Understanding Identity and How Our Past Shapes Who We Become with Catherine Gray

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:37

Hi, Catherine, welcome back.

Catherine Gray  01:40

Hi, thanks for having me back.

Eric Zimmer  01:41

I don’t know if this is three or four for having you on, but it’s been a good number, and you’re always one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I’m happy to have you back. We’re going to be discussing something new for you, which is a novel instead of a non fiction book, and it’s called versions of a girl. But before we get into that, will start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do. I love

Catherine Gray  02:37

the parable and for me, so whenever I had my daughter, I became a parent aged 42 two years ago, and something happened which really made me think about the parable a lot in that my bedtime routine became completely disrupted. And for many, many years now, every night, before I go to sleep, I write a list of gratitudes, and a lot of that is to counter the fact that I have such a negatively biased brain as most of us do, and left unattended, my brain will become, you know, a doomsayer, a nihilist. It will focus on everything that’s going wrong and everything that could go wrong. And I found it was actually a magical cure for my insomnia. This writing of all the all the positive things that were happening, um, could potentially happen. And, yeah, as I say, when I had my daughter that just fell on the classroom floor because of tiredness. And you know, it all goes out the window. And for six months, I became very, very negative and irritable towards myself. So it really does make a difference what you feed your brain. And for me, I need that nightly diet of positivity. Otherwise, my brain goes to a dark neighborhood, and yeah, I have to really call it back. So that’s what it means to me.

Eric Zimmer  03:56

Lovely. Did you experience any postpartum depression, was that part of the irritability and all that? Or how was that time for you? Because I know it can certainly be challenging.

Catherine Gray  04:07

I definitely felt the hormones. I’ve read that the hormonal surge that you received during pregnancy and also thereafter, which apparently lasts about two years, is akin to feeling premenstrual all the time. Now, when I’m premenstrual, I don’t get teary like a lot of other people do, but I do get very irritable, even sometimes murderous. I have not murdered anybody yet, so I didn’t experience sort of postpartum depression. I experienced what is a lesser known offshoot of it, which was postpartum rage, and this wasn’t directed at anybody in my life, apart from potentially myself, right? And the items in my fridge. So I found myself doing things like throwing peppers at the. Which do not do that, it creates an almighty mess, and also a tub and permits, which, again, really bad thing to throw. Yeah, yeah, that’s completely settled down now, but I’ve really struggled with it, and also the tiredness and just everything that you can’t predict is going to happen to your life happens. And, yeah, it was a tough period, but I’m through, and I’m out and I’m okay, and all I’ve murdered is some peppers,

Eric Zimmer  05:26

good. I’m glad that that’s been the extent of the damage. You know, a couple thoughts come to mind there. I mean, I do think the first couple years after having a child can be very difficult, just the sleep, all of it, and I think it’s a beautiful time, but it’s a very trying time for many people. The other thing is you were talking that I thought about was this is interesting, because in men, depression is often diagnosed by irritability. Interesting. That’s the way it manifests. So for me, my depression manifests as general deadness and irritability, very rude, just irritable with every little thing for no good reason, right? It’s the sort of stuff that you know, at least I know I’m like, there’s no reason to be irritated by this, but yet I am,

Catherine Gray  06:18

yeah, and it’s one of those emotions that you really tend to beat yourself up about because you’re like, I should be better than this. I shouldn’t I shouldn’t be irritated by this, and yes, I am. So what do I do? So it was a really hard time for me. The only time I can liken it to would be early recovery, although the emotions were different, because in early recovery, I didn’t feel like that. But yeah, it was. It was a similarly challenging time, I would say, yeah.

Eric Zimmer  06:45

So this latest book is a work of fiction. Your previous books have been memoirs about recovery. How are they described?

Catherine Gray  06:55

Well, they’re often described as a hybrid, because they’re not just memoirs. So my story does feature in them, then I go off and explore journalistically, all of the research, talk to experts, and also weave in lots of self helpy tips and tricks. So it’s like a hybrid between those two. And yeah, so I’ve done four of those now, and this is my first fiction. It’s my debut novel.

Eric Zimmer  07:22

I think we may have only talked about three of those. We must have missed one. I don’t know which one, but we’ll sort that out off air. But the fiction is, I told you that I think the book is amazing. I was captivated from the very first sentence any book that basically says, in a way, she’s looking forward to prison as a place of starting is so good. Like, I’m like, Well, okay, I have to know who is she and why is she going to prison, and what’s wrong with her life, enough that she actually is looking forward to it. It’s a great start.

Catherine Gray  07:54

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I love a bit of crime in any novel. Yes, I love somebody to die and puzzle, you know, sorting out who did it and why, and, you know, what happened. So for me it was a really key linchpin that sort of crime aspect. Although it’s not a crime novel, it’s coming for age more than crime but I guess it’s a blend of the two.

