Casey Schwartz, ATTENTION: A LOVE STORY
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[1:08]I'm here today with Casey Schwartz, who's the author of Attention A Love Story.
[1:12]The graduate of Brown University, Casey has a master's degree in developmental neuroscience
[1:16]and psychoanalysis from University College London.
[1:19]Her first book in the Mind Fields was about the culture clash between the old and new
[1:23]ways of thinking about the mind and brain.
[1:26]Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times magazine departures, New
[1:29]York, and many other publications.
[1:31]She currently lives in New York and Brooklyn with her husband and her new baby.
[1:35]Welcome Casey.
[1:36]Thanks for coming on mom's.
[1:37]Don't have time to read books.
[1:38]Thank you, Debbie.
[1:39]I'm so thrilled to be here.
[1:40]Casey had a baby six weeks ago named Dash and she's finally out of the house and out on
[1:46]subway and back into the mainstream.
[1:48]So we're going to go easy on her.
[1:50]Don't go too easy on me.
[1:52]So congratulations again.
[1:54]Attention A Love Story.
[1:55]I loved this book.
[1:57]It was so good.
[1:58]It was like part memoir, but then you did all this investigative research and just sort
[2:02]of like wove it in all in the first person tone.
[2:04]Actually, I should just ask you to describe it.
[2:06]But anyway, just so you know, I really love this book.
[2:09]Oh, that's so kind of you.
[2:11]Really.
[2:12]Thanks.
[2:13]Anyway, tell listeners what Attention A Love Story is about.
[2:15]Well, it's about this quest that I've been on for probably the last four years to try
[2:21]and understand what attention is and how it connects to every aspect of building a
[2:28]meaningful life and why we need to fight to take it back from the screens that have inundated
[2:35]our lives.
[2:36]And it's also about your own journey and what made you on this quest to begin with.
[2:41]Totally.
[2:42]This book is highly personal for me.
[2:44]And in a sense, it started when I went off to college around the year 2000 and a friend
[2:49]handed me a little blue pill called Adderall, which had only been on the market for about
[2:55]four years at that point.
[2:57]And I wound up spending, you know, 10 plus years kind of addicted to the so-called attention
[3:03]pill, thinking this pill is necessary for me to succeed and achieve and pay attention.
[3:11]And it was only when I was about 30 that I was able to get off because I understood that
[3:16]it had had, ironically, the opposite effect for me that shattered my attention.
[3:21]And I think it was in that period of time that I became kind of fascinated by attention
[3:27]itself.
[3:28]And then a couple years later, I had this thought one day, like it was so, it was such an
[3:32]emotional thought, like, why are we giving away our attention so casually?
[3:37]This was about 2015, you know, well into when screens had invaded.
[3:42]I think before we'd all gotten a little disillusioned with Silicon Valley.
[3:47]And it felt like such a pointless thought to have, like, it was, the fight was over.
[3:51]Silicon Valley had won.
[3:53]But it was still the one thing I felt like it was worth devoting my time to do my next
[3:59]book on.
[4:00]It was the one thing that I felt that grounds well of emotion that I could live with this
[4:04]subject for years.
[4:05]And you really, like, delve deep.
[4:08]And in this book, you talked about the process that went into writing your last book,
[4:12]and how you journeyed through a therapist's years and years of transcripts.
[4:17]It's like a stroke patient who was, I mean, you go into it and you stay with your
[4:21]topics for so long.
[4:22]I mean, it's impressive.
[4:24]No, not at all.
[4:25]I mean, he was a that particular person who was a pleasure to spend time with.
[4:29]And he can't, he comes up in this book because this was a therapist who was working with
[4:33]a patient who had had a stroke and couldn't speak.
[4:36]And they did their therapy for seven years somehow together.
[4:40]And he became, for me, an example of monumental heroic attention as you try to decode a man's
[4:48]language when he can barely get out five syllables.
