UnWorld with Jayson Greene

In this episode, we catch back up with Jayson Greene, author of the memoir Once More We Saw Stars and learn about his new book and first novel, UnWorld.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you.

Now, we sometimes spice it up with different kinds of episodes, especially when there’s a book that I particularly enjoy, and when I can get time with the author.

So today’s episode is actually kind of a casserole episode because we are talking to Jayson Greene, who was a guest back in the Terrible, Thanks For Asking days when his memoir, Once More We Saw Stars, was first released.

This was one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. It was one of the hardest memoirs I’ve ever read. It is the story of the death of his toddler daughter, Greta.

So today, Jayson is back with his second book. It is not a memoir. It is his first novel.

UnWorld is a book, maybe could be classified as science fiction. It is about grief. It is about memory.

It is about technology. And it touches on some of the things that we actually talk about here a lot. The book starts with Anna, whose teenage son Alex has died suddenly.

Was it a suicide? Was it an accident? Nobody can know for sure.

And the loss of this child has reverberated the way that these losses always do.

Anna feels suddenly so disconnected from her life, from the couple friend whose daughter Samantha was Alex’s best friend and who was the only person with him that night, from her husband. She is also feeling disconnected from her upload, Aviva.

This is an AI-powered version of Anna’s consciousness that lives in a small device behind her ear, a version of her that knows her own version of Alex.

And when Aviva asks to be emancipated, to leave Anna behind, Aviva is leaving with her own memories of Alex, a boy that she knew even though she’s just AI.

Then there’s Kathy, a recovering addict who is studying digital personhood, who crosses paths with this emancipated Aviva.

And through each of these characters, Anna, Aviva, Samantha, Kathy, we get fragments of the unreality, the unworld that we all live in right now and that we especially live in when we’re grieving.

So if you’ve listened to our AI wife episode or if you’ve listened to the episode with Julia Hatz who wrote The Connection Cure, you already know why I’m into this and why I wanted to talk with Jayson because technology and memory and grief and

loneliness are intertwined parts of our world and they will only get more entangled. We can already make AI versions of our dead loved ones to video call. We can already disappear into digital worlds where we can and do make real human connections.

We can and do already leave bits and pieces of ourselves in the cloud and we lose bits and pieces of the people that we love the same way. The UnWorld is already here. It is all around us.

Today, we’re going to talk with Jayson Greene about his novel, UnWorld, and here’s what the casserole part comes in. We are going to take a listener question as well. I’m Nora McInerny.

This is Thanks For Asking. Let’s get into it. Jason, it’s been a few years, which is so weird.

I think it’s been at least two years since we talked, but the first time we talked was when your very first book came out. And I was surprised when you said to me via text message, I don’t know why I have to disclose that.

He said this to me via text, guys. He didn’t say it to me out loud, but you said that this book, this novel that you wrote could be a shadowy version of your memoir. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like I’m disclosing something very personal and in a way that when you write something, you give it to someone else and then you just sort of, sometimes you just keep your mouth shut and ask what they thought and you get their

reactions. So, but I don’t necessarily suspect that most people in my circle would have read this book and intuited that particular fact.

But I have had a few close friends who would say, oh, wow, I can see how this is like, and this is not language my friends use, but this is the way I thought of it. It’s almost like a nightmare that the book I wrote first is having.

So it’s abstracted, and in the way that a dream will be like, well, in this dream, I was married to some other guy, and we lived in this weird townhouse, and we had a dog, and then this happened. But it was really about when this happened in my life.

That’s the nature of this novel’s connection to the trauma and child loss and bereavement parts of our life as a family, really.

Yeah. Yeah. Did your headset move a little bit?

Can you move the mic like a half inch away from your mouth?

Yeah, absolutely.

There we go.

Is that good?

Yeah, perfect. Okay.

Yeah.

You’re popping a little bit, and that’s okay. Yeah. What did you just say you said?

Like it’s the abstracted version of your first book, which is, I think what made it very easy for me to connect with is that grief does kind of shatter and abstract your world and the way that you experience your emotions too.

And there’s so many elements of experiencing a traumatic loss, which is different than your grandmother going peacefully into that good night after a long, beautiful life that feels so nightmarish and just shifts the way that you even experience the

world around you. And that really came through for me too.

Thank you. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, Once More We Saw Stars was really written.

I really wrote that memoir in a state of hyperclarity. I was really in that state of post-trauma where everything, like every leaf on every tree seems like you can see every vein and everything is hyper, hyper clear.

And I think that that book, people would say, I read this and oh, I don’t know how you wrote about the clarity of this moment. And I don’t know how you were able to access this.

And what’s interesting to me about how I felt when I sat down to write my novel and started exploring what I wanted it to feel like was that I realized that all that murky stuff that was swimming around sort of deeper inside of my system, all those

nebulous feelings that you’re just sort of aptly and so adeptly identifying were the things I didn’t know how to write about next. And they weren’t the kind of feelings that lent themselves to another memoir, because I didn’t have a clear story about

my own life. But what you said was that there is this sort of unreality to your emotional existence and to the world that you move through, that never repairs itself after a traumatic and particularly like a violent death of a loved one.

And it’s a feeling that I can only sort of describe as a sort of whisper behind the curtain that something isn’t exactly in place. Your own life begins to feel somewhat dreamlike, particularly in moments when it’s at its most mundane.

I think you have to clear my throat, excuse me.

It’s when I’m standing around at my son’s school pickup, for instance, and he’s eight, and there’s some sort of part of my psyche that’s keeping track of maybe time, and when we measure time by emotions, things get funky.

