Natalie
And Nat — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe problems big and small with you, our dear Reframeables.

Rebecca
And why do we call you such a term of endearment?

Natalie
Because Rebecca, we are all in the process of reframing and being reframed.

Rebecca
Do you like how I say it different every time?

Natalie
Do you like how I try to match your difference with a new difference?

Rebecca
I totally like it. This week we connect with journalist and writer Leah McLaren to reframe memoir.

Natalie
Yeah. We talk about her new memoir, Where You End and I Begin, which started as a book that she was writing with her mother, and then in the end became a story about herself.

Rebecca
We talk about Toronto art schools in the 90s, the traumas of mothering (you know, one of my favourite topics), MeToo, victim narratives, and more. It’s a meandering conversation that started even before we pressed record, so enjoy.

Natalie
We are reframing memoir with Leah McLaren. Leah, thank you so much for being here. We’re so excited to have you.

Leah
Thank you for having me.

Natalie
Ok, I’m just going to dive right in, because reading your memoir was a really personal experience for me, which was very interesting. I didn’t expect to connect so intensely with your story — because your story is not my story, and so I was very curious about how the memoir itself is so personal and yet relatable. And I went to an arts high school — I really felt every one of your descriptions of the complex mind of a teenage girl. I’m going, “Yes, that was me too.” So there was just so much of the I in your memoir that I was struck by just… I don’t know. Is there something in there, like the dichotomy of the specific to the relatable, that strikes you about this genre?

Leah
So it’s a memoir, but really, it’s just one story. I think the best memoirs are, of course, just one story. It is about certain things, but really it just is that story. So I think that when you are telling a very specific story, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I think memoir works a lot like fiction — at least that’s the way I endeavoured to write the book. Like I’ve done investigative journalism and longform journalism that is not personal journalism, and that is like a totally different part of my brain — it’s reportage. And the part of my brain that I really used for this book was this stylist part. So it’s more about observation. So I think that maybe what you identified with, it’s a more universal thing. It’s the way you identify with a character in a novel, right? It’s that feeling of just something complicated being unravelled and laid bare in a way that you always knew, but had not quite been able to articulate before. I always feel that when I read Alice Munro — I’m like, “That, what you’re saying, yes!” And it’s not because I’m identifying with, I don’t know, some housewife in Victoria who’s just gotten divorced or whatever her stories are about. It’s more about the acuteness of the observation.

The fact that you went to an arts high school, that actually is a big thing in common, because not many people have had that experience. Where did you grow up?

Natalie
So we’re in Toronto and I went to ESA, and so I was parsing the details in your memoir to go, “Oh, she must have been at Claude Watson.”

Leah
Yes. Yup, definitely. ESA! Oh… you know.

Natalie
I know.

Leah
No, ESA is very cool. Most of my friend’s kids who go to art school go to ESA, and I’m not sure why that never even occurred to me. I didn’t even try out for that. I don’t know — who knows. Who knows what I was thinking. But I did that commute all the way up. But it would’ve been easier to go…

Natalie
That’s long. I could write a whole other book just about…

Rebecca
On the art school?

Leah
Art school, and I think I will eventually. I’m talking to my editor at the Toronto Star about it. The alternative school system in Toronto in the late 80s and 90s was such a disaster. I know so many kids, really smart people, who just basically dropped out. Like it was hopeless. It was ridiculous. And it was like, in terms of duty of care, it was just like, you go in — you have these, like, 14, 15-year-olds. You meet with your teacher once a week and you do a self-directed project — that’s not education. And nobody ever talks about it, and a lot of these kids (I mean, I know tons of them) ended up… eventually they went to university or they didn’t, but they just were basically not educated, I think.

Natalie
No.

Leah
It was a total disaster. And it’s like this quiet thing that’s just like, “Let’s just not talk about that.” But my art school, there was a lot of weird stuff that went down. It was great. I loved it, and I actually had a great time there and I learned a lot, but it was insane. We just smoked inside, and we’d stay till all hours in the school rehearsing, and nobody was ever there. In the last year, we had to get up in front of our classmates. We were like 17, with people we’ve been in school with since we were 14, and confess our deepest kernel of pain and cry.

Natalie
Oh my gosh.

Leah
It was like a psychodrama exercise. And people were like, “My uncle sexually abused me,” or, “I’m bulimic.” And one guy got up and he had this girlfriend for two years and he was like, “I’ve been having an affair with her,” and the other girl got up and ran away and it was like, “Is she gonna kill herself?” — because she was bulimic.

Natalie
Oh my gosh.

Leah
Anyway, it was so insane. But I don’t know if it’s still like that.

Rebecca
I’m sure it’s not, right? I feel like there’s been a movement, because I went to theatre school in Toronto, and I mean, our theatre school was a lot like that. I felt we weren’t well-cared-for as students, and I feel like there’s been a different movement in theatre schools, so I wonder if in high schools as well. I mean, that wouldn’t be ok now, right Nat?

Natalie
No — no, no, no.

Leah
Well yeah, in high school especially too — like, I remember we did like nude scenes. We did gay love scenes with mandatory kissing. I remember there was a kid in my class, he was a religious Jew, and he was like, “I’m not comfortable with this.” And they were like, “Well, you know, you’re just going to lose the mark.” And he was like, “I’m an observant Jew! I don’t want to kiss a boy!”

Natalie
Oh my gosh.