[4:52]And yet, once to write down Bloomingdale's and totally still still an enormous life of sorts,
[4:58]you know?
[4:59]That really is like such a nightmare.
[5:00]Like the idea that you can, you know, the trapped in your body, like completely, I mean,
[5:04]completely.
[5:05]So I went to bed ruminating on how awful that is, and I'm lucky we are even to be able
[5:10]to talk completely.
[5:11]But then you also go into things like a complete analysis of the total work of David Foster
[5:16]Wallace and have yourself like peering over his balcony and how other people have written
[5:22]about attention or to tell me a little bit.
[5:24]Completely.
[5:25]This book is both personal.
[5:26]It's about, you know, my struggle with Adderall, my dad, my mom, psychedelic science,
[5:32]but there are also these four incredible writers who play a huge role in this book, David
[5:38]Foster Wallace, William James, Aljuice Haxley, and Simone Bay.
[5:42]And when I was first starting the book, I knew I wanted to include writers.
[5:47]But it's like, how do you choose because attention matters to every writer?
[5:52]I then over the course of my research realized all in the space of one month that for
[5:57]these four, attention had become an obsession, attention for all four of them in different
[6:03]ways meant the world.
[6:05]And in the case of David Foster Wallace, like you can see it through infinite jest, but
[6:10]it's really as he got older and closer to his death at age 46, that I think attention
[6:16]became kind of like an organizing principle for him.
[6:19]If you read his final novel, The Pale King, you just see even the word attention is mentioned
[6:25]150 times.
[6:26]And that's a book about basically about boredom.
[6:29]It takes place at an IRS office in the middle of the country and it's about how do you
[6:34]not go insane when you're just plunged into tedium?
[6:38]And I guess for him, the answer was attention.
[6:40]Wow.
[6:41]So why did you decide?
[6:43]I know you said you realized it could be something you would spend so much time on.
[6:46]But when did you say like, I'm going to share all this personal stuff that happened
[6:50]with me?
[6:51]And I'm going to put it all in a book.
[6:52]I'm going to put it out there.
[6:54]And that's what my next move is.
[6:56]And how did you feel about that?
[6:57]Like do you ever have reservations about putting it all out there?
[7:00]Like for people who didn't maybe know that you had been going through this?
[7:03]Well, actually, the Adderall section started as a piece that I did for the New York Times
[7:08]magazine in 2016.
[7:10]And by the time I wrote that piece, I've been totally off Adderall or basically totally
[7:14]off Adderall for three plus years.
[7:17]And it honestly felt like I was writing about another person.
[7:20]I was writing about, oh, this 20 something.
[7:23]I mean, I knew her very well.
[7:25]But it was not quite me anymore.
[7:28]And that gave me just enough distance to be able to be completely candid about the experience.
[7:34]But also, I mean, by then, I'd heard so many stories about people just like me who had
[7:39]been stuck in this addiction for so long and all the ways that Adderall had kind of
[7:44]distorted their lives.
[7:46]But I thought, you know what, this has to be told.
[7:49]And like, I know that there are people out there going through this exact same thing.
[7:54]So I didn't have that many reservations about it.
[7:58]Maybe I had to kind of like convince myself, oh no, this isn't that personal in order
[8:02]to do it.
[8:03]No, it's so important that you didn't.
[8:05]So help me.
[8:06]Oh no, I mean, I don't know about that.
[8:07]No one's too.
[8:08]I mean, every story that someone tells about their own experience ends of helping other
[8:11]people and maybe somebody's stuck in the same thing and then they read your book or they
[8:14]read your article.
[8:15]Yeah.
[8:16]I think it's great.
[8:17]Well, thank you.
[8:18]And you talk a lot about the relationship between addiction and attention and how they sort
[8:23]of dovetail throughout.
[8:25]And you know, this is actually one of David Foster Wallace's great themes, too.
[8:29]And you can see it through infinite jazz.
