Goldie Taylor, THE LOVE YOU SAVE: A Memoir
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
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[1:03]Goldie Taylor is the author of The Love You Save, a memoir.
[1:06]Goldie is a veteran journalist, cable news, political analyst, and human rights activist who
[1:11]has covered national politics and social justice issues for over 30 years.
[1:15]She has been featured on nearly every news network and talk show.
[1:19]And she has written for Salon Ebony the Grillo, the Huffington Post, the Atlantic Journal
[1:22]Constitution, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and most recently, as editor at large for
[1:27]the Daily Beast.
[1:29]Welcome Goldie.
[1:30]Thank you so much for coming.
[1:31]On mom's don't have time to read books to discuss The Love You Save, a memoir.
[1:35]Thank you so much, Zippy, for having me.
[1:37]This is terrific.
[1:38]Ah, well, it's such an honor to talk to you.
[1:40]And oh my gosh, your memoir was just so open and raw and vulnerable.
[1:45]And oh my gosh, it was beautiful.
[1:48]Really beautiful.
[1:49]Thank you.
[1:50]Thank you for that.
[1:51]It's been quite a road, as you can imagine, writing a memoir such as this.
[1:55]And then working through present date issues with family.
[1:58]Yeah.
[1:59]So it has been a little murky to navigate emotionally.
[2:03]Yeah.
[2:04]But I think all in all probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
[2:09]Wow.
[2:10]Take listeners through what this book is really about.
[2:14]But also I'm curious why, why, like why did you write it now?
[2:18]What made you ready to face all of the murkiness that you probably thought would lay ahead?
[2:24]And why share your story at all?
[2:25]You know, what I think is there comes a time everyone comes from some place.
[2:30]Everybody has a story.
[2:31]Everybody has a piece of brokenness somewhere if they lived long enough.
[2:35]Going back now for me was a time for me to become the witness for myself that I didn't
[2:41]have coming up.
[2:43]And so I didn't see a reflection of myself and family and the community surrounding me because
[2:49]all of these things, all of this trauma had happened in secret that it wasn't talked about
[2:55]that it wasn't dealt with and thus wasn't reflected back to me that something happened
[3:00]here and something very bad is wrong.
[3:03]I had to go back and be my own witness to be the grown-up that I would have wanted to
[3:08]have had when I was a kid and to tell the story from that perspective.
[3:14]Along the way, I have to tell you that there were pages when I just had to stop myself
[3:19]and take a breath.
[3:20]There were days when I simply could not get out of bed that I just wondered though just
[3:27]to keep going, right?
[3:29]And the more I went back, the more I remembered and was able to sort of set those bones into
[3:36]place.
[3:37]And by the time it was over by the time I finished that first draft for the publisher,
[3:41]I took a huge sigh of relief that it had been laid down really exactly as I experienced
[3:48]it.
[3:49]Oh my gosh, do you looking back on it now having gotten it all down and out?
[3:55]Do you look back with any sort of, I mean forgiveness is the wrong thing, there's nothing
[4:00]to forget, like compassion, that's right word.
[4:03]Do you feel like compassion and like a different view of your younger self now that you're
[4:10]a grown-up, essentially looking back and thinking about what does the change in perspective
[4:15]change the narrative for you at all or how you feel about it?
[4:19]I think it really does, you know, I say that when I was a little girl, I was just an angry
[4:24]child that you could smell the madness going off my belt, really.
[4:30]Going back now, seeing myself as an 11-year-old girl attacked my neighborhood and then
[4:37]rivet it as my an older cousin, the casual cruelty of my aunt Geraldine, the disconnection
[4:44]I felt with my mother and sister, you know how I sort of took refuge under my grandma
[4:50]Alice's skirt.
[4:51]When I look back at all of that now, I see and feel not only a level of compassion for
[4:57]myself and even, yeah, forgiveness for myself because I thought it was dirty, you know,
[5:02]I thought I was small and it's significant in matter to nobody.
[5:05]I thought at one point that I had belonged to nobody and to nothing and nowhere specifically.
[5:10]So heartbreaking to look up now and see and hear the traumas that my aunt and mother endured,
[5:21]older cousins endured to, you know, sort of understand really where they were coming from
[5:27]them.
