Making Relationships Work (or Not) with Maggie Smith 59:27

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on! It's on!

Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is The Coronation with 100% Less Queen Elizabeth. Oh.

Just kidding. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. I do miss her. And I'm Naeem Arraza. How improper to make dead queen jokes, Kara. Yeah, it's time. It's time. It's time to make dead queen jokes. You're so British, and you're not British. I love the Brits. Unfortunately, I didn't get invited. There are fewer than 3,000 guests attending in the audience. Amongst those who RSVP'd yes at the time we're taping this, Prince Harry. But his wife, Meghan, is not attending. Prince Harry is not attending.

Do we care? No, we do not. We do not care. We do not care. We did our British show when we were in London, and that's that. That's it? The British quota has been met.

Everyone's so fascinated by that marriage of Meghan and Harry besides us and by public marriages in general. They are. I'm not as fascinated by marriages, but I always am fascinated when there's a divorce. Recently, I learned Kevin Costner got divorced. And I'm like, I didn't even know he was married, but I want to know now why he got divorced, which is none of my business. Yeah, that's been a big thing. It's either the marriages and romance of like gossip things and they go through that and then it's the disaster of the divorce. Yeah, people are fascinated by the breakup. Yes, the breakup. The breakup.

And it's relevant to our topic today because we have a guest, Maggie Smith, the poet, who has opened up her own life through a new book that we'll get to shortly. But what do you think? You've been married. And divorced. And divorced and married again. What do you think makes marriage successful? I have no idea. I can't say I'm particularly good at it. Obviously not the first time. You know, I think I don't give people marriage advice. I do give them divorce advice. If you're not happy or unhappy, usually it's not happy. There's a very big difference.

you should do something about it because life is short. And, you know, you try your hardest to behave correctly and to do the right thing. You don't always succeed at that. I've had a pretty good relationship with my ex-wife. Sometimes not. Sometimes... You guys have a great... I mean, I've been in your homes for dinners with... I'm like, lesbians are so evolved. Yeah, we do. You know, we try really hard. We don't agree on everything. Your mother stays at her house. Yes, yes, it's true. We do a lot of stuff. But, you know, gay people just started to be able to get married. Now we get to be divorced. But marriage is hard and especially...

after children. It's hard. It's hard to do. I think seeing how hard marriage is and seeing marriages collapse, for single people or for people who are not yet married, even if you're in a relationship, the question is, well, should I marry this person? How do you know when? And I just did a piece with Esther Perel on this. How do you know when to lock it in? It puts such a high bar on that decision. Well,

Do you have advice on that? Yes. No. Well, you basically break up with people all the time. That's my impression. I do. I'm into the breakup. But you do the breakup, which is really an interesting development. Why? I don't know. It just is. A lot of women don't break up as much as you do. You're like, no, I don't like him. I don't like him. You know, there was a really good Saturday Night Live called, it was an app called Settler. This is dating for people who want to settle, finally want to settle. It was really funny. It was like a little too on the nose.

I went on a blind date with Amanda, set up by Candy Fight, Lydia Polgreen's wife. And she was fantastic. She's responsible for these children now, I guess. Yeah, within a year, you guys were... Yes. Well, she said, I have two people to set you up with, and I had not been single my whole life. And I had just broken up with someone, and I'm like, I'm going to be single a year. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to finally, like, literally since seventh grade. And so...

I said, all right, I'll go out on this date. And she said she had two people. And Amanda was the first one. And who was the second? I'm not going to say, but it's great. I know who the second is, so I want you to tell. No, I'm not going to. Someone great. And we met and that was that. That was that. I just knew she was just, she made me laugh, I guess. She's funny, smart.

beautiful. She just made me laugh. I think that's the most important thing to me. And you don't know why. And I really literally wanted to be single. I had this single lady house in D.C. I was like, ooh, I'm single lady. Sorry, nobody has a single lady house in D.C., Kara. No, it was like a bachelor lady house. It was a lovely little house. For me, it was like, I'm single and I'm ready to mingle, I guess. You make it sound like a bachelor pub. It was a hot tub in the middle.

There was a hot tub. There was a hot tub. There was a hot tub. Louie's hot tub. Louie's hot tub. But, you know, it's harder, especially when you have kids, to introduce, you know, someone new and stuff like that. My kids were older at that point, so I didn't really want to take all their opinions into account. But it worked out really well.

I don't think as much as you do. I just go. I don't think. I just break up. You just really do. Thoughtlessly break up. Yeah. That's me. I don't know if you're thoughtless about it. No, I'm not thoughtless about it. I just think you don't need to be married. I can see why you wouldn't. I could see why you wouldn't. I think when you have kids, I do think...

It's easier when you are not a single mom. I think there are wonderful single moms. Scott's, for example, been raised by a single mom. But I think the level of difficulty is high. Yes, very high. Well, our guest today has been very open about her marriage. And she shot to fame for her 2016 poem, Good Bones. Great poem, by the way. Great poem, yeah. And you're a big fan. The poem became what Slate called a, quote, mantra of hope in hard times. Yes.

So do you mind to just read a bit of the poem so people know what we're talking about? I'm going to read the whole poem because she writes short poems. And she talks about this in the book and in the interview. She writes very short. Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short. I've shortened mine in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I'll keep from my children.

The world is at least 50% terrible, and that's conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird, there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short, and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor walking you through a real shithole chirps on about good bones.

This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. This is a great poem.

