Alena Dillon, MY BODY IS A BIG FAT TEMPLE: An Ordinary Story of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood

[0:58]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have kids. Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things moms don't have time to do. All the authors have been on this podcast. Also, check out my TikTok at with Zibby and Tracy, my other podcast, sex talk with Zibby and Tracy. Check out moms don't have time to write on Medium, and of course, my new publishing company called Zivvy Books. And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids. Hi. Hi. Hello. Enjoy the show. If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids. Here's a little snippet by one of the authors from the anthology. My name is Lindsay Powers and I'm thrilled to have contributed to Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids. My essay is called Let's Just Meet Here Every Day. It's about the breakup of my pandemic pod. And what I really don't have time for is more anxiety about COVID. I'm really looking forward to getting my young kids vaccinated. Elena Dillon is the author of My Body Is a Big Fat Temple. Elena is the author of Mercy House, a Library Journal best book of 2020, which has been optioned as a television series produced by Amy Schumer, as well as The Happiest Girl in the World, A Good Morning America pick, and My Body is a Big Fat Temple, which is coming out now about a memoir of pregnancy and early parenting. Her work has appeared in publications, including LitHub, River Teeth, Slice Magazine, The Rumpus and Bustle. She lives on the North Shore Of Boston with her husband, son, and Black Lab. Oh, maybe her lab can play with Naya. Welcome, Milena. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss My Body is a Big Fat Temple. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so pleased to be here. It's such a joy to have you. I feel like I have just sat down and had a long coffee session with you having read your book and learned all about the ins and outs and your dog and your baby and the whole process. And you're so funny. I love your sense of humor and the way you like, look at the world. Your one liners are like fantastic.

[3:15]Alena Dillon: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I know that's crazy. Like, you know so many intimate things about me

[3:20]Zibby Owens: now. It's true. Well, I have a memoir coming out in July, so we can, like, finish up. Guess, we'll reciprocate. Then I'll know all about you. I wonder what it does to, like, making friends when two people have read each other's memoirs and then they sit down. Like, what happens then? Like

[3:34]Alena Dillon: just open your hearts, I guess. Yeah. Know, you've already gone through all of the small talk, right? You just like start in the middle of a friendship. Yeah. You just, yeah, you catch up. Maybe that's how everybody just needs to do it, you know? Yes, we just need to exchange our memoirs.

[3:48]Zibby Owens: That really saved time. Oh, my gosh. Well, tell listeners a little about, you know, the timeline of this book and, you know, the period it covers and why you decided to write about

[3:58]Alena Dillon: this stage of your life. Sure. Yeah. So My Body is a Big Fat Temple covers from prepregnancy all the way through to when my son is two years old. I decided to write it for a couple different reasons. So, like, the first is just that I write nonfiction just to kind of figure out how I'm feeling about something. Sometimes I can't even just wrap my head around what exactly I'm feeling and why. So essays help me do that. It helps me put into a proper framework. So at first, I was kind of wondering why I was now in my 30s, having been married for several, several years and still not adamantly wanting children in the way that I thought maybe I was supposed to. So trying to figure out if that was okay, if I actually wanted children, and why, what was holding me back. So that was like the first few essays. And then the next thing was when I decided that, yes, we did want to start a family. I started looking for narrative stories of the beginning, this journey of motherhood so that I could try to understand what to expect and prepare myself. Also because, look, the experience is different for everybody, so I wanted to kind of collect a few so that maybe there would be something that I would ultimately recognize. But I had a hard time finding a lot of narrative stories. There was some how to books and some like the science of pregnancy and things like that, which were all very helpful. But there wasn't just a lot of what it was like on the personal level for individuals. So that it occurred to me. I'm sorry, my dog's barking. I feel like I also know Penny.

[5:28]Zibby Owens: I mean, I'm like, you know, how are Penny's knees? Like, you know, what's going on? She

[5:33]Alena Dillon: wants to tribute her thought and the veilman's here. Yeah. So yes, so I wanted to, I realized that because there's, it's like lacking on the bookshelf that maybe there needed to be more contributions. And it seems like a special shame because pregnancy and motherhood is such a, like a practically universal experience and there's such a dearth of material. And then as I went through pregnancy and hit different milestones, it occurred to me that a lot of the experience is not discussed and that it's kind of cast with a very reverend, under a reverend lens. And it does a disservice to people who are about to encounter that experience to withhold a lot of the anxiety and physical pain and the downsides, because when they come across them, then they feel like no one else has gone through it and they don't have a community to turn to. So that was kind of the last point of this book was to expose all of the nitty gritty to kind of start the discussion so that I could be somebody for a reader so that they don't feel so alone when they come across the same experiences.