[5:28]What I know now more than I think ever before is that my mother gave me every single thing
[5:33]she ever had to give and if she didn't give it, it's because she didn't have it to
[5:39]give.
[5:40]And so I have a severe level of compassion for the woman that she had to be, but also for
[5:48]that of my aunt who early on in this book doesn't come off very well, right?
[5:53]A very loving, but if you knew for the way that I did until she passed away just a couple
[5:59]of years ago, you know, that she was one who loved hard and that if you were hers,
[6:04]she would never let you go, never ever let you go and that she would spend the full of
[6:10]her days doing her darkness to keep you safe and from harm and for her and for the others
[6:16]and my family, it wasn't about teaching children how to thrive because that was never
[6:21]the question.
[6:22]The question was would they survive?
[6:25]And so these were people from the country who only believed in making sure their children
[6:30]lived to see the next day.
[6:33]It was that basic for them.
[6:35]And yet here you are today with this hugely amazing career and, you know, thriving is an
[6:42]understatement.
[6:44]And you came from like the most awful situations.
[6:48]There was this one passage and this may be sort of triggering in terms of sexual abuse,
[6:52]but if I could just read this one paragraph, by the summer of 1981, the warring in
[6:57]my head was near constant.
[6:59]I had sharp memories about the day I was raped and at times I awoke screaming in the
[7:04]dark.
[7:05]I was afraid to go outside, went days without bathing and rarely ate.
[7:09]My tangled, unwashed hair fell out in clumps.
[7:13]I don't remember crying or even talking much.
[7:16]I mostly kept it to myself.
[7:18]It was safer that way.
[7:19]I thought I was scared that somebody might touch me.
[7:23]Oh, it is heartbreaking.
[7:26]Goldie, my gosh.
[7:30]You know, we lived in a house full of people in my aunt's children's house.
[7:34]My aunt, my uncle, my grandmother, her children who were their teens by then, late teens
[7:39]by then, and all of these grandchildren of my aunt's and all of these cousins and such
[7:46]that there was there's a gap of people in this house.
[7:49]And so there's really no place to be alone.
[7:51]It was hard to go through a day.
[7:53]We just didn't brush up against somebody because the house was just so crowded.
[7:57]And so I took to books, my aunt had a stairwell that sort of went upways and cut to the
[8:03]left.
[8:04]Well, at that cut, there's a landing, it's covered in red plush carpet, right?
[8:08]She made a sweep in vacuum every day.
[8:11]I would grab a book and sit in that cut, sit in that landing, to get away from all the
[8:17]the other people in the house.
[8:19]And as long as I was there reading, my aunt let no one bother me.
[8:24]It was my own secret refuge, even though I could be seeing, you know, it was a private
[8:30]fence for myself.
[8:31]And so yeah, it was that was where I healed in the solace of that landing.
[8:38]But early on, I was afraid that they knew and that they blamed me and that I had
[8:47]done something terribly bad, something that would bring shame to our house, to my mother,
[8:54]to my uncle who reared me.
[8:56]I was so afraid of that shame that I didn't let anybody in on it, but didn't open up about
[9:04]anything to anybody.
[9:06]My aunt used to say that, you know, children ought to be seen and not heard.
[9:10]Well, that was exactly me.
[9:12]I did not want myself to be heard and fear of being judged even more.
[9:17]Well, I'm so sorry that you had this experience.
[9:23]I just, it's heartbreaking and the way you wrote about it.
[9:28]It's like we all were living through it on your shoulder as you went through it and it
[9:32]hurts.
[9:33]It like physically hurts the reader almost to go through it.
[9:36]A lot of this books are centered on this period of childhood for you.
[9:40]And yet we know what's happened, like the fast forward of life.
[9:45]But there wasn't a lot in between.
[9:47]So how did you go from, you know, as you said, 11-year-old girl, 16-year-old girl, everything
[9:53]they read about in the book to your career now and what do you do with all those feelings
[9:57]as you go through it?
[9:58]Like, how did, like, what happened?
[10:00]But give me the P.S., the whole thing, the P.S.
[10:03]There was a lot of stumbling, a lot of falling.
[10:06]There was a lot of what I call self torture,
[10:08]you torture yourself over the years for this.