This says a lot about the times we're in, too, and about children, the difficulty of saying difficult things to kids. And keeping the world bright for them. Right. And at the same time, knowing it's not, and you have to teach them that it's also not. You know, you have those discussions with your kids when you're older. Anyway, this poem went completely viral. Completely viral. Meryl Streep read it at Lincoln Center. Yeah. But you read it at the end of our episode with Sam Altman just months ago, and we were talking about the hard times of AI and hoping.

a time of AI. She's a beautiful prose writer, too. And you can see that by the poetry. She's very easy to read, but also complex and really gets the heart of things. And she really exposed herself in this book, a marriage that went

wrong in lots of ways. Because the poem, ironically, which made her successful... I don't think the poem was to blame, but... The poem's fault. Part of me thinks she was a successful poet and he was not. But the poem changed the balance of her relationship because she went from being a

a person who had kind of pulled back from work and was freelancing to raise children, to all of a sudden, you know, having a lot of interest in her. Right. And wanting to work more and having the opportunity, book deals, et cetera. And that changed the configuration of her marriage. Sure. There was infidelity. Her husband cheated on her, which she writes about in this book. And she ended up divorcing and then writing a couple of books, Keep Moving, which was kind of a self-help book in 2020. And this most recent book called Drawing from the Poem, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Mm-hmm.

How did the book land with you? Beautifully. I thought it was really well done. I liked how she did it. She did some pages were just a single word or just a sentence or things like that. We've interviewed a bunch of people like Brene Brown or Glennon Doyle. You know, it's in that genre, I guess I would say, because when I went to the reading in Washington, it was full of

Like it was not, there weren't a ton of men there. So she aims at sort of women who are, you know, working and struggling with kids and the different compromises you make, especially straight women. And it really resonated with them. And anyone who has got to struggle and juggle has that issue. And then when she started talking about, you know, look up and see if your husband's the person you want to be with, like half the crowd was like, no.

You could hear a visible, like, yeah, I'd rather be single. Because she's like, I love being single. And they're all like, oh, being single is fun. I know, but they all were. You could feel it. And Amanda and I were like, whoa. It's like the straight ladies were really unhappy. Yeah.

It was super funny. I mean, not funny, but it was funny. So this is one where, Carrie, you went rogue. I didn't go rogue. It's my show. It's our show, too. I know, but I should be able to interview who I want. Yes, but I was a little more skeptical. Yes. I wasn't as familiar with her work and was more skeptical. You don't like touchy feelings, is that right? I love touchy feelings. I write about this stuff. I write about dating. Yeah, and yet you don't. I only get to interview hard white men. Please, I'm the one. Remember when...

Remember when I wanted you to interview Brene Brown and you were like, who's Brene Brown? Well, I did that for you, didn't I? You did. So you should have just said, yes, Kara, please. I didn't know I was going to make a softie out of you. No, I'm not a softie. I would like to be able to talk about my softer side of Kara. So that's just the way it is. And I'm very excited. And this is the thing. We often disagree. But when there is a disagreement, unless there is a factually right answer editorially, we should do it. An indicator is that, yeah, it should be about passion. Yes, 100%. We can interview all the people.

masters of the universe we want. But I do think when you do the smaller stories, I think they often resonate. I'm often attracted to smaller stories that say a lot about a lot of things. And this book is about loneliness. It's about ambition. It's about failing and trying to figure it out. It's about love in a lot of ways. I think that

It's a very Western world of marriage. 100%. For context, my parents hadn't arranged marriage. They were married for 40 years until my father passed away. My grandmother never asked if she was happy in her marriage. I never thought of it. My parents were happy. They were happy. They were in love, and they were very loving to each other. I think one of the challenges, though, is that

That world is different. The Western world, I think we live in, there's nuclear family. You have no extended family for support. So it puts a lot of burden on your marriage, on your kids, on your work. You're very individuated. Yeah. So there isn't as much shared identity. I think he seemed disdainful for her success rather than encouraging of it. Yeah. You know, you get the sense that he could have been nicer about her success. He was more successful financially. He was a lawyer. That's different. He's just a lawyer. And she was more successful creatively. Yeah. Yeah.

He's just a lawyer. I'm sorry, but he wanted to be a writer and he couldn't until he was a lawyer, so. Yeah. And ultimately, she's writing about her marriage, right? And we can all see ourselves in that in different ways. You know, the stories are not that similar to a lot of people. And that life is very resonant for many people. And do you know what it's not about?

It's not fucking about Elon Musk. Oh, thank God. This is the one episode. That's one of the things. There's not a fucking bit of Elon Musk, except right now. Yes. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we're back, we'll make this place beautiful with Maggie Smith.

Welcome, Maggie Smith. I'm a huge fan of your work for many years now. I'm a secret poetry fan. People are always surprised, but I find it very comforting to read poetry most of the time.

Actually, that makes me like you even more. Now that I know you're a secret, you're one of my people. Secretly, you're one of my people. Now, you have a new memoir out called You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which is a line in probably your most famous poem. I'd love to know why you decided to do a memoir over a poem, given you're better known as a poet.

Yeah. I mean, I honestly hope every idea that comes to me complies and agrees to be not just a poem, but one of my poems, by which I mean it's probably going to be fairly concise and condensed and distilled. Right. And I could not do that kind of narrative work or...

processing or thinking back or reckoning with the past or bringing in a bunch of outside stories or frankly letting my gallows sense of humor into it. And so, yeah, it was not going to be a poem or even a series. I know. I had a take. I was like, why didn't she write this? I'm like, oh, she needs more words.

She needs more words. Real estate. Yeah, real estate. You needed real real estate. Although there's plenty of poems where you reference this and you have this sort of the foreshadowing that you do a lot. But let's talk about the memoir itself overall first. I think it's talking about losing and finding a narrative in one's life. And you actually referenced your marriage very early in one of the poems that you quote, which is, we knew eventually we would want different things and then we wanted them, which I thought was a devastating line.

