The New York Public Library



Mary-Louise Parker | Mary Karr

November 9, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. (applause) Good evening. Good evening. My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal at the library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate.

It is a pleasure to welcome Mary-Louise Parker—to welcome her back. She was here with Ryan Adams some years back, and Mary Karr for the first but I hope not last time to be LIVE from the New York Public Library. After the event, which will last about as long as a psychoanalytical session if your shrink is generous, they will both sign their books. Upcoming two more events. Next week, I will be interviewing Edmund de Waal. You may remember he wrote a magnificent book called The Hare with Amber Eyes, and now he’s written a book about the mysteries of whiteness in the form of porcelain. Then in December the Robert Silvers Lecture will be delivered this year by Helen Vendler.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation for their fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library tenth anniversary. To celebrate, the Ford Foundation will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar. When you give, you’ll help make sure we continue to engage New Yorkers in conversations that contribute to and enrich the cultural discourse. Please consider giving with the pledge cards you will find on your way out. Additionally, I want to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

Essayist Mary Karr knows about writing a life. Her new book, The Art of Memoir, is an elegant exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms. Tonight, she’s joined by actress Mary-Louise Parker, whose unconventional memoir in letters, Dear Mr. You, was described by Karr as “pants-pissingly funny” and “a magnificent necessary surprise for reflection on the genre.”

As many of you know, for the last seven or eight years I’ve asked my guests to provide me with a biography of themselves in seven words. Seven words that may or may not describe them, a haiku of sorts or if you’re very modern a tweet. (laughter) Mary-Louise Parker submitted these seven words to me: “I’m not dead yet. Don’t make me.” (laughter) Mary Karr submitted these seven words to me: “Bestselling memoirist, award-winning poet, black belt sinner.” Please welcome them.

(applause)

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: There are actual humans out there!

MARY KARR: I asked Mary-Louise to begin by reading. Well, there are so many sections of the book she could have started with. This is “Dear Doctor,” I hope, is that right?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: This is towards the end. This is the end of the letter of the doctor who saved my life. He may be sitting next to you, I have no idea.

I got to watch people try to save a life. I felt mine pulled away and back in spurts of protest and compliance. From a completely different vantage point, I got to measure a length of mortality against that infinite question mark. Best of all, there is a small but distinct category of negative thought that I abandoned somewhere when I realized I only had the strength to hold so much and something had to go. I can’t decide where existence lies or barely dangles, and Doctor, maybe you don’t know either, but I can tell you I am humbled by the second chance.

I don’t know what death is, but I am 100 percent clear on what it isn’t. It isn’t my daughter refusing to try on a pair of shoes while the salesman admonishes me for buying her the wrong insoles and then leaving the store furious as my daughter says, “I want you to know I support you 100 percent. Can today be the day I start drinking coffee?” It also isn’t the dog digging a pack of gum out of my purse and chewing it, then peeing on the gum wrappers and crawling in my lap, making me forget to hate her. It isn’t having the door handle to my office break off in my hand when I realize my only keys are in there and then remembering that, oh yeah, these are luxurious problems.

It isn’t having too much to do and wanting to scream, and it isn’t screaming. It might be poetry, but it isn’t sitting and hearing it read by my son. It isn’t him giving a standing ovation for the actor with the smallest part, or my daughter confessing that she lied and then doing a cartwheel. It isn’t getting a whole e-mail in ESL from my niece and not caring that it’s politically incorrect because I laugh so hard while reading it that I actually cry tears. It isn’t Antiques Roadshow after sex for the sixth time while the sheets threaten to disintegrate. It isn’t me listening to my children breathe at night and that being enough to want to keep my heart pumping blood.

That one, mine, was not the only heart you saved. Sure, they might have used their loss of their mother to fuel them in life toward a greater purpose, or maybe it would have been so damaging that they’d never fully come back. Thanks to you I don’t have to watch either of those scenarios play out while perched on a cloud fighting with God to let me intercede or spend eternity aching to at least become the quivering sunbeam that lands on them one morning when they roll out of bed aged twenty-five.

As my friend Father Bob says, “Medicine can be more art than science.” I believe the best doctors are a particular category of artists with the creator’s instinct to throw something on a canvas and start expanding, which must come down to divinity and the ability to judge what would bleed well into what. It was too scary for me to face, my body giving me warnings of being so screamingly temporary. I wonder how often we are being nudged but we turn away. We find a place to jettison all of it or hand it to someone and say, “Here, please, organize this for me, I can’t stand it.” It would be eerie if those warnings lingered somewhere, the sound of them. “Run home.” “Don’t answer the door.” “Walk away from him now.” What if that lasted? If only I knew what last meant.

There is no now, my father would say, banging his cane on the floor on the word “now.” As soon as you say the word, it’s already in the past. When is it? There isn’t one. This is the only moment and it is already past. The only things suspending time are children and cross-country travel. Not even all our stars are moving, that was light-years ago, it’s only us here, dying as slowly as we can.

(applause)

MARY KARR: Wow. Is there another section you’re going to read now? Or no?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I was going to read I guess later towards the end when everybody is bored.

MARY KARR: Okay, we’ll save it, we’ll save it and savor it.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Something lighter. Lighter than death.

MARY KARR: Actually, we’re done now. That was it, that was the whole event. You know, I reread your book today, it’s like the fourth time I’ve read it. I didn’t intend to reread it, I intended to skim it. And what people don’t know about Mary-Louise is she reads a lot of poetry, so there’s a lot of poetry in the book. But it starts with gratitude, “To you who can fix my screen door, my attitude, and open most jars. To you who codifies, slams a puck, builds a decent cabinet or the perfect sandwich. You, sir, you took my order, my pulse, my bullshit.”

