a wonderful idea. And then it's immediately flips into what am I doing? This makes no sense. There's no story. Why am I doing this? And just pure dread as I learn the material. And I'm really sort of struggling my way through. It's a little bit like getting on a plane. You don't know the destination, you land, you don't know the language. You don't know the roads, you know nothing. And it's misery, it's absolute misery. And the whole time you're thinking, why did I get on the plane over time? If you're lucky, you begin thinking, oh, I see this road connects to that road. And I have begun to understand a few words of the language.
And if you have enough time, you arrive at a point where you think, oh, this is a wonderfully interesting place. I can't wait to tell people about it. So that's the arc of my writing experience. And you know, the, the moment of thinking, oh, this is such an interesting place. I can't wait to tell people about it. That's the moment where I sit down and write. And it feels, um, like I'm now on a mission to explain to people why this strange land is actually really worth visiting a strange land that very recently I looked at with horror.
JIM COTTER: And that's what comes out in the writing that it's a person like we're seeing, obviously the version of you, that's now not frightened and is actually ready to tell, tell your tales. That's what comes out. And it's an extraordinarily positive worldview, which I think is probably what your worldview might be.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Yeah, well, I, I believe entirely in the idea that learning about the world is in and of itself existentially valuable. You learn about some things that you like, you learn about some you don't like you learn about things that you were uncomfortable with. You learn about things that are funny and surprising and engaging, but the bottom line is there's an, it's an intrinsic value in learning. And so in that sense, I have a wildly optimistic worldview because how could that not be optimistic? Um, I'm not saying I like everything that I learned about, but I think the learning is, is the whole point of being alive. And, and so each time you embrace learning about something, you're engaging in the sort of essence of what, how we bring meaning to life. I also think it's, um, your kind of moral obligation to try to learn about things you don't know about.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) In the past two years, Susan Orlean says she hasn’t been able to write without tipping her hat to the new circumstances of the world, but rather than write about the human pandemic, in her story “The Rabbit Outbreak” she wrote about a virus that started in China and killed 140 million bunnies there while spreading elsewhere in the world.
(Excerpt from “The Outbreak” read by the author)
Most rabbits have in their skillset the ability to pretend they're healthy even when they're quite sick. It's sort of the inverse of playing possum, but done for the same purpose, namely to deflect attention from predators who would consider a sick rabbit easy boot games as a result of this, playacting rabbits often die suddenly, or what appears to be suddenly when in fact they've been sick for a while. This past February, a pet rabbit being boarded overnight at the busiest rabbit veterinary practice in New York City, the Center for Avian and Exotic medicine died. The fact that this rabbit had seemed chipper, but then expired without warning was chopped up to the rabbit habit of feigning good health. Later that evening, another rabbit at the clinic died. The coincidence of the additional death was strange, especially because the first rabbit that died was elderly. And the second was young. A third rabbit that died at the clinic that same night was middle-aged. Even though this rabbit was known to have had an abdominal mass that compromised her wellbeing, there had been no reason to think she was about to perish. Two deaths might have been a fluke. Three seemed ominous.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Orlean writes about animals often— a fascination that dates back to her happy and what she calls “uneventful childhood” in Cleveland, Ohio.
In her 2021 essay collection On Animals, Orleans brought together a lifetime of observations about the critters we dote on and the ones we raise for food.
SUSAN ORLEAN: The animals are everywhere in our world. They, even if you're not an animal lover, you are constantly interacting with animals, benefiting from them. You know, they, they are woven into our lives. So writing, writing about them to me feels quite integrated into the idea of writing about humanity. Um, it just happens to be a different lens. Um, and the issues that it raises are also so complex and compelling and interesting all of the issues around, you know, what it means to be the apex predator on earth with this universe of animals that we control and manipulate and interact with and use, and, uh, welcome into our homes or eat or hunt or wear,
JIM COTTER:
Or,
SUSAN ORLEAN:
You know, that, that stewardship and how we navigate it is endlessly interesting to me.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Of course, these stories are as much about the people as they are about the animals. And I find the ability to write about human behavior through the lens of our relationship with animals, to be a very rich opportunity. And there really isn't a single story in the book that doesn't include people. Even the one that I was determined to write without human interference, which was the profile of a show dog is overwhelmingly about the people who manage this show dog and take care of them. Of course it is. He couldn't talk. This is my great revelation is after I insisted on having time alone with him having the moment of going, oh, well, I guess he's, he's not going to talk. And, and of course watching the crazy kind of subculture around show dogs was fascinating. The dogs in their own way were much, you know, they were dogs and they did dog things, but the people were irresistible and revealing and funny and eccentric and passionate.