I know what that feels like. So talk a little bit about that idea of losing and finding your narrative. Yeah, it's funny how if we were reading a novel or watching a movie, I think we're smart enough as people who take in lots of culture to notice foreshadowing when it's presented to us in the context of someone else's story. Right. And we are often not...

able to see foreshadowing when it's just an inch from our own noses. But I had the little seed of an idea that we might not always be traveling in the same direction. And as it turns out, sometimes the choices we make in our 20s don't hold. In our 40s... No, not at all. And I think, honestly...

that's okay. And I would not have said that four years ago. I would have said that was an absolute failure and I can't believe this happened and everything should have stayed, you know, sort of frozen in amber forever the way that it was, you know, quote unquote supposed to be. And,

through just sort of metabolizing the experience and writing this book and the finding, I was able to kind of see, no, I think this was always going to be the way this particular story turned out. And it could have taken different paths. Yeah, you talk about that, where it could have gone differently, where you make different decisions, which you don't see as the cracks start to create. I think you used the term cracks get bigger and bigger. Yeah.

in the relationship. Yeah. I mean, I think most of us, especially by the time we hit midlife and if there are children involved and if people have multiple careers and time is tough to come by and, you know, communication becomes more and more transactional, particularly with parenting in the mix. A hundred percent. You know, these little hairline cracks, like maybe one or two. It's like my old house and these old plaster walls, right?

You know, one or two little cracks and I can hang a piece of art over it. Not a metaphor. I'm literally doing it in my house. But once those tiny cracks meet another tiny crack from another area of the wall and it splits, that's when I have to call the contractor. Right.

And there is no marriage contractor. That's not how it works. Right. But when you were trying to get this idea of finding your narrative, in the course of the marriage, you lost it in some fashion. Yeah. And I think that's not unusual. I mean, I think that it's sort of, you know, let's bring talking heads into it. It's sort of the David Byrne lyric, how did I get here? This is not my beautiful life. This is not my beautiful house. Right.

And I think a lot of us wake up in middle age in particular and start to kind of reckon and take stock of all the different choices and paths and opportunities we took and opportunities we didn't take that lead us to this place that we are in the moment. Yeah. And what I found was that there were a lot of pieces of me that I had sort of snipped off and bargained away from

over time in order to be

And make it work. And what does that mean? Right. And make it work. Right. And you do talk about the choices because I had another, I have new young children, I have older children. And sometimes I look at the house and it's full of toys and I go, oh, and my wife looks at me and she goes, you picked this. And I'm like, you're right. I did. I did. I'm remembering I picked it. This is the deal. So you wrote a really great line here. Sometimes I feel like I titled this book Kittens and Rainbows, which is...

which is true because it's called You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and then wrote Hell, which I thought was really funny. Yeah. I mean, the title is both a reclaiming of a poem that I have ambivalent feelings about for lots of reasons. I'll bet. And a sort of directive, mostly to me. And yet, you know, You Could Make This Place Beautiful doesn't preclude all of the

The cracks in the plaster that need to be either fixed or art needs to be purchased and hung over it so that we don't have to look at it. A lot of art. Yeah. So you do try to find the good part. There's another line you have is, love is a perfect pit on my otherwise rotten fruit, which was kind of, wow, that's something else. Yeah.

I was thinking about my own divorce because many people who are straight have that feeling of rotten fruit. In a lot of ways, I don't feel that way. We had a pretty amicable divorce. I think gay people don't have all the imagery around marriage, so they think it's all going to be kittens and rainbows ever because they never thought they would have it. I'm older.

And I remember it was only straight couples who told me, you have to make it work. And I always would say, do we? Actually, do we? And it was a really interesting experience. I'd love you to talk about the idea of this being devastating to you because it comes through throughout the book that you thought this was going to be forever and it certainly wasn't. Yeah. I shared the galley with my father once.

And he texted me and said, I didn't realize how much pain you were in, which is interesting because I see my dad every week.

This isn't someone who lives across the country. We're having Sunday dinner, all of us, every Sunday. So, I mean, he's someone who watched me through the worst of it and still didn't know, which on one hand, it's like, well, I can congratulate myself that I seemed like I had it together. And only now reading the book do people see how little I slept and how much I and all the feelings I cracked grinding my teeth.

Yeah, but it was terrifying. It was terrifying. I mean, and I think this is very particular to, I think, the kind of relationship that I was in, which is I was the primary caregiver and did not work full time for a lot of the kids' young years. And when we were divorced, had been self-employed for years. Not

in a way that was like incredibly lucrative. Right. So there's lots of devastation at the end of a marriage like that. One is, well, it's been 18, 19 years. How could this have happened? I thought you were my person. And not only is the present now completely imploding, but now the future I've been counting on just went completely poof. Right. Talk about the idea that you sublimate yourself to someone in order to make it work. Is that a compromise?

