Joanne Limburg is an award-winning British writer known for her poetry, novels, and memoirs. In the podcast, she discusses her latest book Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism, and Motherhood, in which she feels a kinship with historical female figures and addresses letters to them.
Some notes on the conversation:
- On Virginia Woolf: Joanne found connections in Woolf's personal writings about feeling like an outsider and struggling to dress appropriately for society. This resonated with Joanne's own experiences. We chatted on how dress and fashion is seen in society.
- On Adelheid Bloch: Adelheid was murdered in the Holocaust. Joanne wanted to write her a letter as an act of solidarity, to say she is not forgotten.
Adelheid Bloch. (She is mostly non-speaking). She was a young woman who was murdered as part of the Nazi program of murdering intellectually disabled people or disabled people of any kind. We have nothing of her voice. We have only a few records, a very sad record and the words that condemned her to death which were horrible words; idiot, unworthy of life. I was thinking about those two words and how we stand in the shadow of them and what they meant for her, and what is the supposed link between them. So my letter to her is kind of exploring history because there's not much of her to say. Also, I wanted to write a letter to her to say, "You are not left out. You are a sister too, and I apologize for all the times you have been left out."
And,
…it was a matter of great importance that I write this letter to Adelheid and that people see that she's human and that she's not totally different from me. Because there's an issue in sort of discourse around autism, as I'm sure, sure. There's a difference between high functioning and low functioning. So there's constant stress between splitters and lumpers as there is with any classification.
We can't possibly be the same thing or we all are the same thing. Also, I tend to lump not because I particularly want to get all the attention that people imagine comes from being severely afflicted. It doesn't. I think actually what you get from being seen to be severely afflicted is ignored and pushed aside, not massive amounts of attention. But because I think it's safer if we hang onto them. If you can't have solidarity with someone as opposed to pity or care, they're not safe because they're outside identification. “
- On autism and motherhood: Joanne realized the so-called "refrigerator mothers" blamed for autism were likely neurodivergent themselves, profoundly misunderstood. The misreading led to damaging views of autism.
“ it seemed glaringly obvious to me that these so-called refrigerator mothers were neurodivergent, and that their neurodivergent presentation was being horribly unkindly and disastrously misread.”
- On grief: Joanne wrote a book after her brother's death aiming to create something beautiful, a monument. Grief comes in waves and is still raw for some types of loss.
- On writing: Joanne listens for an "echo" when writing, for something unexpected to emerge. She moved from notebooks to typing, which matches her thought speed better. Teaching helps crystalize her own thinking.
I know of some others who find typing better than notebooks.
- On advice: Joanne stresses compassion for oneself and others. She is drawn to how language shapes reality and is exploring that in current poetry and lyric essay work.
The conversation covers writing as therapy, Jewish identity, and navigating societal expectations as a woman and mother. Joanne offers deep insights from a life spent exploring profound human experiences through writing.
There is a transcript below. A video is available if you find captions or YouTube a more accessible platform.
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Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben
Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Joanne Limburg. Joanne has written poetry, novels, and memoir. Her latest book is Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism, and Motherhood. I highly recommend the book. On reading your work, I've learned a lot in a personal way about Jewishness, OCD, grief, autism, feminism, intersectionality, and parts of your life story. I'm super excited to chat with you. Welcome.
Joanne (00:00:38):
Thank you. When you read it like that in a list it sounds like no fun, doesn't it? But I assure you there are moments of lightness.
Ben (00:00:46):
Definitely lightness, and dare I say humor as well.
Joanne (00:00:51):
Yes, definitely. My heart always sinks when I'm at a part with, "So what do you write?" "Oh, nonfiction." "Oh, what about..." And I think, "Oh, dear, how am I going to address this?"
Ben (00:01:03):
Maybe you should just say you write about life so that encompasses everything. So my first thought was around kinship. So in Letters to my Weird Sisters, I find you have a kinship with these sisters, your sisterhood through these historical figures. I was wondering how did you arrive at this feeling of kinship. Does it vary with your different sisters and the knowledge that we have of them? I guess everything in history is our imagination about them. Anyway, there's some things that they may have written or some of it with that. But I was wondering about this feeling of kinship that you have with these historical figures, and what do you think about it now and how it has come about?
Joanne (00:01:50):
Well, it came about because I got my autism diagnosis relatively later in life at the age of 41. From the beginning, I was thinking about how I'd never recognize myself until I'd read accounts by autistic women; the official ones written from outside in. I could never relate to, I always suspected. I thought, "But I'm not that person who's being described." I wouldn't describe myself like that. I don't think most other people describe me like that either. Then when I found early autobiographical writings by women like Donna Williams, I thought, "Oh, yes, there's something I recognize here." I was thinking about this sense of loneliness, and I was thinking about how culturally when you're in a marginalized group, you want to go back and claim people. So for example in my one novel, I wrote about Queen Anne, and sometimes she's talked about as a queer figure because of her relationships with women. We don't really know what they were, but she's available as a figure for people to fill that kind of kinship with.
Or to take a more recent example, Gentleman Jack and list that she sort of reclaimed as a queer figure. And I was thinking, "Could I reclaim some weird people?" I chose the word weird because it's really not very good manners, sort of academically or any other way to actually diagnose someone after their death or indeed diagnose someone at all. But I wanted to explore this kinship and I wanted to provide the sense of community for other women because I know how many of us and people marginalized genders, because I know how many of us have gone through life feeling like the only alien on the planet.