[10:09]There was a lot of compartmentalizing and talking away.
[10:12]I did as my mother did.
[10:14]I tucked it in and I kept moving.
[10:16]You know, I raised my children.
[10:18]I got married and had children.
[10:20]I went back to college.
[10:22]I started a career as a journalist at the Atlanta
[10:24]Journal Constitution in Atlanta, making $7.50 an hour,
[10:28]25 hours a week was the cat, right?
[10:31]And so I started from the beginning just at my mother had.
[10:35]And I kept swinging.
[10:37]And there was one day though, when things just caught up with me.
[10:42]I had been on NBC News.
[10:44]I had been on, you know, good morning America.
[10:46]The today show, all things considered.
[10:49]The BBC, you name it, I had been on that show
[10:53]talking about social issues of nearly every strike.
[10:57]But one morning it all caught up with me.
[10:59]My own story stopped me in my tracks.
[11:02]And I had to write it down.
[11:03]I wrote the first essay for the Daily Beast back in 2019.
[11:08]And that essay became this memoir.
[11:11]I would say to anybody reading this book
[11:14]because I wanted to take you in the moment.
[11:16]So you can see, feel, smell, everything
[11:19]that I was experiencing.
[11:22]We know how this story ends.
[11:25]We know that I raised three amazing children.
[11:29]And three glorious grandchildren.
[11:32]We know that I not only survived, but I thrive.
[11:36]I want everybody to keep their eye on that true north.
[11:40]That no matter how bad it got from me,
[11:43]the cousins, my siblings, no matter how desperate things became,
[11:47]we all made it.
[11:49]And my aunt and my aunt lived to be a very old woman.
[11:53]My mother's going to live to be a very old woman
[11:55]that despite everything that they experienced,
[12:00]we all made it.
[12:02]Some of us less than whole, for sure.
[12:05]But I think an old friend told me everything
[12:08]may not be perfect again.
[12:11]But it will be all right if you let it.
[12:14]I decided to let it be OK.
[12:17]I love what you said that there's
[12:20]a difference between being whole and being perfect
[12:22]and just being OK.
[12:23]And sometimes that's the best we can do.
[12:25]And that's OK.
[12:26]And that's good.
[12:26]And I also loved what you said at the beginning
[12:29]about how we all come to life with all of our broken bits.
[12:32]And sometimes I look around.
[12:35]And I'm like, everybody walking down the street,
[12:37]everybody in this bus, or everybody in this airplane,
[12:39]or whatever, like if you just looked at the cracks
[12:43]of all the people, all the damage that's been done,
[12:45]it's amazing that we all can operate in this society.
[12:49]It's why things are falling apart the way they are.
[12:51]But I don't know.
[12:52]And we can still get on the bus the next day, right?
[12:55]It's amazing that we still wake up to take on these days.
[12:59]Oprah Winfrey said once, he courage doesn't always
[13:02]for sometimes that gentle voice in the morning that says,
[13:05]I will try again.
[13:07]Every morning is a new try again for me.
[13:11]And so I get to start over every day.
[13:16]And the thing is, there's somebody out there listening
[13:18]and somebody out there reading your book
[13:21]or listening to your audiobook or whatever.
[13:23]And they're hearing this and it's making all of the difference.
[13:26]It's going to make all the difference.
[13:27]That's exactly what we're hoping for when you know,
[13:29]Goldie, why write a book like this?
[13:32]Why talk about the dirty laundry?
[13:33]Why talk about the bad things?
[13:36]Because I want other people to know
[13:37]that there's an opportunity for them,
[13:40]that they're not alone, that they have safe harbor
[13:42]to be their own witness to tell their own story.
[13:46]And some of it may be still unfolding, right?
[13:49]But that these are not the things that we should be hiding from,
[13:52]but the wards and all that we should be embracing about ourselves.
[13:56]Perfection is in the imperfection.
[13:59]And so I am hoping that this book reaches young people,
[14:04]people on 55.
[14:06]So during 55, so I hope that it reaches another Goldie
[14:10]and says, you have another opportunity.
[14:14]And what about the part about the shame that you felt?
[14:18]Is there any way to just let people know
[14:22]that the shame is they don't need to feel the shame?
