Transcripts For CSPAN3 Laura 20240706

Joining us now on booktv is laura robins, author of stash my life in hiding comes out march 7th of this year. And i want you to start with a quote on, page 18 of your book. Okay, if hiding in plain sight where an olympic i would be a gold explain that quote oh that boy so i had i had a really interesting childhood i was in one way it was really idyllic. I lived in cambridge, mass. I went to a private school. I, i have i have an amazing mother who always told that i was worthy and lovely and beautiful and, loved me. But i also had a stepfather who for whatever reason, the way that i was rubbed him the wrong way. That was curious. That was that was opinionated. That thats the kind of little girl i was every time i was any one of those things and more, he would become emotionally abusive toward me. So order to kind of keep the peace in. My house, i learned to edit who i was in order that it didnt set off. So if being too chatty was annoying to him, i was less chatty. If being curious was annoying to him, i would be less curious. So would i started hiding who i was in front of everybody without anybody knowing, without ever making a declaration that im going to change myself. It started bit by bit, and then it grew and. Grew until not just inside the house. But outside of the house i would edit myself to fit in whatever scenario. I was in. And thats thats what thats about and stash my life hiding is the name of the book. Yes the hiding of the stash. When did you start using. So yeah. So there is its a double entendre. Theres title stash because i stashed pieces of myself my entire life, but i also had stashes at the end at the end in the year 2008, which is the year i write about, i had stashes, pills and booze all over my house. Really all over the upstairs of my house. And they were they were for survival, for me at that point, a lot of people in recovery talk about they stopped using and drinking when their children were born. My story is opposite. I didnt start using addictively until after my kids were born and they they were young. They were about, i dont know, two and three. When i first started taking the pill, i eventually became addicted to. That lasted for about six years. So the last three years i was in an addiction. Why did you start . I started because i. I couldnt sleep. I had to kids that were born one year apart and they actually arent a year apart. But one was born in 98. One was born in 99. Boys, two boys and very energetic, amazing little. But i was you know, that thing youre supposed sleep when they sleep. I couldnt and so they would wake one, you know, one at one in the morning, one at three. And then i could never get back sleep. So i was really the impact of just not sleeping for days on end, weeks on end, months on end and. A doctor prescribed ambien for me to help me get to sleep and kind of reset my system and. It it changed everything for me. I it i absolutely loved it i loved how it made me feel i loved the fact that i could get a good nights sleep. I love that the kind mom that i was the next morning as opposed to like the bedraggled, short tempered, tired mom because. She didnt have any sleep. I was this loving mom energy like i thought it was this panacea for me. But what happened . I mean, this happens a lot with with different substances. Is as i continued to take as prescribed for about a year and then my tolerance grew. So i needed more the following year like maybe and a quarter to get to sleep for one and a half and then it was two and then three, and then it was as many as i could get by end of the year. By the end of 2008. When did you know it was a problem incrementally like that . Last couple of years i. I would have flashes like maybe this is something i should look at, but i think my desire to not look at it was greater than, than my, my intuition that was telling me. This might be something to talk to somebody about or get some help with. So i call them my three horsemen rationalization and justification and minimization. Every time something came up, i will just like rationalize it or minimize it, oh, it wasnt that bad or it wasnt for that long or, you know, justify saying it because soandso is, you know, xanax every night and its not problem for her. So why should i tell anybody this . So i knew, but i didnt know was in deep denial. And then finally in june, july of 2008, i admitted it to myself maybe a good time to talk about the community that you lived in at the time, the state of your marriage at the time, the i was so i lived in los angeles. I was married to a director. We had a very glamorous hollywood life. He was he was was a publicist and he was a director. I was an entertainment publicist. And, gosh, when first met and fell in love, we had so much fun. Like it was just it was everything that one might imagine that life to be. And then after after my our kids were born and things shifted where i ended up being, i gave up my company, stayed home, and he was then on the road shooting a lot. So we werent as much. So it became more of a very solo time for me, yet i was, the pta president at my kids school, i had just been asked to join the board. You know, there were premieres to attend there were jewelry shows to be present at. I you know, a personal shopper at a very, you know she Department Store which no longer exists which breaks my heart barneys. I had tennis with the girls like every thursday i worked out every day with a trainer there were nannies there were housekeepers had a groundskeeper that i in charge of so it was just very big a high profile life. And behind the curtain, this ambien addiction was growing. Another quote from, your book i always felt the burden of representing excellence, a theme which follows me to this day. Yes and thats and thats part of it. Part of the the thing that allowed me to stay in denial for as long as i did was that. If because i am you know, kind of like i am