Leah
And, like, nudity. It was crazy. Then you just get into the whole conversation about acting and theatre and girls and women. I obviously didn’t carry on with acting — but I mean, I had friends who were at, you know, theatre school, and then like two years later they were, like, laying in a bikini across a car at the car show. And it’s like that world can slip very quickly for girls. Once you have an agent, you start going to certain calls… I had an agent, commercial agent, and I remember being sent at the age of like 16, 17 to actress model calls for a Moosehead beer commercial and being told to like, have a bikini top under your thing and you’d have to slate yourself. And I was smart enough to be like, “Fuck this.”

Natalie
Yeah. “I’m not doing this.”

Leah
Yeah, “I’m not doing this.” Because if you don’t get the big roles, then you quickly become Moosehead beer commercial meat.

Rebecca
Yeah. Props.

Leah
Yeah.

Natalie
Bec, that’s one of the reasons why you moved into directing and production as quickly as you did, right?

Rebecca
Yeah. I think I just like having a bit more control. And you know what? I put what my daughter was doing — I was letting her do auditions for a while, and then it kind of just stopped, and I actually feel good about that. I’m like, “What was I doing?”

Leah
That’s the ideal thing, to let her decide on her own. Because that’s the problem if you stop your kid from doing something — you’re basically pushing them into it, if they’re a certain kind of kid.

Rebecca
I just wanted to ask Nat, it was the other reason you relate to this book, because you’re both the eldest. I found that your descriptions, Leah, of the dutiful daughter, the caregiver — that is so much how I relate to you, Nat, or the role you’ve taken on. So I was wondering…

Leah
Well, I feel tremendous guilt, actually, about my sister. I was a kid, right? My parents broke up when I was eight, and then there was this period where we went back and forth a bit, but pretty quickly my mom moved to the city and I was just very, very focused on her and trying to be with her, and I missed her so much. So I sort of finneagled a place at this art school, totally on my own steam at the age of like 13 — I don’t know how I did that, but I was so determined to get out of Cobourg and go to The Big Smoke, Toronto. And I really didn’t even give a moment of thought to the fact that my sister and I wouldn’t grow up together from then on, and also that I was leaving her alone. I mean, she was very safe and happy with my dad and my stepmother — my second stepmother, my first one was not so great. But I don’t know.

It was only much later that I wrote a scene about it in the book. It got cut for some reason. I remember crying when I was writing it, and emailing my sister and being like, “Oh, I’m so sorry I went!” She was like, “Whatever, it’s fine.” But I think it really was hard. It’s very different, our relationship — you know, we don’t have a podcast. And we’re very different, and, you know, I didn’t live with her from the time she was nine or ten, and then we didn’t live in the same city after that. I lived in Toronto and she lived in Ottawa. And as you know, that is quite a distance. And so my parents, I wish they had done more. My dad did try, but my mother wasn’t hugely focused on getting us together, so it did affect things. You know, Meg and I, we love each other. We’re good. We saw each other this summer, it was great. And all these sibling relationships are different. They’re all different. But yeah, the whole ‘one kid goes to live with each parent’ is kind of weird in retrospect.

Rebecca
And do you feel like you just can’t make up for those years now? Is that what you think now?

Leah
No, I just feel like it is what it is. But, you know, when I see her… once a year, maybe, and she doesn’t travel a huge amount. She travels the way most Canadians do, like, “I’ll go to New York for the weekend. I’ll go to Florida.” She has two little kids now, and to come to Europe is huge.

Natalie
It’s a haul.

Leah
It’s a hall. But in London, everybody travels all the time. Nobody thinks anything of it, and it’s just sort of the way the culture is. It’s the way the school calendar is, too. It’s very chopped up and there’s half terms everywhere — it’s actually quite annoying. Every time you do anything, people are like, “So, what are you doing for half-term? So, what are you doing for Easter holiday? So, what are you…” I’m like, “Fuck off! No, I’m not going to Greece! Leave me alone.”

Rebecca
I’m going to sit in my house.

Leah
It kind of makes me miss Toronto, because everyone’s like, “Wow, you’re going on a plane.” If you get on a plane in Toronto, other than New York or Montreal, you’re going far. I do feel claustrophobic in Toronto. I think if I ever moved back (and people talk about who’ve lived over here, and America too), you feel like there’s nowhere to go. Because the great thing about London, or anywhere in Europe is it’s just… it’s amazing. It’s still miraculous to me. You can just go and get on a flight for like two or three hours and be like, “I’m in Greece. It’s totally different. The language is different, the food is different. There’s olive trees everywhere. The climate is different.” And yeah, that’s not North America.

Rebecca
Just thinking back to your sister and how life shapes us, there’s kind of a world-weariness about your humuor, or something self-deprecating. How do you see humour?

Leah
My feeling on humour is: it needs to be everywhere all the time, and it is the greatest solace on the planet Earth. And if you don’t have it, you are going to suffer because there’s a lot of pain and suffering in the world, but there’s also a lot of hilarity. And laughing is just fun. So yeah, I will pretty much make a joke of anything I can. But also my book is quite dark, so I think if you’re going to write something dark, it really helps to have humour — not silly humour and not glibness, which I try to avoid.

Natalie
It’s a hard balance to strike, isn’t it?