Were you a daddy’s girl?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I still am daddy’s girl. That’s a terminal condition, really. That one doesn’t stop.

MARY KARR: You don’t die from it, though.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, hopefully not. I think it’s funny that you mention poetry and gratitude in the same sentence like that, because I was rereading your book, Devil’s Tour, and I was struck by the way you said poetry never left you stranded, and I feel that’s what I always got from poetry, feeling that if you’re someone who grew up—and people tend to roll your eyes if you’re an actress and you say that you were a loner, but you’ll just have to take my word for it, or you can talk to whoever went to my high school. If you grew up or at all were someone who ever felt lonely or isolated or, you know, separate, there’s something about the distilled experience in the spray of words like on the page that just, for me it made me feel less alone in a way that movies didn’t or not even necessarily fiction sometimes.

MARY KARR: But you read poetry, am I wrong, almost exclusively. Like, you read more poetry than scripts. Fiction, nonfiction.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I try not to read too many scripts, yeah. I read poetry mostly. I do read other things. I love short stories, I love Edna O’Brien and Deborah Eisenberg. But I do read an awful lot of poetry, yeah.

MARY KARR: Why do you think every, this book for those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a kind of love poem to the masculine, involving fathers, grandfathers, sons, daughters of people, a guy named Tarzan who wears a loincloth, and I don’t think you actually dated, there was something going on there. Why is everybody so mad at boys?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Thank you.

MARY KARR: I mean, actually, we know why they’re mad at boys. Why shouldn’t they be? Here’s one now.

(laughter)

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Show us your stuff. I feel like if I was going to write a book about the masculine and men, I mean, who, in the end, who loves men more than me? Maybe. We can go to the mat about that one later. Yeah, I do love men, and I was raised by this extraordinary man, and I was lucky enough to meet these men throughout my life who—with little maybe what might be forgotten gestures, or even relationships or moments that loomed kind of heroic for me in my life. You know, the boy that I didn’t really, I didn’t know his name, that I saw in the hospital.

MARY KARR: “Dear Big Feet.” “Dear Big Feet.”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: “Dear Big Feet.” Yeah, I do have an appreciation for what is male, despite being almost again terminally female myself in many ways, almost tragically so. But I do love men and I have spent a good deal of my life trying to figure out why I was forfeiting parts of myself in exchange for that, a certain kind of attention from them.

MARY KARR: Give me an example of that.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: An example of that? Oh, God, well, I just happen to have several hundred of those right here.

MARY KARR: Available to you for a pittance.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I think—I think—My friend, I think this is the book, Joe, when he first saw me in college he used to call me “the girl without a spine,” because I was always draped on some guy, you know? And I think it came from being such a wallflower that once I was out of my cage and I found that—I figured out how that one worked, I wanted to play with that toy all the time, and I didn’t want to let go of it and I wanted this one and that—it was just sort of an insatiable thing that wasn’t always entirely only sexual or romantic either.

Suddenly when I was at college I suddenly had all these gay male friends that I never had in high school. In Arizona, nobody was out of the closet when I was in high school. Suddenly they wanted to borrow my pantyhose and do their makeup and I was like, I was in heaven, that was like a whole different side of men that I didn’t know, which is also reflected in the book.

MARY KARR: Mary-Louise has at one point very early in the book one of my favorite hitchhiking signs of all time: “Marin County, please. We’ve read Sartre.”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: It worked really quickly, because when you’re just outside of Berkeley—

MARY KARR: That’s how you get picked up?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: It worked really fast and I was in fact reading Sartre.

MARY KARR: But you had to hide the boys.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: They pushed me out on the corner by the off-ramp and made me pull my skirt up, which was already, you know, sinfully high and pull my shirt off my shoulder and get us a ride, and as soon as somebody stopped, they would pile in the back. Which you should not do now ever, hitchhiking is not safe now.

MARY KARR: Even in Berkeley. Well it wasn’t safe then, I mean Ted Bundy was cruising looking for you.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I didn’t know about that, they didn’t tell me that.

(laughter)

MARY KARR: Who did?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah.

MARY KARR: We just thought it was Ken Kesey, right?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Hitchhiking, it’s a slippery slope, let’s just leave it at that. A girl’s gotta get from one side of the bridge to the other, you know?

MARY KARR: Do you not want to talk about “Dear Blue?” I’m sorry, I loved him.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Blue, oh, no, I loved him.

MARY KARR: Can you describe to them what he wore, because it’s an interesting sartorial situation.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, you know, I actually could read that now because it’s better than my saying it. When I was very young, I worked at a health food sort of co-op, it’s kind of a legendary place, and it’s not a cult per se, but there were cultish aspects to it, and it was at a time when there were no vegans, there was no—people didn’t put chia seeds in their Frappuccino and things like that, it was really a way different time, and spirulina was something exotic anyway. And I was living near the beach and I never wore shoes and that was one particular chapter and I met this guy whose name was Blue. This is the letter I write to him.

Dear Blue, did you sew it? I’m just trying to imagine where you got it. There was no such thing as Amazon yet, and I’d never seen one except on Tarzan. Your loincloth. Did you use fabric from an old couch? You didn’t have a couch. Maybe you liberated a square of fabric from your teepee or stitched together some burlap bags that once held hydroponic fertilizer. You wore that cloth on your loins every day. So maybe there was even a spare. You were a fruitarian eating nothing but fruit and nuts, though apparently beer was also a fruit. A van illegally parked on the beach—not beside it, on it—was your home, and you needed no shirt, shoes, nothing.