Eric Zimmer  08:18

It’s a blend. I mean, there’s definitely a whodunit in it that runs through the whole book, right? Yeah, there’s a character who is murdered, and you don’t know who through most of the book, and it seems significant. So I would say, yeah, it’s kind of a mix of two, but the heart of the book is really about, why don’t you describe the coming of age and the split between Fern and flick? You’ll do better than I will. Okay,

Catherine Gray  08:42

so the book opens on a 14 year old girl. She’s called fern. She spent equal years with each of her parents. Her parents are divorced. They’ve been separated for a long time, and her parents are very, very different. Her father is a hell raiser. He lives hand to mouth in California, in motels. He’s a borderline genius. He means well, but he’s mostly a disaster. Her mother is this ex ballerina who lives this gorgeous life in a London townhouse. Her biggest concern is what you think of her. She’s more of a helicopter parent and an unexpected visitor comes along and throws Fern, the main character, a dilemma as to whether she stays with her father in California or goes back to her mother in London. So it’s an exploration of how your dominant parent and how your dominant home life can shape your future trajectory. The story splits, and then we follow both versions of the same character over the next 21 years and see how they unfold and how they’re shaped differently, and how they shape similarly as well. So I wrote the first draft when I was pregnant and I was obsessed with nature versus nurture, and this is what came out. So I think it’s. Really an acceleration of the kind of parent that I want to be and the kind of parent that I don’t want to be. I would say if you boil the book down to one central theme, it’s the parent and child relationship. I think that would be it, because there’s lots of different examples in the book of how that dynamic unfolds. And what’s interesting is the parent in the book that arguably commits the biggest crime in inverted commas is the one who comes off probably the best because of the way that they deal with what they did. So, yeah, it’s childhood. You know, character shaping, addictions in different forms, recoveries in different forms. There’s lots of juicy topics in there that will be fun to play with, especially with the dual timeline narrative.

Eric Zimmer  10:43

And what age remind me the two of them sort of splits. How

Catherine Gray  10:46

old 1414?

Eric Zimmer  10:48

So up till 14, they’re one person. They’ve lived the same life. At the age of 14, one decides to go back to London to see her mother, who she’s not seen in a long time, and the other, at the last minute, decides not to get on the plane, and at that point they’re two separate stories. Exactly what I find fascinating about that is that it is nature versus nurture, but what you’ve got is both, right? Yeah, you’ve got someone who’s got the same genetic makeup, someone who had the same formative year experience, but yet, at the age of 14, they go different directions, and their lives unfold very, very different. And it’s just interesting to think about as a parent. I think you always think about like, how long does what I do as a parent matter? And there’s a lot of research out there that shows like it’s the first few years, those are so formative, right? Yeah, but what I love about the book is, yes, those first years are formative, but it also shows that that influence does not end at 14, even though it’s less than it was when you’re young. These two girls take very different paths from the age of 14 largely based on the environment there.

Catherine Gray  12:03

Yeah, I think everything that is coming out recently says that the first three years are the most key. And if you get those right, it’s almost like you’re fine. But I also think that launch into adulthood those years of I would define it as 14 to 21 especially with so many young adults living at home now. I mean, I Rick showed back to my home many times over my 20s and even early 30s. So it’s so important that the way that you’re sort of finished and pushed into the world, and the messages that you get in adolescence, when you’re figuring out who you are and also how you know romantic relationships come into play, and also your use of substances come into play as well. Yeah, and you know, we often do what our parents do rather than what they say we should do. So it was really fun to play with, and also because the same set of characters in each timeline are doing different things, and there’s that butterfly effect. So in the timeline where Fern stays with her father, who’s wrestling with a savage addiction to alcohol, because she spends a lot more time with him, the effect on him is different than in the timeline when she leaves right and he becomes famous in the other timeline for his music, because he’s really talented musician, and that has an impact as well. I really wanted to explore also the idea that money doesn’t necessarily solve things. Yes, in many ways, it can make being okay harder, because you have the money to numb the consequences and pay to get yourself out of trouble, almost, and if you’re surrounded by yes people as well, that can have a delayed effect on any sort of self realization and improvement that you want to make. So I wanted to play with that as well. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  14:03

it’s really fascinating the way that unfolds. And I think what you said there is really important about adolescents in that we put into action what we’ve learned about romantic relationships. Yeah, and again, by and large, that’s when substances, you know, drugs, alcohol, come online for us. And what I think is interesting about the two characters, and you mentioned this in an email to me, is, you know, thinking about their attachment styles. We’ve done episodes before about attachment styles, anxious attached versus avoidantly attached versus securely attached, right? And neither of the girls is securely attached, and that happened early, right? That’s when that forms. It forms early on. And so neither of them had a life that would have been securely attached. But it is interesting that in those adolescent years, their attachment styles, avoidant and anxious, come to the play. They each have a different one. And so I think it further shows this. Idea how? Yes, a lot of things are formative in those first few years, but they’re not definitive. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  15:06

there’s a fourth attachment style that often people don’t read about. It’s disorganized attachment, which basically means that you’re both. I love

Eric Zimmer  15:15

that phrase too. I mean, you could just call it like both or dual attachment styles, but the fact that it’s called disorganized, and I think I have that one cracks me up, like just disorder, like, who knows what’s going to happen could

Catherine Gray  15:30

go either way. Yeah, basically, I think the easiest way of thinking about it. So John Bowlby, who, I believe, came up with the theory of attachment styles and did a lot of ground breaking work on it in the 60s, he theorized that it happens in the first five years of life, and ultimately, if you have a secure, consistent, safe relationship and home life, then you are likely to grow up to be securely attached, whereas, if you do not, then you are likely to grow up to be either anxious, avoidant or both, which is disorganized, and I definitely relate that mostly I skew anxious, but that is because I’m very attracted to avoidant people, and so therefore that tweaks my anxious side, whereas when I have dated Secure people and also anxious people, I skew avoidant, but ultimately, what your subconscious is trying to do in this awful recreation of your early years is to stop you being stable and to almost keep things unstable, because that’s what you’re used to, and we repeat what we don’t repair. And so it’s almost if you do find yourself in a secure relationship, I will burn things down. I will blow them up. I will find a way to make them unstable. But the awareness of that is the key to changing it. So that’s why the two different versions of Fern, one of them skews anxious and one of them skews avoidant, because of the relationships that they’re in. And that was really fun to play with as well, and really made me think about myself. I think while I was writing the book, I did actually realize I am both, and before that, I would have told you that I was anxious because I really related to the avoidant character as well.