[8:31]But I really kind of realized, you know, they're twinned in this funny way because they
[8:36]both have everything to do with being able to kind of sit with yourself and sit with
[8:40]your own thoughts.
[8:41]I mean, it's like what was driving me to reach for these amphetamines.
[8:45]It was like this sense that, oh, I can't be just here on my own without this chemical
[8:50]enhancement.
[8:51]I can't face my own capacities and my own thoughts.
[8:55]I need to distort an altar.
[8:57]And I think that in a way, you know, when you when you're compulsively reaching for your
[9:01]phone, it's exactly the same impulse.
[9:03]It's like, no, I'm terrified of sitting here in silence.
[9:07]I'm going to I'm going to scroll through Instagram for the next 90 minutes.
[9:10]You know, there is that famous study that they did at University of Virginia.
[9:14]And I think it was like 2014 where they found that a huge percentage of the subjects
[9:19]would rather be receive electric shocks than be left alone with their own thoughts.
[9:25]I mean, like it was something like 25% where like, no, I'd rather be electrically shocked
[9:31]than have you take away my phone.
[9:33]So that's part of the puzzle of this book is like, was trying to understand, what are
[9:37]we running away from?
[9:40]And I think that that answer varies so much from person to person.
[9:44]There's not a universal response to it, but it does seem to be a universal desire.
[9:48]And I also found interesting the study and I'm going to forget who the man who did the
[9:52]study that said he didn't think 80 to 80 HD was genetic, but that it was a coping mechanism.
[10:00]for not being able to deal with some of them
[10:02]less savory aspects of your own life.
[10:04]And so you don't want to pay attention to that.
[10:07]And so you got your thoughts go every which way else.
[10:09]Oh, completely.
[10:10]That predilection, no, most for that type of thinking
[10:14]gets passed on, but not through genetics.
[10:17]I didn't say that very well.
[10:18]Right.
[10:19]And I was so struck by that thought, too.
[10:21]That is this doctor named Dr. Gabor Mottet.
[10:24]And he is a fascinating figure.
[10:26]His specialty is really addiction.
[10:28]And again, there's this connection.
[10:29]He's also written and spoken at length about attention.
[10:33]We spent a good amount of time together.
[10:35]And his feeling is that little kids start,
[10:40]they realize that anything stressful or painful
[10:43]or unsettling in the environment they're in,
[10:46]they can escape by seeking distraction, internal, external
[10:50]distraction.
[10:51]It's like it becomes a tool for them to survive.
[10:54]And then it turns later into a set of behaviors that's
[10:57]then problematic when they're a school age.
[10:59]And that gets diagnosed as ADHD.
[11:02]And so it's really so what was radical for me about Gabor's
[11:06]ideas was that it was so in motion-based.
[11:10]Talking about attention through a lens of emotion,
[11:12]rather than brain or intellect, but really about feeling.
[11:16]And after all this research and your own experience,
[11:18]do you have a point of view about medicating
[11:21]children for ADHD or adults or?
[11:24]Right.
[11:25]I mean, it's hard for me to answer because I have no doubt
[11:29]that there are just definitely kids and adults out there
[11:32]who can be helped by Adderall or other medications like Adderall.
[11:36]I never had a legitimate case of ADHD, right?
[11:40]And but that said, it was insanely easy for me
[11:44]to get my own prescription.
[11:45]I mean, I think I accomplished it in 40 minutes.
[11:48]I think that ADHD is still a very gray zone diagnosis.
[11:52]I think it's very easy to think you have it.
[11:55]I mean, who among us doesn't think we have ADHD from time to time,
[11:58]right?
[11:59]And I think that there's so much off-label or partially off-label
[12:04]use of it that you have to be sort of just super aware of,
[12:10]do I need this?
[12:11]Am I being helped by it?
[12:13]It's so funny.
[12:13]I had this period of time where I thought
[12:16]I was losing all my memory.