You and your friend Gary drove to the border at dawn to get avocados and figs for the co-op where I worked also, and then you went to the beach if you had no one to Rolf. You were a Rolfer, too, massaging those lucky people while wearing nothing or your loincloth. Okay, maybe a piece of jewelry was also on your body, a necklace, but that was it. You and Gary both had gorgeous ocean-soaked hair that was longer than mine. Gary had a mane of chestnut that might have made him rich if he’d opened a Seven Stations of the Cross theme park. Your hair was its own Disneyland. It glowed in the dark from saltwater and sun. That hair gave you the vibe of being both switched on and overcooked at the same time. You were the only men I’ve ever seen who could wear your hair in a bun with a flower and not seem sissy. You had soul patches and tans, period.

Diving in the surf might happen five times a day and how could you lie down at the tide and feel sand rushing everywhere if you were wearing clothes? When you took me to that nude beach up the coast, taking off your loincloth seemed brazen. A dog could walk away with your entire wardrobe in its mouth. (laughter) Ripping it off was a breeze, though, and you threw yourself into the water leaving me in awe of how little there was between you and the world. It took hardly everything to be not just happy but filled with a kind of alien joy.

You took anyone’s idea of modern life and set it on fire decades before anyone dreamed up Burning Man. You didn’t need to rent an RV with Wi-Fi and stock up at Whole Foods to drive somewhere and let the madman into your third eye. You’d found it and had it and let it in and had it going on and out again. Even your name, which you said had become you after you dropped acid and were sitting on a massive rock by the cliffs. When you opened your eyes, everything including you was blue, except your loincloth, which for the summer I knew you, was a light brown man-wrap that made you and Gary look like Malibu Jesus dolls and kept you from being arrested for indecent exposure by more or less covering your genitalia. You and Gary would come into the co-op first thing in the morning with Minnie Riperton pouring out of your van. The two of you would pelt me with flowers while I sat in the back of the stockroom bagging and weighing organic nuts and bizarre dried sea vegetables. Back then only the hard core that came into our store even knew about dried kelp. In the eighties only true hippies bought spirulina in a bag and snorted it or however they took it once I’d bagged and labeled it, probably incorrectly, and priced it most definitely incorrectly.

Some days joining me at the scale was a sweet and sullen transgender boy named Luxe who wasn’t much better than I was. We got in trouble for throwing a block of Gouda up at the ceiling fan to see if it would come down in chunks, (laughter) so they separated us. They had one of us bag while the other stocked dairy, which meant standing in the refrigerator and replenishing all the yogurt and kefir and freezing our asses off. I found the scale confusing and was never good at math, so I’d spend hours getting yelled at by that girl named Jacque who was a higher-up. I heard you used to date her, which I had a hard time picturing. Jacque dressed in those macramé tops that she made and tie-dyed and she sewed her own maxi pads with inspiring words inked on in beet juice to make her connect to her yoni. (laughter)

I don’t know if you were into this also, but Jacque drank her pee, which once she blew in my face lightly then asked me, “Hey, does my breath smell like urine?” It was brave in a way but she was hard to admire because she admonished me daily for being inept. She said my mistakes made her feel confused and out of touch. Freshly punished, I’d go back to my station and try to get the plankton or dried matcha out from under my nails, wishing I didn’t have to work two jobs, or that one of them didn’t have to be this one, which sometimes paid me in avocados.

(applause)

He was really kind of a beautiful guy, and I say that in the true hippie sense. He was switched on. He actually emanated some kind of light. And I remember before I went into work my first day, somebody said to me, “See if you meet this guy Blue, I want to hear what you think about him,” and I just remember turning around and this guy, it was like—it was as though he had his own light source behind him.

MARY KARR: Walked around with a halo.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: He was beautiful and he was beautiful inside and out. He really—

MARY KARR: Did you—I didn’t understand your relationship. Is that somebody you actually went out with?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I wouldn’t say we went out. (laughter) I didn’t—there was no, there was not a lot of out in that town.

MARY KARR: There was not a lot of out to go to.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: We were out, the town was outdoorsy. I’m trying to obscure his identity. I wouldn’t say we went out but we had an appreciation for one another that—

MARY KARR: “Dear Popeye, you said you would love me till you were ashes.” There was him.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Poor guy, he still does, too.

MARY KARR: I know he does. How could he not? I know how he feels. He’ll have to fight me. But there’s not all—they’re not all glorious, these men you come across. There is, is it Cerberus—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Cerberus.

MARY KARR: Cerberus.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: It’s the dog that guards the gates of Hell. The three-headed dog.

MARY KARR: You dated him.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: All three of him, yeah. (laughter) His many heads.

MARY KARR: Can you explain how you landed on Cerberus for him, for this dude?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I’d love to—love to kind of explain why I used that method for telling that story. But really it was just kind of like, “Cool, I’ll write it like a fairy tale, then I can use a different font at the beginning of my paragraph.” But it was—in the end what made it work for me was that I wanted—I needed a way to recount these relationships because they’re a huge part of my life and some of them were punitive and ugly, and I thought it would be effective to tell it in a way where, you know, when you remember things, everything becomes completely polarized, and you’re completely innocent in the story and the other person is demonic.

MARY KARR: Does that ever change? Does that change?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I wanted to sort of almost do a cartoon version of that and I thought it would—then it would give the story levity. Because what I didn’t want it to do was seem like I was asking for sympathy or elicit any kind of, you know, because I was complicit in that, I laid down for it, I asked for it, I conjured it, I even pulled it out of people I think at times, and it’s also a conversation that I still have with myself, that I don’t fully understand, I think if you’ve had more than one relationship that wasn’t—

MARY KARR: Ideal.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Constructive.

MARY KARR: Ideal.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I have had mostly so many beautiful relationships but I have had a handful, you know, I’m fifty-one years old, that were not awesome, and it’s you do end up having that conversation with yourself over time, why did I do that, why did I allow that?