[14:25]Like that's so ill placed, you know,
[14:27]it might be an instinct to feel that way,
[14:29]but if they could just let go of that.
[14:31]Shame is taking some of the blame.
[14:34]Shame is taking culpability in your own victimization.
[14:38]And I just don't buy that, right?
[14:41]And for many years, especially in my early 20s,
[14:44]I was an incessant person, as showered incessantly,
[14:47]every day, more times a day.
[14:49]And I had no idea why, right?
[14:50]All I said, I'm just sweaty or I was trying to scrub off.
[14:56]The shame, scrub off what I thought was the guilt.
[15:00]But 55 year old me looks back and says,
[15:02]what wasn't a left in your girl really guilty of?
[15:06]Other than wanting to ride her bike to the park
[15:08]and show it off from her friends.
[15:10]And so, you know, there comes a time
[15:12]when I think as we mature and as we grow
[15:15]and that we sort of begin to look at these events
[15:18]and their appropriate perspective.
[15:20]And that's where the shame went for me.
[15:23]The shame for me went with,
[15:25]what were the 12 or 13-year-old girl really now
[15:29]about making choices,
[15:31]about how she should or shouldn't be treated,
[15:34]what would she really know about these things?
[15:36]And so, I gave myself the benefit of the doubt
[15:39]in my later years that I couldn't give myself early on.
[15:42]And then what was it like having kids at the same age
[15:45]when all this happened to you?
[15:47]You know, my daughter wrote her memoir,
[15:49]came out two weeks before mine,
[15:51]it's called The In-Between.
[15:53]She writes it at the same age as I have written mine,
[15:57]between the time she's around 13 years old.
[16:00]And what she catalogs without knowing what's in my book,
[16:03]what she catalogs is how trauma is passed down
[16:06]through generations.
[16:07]Yeah.
[16:07]What she catalogs is she had a mom just like mine
[16:11]who was fighting to survive copping, make it,
[16:14]who was reconciling herself,
[16:16]navigating her own rivers of grief,
[16:18]morning in shame,
[16:20]and that she too would begin to mourn and grieve her own.
[16:25]And as she was coming of age,
[16:28]maybe things could have been better.
[16:29]Maybe I could have kept a better house
[16:32]or had had a better boyfriend
[16:34]or a better job maybe.
[16:37]But she understands about me
[16:38]as I now understand about my mother.
[16:41]Every single thing I had, my children got every ounce of it.
[16:46]And so for her, it was the same kind of living
[16:51]and reliving, but we know what happens
[16:53]at the end of her story too.
[16:56]She goes to Brown University on a early admit, right?
[17:00]She becomes an educator and runs a charter school
[17:02]in San Francisco.
[17:03]We know how her story transforms.
[17:07]And so I think that's the glory
[17:09]in all of that of having raised
[17:11]to incredibly bright children who are all writers, by the way.
[17:14]but who all have a sense of self power.
[17:20]They're meeting this world, I say, on their own terms.
[17:23]But they have a genuine sense
[17:28]that they are in charge of their own destinies.
[17:32]And I hope that I've played a part in giving them that.
[17:36]Did they know the events that happened in the book?
[17:39]Had you talked to them about it?
[17:41]We hadn't discussed that.
[17:41]No, no.
[17:42]Oh my gosh, we've never discussed it.
[17:44]They had some inkling about our family matters
[17:48]because we were so distant in so many ways.
[17:51]We'd come for holidays, but we really didn't have
[17:54]that big of a relationship with family during that time.
[17:56]So they knew that we were a bit of an island
[17:59]and that we were different in some ways,
[18:02]but they had no idea about what had gone on
[18:06]in my aunt Geraldine's house.
[18:07]They had no idea that I hadn't been wholly raised by my mother
[18:11]that I'd love for my aunt, almost the majority of,
[18:14]my childhood.
[18:15]They didn't know that I'd been assaulted not once,
[18:17]but multiple times.
[18:18]They had no idea about that.
[18:20]What they did know is that I had a disconnection
[18:23]with our family that they just couldn't put
[18:25]their finger on exactly.
[18:27]And so today they all do.
[18:29]I had some very tough conversations with them
[18:33]before I wrote the book.