Leah
Glibness is the path to nowhere, I think. I think I was on Wendy Medley’s podcast and she was like, “Your mother was a terrible person, she had a sign on…” Wendy’s very earnest, obviously, and she was like, “She had a sign on the fridge that said, ‘Commitment sucks the life right out of you.’” And I was like, “I still find it funny!” Like it is funny. It’s just…

Rebecca
I think it’s funny! By the way, I do think you do that really well in the book — because it is very dark, but I didn’t feel really dark reading it. It felt that you did infuse it with life — like life is…

Leah
Well, also nothing terrible happens — like, that terrible. I mean, I think I’m looking back on my childhood because it was very feral. It’s Toronto at the time. I was talking to Sarah Polley, because she has a book out and she went to my high school, and we were in high school together. And obviously her childhood was totally weird, and crazy. She was famous, right? But it was similar in that we had single parents who were just sort of checked out — except that they were like, “Hey, if you want to talk about politics or philosophy and, like, have a smoke, then I’m your parent. But other than that, I’m not really much good for anything.” And I don’t know what it was like for you guys, but that was very common among the kids I went to school with. The conditions of my family life, particularly as a child of divorce, I knew a lot of children of divorce who were just really underparented.

So I think part of the reason for that was that Toronto was so safe at that time. It was the mid-90s really, wasn’t it? It was like, 89 was my first year in high school. The Berlin Wall fell. It felt like, basically, war is over except, like, I don’t know… Israel, and far away places. Central Africa, maybe bad things are happening. But basically, bad, brutal conflict — that doesn’t happen here. The major debates in politics and society seem to have been settled. That sort of end of history moment. It really felt like, ok, capitalism has won, but we found a way to do it that’s broadly liberal and responsible. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have the world under control. It’s all good, you know?

And so there was a feeling that, and it was a sort of holdover of the hippie era, that children could be treated as adults in a way, but it wasn’t so bad. Do you remember in Toronto during that time, Gerald Hannon recently died. He was a very good writer, but he was a proponent of the boy love movement. And the boy love people, or child love people, they marched with Harvey Milk and his gang. There was a huge segment during this push for gay rights, the first push in the 80s, there was a big proponent of, like, “Look, we should let children consent.” And Gerald Hannon, you can go back and you can find the stuff he’s written about boys and children. And that was like liberalism was kind of tipping over, especially when it came to children and a duty of care toward children, into a kind of morally murky zone. And my mother was definitely not that, but she did treat me as an adult. And that was not completely unusual for the children of cosmopolitan intellectual media arts types, in my experience.

And now, my friends in Toronto and my friends here are broadly speaking from that same demographic. You know, they’re journalists, authors, whatever artsy types. But we don’t raise our kids that way. Like, we’re not like the Von Trapps, but there is a sense like there’s grownups and there’s children. And also, you know, I think things like MeToo, you know, and going through that sort of wave of, like, sex positive feminism and then being like, “Hmm…” Woodstock 99 — like, “Maybe this isn’t so great, girls showing their tits.” I covered that. It was one of my first big assignments for The Globe in the late 90s — obviously Woodstock 99. And have you watched the documentary?

Natalie
I haven’t.

Leah
It’s crazy. It was just tons of fratboys going around in, like, tie-dye shirts being like, “Show us your tits!” and all these girls like, “Woo!” You know, I was covering it for the paper and I was there with my boyfriend and a couple of other male music critic reporters. So I obviously didn’t feel predated personally, but I remember at the time just being like, “This is insane.” But that was all kind of tame — you know, Bill Clinton, and it all came from the same, like, “Hey, it’s all ok. It’s, like, groovy, man.” You know? And it’s like, “Hmm, not so good for women, actually. Or girls.”

Natalie
No.

Rebecca
Yeah, vulnerable girls. Yeah.

Leah
So Toronto felt safe. Didn’t you feel Toronto was so safe growing up? It just felt like we didn’t lock our doors.

Natalie
We were sort of Rexdale, and then moved our way slowly south, kind of into Etobicoke. Rebecca went to Richview, I went to ESA. Like, our lives were pretty…

Leah
Right. Did you know the Fords?

Natalie
No.

Leah
Did you buy pot off the Fords? The bros?

Natalie
No.

Rebecca
Well, they more Mississauga.

Leah
Oh, right.

Natalie
They were a little further west. Though, interesting — my life as a teacher, I did start to come into contact with a bunch more of that. Because I worked for the TDSB for 20 years, and so the impacts of the Ford touch sort of showed up in my students who were part of the football teams.

Leah
Oh, interesting. What do you mean?

Natalie
So even though they weren’t coached by him, we played teams who were coached by the one who’s dead. So anyways, just like lots of really negative but, like, interesting dynamics. But yeah, in terms of our own youth, ESA for me, I was so in my own head. I don’t know, I was a music theatre major, right? I mean, I was just singing all the time. Everything felt safe and easy. And downtown, Queen Street — I mean, we were out and about all the time, and you’re right. I don’t think doors felt like… there was no great necessity to lock them, if you want to use that as a larger metaphor for how we felt internally. And yet, it’s interesting that in my twenties, like later twenties and early thirties, I’m now divorced and moving into a whole new part of my story. I think the dangers of just life as a woman in the city showed up differently for me. So I don’t know. Is that a time piece?

Leah
Yeah. It’s like, are you more aware of it because you’re smarter and older.

Natalie
Exactly. There was just an ignorance, perhaps. Yeah.

Leah
Yeah. I think I definitely put myself in crazy situations. Just, I don’t know, being a teenager and thinking nothing of getting completely wasted, or smoking pot and being so wasted in a house I didn’t know, with people I didn’t know. Sleeping in beds with random guys that could have raped me, but didn’t, thank God. You know, I would never put myself in that situation. And far fewer men want to rape me now. You know what I mean though — it’s true. When you’re a 15-year-old girl, every creep wants to rape. It’s hard. Do you guys have daughters?

Natalie
Rebecca’s got two.