[12:18]And I went to neurologists.
[12:19]And I was like, something's happening.
[12:20]I can't remember anything.
[12:21]And it turned out that I was so focused
[12:24]on so many other things that I wasn't imprinting the memories
[12:27]to begin with, which is exactly what you talked about in your book.
[12:30]I mean, I had like MRIs and all that stuff.
[12:33]Like it was, I was getting lost on the street.
[12:36]Like I was like, I was like, what was going on around that?
[12:39]Oh, I had twins who were not sleeping.
[12:42]They were like three and a half hours.
[12:44]Oh my God, say no more.
[12:45]We were out of our apartments, staying in this temporary, awful housing
[12:49]situation while between apartments, tantrums, like crazy.
[12:55]And I just started like losing my mind.
[12:57]I was like, I can't remember anything.
[12:59]And so then I had to go get this neuropsych evaluation
[13:02]because I've never had attention problems either.
[13:03]I was like, great and school.
[13:04]Everything was fine.
[13:05]Right.
[13:06]And they're like, well, maybe now you have a attention problem.
[13:07]I was like, I don't have attention problems.
[13:09]I'm just doing a lot of stuff that I'm not like,
[13:11]I can't fill out a forum correctly anymore.
[13:14]Do you know what I mean?
[13:14]Yeah, anyway, so finally they said it's not
[13:16]that you have a memory disorder.
[13:18]So I was like, oh my gosh, I have early all the time
[13:20]or something's going on.
[13:21]But just that the things were not sticking to begin with.
[13:23]Right.
[13:24]Which stays with me is like this haunting, you know?
[13:27]Yeah.
[13:27]Paying attention enough that I can get anything in the bank.
[13:31]It's so, I mean, I had no idea that there's actually all this
[13:34]neuroscience research showing a definitive link between
[13:37]distraction and forgetting.
[13:39]And it makes total sense that if you're not
[13:41]paying attention to your own life, you're actually
[13:44]not going to remember that much of that.
[13:45]That's right.
[13:46]It's like when you like, I was like, I can never remember
[13:48]if I washed my hair or not in the shower.
[13:49]Like, did I do it?
[13:50]Did I not do it?
[13:51]Because I wasn't focused on it too.
[13:52]You know, it's like your body just right.
[13:54]Exactly, it goes on anyway.
[13:56]You have this sad moment though in the book,
[13:58]happy, sad kind of thing, where you got your first
[14:01]prescription after basically googling ADHD and figuring out
[14:03]what to say because you're a smart person
[14:05]and anybody can figure out how to fall basically in the doctor.
[14:07]No, that's right.
[14:08]Yes.
[14:09]Well, anyway, that's okay.
[14:10]But you had this moment and I, you had some quote about how
[14:13]alone you felt much of course I won't be able to find.
[14:16]Yeah, you said you felt suddenly entirely alone.
[14:19]Okay, not such a big quote.
[14:20]But anyway, tell me about that moment on the street.
[14:22]You were in LA and you got your prescription.
[14:24]I was going to watch that.
[14:25]I think I was 22.
[14:26]I'd been taking Adderall whenever I could get my hands on it
[14:29]and college, but I never had my own prescription.
[14:32]And I finally, I was sort of tutoring kids and trying
[14:35]to take classes to be able to apply at a graduate school.
[14:39]And I'm just in LA and it suddenly occurs to me, oh,
[14:42]it would be so convenient to have my own prescription, you know.
[14:46]I wouldn't have to be dependent on whoever I could find.
[14:51]And that was dangerously easy to accomplish.
[14:54]And I, you know, it was a 40 minute consultation with a young
[14:58]psychiatrist in LA and I come out onto the street.
[15:01]And it was wave of sadness came over me.
[15:04]And I think it was because no one I was close to knew how deep
[15:09]into this dependency I was suddenly, I'd suddenly gotten myself
[15:13]and also how far and how long this was going to turn out to go on.