So I started to look for women. And a few, I sort of didn't go with. So I didn't go with Hildegard of Bingen [a saint], I didn't go with Margery Kempe, and I didn't go with some wonderful 17th century English Protestant nuns who left lots of autobiographies in Belgium. They're fascinating, but I didn't go with them in the end. …So in the end I came to four and I had a different relationship with each of them. I came up with the idea of addressing them as you because then I could address the difference in this relationship, which is in the differences between me and them in culture or status, or whatever; the differences between me and them in other ways, but also the similarities. Also to reflect the fact that one of them left a massive, massive historical prints and the others did not. So the one that left a massive historical legacy, of course, Virginia Woolf, and I addressed her as Mrs. Woolf and signed myself as Joanne Limburg doctor, because I had a feeling that to address her as Virginia would be presumptuous, for example. I hope I'm respectful to all of them, but I'm very aware that I am entering into the presence of with her. So that informs that letter.
Then second letter to Adelheid Bloch. She was a young woman who was murdered as part of the Nazi program of murdering intellectually disabled people or disabled people of any kind. We have nothing of her voice. We have only a few records, a very sad record and the words that condemned her to death which were horrible words; idiot, unworthy of life. I was thinking about those two words and how we stand in the shadow of them and what they meant for her, and what is the supposed link between them. So my letter to her is kind of exploring history because there's not much of her to say. Also, I wanted to write a letter to her to say, "You are not left out. You are a sister too, and I apologize for all the times you have been left out."
Then the third letter was to Frau V. Frau V doesn't even have a name. Her only trace is as an anonymized mother of an anonymized patient in Hans Asperger's paper. He never says that she has what he thinks her son has, yet he describes her as being remarkably similar. When you read about her that, for example, she wasn't that interested in how she dressed. She wasn't that interested in running the house. She had a tendency when everything got too much for her to go and walk in the mountain to the brook and think. So in that essay, I'm expressing my kinship with her. I'm also a mother though not of somebody who's been given an autism diagnosis. So I'm thinking about autism, motherhood, and how you can't really untangle autistic mothers like me from autism mothers.
I thought I could try elaborately to untangle the two concepts, but they arrived in a sticky bunch. So I'm going to address the sticky bunch, which is what I do in that. So that's very much about motherhood. And then the last one was Johannes Kepler's mother, Katharina Kepler who was accused of witchcraft in Germany again in the early 17th century. And because her very brilliant and very conscientious son defended her and kept a record, we have a sense of this woman. And what she was, was a woman who just wouldn't be soft and wouldn't cry when she was supposed to cry and butted in when she had something to say, and is the sort of unsoften woman that a lot of us on the spectrum are, unless we mask. So that was about unsoften woman heard its consequences and its uses. Then there was one last letter which was to someone who actually was my friend who died a few years ago, who had her autism diagnosis not long before she died.
Ben (00:08:35):
one of the things I reflect now, and it'd be great to perhaps tackle the nuance and the complexity that you tackle with all of those figures, and maybe we can touch with one or two the ones you'd like, is how you came to the letter form. It's interesting if I look and read back across all of your work, some of it's in poetry form, you have your memoir form that the structure on that form seems just really right like you are addressing them personally, and you are taking the moment of where we are now with our modern day sense of view of where we've got, but still, like you said, very respectful of who they might have been or how we are in the imagination. In your writing, do you come to form kind of naturally because you're kind of getting the content and it seems that this is a natural formal process, or where does form and structure sit within your writing process? It just seems to really sit so well and amplify across so much of your work. But it's so varied; memoir, poetry, and this. I didn't know if it's one of those intangible organic things which just grows out, or whether there was something which kind of hits upon it.
Joanne (00:09:56):
It takes a while. The thing that makes what you're trying to do work takes a while. So for my memoir, Small Pieces, it took me a while to come onto that structure of Ten Vessels from a capitalistic image, for example. And once I'd got that, it all became much easier. With Letters to My Weird Sisters, originally it was Weird sisters, and I was thinking about writing essays. Then I thought about a book I really loved by Georgina Kleege who's a wonderful, wonderful writer. She is blind and she wrote a wonderful book about About and addressed to Helen Keller called Blind Rage. It's a series of letters. So she's coming from her point in the present, and she's partly writing biography of Helen Keller only in the second person. She's sort of coming to some kind of reckoning with the figure that Helen Keller, who has been made to be the good disabled person, the inspirational disabled person. I thought, "Yeah, that's how to do it." Partly because I wanted to sort of express this sense of intimacy that you can have with the people that we have in our heads for whatever reason, whether we've imagined them or some kind of reading as put in that sort of parasocial relationship, I guess. And also, particularly with Adelheid Bloch who was mostly non-speaking, who is with respect to me less privileged. I did not want to speak for her. So if I spoke to her, then I would not be-- Well, I wouldn't be appropriating with her with my hope. But I'm very clear. I respect. When there's a me and you, you're respecting the distance between you. There's a relationship, but that relationship is a relationship of two different individuals.
Ben (00:12:06):
That's really clear, really well thought out, and just really works as it does across all of your work, I find that form and content. Perhaps tackling Virginia Woolf because, so famous to so many of us and has, I guess, a myth associated with her. We all have in our heads probably what Virginia Woolf is to us. And obviously there's quite a few threads of mainstream views about what she is or was to us. And you really tackle, I think, a lot of that nuance in the way that we being humans are going to have good bits and bad bits and complex bits. You set that up all the way from the front actually in your letter to the readers; this complexity, this intersectionality, and this nuance. I guess she did have so much public of her own writings. I guess the question would be, so when you were researching that and reading her writing, how did your view of her, or the view that we have in our head of her change much? What would you have said maybe is in your reading of her most misunderstood or most surprised to you about what came out of your reading and your letter to her?
Joanne (00:13:30):
I think the unusual thing was that I came up with-- There's so much Woolf scholarship. So this comes with a sort of Carvey act that somebody else may have said this. I looked as hard as I could, but there's so much. So apologies if you're out there. These were unpublished during her lifetime, and they were written to be read to the other members of the Bloomsbury group. So they're quite intimate. When she wrote about her early life and her life as a teenager and her difficulties with clothes and appearance-- She had difficulties with clothes and appearance throughout her life, and I think felt very left out. There's a story she wrote that's a kind of supplement to the Mrs. Dalloway book called The Dress that is about somebody arriving at a party in a wrong dress and feeling-- I think the phrase is like a fly in a saucer. It's on the face of it, such a trivial thing. But this woman feels contaminated by wrongness and utterly rejected and then ejected by the society in this party. And it's all found out with this dress.