that this happens in all marriage, right? Or is it disappearing yourself, which I think you talk a lot about invisibility. And I think the line, I steadied, I love the word stead, so I steadied my tears. You put them back in that piece that you talked about in the New York Times. Talk

about this idea of folding your happiness. And sometimes that's the thing you need to do in a marriage, obviously. Yeah, I agree. I don't think, I mean, I don't think any marriage works if both people come in and say, this is me, take it or leave it, and I'm not going to bend. I think that never really works. What I realized, really only at the very end and then more in the rear view, because I'm always able to see things a little clearly when I've had a little space, is

is that the things that I let myself get small about weren't small things. They were sort of essential things. And so if you feel like your work is diminished, it feels like you are diminished. If you feel like you're not able to sort of take up space

and claim the same kind of agency in your house as the other adult, that's, like, it just felt like an injustice. Right. Because in a lot of ways, what also comes through, and I think, you know, you were both writers at the beginning of your relationship. You met in a writing class, creative writing class. He was jealous of your success, resentful that you traveled because he had to pick up the domestic labor, which you normally did, and you were the sort of go-to person, which is a common experience for women, but a

a lot of relationships. Talk a little bit about this. I suspect he wasn't as good a writer as you, and that's just me saying that, but can you talk about the jealousy your ex felt over your success? Yeah, I mean, I can only speak for myself, and he never communicated in a clear, direct way. But since I can only speak for myself, the best I could do ethically in this book was present what happened from my perspective and let the reader come to their own conclusions. And

You know, I think part of it, too, is if you're used to having your spouse available for doctor's appointments, child care, packing lunches, doing laundry, making sure everything, you know, quote unquote, runs smoothly, if you are accustomed to that.

And then their career takes off in a way, whether it's writing, which maybe pains you in a way that like if it had been pharmaceutical sales requiring my travel, if it had been something lucrative and not creative, maybe it would have been slightly different and not a double whammy because it would have been inconvenient from a childcare perspective, but maybe not stingy in the way that maybe it was. Who really knows? Yeah.

But yeah, I don't, it's almost, I was saying to a friend the other day, if you're used to receiving from a person $100 a day for years, and then that person says, you know, I actually think I'd like to keep $40. And I'm going to start paying you $60 a day.

The person could either be like, you know what? 60 is fine. You deserve the $40 and I will take the 60 and that is plenty for me. Or the person might be like, you know, I've been really used to receiving $100 a day from you. And I like that. And I would prefer it that way. It's a common experience for women too, to take over in general. Yeah. And I wanted it. Yes. And to be honest, I wouldn't do it any other way. And knowing what I know now and looking back, I would not have done it

You know, we all...

We all inherit this stuff too. So I mother in large part the way I was mothered. Yeah, you talk about this. You realize you're doing the same sort of domestic labor your mother did. Yep. I basically sort of copy-pasted my parents' marriage and child raising into my own home, which in some ways doesn't make a lot of sense because we're really different people who had very different career trajectories before.

And yet I had a good, you know, quote unquote, good childhood. And that's what I saw that was modeled to me. And so some of this is inherited and, you know, some of this is,

We built this together. No one made me sign something on my wedding day that said, no matter what happens, you're the one who's going to take care of the kids. Right. But that often happens. One of the things I used to observe with my friends who were straight is the women swooping in. The husbands would try to do something like change a diaper and not do it very well. Or I was in a party and I was upstairs with all the husbands. I don't know. I was put up there. But

The kids were playing and one of the kids was heading towards my stairs. And I just sat there. I'm like, how long is he going to figure out? I was going to be there. I was standing there. So the kid couldn't have gone over. And the kid almost went over. And I was like, wow, you really aren't paying attention. Like it was fascinating. But I often also saw women swooping in and fixing it. Like, oh, you're not doing it right. And diminishing a man's experience. So I always thought that was really interesting. Also, if you're used to the person who's doing it and everything is second nature to you,

Sometimes it's also easier to do a thing yourself than it is to take the time to explain the thing to someone else. But the problem of that is then you never get out from underneath having that on your list of tasks. That's right. Right. Nobody else can do it but you and no one does it as well as you. Right. You become essential. And then you basically become so essential that if you leave the building for two days...

It's not okay. I just had my first daughter. She's almost four years old. I think about it all the time. I have three sons, but...

just one daughter. And I do think about the same thing, even though, you know, very strong female presence, a lot of power, et cetera. Do women sharing these experiences lead to change from your perspective when you were thinking about writing this? Because you got a lot of reaction. Goodness, I hope so. I mean, I think about this too, like not only what are we modeling to our daughters, but what are we modeling to our sons about their expectations if they end up

in a straight relationship with a woman. Like, will they be like, well, my mom did everything, so that's what I'm expecting from...

my partner. So I'm really aware of that. Because this is memoir and not self-help like Keep Moving was, I really wrote this book without focusing too much on sort of what quote-unquote good it might do or what change it might affect. I told someone early on my hope for the book is that someone will read it and feel seen, which is a really simple ask. And someone just the other day

emailed me out of the blue using the email on my website because they read the excerpt in the cut and said, I feel seen. Just verbatim what I said my hope was for the book. So I thought, okay, so that happened. People will see, if not a complete sort of echo or rhyme of their own experience in this book, they will see something probably in

That they can relate to. Well, one thing that was interesting, which I think you had a little hard time relating to, but then it sort of emerged over the course of the book, is your book has anger. I love that. I get angry very easily and express it very clearly. Women aren't supposed to be angry, which is absurd. Women's anger scares men. You talked about that. Your anger scared him when you had just a tiny bit of it. Right.

I want you to talk about the way, in this book especially, how gender affects the way we process anger, whether it's our own or someone else's. Oh, my gosh. Well, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you're too angry, people call you angry and shrill, and that's not the way that women are supposed to be.

And if you prioritize peace and say, you know, I'm not going to be angry. I'm going to kind of try to accept this. Then you're weak and you should be angry. So it just honestly feels like as a woman, there's not a way to feel that isn't critiqued and policed as being unacceptable. Like really, we're just supposed to be quiet and not have feelings. So talk about the context of this relationship, because there's one point when your husband realizes you're angry and has a problem with it.