[15:18]I mean, it was going to be eight more years of really being totally dependent
[15:23]on Adderall.
[15:23]And you had another scene where you were laying in bed and you had an injury
[15:28]and your mother was laying next to you and your mom, by the way, we should discuss.
[15:32]So your mom, Marie Brenner, has been the number one mentor in the writing world
[15:37]for me since I was a kid.
[15:38]So she's a friend of my appearance.
[15:40]And when I was growing up and I was like, I want to be a writer,
[15:43]they were like, well, I guess talking to Marie Brenner, you know,
[15:45]she writes, you know, and she has been like so amazing to me.
[15:49]And I remember her taking me.
[15:50]She doesn't even remember this, but she took me when I was living in LA
[15:53]after college to the book fair at UCLA, the LA Times book fair.
[15:57]And she had like a press pass and she got me into all these events.
[16:00]And I was like, this is amazing.
[16:02]Like this is the coolest thing.
[16:03]And she's like, oh, did I go to that?
[16:05]Yeah.
[16:06]Did I, I love that coincidence and that connection so much because, you know,
[16:10]I know that you know that my mom's the sort of force of nature.
[16:13]Yes. And she's this, you know, she's this South Texan turn New Yorker
[16:17]with this like insatiable lust for life.
[16:20]And we are so close, but I think that even though I spent a decade on this pill,
[16:25]she didn't exactly know.
[16:28]Yeah.
[16:28]I mean, I think she knew something that she didn't really know anything,
[16:32]the extent of it.
[16:33]And your mom, what you said in the book about her, about her constantly asking questions,
[16:38]oh, she's like a lean forward.
[16:40]Let me ask a thousand.
[16:41]Oh, yeah, a minute type of person.
[16:42]Yeah.
[16:43]And you were saying that that is kind of now good manners for you.
[16:46]You said she's the ultimate question-asker as much in everyday conversation
[16:49]as in her life as a journalist.
[16:51]In fact, for her and now unavoidably for me,
[16:53]asking questions has always been the very definition of good manners to show curiosity
[16:58]about another human being and mean it.
[17:00]Right.
[17:00]And actually, you know, people make fun of both my mother and me
[17:05]for the incessant questions that we have.
[17:08]So I don't know if everyone would agree that it's good manners.
[17:11]But it's like, it's been such a model for my life because my mother's curiosity
[17:15]has been the very lifeblood of her whole career and her whole existence.
[17:21]And she was always the mother who was saying, you know, let's go see,
[17:25]let's go meet, let's put everything aside, let's go to India,
[17:29]let's go find out.
[17:31]And I think for her, curiosity and therefore
[17:34]paying the paying attention that comes with curiosity
[17:37]is this way of getting out of your own self and your own little predicament
[17:43]or your own depression and being absorbed by the people or the places around you.
[17:48]And it's this tonic and this sort of like recipe for happiness.
[17:53]And your dad also is an author and you go into detail about what happened
[17:57]and we don't have to discuss.
[17:59]You can't argue that he was a victim essentially of the Me Too movement.
[18:03]And he lost his job, his prestigious job at WNYC
[18:07]without cause, without an explanation.
[18:10]He was sort of shown to the door.
[18:12]And the ripple effects that your family, that it had in your family
[18:15]and that there's another side of the coin of this whole, of this movement.
[18:20]I mean, we don't know what happened because we never found out.
[18:24]And my father, you know, had been on the radio,
[18:28]a New York playing the American Songbook and Sinatra and all of it for about 20 plus years.
[18:33]And at the age of 80, he was one of, I think it was like the eight or nine men that NPR fired.
[18:40]And I can't really speak to any of the other cases.
[18:43]But in his case, we just never really found out why.
[18:47]So he, I don't know if there was cause or not, but we weren't told.