MARY KARR: It’s like, my mother was married seven times. I always thought—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: She should have figured it out?

MARY KARR: No, at what point do you say, maybe it’s not them?

(laughter)

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Right.

MARY KARR: Is it number three? Number four?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: No, it’s like, “You’re picking them, lady.” Like is what I was saying throughout that like this is essentially the same man just sprouting a new head that sits there flaccid and just kind of pants at you.

MARY KARR: To me that’s one of the most in some ways moving and realistic portraits, I mean, they’re not— Do you think you’re too hard on yourself? I mean, I often thought—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Do I think so? Yeah.

MARY KARR: I mean, as I was reading this, even despite naming somebody after a three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell, you seem to me like you’re very—if there’s an asshole in the book, it’s often you.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, yeah.

MARY KARR: Am I wrong?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I’m not going to write a book where I’m indicting other people, and if there needs to be a foil, I have plenty of material to use myself for. You know? I didn’t—

MARY KARR: But it’s such a funny book, it’s such a funny book.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I didn’t want this book to be in any way—I feel like we’re a culture of it seems to me there’s a new witch hunt every day, you know, like everybody’s exposing something or someone or ten celebrities who have three nipples or something like that, or click here if you—you know, horrible pictures of people at the grocery store, I feel there’s enough exposure in a damning way that why not—there are so many instances in my life that I’m so grateful for someone who shined their light on me for one moment or showed me some kind of kindness, like Abe, my accountant, or the doctor, or my friend Adam, so many people, my friend Jeff.

MARY KARR: Can I just read the introduction to “Dear Abe?”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I just have love for these people, I wanted to write something that was nice.

MARY KARR: “Dear Abraham, you took me in when I scratched at your door, needing somebody with your skill set.” That’s how you feel about your accountant. I just met Abe, I want him to be my accountant.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I know. He treated me, and still treats me, like, you saw, like a daughter, he treats me with such love and care.

MARY KARR: Who can say that about their accountant?

(laughter)

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: He goes so far for me, and when he met me, I was this girl in I was completely broke, and he had to tell me I was broke, because I didn’t know, I couldn’t understand my bank statements, and he had to explain them to me and break the news to me, the unfortunate news that I had absolutely no money whatsoever, because I’d spent it all, I’d bought, I’d just gotten a little bit of money and used a credit card and some other funds and gotten a pool table for a boy, and he had to tell me, “you could not afford that pool table,” and I became very depressed and I asked him—

MARY KARR: Shocking.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: —if I could sleep on his couch, and I took a nap on his couch and he just kind of sat there and stared at me for a couple of hours. It’s not like I was somebody that he was impressed with. (laughter) I was just a girl in his office who just wandered in, you know, who really did need guidance, and who needed his help and he gave it to me for no other reason that he was kind and he felt a connection to me.

MARY KARR: Do you think people were afraid—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And I was cute.

MARY KARR: You are cute.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Not as cute now, but I was cute then.

MARY KARR: I think you’re way cuter than you were then. I think your cuteness quotient is rising, is my personal opinion. Do you think people are afraid to say they need something? Do you think now—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Oh my God.

MARY KARR: I mean, you’re talking about the kind of outrage culture. One of the things that moved me about these pages. I had a sort of—I had an interview where somebody said, you know, “well, you have celebrity books in the back of your book suggesting that people read them.” And this is somebody—I mean, you can tell by the prose, this is not—this is not “look at my titties at the after party” kind of prose, I mean—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: That was years ago.

(laughter)

MARY KARR: It was years ago for all of us. Do you think people—to me what I loved, part of what I loved about the book was the sense that you’re not afraid to say what you need. You’re not afraid to go to sleep on Abraham’s couch. I would be terrified.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Honestly I felt most of my life afraid to ask for things and I’ve often felt more of an observer, which is why I think I have a fairly keen memory for details of moments that I observed in other people or expressions or things that I saw wash over people’s faces or things that they said. Those kind of things I remember so acutely and it’s from being the person who was watching and I never felt brave enough to ask for things and I still don’t. It’s funny because I remember that moment with him and I barely remember “Can I sleep on your couch?” But he remembers. I remember that he asked me if I wanted something to eat and I was starving but I said no. I wasn’t starving but I was really hungry and I said no.

MARY KARR: Isn’t that what we do though, as women you’re not supposed to eat that much.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Also if someone says, would you like this, can I get you something to drink, “no, thank you.”

MARY KARR: Let’s start saying yes from now on.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: For anything.

MARY KARR: Everybody here if we all pinky swear and we set out tomorrow with that as a goal, I think we’ve got a shot. But you seem to remember very keenly and I’m often accused of making things up when I say I remember—why do you think you have a particularly physical memory? Because the book seems to me to have a lot of physical detail.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I think I overinvest in other people and I overconnect to other people and that’s my relationships are so intense sometimes because it’s that release that you get when you feel seen suddenly, which is at war with the majority of me, which hates to be looked at. I do crave being—you know, you want to be really seen by someone and connecting to somebody is paying attention to them and what do they need and what are they thinking and what do they want for Christmas, and I just saw them touch that tie, or—those kind of things I remember, and it’s overconnecting that which makes disconnect from other things, which makes me leave the mail in the freezer or, you know, that makes me forget huge chunks of the day. And it’s not that I’m saying I’m so martyred or I’m so saintly that I’m overconnecting. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily a good trait. Sometimes it is and sometimes it comes out of a generosity and sometimes it comes out of need, you know? And it’s hard to say which is which. I’m not really probably self-aware enough to say which one is acting at which point. You know, when you’re being generous, we want to believe that all our generous gestures come from goodness but sometimes they come out of need, I think. Need to feel like a good person, feel like we’re seen as a good person.