But nonetheless, there’s a sort of a count it in me that’s noting how many years it was since we first had a little baby, and how many years it is now that we’re standing on a third grade playground, and there’s a bit of confusion there where a voice

says, wait, weren’t we supposed to be here at some other point in time along some other timeline? That is the rupture that I think lies at the heart of UnWorld, even though on its premise, it’s premised as a novel set in a futuristic world where, I

mean, although it’s not that far in our future anymore, where I think if you were to pitch this book to someone you were talking to on the street, and you were trying to get them interested in it, you might not say anything about, the first things

you say might not be about grief and unreality. You might be saying something about, it’s about this woman who has this digital version of herself, and they have like a psychic, they split off from each other. The upload says, I’m leaving, and people

might say, oh, that sounds interesting, you know. But I used that because, one, I’ve been fascinated forever with any kind of story about a mind that splits off from itself, and any kind of story where the character has a doppelganger.

I’m obsessed in particular with the doppelganger, this chill of lack of recognition of your own self and your face in the mirror. I think that’s something that probably predates Greta’s accident.

But I do remember really vividly feeling it when I was still in a hospital, and we were waiting by Greta’s bedside, and we had to keep her stable for 48 hours while they looked for recipients. I remember of recipients for her organs.

I remember looking up at the mirror and being like, that is not a person, you know, and there was a very profound dissociation from yourself.

And so when I decided to write sci-fi, it was really sort of, there are certain kinds of murky truths that only allegory or fiction will allow you to even express.

I couldn’t write a memoir about this feeling of unreality, so I had to invent a world to inject that feeling with, and that’s how I got to this premise.

Yeah. When did the idea go from that recognition that there is this sort of emotional, and sometimes even like real, like what you described, like seeing yourself in the hospital and being like, that guy looks familiar, but I don’t know who he is.

When did that go from that feeling to the knowledge that this is an idea, and this is a novel?

Well, and this zooms out a little bit into other more mundane areas of my life and existence, because frankly, the idea that I had predated my life as both any kind of parent and a bereaved parent, or rather, no, I guess, let me rephrase that.

I would say that it does zoom out into an earlier pre-bereavement time in my life.

The first time I grew interested in this idea of our relationship to the mind, and particularly as the noise in the culture started to pick up a little bit about what the AI sort of futurist people were interested in with this technology, it became

really clear to me that these people were just obsessed with replicating the mind and turning the mind into this engine. I think as a person who lives with a very unquiet mind and has spent a lot of time and energy wrangling that unquiet mind and its

effects on my system and my body and on and on, that idea had like a very dark power to me. I think it spoke to me years before.

I would have considered writing anything about trauma because at that point in my life, I had no first-hand experience with that at all.

When you see that version of yourself, like when you look back at photos of yourself before, you know, that the chaos of the universe had touched you, what do you feel for that person?

Well, I think it’s another moment like you described, like I identified for you already where I’m looking in the mirror and like that’s just a person.

Like, I don’t actually feel any sort of, I can’t, with a photograph of myself from when Greta was eight months old, I can put myself like, I’m going in different directions here, let me reel it in.

Photographs pretty much chip off that moment from your memory and make sure that you never remember them in your body ever again. So when you see a photograph, it’s an alienation, right?

You’re never going to remember being that guy in that photograph. This is something I thought about a lot and intensely when my daughter died. What you have are photographs of your daughter, and none of them remind you of her.

They’re just images of her. Whatever you have of her is inside of you, right? And will always only ever be inside of you.

And I think that that applies to images of yourself in a lot of ways as well. So when I look back at like 32-year-old Jayson, it’s not like I can feel something for him in that picture because it’s really just a frozen tableau.

And the only memories we have of those time in our lives are so murky and they’re so tied to sense. They’re sense memories, right?

I remember looking, I have a picture of me holding Greta when I was 31, and I have a bad haircut and old glasses and an ugly J. Crew shirt on, and I’m at a beer garden. And I can tell you that I know, I remember being at that beer garden that day.

But what I remember is like the smell of the lime on the cup of my beer. I remember glancing down and seeing the stones. I remember hearing the music.

I remember the squirm of my daughter on my lap. But that photo doesn’t do any of those things. That’s all living inside of me.

And this is again where you get at the stuff that people want to write fiction about. Those are feelings that they can’t be captured. So yeah, there is this pre-traumatic me.

But yeah, I mean, he had a lot of the… I mean, I share all the same interests in many regards. I just have a different view on them than I would have.

So I mean, and this book is testament to that. I’ve had this abiding interest since before any kind of trauma or darkness had visited our family or my life. And I would say that like…

I actually, because at the time that I was interested in this, I had no conception of myself as a book writer yet either. I should also say that this was when I was still firmly working in a music journalist, world. I spoke of pieces.

I wrote pieces. I wrote reviews. I was a critic.

That was my life. It was little pieces and parts. And the idea that I might be an author was about as far removed from how I felt at that time as it felt when I was 12 to imagine myself married.

It was a very large imaginative leap to make. It didn’t feel connected to my current reality at all. So I didn’t say to myself then, what a cool idea for a novel this would be if I made a character where a woman had this split with her digital clone.

I thought, what a cool idea. I should go out and find some people who do this in the world and speak to lawyers who are interested in where civil rights for humans are going to meet this weird world of copyright.

What kind of unholy matrimony is this going to create in the legal system? So I went out and I pitched articles to various publications. This is 2013, 2014.