Eric Zimmer  17:15

Yeah, you more or less described the way I am in relationship, if I’m not bringing a lot of consciousness to it, which is, if you are attached to me, I’m going to run away. On the other hand, if you’re not attached to me, I’m going to chase you. But there’s going to be a certain amount of distance between us either way. And, yeah, right, just whichever way you move, I’m going to move the opposite way Exactly. It’s just perverse. I guess, perverse makes it sound like it’s a willful thing. It’s just baked into me. Now I’ve become very conscious of it, and I’m better able to work with it than I used to be. But that pattern, you know, haunted all my relationships until this one, yeah, if somebody

Catherine Gray  17:52

was really into me and they were like, I want this, you know, I want to get married and have kids with you, that there was nothing more likely to turn me off. I’ve had some psychologists describe it to me really brilliantly, and she said it’s like a box dance where you know, like you said, you always maintain that distance, so if somebody steps towards you, you step away. Yeah, and that just carries on and on and on and on until you finally break the pattern by being aware of those urges and impulses and trying to counter them. And I’m now engaged to a long term partner. We have a child together. We have a house, and he skews avoidant, and I’ve just sort of accepted that’s my fate. You know, I am destined to end up with avoidance. But thankfully, he is aware of being avoidant, and I’m very aware that that tweaks my anxious side so but it doesn’t mean that it’s not without challenges. It presents many challenges as dynamic, so we have to work with that constantly and be aware of it.

Eric Zimmer  18:53

Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that is, as you said, you know the pattern. I know my pattern, it doesn’t stop the feeling coming up, yeah, of wanting to pull away or wanting to grasp that still emerges within me. It’s just, as you said, I have most of the time enough awareness to go, Okay, hang on. That’s just, you know, an old pattern, and it’s similar to how we learn to work with not drinking early on, right? The desire to drink emerges, but we learn how to handle it differently, although I will say it is different in the sense that, at least for most people who are in long term recovery, the desire to drink or use just disappears, kind of vanishes, but the feelings that caused us to want to do that don’t, yeah,

Catherine Gray  19:40

that’s absolutely true. I think what happens is you just learn to deal with them in other ways. That’s maybe why it fades into complete obscurity, because you’ve actually just assembled a whole new toolbox of things that you do instead of drinking. And I’m now 11 years sober. I just turned 11 at the weekend. Yes, and I honestly never miss it, crave it, want it. It doesn’t even occur to me now, no matter what is going on in my life, like when I was talking about that postpartum rage that I experienced, my hand never itched for a drink, because that’s just not part of my coping strategy toolbox now, so I have just so many other ways that I deal with that. And yeah, it does fade, and it’s lovely.

Eric Zimmer  20:24

Yeah, yeah, I’m in Amsterdam right now, and I was a heavy marijuana smoker in my using days. I loved it. It was up there with alcohol. And I’ve been getting used to this over the last few years, as it’s become legal in parts of the US also, because with alcohol, I just became immune to it, because it was all around me all the time. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  20:47

it’s omnipresent. You literally can’t get away from it. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about how the legalization of marijuana could affect people who are in recovery from addiction from marijuana, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  20:57

because all of a sudden it’s showing up. Yeah, again, in a way that it hadn’t before. It also has the allure of, sometimes what a new drink will have to somebody who’s in recovery, like, oh, I never got to try that drink, right? It’s like, oh, there’s all these different types of weed I could try, and I could just go shopping for it. So even with that, though, my point in bringing that up is I walk by pot stores all the time here in Amsterdam, and it smells like weed outside of all of them. And I just have, it’s a flicker. It’s just a flicker of a like, Hmm, I used to like that, and then it just kind of dies away, you know? And it’s so minor, but it’s weird to see it occasionally brought up. I imagine it’s what would happen to me if suddenly they start selling heroin on street corners. I’d probably that that long dormant part of me would probably be like, Well, hold on, you know, like, I still won’t watch any sort of, like, needle being used in any way in a movie or on me. I, you know, close my eyes. I just, I don’t want to see it because it’s triggering. Yeah, that’s

Catherine Gray  21:57

so interesting. I’ve never thought about that. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons that with alcohol, you do have to become immune to the constant marketing and presence of it, because it is just everywhere. Even, you know, every single social event is the centerpiece of it, yeah? And so you’re sort of thrown into the fire. I’ve never thought about that, yeah, what an interesting way of thinking about it.