MARY KARR: But it’s also—but isn’t it also need to connect?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And need to connect to someone, need to be needed.

MARY KARR: Feel less lonely, that’s not such—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Feel less lonely.

MARY KARR: A venal, it’s not like needing those shoes.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: No but then you—I know, they’re so good.

MARY KARR: She told me sequins were neutral before we came out.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: They are, very neutral, they are, and so is fringe.

MARY KARR: Fashion New York, you heard it here first.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Show them your shoes, Mary.

MARY KARR: She looked at them and she said, “hooker, please.”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I respect that. I do feel like if you are aware of when you’re acting out of need, then you can be aware when you have a truly generous gesture, when you are being completely selfless, then you really know when that is that there’s a difference between the two—does that make any sense or—

MARY KARR: I’ve seen you with your kids, and you’re an incredibly generous mother, you have two beautiful, beautiful children, a son and a daughter,

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Thank you.

MARY KARR: You got one of each. I’ve only got one, but I’m sprouting another. I recruited. I recruited a daughter through my son. But are you—what kind of mother are you or is that even a fair question to ask? Are you—I mean, it seems to me, just as your friend or someone who’s seen you with your kids, you seem. I mean, didn’t you have a Hawaiian theme night or something? I mean, wasn’t that?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: We had round the world nights, we’d do Evening in Paris and we’d play Édith Piaf and make, you know, French food and then we’d dress—

MARY KARR: Wear a beret.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Wear a beret or speak French and we did Evening in Japan. We did Evening in the Middle Ages and we all ate drumsticks, covered ourselves with flowers and things like that. I do like theme nights, we’d have a lot of theme nights.

MARY KARR: It does seem like that kind of household. But I mean, who even thinks of that. Was your mother that kind of mother? Was your father that kind of father?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: My mother couldn’t be that kind of mother, she had four children, she didn’t have anyone helping her at all. You know, there were times when my father didn’t have a job. And you know, my dad was looking for work or he was at work, and she was just trying to get food on the table and get us taken care of. And Eileen—to be a single mother is a different kind of pressure but I have had the luxury at times because my job allows me, when I do work, I work very intensive hours, but then I have times when I’m off and I can take them to school every single morning and I can be the one that puts them to bed at night and if I can be I will be, that’s much more interesting to me than going out and going anywhere. It’s just, it’s much more fulfilling to me, it fortifies me in the way I wanted my whole life, you know, I wanted that.

MARY KARR: And did you—How do you feel about—I know your son is interested in acting. Your daughter? No?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: She’s very artistic, very artistic, she’s an incredible visual artist, she has an beautiful singing voice, she plays beautiful piano. And I think she does have a bit of a clown about her as well. But you don’t really know, and my son is a great writer and perhaps unfortunately seems to be a bit of an actor.

MARY KARR: But you wouldn’t discourage that. As long as they liked it.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I wouldn’t discourage anything, because—I really got that from my father, who, he felt like it was not his place to give advice and even when I went to college I went to drama school and you could take minimal, minimal academics classes and get a BA, and I said, “I think those are going to interfere with my arts classes.” My dad said “okay.” And I think now if my kids came to me and said basically, “I’m going to go to college for four years but I’m not going to have a BA,” what would I say? And because of my father I would say, “Okay, you know what you’re doing,” because that’s what he said to me. I said, “I’m going to be an actress so I don’t need to go study geometry—have like one geometry class once a week which I’m going to fail anyway.”

MARY KARR: But your movement teacher was not as encouraging to you. There’s a chapter here called “Dear Movement Teacher.” What was your failure in movement class? You seem to be able to walk, talk— (laughter) What was it that he wanted? Can you explain really what he wanted you to do?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, it was unclear at the beginning to me. He really took a dislike to me and I’ve learned over the course of my life that I have, can sometimes give off some kind of vibe that is strong when I come into a room. I suppose he didn’t like me. And I wasn’t paranoid, he really didn’t like me.

MARY KARR: At this point in your life you were wearing opera gloves to breakfast.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: This is true. And I felt sort of persecuted by that and he wrote an evaluation that sort of detailed what I wasn’t doing in the class and what I was doing that was not acceptable. Like, “Lack of physical energy is alarming.” “Appears spaced out and bored.” “Asks offensive questions.” “Use of sexuality is offensive.” But he wrote this evaluation and put me on arts probation.

MARY KARR: Art probation.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, we’re going to take your arts away from you! But I felt super persecuted and then a friend of mine said to me, “What are you going to do about that?” And it was one of those moments in my life where I was just able to hear the truth and at first I was kind of slapped, I felt really stunned, “What do you mean what am I going to do? He hates me and,” you expect your friends to say, “Yeah, he’s horrible, he’s an asshole,” and he said, “No, he’s the teacher,” and suddenly I was struck by the fact that—this—the truth in that was intractable, it was just irrefutable, he’s the teacher and I’m the student. There was nothing I could say back, and I realized—it was invigorating, that moment. It was a slap in the face, but it really inspired me, and I thought, “He doesn’t like me,” and it didn’t happen in that moment, but it happened almost in that exact moment that I thought, “I’m going to see if I can do what he’s asking me to do, and I am going to find respect for this person,” which I found—an immense respect for him and he was right about everything he thought about me, because he was the teacher and that was his class and he allowed me in, he let me change his mind about me, which was so generous, because I learned that lesson that just because someone likes you doesn’t mean that they’re immediately dismissible, and just because someone likes you doesn’t mean you can’t change their mind and just because someone likes you doesn’t mean it’s any of your business as to why. But in that instance he was right and it was appropriate for me to try to—to try to be the student he wanted me to be, and I did, and he let me and it was a massive lesson for me.