Yeah, I mean, of course I have been angry and sad. And there have been times where I felt like I was angry as a way to protect myself from feeling deep sadness. Because it's easier for me to feel angry, which feels a little bit more surface, than to get at what's underneath that, which is hurt. Mm-hmm.

Or a feeling of rejection or not being valued. And there have been times where I've been so sad I haven't been able to tap into that sort of righteous fury that probably would have made me feel a little bit more motivated on that given day. And so I really do think in the book I'm toggling between these things. And part of the struggle for me was...

realizing I wanted to be able to use my anger, feel like I could own it, but also not be owned by it. Sure, yeah. It's a vehicle to something else, in other words. It's a vehicle to something else, and it can sort of be outsized. And I didn't want to get lost in the sort of self-righteous, angry space where I wasn't actually able to move forward or set the thing down. Right.

because I was ruminating so much and just so pissed off. Yeah. And I was also drawn though, at the same time to this line you wrote, betrayal is neat because as you put it, betrayal absolves you of any blame. Um, talk about you, you, you go back and forth on this, the blame, how things went, where, how you behaved and things like that, because it sort of, if he's the betrayer, he gets all, he gets to carry all the burden of this. Um,

Does that change how you feel like that you have a piece of it, which I thought you did, which was important in this book, is to not totally make him a villain. Oh my gosh, no. He sounds villainous in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I thought you did that rather effectively. Yeah, I'm glad that came through. What I wouldn't want to write a finger-pointing book, nor would I want to read one. That seems like it completely lacks nuance and is oversimplified in a way that's

not literature. And so, yeah, I really wanted to look at the way that

Again, those little cracks. You know, if somebody creates a big crack, that doesn't mean that that was the thing, right? There's still a lot of other stuff. Right. And I think, and I actually do sort of shift in the book early on in the writing of it. I'm thinking, well, maybe if that hadn't happened, things would have been fine. And then I get to a point, no spoilers, later when I realize...

Actually, no. This was going to be the way that it turned out, even if not all of these plot twists happened. I think we were... The narrative structure you impose on it, rising action, crisis. The narrative structure, right. I think it was going to have the same ending, even if the sort of like circuitous track it took to get there.

Right. Was different. So you ask if your kids will wonder why being their mom wasn't enough for you because you discussed that and then you realize that men don't struggle with guilt and wanting to be more than a dad, that they can have both the personal and the professional together. It's an old why women still can't have it all conundrum. How do you,

how do you think about that? Because you raise the issue in the book itself. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason we have a phrase that is mom guilt and dad guilt doesn't exist. It's not a phrase. It's not part of our language.

If we have to give language to something, it's because it's sort of real and ongoing. And so just the expectation that so much of my identity should be wrapped up in being their parent, and that if I want to carve out something extra, something else for myself, that is seen as a sort of a front. Like, shouldn't this be enough?

Why isn't this enough? It's sort of like, again, a phrase that's not used for men would be something like too big for your britches. Right. That's a Midwestern phrase. Totally a Midwestern phrase and something no one says about men. Right, right. Because men can't be too big for their britches. Right, right. Men can't have outsized expectations for themselves or their possibilities. That is completely gendered.

We'll be back in a minute. One of the things you do talk about is this poem, Good Bones. Even after the poem went viral, I was still hidden, cleverly disguised as one of the least visible creatures on earth, a middle-aged mother. The word invisible appears a lot in your book. If you feel invisible, how do you imagine middle-aged mothers who don't go viral feel? Because that poem certainly went viral.

Well, but the funny thing was, is a lot of people didn't know. So I could just be pushing a stroller in my neighborhood and it's not like you're Bono at Target. Right, right. That's true. It's, you know, being well known as a poet among poets. It's like being famous in Pittsburgh, I guess. It's just not a thing. So no, it's still very invisible. And to be quite honest, as an introvert, remaining invisible is a gift. Like...

I would not want to be fully visible in the world all the time. I would not want to have a face that people are like, oh, you're that person. I don't want that in the least bit. I would like to be a hermit writing poems. But it's true. I mean, I think...

It can be kind of blissful to be able to move unseen through the world sort of under everyone's radar. You said you felt ambivalent. What was the ambivalence? That you happen to be an introvert? You're a more gregarious introvert than most introverts. I'm a gregarious introvert, yes. I'm good in ones and twos. Mm-hmm.

I mean, really my ambivalence about the poem has to do, well, now people know some of the ambivalence about the poem, which is that my marriage kind of wasn't quite the same after the poem went viral. Why was that? Because it suddenly required or allowed me, it gave me opportunities to sort of lean in to my writing career in a way that I hadn't been before.

able to do that before. So until that point, I was pretty much writing poems at home and I would go out very rarely to give a reading or go to a university, but I was very available. And so suddenly if like reporters are calling and the BBC's on the phone and you have a speaker's agency and it's being read on TV, there's a level of visibility and also a demand for your time.

could be seen as being incongruent with your domestic responsibilities. So that was part of the ambivalence, was like, this was really good news for me as a writer, but it was really complicated news for me as a person living in this house. And then the other ambivalence was just the poem itself.

is a disaster barometer, which I didn't know when writing it that it would be this sort of bad signal for bad things happening. But, you know, I wrote... Things fall apart. Things fall apart. Like, I didn't know. And so I wrote this poem just like as a mom thinking about all the things I don't really want my little kids at the time to know about the world, but also knowing that there's

there's hope and that we can make it better. Right, right. Do you like the poem still? Do you like the poems? Oh, yeah. I don't dislike the poem at all. It's just not...