So this wasn’t exactly a time when the headlines were alive with this yet. I got a lot of, this is cool, but this is weird.

This is cool, but we’re not worried about this.

Right. This isn’t really going to, you know, and it’s not, you know, this isn’t, this doesn’t fit anywhere in what we’re doing.

And so I would say that the seed for this idea and this very specific notion, right, because I had read a lot about this, this, this, this clutch of Silicon Valley trans humanist thinkers, right, who really all fervently, earnestly believe that this

was the future, right, this, this at one time included our good friend Elon Musk. This at one point, you know, Martine Rothblatt who runs a foundation called Teresem.

I mentioned these people, I don’t really have any affiliation with them, but their ideas were so vivid that they intrigued me. This idea of merging the brain with this other brain sphere that was just outside of our body, right?

And that siren call, what would that fulfill in us? What need would that meet?

And what does that speak to what’s lacking inside of us that we would even be, that we’d even feel drawn to something that, you know, from another perspective might look horrific or Frankenstein terrifying, you know?

And it wasn’t really until after Greta died, I wrote my memoir and it was when all of that was settling and I was looking around. And many things were happening at once. I was groping for something, a new project.

I had poured pretty much every bit of who I was and like what I thought my life purpose to still exist on the planet, you know, to be into the crafting and releasing of that memoir, which I had imbued with so much existential weight.

It was this thing I was putting out that was going to replace the absence where my daughter was as best as it could. It had her picture on it.

It was emblematic of so much of this moment in my life that felt like charged with an almost mystic, a personal mystic resonance, where one child is gone, another child is coming.

And I felt like once the dust had settled on that, I was a person with a child and a book, and I didn’t know what was left or what was next.

It was a maybe more gruesome version of your very run of the mill writers malaise, your book’s out and now what, kind of. And for me, it felt like not only is my book out and now what, but also I’m a bereaved father and fucking now what?

I didn’t really know. And it was then in living inside of that sort of space where I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted.

And yet we were also suspended once again, and the sort of beautific on reality of life with a toddler and a baby, where this idea sort of glinted back at me through the fog. And it was this story about fragmentation.

And I realized that when I thought of this eight years earlier, I wasn’t looking at a story I wanted to write for some publication. It was a playground. And it was a playground for myself to get lost in.

And it was and get lost. I did. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there’s so much that you said there that I want to react to and talk about for several hours.

And one of them is, you know, you mentioned that there’s all these techno-humanists and there are all these people, typically in Silicon Valley, who are talking excitedly about the ways that, you know, we can, quote unquote, merge with technology,

but really, it is more of a fracturing than anything else. In the book, the upload is, it lives in a tiny device that, you know, tucks find your ear and, you know, the main character, this bereaved mother, she doesn’t get it because she is hoping to

have some more, you know, in a whole version of her reality. It’s something that she buys the way that we buy into all kinds of new technology as sort of in administrative purpose. Like this is almost like an assistant.

This device is going to make sure that, you know, everything is like running a little bit more smoothly. Also, you can stop me if I’m fully misunderstanding that.

And the result is something that none of us see whenever we adopt like a new technology or get really into some like new technological idea, which is like you do leave pieces of yourself.

Yeah, you do.

All over the place. And the more that we kind of outsource our humanity to something that is meant to make us more efficient, I do think that we lose a piece of us. And I saw that all throughout the book.

I saw that with, you know, the boy who plays in this hyper-realistic sort of video game called UnWorld. And the way that I was like looking at my sons playing, you know, Roblox, playing Minecraft, playing even, what’s the dumb one, Fortnite, right?

And like making these avatars of themselves and making these connections with people, you know, like that they know from school and also sometimes like playing with like complete strangers online.

And I thought about, you know, that I can access some things of Aaron’s online, but there are far more pieces of it and of him out there that I never had access to and never will.

And I really think you did that very beautifully, where this is a sneaky grief book and not an overt grief book.

Like, it’s funny because I chose to write a book that like uses AI, and yet I get hives when I talk about AI a little.

And what, because I think what I’m interested in really is the degree to which we all misunderstand the impulses that are driving all of this and the screens and the technology and the game. That stuff’s boring. It’s lifeless.

It’s anti-story. It’s anti-human. It’s, it’s anti-drama.

It’s anti-everything that, you know, it’s anti-body, frankly, you know, and as you sort of alluded to that where you’re trying to catch more of yourself. Well, what you’re doing is you’re taking it out of your body.

You’re yearning to escape your body.

And what I really wanted to get at is how the sorts of existential questions that we just face on a Tuesday now are indistinguishable from like, myth and parable and, you know, the sort of questions that come up on a daily basis, like whether or not

it’s possible to reanimate a dead loved one through some sort of send away service, which is now eminently doable. You know, these are questions of Old Testament parable. These are questions of myth.

And I think that we’re not, this is, you know, if I were on the Subway series, this would be my hot take. I think we are not treating these things with enough medieval suspicion and fear and awe and terror.

Because, you know, there’s like the classic and stupid Simpsons meme where one newscaster says, do you think it’s time to panic? And the newscaster says, yes, I think it’s the perfect time to panic.

And I don’t think panic is the right word, but I do think that, I think there should be more outcry, there should be more visceral, there should be more viscera involved in our decision-making, in this world in which everything is being marched off

the edge of a cliff with the steady, clean language of reason. And this is the thing with reasoning minds and machines. I mean, a reasoning is a little part of your brain.

