Erika Schickel, THE BIG HURT: A Memoir
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[0:40]Erica Schickel is the author of The Big Hurt, a memoir,
[0:44]and you're not the boss of me.
[0:45]Her essays and journalism have been featured in The Los Angeles Times,
[0:48]Tinhouse, Ravishly, Bust Magazine, Salon,
[0:51]and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.
[0:54]She lives in Los Angeles.
[0:55]Welcome, Erica.
[0:56]Thanks so much for coming.
[0:57]On Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Big Hurt, a memoir.
[1:01]Thanks for having me, Sivi.
[1:02]I'm really excited to be here.
[1:04]I love this show.
[1:05]Oh, thank you.
[1:07]So in this book, I want you to tell listeners what it's about,
[1:11]and sort of what made you decide to write this memoir.
[1:13]But in the memoir, there's a character writing a book called The Big Hurt.
[1:17]And so is it really okay for you to call this book The Big Hurt, too?
[1:21]That needs a little explaining.
[1:24]To answer your first question, I wrote this book because I absolutely had to
[1:29]in order to understand and save my own life.
[1:32]I mean, just at a very sort of visceral level, you know.
[1:36]And I started writing it about in 2008 after my first book,
[1:42]which was a funny memoir called You're Not the Boss of Me,
[1:45]Adventures of a Modern Mom, that came out.
[1:48]And it was time to write my second book.
[1:50]And what am I going to write about?
[1:51]Oh, I'll write about my very colorful, fun, zany bohemian boarding school.
[1:58]And as I began to look at that story, where I did have an amazing growth experience
[2:04]from 1978 to 82.
[2:06]I was sent there, had an amazing time and then six weeks before graduation.
[2:11]I was seduced by a music teacher there.
[2:15]And the school found out and he was fired and I was effectively expelled from the school.
[2:21]So I started, I wanted to write just sort of a funny boarding school memoir and suddenly
[2:29]this story bit back at me because I had been ignoring it for all of my adult life until that point.
[2:37]Wow. And so tell me what happened from 2008 to now?
[2:42]Yes. Well, so I started writing the book and we will recall that around 2008 and nine
[2:50]Facebook came into full flower and it was a time where people were finding each other
[2:56]who had been lost to each other over years and decades. And one of the people I reconnected with
[3:03]was my best friend from high school, a man named CJ Dalit, who was the only person who had
[3:10]known about the affair. So he comes back to me and tells me his version of the story, a version
[3:18]in which I had been abused by the school, by this teacher and that a traumatic event had happened to me.
[3:25]So suddenly the scales have fallen from my eyes and rather than actually do the work of
[3:34]confronting this incredibly painful story and a past that was too big and deep and scary to fully
[3:41]parse, I thought it would be easier to have a love affair with the notorious crime writer
[3:49]who I had met and sort of had been holding in the back of my mind for a couple of years,
[3:54]a man that I had sort of, I had made him sort of the locus of my lost eroticism,
[4:01]my sense of myself as a bad girl, which is sort of this burden I've been carrying my whole life.
[4:08]And this affair blew up the marriage. I was married. I had two kids and it just turned my life
[4:16]upside down and as I became more involved with this man, I began to realize that what I was doing
[4:22]was repeating the story from high school with him. I was reenacting it. I'd found another inappropriate
[4:29]older pedagogic man to take over my life. And so that forced the book into an even deeper level
[4:40]of inquiry and trying to sort of trace the patterns of my experience and then also sort of connect
[4:47]them to larger patterns in my family, in the culture I was raised in, and in the history of our
[4:55]culture at large at that time in sort of late 70s, early 80s, which was a very predatory time.