Leah
Yeah. I had sons, and I was so relieved. And I was like, “I wanted to,” and they were like, “Why?” I was like, “Umm, they won’t get raped, probably.” I know. “Because white men do better — have you not looked at the world?” Like, I’m sorry, but just the worry — because I was wild, as you know from reading my book. I would be terrified to have a daughter who saw the world like me.

Rebecca
The incident in the pool that you open the book with — you were young. You were 15, or 14, or…?

Leah
Yeah, I was 14.

Rebecca
That’s so young. My daughter is 13, turning 14.

Leah
I know. It’s crazy. I did an interview on the agenda and Nam, who’s such a lovely host, but she opened the interview by saying, “So, when you were just 14, you were sexually assaulted at a pool party.” And I was like, “Whoa. Wait. I really don’t want to get sued, because I never said that. But also, I still don’t think of it, what happened, as an assault.” Yeah, there was a part that happened in the pool that was sort of a joyless threesome. And then there was a thing with me and the boy involved in a bedroom later. And that scene was the first scene I wrote for the whole book. I was thinking about that night, and I think all of us who are involved in that have all thought about it our whole lives.

Because it’s one of those strange things — I’m very interested in things that happen to you, to us as women, or just as people, that kind of exist in a moral gray area. Where you know you can’t quite decide what happened, and who was at fault. And you know, there are overlapping rights and competing agendas. And I feel for me, those things are the ones that stay with me, and that I want to unpick forever and ever and ever. Because also, I guess I would call it a traumatic event. It certainly was traumatic, but it was more just really confusing. But I’ve now had a lot of time to think about it, and I think we were children, first of all, and that we didn’t know what we were doing. And I think it was painful and hurtful, and we all suffer, but I really think there are sometimes things that happen in life. And the healing that needs to be done, if there’s healing from that, is to think about the sort of whole of it and the moral complications of it, rather than looking to draw a kind of clean narrative out of it, for me.

And then of course in the book, I finally break down and confide in my mother about that event. The thing I was really upset about was that my best friend broke up with me because of gossip at school, and it was one of those sorts of things. I was so distressed about that, and lost a lot of weight, and fainted. And then my mom confessed to me that she had been abused, but in a much more stark black and white way when she was 12, as opposed to 14. And as you know, as the mother of daughters 12 and 14, those are…

Rebecca
Yeah.

Leah
Yeah. You know, I developed quite young, so my 12 and my 14 were very different. And the way those two stories flowed into each other has always interested me and stayed with me.

Rebecca
Like how she said they were the same and you’re saying…

Leah
Well, first of all, our relationship had become kind of like a friend relationship. So that’s how she encountered me. So I knew that I could tell her this, even though I was so deeply ashamed of it. Like a normal mom, if my kid told me that they were involved in something like that, it would be very hard not to feel like, “Oh my God, I failed.” Right? “I failed, and therefore I must take action.” In a way, what she did was the best thing — was that she listened and took it on board, but then because my mom is primarily interested in herself (which, you know, lots of people are), but she then told me her story right after, as a sort of balm.

I’m sure it’s happened to you guys. With friends that will often happen. You know, I was just out with two friends, one of whom is having, like, a text affair on her husband, and doing all this crazy porny video stuff. And the other one got divorced a year ago, but Tindered for a while, but now has found a boyfriend. And the one woman was saying, like, “Oh my God, I’m a lawyer, and I just sent this Cuban cab driver a video of my vagina.” And she was like, “And I’m a lawyer, and if that ever gets out, and oh my God, and what am I doing? Like, what has overcome me? And this is the craziest thing.” And then my other friend was like, “Oh dude. Don’t worry. I sent some random guy a video of me masturbating with my vibrator. What was I thinking?” And I saw the other friend go, “You did? Why didn’t you tell me this?” “Well, I was so horribly ashamed of it. I never even met him in person. It was just like this crazy…” She said, “It’s weird. I didn’t know. Suddenly you’re single, and you’re like, ‘Is this what you do now? Is this what teenagers do? I guess it is. It’s a whole thing.’” But anyway, my point is that women often do this with each other, right? You’re like, “Look at my…” It’s like, “Show me your wounds.” “Well, look at my wounds.” “Oh my God, that’s terrible.” You know? And it really is helpful. And anyways, the other friends felt much better, although still a bit guilt-ridden. But I think that’s what my mother was intending.

Natalie
Right.

Leah
But of course the difference in our situation is I was a child when she was an adult. So it kind of felt a bit like… well, at the time it was great. It felt like a relief because I was like, “Oh, my story, this is nothing what happened to me.” Which is kind of what I wanted to hear, but later I was like, “Probably not like the finest parenting moment.”

Natalie
I wanna pick up on that part though, specifically about the idea of the story as being… not conflated necessarily, but definitely like… you have a line in the memoir. There was this realization that the story was not as important or interesting as you’d believed — of what happened in the pool. And in some ways then that relieves you, right, of the pressure of what a story like that could do to your mind. And at the same time, it made me think, because you had prefaced that whole section in the piece talking about an uncle of yours who had also been a reporter and how he had commented on, basically, you can find any story interesting if you look at it closely enough.

Leah
Yeah.

Natalie
I was reading those two lines, kind of weighing them in both hands, and then I wondered, “Ok, so then what makes a story interesting?” Because if all of a sudden what is quite a dramatic pool story is not as interesting as you wondered if it was, what’s the kernel there?