It is, and we see increasingly in the world, in the political sphere, just how little a part of our brain, that reasoning chip even is. The rest of it is made up of overwhelming feelings of dread, nausea, fear, terror, mystical awe.

And these are the feelings that you can’t rip out and put anywhere, because they only live inside of your body, right?

And this book is a little bit about what does a world feel like when all of those feelings, we’re trying to take them out of ourselves almost.

And like what’s sloshing around in the atmosphere, around us in this strangely emptied out new world, right? What’s that roar that you’re hearing, that disembodied roar?

And to me, what’s a better, or at least for me personally, it struck me like an incredible metaphor for there to be a literal being trapped in the air basically that doesn’t have a place to be.

It’s not quite a ghost because it’s not dead, but it is like a disembodied roar that we’re like ripping out of ourselves and throwing out into the ether.

So much of the things that make us vital and make us matter to ourselves and matter to the ones around us are these things that are inextricably bound up with our lives here on earth.

And I just think that there’s so much that’s being, people are attempting to bleed these areas dry in a way. I think any TikTok feed where someone, and I’m going to start sounding judgmental in a minute, so I’m going to be careful. But I think-

That’s literally my whole podcast.

I’m always like, I am a deeply biased person. But I will tell you, I will tell you my biases. It won’t be a mystery.

I’m going to hit the breaks a little bit on what I was about to say.

But here’s what I will say, is that I think that I can’t judge truly, with any knowledge, what people use their social media platforms for. I don’t know what people get out of it.

And I understand very much that there can be something very powerful, in the same way that I have a bad feeling and I write it down. Am I doing something all that far removed?

It works for me, from a person who is trying to externalize this bad feeling. And I think I can only speak to my own intense subjectivity.

And for me personally, within my body and my system, when I open up a feed like that, or I open up a new tab, what I feel like I’m staring into is a wailing wall. It is a wailing wall of disembodied fear.

It is the collective unconscious and it’s there in 0.0007 seconds. And so that was the only part of our sort of new like grief tech, as you use the word administrative.

Like I didn’t want to write a book that felt like it was populated by iPhones and screens, you know? It’s like emotions trying to rage out of control in a very antiseptic space and what happens.

And what happens, and I think that’s like a perfect way into this next part of the conversation, which is it’s bananas to me that you were thinking about this in 2013 and 2014.

Like when you were thinking about this in like the before times, because it’s so timely now, even though like you mentioned, these are kind of timeless topics.

These are big, big questions we have always been talking about and thinking about and wrestling with.

But the ways that I see technology and specifically AI being applied and sold and even more sneakily quote unquote given to us so that we train a product that will then be sold back to us that really contains us is so, so dark and so intent on

replacing our humanity or sort of asphalting over it. Like the human experience is very bumpy. It’s very craggy.

And this is like, what if we could just sort of surface smooth over it with something that is also not a very stable surface and will also completely explode given any moisture, freezing, too much heat, you know, very, also, also very unstable.

I’m going to give you a couple of examples, which is I’ve been seeing a lot of, you know, articles and posts basically saying like, well, what if when you miss your dead dad, right?

What if you just had a AI companion who was created with two voicemails, a few videos, some photos, and you describing your dad, and you just talked it out with your dad, right?

Let’s not talk about the, you know, the fact that writ large, we don’t really have a culture that gives us any space to grieve. Let’s just ignore the fact that grieving is a physical and emotional, very human process, something that needs to be done.

What if that could be outsourced and what if that could be sold to you? And we did an episode earlier this year, and a man had reached out to me and he had created an AI version of his dead wife.

And I talked to him and I fully understood, I understood the impulse down to my body. I get it, right? What I wouldn’t give, right?

One more conversation. There’s something about that early phase of of widowhood, especially where you’re driving home and you’re like, I don’t have anyone to tell him coming home, you know?

Yeah, I do.

I don’t have to, you know, I’m walking in and a guy had a baby on my hip, but it’s like you drop your keys and you’re like, we’re home, you know, instead of like the we’re home, right? It’s like, it’s just so different. I get it, I get it, I get it.

And I just think that it is, it’s not a solution and it’s not even a bandaid. It’s like a, it’s fucking stupid and it’s so nefarious because never once as a person who’s like creating this technology, been like, no, but I really want to help people.

They’re like, how can I get as much cash as possible so quickly by looking at what affects humans around me and then saying, I could sell you that. Oh, you need support afterwards?

What if this support actually, what if you never had to like go meet a new person? What if you don’t have time to go to a support group? Why?

Because you’re working all the time. Why are you working all the time? Because the same 10 billionaires like own everything.

I don’t know.

It’s just so-

Yeah, I get it.

I do.

You know, and to say, and to like speak out against this, people are like, well, I mean, it’s happening, right? We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

It’s like, right, but you also don’t have to like repeatedly ask the genie for three more wishes.

Well, what a great metaphor you just used. This is what I’m trying to talk to, a genie in a bottle, right? And this is the thing, I feel like, in some ways, people are right.

This is inevitable. But what I think is missing is the attitude that we approach it with.

And again, I was recently talking to someone who had this brilliant observation that pre-industrial times, which we’re often described as primitive, and that those were sophisticated people living in primitive times, and that we are primitive people

living in sophisticated times. And I thought that was really powerful. And so much of what’s been washed clean of our daily lives entails the sort of ritualization of these feelings, right? And so storytelling is one of the biggest ones.

And so like, yes, stories about genies. Who are the people who would come to you in olden times and offer to give you back your dead relative at a price? That’s a witch or a wizard, right?