[18:52]And therefore, I mean, if there had been, he never had a chance to take responsibility or
[18:57]apologize or defend himself.
[19:00]So it was, it was a strange happening.
[19:03]The coincidentally took place while I was buried in research for the attention book.
[19:07]And I went back and forth for so long about whether I wanted to write about it.
[19:11]Because it's such a risky subject to talk about, I think it's understandably so fraught.
[19:18]And so important movement and a moment, a cultural reckoning.
[19:23]But I did want to share the experience that we went through.
[19:26]It was like, I'll never forget the feeling of, you know, his suspension was announced.
[19:31]And suddenly I'm seeing this moral outrage spread on Twitter within 60 minutes
[19:37]of people just jumping to conclusions without absolutely no information and no fact,
[19:43]nothing denouncing him, reclassifying him as a sexual predator.
[19:48]I mean, with zero information.
[19:51]And it was such a learning moment for me.
[19:53]Wow.
[19:54]Yeah.
[19:54]That's tough.
[19:55]I mean, it was.
[19:55]It really was.
[19:56]It was probably one of the hardest things we've ever gone through as a family.
[20:00]And you were, like, obviously so on the front lines.
[20:02]You were like, and then I had this call with my dad's lawyer.
[20:04]And then I did this, like, I was in the match.
[20:06]I was in the match.
[20:07]I couldn't help, but I mean, as a reporter,
[20:10]I was enmeshed because I really was trying
[20:13]to extract as much information as I could.
[20:15]And as a daughter, I just, I was involved.
[20:19]And it sort of, it was my own attention
[20:21]was completely hijacked for probably two or three months.
[20:25]And yeah, it was living through that
[20:27]was, like, nothing I've ever been through before.
[20:30]I'm so sorry, that all.
[20:31]Oh, dad, I mean, thank you.
[20:32]But here we are, and he's okay.
[20:34]He's okay.
[20:35]Tell me a little more about your process.
[20:37]You mentioned you were deep in the research
[20:38]when this all happened.
[20:39]Give me a visual of how you work
[20:41]and what you do with all the research you collect
[20:43]and is it all over your room and sticky notes on the wall?
[20:46]What type of thought?
[20:47]It's funny, because my desk is the dining room table
[20:50]that's in our living room.
[20:51]And that's now, as of six weeks ago,
[20:54]like, the diaper changed, because I just had a baby.
[20:57]But I would just, I write in the morning.
[20:59]I write for three or four hours, as soon as I wake up.
[21:03]And no, it's not that much paperwork
[21:05]flying all over the place, thank God.
[21:07]It's mostly, whatever I'm reading is right next to me.
[21:10]My notebook's right next to me, but it's just me
[21:12]at that computer in those first precious morning hours.
[21:15]And just how do you go back?
[21:17]How do you have the confidence?
[21:19]Or like, I know this must happen to so many authors
[21:21]where you have to start from scratch.
[21:22]You have to redo and redo.
[21:24]How do you just stay with it?
[21:26]Like, how did you do it?
[21:28]What do you think?
[21:29]I feel like it's almost irrational,
[21:31]like the tenacity that you need to finish a book.
[21:34]It's like almost crazy.
[21:36]It's borderline nuts, you know?
[21:37]I really believe that.
[21:39]And I think a lot of writers have it and it you need it.
[21:43]And also, I should say that my age in Andrew at the time
[21:46]was huge, because he was like, just stay calm.
[21:50]We're going to saw this.
[21:51]We're going to find you a new home for it.
[21:54]And every single publisher in New York,
[21:56]said no.
[21:57]And then Dan said, maybe.
[21:59]Wow.
[22:00]It's impressive.
[22:01]I mean, this is not for the faint of heart.
[22:02]This life, this author life, I mean, is it?
[22:05]Right.
[22:06]And it also feels like increasingly kind of, you know,
[22:09]marginalized and anachronistic, because everything's
[22:12]happening at the speed of Twitter.