[5:02]Well, the way that you wrote about how this affair began and the transition from it being an
[5:08]inkling in your mind to being something on which you acted was so well written and the way
[5:14]the way you used metaphors and like all of this, the writing itself was so powerful and it was
[5:23]just amazing. So I was hoping I could just read maybe a line or two if that's okay with you. Please
[5:27]thank you. I love it. Let's see. Well, this was funny too. Okay. Well, we held the vertical line like
[5:33]the good wasps we were, but the horizontal beckoned slowly and inevitably the boundaries began to
[5:39]crumble. We wondered whether it wouldn't be more comfortable to work in the living room side by side
[5:43]on the sofa. After a few days of this, we discussed the pros and cons of lying down next to each
[5:47]other on the sofa so that we might rest. We needed to know what it felt like to lie next to each other.
[5:52]And after all, it was just a sofa, not a bed. In our cockamabey construction, it seemed acceptable.
[5:56]And so it came to pass in the late summer afternoon, but I first lay my head down on Sam's
[6:00]Bates chest and felt I had finally found home. I love that, but it's not even the most beautiful.
[6:05]Hold on. There was this one analogy you had that I have to find. Hold on. Give me two seconds.
[6:11]A writer will always wait to hear her work read back. I will find it in a second, but it was
[6:18]basically about that feeling of the person like winking at you and feeling like you could ignore
[6:27]this person sort of like tapping on your shoulder, but ultimately you had to succumb. Do you know
[6:31]what I'm talking about? Yes, I do. I will find it. I think you're referring to a passage where I first
[6:37]the character I call Sam Spade in the book, who's the lover in the book. And when I met him,
[6:43]it was as though I think I write something winked on inside of me, like that sort of inner
[6:50]girl that I had once been that I had been running away from for 30 years. She sort of woke up
[6:57]and smelled her prey, you know, tossed her hair for him, you know, that's exactly right.
[7:05]Yeah. And that was very much what the experience was like. I had held a version of myself
[7:11]at arm's length. And what I needed to do was go back and I needed to confront that girl.
[7:18]And when I did, I found out that not only was she, yes, naughty, rebellious, sensual,
[7:25]you know, all of these things that, you know, teenage girls just get to be, are automatically are,
[7:32]but she was also a hurt girl, you know. And that was the piece of it that I had never understood.
[7:38]And when I saw that hurt, it was like falling down a well. I became incredibly sad that for
[7:47]a period of years, as I sort of wrestled with the betrayal of my family, of the school I had
[7:56]gone to, you know, every adult who had been in charge of me had had betrayed me essentially.
[8:04]And that's trauma, you know. I had to understand my own trauma. And it does so much of this
[8:11]book is about that. I mean, and one of the conflicts or the tensions in the book is that I don't
[8:17]want to be traumatized, you know. I don't ever, I never saw myself as a victim of anything. My
[8:23]identity is very wrapped up in my self sufficiency, of course, because I was raised by narcissists.
[8:29]So, you know, I'm very, I don't want anyone to help me, you know, I can do this. And I really
[8:36]had to let that go and fall into the sadness inside of the hurt, you know, in order to process it
[8:43]and write about it. Well, that passage, I do have, oh, please, that one, I can't find. You said,
[8:50]the problem was the story wasn't funny. This is about how you were starting to write that other
[8:53]book. And the more I rummage through the memories I had put away three decades ago, the
[8:57]Saturn became. This wasn't the story of a rebellious bad girl. This was the story of an abandoned
[9:02]child. Worse, the climax, my expulsion from boarding school, which I had imagined writing as a
[9:06]kind of sex capade gone awry was neither fun nor romantic. I was 44 years old. I had two daughters
[9:12]nearing the age I had been. My family got rid of me. The idea of abandoning either of them in
[9:17]any way was revulsive and unimaginable to me. What if every decision I had made since 1982
[9:23]was built on the faulty premise that I was a bad girl. What if all along I had just been a very
[9:28]hurt girl trying to survive in a predatory world? My story wasn't comedy. It was tragedy. The
[9:33]minute I understood that, I stopped writing. Yeah. Yeah, it was hard. It was, you know, I mean,
[9:42]one of the things that I, you know, I grapple with and telling the story and then talking about it,
[9:47]you know, I mean, the trauma piece is huge. And, you know, one of the things that's coming up is
[9:52]sort of the ubiquity of it, of how we sort of carry it around with us and how it can happen,
[9:59]you know, in.