It's not like all one thing for me, you know? I mean, I think when maybe from the outside, someone has a poem go viral and they have more opportunities and people know who they are. And read their other stuff. For a poet, right? For a poet, yeah. Everybody knows that poem. Everybody does know that poem. Right, well, and it seems like good news. And it seems like holy good news, like unmitigated good news. And so there's the sort of like trickiness of navigating things

the demands of my time at home. And then the other thing about the poem is it's a little tricky for me to have my readership grow every time.

something bad happens in the world. Like I wish that it was a poem that was read when babies were born and people got married or retired. Actually, I think they're reading it because it's hopeful too. I think that's why, even if it's bad things, it's like also you want it to work. You can make it beautiful. I think it's about hopefulness.

The part I see in that is your kids, right? I think you can't have kids without being hopeful, like about the future or about things that happen. You have to be really kind of demented if you have kids and are very depressed about the future in some ways or it dements you. But one of the lines in one of your poems, I think, another poem, not good bones, is I'm desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here. I think about that a lot.

Like, it has to be a good place. Yeah, that's the first... I've made you, I made you. I made you and I brought you here and you didn't ask to be brought here. That was the first poem. It's called First Fall. And it's the first poem I wrote after becoming a parent. And it took me a year to finally write another poem after having a child because I thought, I don't know how to do this anymore. I mean, my life is now completely different. I don't know how to encapsulate this existential shift...

In, you know, 16 to 18 lines, which is sort of my sweet spot. And so that, yeah, that poem was the first one to arrive. And that was really the core feeling, which is this place has to work.

has to work. And not only that, actually, it needs to deserve you. Absolutely. And you also referenced the hard parts in a lot of your poems with your kids that have your kids in them. And I think it's for my next trick. I think that's what it's called. You wrote, we can't talk about birth without talking about death. Can't talk about death without talking about separation, that thick black

Do I tell her we end like a book, the end? I love this poem because my sons, I'm always talking about death with my sons. I'm like, my dad died when I was little. So it's an important part of my life is thinking about death. And so they're like, oh, mom, another death poem. But talk about writing that about your kid, about you're talking about your daughter. Yeah. Yeah. That was a question. I think she was asking me when she was three or four, like,

you know, and really sort of like drilling me. Like, you're going to die first, right? Because you're older. And what if I miss you? Kids ask the biggest...

biggest, most existential questions. And I never know what to say. And so I write. Yeah. We had a friend of ours die. And when my son, my oldest son was, I don't know, four or five, maybe. So in that timeframe when they don't really understand death precisely. And I was with my ex-wife and he goes, but you're not going to die. And I'm like, of course I will.

And my ex-wife was like, I'm going to kill you now. Now I'm going to kill you. And I was like, what? What? He has to know this. And she's like, not today. He doesn't. Yeah, maybe not right this minute. It was a struggle.

But when you think about writing about your kids, I think a lot of people obviously have written about their kids. And I think myself, because I talk about my kids a lot on my shows and various, I write about them. They're in a lot of stuff I do publicly. And I do think about the performative nature of it and also that it's also genuine. It's a part of me. My second son calls me a Sharon.

My older son has gone off social media, but they're in my work and, you know, they're sort of used to it now. I feel badly now and again. You do write about your kids a lot. I get a very big sense of your kids there and I think I feel like I have some sense of who they are. Do you think about that a lot? Are you worried about them being like, mom, really? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm always thinking about that a lot. In poems, in prose, on social media, I'm thinking about it all the time. Boundaries in life and in writing, that's sort of, that's not sort of important to me, it's really important to me. And so one of the sort of guidelines for me is I don't want to be giving too much of their interior lives or interior experiences away. So a line of dialogue, a metaphor, a conversation,

Um, something that feels sort of not as intimate necessarily feels more, more okay to me, but I'm always kind of weighing these things like stones in my hands and thinking, okay, is, is this okay? Do I feel okay with this? And they trust me. I mean, I've been doing this their whole lives. It's not new at all. They come to readings. They know what I do for, for my work.

And so they know these things, and I don't think it's necessarily unnerving to them at this point. Right. I think about it a lot, I have to say. They're used to it, and I'm like, well, you shouldn't have had a mother who was a writer. I don't know what to tell you. What do they do?

I say whenever a writer is born into a family, that family is ruined. Yes, that's what I said. I actually said something to my mom the other day. She did something bad and I go, I'm so excited for when you die and I'll be writing all about it. She's like, you're excited I'm going to die? I'm like, no, I'm excited to write about it. And she's like, you can't use me. And I'm like, oh, I can. Oh, I will. But the public...

public nature of your career, it's very different of how we think about poets, right? I know you're making jokes, nobody reads poets, but it's not true. There's much more. Talk about that idea of being public and you thinking about it, because then you have all your Instagram. So talk about how you think about technology, because both books kind of started on Twitter in a lot of ways. Well, Keep Moving definitely started on Twitter. I didn't even know I was writing a book.

I mean, I was literally writing myself these little missives each day just to function. And you should keep moving at the end. Keep moving at the end of them. And then after a while, everyone was like, so is this going to be a book? And I thought, actually, maybe that could work. I hadn't thought about it in that way, but sure. And so that's how it became a book. Poems...

don't generally happen on the internet, although I have had inspiration from poems happen on the internet a few times. And the memoir sort of lives completely outside of it, although some of the things I mention, like a tweet inspiring a song, or when I found out that Meryl Streep was reading my poem at Lincoln Center was on Twitter. So, and some of

that too, I think, is I work from home in this office in central Ohio by myself all the time. And my kids are at school. And so my lifeline really to the outside world, since people don't talk on the phone anymore, is my computer. And so a lot of how I'm keeping in touch with writer friends and how I'm reading new poems that I find on social media. Does it change the way you create? Because you have all this incoming?