MARY KARR: You could have been a writer, I mean, not that anyone would want to be a writer, you never get out of your apartment or your pajamas, but what possessed you to go in this whole other direction? I mean, I see you as someone who’s a very—in some ways, I mean, you’re just—your reading habits are fairly sophisticated. Why wouldn’t you—why wouldn’t you—set out—what possessed you, what is it about acting that felt so galvanizing for you?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: That’s really the more interesting question. And nobody’s asked me that, is “Why did you become an actress?” Because my mother keeps saying, “I’ve been vindicated. I said all along you were going to be a writer. My prophecy,” she said to me the other day, literally, “My prophecy has come true, (laughter) everyone knows this now.” And she really did say that, that she felt I was a writer and my whole life that’s what I did, I made little books, and I wrote, and then once upon a time David Granger let me write for Esquire and started letting me write more and more and more and I felt validated in a way that I’d never felt in my whole life except by my dad and his appreciation of me and—

MARY KARR: David Granger specifically.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: David, yeah, he liked my writing and he asked me write another one and then another one.

MARY KARR: So you started with one column.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: One piece. And they, I sent it in and they asked me if I’d written it, and I said, “well, yeah, I mean, I didn’t get my boyfriend to write it, yeah,” and they said, “well, we need to cut it, it’s really good, we might want to cut it,” and I said, “How many words?” And they said, “I don’t know, about this many?” And I said, “Let me do it,” and I cut it and I sent it back and they said, “Really, really good,” and they said complimentary things and then they asked me to write another one and then another one and then over time and it was very male-centered, I got to write about men a lot, so I got to really meditate on that, not that it’s not what I was thinking about anyway. But so it really is the question why did I become an actress is in some ways the most interesting question and nobody’s ever asked me that.

MARY KARR: Because nobody ever asks me why I didn’t become an actress.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I think you could have, actually.

MARY KARR: I don’t think so. I’m a short person.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Oh, so many of them are short. You have no idea.

(laughter)

MARY KARR: Really?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: They have to stand on boxes. Yeah. I was put on a stage at about the age of four and I was super quiet and shy and I stuttered, I still if I’m extremely nervous will stutter sometimes and everyone was a little bit nervous that I was getting up on a stage, it was like for some tap rehearsal or something. I was doing a dance called “the chicken bop” with my brother.

MARY KARR: The chicken bop?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I don’t know what it had to do with chicken at all. I had a yellow costume on. And I got up on stage and the two other little girls started crying and took their little tutu tulle things off, headdresses off, and I walked up there almost alone and was just like happy to be there and suddenly knowing how to dance or how to sell that dance even if I didn’t know how to dance, and there’s a picture of me right before I walk onstage, it’s not really pictures of me on the stage, and I look so unbelievably relaxed, and I’m lying there like four years old and I have this like yellow tutu on, and I get up there and it just felt—and I know it, because I’ve seen it in my son when he gets up—I’ve seen it, I know it, you just—some people you put them there and it doesn’t matter how afraid of other people they are or how shy they are or aren’t. It’s just in some people.

MARY KARR: Do you mind talking about the play I saw you in last year?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Heisenberg?

MARY KARR: Heisenberg. Did anybody see that play? (applause) Amazing. Amazing. Can I tell you my idea of hell is a play with two people in it, and you know. I don’t know, I always feel like it’s going to be Beckett or some aspect of Beckett or somebody who wants—no, not Beckett, it’s going to be somebody who wants to be Beckett, and it’s going to be hell, and you beat the shit out of that play.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Thank you.

MARY KARR: Can you talk a little bit about what that experience—can you talk a little bit about that play?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I loved that experience so much. I just loved it. And that writer Simon Stephens, who wrote Curious Incident of the Dog—he just wrote this play.

MARY KARR: You all might know that play, right? Curious Incident.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And Lynne Meadow of Manhattan Theatre Club, where I’ve done six plays or something on a day when I was having a low moment in acting and I said, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.” She said, “I don’t accept your retirement, and I’m sending you a play right now.” And she has hired me since I was twenty-three years old or something like that. And she sent this play and I knew by page four, and I was so mad at her.

MARY KARR: Can you tell them the premise of the play a little bit? Can you say a little bit about what the premise of the play was?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Two extremely lonely people meet each other, but it’s really about Heisenberg, the principle in physics, where if you observe something closely enough, you can never predict where it’s going to go or where it is or how far away it is, because and I think this is part of it, which I love, it’s so poetic, this aspect of physics to me, is that the observer always interferes with the measurement, and it’s so that you have to take yourself out of any equation to know how far or how close you are to something, which is so poetic to me.

MARY KARR: Was that a hard role for you?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, but I really only like the hard ones. I wouldn’t want to do a play, you know, with people kind of lunching in the Hamptons and, you know, the quippy dialogue, I just wouldn’t. I have to feel like somebody’s like beat the hell out of me every night or it’s not worth it for me.

MARY KARR: Did your mother want you to be a writer? Was she like invested in it?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: No, she just assumed it because I was always reading and I was always writing and I was too shy and—

MARY KARR: And yet when they pushed you onstage, it was like a—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: They didn’t shove me, you know, I think if I’d wanted to not go, they would have but they didn’t expect me to run out there, I don’t think, is what happened. I don’t know how that—I don’t know—I do remember the feeling though and I remember the feeling of performing even on a tiny level really young.

MARY KARR: In some ways this book is an homage, I think, to your father.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah.