Eric Zimmer  22:41

We talked about nature versus nurture a little bit earlier. Let’s talk about nature versus nurture in the creation of addiction. Well, I

Catherine Gray  22:53

have done a lot of research on this for previous books, so I’m just going to quote you some of the studies that I’ve seen and things that experts have told me, but it’s quite commonly known that if one of your parents is addicted, then you are four times more likely to grow up to encounter addiction yourself. And what’s less commonly known is that the chart topping predisposition to later addiction is a traumatic childhood and when we think of trauma, we think of very extreme events, but actually childhood trauma includes things like just being routinely insulted by A caregiver, or moving house a lot, or bearing witness to a caregivers addiction, whether it’s a step parent or your actual parent. And so a lot of us would actually qualify for childhood trauma, and we don’t think we do. So there’s a test. It’s a really interesting test. It’s the A, C, E test, right? Yep, that you can look up and find out if you would fall under that umbrella. And so that seems to suggest that nurture, more than nature, is the thing that sort of activates addiction within and I think it often takes grip in adolescence, which is one of the reasons why I made phone 14, because I think that’s when it’s activated that because that’s often when we pick up alcohol or whatever other drug we later become addicted to, and that’s when it really sort of get teeth and claws into us. And there’s also very compelling evidence that shows that if you pick up young, which I did I was 12, so if you pick up before the age of 15, I think it is, you are again four times more likely to later become addicted. Because it makes sense. Our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re 25 so if we are drinking routinely to medicate anxiety or whatever other emotion. In our early teens, then we’re going to become more attached to it,

Eric Zimmer  25:03

right? We just have more time for our brain to alter in the negative ways that alcohol or drugs alter the brain. Yeah, and I know this question was of particular interest to you as you were about to have a child, and it certainly was of great interest to me, unbelievably, 2526 years ago, that my son was born because his mother and I were both heroin addicts. So it was this, like, are we birthing a destined to be an addict child? So talk to me about that for you, you know, from a personal sense, well,

Catherine Gray  25:38

that was one of the reasons that I arrived at motherhood so late, because in my 30s now I know so I thought I don’t want to have a child. So from the ages of 33 to 39 if you’d asked me, I would have said, No, that’s not for me. But when I had a lot of therapy around my own childhood, I realized that the reason I didn’t want to have a child was because I thought I was going to be a terrible parent and B that I was going to birth a child that was pre destined to become an addict, and therefore I would be subjected to that terrible ordeal of watching the person love the most go through what you’ve been through, and knowing that you can’t really do anything to help until they ask for help. So a lot of that research is what informed my decision to then become a parent. And I was very lucky that I was able to in my 40s, and now I feel much more at peace. My daughter does have a higher chance, but it’s not as simple as you’re just four times more likely to become addicted. You inherit characteristics that can predispose you to addiction, so things like anxiety, introversion, but also spontaneity and extroversion, I believe. So those characteristics you can inherit them, and therefore it depends on the home environment as to where those characteristics lead you. So that’s the way I see it now, and I’ve made all these promises to her that she’s completely unaware of because she’s doing in that I will always endeavor to make her feel safe. That was the word that my research kept coming back to, was feeling safe. That is the way that you can give your child the best possible start. And that doesn’t necessarily look like a nuclear family that stays in one town forever more with a white picket fence and a Labrador, you know, right? That doesn’t necessarily look like that, but certainly so if you look at my childhood, we moved seven times before I was 18, and I was adjacent to three very acrimonious breakups, and so that didn’t make me feel say, yeah. And so there’s lots of things that, but it doesn’t necessarily like I say mean that I will stay with my partner forever, or I will stay where I live now, it’s just that I will be much more conscious of the impact that it could have on her, that inconsistency. So no matter what I do, I will try and provide an environment that isn’t hostile, because that’s something that I experience and but I’m not going to be perfect. That’s another thing you just have to reconcile. Yeah, life is going to throw me all these curveballs, and there are going to be choices that I make that are imperfect as a parent. That’s just how it is, but as much as possible, I want to point myself in that direction.

Eric Zimmer  28:39

Yeah, it’s a beautiful intention. My son is, as I mentioned, much older, and I guess that you know, you never know. But up till now, he shows no signs of addiction that the way I describe it, he doesn’t have the desperate personality I did, right? Yeah, even my teen years before I started using, there was just a desperation about me that he’s just never seemed to have, and so I think we hopefully did okay. But his mom and I split when he was two and a half, right, like she fell in love with somebody else. I mean, I ended up being far and away the stable parent, which blows my mind that anybody would apply that to me, given the fact that, you know, when I had him, I was three years off being a heroin addict. So for now, he seems okay. That must be so satisfying to see it is. And, you know, I think the satisfying thing for me is I don’t believe by any way, shape or form, I did it perfectly. There’s some things I can look at and be like, Oh, boy. I wish they could do a do over on some of that. And I know that at every age I’ve looked at him, I’ve been able to say he is more mentally and emotionally well than I was at that age.

Catherine Gray  29:50

But you are modeling for him that a person can be very happy without any drug, yeah, of any type. So that has a. Massive impact on a child, and something that I try and do with my daughter every night, I’ve read this research that says it’s really good for them to do we have a dance party. And when I was teen, I would describe myself as very buttoned up. I was very tense and very anxious. And when I discovered alcohol, I was like, this is the answer. This is the magic solution to my constant feeling that I’m almost locked within my body and I can’t let go and I I’m really quiet, and I can’t express myself, and I can’t dance or talk to people that I fancy or whatever I wanted to do when I was a teen. And I try and model that with my daughter by throwing myself around the kitchen like a total loon to try and show her and to encourage her to have that lack of inhibition that made me feel like I needed something in order to disinhibit. Yeah, yeah, your son has had the most incredible role model in that in

Eric Zimmer  31:01

some respects, the other thing that we did is his mother and I, you know, started talking to him as early as it seemed like he could actually understand what we are talking about, about the fact that we were both addicts, and how destructive it was to our lives, and the fact that, given that he is the child of that he is more predisposed to it, and so he should approach substances with more caution than the average person would. Yeah, I don’t think it stopped him from experimenting, but I do think there was an idea in his mind of like, okay, I need to be a little more careful here.