Leah
I guess the first point is that my family, we’re a family of storytellers, because a lot of us are writers. Like my mom, me, my uncle, my aunt, and even the people who aren’t writers like to tell stories. And the thing about writers and stories, and journalists and stories, there is a proprietorial sort of attitude towards stories. People fight over stories in newsrooms, right? In journalism, that’s the whole point of it: get the story. And so a good story is gold, right? So my mother’s story was always the best story. And so there is an element of that, and it might sound sort of mercenary, but there was a sense that this story is not going to come out — that somebody has to render it. So that was part of what was at work, but also I was interested in the way my story flowed into hers — or my story flowed out of hers.

Because the thing about the horsemen and her abuse story was that story is all about context, right? There’s what happened, and then there’s the way it’s framed, right? You guys know. So it’s all about framing. And I often say the thing that every writer knows (that maybe the average reader doesn’t, and certainly the average person doesn’t) about a memoir is like, I could have written ten different memoirs about all the events that are in the book that would’ve been completely ten different books without changing a single fact or event. Just by tone, style, perspective. I tried to be true and honest, because I don’t think it would have worked otherwise if I wasn’t honest — like emotionally honest. So I tried to be as hard on myself as I was on anyone else. And I tried to not be too hard on everyone else, you know, and not to be too sorry for myself, or sorry for myself at all — which I’m not particularly.

So my mother obviously at a certain point was like, “That’s my story. You can’t write about this.” The book was meant to be a collaboration, and then that sort of unravelled, and I was just like, “Well, I’d already started writing this book,” and my agent said, “Keep going.” And you know, it’s my job — that’s the other thing too. I was like, “Mom, this is what I do.” And there was a moment when she claimed ownership of that story, and I was like, “No. I call bullshit on that.” And I think that in a lot of families, I think that’s very, very taboo, and a lot of people are shocked by that. But when people tell me that, I’m like, “Yeah, but you weren’t brought up by my mother.” Because my mother taught me that, in a way. So she said, “Writers write,” you know? “Be ruthless.” And she has, throughout my childhood (and I’m not saying this in a bitter way), but she often wrote personal stuff, very soul-bearing stuff and very revelatory stuff, about the people in her life around her without even telling me or us in advance. And she was very mercenary about that and very ruthless. And so, you know, in a way I reject the notion of, like, filial taboos. Just like, “But she’s your mother.” I don’t know. You’re divorced, so you would understand that. I hate it when someone’s like, “But he’s your husband. That’s your marriage.” And it’s like, that’s just two fucking people. That’s all that is. And two people — it could be like the greatest love in the world, or it could be like a fucking double homicide. It’s everything, and nothing. And I think so many particularly women end up just not telling their stories, because as women we’re so much more bound by social conditioning that requires us to be nice and good and proper. It really pissed me off — have you read the Knausgård books?

Natalie
No.

Leah
They’re so good. They’re really good. My Struggle — it’s kind of auto fiction, but it’s definitely his life. Karl Knausgård, he’s a Norwegian writer. And he writes about, oh my God, he writes about rearing small children and just that period when your kids are small and you can’t work, and just the stifling agony of it — and also the beauty of it, but it’s very unsentimental. And when I read it, it’s incredible the way he details it. And I was just like, “Of course, a man is the first one to really get it down.”

Natalie
To get to do it that way.

Rebecca
Yeah, interesting.

Leah
Because a man can be, is allowed to be, to say, “I hate this.” Elena Ferrante also wrote really well.

Natalie
Yeah.

Rebecca
Yes.

Leah
Just, “I hate this so much.” I also found it pretty much unbearable. I was very surprised by that. That was one of the most shocking experiences of my life. I really wanted kids before I had kids, and really love them now, and I love hanging out with them now. But you know when you want kids and you’re like, “Oh my God, nobody will marry me.” And you see these mommies pushing their prams with their flat whites and you think, “Oh, to be you wandering around the park in your flowy dress,” and you just think they must be so happy. And I think maybe some of them are, but some of them were dying inside, and I had no idea. I found that hard. It was shocking. Usually things you kind of get what that’s going to be like on the inside, but…

Rebecca
In some ways, did it make you more compassionate for your mother?

Leah
Totally, yeah.

Rebecca
Her experience of mothering was challenging. I very much can relate to that, it being a very challenging experience. Even though I’m also surrounded by a lot of mothers who… some of my friends love it so much and they’ll use that language, “I just love it so much,” and I find that a little bit alienating because it makes me question myself, or what kind of person I am that I…

Leah
You should move to Britain, because people here just complain about their kids. And it took me a long time to realize — yeah, nobody would ever. When I go back to Toronto, I’m like, “How’s your kid?” and they’ll be like, “Well, Esme won the piano competition…” I’m like, “Oh my God, if you did this in London, you would have no friends.” Nobody wants to hear you talk about how great your kids are. Everybody’s just like, “Oh my God, she got caught shoplifting...” It’s great in that way. But they don’t mean it, they love their kids — they’re great parents. But it’s just like this sort of gallows humour, and everybody just complains. But it’s a culture of complaint. I mean, the upside is Canadians are actually kind of cheerful and positive and nice, and they mean what they say instead of talking in fucking codes constantly.

Natalie
They do talk in code. I’m going to tell my husband that you agree with me on that one.

Leah
Yeah. No, like my husband’s always… I’m like, “Can you stop being passive aggressive?”

Natalie
Just say the damn thing.

Leah
And he’s like, “I was expressing affection.” I was like, “No, you were making a passive aggressive joke.” It’s like, “No, really? So you insult someone?” He’s like, “Yes, we insult each other, and that’s how we show affection.”

Natalie
And that’s love.