MARY KARR: I think in many ways. One of my—one of my—one of my favorite, one of the most moving, I found myself crying at several places and one of the places was where your son was saying, “Isn’t it amazing all the different things we get to do and aren’t we so lucky to be alive?” And you said, addressing your father, who lives on the other side of the grass, “that’s you in him.”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, that capacity for astonishment, and that capacity to marvel at beauty really unabashedly, with no shame at how that’s going to be make you appear. Some people are embarrassed to do that, to really sort of revel in something or marvel at it, and my son really has that 100 percent, he can lose himself in something that he loves, so there’s a lot of hyperbole, a lot of emphasis, shared between my father and my son and myself, everything is so emphatic, which is why my daughter is so lovely because then she is like sort of the equalizing force, she’s more reasonable.

MARY KARR: But your dad was—

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And she’s nine and she’s probably going to have to drive everyone, too. I can’t drive a car, my son probably, sorry, honey, should not drive a car.

(laughter) Daydreamers should not drive.

MARY KARR: Some of us should not be armed and should not be able to drive.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Not be armed, ever. No, you should not give me a gun. And I’m against guns but I’m mostly against guns someone handing me one.

MARY KARR: For you, yeah, you don’t want one. You don’t want you to have one. Neither of us should be armed.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: No. No. But the driving thing is I feel like you’re always driving and you always have people say, like, “You should not be allowed to drive,” and I feel like, and people are always like, “why don’t you drive?” And I feel like, “I’m the person that you shout at.” (laughter) Like, “Lady, you shouldn’t have a license. You shouldn’t have a license!” I am that person. I am saving the world in a way. Only when pressed, or you know on my TV show I would drive—the whole transpo—I loved that transportation department so much. But they tried so hard to teach me to drive, they would come out and watch sometimes if I had to drive just because it was funny for them. (laughter) They loved watching me.

MARY KARR: You shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Your dad was—another favorite, another highlight for me, was your grandfather, when your father was in the war, sent him a cake.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, he was a drinker, apparently, my grandfather.

MARY KARR: He sent him a cake with a secret surprise.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Who I’d not met, and it was the middle of World War II, and he carved the guts out of a cake, he was a coal miner in small-town West Virginia. Carved the inside out of a cake, it wasn’t an actual cake, it was a loaf of rye bread, got a stale loaf of rye bread, carved the guts out, and laid a bottle of moonshine in the bread and then sealed it and tried to ice it and mailed it to my father in the Philippines.

MARY KARR: As a birthday gift.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And he opened it up and he knew—he saw this sort of like horrible, moldy, bald rye cake, rye hooch cake and he knew there was something inside, because it was from his dad, who was another larger-than-life character.

MARY KARR: But you never met him.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I didn’t, no—

MARY KARR: But obviously inspired.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: But I feel like I got to meet him by writing him. I got so much permission. First of all, from my agent, Eric Simonoff because I know I wouldn’t have written the book without him, because he really—I would have sat around for another decade, well, I could write about this—and I even did that with him for a couple weeks, “I feel like everything connects to astronomy now and that I should call it Cold Black Dwarf,” and I was calling it Cold Black Dwarf for about two weeks until he was like, “No, why don’t we just move back to the men and the letters,” and he just—you know, I went to him with this idea that he sort of anointed it and made me feel that it was good and sort of just gave me just the perfect amount of encouragement at the right pitch that I could hear, and there wouldn’t be a book if it wasn’t for that, and then with Nan, Graham, and Colin Harrison, just to have them like give me that freedom and say, “Certainly you can write this other chapter,” and Colin one day giving me this massive gift by saying when I thought I’d written this piece about my father and him saying, “You haven’t begun to write about your father,” and that to me was one of the biggest gifts I could ever have.

MARY KARR: It’s one of the “oh shit” moments.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Yeah, because then I found the last piece in the book and I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t said that, and I remember when he said it, it just put ice in my veins but in a good way. I thought—My brain just started working and it was just him giving that permission to find that.

MARY KARR: Do you have another book in you?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I do, Eric will have to tell me what they’re about.

MARY KARR: You can write about me. That’s what I do.

(laughter)

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I’d love that. It won’t be a PG-13 book. I do, I have, I mean I have a lot of things written already. The idea is for me is to distill them and put them in one direction is difficult sometimes because I get overwhelmed by choice.

MARY KARR: But it’s the real that compels you rather than fiction.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: My imagination, like you, gets sparked by the truth and by my experience and these little things that have happened to me in my life, these little moments. Or when I first saw my friend sing in a club, it just brought back everything, including these little bowls of popcorn on the table, you know, thirty years ago, and so many things like that.

MARY KARR: There’s a lot of God in this book, I think. I mean, I know that people don’t think of you as a God person.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: No.

MARY KARR: But to me it’s a book where you’re kind of combing through the universe looking for spiritual highlights, which are almost always moments of connection or admiration or rage or lust or hilarity.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Well, I mean, for me, it’s a conversation, it’s an ongoing conversation, and it’s a—it’s a search, and any of the words you use sound so cliché it’s difficult to sort of put a name to it, but it is something that I look for, and I do go to church, and I go to different kinds of churches, and I have moments where it’s very hard for me to remember my religion or remember God or remember spirit and then moments where I rage against it, but I was—the first priest that I knew as a little girl was this amazing man who’s in the book, who—

MARY KARR: Father Bob.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Who was different from other men. He was gay, which I kind of knew on a cellular level, my parents knew, but no one ever talked about it, and chain-smoked and, you know, drank whiskey, and was just the most pure hearted, and still is, wonderful man—I asked him when I was nine years old, and that’s one of the moments I remember in my life, “Is there anyone in hell?” We were still in church when I reached up and asked him. I don’t know what provoked me, I had to know in that moment and I just remember the set of his face.

MARY KARR: His response is kind of wonderful.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: He considered, he considered my question.