Catherine Gray  31:36

Yeah, I think that’s so important. I do remember having a chat with my father along those lines as well, but it was too late by that point. Yeah, and I was 17, and I remember us going, I remember it so clearly as well. I was going for a walk on the beach, and he clearly clocked that I had a growing addiction to alcohol already. I was so shabby, hung over, I could barely talk. And he said to me, you know, 20 or so, or whatever he was at the time actually would have been more like 10. And so you have a greater likelihood so just to be aware of that, you need to be careful with alcohol. But by that point, I was fully in Yeah, and I thought, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, it will be different for me.

32:27

I will be able to outside it, unlike you. And no,

Catherine Gray  32:33

yeah, yeah. So I think it’s great that you got that message in early, and I will allow my daughter to read my books whenever she’s you know, probably very young

Eric Zimmer  32:46

as we look at the two girls, they have their own different set of problems. You alluded to this a little bit before, but the one who takes on the name flick grows up in a very wealthy London home, and I find it interesting because you talk about how self obsessed she becomes with her appearance, which she gets largely from her mother. And it was just striking how well you wrote about how uncomfortable that is.

Catherine Gray  33:17

Yeah, I think that’s something that a lot of women of my generation grow up with. But again, it’s everyone, isn’t it? You know, everyone’s surrounded with images of perfection, and that’s now being countered by a lot of different sorts of images. But I certainly I remember taking two hours to get ready for college. I mean, that’s and if I was having a bad hair day or a bad skin day, I just wouldn’t go even though I was obsessed with learning the type of college student that would hand in extra essays. And my tutor was like, What are you doing? I don’t want to mark these extra essays. We’ve got enough to do that. Something that was paramount to my self esteem was looking perfect or as perfect as I could, and so I poured a lot of that into flick, because I do think that relates to that whole love addiction, anxiously attached feeling like your outsides have to be as flawless as possible in order to be accepted as a person. Oh my gosh. I do not miss those days. I mean, I constantly carried around this little magnifying mirror and would check my face before I met anyone, just in case there was anything in their teeth or anything out of place. And now I couldn’t be more different. I just basically only put makeup on for press events or whatever. So it’s so nice when you break free of that.

Eric Zimmer  34:38

Yeah, I interviewed somebody recently. She wrote a book called boy mom, and it was about raising boys, and she takes a similar approach to how you described your books, which are, there’s a thread of memoir in it, and then there’s a lot of journalistic research, right? And one of the things that she found was that more and more boys are taking on that. Oh, I can imagine which I mean, for me, I mean, I feel like I had it from the very beginning. I said to her in the interview, you know, comic books I used to read had the Charles Atlas comics in them. Charles Atlas was a bodybuilding system, and basically it showed like this skinny kid on a beach getting beat up or pushed around, and then he goes and buys the Charles Atlas comics gets big and bulky and strong, and now all the women love him. And so, I mean, even for a boy that was marketed so young to me,

Catherine Gray  35:29

yeah, now I’m thinking about all the superhero stories, and with boys, it was often if you have muscles, then everything will be solved. Yes,

Eric Zimmer  35:36

yep, yep. It’s a thing we all wrestle with, and it is good to see more body positivity things coming out. I still think it’s a long way to go, but it’s some progress. There’s a particularly telling part in the book where you’re describing Fern slash flick, the one girl who split into two her mother, and in the story, her mom kind of gives her up at like, age four. Is that about the time it is, or age seven,

Catherine Gray  36:05

six and a half? Seven? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  36:07

yep. So she just basically says to her dad, here, take her and the book starts to explore her experience up to that point. Yeah, definitely, the mother’s experience. And there’s a particularly telling part where, in my notes, I title it the mother Inquisition, which you write about, like, did you have a natural birth? Did you have pain relief? Are you breastfeeding? You know? Are you swaddling enough? Are you reading to her? All these ways that we like interrogate mothers to make sure they’re doing the right thing. Where did that come from? Personal Experience

Catherine Gray  36:42

entirely, because I found that when I was pregnant, and also, I would say it’s fallen off now, but I’ve curated my life so that I’m less exposed to it. I’m not in touch with any sort of NCT group or anything like that. NCT is in the UK. It’s something that you go to when you’re pregnant, and you meet lots of other parents, okay, also in the same stage of the process as you now, I actually ended up because I did feel there’s just so many messages when you’re pregnant that your body is no longer your own, and people feel entitled to a pine all over your pregnant body, and you’re told to do things and not do other things, and eat this and don’t eat that, and stop running or keep running. And you know, everyone seems to have an opinion, and that then continues into the early years, where lots of people interrogating you as to how you’re doing it and whether you’re going to use baby rice and start weaning it four months, or whether you go up to six months or, you know, and often the only right answer is the answer that you give that matches how they did