There's a character of Mrs. Dalloway and Doris Kilman. Yeah, Ms. Kilman, who is Mrs. Dalloway's daughter's tutor. Rufus was kind of being criticized for writing about this woman in a very snobby, unkind way. It's Clarissa Dalloway snobbery and unkind. The assumption might be that Woolf's identifies with Dalloway to some extent. I suppose she does this to some extent. I've only written one novel, but you identify with all your characters. That's what animates them. But I realize that the sort of outside in us that she gives to Ms. Kilman's own thoughts, this sort of pain of being looked at and being found ludicrous or disgusting, I realize that's her own experience. And this was sort of corroborated by other sources.
There's this very touching passage in her husband's book where he said that people would often laugh at her in the street. He didn't really know why, but people did. There's a line in Jacob's room, and she says something like, "It's not wars that kill us, it's the way people look and laugh and run up the steps of omni buses" which resonates with me so much that I've used it so many times in so many different things. So if anything new came out of it, it was perhaps that reading of Miss Kilman. The understanding that although Virginia Woolf was very much an insider; well connected, upper class, so on and so forth. She had that about her which always made her feel outside.
Ben (00:16:23):
I might pick up on your comment on clothes, because it's a theme in some of your other books as well. I guess it's both a very modern day concern, but you can see throughout history how humans decide to dress is at least in part, quite a complicated social and economic dance, a power dance, all of these things. When we put our minds to it, it's obviously a thing which is important to us. We spend a lot of time doing so. But as you point out, Woolf had trouble with it and you write about it. It's kind of really interesting that piece of kinship which comes out. Is that something which really resonated with you when you thought, "Oh, this is something I see and I guess other people would resonate with it too?"
Joanne (00:17:19):
Oh, yes, so much. I think Woolf like me, she found clothes throughout her life both fascinating and excruciating. She knew that they're not really trippy or they're a matter of social life and death, aren't they? My whole life I've wanted to do something different with clothes and sometimes got looked at a scance when I did. Sometimes more and more I've used clothes to hide and blend in. There's a scene she talks about in her life where her half-brother is dragging her out to society events, and she doesn't have a dress allowance that would allow her to dress for the life he thinks she should lead. So she thinks she has found a wonderful solution. It's very creative. She buys upholstery fabric which is cheaper and different, and has a dress made of it, and she's really pleased with it. She comes downstairs for the pre going out inspection he always subjected her to. She went down and he looked her up and down and said, "Take that dress away and burn it." She didn't I'm glad to say. So it was both a humiliation and defiance.
Ben (00:18:42):
Yeah. That really comes across. Thinking about Bloch, one of the things which really came across, and you've mentioned it already, is this way that-- And I guess there's a debate at the moment around advocacy and appropriation and how much can we speak for one another? When you kind of think about it to the extreme, in some ways, we can't speak for anyone else. We are never in anyone's mind. Even the people closest to you, we don't really understand consciousness that well about how it works. So on the one hand, it's kind of obvious that one can't really speak for another truly. On the other hand, we know that we care for one another and often want the best or want to try and do things which is really notable to me that sort of nuance for someone who doesn't have a body of work. Might not be that verbal in that exchange. And I guess it's the same question. What did you find out in researching that, or in your letter? Was there anything surprising or maybe not surprising or misunderstood, or how you kind of felt in trying to write that letter?
Joanne (00:19:58):
Yeah, I think I learnt-- When I think about it actually, the first thing that comes into my head was I never want to use the words moron, empathy or idiot again because I hadn't realized how that words had been used to throw people out of society, to throw people out of safety and actually to kill them; that they are necropolitical concepts. And that it was very important. That it was a matter of great importance that I write this letter to Adelheid and that people see that she's human and that she's not totally different from me. Because there's an issue in sort of discourse around autism, as I'm sure, sure. There's a difference between high functioning and low functioning. So there's constant stress between splitters and lumpers as there is with any classification.
We can't possibly be the same thing or we all are the same thing. Also, I tend to lump not because I particularly want to get all the attention that people imagine comes from being severely afflicted. It doesn't. I think actually what you get from being seen to be severely afflicted is ignored and pushed aside, not massive amounts of attention. But because I think it's safer if we hang onto them. If you can't have solidarity with someone as opposed to pity or care, they're not safe because they're outside identification. Though I very much felt that it was a political act writing to her. She did speak to the bits of me who know what it's like to be dehumanized, actually.
Ben (00:21:59):
Yeah. I had an earlier conversation last year with Stephen Unwin, and he makes similar points. Son doesn't have very many words at all. He occasionally has a cup of tea. There is this idea about what it means to be human. There's one school of thought which goes, "Well, to be human is to have language." Well, if you are saying that, what are you saying about all of these other humans? It's something that we come to. In your next couple of letters, the theme on motherhood comes out in a really complex way. I'm really interested in that because actually it's a theme which is picked up also in your other books and essays. But this is kind of also seen through often the writings of someone else and a man, I guess with that. But I guess it's the same things is did it make you think differently or emphasize on some of your own thinking around motherhood? Or was there anything surprising or misunderstood around that, that came through in those letters?
Joanne (00:23:11):
I think what I realized in those letters from reading Tanner's papers and Asperger's papers and stuff by Bruno Bettelheim as well, was how it seemed glaringly obvious to me that these so-called refrigerator mothers were neurodivergent, and that their neurodivergent presentation was being horribly unkindly and disastrously misread. I think I hadn't been quite prepared until I came across Crowby and came across these other women. How sure I would feel about that these autism mothers-- Yes, I'm sure there are mothers of autistic people who are not themselves autistic, but the women being so described in newspapers were, and that the misreading of their neurodivergent presentation had led to a horrible wrong direction in the way autism was seen and the way it was addressed.