[6:41]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Well, you started talking about, as you mentioned, your ambivalence, and I really liked this one passage. Hold on. I have like 20 different places dog eared here. Okay. You have this whole section here. Wanting a baby is supposed to be my biological imperative, but I'm beginning to think my maternal clock ran out of batteries, or that the second hand snapped under the weight of hard cider and literary ambitions. Or maybe I'm like one of those rat moms from the famous study who just wasn't born with a nurturing gene, and Phil will be the parent responsible for licking our pups. I'm afraid to have children. And then you keep going on. And then you also say, I fear trading in my current identity for mother. And then you talk about how women are already disadvantaged in the community and everything. But then you say mothers, the epitome of femaleness, are especially broken off from society. We expect them to raise their young and talk amongst themselves in kid appropriate restaurants. We expect mothers to play their part, which means sacrificing everything else they are. They have to justify any time they are away from their family, even when they are working. No one sees a father and asks, Hey, Steve, where are the kids? Because Steve is allowed to be more than one thing. He can have his job, his softball league, and his razor hot shave because he isn't just a dad. He's also an employee and an athlete. I hope it's okay. I'm reading all this. An employee and an athlete and a human who grows a beard and good for Steve. But it isn't equitable because women are defined in total by their relation to their family. When we see Mr. Steve so and so, and we can call her Mrs. Steve so and so sipping beer with friends, we think, Who granted this woman furlough? I'm almost done here. Her pursuit of happiness is an indulgence because any energy spent on her own interests is a direct deduction from energy she might have used to benefit her family. Therefore, she should always be in service because she is a mother. I mean, that's awesome. Thank you. It's just such the reason why I read the whole thing is because it's one of the most clear descriptions of sort of this disparity of moms and dads and also the expectations placed on us and sort of the underpinning for why we have mom guilt. And it's this. It is this very page of this very book that, like, does the trick. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly yeah. It's that moms are expected to be at their at the service of their family. And so that when anytime they're pursuing pleasure, they need to justify it somehow.

[9:00]Alena Dillon: It's never enough that it's just to nourish themselves. Whereas with husbands, it's like, oh my gosh, you need some time off. This actually happened to one of my friends whose husband went away for the weekend after she had gone away for the weekend a few weekends before. And when she had gone away for the weekend, everyone was like, Oh, my gosh, who's going to help, you know, the husband? Who's going to help him with the kids? And then when he went away, nobody offered because, you know, she doesn't need help. She's the mother. And it's just, yeah, it's this crazy disparity. And we certainly saw it, you know, during the pandemic when mothers were the ones that had to straddle all realms, you know, help the kids at home, counsel them, they were the ones then that suffered professionally.

[9:46]Zibby Owens: I mean, I always think there's some evolutionary bias to things like this, that deep, deep, deep down, people know that, and I don't mean this to come off as gender ish or whatever else, but my only explanation is that because mothers are physically the people who, without us, there would be no species, there would be no people at all. Not that men are so disposable, but I don't know. I just feel like there must be some evolutionary

[10:15]Alena Dillon: pressure that we all don't articulate, which leads to this. I think you're right. I think women are trained biologically to tolerate suffering, you know, from the monthly period that starts in their adolescence and just enduring that discomfort once a month and that inconvenience once a month, every month of their life, that it just bleeds into other areas of their life that they have to then, they are equipped to endure suffering. So that struck me during pregnancy too, is like all of this stuff that we have to suffer. And like sometimes there isn't even justification for it. Like these studies that have been just kind of done so casually and not carefully, and they just decide, Okay, they can't have coffee, they can't drink. And just like this blanket decision that isn't even necessarily true or the whole truth or the most accurate truth, it's just easy to tell women, Okay, you can't do this, rather than really hunt down what exactly they should be withholding and denying themselves because we're just used to telling women that they should deny themselves pleasure. Well, meanwhile, you decide to be a mom.

[11:27]Zibby Owens: All of this aside, you go forward and then you have very entertaining, although I'm sorry for your experience when you were pregnant. And I just wanted to read one more thing. You said, I can't write. Characters need my help getting out of trouble, but the light of the computer is gross. Thinking is gross. This is what makes pregnancy nausea different from other sickness I've experienced. Even abstractions are repulsive. So true. I love that. It's incredible.