Eric Zimmer  37:54

it exactly, exactly. So

Catherine Gray  37:57

I did some things that were potentially controversial, like I co slept once my baby was big enough, and I breastfed for a lot longer than some people would. I did it until she runs. I’m still doing it and she’s over two, yeah. So I really found that in order to stay sane, you just have to detach from all of that, which is one of the reasons why I actually ended up leaving the NCT Whatsapp group that I was a part of, because I really felt myself being drawn into that. And you just have to go off instinct and make your own decisions and say, okay, yeah, thanks for the advice, and then do whatever you want to do. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  38:36

yeah. There’s so much of it. There’s so much of it. I remember we parented Jordan similarly, the way you’re describing like he slept with us and he breastfed for much longer. And people told me over and over, you’ll never get him out of your bed. He’ll never learn to sleep, right? You know? And there just came a time where all of a sudden it just seemed like it was the right natural time, and he went off to his own bed, and everything was fine, yeah. And you made the joke there, and you made it in the book, which is the only acceptable answer is the one that you did. You know, like when you’re asking somebody, because I think we’re all insecure about the choices we make as parents, and so when somebody’s doing something different, we read that as, oh, I didn’t do it right, yeah, which we then turn on its head and make it you’re doing it wrong in order so that we don’t feel wrong. Yeah, we

Catherine Gray  39:23

like people to match us, and so whenever I’m talking to parents to be or new parents, I try my absolute best to just keep my mouth shut unless they ask me directly for advice. Yeah, then I will give it, but I will very much positive in the context of this worked for us. Yeah, every parent and every child is different, so that seems to be the way around it is to remember that you are an individual who had a very individual experience, and everyone’s going to have a different way. Thank.

Eric Zimmer  40:18

That advice giving or thinking that the way you did it is the way everyone should do it also applies to recovery, right? Yeah, we see this again and again. Unfortunately, it most often comes out of people who are in 12 step traditions, insisting that everybody do it their way, although there is an equally large group of people who insist that 12 step programs are garbage. But it’s this, here’s how I did it. It’s the only way to do it, which is patently insane. Yeah, I know

Catherine Gray  40:46

that rhetoric, and I think it comes from all paths of recovery, the you know, this is how I did it. So this is the right way, and that’s why I actively rail against it in all of my writing about addiction and recovery, I just say there is no one way, and you just need to try everything and work out what fits you best. It entirely depends on you as a person and your internal beliefs. Like for instance, I discovered having left 12 step that one of the reasons it didn’t fit with me, even though I learned a lot there in the six months that I was there, I innately knew that I would need to move away from it in order to continue was because I have something called an internal locus of control, and I’ve since been told by a therapist, and that means that I don’t feel comfortable when I’m sort of making things dependent on external influences, even though I know that the higher power doesn’t necessarily have to be a theistic, you know, bearded God as you know it can be a god as you understand them. I literally don’t believe in any sort of like force of good out there, which is a bit depressing, actually. I literally believe, you know, we’re bored, we die, and that’s it, and there’s no sort of unseen force looking after me. So I found that I continually butted up against that aspect of the program, and I was having to contort myself quite a lot to sort of fit in with it. And so I just found other ways and but I would never presume to tell anyone that My way was the right way, because I really believe that every recovery path is different, even if it does follow a traditional mode. I do believe it’s always slightly different, even if it looks the same. And so, yeah, people just have to find their own way. There is no one way, right,

Eric Zimmer  42:41

right? There absolutely isn’t. And I think we’ve gotten to a place where more and more people are acknowledging that thankfully, you know, I ran into some of the same challenges in AA, although it saved my life twice, so I’m extraordinarily grateful to it where I eventually felt like the contortions I was having to do to translate everything just got to be a bit much for me. There were some other challenges I had also that had to do with how what being an alcoholic meant to me and what it seemed to mean to a lot of people in 12 step programs, and those increasingly diverged as I got better. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  43:19

I found that too things like I would no longer refer to myself as an alcoholic. Now I do if I’m in circles where that’s the term that everyone uses, but about four years sober, I let that term fall away, and I did it very quietly, because I was a bit scared to be honest, I had internalized the belief that if I did allow that turn to fall away, then I would slip into denial and start thinking I could moderate again. But for me, two things co exist. I no longer believe I’m addicted to alcohol, but I also believe that if I were to pick up again, I would very quickly become addicted to alcohol. And so I approach it in a very neuroscientific way. So I believe that the path in my brain that was addicted to alcohol does still exist, even though it’s disused and, you know, overgrown, and it’s more of a trail that’s been forgotten through some woods, whereas once it was a six lane highway, yeah, yeah, but it does still exist there. So I will never drink again. I will never believe that I couldn’t moderate because I don’t believe I can. But equally, I do not feel like I am currently addicted to alcohol. So it doesn’t feel right for me to call myself an alcoholic these days, that I’m 11 years sober.