[10:00]Inside of very privileged lives, which is a life, the life that I had and that I'm describing describing in the book, you know,
[10:08]I grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of a well-known film critic, Richard Shickle, and a novelist, my mother, Jill Whedon.
[10:17]It was, I went to the best schools, I was sent to the best camps, I was given a beautiful education,
[10:24]but I was emotionally abandoned by my parents. And so, you know, sort of teasing that piece of it out in the book,
[10:35]and then putting it back into context is really kind of what I'm trying to do here, you know.
[10:41]This is not special to me. You know, this is something that people can experience anywhere.
[10:47]And can you talk a little more about how you are abandoned by your mother at age 14 and like what that looked like to you?
[10:54]Well, yeah, I can. I mean, what it looked like was her basically, you know, my parents had an ugly divorce when I was about 12.
[11:04]So by the time I reached puberty, you know, I was acting out. And my mother, because I was doing a little shoplifting and lying and sneaking around as unsupervised girls will do.
[11:17]in the 70s. My mother decided that I was a danger to her, that that was something about me that was threatening to her.
[11:26]Now I understand that that is her own trauma, and that she was actually handing down to me a hurt that had been engendered in her by her parents.
[11:37]And that what I have come to understand that what I was suffering from was epigenetic trauma. I mean, you know, and I actually am able to illustrate that in the book.
[11:48]I'm a third generation of women in my family to sleep with a teacher. So, you know, that's that's when I understood, you know, that my mother no longer on my side.
[11:59]And then they, I got sent away to London to be an au pair when I was 14 and I did some shoplifting in London subconsciously to get myself sent home. It worked.
[12:11]I was sent back to the States and instead of being brought back into the bosom of my family and going back to the Dalton school in the fall, which is where I had been going.
[12:20]I was told that I was going to be sent off to boarding school. And that's how I ended up at Boston at the board of school, 70th of fall of 78.
[12:31]And then the boarding school story is one of me, keep trying to go home over the summers and over breaks and stuff. My, you know, the time in the culture was one of people becoming adults suddenly were given the car keys to their own lives, you know, my parents were raised in the 50s.
[12:50]And or actually in the 40s and the 50s. And suddenly, here was the sexual revolution and everybody was, you know, wanting to get a piece of that action, including both of my parents. My father went out and swung like big time and my mother ended up falling in love and moving in with my best friend's father.
[13:13]So everything was just insane at that time, you know, and kids got lost. And, you know, one of the things this book, the big hurt is done is really connected to that sort of vein that was happening in gen for gen actors.
[13:28]And I guess really what I am is generation Jones, which is sort of that that generation between the boomers and gen X, you know, 60, I think it's like, you know, it ends at 65.
[13:43]So I'm pretty much in the pocket for that. Wow. You had an amazing, by the way chapter title about the sort of three generations of teachers.
[13:53]I was reading it. I'm like, this is definitely not what I'm going to listen to in the car with my kids because of all the pictures, which is fine. And it served the story very well.
[14:01]and I'm trying to find this section. It's called a brief family history of teacher blankers.
[14:07]I'm just going to believe don't ask words in this book. You don't miss words. But, you know what, like the rawness of your story sort of comes through. I mean, there's a lot of like anger underlying a lot of this right. It's all coming out right.
[14:22]It's not like such a sadness, you know, madness. Yeah. I mean, I, and, and, you know, remember that while I'm having these revelations about the truth of what happened to me and my generation in that period of time, I simultaneously have two children who are the ages I was when all this stuff happened.
[14:47]It's sort of that, you know, and I think a lot of us have this experience as parents as mothers where suddenly we see our parents with our children.