You know, I don't know. I guess in some ways, if you think about like all of your, the sort of stimuli is sort of like that you're able to collage together. It probably does change the way I create. And yet, I mean, I don't even know how to type properly. So I still write longhand first. So I am like as incredibly online as I live online.

I still work like a complete Luddite. Before we started this, we're talking about AI being a problem. I got barred at Google to write a poem in the, I said, write a poem in the style of Maggie Smith. And the poem, I'll read the first stanza, the future. The future is a mystery, a blank canvas, a blank page. We can fill it with anything we want, with hopes and dreams and love. This is a terrible poem. Are you worried at all about being? No.

No, it is a terrible poem. I feel like at least my job is safe for the time being. Yeah, it'll get better. I'm not really concerned about it. So I want to finish up talking about where you are now. You wrote at the end, though, by the time these pages are printed, by the time you're reading this, may I be in a place of forgiveness. Are you there? Do you have to be?

I don't have to be. I think I'm in a place of acceptance, which texturally feels a little different. Okay. Right? Like, I think I'm in a place where I'm more at peace with

with the events that I write about in the book. I'm not spiraling over them. I'm not ruminating about them. I'm not lugging it around. And I honestly, I kind of credit not just the lived time, but the writing of the book for helping me to do that. It was almost like I had had this giant piece of furniture blocking a doorway. And I had to kind of shift it out of the way so I could walk. Right.

Right. Through it. And so I'm at a place now where I can just be like, so that happened. So that happened. It was not good. So my last thing is the last poem in your book. I think it's called Bride. I think this line is fantastic. Darling, I say I've waited for you my whole life, which you're talking about yourself. Yeah.

I have always said, if I could date myself, that would be the best thing ever and marry myself. Have you realized that finally? Because that's a don't give a fuck poem. Like, I'm good. Yeah, I'm good. I think, you know, I belong to myself. Yeah. Like that belonging is the primary belonging and any other kind of belonging is...

is extraneous, is extra by nature, right? So if I'm at peace in myself, I feel a sense of wholeness. I don't know that I'd want to marry myself. I can be, you know. Pain in the ass. Yeah, a real pain in the ass. Like it might just be like two wolverines in a closet. That's true. Or two introverts who no one ever speaks to the other person ever. I'm not really sure. Yeah. But being alone is fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you're the last person you're going to talk to before you die. You know that. You're the last person you're going to have a little moment with. I'm okay with that. But do you feel, it seems like you feel happy with this poem, although it's a mixed poem. Yeah, it's a mixed poem. But I think, again, it lands in a place of both acceptance and embracing of the self. Like, I think of this poem as a valentine for the self, like a love poem to the self.

This idea of like you lift the veil and, oh, it's you. Like you're the person I've been waiting for. Maybe you're the person you've been waiting for. Maybe it's not someone else. Maybe actually you're good as is and that's okay. All right. On that fantastic note, we're going to end. This has been a delightful interview. Well, thanks for having me.

I wonder how many men are still listening to this episode. Stop it. Are you there, men? It's me, Naima. Next week, I'm sure I'll have a rich white man. I'm kicking the teeth. I'm sure that'll happen. No, now that they're gone, we can talk about that. Okay. All right.

By the way, Blakeney, who used to be a yoga teacher, had a great description for it. She said, this is like the yoga retreat you didn't sign up for, but you feel good afterwards. That's correct. You feel good afterwards. It struck me that whenever we talked about her husband, she was super careful about him and caveating, well, this is my experience of his experience. But in the book, and this happens when you write personal essay, in the book, you are

you kind of pour it out all out when you're writing and your editor and everyone's like, put it all out. Right. And then when you have to confront it in real life and 3D and talk about it, it's,

Very exposing. Yeah, I think I'm sure he's not happy about the book. I can't imagine. And I think she'll have she will have to contend with her kids later. I was thinking that there's a lot here that's not very positive about her husband. And even if he's a jackass, you have to make those decisions very carefully, especially publicly. Yeah.

You know, and like that. And I think she really went there with him. And I think kids will have a word or could have a word or two with her later. I always think about that. Is great art worth hurting people in your life? Well, that's what art is, right? I mean, in a lot of ways, there's that Joan Didion quote, writers are always selling someone out. In this case, she really sold out her husband. She did. And I think there's an argument to make that he sold her out too. Sure. Sure.

Sure, but again, like he didn't know. Well, no, he was married to a writer, so too bad. He knew, yeah. I was just with someone the other day who said to me, oh, whenever I date a journalist...

I'm always really cautious. I'm like, what kind of creepy stuff do you do when you're not with a journalist? But I always try to be really careful trying to make the person as anonymous as possible, but they know who they are and people in your life know who they are. And I think it's like having a zit on your face. You think everybody knows. I try not, I talk on Pivot a lot about, you know, my kids and Amanda and stuff like that. But

I don't talk about the bad things, like, because I just don't, you just sort of leave them behind and move along. And I think in this case, you know, it was the backbone of the book. It was really the spine of the book. I also haven't written bad stuff about people. I've written about, like, my own failures and what I've learned, but not about other people as much. Because I'm not authoritative on that, actually. I don't know what happens. You never know what happens with two people. Even the two people don't know what happens. In this case, you kind of do a postcard, right? Yeah.

Well, the postcard was kind of there. The postcard gave it all away. Who knows what happened, really. The universal line in this book is, how did I get here? I love when she said that in the interview. She said, I was supposed to have this perfect life. How did I get here? This is not my beautiful life. Right.