(Excerpt from Show Dog, read by the author)
Okay. If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff. Truesdale bef is perfect. He's friendly. Good-looking rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He's not afraid of commitment. He wants children. Actually. He already has children. And once a lot more, he works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun. What bef likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boarish, but he's not. He's just elemental food. He likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints, and hotel soap, but he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Beth's who occasionally drive something to appointments said not long ago, when we're driving on I 95, we'll usually pull over at a McDonald's. Even if Biff is napping, he always wakes up.
When we're getting close, I get him a few plain hamburgers with buttons, no ketchup, no mustard and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don't get them his own fries, but if I get myself fries, I always flip a few for him into the back. If you're ever around bef while you're eating something, he wants to taste such as cold roast beef, a [inaudible] cracker chocolate, pasta, aspirin, whatever. He will stare at you across the pleaded bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and lips tremble and allow a little bit of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him a taste.
JIM COTTER: Lovely. Lovely, lovely.Is there a hierarchy of what you're trying to give the reader emotionally? Cause I feel like on the outside looking in, I feel like it's surprise and humor are the two, your two likes to have one of the called skeleton keys to the, to the hearts of your readers, but it's more than that.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Well, I think those two absolutely a hundred percent and surprise is a particularly interesting one because I think you need it to keep propelling people forward into a story humor. Um, partly just comes out of my own way of looking at the world and that even, even stories that have a lot of poignancy there, there is humor. Um, I also look for something deeper and I don't want to call it melancholy and, and poignancy is maybe a word for it, but there's, uh, a way these stories all have a sense of, um, of passage of something ending or a moment captured that Ben is lost, that there, there is a quality of, um, wistfulness. I think that I, that I like, I mean, first of all, I think it exists in a lot of these stories, but secondly, I think that's an emotion that I like looking for.
JIM COTTER: I was trained by the BBC on, uh, an older producer once said to me, our job here is to entertain and lighten and educate don't ever get caught educating. I have a feeling that you have the philosophy that you're going out and learning, and then you're, and you're not teaching. You're telling you're you're, you're, you're growing. Uh, you know, you're creating a great, interesting narrative about it, but I never have any sense of the pedagogical or the what you're, you're trying to educate me in some way.
SUSAN ORLEAN:Well, that's a huge compliment. And in fact, in my head I am teaching, but I believe firmly that no one should ever actively have the sense that they're being taught. I mean, certainly the tone has to be more subtle than that. Or you have people, first of all, most people dig their heels in and say, don't lecture me, or don't try to teach me about something that I'm not interested in, but I do.
JIM COTTER: Almost like unsolicited advice, right?
SUSAN ORLEAN: Yeah, exactly. And instead what it has to be is you're at a dinner party telling the most interesting story that has a lot of factual information that people don't realize. You know, it's like boiling a lobster. They don't realize that they're actually learning all of this information. And people love facts. People love facts, but it's more appealing, I think, to feed those to them in a way that's got the arc of a narrative and the, the pacing of a, of poetry, you know, it's the aftertaste where they think, well, wow, now I know a lot about rabbits and yet really, I just started reading this cuz it was like a suspense story about this pandemic. But in fact, you get lots of factual information about rabbits. Most people, if you said, I'd like to spend 20 minutes with you telling you information about the rabbit industry, I mean, if, if it were me, I would say no, thank you, <laugh>.
JIM COTTER: Um, the, what you write though is extremely dense. And I think by its nature, particularly with the, you know, you're, you're, you're writing for the new Yorker. You don't get to waste anybody's time at the new Yorker. Like it's gotta be, you gotta keep them with you. Right. Um, and then you have this extraordinary rigorous fact checking system in place there. Um, can you talk me through how, if you're ever corrected for being crafty? [...]