Leah
The cultured is fucked. Anyway…

Rebecca
Hey Reframeables: a little housekeeping. Don’t forget to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts if you like what we’re doing here on Reframeables. Your feedback really supports this reframing project of ours. Also, please sign up for our weekly newsletter, which comes with a free delicious recipe from Nat. And we have a new segment for our Patreon subscribers: mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. So check us out over on our Patreon, and consider a donation if these reframing conversations have supported you or someone you know. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Reframeables.

Did you worry about this notion as female writers — like, in wanting to write a memoir exposing this domestic life, I don’t know, this struggle of, “This is boring that I need to try to unpack my life.” I feel like it was going around writing circles for a while that personal memoir is relegated to women, and we were trying to claim our lives, and it’s very…

Leah
Yeah — life writing, self writing. On my Substack, I have a memoir club that has actually done quite well. I really am a proponent — I do think writing memoir and life writing is one of those things where whether you get published or not, or whether you self-publish, I’ve seen it be really incredibly cathartic and healing and helpful to people to render. I mean, in a way, that’s what talk therapy is. It’s the great panacea of our age, but there’s really no magic to it. It’s about reframing your life. Like, mostly it’s about being kinder to yourself and letting it out. It’s that kind of idea. But I think that writing can be just as helpful in that way. And I know people dismiss it and say, like, “Yeah, it’s a girly thing.” Well, yeah, whatever — I don’t care. Most women buy books.

Natalie
I like that.

Leah
So I also think creative nonfiction is at a very interesting kind of moment. Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. I just read this profile of a French guy called Carrère. He writes these books that are sort of about issues or political events, but they’re personal. So he’s like the reporter, so he might be doing some interviews, but then he also goes back to his hotel and has a fight with his wife on the phone. And it’s very Knausgårdian in that it’s self-revelatory, but also engages with the broader issues. And that really interests me. I don’t know, I felt writing this book — I feel like we’re at a moment where storytelling, if you really want to talk about complicated issues, social media and the way that the internet landscape is, the media landscape is right now, it’s very hard to tell complicated stories in a way that people can absorb, that their attention span is able to absorb when people sit down to read. That’s why a lot of newspapers don’t really have a lot of long reads anymore, or they’re in a long read section that is for people who read long reads. I think longform reportage has been shrinking and shrinking.

But I think that in the world of fiction or memoir, you can really write about those issues in a way that people are able to palate, but also in a way that won’t get you cancelled. Because the truth is a lot of these issues, the most complicated issues of our time, are complicated and there’s not one way of looking at them. And memoir and fiction and creative nonfiction allows you to do that. It doesn’t require you to say, “This is what I mean, this is what this book means.” It’s more like, “Come with me and let me tell you a story, and hopefully it will provoke, you know, thoughts, and I don’t know, maybe you’ll draw something from it — or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll think it’s shit.”

Natalie
That’s really lovely to think about it that way. And now I’m trying to imagine a takeaway from someone who’s sitting here listening to our conversation, who’s not a writer, is a reader — but you know, however they find themselves connecting or disconnecting in their lives. Can a takeaway from the memoir writ large be that we learn about ourselves through the stories we tell? You kind of preface that, right, with, “You could tell ten different novels.”

Leah
Sure, yes. We learn about ourselves through the stories we tell. Also, I think that stories are shared by definition. And also that if there’s one issue that’s like the topical thing that the book came out of… because the book really did come out of the original book that I was going to write with my mom. Not the book it became, but the original idea where we were going to go and find her abuser, that came out of conversations around MeToo. And MeToo, it’s still such a fascinating watershed for me. It’s easy now, people sort of roll their eyes and they’re like, “Ehh, hashtag activism. Me Too, Black Lives Matter, what did it do?” But at the time, MeToo (because it was the first of all of that), do you remember how it felt? It felt like, “Oh my God, look what’s happening.” It felt like our Arab Spring, you know? It felt like the world will never be the same.

And the reason it felt like that wasn’t because of Harvey Weinstein, who everybody knew was a rapist forever, and that was a very extreme story. You know, that was the story that it centred around because we were all angry about that — kind of like George Floyd, the sort of wellspring. The sort of uprising feeling was like, “Me too.” It’s like, “Every woman you know, has experienced this to some degree or another, and all of those feelings and stories matter, and we will tell them, we can tell them, and they matter.” And then what happened, of course, was social media sort of took it and ran with it, and three years later, four years later, it’s like Amber Heard being basically crucified in a libel trial. And it was sort of like: this is the blowback, I guess. But what social media did was it heightened the moral stakes in society. So it suddenly felt like, “Oh my God, you can get cancelled for giving someone a massage at work,” or whatever. Albert Schultz, I wrote a story about his story. It was like, “Really? This is our Harvey Weinstein?” Like, he flashed someone backstage? Like, that’s the best you can do, Canada? Not that, you know… and all of these men, I think too, quite a few men and people were getting cancelled because they had enemies and they’d done some bad things.

So there was this feeling of: the world’s going to be more just for women. And then it was like the moral stakes got raised, and then it was like: no, the world’s just scarier and makes less sense, and by the way, your little story of the thing that happened to you at the pool party, no one cares about that. Because if you want to tell it, you’re gonna get your friend cancelled, and do you really want him to lose his job because something weird happened at a pool party 30 years ago? And so in the end, I’m fascinated at how in so many of these debates, the ultimate bottom line is women shut up. Why does it always get back to that? I don’t know. That pisses me off. So part of the book was out of that. I was like, “There has to be a way.” It felt very scary to write it. I talk to people who want to write memoir all the time and they say to me, “You know, I don’t know if my story, it’s not that extreme, it’s not that na na na…” Because they’ve read memoirs like Tara Westover’s Educated, or The Glass Castle — which are amazing memoirs and obviously crazy life stories. But I don’t think that’s what memoir has to be. I think it needs to be well-written and well-told, but I think that people identify with real stories, but it’s all in the telling. And I think that it’s really important to tell those stories because, you know, people understand moral complications because people live in the world.