You talked about how straight people have different expectations of marriage. Sure do. There was never an expectation you'd have a beautiful life. Right, right. Do you think that's still true this many years in? Yes, I do. I still don't think, you know, everything is visually cued by movies and television and, you know, even advertising is around happy marriages or...

I'm thinking of like 29 dresses, whatever, the one about the bridesmaids. There were 27, Karen. Whatever, I don't know. Why do you got to make her a bridesmaid two more times? Or how to marry a man in 10 days. I like these movies. Yes. But every one of them has this. But these are old movies. I think that the culture has shifted. Now Fleischman is in trouble and you see so much unhappiness. And now I think looking from this side of the street,

I think of marriage as an unhappy place because I'm constantly confronted with stories of unhappy married people. What was the marriage one with Adam Driver? Oh, Marriage Story. Marriage Story. That was a very good story. Scarlett Johansson. That was a bad story.

Literally, I was halfway there. I'm like, shut up, straight people. That was like pre-divorce story, they should have called it. I guess. I literally was like, shut up, straight people. You're driving me crazy. But look, there just wasn't any happy gay marriage. Now they're too happy, of course. They're like, all the gays get together at the end and laugh and have a party. Neil Patrick Harris. Yeah, and they all have a party and then, you know, it's fabulous and a drag queen shows up and everyone dances. It's just, that doesn't happen either. I just think that you didn't grow up with the expectation and therefore you're in a better place because...

Not that you're not disappointed, but you don't have sort of fake versions of your life put in front of you. And so you feel like you're not meeting expectations. Like I remember when I told friends I was getting divorced and we were married 15 years and someone called me and said...

how unhappy were you? What percent? They said, what percent unhappy were you? And I was like, oh, you're getting a divorce. I see. Oh. You know? And she says, 43. Like, I was like, literally, this is a tech person. And I was like, you really need to. Did she get divorced? Yes, of course. How long? And she's very happy. And she's very happy now. We're not selling divorce here. But that was also a very odd moment of the conversation to me when

It was, again, this kind of maybe more Western notion of marriage, but she started talking about these fractionalizations of kind of a more transactional view of marriage. But yet it makes sense because there is so much work to be done. And I was talking recently with a friend of mine, Lindsey Krauss, about this. She's a recent mother, journalist at The Times, and this idea of should you have a kind of postpartum agreement when you have kids? Yeah.

Like you have a prenup agreement about who's going to do the work or a prepartum agreement. How are you going to split up the work and how are you going to compensate for the time? Yep. It's an issue. It's a big issue. Amanda does. I'm doing more and more because I was working on my book, but she does a lot of it. And I know it's exhausting and I know it's super exhausting. But it's also always seen as a cost. And this is a flip on it. My sisters and I say this about my father, which is,

it wasn't a burden to take care of him. It was a privilege. And I think about that with kids, too. There's something, we see it as work and all negative, but actually the time you get, the person who doesn't get to spend time with their kid, that's a huge cost. I never saw it as that. Like this morning, I was like rolling around the bed with the kids. It was hysterical. I was like, this is great. I wish I could just do this. You don't like being here? Telling me I can't do a beautiful show about yoga. How sad for the world. What a sad you had a yoga retreat. You would have. I don't do yoga. Fuck yoga. Please, I wasn't,

Sayulita, you were sending me to some yoga retreat. I know of yoga things. How can you not know of yoga things when you're in San Francisco? But yes, I think that we're going to have a real evolution in marriage and a real evolution in what families look like and move towards a more communal model. And a lot of ways gays have led the way in that. Gays have created, there's a lot of gay families like that where they share kids and things like that. Time share kids. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. I think the straights really want to hold on to, like, go around the country right now. All these

bands on different plays that show different families, all these bands on songs, like the Rainbow Song that Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton sang. I mean, I think there's a real attempt by a small group of people, whether it's one or two people like in Montana, it's run by these three crazy people from one family, a lot of the politics or the Moms for Liberty, who are just not for liberty, they're for

taking other people's liberty. And there's a real pushback of trying to hold on to that idea of this nuclear family that just is not going to exist anymore in the same way. And look, if they want to do it that way, they should do it that way. If they want to be egregiously unhappy their whole lives, that's fine. Those are the choices.

By the way, the text thing that you were talking about, I had that when I was in San Francisco and thinking about getting married. I was in a long-term relationship. And

I would call friends and I would say, hey, I feel a little resigned to my life. And I'm wondering if I should get married, if this is what you're supposed to feel like. Is this resignation what marriage is supposed to feel like? Half of my married friends said, oh, yeah, that's it. That's the feeling. You know you should marry this person. And the other half were like, no, run. Don't get out, run. I'd say run. I'd say run. Don't be resigned. You feel that at that moment, maybe you can be resigned later.

or something, but not right away. What's a healthy period to be resigned in? A couple of years at least. Okay, final piece of advice that you took from that or that you want to give? Oh, just be kinder than you think. I think when you're in marriage, I think it's really hard because whether you're tired or...

you feel like you're doing more or doing less, I think you have to keep that in mind. It's really hard because it's really tiring. And I think in this case, I think they just grew apart, you know, and that's okay. That's all right. I certainly would never write a book about it, though. Good for you, Maggie. I got to say, good for you. Good for you, Maggie. Glad it's a bestseller, but...

Ouch. Okay, well, we're going to spend some time apart, so why don't you read the credits? We'll get out of here. Okay, today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Blake Nishik, Christian Castor-Rossell, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

If you're already following this show, you get to have it all. And if not, you get to have it all. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.