[22:14]So it's like, what are you even doing
[22:15]shut up for years in a room with a computer writing one book?
[22:19]You know, what could seem more preposterous
[22:22]when we live at light warp speed?
[22:24]And yet, it happens all the time.
[22:26]And there's still such a very, just appetite for it.
[22:29]So oh my god, I mean, books are everything.
[22:31]Books give life meaning.
[22:33]And they're having delved deep into these other topics.
[22:35]Do you have a new topic that you think
[22:37]you're going to write about next?
[22:39]For some reason, I'm craving a story that takes place
[22:42]in Los Angeles.
[22:43]And I'm kind of on the lookout for one.
[22:45]But I do, I love writing these hybrid,
[22:47]like, personal and kind of narrative nonfiction
[22:51]and kind of putting it together.
[22:53]That's my favorite way of writing these days.
[22:55]So I'm looking for something on the West coach.
[22:57]And I don't even know why yet.
[22:59]OK, well, in all my time in LA,
[23:01]I will be searching for stories for you.
[23:02]OK, I can't see how it is.
[23:03]I will, I really will.
[23:06]So in the book, you write that, quote,
[23:07]attention can be heartbreaking.
[23:09]You pay attention.
[23:10]And you notice an elderly gentleman one day in a restaurant.
[23:12]And he's looking really lonely.
[23:13]And you ask, does he always come in by himself?
[23:15]And they say pretty much yes.
[23:17]And you said that I paid attention to him.
[23:19]Does not change his life or better it in any way.
[23:22]But I think that it does change mine.
[23:24]But tell me a little about that.
[23:26]That was a moment I was having dinner with my husband.
[23:29]And there was this man in the corner just staring out
[23:32]at this crowded restaurant, utterly alone.
[23:35]But by the way, I mean, I eat dinner alone all the time.
[23:38]But there was this atmosphere to him
[23:40]that was very specific.
[23:41]And after he laughed, I said to the waitress,
[23:44]is he always here alone?
[23:45]And she said, yes, he's always here alone.
[23:48]And it just, it sort of made me think that, you know,
[23:51]it's a very painful thing to see someone sadness so palpably.
[23:55]And I think, and there's so much sadness
[23:57]and so many problems around us.
[23:58]I mean, from the personal to the political, to the global.
[24:01]I mean, it's when I think about the singed koalas
[24:04]and Australia, I could like sob.
[24:06]And I think the instinct is to try and suppress those thoughts
[24:10]and that consciousness.
[24:11]But we have to stay tuned in to what's going on.
[24:15]You had some lime that, if you paid attention
[24:17]to everything, life would be hell.
[24:19]Right, I mean, I, your brain won't let you.
[24:21]I mean, literally won't let you.
[24:23]But I think we just, we have to try and stay awake
[24:27]as much as we can.
[24:28]There also was this moment where I was wondering
[24:31]how you had the emotional fortitude
[24:33]or what lessons you could share
[24:35]when your books deal for the last book.
[24:38]You had an editor, you'd worked on it for years.
[24:40]Your editor leaves the publishing house,
[24:42]you get a new editor, takes you out to lunch
[24:45]or something, and the snow storm and says,
[24:46]actually, I don't think your book needs to exist.
[24:50]And then you're sitting there, like stunned, shocked.
[24:54]My heart just broke for you in that moment.
[24:56]And then I couldn't believe like a paragraph or two later,
[24:59]you're like, and then I sent it out
[25:00]to a bunch of new publishers.
[25:01]And I had to like go back to the test.
[25:02]I was like, did she really do, like really good for her?
[25:05]Well, my agent.
[25:06]Okay, still.
[25:07]But it was, no, it was rough.
[25:09]I was 30, I'd been on Adderall again.
[25:12]It was like actually, I had been on Adderall for 10 years.
[25:14]So the manuscript was a mess
[25:16]because it was the product of very muddled thinking.