[11:55]Alena Dillon: It's incredible just how disgusting life becomes when you have morning sickness. Yes. It's like impossible to do anything. And yeah, I remember at one point literally like stopping on the street and just grabbing hold of a building, just being like, I don't think I can walk another step right now. I don't know how I'm going to get through this next period of my life if it's week eight or something and I'm already this nauseous. Yes. And yes, you have the whole journey ahead of you and you have no idea how long it's going to last, when it's going to get better. It's so daunting. It is so daunting. Although I was so grateful that I was actually pregnant. Anyway. Yes. Yes. Yes. But still, then I went right into the complaining. So as Yeah. I mean, the the reward is ultimately worthwhile, but it is such a hefty cost. And like, we just don't we don't talk about the cost. Right. Like, why can't it be both things that like Exactly. Yes. Our children are so worthwhile and we love them, but we pay this price. Like it's both things exist simultaneously.

[12:48]Zibby Owens: PS, you pay the price continually. Mean, have two 14 year olds and an eight year old and a six year old, and you know, it doesn't end. Like there's always stuff. And it doesn't mean I love my kids more than life itself, I will do anything for them, of course. I don't even need to say that. But it's hard.

[13:07]Alena Dillon: Yes. And it's this complexity of contradictions. It's like, Get out of the house. I miss you. Come back. It's like all this thing that you're wrestling. Today's

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[15:12]Alena Dillon: I wanted to raise a strong feminist and I'm still doing that. To, I guess, I wanted to redo my mistakes, you know, like make the girl that I could have been, but wasn't because I was too insecure or self conscious or, you know, and then, yeah, you just, but you can't decide who your kid is gonna be. Like all these identities just reveal themselves to you over and over again through their life. And that's part of the delight is seeing who they become

[15:42]Zibby Owens: apart from you. Yes. But yeah, I wanted a girl. I think that's one of the most important things I've ever learned about being a parent that I feel like if someone had told me, I wouldn't have necessarily believe them until I had four very different kids of my own, right? Like, yeah, yeah, every kid, you know, I just thought I had all this power and I could, like with what I did as a parent, that I was so responsible for who they became. But really, mean, you're just not. Like, you can only affect, I feel like, I don't know, you can damage them, but can you really like, I don't know. I just feel like it's so on the margins of who they are, what parents, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. No, you're right. That's what I was learning too. I thought that I would have much more influence, but yeah, like you're just there to love them. That's

[16:29]Alena Dillon: all you can do is love them and try to impart some values. But like, yeah, it's like part of the wonder is seeing what their passions are and their hobbies

[16:39]Zibby Owens: and how surprising they are because they can come completely outside from your home. They're just like of them. Yeah. My daughter the other day, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't even say this, but she literally was like, I feel like sewing. She's eight. And she's like, Could I just cut up? Could we go to some store and find fabric? And I was like, No, where do you even find fabric? So at first I was like Googling like where to find fabric in New York City. But anyway, finally I was like, Just take any of my scarves. I never even wear my scarves. Just like, take anything from this particular door or whatever. She's like, how about this blanket? And I was like, okay. Like, I don't even know where that blanket came from. Go ahead. Anyway, next thing I know, she comes back downstairs an hour later and has made the most adorable skirt. A line skirt fits her perfectly, sewed the whole thing herself. And I was like, Oh my God, where is this coming from? It

[17:30]Alena Dillon: was like one of the coolest moments I've had as a parent. Yeah, it was so cool. It is so cool. And like, she's taking pieces of you and creating something for herself. It was like the perfect metaphor of motherhood.

[17:40]Zibby Owens: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I'll just say, you never know what your kids are going to be up to and the skills they have, and that I could never do that in a million years. Like I have no, I just couldn't, but of course I couldn't because I'm not her. And I don't know, anyway, this is such a thing. And it is your joy to witness, right? And it is my joy to witness. All I can do is give her the fabric. Let's just keep this life war going. All I can provide is the fabric and the thread and let her turn it into a beautiful creation. There we go. Anyway, so tell me about writing this as you went through it, because it felt to me like you literally would like get to the end of the day and then just like write about it. Is that what happened? Yes, that's what I did because it was important.