[14:58]And we get like this weird, you know, window seat into kind of like sort of low level abuse or the ways our parents talk to us or dismiss us.
[15:12]I mean, it was very, a very intense time figuring all this stuff out. And yeah, I was angry about it for sure.
[15:20]There was that one scene where you saw your mother with your daughter, I think, and yeah, your tackles went up and yeah, my mother was terrible with my kids. I mean, my kids loved her because they're such dear people.
[15:34]I mean, yeah, my mother was very dismissive with them and sometimes a little bit physically abusive with them. And it was horrifying to see. Yeah, sorry.
[15:45]So are you glad you've gone through this whole, I mean, you say it saved your life, but it sounds like it was very painful and the process of doing it. Are you glad you even went down this path.
[15:54]Are you like you're grateful or you regret super grateful.
[15:58]So, so grateful, you know, it's funny, I, you know, I finished writing this book over a year ago, you know, edits and so forth for publication.
[16:06]And in the time since I finished writing the book, I've been, I've read the vessel vendor cult book, the trauma, the body keeps the score about trauma.
[16:16]I was just listening to an interview with him on with Krista Tippett and he was talking about how trauma is is healed by these sort of non direct approaches and, and he's talking, he was talking about yoga.
[16:33]The trauma victims need to like anchor themselves in their bodies. And I sort of fell into a very intense yoga practice at the same time I was dealing with this and I didn't put it together until like yesterday.
[16:48]I began experimenting or working with psychedelics and I, there's a piece in the book where I have where I drink ayahuasca and I go back and I actually visit my mother, my father, sand spayed and myself, all as small children and I, and I opened my heart up to them and to myself to a degree that was deeply profound and changed me.
[17:17]And then finally, the act of writing telling the story and you know it took me 12 years to write this because I had to understand it in order to write it, live through it in order to write it.
[17:31]But that is profoundly healing and one of the messages I've come away with is like people need to write about themselves and to find and to reparent themselves by retelling their stories taking their stories back from the people who told them who they were when they were kids.
[17:50]And look at what that, what was really going on and what people, what stakes people had in that and say, you know what I'm now going to tell my own story, even if it's just to yourself in your own private diary it's a really helpful important thing to do.
[18:09]You also in the book talk a lot about you're having an affair with an author, you're an author yourself, you just come out and you track sort of the literary community and some of the inside stuff that happens among different writers and different scenarios.
[18:29]Do you think relationships between two authors have like a certain you know color tends to them because of the introspection or anything or I don't know what do you think about having a relationship sort of in the context of the greater literary scene or at least as it was at the time.
[18:46]Well, I mean it's at the time, at first of all, my literary career suffered terribly because of this affair, you know, there is so much misogyny and literary culture it's kind of staggering.
[19:01]And because this man was a famous novelist and you know I was sort of labeled as a coattail writer and all of that, and I will not deny that there there was something in his in his literary being presentation that was very compelling to me because it was an edible bond.
[19:23]Let's not forget my father was a famous prolific first draft writer so you know while people thought maybe I was trying to you know level up my career by being with this man actually I was being just deeply edible as both of us were his mother had been famously murdered raped and murdered when he was 10 years old.
[19:45]And he was looking for the pale skinned redheaded woman to replace her and you know that little section you read Zibi about me lying down and putting my head on his chest.
[20:00]It's kind of ground zero for that relationship
[20:03]because it was a trauma bond.
[20:07]And it was so much bigger and deeper
[20:09]than any kind of like literary ambition.
[20:14]You know, if it had just been that,
[20:16]I might have gotten out of it sooner,
[20:20]but you know, it was a really deeply,
[20:23]emotionally compelling relationship.
[20:25]No, no, I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't.
[20:29]You can tell that from, you know, from the outset.
[20:31]I mean, even just the way he, from his first sort of response
[20:36]to you and you reached out to him and writing
[20:39]and the, you know, he's the sky.