Eric Zimmer  44:37

Yeah, I think I still refer to myself as an alcoholic and addict, but I do it because it’s just a shorthand for me of saying something similar to what you just said, Yeah, I clearly am not addicted to alcohol, because I haven’t used it. I haven’t used a mind altering chemical in 15 years, so I’m clearly not addicted. I like the neuro scientific thing, because the other. There danger. This is the thought that sometimes gets in my brain, and it is the one that says, Well, sure, you use drugs and alcohol because you didn’t know how to cope with the world, but now you know how to cope with the world. So perhaps, and that’s what got me, after eight years of sobriety, back to drinking. It was that exact line of thinking. You’ve done all this work, you’ve done all this recovery, you make good decisions in all aspects of your life. I make sure it’ll be fine. And of course, it wasn’t. And so for me, I just basically stay with a risk reward calculus, which is the reward, if it went right, would be that a time or two a week I got a slight buzz on that would be the reward at best. The risk is everything, right? The risk is my entire life, and I’m just like, well, that’s a crazy trade. Like, I wouldn’t do that for anything else. If somebody was like, Well, you know, twice a week you could come here and you could play this game and you’d be happy for an hour, but you’re betting at the same time that if that doesn’t go right, I’ll take everything you own. I’d be, like, that’s a crazy bet. Like, no, like, that’s not, that’s another terrible so that’s kind of where I am. But I love your neuro scientific idea too, that that pathway still exists. And yeah, because that was my experience after being sober eight years and picking up and using again, was it wasn’t immediate. I didn’t immediately go back. I never went back to using heroin, but over the course of a couple years, I ended up just as sick as I had been in the first place. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  46:37

and I really do believe that would happen to me, and what you were just saying about the risk reward analysis really reminds me of that recovery saying that using or drinking is temporary fun with permanent consequences. Oh, yeah, I love that, and I think about that a lot. And also it’s the addictive voice. So I also use something called addictive voice recognition back in the early years now. Now my addictive voice is non existent. I don’t hear it. But if that voice were to pipe up, the voice saying, but you’re, you know, it’s been 11 years, surely you could just maybe have one or two. I’d be like, No, I know what that voice is, and that is just my addiction, yeah, in a different form, because it will take so many different, wily, conniving, you know, there’s that thing about it being cunning and powerful it is. So I would shut that down immediately. There’s a nuance there. Even though, in the right circles, I would use the term addict and alcoholic, yeah, because I’m not against those terms. It’s just that ordinarily, I would describe myself as an ex at it that feels more accurate to where I’m at. Yep,

Eric Zimmer  47:43

there’s a line in the book where flick, which is the version that moves to the rich London home, has a friend named Sita. Is that how you would pronounce it? Yeah, that’s right. And Sita accuses her of being manipulative. And flick says, Well, what do you mean? Manipulative? And she says, you know, massaging the narrative for your own means, and I’m reading what you said. Flick didn’t understand why that would even warrant comment. Wasn’t that what everyone did, wasn’t that just being good at life.

Catherine Gray  48:14

This came directly from my own experience, because I recall I was probably one year out from sobriety, one of my friends saying that I had become very, very manipulative. And similarly to flick, I didn’t even understand what the word meant. I couldn’t wrap my head around the word because I just had assumed that everyone did, that everyone manipulated the narrative, and tried to control how other people saw them, and tried to get the best results for them. So I’m still manipulative. Now I know that I have that in me, because it was so much a part of me first 33 years of my life, and I do often have to stand back and think, Okay, what am I trying to gain here. Am I withholding parts of information in order to make people think about me a certain way? And I really have to pull myself back and just be straight down the line, and, you know, counter that manipulative urge that I want to go with all the

Eric Zimmer  49:16

time. Yeah, the problem is that if none of that is as straightforward as just drink or don’t drink, right? Because we all are, to some degree, even without knowing it, controlling the narrative that we tell ourselves. I mean, the way we present to the world, like that, is kind of baked into us, and there’s a subtle form of it that I recognized in later years, right? There was the obvious manipulation, where I’m manipulating something to get what I want, right? Yeah, but there’s another type of manipulation, which is that I’m trying to control your emotional response. That’s

Catherine Gray  49:53

it that really hits the nail on the head. I think for that reason, sometimes I will. Protects. And then I will delete it, because I know that I am trying to admit a certain response from the person that I’m texting. And then I will bring it back, and I will remove information that is, you know, designed to evoke pity or admiration or whatever it is, you know, my manipulative author he has come up with, and I just keep it as straight as possible, for want of a better word, and that’s how I fight against it. Yeah, I do think all of us have the capacity to be manipulative, and being aware of it is just half of the battle, really.

Eric Zimmer  50:38

As you were saying that, it made me laugh a little bit. I was thinking in my mind like this being thoughtful means that I have to retype texts and emails over and, oh, like, you know, I write it out, and I’m like, hang on, let me I need to think about, you know, it’s just funny. But the subtle nuance of this that I even realized was that I was manipulating people with quote, unquote good intentions, because I would think they can’t handle what I’m going to say or what I’m going to say to them, is going to make them upset, and I don’t want them to be upset. Yeah, it’s a whole nother level of withholding honesty, which in certain situations, I think actually makes a lot of sense. And in other situations, if you’re trying to be intimate and close with people, is a terrible idea.

Catherine Gray  51:27

Yeah, it really is, because that leads to resentment. Because if you’re not being honest with people how you feel, then you’re running the danger of nurturing resentment. So it’s really hard, though I know exactly what you mean, and I like to be as nice as possible. But also have people think, well, of me, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  51:47

of course. Yeah. So there’s another great line in the book where you’re talking about flick where she realizes she’s a people pleaser, like she desperately wants to please people, but she has the unfortunate habit of displeasing people. Time, yeah, personal experience, yeah, definitely,

Catherine Gray  52:05

personal experience. I promise the entire book is an autobiography. Just the lines that you’re plucking out are really, are really just things that I’ve experienced. That is one of the things that I think is so true of people who come into recovery, and just people in general, is that so many of us intend to be or are driven to people pleasing, and then we accidentally end up people displeasing, because actually, it doesn’t really work. It just ends up going very, very wrong. And so that’s something that I fight against on daily basis as well. It’s a lifelong battle there.