Rebecca
What about this idea of joy coming out of trauma?

Leah
Oh yeah.

Rebecca
You say that about your son. I found that really beautiful.

Leah
Yeah. Yeah — Frankie is kind of magical to me. I haven’t written about this or anything, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter. But he was recently diagnosed with this thing called absence seizures, which is a form of childhood epilepsy, and I’m convinced it has something to do with his crazy birth. Because he also had a squint, and he had to have surgery because his eyes crossed. And so he’s medicated now, so it’s starting to get better, but basically he calls it ‘glitching out’ — he goes unconscious, automaton, but doesn’t fall down. It’s like fainting in situ, for five to 20 seconds, up to 200 times a day. It’s insane.

Natalie
Wow. I’ve read about this. Ok.

Leah
Yeah, it’s super weird, but most kids grow out of it. It’s medicatable. It’s highly treatable, and so it’s fine. But it’s very spooky because it’s like, “Where does he go?” And I feel like he’s in his magical Frankie world. His birth was so awful and traumatic for both of us, but he is just this sort of, “Bew bew bew, bidubidubidoo.” Not all the time — of course, he’s pain in the ass, but yeah. I just have this feeling about him that, I don’t know, I just know if I buy all that early childhood stuff. You know when you’re pregnant and everyone’s like, “Oh it’s so important, the birth, and it has to be a wonderful experience, and your baby has to be covered in the go from your vagina, otherwise they won’t… whatever, their microbiome won’t work.” And I just realized, yeah, or that could all not be true because Frankie’s awesome. And I also don’t think trauma works in one way. I think we read a lot, some people just… the smallest things, they just have less tolerance for them. And then some people, amazing things come out of. I mean, Nelson Mandela, what the fuck was that? Like, guy sits and rots in prison for 20 years and then comes out and becomes this unbelievable leader? Like, who does that, you know? Amazing things have been born in the course of human history from suffering.

But mostly, also — part of the book is that, so the opposite thing, which is the dominant victim narrative story or the story about victims, of the image of the perfect victim is that, especially women, that if you’ve been victimized, then you will as a mother become this incredibly risk-averse, hovering, coat-your-kid-in-cotton-wool kind of mother. And in my experience, by and large, that’s not what happens. And also being victimized does not usually make people nicer, or better, or less likely to neglect other people, or more able to love. And that’s part of the reason I do think victim narratives, they reverberate — like when if someone is raped, that will last for generations. Because women, we are the caregivers by and large. The things that happen to us and happen to our body affect everybody. But sometimes, it’s all good — like Frankie. I don’t know.

Natalie
It’s so interesting to hear you — because, you know, we know about intergenerational trauma. We can read about these concepts in a large sense, but even just in the smallness of our own personal stories, it’s really interesting to hear you say that because like I’m just thinking of shit that’s happened in my life that, I don’t know, at some point maybe I’ll talk about it on here, maybe I won’t — whatever. but it has definitely made me a worrier. So I don’t coat Frankie with cotton wool as you say, but I do think it’s very interesting that my kid is also a worrier, so he’ll comment on, “Mommy, don’t worry so much.” But yet he is, like, uber-cautious in all things and it makes me go, “Have I passed this? Has my various trauma made its way into his DNA?” And I don’t know.

Leah
Yeah. I once did a story on nurture versus nature and interviewed a whole bunch of geneticists and social psychologists, and even the social psychologists (who are obviously on the nurture side) — genetics are so huge. It’s so much of what our kids are. I feel like so much of parenting, actually good parenting, is just being open to who your kids are, and forcing yourself to accept it. The parts of it which are difficult, and often those parts are things where your kid is similar to you and has the same, you know, thing about yourself that irritates you about yourself and you think, “Oh God, that was not going to happen to you if I did my job right.” But I really think that a lot of it’s inborn, and my nature is very like my mom. I think that that was probably just an inborn thing. It’s been very interesting, the responses to my book because some people are like, “Oh my God, you were so badly parented,” and some people are like, “Your mom’s hilarious!” Oh God, I wish I could have her on the show.

And it’s fascinating, and that makes me happy. I feel like good, well-told stories should open themselves up to different interpretations — and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s the same as my interpretation as the writer and the person it happened to, because once you write it down and it’s in a book form, the relationship is between the book and the reader, and it has nothing to do with me, really. And I like the fact that people can just take totally different things from it. That’s very exciting. It’s kind of like music — I feel like it is the highest art form, especially classical music. What does it mean? What does Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony mean? Well, that’s not really a question. It’s something you experience with your body. It’s so sort of primal, music. I always love to think about those people, back in whenever it was, the 17th century, listening to Vivaldi for the first time. It’s so shocking, right? The intensity of the feeling.

Natalie
I love that.

Rebecca
Was your book in the end, do you feel like that one of the things you said was that you wanted it to be an act of devotion? Do you think it was that?