This is the realm of sorcery. One of the earliest parables about automation is the sorcerer’s apprentice. These are bargains you strike with sorcerers, right?

And humanity understands this because we have millennia of stories about it, right? And this is the level at which the story telling about this needs, and I’m not putting my book out there to be like, my book has to be.

I just wrote this to express the feeling I have, that this is the kind of feeling I feel like needs to be out there, right?

You earlier were imitating some sort of Silicon Valley person saying, well, what if we could just take this person and sell it back to you? And I think the appropriate pitch to be, well, what if they could take this back and sell it back to me?

What’s missing is the scream of terror at what this might mean.

And who are they going to sell it to?

Jayson, I went to, I’ve told this story in the podcast like a hundred times, but guess what?

Now it’s going to be a hundred and one. But I went to TED the year that I did my TED talk, and I was in the audience while somebody was presenting. I could probably find it.

Maybe I will for this video this time. And their talk started with a deep fake of President Obama, but it was four videos of President Obama. They were like, which one’s real?

And they were like, you don’t know, right?

Parlor game, fun.

Right. I was like, why is this good? And then the guy kept going, he was like, you know, we did interviews with Holocaust survivors.

Now kids can interact with a Holocaust survivor. And I’m like, no, they can’t.

No, they can’t.

No, they can’t.

Through the definition of the Holocaust, yes.

And he said something about like, you know, imagine your kids talking to your dead grandparents.

And I thought, my dad was dead, and my dad was, you know, a Catholic, and my dad was, I just could see him in the VA cemetery, just spinning in that grave, just being like, absolutely not, you know, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

When you’re gone, you’re gone. And that is what makes life valuable and meaningful.

And what makes it so painful, what makes this novel feel so real, is that we are left in, in UnWorld, we are left in this version of the world where something primary and primal is missing.

And as my uncle, who is a philosopher, who has never used the internet, and don’t you dare show it to him, he’s almost 90. I want to get him all the way across the finish line without him, without him going on this place.

That’s beautiful.

He said, they are in the light, and we are here pawing our way through the dark.

That’s beautiful. Beautifully said. Oh my God.

And that’s what it is, right?

That’s what it is.

And I really felt so close to, every time we switched point of view and we switched character, I could see their darkness, I could see what they were pawing through, and I really loved that each of them had their own version of the UnWorld, which the

name, wow, it’s powerful. You know, it comes from, I’m just like, no, I’m just talking to the audience, but sorry, but you know, it comes from like, in your book, UnWorld is like a specific video game, right?

Where it’s like sort of like a realistic video game, but like it really is, it is the reality and the unreality of living like life as a person.

Yeah, right. Beautiful. Wow, thank you.

Thank you for saying that. That’s incredible. I’ve never heard it quite expressed to me that way.

And it’s interesting too, cause one of the reasons I made a conscious decision that this is a book with multiple different narrators, but it’s a tricky one.

And I don’t want to like give away a plot point, but the way that the narrators work, there’s a bit of, you know, mirroring happening, right?

And so the question of who the I is in the novel is part of the fun of the novel, if it’s fun, part of the interesting thing in the novel.

And you don’t read really many or even hardly any polyphonic multi-perspective novels where every single perspective is told from the first person.

In fact, usually they’re either authored person to give a sort of omniscient overview, or there’s a single kind of, if you were to draw on a piece of paper, or all the characters, there’s one character who is assigned an I, and then you can sort of

do the work afterward if you want to diagram it out. Like, oh, I understand now that I’ve read this novel that at the heart of it was this central character.

But, and I actually got that feedback early on when I was workshopping a section of this novel from one of an advisor at the time who said like, well, this is really looking good, but you want to consider switching up the perspective so it’s not all

I that gets to be a little off putting and confusing for the reader because they want to know who the I is. And I remember thinking that what I really wanted was for every single character to be trapped inside of themselves in such a way.

And part of what this novel is also hoping to express is the feeling of being buried in your own mind. Each of them is feeling that for different reasons. Grief and trauma is a huge component of it.

They’re all made to feel alone by that. But the true enemy, as like the old adage goes, is not pain but suffering. It’s the sort of things that you think when you’re left alone with your pain.

And every character in this novel, I needed them to feel exquisitely trapped and alone with their pain.

And that was what made the yearning of those sections coming together at the end palpable to me, was that you understood on a visceral level having stood in each of their consciousnesses and only you understand that just outside of their frame of

reference, there’s another person. And watching those various trapped first-person perspectives hesitantly yearn towards each other pawing through the dark, as you so elegantly put it, was a very conscious decision, because this is a book about a

Yeah, it’s like whenever there’s always like a central, like in life, every loss, right, has like a center of the blast, and then there’s like this blast radius.

And, but you believe that you’re in the center of it. Like everybody is at the center of their own experience, right? Everybody’s like, this is me.

Like, yeah.

Well, cause at the end of the day, you are, you do have the anchor last around your leg of your you, your me, your I, your grounded in your specific, the walls of your consciousness are, they’re not porous.

And again, that’s a, you wouldn’t yearn for something as gruesome as this, this sort of escape if you did not feel so relentlessly trapped inside of the claustrophobia of your aloneness to begin with.

Okay, so I texted you this, but I’m stunned at how well you can write women. And there were certain lines in here that I just felt so, so, so deeply in my soul. So I’m gonna, I’m going to, I’m gonna read you.

Your own lines to you. And I don’t know if that’s your version of hell, it is mine. So you’re just gonna have to deal with that.