here, right . Theres im one of very few black in this very white space were in today thats been my whole life. And so if i am the representative for what people know as black then i can also be an addict because. That would mean that black black people are addicts or black people. Have you know, Substance Abuse disorder. If im representing which often felt like i was so my effort to get to deal with this thing, to get a handle on it by myself letting anybody know that that was part of it dont if if i go down, im taking all the other black people with me, or at least the other black moms in my school. That is my thinking. Then what was the breaking point for you . When did you decide to not just deal with it by yourself . The point i mean in recovery we call a bottom and there were several other pretty spectacular things prior to this that could have been my bottom, but they werent. My bottom was simply 4th of july. We had gone our beach house and i was just me, the kids, and i was going to take them to see the fireworks. And i was in such debilitating from ambien that i couldnt. So i feign i didnt feign a headache. I had like everything. But i asked our neighbors to take them and they did. And i did my best kind of get relief by taking more ambien and drinking and. I couldnt i couldnt get i needed to get and i was out like, i didnt have anymore. I would have had to go back to our city house to get my stash. And i didnt have my stash. And then my kids came and they needed their mom, you know, needed to tell me about the fireworks, needed bedtime. They needed like this stuff that my role was in their life. And i i was just like, okay, this enough. I cant. If i cant get loaded and i cant be sober, like, i be like this, i have to go get help. I have to go do something. Whered you go . I went to arizona, where we are now. But not. Not here. I went to the meadows and wickenburg. Arizona, which, you know is theres if you arent familiar with wickenburg, theres not much around there. Its pretty much in the middle, nowhere. But there is this world renowned treatment center. And so i, i was flown there by my now exhusband. He chartered a plane and flew me there and checked me in and. I spent the next 30 days there. Whos got scotty scott . S scott s is my boyfriend. And, um, who i met the hour i checked into treatment 15 years ago, the hour after i checked into treatment he didnt start off as my boyfriend. He started off as this annoying guy that i wanted to swat away like a mosquito and he became the reason i stayed. I would never have stayed there if it werent for him. He absolutely saved my life more than once and we after we got out of treatment, he went back to utah, where hes from. I went back to l. A. And he moved. He moved to l. A. To get sober. He ended up staying. And we dated for six years. And then about seven years ago, we moved in together. Why did you write this . Why is it coming out now . You know, when i was going through all this into thousandeight and you and i were talking before we started the interview about books and books are how i navigate the world ever since i can remember ive i didnt graduate from high school i never to college all of my education is from the books that i read thank goodness my mother read to me the way that she did thank goodness she she read to me this wide variety of books and captured my interest. So everything i know how to do i know from books and some Life Experience but books are always the basis of it. There was no book for me when i was going through this. There was no book for a woman who was getting divorced who was getting sober, who was black, who was a pta mom who wasnt coming from drug dens and prostitution who wasnt coming from a sexual trauma, who was coming from this place of privilege and was nothing that i could read, where i could see myself reflected in that. So, you know, i expecting to see it year after year after year. This is 2008. Its 20, 23. Theres still nothing theres no book written. A woman of color thats in this genre called quetelet hugh hewitt t that its a genre of books dedicated, helping people look at their with alcohol or drugs, whether it stopping or slowing down or moderate. There are no women of color that genre, if you google it youll see you have to put in of color if you want. If you look up quetelet authors, you wont find any of color. If you put enough color, youll find some. Theyre buried in the stacks way, way down there. Books are released decades ago. Theres nothing. And i was just thinking about, you know, because i went to my local bookstore in los angeles when i was going through this and looked at the shelves, im thinking about the next woman of color whos going through this and shell be able to look at the shelves now and see at least one, which will hopefully lead tell publishers and booksellers that we need more because theres a dearth of women, of voices, stories in this genre by of color. Youre a first time author. I am. How did get this book published . Oh, this was great. I the summer of 2020, harpercollins put out an Instagram Post saying they would take 30 pages and a query, which is a pitch letter for publishing 30 pages in a query from unnamed into authors. September third or fourth was the deadline. I saw this post in june. I didnt have either, but im like, im going to write these 30 pages in this query and im going to im going to see what happens. Like, this is my sign from the universe. And so i wrote the 30 pages and i wrote the query and got it in on time. I got it in on my birthday, which is august 27th, and i got the auto, you know, when you turn in something that says thank you for your fiction submission, blah, blah, blah, only fiction submissions be considered. And i hung my im like, no, its a memoir. Theyre not going to consider. And i sent it to a friend of mine who was actually queen of quetelet holly whittaker. She wrote this book quick like a woman, the New York Times bestselling