[20:41]It's like, whew, you know, it's intense.
[20:43]I mean, the whole thing, it's like very intense
[20:45]and I can't imagine it must have been,
[20:47]it would have been very hard for anybody to, you know,
[20:51]resist some of that stuff.
[20:53]So it was impossible.
[20:55]But here's the thing that was interesting about it.
[20:57]And it was sort of an ongoing thing in our relationship.
[21:00]He was, he was a sort of had this identity as being a conjurer.
[21:05]He was a man who would lie in the dark
[21:08]and think about women and wait for the phone to her.
[21:11]You know, he was the famous Lothario.
[21:13]I mean, you know, and in this case, I conjured him.
[21:18]I had met him and I understood that he,
[21:22]that there was a connection between us.
[21:24]I sensed it first.
[21:25]I thought about him for two years.
[21:28]And then I conjured him.
[21:29]I friended him on Facebook.
[21:32]You know, I mean, it wasn't a, you know,
[21:34]this bad man took advantage of me kind of a story at all.
[21:38]Although, you know, he was sort of a bad man.
[21:41]And the entity didn't in many ways, they could manage of me.
[21:43]But it was mutually assured destruction.
[21:47]It was, we both had a deep agenda
[21:50]that we weren't even that aware of
[21:53]that was sort of compelling us through the relationship.
[21:55]No, you did a really good job of showing that, right?
[21:58]Like, you wanted to click the button to start
[22:01]whatever on Facebook and then put it outside
[22:03]and be a beautiful garden or whatever and put it around.
[22:06]And you're like, and then I hit the button.
[22:08]And they're like, okay, now it's getting good.
[22:12]Well, that's gonna happen next.
[22:13]Wow. Well, first of all, it's one thing
[22:15]to have the kind of introspection
[22:17]and the level of self analysis that you possess,
[22:20]which is really like notable and amazing.
[22:24]But it's another to put it out there
[22:25]for everyone in the world to join you
[22:27]in that process.
[22:30]And also to have the real characters of your life exist.
[22:33]So how has that been since this book has come out?
[22:36]Mostly it has been good, you know,
[22:38]in terms of writing around things about real people,
[22:41]you know, there are some real names in there,
[22:43]but mostly those are people who are either dead
[22:46]or have given me permission and read the pages.
[22:49]There's been some backlash in my personal life
[22:54]from former friends who betrayed me even further
[22:58]as regards the book, a man who works in the literary world
[23:03]who betrayed a trust.
[23:05]Anyway, there's been some bad stuff.
[23:06]But mostly, you know, it's been really, really positive
[23:12]and, you know, as to the question of like,
[23:15]how did I put all of that truth onto the page
[23:19]I've always just been that person, you know.
[23:22]I've always believed in the truth,
[23:24]in the power of the truth.
[23:26]And I even say in the book, you know,
[23:30]and it's a childish belief, I think, on some level
[23:33]that I keep hanging onto that the application,
[23:36]the conscious application of love and truth
[23:41]can solve any problem between people.
[23:45]It may not actually be true,
[23:47]but I still cling to it.
[23:48]And that's the spirit in which I wrote the book.
[23:51]I just, I needed to tell the story.
[23:53]I understood it was a story that was bigger than me than
[23:58]and I needed to, I had to bring,
[24:01]I believe everything on the page if it was gonna work.
[24:04]Wow.
[24:05]Well, the end result was fantastic
[24:07]and so immersive and, I mean, wow.
[24:10]So thank you for taking me on your journey
[24:13]the ups and the downs and it's intense and amazing.
[24:16]And thank you for putting it out there
[24:18]and not keeping it to yourself.
[24:19]I mean, it's gonna help a lot of people
[24:21]and raise awareness about lots of things
[24:24]and particularly the role of the role we play
[24:28]when things happen, right?
[24:29]Like, is it like, is it a part of me?
[24:32]Did I cause this or anyway?