Eric Zimmer  52:41

What I’ve found is the longer I sort of, I never know what to call it. I don’t really like the phrase, the longer I’m on my journey, or the deeper I go into trying to be the best version of myself, maybe that’s the best way to say it. The deeper I go into that, the more subtleties I see that 10 years ago, I would never have seen, I never would have thought of that way in which I am, you know, not being the best version of myself. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  53:07

it’s so true. And I continually have a problem with my relationship with the word no, and I really have to work on that, especially with from a work point of view, because I want people to like me, and therefore I say yes to far too much, and then I burn out. So it’s something that I do battle with very regular basis.

Eric Zimmer  53:31

I wrestle with this a little bit too, and some of it is that I don’t want to say no to people. The other thing that drives it, and I don’t know if this is part of it for you, but when you’re like you, you’re an author, right? You make your living by people buying your things, right? So when people ask you to do something, it’s often the reason you do it is because you’re getting your stuff in front of other people. And so there’s certainly a I don’t want to say no to people, but then there’s also, in my case, a fear, like, I can’t turn down any opportunity. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  54:01

a fear of becoming irrelevant. Yes, yes, they’re all going away. Have to go and work in tefca on the counter. You know, every creative has that fear, because they’ve often worked so hard to get where they are right, and spent so many years. I mean, I’ve spent many years doing second jobs and scrambling to get by, and it’s only really in the last few years that things have really come together. So there is a constant alarm, but it might all disappear overnight just because you’ve said no to coming on one event.

Eric Zimmer  54:37

You didn’t go to that one place you were asked to speak where there were six people and it just it tanked your entire career late in the book. This quote from Carl Jung that goes something like, we are not what has happened to us comes up and one of the characters reacts fairly strongly to that idea. Say more. Yeah.

Catherine Gray  54:58

So the exact quote is. Something like we are not what has happened to us. We are what we choose to become. And I take some serious umbrage to the first part of that quote, that we’re not what’s happened to us, and so does the character in the book flick, because I think that’s naive, right? I really don’t think that you can erase the first 18 years of your life or whatever, and start afresh and decide who you’re going to become now that you’re an adult, and you’re supposedly sort of free of your childhood and your parental influence, because I just don’t think that ever the case. I mean, we now know. We now know so much more about it. We know that the body stores early experiences and the nervous system reacts before we do consciously, and that’s why often we have outsized reactions to things, because they remind us of the childhood wound and all that sort of thing. So I do really think that in order to move past that and start to be able to choose who you become, you really have to go deep and do the work at the risk of sounds like a cliche. Otherwise, if you don’t have the awareness of why you say, for instance, react in an outsized way, if somebody delays responding to your message and knowing why that hurts, you can’t choose your reaction. So I do see it in so many people that I think in our 20s, we often just sort of ricochet around in reaction to our childhood and often repeat our parents mistakes, or go too far the other way and go the polar opposite. And it’s only really in our 30s, 40s and beyond that, we begin to be able to choose who we’re going to become, and make more conscious decisions about the person we want to be and how we want to parent. So it was something that I really wanted to sum up in the book, and I feel satisfied that I have, yeah, I

Eric Zimmer  56:57

think so. I was walking down the street the other day and I saw a quote on a card from Jack Kerouac, and I don’t remember it exactly, but it said something like, nothing behind me and everything ahead of me about being on the road. And I was like, Well, no, not exactly. Like, no, we are a result of the countless causes and conditions that have come together to make us who we are today. Yeah, you can’t unwind that far enough, right? Even if you start to go, Well, I think I might be this way. We’re just making it up to a certain degree. Am I that way because my mom did this? Or am I that way because Johnny in third grade punched me over a juice box? Or do I think that because some musician I loved when I was 14 said, I mean, it’s just this. Can’t sort it out. Yeah, you can make some attempts to see what some of the big things were, but we never really know fully. No,

Catherine Gray  57:48

we don’t, but I think there is a middle ground to be found. So something that I do tend to do is I’ve been in and out of therapy. I’ve done therapy really three big times in my life, but I’ve always had an end in sight, and for me, I don’t want to stay in forever, because I do think that there is a happy medium to be found between it’s that bumper sticker don’t look that you’re not going that way. You do need to look at that, but then you also need to go that way. Yes. So I think both can be true, that what has come behind us, you know, we’ve already been through, doesn’t form where we go. But then also that there is a point where you’ve done enough work on it that you can really start to choose your own trajectory.

Eric Zimmer  58:36

Can we use the line near the end of the book to sum that up, or is that too much, I

Catherine Gray  58:41

think we can So towards the end of the book, this isn’t too much of a spoiler, because there’s plenty in the book that isn’t surprised with lots of twists and turns, you know, the murder mystery and another big reveal. But towards the end of the book, one of the versions of her flick rewrites that Carl young quote, and it becomes we are what had happened to us, but now I choose who I become, and if anything could sum up my motto for life, it would be that I think that’s

Eric Zimmer  59:09

a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Catherine, it’s always such a pleasure to have you on I can’t recommend the new book highly enough. I’ve loved all your writing, but this novel, I was so excited I just read it, and was one of those I didn’t want to put it down, kind of books from start to end. So bravo.

Catherine Gray  59:25

Thank you.