Ben (00:24:09):
Yeah, I could really see that. I'm still sort of astonished how much damage that concept still has today. And particularly in some geographies, it seems to be still a really dominant trope around that. I'm kind of really surprised at myself in some ways that I've been so slow or late to learn around like for instance, this concept of matrescence, also menopause that so many biological, psychological neuroscience-based changes happen to us like we have at puberty and those which are sort of well understood. But they're not taught about that science has only just started to come through and just seems a real whole, a real lacuna in that thinking. Maybe thinking about your memoir, you talk a lot about what motherhood has meant to you and all of those type of things. I guess one of my reflections is that we kind of need more education and lived experience around it. I guess maybe it's the same sort of question. Is there anything around this area that you think just people should understand more about motherhood or is really misunderstood? And I guess this intersection because it goes with all of these things with identity and autism and all of these things. You just have this really complicated stranded things on what motherhood means, and it's come into your letters and to your work.
Joanne (00:25:51):
Yeah, I think what came through in the writing of this letter and what I was reading for it was how we still on some very fundamental level. We have trouble seeing mothers as human beings, as individuals. We are seeing in terms of what we provide and the traffic all goes one way. So it's partly about relationships of care and how we see them as non-reciprocal. It's partly about the way it-- I think it's probably really developmentally appropriate for a small child to have no empathy for their mother because they've got enough to deal with, they've got all this pruning or not pruning of your autistic going on. They're trying to deal with suddenly arriving in this body and this environment. I think it must be overwhelming being a baby.
So the mum is probably presumably their maternal holding environment. So while she's being their maternal holding environment, she's also rather inconveniently a person with her own needs and her own limitations and her own desires. But we seem to take this sort of baby unawareness of personhood through our whole lives, towards anyone on which we're dependent. We don't see it. You saw this during the pandemic where suddenly people became aware of how these people that we don't see-- delivery people, people who work in supermarkets, people who work in hospitals, all these service industry "service providers" were terribly important. You kind of hoped-- I wrote the book in the middle of the pandemic and I thought, "Well, maybe this will be a new acceptance that people who care for us need care and appreciation." But it seems to have just fallen back again.
Ben (00:28:03):
Yeah. We had this idea that we might build back better, is what I heard in several types of in industry. And actually, we had it in theater as well. And like you, my observation is that we haven't really fundamentally shifted that much. And what exactly you say is true, like all of the caring, the unpaid caring, and then you go up a little, the really badly paid caring of cleaning, nursing, teaching. All of these tends to be-- not exclusively, but tends to be intersectional with womanhood, all of this. And you're right. It's throughout history being completely ignored, and now it's just mostly ignored. It seems kind of really surprising. And when it kind of comes to the fore like it has done, it has a kind of moment in its spotlight and then seems to have gone back to being ignored. Maybe riffing on that, one of the other things I get more from your memoir writing was a lot of writing around sort of therapy and discussion ideas.
Another one which I kind of view in the same bucket are these conversations you have with a rabbi. I had a conversation with a priest earlier this year, and a lot of those conversations, people put in the kind of therapy bucket in the sense that we're talking about meaningful things with people. I'm interested to know perhaps your view of all the different sorts of therapy you've had and conversations with rabbis. What has been helpful, what maybe you think is maybe less helpful and why you've kind of...? It seems to me that you are writing or writing it out particularly in your forms. In some ways, I think maybe writers always have it as a form of therapy is maybe why a lot of us write anyway; to try and process ideas that we're having. But any thinking around your conversations with the rabbi or therapy or kind of writing as therapy as it is in your work?
Joanne (00:30:10):
Well, I suppose you are looking for connection. You are looking to be heard and you're looking to hear yourself better. I think the first thing that comes into my mind when people say, "Oh, you've had a lot of therapy," is like I feel this very British guilt and shame and embarrassment about that. For not managing to just pull my socks up and get on with it and also for having the privilege to pay for it. The truth is everyone should be able to have access to it. It shouldn't be a luxury. Also, you work on yourself partly for the benefit of the people around you so that you can relate better to them and be of more use to them and listen to them better with lessons and you are heard.
Well, if I think of things that I wouldn't want to do again, I think seeing a very strict Freudian psychoanalyst was a bit much. I have very mixed feelings about cognitive behavior therapy. I did find that for some of my OCD and my anxieties just dealing with a behavior, it did help because it is a loop from feeling to anxious sensations, to thoughts, to actions all the way around. But I've never found it particularly helpful for depression because I don't think the idea that things are very sad or things are very difficult and things are very painful. It's actually a cognitive error.
Ben (00:31:55):
What's the phrase? It's a feature, not a bug.
Joanne (00:32:00):
Exactly. Also, CPT is very quick and very short, and I think it's quite shallow. You deal with this quite-- It's done in quite restricted language in a restricted time, space in a very step way. And the idea is that anyone can deliver it. And actually, I think no one person can deliver therapy to any one other person. It's not about the system, it's about the relationship always. So I think it misunderstands that. Also, I think the reason why it's everywhere is because it's quantifiable and therefore comfortable. You can give someone a questionnaire at the beginning, give them a questionnaire at the end and say, "Look, there's an outcome."
Ben (00:32:58):
Yeah. 2.4, isn't that great?
Joanne (00:33:00):
Exactly. I'm 2.4 less hope though than I was when I filled in Beck's hopelessness scale at the beginning of this. But also, failing to take into account the fact that because you've sunk the cost into it, and because you don't want to be horrible to the nice psychologist, of course you're going to say you feel better.