Okay. Okay. Oops.

I think it starts over here. Okay. Okay.

Rick loved guessing what I was feeling, but he didn’t exactly love hearing he’d been wrong. I had just finished him, I’d just finished telling him something I needed after all. And he had feigned his own deafness in response.

Or had he? Perhaps I hadn’t used the right words, the ones he would somehow need me to use in order for him to understand. This proved the pointlessness of words to me.

Even if you told people exactly what you felt, they could make it mean anything they wanted in their heads. They could even and often did turn them against you. Why bother?

Damn, damn. Did you, not like you can’t just be good at your job, but did your wife read your writing?

Oh, yeah, she absolutely does. Although not like while I’m doing it. I’m like a little bridge troll in a corner for many, many years slavering over it and not letting her touch it.

And then at the very end, she’s allowed to read it after other people have told me it’s brilliant, several people preferably, because no one, and this I’m going to take an aside here to give a shout out to my wife, Stacey, because I have been an

editor. I’m considered to be a fairly ruthless one. I’ve had people tell me that being edited by me is a bit like undergoing a surgical procedure. I value that sort of editing.

I have had incredible editors.

There’s been no one in my existence who has been proved such a ruthless and withering in the only possible sense I could mean those words, and that is positive, line editor as Stacey, who will read three sentences of a book and go, this sucks, it’s

dumb, I’m bored. When I ask her why, she’ll be like, well, this word is bumpy and that word is wrong and she’s correct 100 percent of the time.

So if I were to show her this book in its infancy, she would have burned it alive with the intensity of her gaze, right? It needed to be strong enough to withstand and by the time I showed it to her, I’m not joking, we were in first pass pages.

So you’re like, it’s cooked.

It’s cooked except Stacey is going to read it now, everybody. And then I’d be like, all right, here’s the bad news.

Lots has to change because no one caught, and I’m not saying that to be disrespectful to the incredible minds who worked on my novel, who really are the best that exist in my opinion.

But no one was able to zero in ruthlessly on the kind of thing, the false notes that can exist even within three words in relationship to each other. Her ear and nose for falsity is so extreme.

And so I didn’t let her read it until the very, very end. And now that passage you just read, that was there intact before she read it. So it’s interesting that you asked me that.

But yeah, I mean, she does. I don’t know how it is in your relationship, but we have a sort of funny, I don’t want to say it’s don’t ask, don’t tell. Because I mean, I think the truth is that we know each other so well.

It’s like painfully obvious from where every single thing that I write on the page has come. No one is as familiar with the contents of my daily thoughts and psyche. And so I don’t know that she’ll make a joke.

Like I recognized something in this part, and that’ll be the extent to which we even go there really. But it’s very, yeah, I mean, everyone who has any kind of relationship, right, has those sort of weird internal negotiations.

And yeah, I don’t know.

Yeah, I think to me, I’m going to give you something which is I think that because you guys have been together so long and you do have such a, like one, even I think as someone who’s never met your wife and has had like five conversations with you,

but I can tell, I can tell, I always can tell what kind of a husband somebody is. I think you’re a very observant husband. And I think like you’ve absorbed and like observed her so well.

And I think, you know, probably more than just Stacey, but I think like you are that kind of person who’s not just looking, not just hearing what somebody is saying, but also taking in all of that context.

And that’s why these characters feel so real. And it doesn’t feel like I’m reading a guy describing what he imagines a woman would be feeling, which is like, sometimes it’s a huge miss. Sometimes it is a huge miss.

And I truly was like, jaw dropped that the first section for our readers, and this will also be in the intro, too. But the first section is, Anna is this bereaved mother.

And it just felt, as a person who’s not lost a child, like all of those feelings, all of those thoughts, all of those even uglier thoughts just felt so real and so resonant to me. So that’s just a little compliment. Tell us, she did a great job.

Okay, she did a great job through years of training.

I never considered writing a novel from the perspective of a man. Ever, honestly. And I don’t know, it’s just, you know, I offer that as something that I realized later on.

You know, someone said to me like, wow, this is really beautifully inhabited, you know. I wonder how you chose to choose this character and, you know, what made you want to go this way.

And then it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually thought about it, you know, for whatever reason, I hadn’t decided to write in the voice of a woman.

And there’s another moment in my life that, you know, this is sort of ancient, sort of funny story from my childhood.

But I remember when I was sort of in middle school and still wrote just to write for fun, you know, this is the last moment in childhood before I feel like this sort of went away, got stomped out.

But I was like, just for the hell of it, I was writing a fantasy story in my English class.

And I was writing chapter after chapter after chapter by hand, you know, and turning it in and, you know, just super nerdy like it was about to be, it was, I was about to be bullied out of doing this very soon.

But in this little moment of my 12 year old, 13 year old life, I was writing chapter after chapter of this thing because I had just read this like five book fantasy series and was, you know, just in it.

And I remember showing it to my older brother, who is a half brother, he’s nine years older than me. And he had always been very important as a sort of figure I looked up to. And he at the time was at NYU for creative writing.

And so he also represented to me this incredible aspiration. And so I like nervously when he was home from break, I was like, Hey, John, I wrote this thing. And he read it.

It was really sweet. He read it and he treated it with all the, all the sort of gravity that he would have treated something in his workshop, which I really was grateful to him for.

One of the first things he said was like, Jason, I can’t believe you wrote this from the perspective of a girl, how brave, how interesting, how hard. Like, how did you know what a girl feels like? I remember being like, well, she’s a girl.

