Nina Renata Aron, GOOD MORNING, DESTROYER OF MEN'S SOULS
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zive Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
[0:11]Moms don't have time to read books.
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[2:07]that's enough for me. Now go listen to this episode. Today's episode has been sponsored by
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[3:47]I had such a nice time talking to Nina Renata Erin. And if you're interested in seeing us talk live,
[3:52]we did a ZIGTV video together during the quarantine. And you can check that out at my Instagram
[3:58]page at ZIBBY Owens. Nina is a writer and editor living in Oakland. She's a features editor
[4:03]at full stop and online literary magazine. And her work has appeared in the New Republic,
[4:07]The Rumpus, The Millions, and Elsewhere. She recently published a beautiful,
[4:12]gritty and unpotatable memoir called Good Morning Destroyer of Men's Souls.
[4:17]Word of Warning, I read this on my computer with my traditional 200% Zoom feature. And my
[4:24]daughter was here and that was not a good idea because there are a lot of curse words in her book.
[4:29]So just buy your beware on that front. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
[4:34]Hi.
[4:34]How are you? I'm happy to be here. I have to have my coffee because it's a little earlier in
[4:42]California. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know. I've run up against this before. When I originally
[4:47]started this, well, first of all, I never imagined I would still be doing this now. I thought
[4:50]this would be like two weeks. We're all going to be home. But I would have made it later for
[4:56]the West Coast and I wouldn't have made it the exact same time my daughter had school. But you know
[4:59]what? You can tell me. These are the mom challenges. Well, you've been, I've been watching
[5:05]these interviews you're doing. It's such a comfort. It's been so great. So thank you for everything.
[5:10]You're doing for writers who are adjusting to this new reality.
[5:15]Your problem. It's helping me adjust as well. Give me something to do.
[5:21]I'm kidding. I mean, yes, I really enjoy it. And I'm delighted to get to talk to people who
[5:27]it would have been hard to talk to everybody all over the world. I know. That's the one. That's
[5:30]like a silver line. Yes. And while that we can just I had my virtual launch event the other night
[5:36]and all of my East Coast people, my family and my closest friends and my West Coast people were
[5:42]all like in the room together. It was so great. I love that. That's so nice. Maybe some of
[5:47]some, maybe some of these ways of congregating will stay. I think so. I mean, I think one of my friends
[5:53]said to me after that, you know, part, I said, I felt I really felt so loved and supported that
[5:58]night. And she said, nobody's doing anything they don't want to do right now. So when people are
[6:03]choosing to do something, they mean it, you know, and I was thinking, wow, I wonder if maybe we
[6:08]don't ever have to go back to not meeting it. That would be good. And a lot of these things,
[6:14]I think are working out very nicely online, you know, because I think so. Half of life is like
[6:18]racing around from place to place. And, you know, this is this is great. I know it's easy. It's
[6:24]easy. It's easy. Well, your book, by the way, so I've been doing a lot of my reading these days
[6:31]because, you know, books aren't being sent best enough and all the rest of it on the Kindle app for
[6:35]iCloud. I was like on my computer. And I don't know if I'm getting older. What, but I now have it
[6:40]all on like 200% of all the words. I do that too. Like it's so embarrassing. Even Microsoft
[6:46]Word is 200%. So I had it like flastered all over my giant, like desktop. And my daughter was
[6:52]sitting in my lab, like doing her drawing for school. And I'm like going to the pages and every
[6:56]other word is like, oh my, and she can read. I was like, don't look up. Don't look up. Don't see this.
[7:05]I feel about my own children. I'm like, they can admire the pretty cover of my book, but they may
[7:10]not open it for a long time. I'm getting intense and gritty. And oh my gosh, though. It is.
[7:16]It is. Well, tell me about, well, first of all, for anybody who might not know that. Can you
[7:21]do have a copy of it? Of course. I just, I have this. It came out a few days ago. It's such a
[7:26]luscious item. I love it. I love it too. It's really, it's yummy. I mean, I love the cover, but
[7:32]something about this in hard covers, like I can't stop picking it up in. It's like a baby.
[7:37]Oh, congratulations on that. Thank you. It really is so exciting. Thank you.
[7:42]Yes. Cool. So tell us what it's about. And it's super personal and emotional and all the rest.
[7:48]But it is really personal and emotional. It's a memoir. It has some, it's sort of laced with
[7:54]cultural history. And it's meant to be sort of the first literary memoir about codependency.
[8:00]So I grew up in a household with a family member who struggled with addiction. My sister
[8:05]brother struggled with heroin addiction when we were teenagers and in our 20s and made it out.
[8:11]And it's a complete badass in my hero. And that experience really colored all of my relationships.