[25:19]And it was canceled by this young editor I was reassigned to.
[25:23]And it was one of the worst moments of my life
[25:26]that became one of the luckiest things
[25:28]that ever happened to me, because she and I
[25:30]were never going to have a creative collaboration.
[25:33]And by incredible good luck, it led me to Dan Frank,
[25:38]who was the editor of that last book
[25:40]and is the current editor of this one.
[25:42]And that has been one of the most precious,
[25:45]charmed relationships of my entire life.
[25:48]And it was the prompt for getting me off Adderall.
[25:51]Because I realized I have made such a mess
[25:54]of everything I actually care about.
[25:56]I can't write on amphetamine.
[25:57]So I cannot feel or see clearly.
[26:00]And that getting my first book canceled
[26:02]was like the rock bottom moment that within months,
[26:07]I was off Adderall.
[26:08]He could have gone a very different way.
[26:09]I mean, yeah, it could have.
[26:11]I mean, it was by the skin of my teeth that Dan took me on.
[26:13]And I had to re-report and rewrite that entire front.
[26:17]I mean, I don't think a single sentence
[26:19]was remain the same.
[26:21]So it was like another whole year of writing and reporting.
[26:24]And it was so worth it just to have a chance to be with him.
[26:28]In conclusion, after all of this research
[26:30]and your whole book and everything,
[26:32]how can we pay more attention?
[26:34]How can we live more in the moment?
[26:36]This is something on my mind all the time, like most people.
[26:40]What do you think?
[26:41]Because it helped you to learn all of this
[26:43]and has it changed your behavior?
[26:45]I think it has.
[26:46]I mean, I, for me, personally, things
[26:48]like silent meditation retreats and digital detoxes
[26:51]are just too radical.
[26:53]And I've given up hope that I could personally
[26:56]could be helped by them.
[26:57]But the power of studying and thinking
[27:00]about how important attention is in terms of having
[27:05]a good life just to have that thought in your mind
[27:09]when you're in the middle of an Instagram stupor.
[27:13]When you're on Twitter and despair at the discourse
[27:16]you're seeing, just to stay, try and stay conscious
[27:20]of the fact that right now your attention
[27:23]has been hijacked and by literally technologists
[27:28]of Silicon Valley and their algorithms
[27:30]have taken your attention from you.
[27:31]And then you need to stay awake and push back.
[27:35]For me, that's the only thing that's helped me so far.
[27:39]But I'm still looking for other solutions,
[27:40]like everyone.
[27:42]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[27:44]Yes, I actually do.
[27:45]And to young writers right now, I would say,
[27:49]avoid and resist group think.
[27:51]I think there's so much fear about offending
[27:54]the group that you want to be identified with online.
[27:58]And that I don't think that great writing really springs
[28:02]from placating the group you wish to belong to.
[28:05]I think it springs from speaking from your heart,
[28:08]even if you're going to offend or alienate people
[28:11]that you admire.
[28:13]You love that.
[28:14]You have to stay true to yourself, I mean, that's right.
[28:17]Always.
[28:18]Well, thank you so much, Casey.
[28:19]Thanks for coming on.
[28:20]And thanks for this great book.
[28:21]And thanks for bringing attention to the forefront of my mind
[28:24]and helping me think about it in a whole new way.
[28:27]Oh, you're so welcome to me.
[28:28]Thanks.
[28:29]You've been listening to moms and have time to read books
[28:31]with Zibi Owens.
[28:32]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com
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[28:39]and also lots of live events.
[28:40]Thanks again for listening today, everybody.
[28:42]And don't forget to check out wefoundtime.com.
[28:45]And it's also available on zibiowans.com as a tab.
[28:48]But also, wefoundtime.com, check out the essays
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[29:06]I really appreciate it.
[29:07]You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books.
[29:11]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound
[29:14]for the Sound Editing.
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