Like I didn’t think about it then either.

So you’re like, she’s a person.

Well, I mean, I don’t mean to say that there’s no difference. There is, but I think what I’m getting at is that whatever voice is inside of me that I write in, it probably comes from a more feminine place than masculine.

I wouldn’t know how to write a story from a male, you know what I mean?

I feel like that feeling you get where you’re reading a woman’s, a novel written by a man about a woman, where you’re thinking to yourself as you read it, oh, this woman would never think this.

I feel like a man would get that if I wrote a novel about another man. Maybe he’d be like, nope, not even close, dude.

Okay, I love it. Jayson, do you have like 10 more minutes? I did bad time management today.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, good, because we’re gonna, like the next, you know, this is typically a call-in show, so I get, Oh, yes, that’s right.

I get calls and I get texts and I picked one to discuss today. It’s from a woman named Ashley, she’s 27, I’m gonna read it to you.

People call and text in about all kinds of things and this person specifically is asking for advice, asking for insight, so I’m gonna read it and we’re gonna discuss. So, Hi, Nora, long time listener, recent paid subscriber.

Thank you, Ashley, first time texter. I would call you, but I have a cold and a stuffy nose and no one wants to hear that. My name is Ashley, I’m 27 and I live in New York and my dad died by suicide in September.

I have a lot of feelings some days and none at all on other days. I feel numb, but also like there’s a 15,000 pound elephant sitting on my chest and also no one can see the elephant or see that it’s crushing me.

I’m exhausted having to point out the elephant and ask people who should see the elephant to help me. Oh, and one more thing, how do you make new friends when you’re grieving? Okay, thanks, bye.

Wow, wow.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, I want to say that you should be a writer, Ashley, the image of the beautiful and so palpable image of the invisible elephant.

I know exactly how you feel just from you saying that. So I want to say thank her.

Yeah, and Ashley’s in the UnWorld right now. Ashley’s in there. Ashley’s wandering around New York City, which is like the…

I thought about this all the time. I went to New York after Erin died, and I just was thinking this is a place with so much life in it, so much life.

And look at all these people doing their thing and walking around, and probably some of them feel this way, and I have no idea which other people here are feeling this exact same way.

You don’t. Yeah, I know what you mean. And, God, first of all, I mean, I feel like I’m so sorry that you’re going through this.

I’m so sorry. And as far as feeling numb some days, feeling nothing, that’s some of the scariest stuff that was scary for me. Because it always felt like, oh, this must mean that I’m broken inside.

You know, we have this funny, weird, I mean, we, I think people do, this weird way of looking at your mental health or your emotional capacity is like an engine or something that could just short out. You’re like, oh, I overheated and it broke.

And I’ve had people tell me this and it’s helped me. And so I will say it, it’s probably a cliche, but I nonetheless feel it. That every time your system shuts you down, it’s trying to help you.

It is acting out of some sense of caretaking from within you. It is trying to help. It doesn’t mean that it’s what you need or what you want at that moment, but it is evidence of your system working for you.

It might not be doing the work that you want it to do forever, but it’s the last thing it represents is something wrong with you.

Yeah, and I know that when I was given some of that language for my own path, through mourning my daughter, it gave me something concrete. And so I offer that in hopes that it might do the same or some semblance of the same.

Yeah, I like that. I also think making friends, new friends when you’re grieving is so interesting because you are going to, throughout your life, meet friends who are representative of where and who you were at the time.

Yes.

And not everybody is going to get like the full headline right away. And there is going to be a time when having a dead dad is not the headline. That’s going to be like a footnote.

And there’s going to be times where that footnote again, like pops back up and it’s front page news again. And you don’t have to. And I struggled with this.

There was, there was a period of time. I wonder if you felt this way too, Jayson. And there was a period of time where that was the most important thing somebody needed to know about me.

Like if I met somebody, they just had to know because it also weeded out a lot of people, too. You know, like I would truly be like, hi, I’m Nora. My husband just died because I just like that was such a big part of my life.

And like, I think that’s OK. I think that’s OK. And there are so many people who are your age, different ages, whatever, who have experienced something similar.

Find a group. Find a group. Find a group of like people who have survived suicide.

You don’t necessarily need them to have lost their dad, but you need people who understand like this kind of loss and this kind of pain. And they might be the people who get you through just like the next little bit of life.

And they, some of them might be people who are with you forever. And I did not want that. I did not want to be like, you know, I didn’t want to make widow friends.

And then I made one. And then I made many. And some of those friendships, you know, have just sort of like faded away naturally.

But some of them are still like so vital to my existence, even though that’s no longer like the headline of our relationship.

That’s so nice. Yeah. I’m trying to think if that’s, I know what you mean.

And I’ve also had friends that I’ve made through groups. And I would echo and second what you said.

That was something else that I needed someone else to tell me, that I didn’t need to know people who’d lost children to feel like I was in a community.

There was a lot of sort of medieval thinking about how child loss is the worst and ultimate total, which I suspect is very similar to how people feel about losing loved ones by suicide, frankly.

I’m even alone in this crowd is probably a very seductive feeling because I know that I succumbed to that voice on occasion.

I learned really quickly being in a room full of people who had lost all kinds of loved ones in circumstances that looked absolutely nothing like mine.

That grief is a community and that sounds so like, give me a hug and here’s your mug and I know that, but it was so important for me to feel. Yeah, it didn’t matter.

In a way, it erased my feeling of aloneness and that I was specifically marked by a particular kind of unfathomable grief. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to feel that.