Leah
That had two different meanings. My mother certainly didn’t experience it as that. I did — I mean, I was sort of deluded. I kind of thought, “Oh, she’ll read this and then she’ll understand.” But the thing is, you know, my mom, there are great things about our relationship and there are challenging things. And the challenging thing has always been the same challenging thing, which is that she is one of those people who just has a really hard time seeing her life through any other prism but her own. I think we all struggle with that, but to be a good parent, you really have to try to be like, “Ok, this is about you.” It’s not about, you know, the fact that you, I don’t know, got drunk and had a threesome at a pool party — is like not a reflection of me and my parenting, and it’s not the time for me to have a fucking crisis, right? So she was actually not that. Or it’s not the time for me to be like, “Oh, well let me tell you what happened to me when I was 12.”

Yeah, my mom’s not great at that. I didn’t expect it. I kind of hoped, but I think also you don’t know really why you do something. We don’t really know why we do the things we do until after we do them, and then you sort of look at the aftermath of your life and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s why I,” whatever, “I married that guy,” or I, I don’t know, went hang-up gliding drunk that time — or I wrote that book. Various mistakes you can make in your life. But all I know is that I felt so compelled to write the book. I’ve never felt so… I mean, I’ve never done anything else for a living, right? And I would hear people, writers, talk about like, “The book wrote itself,” or, “I was just galvanized.” It’s like it was like some external force, and I was always like, “Whatever.” I always liked my work, but it always felt like work. But with this book, it really was like a crazy urgency. It was just like it had to come out. I felt like I could never write another book until this book was out, and it’s a real relief to have it just sort of, “Ok, there you are,” on the shelf.

The thing is, I don’t know if it’s going to be a big deal — not the book, but I mean, when you write about your life you affect the story of your life and you affect the people around you. And it’s very upsetting for some people, and for some people it’s like nothing. Like Max, my high school boyfriend — he now plays in the symphony here in London, I see him occasionally. I sent him the book and there’s this super explicit hilarious failed anal sex scene when we’re like 19. And I was like, “Are you ok?” and he was like, “Oh, it’s so funny, yeah.” And I was like, “You don’t mind I used your name?” And, and he was like, “No, no.” I mean, he’s single, so maybe if he was married, I don’t know…

Natalie
I was going to say — maybe it works to his benefit.

Leah
Yeah, maybe. Some people are super private, and some people also really struggle. Max is an artist, too. He’s a violinist and violist, so I think that gives him a particular understanding of creativity in a way. Some people struggle, and I think it’s understandable. They feel like, “Why are you taking the truth away from me?” I had one friend, I won’t go into it because it got a little bit… there were lawyers involved. But there was one friend who actually objected and was getting threat-y about it. Essentially what this person’s problem boiled down to was, “That is not the way I experienced that event, and that event was deeply painful for me.” And it wasn’t like, “I’m accusing you of lying,” because I was like, “Well look, it’s my memory, and it’s through my perspective, and I don’t pretend that my memory is infallible.”

Natalie
No — and you name that right off the top. Yeah.

Leah
Yeah. But people feel a real loss of control and they feel like, “How come you get to be the arbiter of a truth that I was involved in?” And it feels very upsetting. I interviewed on my Substack my mentor, this woman Cathrin Bradbury (you should have her on, her book is so good), and she had a great quote, which was like, “You pin people like butterflies to the page.” There’s a ruthlessness to writing you just can’t get around. And it’s true. Writers are thieves, essentially of truth.

Natalie
That’s so interesting.

Rebecca
In the end, legally though, it is just your memory though, right?

Leah
Yeah. There was no legal case to be had, but it took some phone calls between lawyers to determine that. I was just shocked by the whole thing, and then I just realized, “Oh, this person’s really in pain and really upset about what is happening.” And I tried to talk it out, but the person in question also kind of had wanted to be a writer too, so there was a bit of that in play. I don’t know. But you know, people react very, very differently, and some people don’t care at all, some people do. It’s very strange. Like my friend Violet, who I have like that crazy coke bingey night in New York, and her whole story about her MP husband who left over a Russian model after 12 rounds of IVF in New York.

Rebecca
Oh yeah, yeah.

Leah
I was a bit like, “Oh my…” because I’m not very good friends with her. I mean, I know her, she’s great — but I was like, “Oh my God, how’s this going to go down?” And I sent her the book, she was like, “I love it! Don’t change a word!” And she’s so excited — like she’s told all her friends, she’s really, really excited, and I’m like, this is so crazy. Some people would be like, “How could you?”

Rebecca
Yeah, but do you send it after? I mean, do you have to send it when it’s done, just to warn them? Because you can’t… otherwise you’re at risk of changing everything, right?

Leah
The lawyers would have me not send it to anyone. Obviously, the editor was not super happy. I had a whole bunch of going back and forth with him, and I actually sent him pages as a courtesy. I insist on sending pages to people that I like and who were in it as a courtesy, because I feel like people should be prepared, even if I changed their name, because I just think that’s the right thing to do. Now, my lawyer then told me, “Don’t do that.” And of course it’s true. In journalism you would never do that. You would never say, “Oh, hey Harvey Weinstein. I’m writing this big… why don’t you have a look at the pages and just get back to me?” Or even less, even if it was like, I’m doing a profile of you, you would never give copy approval. Vanity Fair does sometimes, in order to get the biggest stars, but that’s controversial — proper journalism, you’re not supposed to. So it’s a weird murky area because some of these people… you know, my sister, my mother, obviously my dad. My stepmother didn’t want to read it because she finds it unpleasant. We just pretend — my stepmother pretends I haven’t written a book. Which you guys get — I tell British and American people and they’re like, “What? That’s so weird.” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually just very WASPy and Canadian.” “Do do do doo, you don’t have anything nice to say…”

Natalie
“Can I pass you some crackers?”

Leah
Exactly. “Pâté?”