Ben (00:33:23):
And in that sense, the conversations with the rabbis, because there was at least a form of shared culture with some, because actually again, I think your emphasis on the individual is exactly right. Some rabbis you'll have a connection with and some you'll not even if you've had a shared understanding of certain aspects of culture. Because of that, I guess in some ways, perhaps more helpful or at least more thought provoking in some of that, or less so because they also come from a particular place and reading of that.
Joanne (00:34:03):
Well, I suppose the two rabbis I speak to in the book are far more orthodox than I am. So again, I was aware of that difference. The way they talk to other Jews is to be respectful of that difference themselves. Rabbis are not priests. They don't have any closer connection to God than the rest of us. What they have is deeper knowledge of the scripture. So it's as if you ask them, you're saying, "Well, what does collective Jewish wisdom think about this?" And they can tell you, or they can tell you their interpretation. So it's not quite like therapy in that way. They could be emotionally intelligent or not as anyone else. They can help contain whatever anxiety you have. But it's like knocking on a door and going, "What does the book say?"
Ben (00:35:05):
Yeah.
Joanne (00:35:07):
I think I'd understand that for a Jew, that's not a dry relationship. The book is a very living thing that connects us all; the word.
Ben (00:35:18):
Yes. Well, actually that's a good segue to one thought I had which is how well you rate the so-called DSM. I think we're onto DSM-5 now, which stands for-- Let me get this right. So it's an American psychological or psychiatric manual. So it's called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM. We are now on five, and we are on DSM-4. There has been DSM one, two, and three which I guess intersects with labels and the like.
Joanne (00:35:56):
DSM, the path strikes back, all of that.
Ben (00:35:58):
Yeah, exactly. So I guess if you're practicing psychiatrist, obviously it's going to be somewhat helpful. But I guess for a lot of people in the field and this complexity, it's kind of not helpful. Or the way we've thought about a lot of these things changes with time, and we can actually see it within the manual, which is kind of interesting. I remember someone commenting to me that some of the human conditions we see now, maybe a couple of hundred years ago, people would've been thought of as mystics or treated very differently. Now, we might give a label as schizophrenic or something else. So it seems to me that a lot of these things have been very well preserved in humanity over time, over thousands of years and the way that we've thought about them has changed over time. You write about DSM a little bit in labels. So I was thinking about what are your thoughts about the manual now? How has it changed? Is it helpful and labeling when we have all of this complexity and how. Maybe there's something about the human brain today where we seem to want to bucket and label a lot. And to the extent that it's useful or not.
Joanne (00:37:14):
Well, when I first heard of the DSM, I was in my late teens, early twenties, and Jonathan Miller was talking about it. And of course, he was trained as a neurologist, I think. Of course, I very much looked up to him, admired him. I wanted to be someone like that, this wonderful public intellectual also Jewish who knows everything or can give the impression of knowing everything. Knows the opera and the science. So it was aspirational to me, and I liked the idea in those days of big compendia of things. So when I was a small child, we had a pair encyclopedia which is that big, but I very much liked the idea and probably a rather autistic way that I could know all the things and all. I talk about this in connection with Linnaeus in the book. It's a particularly autistic kind of cognitive talent and cognitive joy to be able to arrange things in patterns. It's as aesthetically and its functionally pleasing. I liked the idea that I could know things and know other people. I didn't think about difference between classifying a flower and classifying a person.
When I came to research my book about OCD or possibly even before then, I began to read all the pushback against it. I understood that it's the outcome of a lot of very specific political and economic interests, and cultural interests compromising with each other. So it's necessary in America because in order to get health insurance, you have to tick a box. So you have to have a label; no label, no treatment. Then you've got the psychiatrist on one side, you've got other professional groups. You've got the drug companies, you've got the health companies, you've got increasingly patient groups. So it's pressure for patients, for example, that brought in PTSD, and it was pressure from people that had homosexuality removed from the book. And most recently, there has been some pressure back and forth between autistic people and professionals who deal with us. I think I see it for what it is. It's a sort of pragmatic fudge, and if you take it as literally true, it could do a lot of harm.
I always talk to my students about this when we do ethics, … Unfortunately, we don't have the equivalence. I know this is a cup, glass rather. I obviously don't know it's a glass. I don't expect any reciprocity with it. I pick it up and I use it. Whereas you're to say, "I know Benjamin," I'm talking about reciprocal relationship, in Martin Luther sense, "I am bow." And that is a qualitatively different form of knowing from knowing a person of the collection of facts. I don't think actually that it's ever appropriate or safe to claim to know a human being except in the connector sense. I mean, obviously if they're lying down on the table euthanized and you are dissecting their colon or something, …But once they're awake and you're talking to them, it has to be connected.
Ben (00:41:04):
Yes. You'll never [know] their soul.
Joanne (00:41:08):
Exactly. Let alone classify it.
Ben (00:41:11):
Yes. I think the Greeks had similar different words and we seem to fail it in English. And I think that's really practical insight that sure, we've got the system as it is bureaucratic, economic and the like. Some of the bureaucracy requires tick box and economic interest to do that. But don't be fooled into thinking that's it. And in some ways, referring to our earlier comment, if you are reading the scripture if you take it literally, you're just only going to see one surface element which will probably steer you wrong with a lot of that. Thinking about your memoir, you wrote towards the end of it three kind of quite contradictory, laughable life rules within them. But I think I see a touch of it myself and in others although you write it very clearly and quite contradictory.
So one of them was, "My writing should be successful or I'm a failure. But if I write for money, I will have no integrity." Another one was, "I should be my best to stay thin while bearing in mind that only trivial minded women think about these things." Your last one was, "I should be a perfect and ever attentive mother to my son without becoming the kind of reactionary betrayer of the sisterhood who allows her husband to support her." I laughed at that and we laugh at that now, but I actually think you've obviously had it in your mind to an extreme, but I think we all have these conflicts. Where do we sit? You just wrote about them kind of very plainly and obviously they sat in your mind. So one is about money and work and another is about how we look or how we don't look in society and another. One is about patriarchy, motherhood, sisterhood, and family and all of that. So I was really interested in that. What do you think about hearing them now and your reactions to writing or looks and the like?