Yet I think there was a tiny part of me that clung to it because maybe there was some part of me that had a magical belief that in order for me to survive, we had to hold out this thing as the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to any human

ever in history. Then that part of me learned that that was only going to keep me alone and my wife and I alone.

The minute that I started to let go of that fear was when I realized that I was looking into the eyes of a woman whose husband was still alive but he had been bitten by a mosquito with West Nile virus and he was now basically a shell of himself.

She described him as a toddler in a grown man’s body and she had lost him.

He was gone and yet she still had to be involved in the maintenance of his life and I was so aware of the specific weight and smell of that woman’s grief in that moment that it was literally impossible to hold on to that little part of me that felt

like I couldn’t make friends with anybody. Yeah, so I’ve made friends like that and I also would second what you said about there being friends who see you through transitions. We made some child bereavement friends.

We picked, you know, picked, that sounds gross. We gravitate, we found ourselves naturally gravitating towards a couple of people who we were simpatico with and they always were people that we imagined we would have been friends with normally.

And they saw, we saw each other through. And yeah, you’re right. Like looking back on it from a 10 year remove from our trauma, there aren’t people who are in our lives every day, but I’ll always consider them to be important.

So, but Nora, I think what you said is perfect.

I’m actually going to leave actually with a passage from your book. Sorry. Okay.

And this is something I underlined and I’m like, I love so much. Okay, here we go. I am made of this pain, I realize.

And so is everything. This pain is what the world was made of before the breath of God made it so that we could be said to exist in opposition to it.

God made borders, he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets. We stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.

So I hope Ashley finds that as beautiful as I did, because I do think that the things that we think set us apart from the world are the things that just cement our place in the world, that make us a part of this world.

So Ashley, thank you for writing in. Jayson, thank you for being here. That is the sound of the dogs, because Stacey’s home.

Just about.

That is our, that is the alarm has gone off.

Our time is up.

That’s the rapid up music playing behind me.

That’s it, that’s it. The dogs are losing their minds. All right, bye, Jayson.

Thank you.

Bye, Nora. Thank you so much. Bye.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this has been Thanks For Asking.

That was Jayson Greene, his debut novel, UnWorld, is out now-ish, I think. And if it’s not out yet, go over to our Substack. There’s always a Substack post that goes with every episode.

Substack is a way that you can support the work that we’re doing here. We have posts that go out with every episode, and we have a copy or two of Jayson’s book to give away to our paid subscribers over on Substack.

Substack is also where I send out weekly essays and I send out a monthly reading list of all the books that I’ve read that also includes book giveaways for our paid subscribers.

So that is linked in our description, but it’s also noraborialis.substack.com. Thank you for being here. I truly, whether or not you are a paid subscriber, like I mean, I’m the worst salesperson in the world.

I’m always like, do you do it or don’t? Honestly, like don’t. Honestly, keep your money.

Honestly, that’s fine. Truly, life is hard. We’re all doing our best.

Like it is an honor to have time in your day. It is an honor to share this space with you. I truly mean that.

And listening to our show, sharing it with somebody is that is it. That is a very, very big way to support our show. So you’re already doing it, is what I’m trying to say, because we are an independent podcast and that support really helps.

There are a lot of big companies with a lot of money. We aren’t one of them. And honestly, that’s by design.

That’s by design. I wanted to make a show that we could make as humanely as possible and that we could make our way on our own time. And this is the work that we want to be doing.

So thank you for being here and thank you especially to our supporting producers. Supporting producers are the people who have joined the Substack who have said, look, whatever the annual amount is, I want to give a little bit more.

And truly, they’re doing that out of the kindness of their heart and because they get their name in the credits. And so without further ado, I want to thank all of our supporting producers.

I’m talking about Ben, Jess, Michelle Toms, Tom Stockburger, Jen, Beth Derry, Stacey Demaro, Emily Ferriso, Stephanie Johnson, Faye Barons, Amanda, Sarah Garifo, Jennifer McDagle in all caps, Elia Feliz-Milan, Lindsay Lund, Renee Kepke, Chelsea

Cernick, Car Pan, LGS, Let’s Go Sir, Let’s Go Sports, Let’s Go Sports. I’m imagining that is what it stands for.

Stacey Wilson, Courtney McCown, Kaylee Sakai, Mary Beth Barry, Joe Theodosopoulos, Mad, Abby Arose, Elizabeth Berkeley, Kim F, Melody Swinford, Val, Lauren Hanna, Katie, Jessica Latexier, Crystal Mann, Lisa Piven, Kate Lyon, Christina, Sarah David,

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Dobrzinski, Robin Roulard, Nicole Petey, Monica, Caroline Moss, Rachel Walton, Inga, Bonnie Robinson, Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, Penny Pesta, I love saying that name. Penny Pesta is the cutest name on earth. Kaylee, Dave Gilmore, and Jacqueline

Ryder. This episode was produced by Marcel Malekibu. Our opening theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson. You can find his music everywhere under the name Lamar.

He has a new band called Lamar. So gorgeous, so beautiful. Our closing theme music that you’re hearing right now is by my young son, Q.

He was eight years old and he produced this on Garage Band, and that is how he would like to be credited. And I had to pay him $100 to use this music. And I think if he hears this, he’s going to say, no, I said $200.

He said $100 and I did pay him. Then I can prove it. Thanks for being here and we’ll see you.

I’m pretty sure we’ll see you next week. We’ll see. Probably next week.

Let’s say next week.