[8:18]And just the way I related to the idea of love and sacrifice and what you're supposed to
[8:22]sort of do in relation to other people and take care of them. And I really thrived on
[8:28]sort of feeling needed and was really alive and by feeling needed in that dynamic. And then
[8:34]it's about how that, you know, largely how that played out in my romantic relationships,
[8:39]subsequent relationships. So I had an affair when I was married any young mother with an ex-boyfriend
[8:45]who was a hardcore drug addict who was in and out of sobriety for many years. And we were
[8:51]madly desperately in love. But it is very gritty and it's very intense because it's about
[8:57]addiction. And I know a lot of people don't have personal experience with that kind of hardcore
[9:02]addiction. But it's also sort of broadly about executions that women place on ourselves and that
[9:09]throughout history that are, you know, have been placed upon us culturally and sort of how much of
[9:15]ourselves to give in love, whether it's, you know, in any kind of relationship in motherhood and
[9:22]our family relationships. So hopefully it, you know, has like broader reach beyond just those who
[9:28]enjoy a good gritty addiction that more. But I always was reading addiction memoirs my whole life
[9:34]that I never understood why none were written by people who lived in those households and suffered
[9:41]through that. It's terrible and it's really confusing and it really can, it can really skew everything
[9:49]in your life and be, it's just incredibly challenging. And there are resources out there for people
[9:55]who have that experience. But I always was looking for like, I wanted this.
[10:00]book so I had to write it. I love that. I mean that's the best reason to write a book is when you
[10:06]can't find what you're looking for and you have something so unique to say. I mean it's great and
[10:10]I'm like you I love addiction memoirs. I always feel kind of bad saying that. No there's I mean as
[10:15]genre especially I think in like the last 20 years as women have started writing their own. I mean
[10:19]I think it was a very male dominated genre for a while but they're stunning and they are sort of like
[10:27]they encapsulate a kind of personal development narrative often that I think like a lot of us are
[10:32]after making those changes in our lives whether or not we have struggle with addiction. They are
[10:37]these sort of salvation stories. I love them. Yeah you're so right and so always just so open and
[10:43]personal and like dark but then you know there's some sort of light at the end because you know
[10:49]they've written this book and I don't know. Exactly no totally. I know and I kind of worried that I would
[10:53]I don't know. I thought maybe I wouldn't have to share as much of my own struggle. I was like well I'm
[10:58]gonna write about other people's problems. I realized if I'm gonna write this I have to like
[11:04]really go for it with my own. Be really really honest which I was. It was yeah started.
[11:11]Yeah how does it feel now that this is in the world? Is there like any random school teacher or
[11:16]somebody out there that you're like oh my gosh this person's gonna see what I have to say.
[11:20]It's funny I keep saying I said this at my lot event too. I've had a mom friend ask me like how do
[11:27]you feel knowing that people are gonna be able to read this and I said I feel so relieved that I
[11:32]never have to pretend to be normal. So in a lot of ways I mean I think I think it's only okay and I
[11:40]only feel comfortable sharing this because my life has been really transformed by recovery and
[11:46]therapy and all the work I've done on myself and to be able to write this. So I talk about these
[11:52]things now with like a certain degree of detachment but yeah there are definitely people who
[11:58]have reached out to me to say congrats on your book. I'm so excited to read it and I'm kind of like
[12:03]you know I want to just sort of like learn them that it's heavy but I also feel like all lives
[12:10]have heaviness and there are people who choose to share about it and those who don't and it feels
[12:17]surprisingly healing to just choose to like this is my truth. What can I do you know?
[12:24]It feels good and think about all the people you're gonna help by doing that. I mean I hope
[12:28]I'm sitting yourself out there. I do hope so yeah I think I mean I was always so ashamed of some of
[12:34]these things and really sort of confused as to why I was making certain choices in my life and
[12:40]I wish I had had more to read that made me feel like you know this stuff happens. It's normal
[12:47]you know it's just like it really is part and parcel of living with this disease of addiction.
[12:52]There you know I talk about it in the book but co-dependence used to be called co-alcoholics because
[12:58]the dynamic was thought of as a two-person dyad you know that and so one person's alcoholism
[13:05]expresses itself in this particular form of drinking too much and the other person's alcoholism
[13:11]expresses itself in all these margarine controlling manipulative behaviors and rage and you know
[13:18]and so I hope that I can sort of normalize that this is how this family disease expresses itself
[13:26]in other people. You had some great line which I'm probably gonna get wrong but it was something
[13:30]like when you were talking about the disease of addiction you said your disease was loved.