Joanne (00:43:29):
Oh gosh. Is that the woman who thought too much?
Ben (00:43:30):
Yeah.
Joanne (00:43:31):
Because it's such a long time since I wrote that now. I thought, "Oh, did I write that?" That was my first response. It makes me think about how-- I think we're all in these pincers. I'm describing kind of pincers from this side and from that side. Don't be that, but don't be this. You absolutely cannot win. I'm sure there are things that apply to everyone, but it's certainly true for women. Like don't be a boring mother, don't be a heartless career woman. Don't be sexy, that's immoral. Don't be unsexy, what's the point of view then? And yeah, I think it's objectively the case for a given measure of objectivity that we are caught in those social pincers. But I think also if you're autistic or if you have OCD or both, one thing that can happen is that you take these very much to heart. And I'm still not entirely on top of all the ways in which I do that. I think that's what's meant by black and white thinking. So these things can become very destructive parasites inside you.
Ben (00:44:45):
Yeah. I think that's very wise we have these things. I think a bit sometimes it's the stress which comes at, for instance, family dinners, because we have to wear these hats and they all land on our head at the same time. So suddenly you are a mother, a wife, a sister, and maybe a daughter all at the same time. Typically we try and separate those hats out, and then we realize that obviously we are all of these things. But if we are all of these things at the same time, that's where some of the stresses come from. And it's kind of very obvious when you have these kind of family gatherings and suddenly your own mother expects you to be a daughter. But if you are being a daughter, how are you being a mother and all of these type of things? But it's clear to me that actually those similar conflicts are around everything. And now we have it today where we say to women or young women, "You've got to speak up, but also you've got to sit and be quiet in the corner" and all of these things simultaneously.
Joanne (00:45:48):
Yeah. Speak up, but not in a way that makes your face or your voice seem ugly while doing it.
Ben (00:45:54):
Exactly. Speak up, but only the things I want to hear.
Joanne (00:45:58):
Be feisty only in a sexy way.
Ben (00:46:01):
Exactly. I wanted to touch on one of your other books which I was really moved by which is essentially-- I guess if I have to sum it up is kind of on grief. But also the limits to what we can either understand about another person or what we go through and how we process grief. I guess for those of us who've been through these kind of events or traumas, it always lives with us in some way. And I think perhaps it's meant to with some of that. But maybe looking back, what did you maybe most appreciate around writing that book and what it maybe helped you or revealed about the way you think about the world or yourself. Or was it that in the end you kind of thought, "Well, in some ways, one of my conclusions is that we can never quite understand and maybe that needs to be enough." But I don't know what you think about grief and the whole process.
Joanne (00:47:01):
Well, I very deliberately left the book open. There are different kinds of grief. My parents both died of natural causes, and I don't feel the acute grief for them that I felt at the time. But my brother-- and this is sort of what sets the book in motion, took his own life, unfortunately. It still cuts like a knife. There could be a number of reasons for that. I don't know, but it's still very much present and painful. I can hear as I'm talking now that I find it harder to talk about than I realize. I think you go through stages; it goes and it comes back. So there is just for one illustration of that. The subtitle of Small Pieces is a Book of Lamentations. I make reference to the Book of Lamentations again, which is a book supposedly written by Jeremiah, but actually written by various other hands lamenting the fall of Jerusalem, the fall of the Temple, and the Babylonian exile.
I'm now writing under the auspices, if you like, of lamentations again which very much suggests things aren't unfinished. When I started writing book, I was thinking about reparations in the sort of object relations sense, how art makes reparations, how it can make reparations towards yourself, towards your internal objects which are your internal representations of your people, the people close to you. I still felt like that afterwards. But also, I very much took with me something my supervisor, Meg Jensen said to me. She said, "You may want to do something really different. You may want to do something about trauma and whatever. But in the end, all you can do in the face of this is try and make something beautiful." So in the course of that book, I tried to make something beautiful, and it is a kind of monument. It doesn't stop anything being sad, but there it is.
Ben (00:49:26):
Wow, that's a really beautiful insight. Just dwelling on that a moment. It doesn't take away from its sadness, but you can build something insightful or beautiful from it. In your writing then, are you conscious of what tradition you might be writing in? I guess at the moment there is potentially you could say a mini flourishing of life writing, which particularly if you go back 200 years ago because of the historical and all the other circumstances we've been alluding to, very little life writing from women or any other marginalized type of...
Joanne (00:50:11):
Or very little public life writing. There were diaries
Ben (00:50:15):
Yeah. That got published, went into the machine. All that is then read today by some more mass audience, sits in libraries and the like. I actually think we might be in a golden age of this kind of life writing. But partially, just because we have it now in a way and in a publicly accessible way than before. I actually think the same on so-called children's writing, which I think is actually just writing for everyone that again, that's potentially we've got a flourishing within that. You are very well read and your books well researched and obviously chime in in all of that. I guess writing in the moment it is harder to place. But do you feel you're writing in a tradition? Do you have a kind of sisterhood and kinship with these other writers writing alongside you all from life, even though you've got all of these different things? Or does it feel a little bit more of a lonely thorough still that there's this writers, you write in your room? Writers may meet up a little bit, but it still can be a more lonely kind of occupation. So kinship with others, and is it a golden age of life writing at the moment? And how should we think about that?