[18:35]After I wrote the first essay, I let them read it.
[18:38]And then they said, you know,
[18:39]you have to publish this, don't you?
[18:41]I said, sure, I do.
[18:44]I tell her conversations have come with my mom
[18:46]who now has a brand new ration of guilt.
[18:49]And, you know, just last evening,
[18:51]they had another conversation with her
[18:53]and with my older daughter to say,
[18:55]you aren't culpable here that you did the things,
[19:00]made the choices, you knew, you knew needed to be made
[19:04]to keep your daughter as safe as possible.
[19:07]And so sure, there were some tough conversations
[19:10]but my children, they had no idea.
[19:15]Wow.
[19:17]That must have changed the dynamic
[19:18]between all of you, been to imagine opening up.
[19:22]I mean, if my mother were to all of a sudden tell me all of this.
[19:25]I don't know, it would just change everything.
[19:26]I feel like it would just, I don't know.
[19:29]It changes your whole relationship
[19:30]when you get to know someone in a new way.
[19:33]Obviously, but the transparency,
[19:34]greed's even greater intimacy.
[19:37]Yes, my children and I are.
[19:40]We're best friends, all of us.
[19:43]And so I think that became exceedingly helpful
[19:46]as you begin to unspool a story like this.
[19:49]But the transparency, the authenticity,
[19:51]I've always been known for that.
[19:53]I've always been known to say the ugly thing out loud.
[19:57]So when I decided, yeah, we're gonna write this.
[20:00]my children will not surprise me more surprised it all. Interesting. So now that you wrote it
[20:06]and it's out there and everything I feel like this must have been something that had been weighing
[20:11]on you for a long time to like get it out. How do you feel now that it's out there? And like
[20:17]where do you go from here? Do you write more books like do you want to share more stories? I mean
[20:22]there's so much you didn't cover in this book. You could really add some more installments.
[20:27]There there is more. My publisher and I sort of haggled over how much to tell now or what you
[20:33]should be told will be in another volume. I think my next story probably is surrounding myself and
[20:41]my kids and how we began to navigate the world together. I'm now raising my nine-year-old granddaughter.
[20:49]The circumstances behind why I am five and raise it a nine-year-old. That's another story to tell.
[20:56]But it will have to wait. It will have to wait until she is of an age where she can decide that
[21:02]she'd like the world to know her story. And so it will wait just a little while in between now
[21:08]and then maybe I'll write a little more fiction. Nice. Amazing. What advice do you have for aspiring
[21:17]memoirists in particular who are wrestling with the story trying to find a way to tell it maybe it's
[21:22]hard. Maybe it's just that what what's your advice? There are good drafts and there are no drafts.
[21:31]Write it down in pieces if you have to in through the hours of the night if you must in notebooks.
[21:38]I wrote part of this book on subways on the notes and my cell phone. And so write it in
[21:44]snatches if you must. Take time for yourself. Give yourself space. Forgive yourself as you go
[21:49]along when you stumble upon a piece of hurt that you know you might feel overwhelming.
[21:55]Well your story just might be a joyful one. Write that one too. And you may decide that
[22:01]no it's a story you don't the world the world really know. But you've been your own witness
[22:06]in the end. And so what I'd say is write when you can get the draft down and put your full
[22:14]cell phone the page. Let yourself fly apart. When you start to edit. When you start to you know
[22:21]constrain your story your voice. The readers will catch on to that pretty quickly. And I think
[22:27]they gravitate when they know that you've been vulnerable on that page. Let yourself fly apart.
[22:34]That is awesome. That is wonderful advice so inspiring. Goldie thank you so much. This has been
[22:40]so nice and was just as sort of deep and intimate as the book as experience of reading the book.
[22:46]So thank you. Thank you so much. You're very welcome and I can't wait to get to zibby's books.
[22:52]I'm excited for you. I'm so excited for you. Like what a dream come true. I know I can't wait.
[22:58]I can't wait. Thank you. Please come visit. Absolutely. Okay. All right. But I have a great day.
[23:06]Thank you so much. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't have time to read
[23:12]books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read
[23:17]books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet
[23:22]lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for
[23:27]the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[23:32]now trim music.