SUSAN ORLEAN: Yes. I'll give you an example, which is, will sound absurd. But I had a story where I began, I describe the day as being warm. I thought I was there and it was warm. And the fact-checker came back to me and said, I checked the weather report for that day. And the weather was actually kind of cool. It was 60 something. And I thought, wait a minute. I remember it as being warm and also who cares except her point was, but it's a fact. And if it's a fact, it should be correct. Um, if I said it was a sleepy day, which was more perception, that is my, um, interpretation, and that doesn't have supporting documents to prove that it was a sleepy day. But if I'm going to say it's warm, it should be warm. And that was, I think the one where I thought I was so annoyed and, and then also slightly embarrassed thinking, well, I don't remember it as being warm, but I'm not writing in my notes warm day. I, it was my memory of it being a warm day and someone might argue who cares. But the fact is that if you say something is X, it should be X.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Among Orlean’s best-known works of non-fiction is her 1995 New Yorker article about the arrest of horticulturist John Laroche, who poached rare orchids from a state preserve in southern Florida. The story led Orlean to explore the eccentric world of orchid enthusiasts, and resulted in 1998’s non-fiction bestselling book, The Orchid Thief. In 2002, it was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, with an all-star cast and a character played by Meryl Streep who was called Susan Orlean.
And when I first read the script, I said, absolutely not. You, you may have optioned my book, but this isn't my book. What are you doing? And you didn't, I'm not, I don't want to be a character in this. I, excuse me. I, I, I just said, I don't know what you guys are doing. I don't understand it. It's very baffling. That's still your business. You do whatever you want to do, but I don't want to be in it. The problem was they came back to me and said, everyone in the movie, and this is true. Everyone in the movie is a real person.
And that's a huge piece of the Metta meditation of the movies that everyone in. It really is a real person. And they really wanted my name. I thought. And I said to people actively, this is going to ruin my career. I mean, I'm going to be portrayed as this lunatic and drug user, and then I'm having sex with my subjects. And it's just insane. One day I woke up and just said, oh, why not? I mean, it was just honestly this weird thing where I went from being dug my heels and no, no, no, no, no, no, no. To suddenly thinking, well, whatever, I mean, what the hell?
This is once in a lifetime, we'll see what happens. And I thought, you know, the people who know me know this is fictional and the people who don't know me, so who cares? I don't care about the people who don't know me. Um, and I love the movie. I think it's brilliant. I, I, in many ways it's perhaps truer to the spirit of the book than a very literal adaptation would have been.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Whether writing about people, places, pets, or plants, Susan Orlean plans to continue following her inquisitive disposition to each next, new story. She believes that storytelling is a matter of organization— bringing order to a chaotic world. A task that feels as important now as ever.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Story is the essential unit of human experience.
JIM COTTER: And we're hardwired
SUSAN ORLEAN: Absolutely. And
JIM COTTER: And not necessarily to tell it, but to receive it.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Exactly. And I think that that is, it's such a basic urge to see logic in the patterns of life and, and that there is a traceable arc that begins somewhere, has a middle and comes to a satisfying end. I mean, that's just, we yearn for that. We look for that and those are the units that we commit to memory
JIM COTTER: And also the, the sort of the safe harbors in an extraordinarily chaotic world that we have these people call writers who can sort of untangle the puzzle and sort of show us that there might be some order there
SUSAN ORLEAN: And it is that I think the, the reason that we gravitate to stories, even if, you know, there's been a lot of talk about how people are so fascinated by true crime. And I think well true crime is the perfect story. You know, it, it it's appealing in a very logical way. It's dramatic it, there's a beginning. There are characters, there's an end, you know, that it
JIM COTTER: And all tied up with a lovely bow.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Yeah. And, and that I, it makes perfect sense to me that we increasingly gravitate to stories that have internal logic and that make you think, okay, this is the way the world works in a, in a time when a lot of our feeling is how does the world work? Or does the world even work? It's chaos, it's confusion. Everybody wants to know how does the story end? And I think that we all feel there's a lot of anxiety that comes from the unfinished chord. You know, there's a musical
JIM COTTER: Dissonance.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Yes. And you're waiting for that major conclusive chord that, I mean, even when you listen to a piece of music that doesn't end it, you feel weird. You feel unsettled. And I think that is, we are in an era of that. So there's a real yearning for some well, the resolved chord, a resolution as you know, they're both parts of the same. Yeah. Word. Right. We want to resolve the chord, but we also want resolutions, which we rarely get to be honest, Right? And we, it's true. I mean, even in, in a story, there isn't always resolution, but there is a completeness that feels, that's satisfying and comforting to think there's logic in the chaos of living. There are these units called stories that are logical.
(JIM COTTER VOICEOVER) Susan Orlean will continue to bring order to chaos with humor and compassion— digging deep in pursuit of truth, and leaving us with a satisfyingly full understanding, if not the classic “happy ending”.
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CREDITS
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