[13:35]Yes yeah yeah so beautiful I mean it's true so you just kept like putting yourself out there
[13:40]and opening up and like getting so enmashed and all the rest and yes yeah and I think that you know
[13:48]among especially the women I'm close to in my life those questions of how like you know how to
[13:55]have boundaries in love those questions are always like present in all of our relationships and so
[14:03]yeah I say that the disease I had was loving him this particular partner which is definitely true.
[14:10]How long did it take you to write the book? It took me once I had this idea I did about six months of
[14:16]research before I wrote the proposal and then the writing of the book was a year and a half
[14:22]and during that time that was besides raising my children that was all I was doing and it was
[14:29]really intense. How many days did you end up crying? Oh my god I mean it was so funny because I
[14:39]feel like I was kind of researching like my own misery you know I mean I was I was research a
[14:44]researcher of my own depression so I was like going back through I've always kept journals and
[14:49]really like pretty diligently you know it's like back through so many journals and letters and emails
[14:54]and really the hardest times in my life so when I needed a break from those you know I'm like
[15:01]trained as an academic and there's some like history in here and not nearly as much and I think
[15:06]I wrote like a history book while I was raised but I would take a break and throw myself into
[15:14]this sort of historical research about the templates movement and Alan on and how women have sort
[15:20]of historically related to alcoholics and addicts in their lives. That was my break. That was my
[15:25]break. That sounds like a real remake you know. But it was fascinating it's really fascinating I hope
[15:32]that I don't know I think I'll write something about some of that history that didn't make it
[15:36]into the book because it was so interesting. How did you go from that intensity of emotion to
[15:41]then like dealing with your kids? How old are they at the time of writing and they're now
[15:47]11 and 8 so this was like the past couple years that I've been writing the book. How did you just
[15:52]switch the trigger? I mean it's funny it's like I mean I don't think I switched the trigger I think
[15:57]they I mean as you know it's like you just sort of called upon to be another version of yourself
[16:03]which is why they are such a life-saving amazing I mean they're just they're great and they're so
[16:10]funny and I found that I would I was really worried that I would sort of like carry this sad
[16:17]phone or mom energy like into the evening or something and then they would come home from school
[16:22]and I would just you know they make you feel great. I was I felt really just lucky to have
[16:30]my real life was playing out and reminding me every day that like we're all happy and okay and healthy
[16:38]and that just kept me very like grateful. Yeah I feel like there's this extra huge pressure on
[16:44]moms to like have it all sort of you have to present as them what together and yet I feel like kids
[16:50]can always see through it like kids can see through me a mile away when I'm like pretending that
[16:55]I'm gonna get mood they're like yes no why are you so sad and I'm like how can you tell?
[17:00]They're always like you being sad is making me sad so that I was worse you know now I'm sad
[17:07]and I've made my kids that it's like yeah no win it's like I just can't I just can't but yeah
[17:13]anyway so to have undertaken a project like yours in the midst of it all and I'm super impressed
[17:19]thank you it was really cathartic I had heard people say that about writing books before that
[17:23]it like something sort of like needed to come out of them in a particular way at a particular time
[17:28]I feel grateful that I think I was sort of like struck by that bolt of lightning this just all
[17:35]just arrived you know it had to happen in this way and I'm so glad that I had my kids there to sort
[17:42]of like just light you know all the way through. Do you have advice if people are listening or
[17:49]listening later who are struggling with somebody in their life who's going through this or
[17:53]have recovered or I know their sites like we connect and all these great resources for people
[17:58]but do you have any specific advice or advice on the writing process itself? I mean I have really
[18:04]been thinking a lot about people who are trapped in these kinds of dynamics right now and who
[18:08]are living in households with active addiction right now I just think it must be so hard to be dealing
[18:16]with that with all these restrictions on our movements and to those people I say like there are
[18:22]resources out there what we connect is a good one and Alonon has really been like a powerful
[18:30]community for me there are you know I mean I think the key is finding other people who understand
[18:36]because I think that we can you know access websites and like read guidelines and self-help
[18:42]bulleted lists or something but really finding people connecting with people who understand exactly
[18:48]what you're going through is the most powerful thing there is and my only writing advice ever
[18:54]is to read that's all I ever want to do but reading is every I mean it's all in there you just have
[19:01]to read books. Well thank you so much for coming on the show thank you I love your show I'm so
[19:09]so glad I got to come on and I'm so happy and I can't wait to like listen to all the rest of
[19:14]your author interviews they're like so fantastic thank you that's really I love it thank you
[19:20]awesome thanks so much thank you thank you guys bye bye thanks again for listening to my podcast
[19:26]moms don't have time to read books if you liked this episode please follow me on instagram
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[19:41]today's episode has been sponsored by stylist. Please try out stylist again it's text to number 926-848
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[19:54]thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to
[20:00]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[20:03]Thanks for listening.
[20:04]You can always email me at zibi at zibiowans.com.