[24:34]Yeah.
[24:35]I'm really interested in that question, you know?
[24:38]And the answer is yes, but we are acting on things
[24:44]that we don't even understand.
[24:46]Yeah.
[24:47]And I also just wanna say for your listeners too,
[24:50]you know, I mean, this is a big, heavy book
[24:52]and it's full of truth and it's full of uncomfortable things.
[24:56]But it's also a very, it's a funny book.
[24:59]It has, it's got a good plot.
[25:03]It's a page turner, you know?
[25:05]It came out sort of with the voice I wanted
[25:09]to have out in the world.
[25:11]I wanted it to be a good read, you know?
[25:14]And luckily, not so luckily,
[25:16]I was given plenty of material to make it a good read.
[25:20]So, yeah.
[25:21]Yes.
[25:22]Yes, absolutely.
[25:24]I hope I didn't paint this as too dark.
[25:26]No, no, no, not at all.
[25:27]Okay.
[25:28]So what now?
[25:29]What are you gonna do with your life?
[25:31]No, God, that's the question Zibi.
[25:33]I mean, you know, I'm actually really sorry.
[25:37]I'm wondering myself.
[25:39]No, no, I mean, I'm a little bit suffering
[25:42]from a combination of having given birth
[25:45]to the big book of my life
[25:48]and having survived a pandemic.
[25:51]And I, you know, the literary world has changed,
[25:55]but larger world has changed.
[25:58]I have an understanding of like what my gifts
[26:01]and my message is.
[26:03]And I right now, I mean, I'm gonna keep writing, of course.
[26:06]I mean, I've begun another book,
[26:08]but I'm really trying to figure out
[26:11]where I can have the most impact
[26:13]and it was the rest of my good life ahead of me.
[26:17]You know, I'm in my 50s and, you know,
[26:20]people in our 50s, we'd like to say,
[26:22]we've got 20 good years left in there.
[26:24]And I wanna really, I really wanna use them
[26:27]to the best to get other people
[26:30]to open up to their own healing, you know,
[26:33]and self-love and understanding.
[26:36]Wow.
[26:36]There's no lack of work in that arena.
[26:38]That's for sure, unfortunately.
[26:40]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[26:43]My advice to aspiring authors, you know,
[26:45]everybody always says, just sit down and write,
[26:48]and that's always the good first piece of advice
[26:50]and sometimes the hardest for us to take
[26:53]on a moment moment basis.
[26:55]But in terms of writing, you know, memoir
[26:58]or writing a per telling your story,
[27:00]I urge people to look at the story
[27:03]and write just write down the first version
[27:06]and then look at it again and go,
[27:08]I need more detail here and then look at it again and go,
[27:12]okay, that story is about that,
[27:15]but what is it really about?
[27:16]What am I really trying to get at here
[27:19]and just going digging deeper and deeper and deeper
[27:23]and that takes many versions, you know,
[27:26]I wrote and rewrote this book many times
[27:29]to get it where it is.
[27:30]And that's because, not because I didn't write it well,
[27:34]the first time it's just that I needed to go deeper
[27:36]and learn more.
[27:38]It's great advice, excellent.
[27:40]Erica, thank you.
[27:41]Thanks so much for chatting today.
[27:43]And yeah, I hope you stay in touch
[27:45]and I'll be following along to see what you decide to do.
[27:47]Me too, Zivi, congratulations on all your success
[27:51]and thanks so much for having me on.
[27:53]Thank you, thanks for coming.
[27:55]Thank you.
[27:55]Bye bye.
[27:57]Thanks for listening to this episode
[27:59]of moms don't have time to read books.
[28:01]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram
[28:03]at Zivi Owens and at moms don't have time to read books.
[28:06]Also sign up for my newsletter at ziviowens.com
[28:08]and sign up for my virtual book club
[28:10]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[28:13]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[28:14]that texture sound for the sound editing.
[28:16]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[28:18]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.