Joanne (00:51:36):
I think it is. I very much don't do with people who lament. So many people are doing it now. I think it's brilliant that so many people are doing it now. We're hearing all these stories and hearing all these voices. It's not that any of them are definitive. The whole point is nothing is definitive. We have this mosaic, these overlapping images. Then from these different subjective viewpoints you might get somewhere near the whole, but the whole isn't actually possible. Well, you do feel on your own, but you also feel that you have other people behind you. We have influences. I have two very different ones. For example, one is Marian Milner, who was a psychoanalyst who wrote in the 1920s a book called A Life of One's Own which is an act of introspection. I read that in my early twenties and that was very influential. Another one is an American writer called Betty MacDonald who wrote very funny memoirs: very funny, very sharp memoirs. She's best known for The Egg and I. But my favorite book is a book by her called The Plague and I. It's literally a hilarious account of a stay in a TB sanatorium in depression, Seattle.
Ben (00:52:52):
Wow.
Joanne (00:52:53):
She's just there in all her spikiness and it's great.
Ben (00:53:01):
That's amazing. So you teach as well. Does the teaching help your writing and how much do you enjoy that? Is there anything perhaps people would find or a teaching technique which is maybe unusual or something that you've come across that you think, "Okay, this is actually really good for my students to think about," which maybe you haven't discovered more. So what do you think about teaching and do you have any teaching techniques or even books or things that you nudge students towards which perhaps is a little bit more unusual or underrated?
Joanne (00:53:43):
Well, I go back and forth a lot between my work and teaching. Students can teach you something or quite often, putting the teaching materials together is a good way to realize what you think about something. Because often you don't. You just have an intonation of what you think about it. And essentially, "I want to go there, but I don't want to go there." And that joined up with that that's the kind of preverbal information. Then you have to put it into words and say, "Oh, so that's what I think." So it's useful in that way. Sometimes students can point out biases or tendencies or habits that you wouldn't be able to see for yourself, which is useful; difficult but useful. What I've found as I've become a more experienced teacher is I try and do less and less. I know I have to provide some content and they need content. But the more confident you get, the more confident I get. The less I am about giving something from me to them; the banking I do of education, especially as it's a skill, and the more they're about facilitating. So the thing I always recommend-- and she's not exactly underrated is Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones of Writer's Mind. Because she says, "Get to know your mind. Believe me, for writing, it's all you have." In a sense, that's the only thing you need to know. But it's a very complex and profound thing and something that you keep re-encountering.
Ben (00:55:13):
That's great. Yes. So I have read that. So this emphasis on just doing less and enabling others is kind of quite profound in its own way. Perhaps that's a good...
Joanne (00:55:26):
It's hard. It's hard to do.
Ben (00:55:27):
Yeah. Hard to get out the way.
Joanne (00:55:28):
Yes. Hard to do.
Ben (00:55:30):
And actually, as you've mentioned earlier a little bit like in therapy, probably a lot of it is in the dynamics of the people, both student to student as well as student to teacher, whether that comes alive or not for all of the various reasons.
Joanne (00:55:45):
It's restraining yourself listening is such a hard thing to do because it's actually about restraining yourself so much.
Ben (00:55:53):
Yeah, exactly. This whole called active listening which there's a slight oxymoron within it. But there is a truth to it that actually it's quite hard. You have to put effort into it. But it is definitely on the restraining side as well as that.
Joanne (00:56:13):
And it's the same with being a parent actually, especially as they get older; restraining yourself.
Ben (00:56:21):
Letting them be, yeah. I'm not sure how well I dig on that. We'll see.
Joanne (00:56:25):
I'm not sure how well any of us are doing. My son is 20 now and I said, "Oh, well I wasn't going to talk about it because I knew you were going to mention it yourself." But he said, "That has never stopped you before."
Ben (00:56:38):
Yeah. Harsh, isn't it? I was reading a short essay you had in a collection recently and he was making some commentary on a questionnaire. You have to send in. His commentary was basically saying, "Yeah, well my mom does too much of this rather than the other way."
Joanne (00:57:00):
Yeah. He gave you a bit of a consumer report.
Ben (00:57:05):
Well, that might be a good segue into the last couple of questions. One is sort of about your own writing process and maybe if there's anything you want to share about that; about how you approach writing. I guess I've spoken to now a variety of creators and there is definitively no one way of doing it. In some ways the advice is not that helpful because it's always specific to the person. But I'm still intrigued because of just that sheer variety. So I suppose how would you describe your writing process or writing day? Is there anything about it that you think is kind of, "Oh, this is kind of quirky, but it works for me." Do you prefer writing in the morning, in the evening? Are you writing in long burst, short burst, everything? Do you still write in notebooks or do you prefer typing? Do you like doing lots of research and then some, or maybe you have a little bit and you work from a sentence and an idea? I think we touched on the fact that that structure and form sometimes happens somewhere in the early middle and then is often a linchpin for how things go. But it's not often there at the very start of where you are going. But anything you'd like to comment on about how you write or how you think about writing?
Joanne (00:58:24):
Oh gosh. Well, I've just learnt again to listen and be patient because I have had this image in my head of when I want to write, but I've just shouted down the well, and I'm waiting for an echo. I know it's working when I hear an echo and something's coming up that I didn't expect when-- I call it meeting myself, coming back. You can sort of create the conditions for that to happen by sitting down and writing, but you can't will it to happen. And also, I think it's just very important to get that self-consciousness out the way earlier and I'm not good at that. All those voices around your head telling you, you should do this or you should do that; those hints of voices we talked about earlier. Watch out for them. They may be there in heavy disguise, but they'll be there and you want to firmly shut them out of the room or at least tell them to shut up or come to some arrangement with them when you're writing or they will just eat you and eat your writing
Ben (00:59:24):
Yes. I hear some writers sometimes use forms of either automatic writing techniques or just techniques where the goal is to do the writing and trying not to listen to anything else. Do you find those helpful at all?
Joanne (00:59:40):
Not as such. I'll tell you what has helped with me, and that's moving from a pen to a keyboard.
Ben (00:59:45):
Interesting.