MARY KARR: He thought about it.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And the fact that he considered it to me meant, “oh you can make it up, you can think about it, you can arrive at it, it can be your opinion and it can be an instinct. It can be your own relationship with God, it doesn’t have to be what someone tells you it is. It doesn’t have to be”—he didn’t say this verse, this, this, and this.

MARY KARR: But he said, like, now?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: He asked me, he didn’t say anything else, he said—

MARY KARR: Now?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And he said, “No.” And I’ll never forget that as long as I live.

MARY KARR: Imagine. I’m bathed in relief.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Exactly.

MARY KARR: I feel so much better.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Exactly. But it made—I saw that it was his opinion and he approached it like I was allowed to have my own opinion as well and still be a spiritual person. And I tried to do that with my children as well—one day one of my children said, “I’m feeling kind of sixty/forty about the cross thing, about did he come down off the cross or not? Sixty-five maybe he did, you know, thirty-five maybe he didn’t.” I said, “Okay, let’s talk about that. Let’s see how you feel when you go in there, if you feel that way afterwards.” It’s okay to feel whatever you want to feel or think whatever you want to think and take from religion or not what you can, but if you do take, there is something there sitting in the room with a bunch of people who are trying to arrive at something to be better people. And if you find those rooms, then religion is extremely useful. If you find rooms that shut their door or their windows, or even shut their door just a crack, those are the rooms that exclude and you don’t want to be in those rooms. But there are rooms in the world where people are trying to find that and those rooms, I believe, shoot something up into the stratosphere.

MARY KARR: The New York Public Library is a cathedral for me.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Absolutely.

MARY KARR: I mean, I think books for those of us who are book people I think where else do we find God? You bring your little lonely ass in off Forty-Second Street and get to see the big lions and sit in the Reading Room.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: And I read this poem the other day that Michael Taeckens, my literary publicist, gave me, this Linda Gregg poem, I’m obsessed with her right now, Gnostics on trial, and it just made my head explode, and I thought, just those moments when somebody makes something so clear within the space of a verse or a stanza, it just hits me it’s like a shot of tequila or a slap on the face, a good slap, if there are good slaps. There are good slaps.

MARY KARR: There are good slaps. Let’s tell the truth. You’re not supposed to say that. You promised me you were going to—we should be probably be wrapping up but you promised me you were going to read another piece. Can we have a send-off.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I don’t—which would you?

MARY KARR: Can we have a send-off piece?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Eric Simonoff, what do you want to hear? “Dear Little Owl?” “Dear Orderly?”

MARY KARR: “Dear Orderly.”

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: What’d he say? “Future Man.”

MARY KARR: “Future Man.” That’s good.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: Dear Future Man who loves my daughter. Oh yeah. First of all show up a bit late. It may be better if she’s seen a little of the opposite of you and relaxes in your arms only once she realizes you don’t have a gruesome face hiding under the one you first showed her. Do not have another face hiding. Yeah, I really would not. Swoop in late but not so late that she doesn’t trust it when you say you want to make her drunk on happiness. Make her drunk on happy. Make her unhappy. Put yourself first. Do that a while. Do it long enough so that she suffers.

When she is done with that suffering, which will only make her more compassionate, watch as she rises up like the sea’s last wave and crushes you with her silence. Notice how that silence moves in on you as she speaks, telling you that she’s had enough and you have to change. You will see her mouth moving and recognize the words falling out and forming sentences that mean “quit this moment, or I will quit you.” But the quiet that continues with threaten with staying forever if you don’t comply, that is so much louder than her words. She will not be crying or begging. She will realize she is powerful and perfect alone and that she doesn’t need you. Her commitment to those words will terrify you.

Careful with metaphor, as by then her mother’s overuse of it may have exhausted her and made her immune to poetry. (laughter) Remind her about poetry. If she has given you children, remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth words in this sentence. “If you hurt her in ways that are reparable, I will send people out to hurt you back. Sorry, but it has to be like that. Yes, you may have had a difficult childhood. But please allow me to introduce myself. Hello, I am the woman who doesn’t give a shit.”

Make her something warm to drink in the mornings and give her time to begin speaking. Only rush at her with an embrace or a gemstone, wildflowers, a love note, Yeats. Do not fight with her in public. This almost includes the dog. She has an elegance that should not be polluted by compromising her privacy. This has something to do with loyalty. I am not sure how but it does. Speak glowingly of her to everyone, even on the days she has infuriated you. Inflate, you have landed the loveliest girl walking the earth.

Be a friend to her brother. Be a brother to him. Help him out if he needs it and give him the opportunity to help you. Call him for no reason and drop by with her on days you may not feel like it to make sure they stay connected. If her brother is telling a story about me in which I seem especially annoying, please feel free to poke fun. I want them to take comfort in the fact tthey share a mother who is only theirs and a childhood as wild and special as they are. I need them to have each other, it’s almost all I need.

My brothers have protected and championed me in ways that she will need also. My own brother came to the bus stop with me when he learned I wasn’t getting a seat because of my rampant unpopularity. He stood there, arms folded as though he were barring everyone from entering the rest of their lives if they did not comply with his wish to treat me with respect. He said nothing but stared into the face of every kid on that street corner, promising that their futures were going to remain in question unless they understood. All conversation stopped. One person snuck a look at another and his head whipped around to catch both of them incredulously looking at one another. “Try me,” his eyes said, and “don’t think I won’t.” The bus pulled up. I got in line and looked at him still standing there with barely contained galvanic ire. I tried to convey my thanks. His eyes said back, “that’s how much.”

Thank you.

MARY KARR: Mary Louise Parker. Thank you.

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I can’t read the rest of it, I’m sorry. Sorry.

(applause)

MARY KARR: Mary Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You, thank you, thanks so much.

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