book, hardback and paperback and i sent it to a couple of months later because she asked for it. I was telling her that story and she read it and she freaked out and she sent it to her agent. And her agent freaked out. And signed me two days later and said how quickly you get this written . That was in. Of 2021st november 2020. So april of 2021, i turned it into the complete manuscript and she sold it at auction to simon and schuster. Atria in october 20, 21. So it was such a heady, experienced to go from being rejected one summer to different of the big five publishing houses bidding your book almost almost just over a year later. How hard was it to pour this story onto these pages . And there are times you write about in this book that you cant remember. How did you deal with that . As you try to write a memoir as well and a lot of it i cant remember because i was taking drug that interferes with your memory memory. So it poured out. I was very disciplined. I down at 11 every morning because im a podcaster i have a podcast called the only one in the room. So i would do everything for the podcast from like to 11 after i worked out, after i. And then at 11 i would shut down, turn my phone over and i would write seven. And i did that every weekday until april i mostly as soon as i started writing a chapter things started coming to. Me but i had my planners from 2008. Ive kept them, i kept all these journals that i wrote. I have all these pictures like all these theyre photographs get theyre not pictures on my phone. There werent really smartphones then, but i have all these pictures that i developed and then, you know, theyre in just boxes and. I looked at everything. Thats how i interrogated my memory. You talk about writing this book for for someone like you that there wasnt book for someone like you. Yeah. What is a non addict get from reading quetelet . What do you want someone like that to get from reading your book. I the thing is with my book is it is an addiction memoir, but its also a memoir about the ending of a marriage and ending it ethically and with love. Its a book, motherhood and what it means to be a mother. Its a book about living authentically and and the how the departure from living authentically impact you and that can be with addiction. It can be with something else. It could be any type of selfharm. The final thank you that you gave in your acknowledgments. Yes. To my exhusband, who gave me his blessing to write and publish this story. Yes. Thank you. Yeah, hes been very supportive of the whole for me and very supportive of me as a writer. And then i let him know that i was going to start to write this book. I was very upfront with him throughout the whole process. I never wanted him to be blindside by anything. We are still we are no longer raising our sons together, but we still parents to them together. And the most important thing for he and i both is that we are good because that our kids to feel safe. So whatever that takes is what were going to do whats the only in the room podcast . The only one in the room podcast was born out of a viral article that i wrote for the Huffington Post or huffpo about attending a 600 person three day writers retreat and the only black person there and i was so shocked by by that by that circumstance that i had to write about it when i did, because the article went viral. I started to get all these responses and im like, oh, to my boyfriend. Its going to be all these black people that are going to scottie, scottie and and werent black people. There were some, but they were like people from all races, ethnicities, like anybody that had ever felt other in a room for whatever reason. Maybe they didnt have as much money as everybody else. Maybe they were the only Single Person with all of their coupled up friends. But anybody who had ever felt alone in a room full of people wrote in and said, i get it. I know what thats like. So those are the stories we tell on the podcast, we tell stories of any circumstance in which anybody, if theres a good story where they felt alone in a room full of people. Whats the story you told this past week . This past . Oh, my goodness. The best story. I dont know if his book is here. It suck at sony the great escape. I interviewed him two days ago so story was that this indian man indian from india engineered and. Completed. Thats not the word im looking for but successfully. Helped 500 indian men and enforced labor camp in new orleans in 2006 to escape their circumstances and get regular visas. And i dont want to spoil the book too, but boy, what an amazing book. What an amazing story. And hes an amazing storyteller. Yeah, a book that we featured on on booktv. Oh, good. What are you what are you working on this . Week on the only one in the room podcast. And how can people view it or hear it. So yeah, the only podcast, thats our website and everything. All of our episodes, its there are 600 plus episodes. Its evergreen library. The thing, you know, so you can just kind of peruse through it the story were working on now is a woman. It turns out good, but she was pregnant and stabbed 27 times while she was pregnant and by serial killer who left her for dead. Thats the story were working on now. Whats the next story youre working in book form. Are you going to write another book . I am. And i think is going to be a short a collection of essays about being the only one in the room in different circumstance. Were a few examples. Im like for, example, the original only one in the room, but like being the only sober at a dinner party, the only person whos having sex for the first time, sober. Only person who is and trying to raise these two boys like all these different only stories that i have, just figuring out what the best story is that illustrates circumstances and maybe writing that the book is stash my life in hiding or robins first time author it seems like theyll be more thanks for joining us on book