Joanne (00:59:46):
Because I can touch type. But I've realized that post my autism diagnosis, I have elements of dyspraxia. One of them is I have never in my life been able to hold a pen properly and I pinch very hard then it becomes very painful. My writing is awful and it lags behind my thought speed. Whereas if I type on a computer on a keyboard, I can just straight out like that. Also, there's something about the rhythmic tapping of the keys that seems to drum something up. So it's not removed from the physical process for me. It brings me into the physical process.
Ben (01:00:24):
Interesting.
Joanne (01:00:25):
My fingers know how to write.
Ben (01:00:26):
Yeah. I've heard that a couple of times now because people often assume it's notebook and handwriting, which is somehow more true and authentic. I think it really just depends the speed of your thought and how it happens. You are exactly right. The physicality of it can actually get in the way. It needs to match how you're feeling and working. That's really interesting. Okay, great. I had one more referring back to Letters to my Weird Sisters because we only touched on her a little bit briefly. It's your-- I think it's a postscript or an epilogue letter. But in some ways I feel it's a really important one. So I just wanted to touch on it, which was to Karen Freeborn who was a part sort of inspiration on it. I was interested whether you wanted to comment on what you learned writing that letter and what that letter meant to you or means to you.
Joanne (01:01:18):
So much because I miss Karen, so to so many other people. She didn't publish as much as she might've done; I think two novels and one book of poetry in her lifetime. But there's more sitting around really good stuff which I'd like to put out there. So I partly put her in a book because I wanted to state her name. Also, she was so much a part of my writing. I've had difficulty in the past few years, and I don't mind mentioning it's because of the loss of her, because she was my receiver. Everyone needs something to receive that they're writing. She was the person whose judgment I trusted. So she looked at one book, one chapter and said, "Well, it's good, but stop apologizing." I thought, "Well, Karen told me to stop apologizing. So I will." When I sent her the mother chapter and she said, "Very fuck off good." I thought that's real advice because she never let them take the Basildon out of the girl.
Ben (01:02:27):
Yeah. I really sense that. All of those letters together, I learned so much and it was just such a complete picture of just the complexity of where we are and what we've heard of our history and some of our challenges and the like. Great. So the last couple of questions is what are you working on? Are there any projects or items we should be aware of? Obviously, Letters to my Weird Sisters have gone into reprint, which is great. But anything you'd want to highlight in terms of what you're working on at the moment?
Joanne (01:03:05):
There's a possible book of essays that may or may not happen that's depending on various things. But at the moment, I'm working on-- Again, it's something inspired by the Book of Lamentations. It may be poetry, it may be lyric essays or it may be hybrid. Hybrid's such a useful word. "What is it?" "Oh, it's hybrid." I'm using found materials and I'm using acrostics and I'm working in ways that disrupt my voice. I'm really enjoying that.
Ben (01:03:37):
That sounds exciting. I guess from this one more early on, do you know whether something's going to be more poetic, short form, compressed, or longer form? Is that something which happens potentially earlier or it just kind of depends on what you're thinking right now?
Joanne (01:03:53):
Poems arrive differently from longer form things. Poems often arrive as phrases whereas longer things arrive for me as a sort of intimation of the shape.
Ben (01:04:05):
And in your poetry, it's phrases more than images or is it images with the phrases?
Joanne (01:04:15):
I think that's interesting. I haven't thought about that. I often use imagery in poetry. So it could be, I think, "Oh, that thing could be described as that sort of thing." Or I get a phrase or I get both at once. Can't give a more definitive answer.
Ben (01:04:32):
That's fair. The other thing about your poetry which I've read is there's a musicality to it as well, a sound. I'm not sure do you hear your poetry as well like that? Or is it because it's just embedded in your lovely words and visuals and also the way the lines break and everything, it's such a complex whole. But there's definitely something, although I've actually not read it out aloud when I read it, I hear it. Sometimes that's more purposeful. It just falls out.
Joanne (01:05:06):
I think it just goes to the way I relate to language which is quite autistic in some ways. I relate to it as what Freud would call a thing presentation. I just like the stuff of it as well as the meaning of it. My first word was cockle because of Mary, Mary Quite Contrary because my parents would read nursery rhyme rhymes to me. "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how'd your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells." So for me, speech and rhyme and that kind of musicality of language, I guess it all arrived in a lump.
Ben (01:05:51):
Wow. That's amazing. Do you think there's anything which is particularly misunderstood about your body of work that people get it and they think, "Oh, it's just all about this." And you go, 'Oh no, you've not really done that." Or do you think it's slowly people are kind of understanding where all of this is coming from?
Joanne (01:06:13):
I'm realizing it's more and more about warm and how much I like form to form sake, but not just you can make something beautiful because it has become more and more about how we talk about things and the way in which we talk about things; the registers, the imagery, obscure things or bring things forward. And to some extent how the way we talk about the world constructs the world. Is it possible as a writer to intervene in that or to reveal that?
Ben (01:06:42):
Fascinating. I guess, is that kind of line of thought slightly influenced by all of your studies in philosophy as well? Or has it come as a parallel aspect?
Joanne (01:06:53):
Definitely philosophy and reading critical theory and sort of activism as well.
Ben (01:07:00):
Yeah. Great. Well, on that note, do you have any advice, life advice, writing advice or just life thoughts that you'd want to share? We haven't touched on that activism part that much. So maybe we could touch on-- If you wanted to touch on that, you can before thinking about advice to listeners. But anything you'd want to share?
Joanne (01:07:27):
Oh gosh, I don't know if I have much advice, except I'm always telling people to be compassionate to themselves and other people which is very annoying of me. But I do mean it.
Ben (01:07:36):
I think that's very fair. Be kind is I think very good advice. So great. Well, on that note, I'd say please do read Joanne's books. They are excellent. Thank you very much for chatting with me.
Joanne (01:07:52):
Thank you very much for having me. I've enjoyed it.
Ben (01:07:55):
Great.
Joanne (01:07:56):
Thank you.