[18:22]Alena Dillon: It seemed to me to to other mothers, like the pain and the discomfort got filed down and was replaced by just like the joy. It just kind of got buffed. And I wanted to preserve all of the stuff that was like the most accurate in case there were pregnant women who were reading it as they were pregnant and just wanted it to be charged with life as it was. So yeah, every stage I wrote in the present tense as I was living it. And then of course, went back and revised it a little bit and cleaned it up. But yeah, everything was alive in the moment, which was an interesting process because then when I had the whole thing, I could see how my voice was changed by the experience. So it was like this evolving narrator from the beginning to the end. So it was like the writing process, like the narrator was alive and changing. So it was literally a living document from beginning to end. So that seems to be a very satisfying experience for me as the writer, and then I hope for the reader too, just to kind of see how motherhood changes a person. How did, Tell me about the publishing journey of this book relative to your other books, like Happiest Girl in the World, which I know we already spoke about. Tell me about, like, how did this one come about? So this was a little different, and it was part of the reason then that I became so determined to get it published. I think with nonfiction, and you've probably found this too, like there's this kind of, it's almost harder to get published than novels. So I was initially a nonfiction writer. That's what my education was in. But I had a hard time getting published twelve years ago when I was writing non fiction because I kept hearing the same thing. You need an extraordinary experience or a strong platform, which means you need to be famous or have this harrowing thing that's going to get a hook. So I started writing novels. I had tried to get my nonfiction published for a long time, and then I was like, this is not working. Let me just write a novel. And so I turned to that for a while as if writing a novel is so easy and getting that was its own challenge. So then ten years later, have a few, you know, a few novels, but it wasn't that easy. But anyway, I went back to this because this was like the first non fiction project that caught like that demanded my interest again. And I, but I kind of heard the same thing again, which is like, experience was a little too ordinary, like nothing, you know, I had postpartum depression, but it wasn't like, you know, drive off a bridge postpartum depression. Like there was, it's a spectrum. But I thought, you know, it's essential that we publish these ordinary experiences because, you know, there's thousands, you know, everyone is experiencing this and we aren't talking about it. So I ended up reaching out to a couple small publishers and Woodhall Press was so thrilled with the project and has been so excited. And so we, I just had been going through them And Amy Schumer endorsed it because she's like been so I saw them. Yeah. She's optioned Mercy House, which is my debut novel. And, you know, she had been an advocate for difficult pregnancies and women's issues. And there's, you know, a lot of my book talks about maternal health and the same kind of cultural issues that she's interested in. So I figured I'd reach out and she's been so super supportive of my work and she came back very quickly with an endorsement. So yeah, that's been extremely validating and I'm really excited to get this out there. That's really awesome. And so what's next? I have a novel slated for next fall and is the My edits are due November 1. So I'm like in the heat of it. I think I'll make it now. There was a moment where I was like, Oh man, this is not going to happen. But yeah, I'm going get there. That one's about a woman Air Force service pilot and her daughter. It's a dual timeline. So we see the woman Air Force service pilot during World War II on the first woman to fly domestic planes. And then sixty years later, see her daughter finding out about this secret that her mother had kept. And the WASPs had been dismissed after World War II, even though that they thought that they were going to get military benefits and they didn't get any of that. They were just sent back to their houses. Some offered jobs as stewardesses, not pilots. So this character was kind of bitter about like the future that had been stolen from her. And so the book kind of looks at how bitterness can be bequeathed to your children and how that affects like the generation, the next generation. Generation. Inherited bitterness.

[22:34]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Add And it to the

[22:39]Alena Dillon: like the parallel of what women are still fighting for, all the lengths that we've gained, but what we still are trying to accomplish.

[22:48]Zibby Owens: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

[22:52]Alena Dillon: I feel like I only give like one piece of advice and I keep giving it. But my biggest piece of advice is to gather yourself a group of writers and to have these people in your life as a community. I am a person who really benefits from reader feedback. I have a hard time under, like after a project is through, see that it's not as strong as it could be, but I have a hard time pinpointing how to bolster it. So I really rely on other people helping me. It becomes like a big collaboration. Also, just because it's a hard journey, and all experiences are different. So it's nice to kind of compare notes, you know, my agent is doing this. Is that like a normal, you know, correspondence or because I had a couple, you know, I've had three agents now. So like now I have, I can compare like what to be expected, but like you're on your first, you're not sure like what the relationship is supposed to be like. So it's nice to have this community so you can have those kind of discussions. What's your publicist like? What's your editor like? What should we be expecting? And just have that transparency in that community. So there's a bunch of different ways to gather those people. Have a, for my MFA, that's where that came from, but there's so many resources, online communities and ways to meet people. Amazing.

[24:10]Zibby Owens: Awesome. Well, thank you for this. Thank you for taking me back through you know, I feel like I kind of blacked out all of my pregnancies. Like I can't, like they're like hidden in some recesses of my brain, but reading this was like, all of it came flooding back.

[24:27]Alena Dillon: For better or Thank you. Yeah. Don't know. Like there's a reason your body might erase those things. Yeah,

[24:32]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. All right. Well, anyway, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for discussing this book and thanks for sharing your experience to help other people. It's awesome. Yes, thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor. My pleasure. All right, have a great day. Thank you. Okay, bye bye.