[applause] now our guest rebecca is the author of more than 20 books including a field guide to getting lost, the faraway nearby, paradise built in hell, river shadows and wonder love, a history of walking, she is also the author of men explain things to me on feminism activism and social change, hope and also the crime it crisis. A product is a California PublicEducation System from can get into graduate school, shes a regular contributor to the guardian. Leslie jamison is the author of the New York Times bestseller recovery and empathy stands inis the novel. Shes a good tubing writer for New York Times magazine and her work has appeared in publications including in the quarterly review. She directs the graduate Nonfiction Program at columbiaa university. Please help me welcome rebecca and leslie jamison. [applause] before i started im not doing the book signings because its a more Perfect Technology for what people to handle objects and for all the people to handle all the objects and its neverpe been invented and were in a global pandemic, i also want to say i am canceling most of the tour for the next couple of weeks because its the responsible thing to do and i want you want to wash your hands into Hand Sanitizer in between washing your hands and not touch d ything and dont sneeze or cough on anybody, just be really careful, those of us were healthy and robust and have options have an obligation to exercise the loving care for those who are more fragile and for the social body. I decided last week i was not going to sign books and assigning line because of germs in the pandemic is clearly what is that rumbling is the sign or subway, is that like the ultimate new york question. [laughter] so i was not worried about my health but i did not want to be running around the country being a vector in a did not want to be in large gatherings as theyre being banned so that the pendant conversation which means it intersects with the lack of a term recollection with my conversation but i wanted to make that psa and now i will read a little bit and sit down with leslie to whom im so grateful for coming up with such fantastic questions for conversation. This is a little bit of the beginning of the book. One day long ago i looked at myself as i faced a full link the mere and saw my image darken and soften andi seemed to retrt as though i was vanishing from the world rather than my mind was shutting and out. I studied myself on the doorframe just across the hall from the mere and in my legs crumpled underneath me, my own image drifted away from the interdarkness as i was only a ghost even for my own site, i blacked out occasionally and had disease spells often in those days, this time was memorable because it appeared there was not a world vanishing from my consciousness but that i was vanishing from theatg world, is the person who is vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance both and neither in those days i was trying to disappear and to appear in trying to be safe and someone in those agendas were often at odds with each other, as i was watching myself to see if i could read in the mere what i could be and whether i was good enough and whether all the things ive been told about myself were true to be a young woman interface your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee or the knowledge of it are all those things at once. A beautiful woman is unquestionably the most potable the world said Edgar Allan Poe who must not have imagined from a perspective of women who prefer to live, i was trying to not be the subject of someone n elses poetry good not to get killed, i was trying to find the poetic for my own with no maps, no guides, not much to go on, they mightve been out there but i have not located in yet. The struggle to find a poetry in which survival rather than your defeat is celebrated perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that or at least to find a way to survive that relishes your failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In the early years i did not do particularly well or clearly but i did it ferociously,. [applause] thank you for being here rebecca it is wonderful to have the chance to talk to you in it to give to all of us. It is wonderful to hear the beginning of the book and hearing your voice. I was wondering, were in aer strange time and there is a lot i want to ask about the book on its own but i guess in the past couple of days leading up to this event i have been thinking about the ways in which some of the ideas in this book, particular ideas about how Community Functions andh how at rises out of community and identity rises out of community, they feel like they speak to the moment in particular ways but i was curious, i thought maybe we could start with how you been thinking about the present moment we are in, thinking about contagion and health in the ways that we might care for each other, how some of those very urgent realities the moment are spoken in the book or speak to the book or how rather their connections and feel present for you. The tragedy of epidemic, and ordinary disaster earthquake, hurricane, et cetera if the authority and racism dont muck it up too much, people come together in an amazing and beautiful ways as they did for example in Hurricane Sandy and 9 11 much more so than anybody really reflected at the time as we left the bush administration. I think we can say hijacked the meaning of that event and the idea that we all have to be separate to be safe is such a complicatedsa one, it gets so close to xenophobia and as we sit here in the synagogue, weird ideas about purity and im excited to be in a a synagogue n a synagogue playing the min is ago and whats interesting to me, we have to be separate to be together and be in separate is how we take care ofe each othe, were going toar separate ourselves in various waves out of solidarity and how do we communicate that, it is interesting, its almost them purposes of what happened to me as a young woman, i realized that a certain point, why was i not political when i was young and realizing toat be political you have to feel like you have something in common with other people and that you have power, i started out with neither of those things and obviously ended up with plenty of both but itin was a journey so i feel like also every crisis is partly a storytelling crisis, how do we tell the story that we are doing this, not because we are shunning them, how do we tell the story that we are separating physically because werepa coming together and its virtually a Civil Society and how do we do it when the institution that shouldve laid the groundwork to do this right have failed as a Trump Administration has economically in terms of managing the cdc, the information and the rest. Theres a lot to say from what you just said but i do think there is something that is subtle and vital about the role the narrative can play in framing as a form of care rather than a form of fear mongering or scapegoating or distancing or even just talking about in that way and that separateness is away were trained to care for each other than protect ourselves an attorney important thinking about care rather than protection or Something Like that. It is also going to be interesting because we are such a profound unequal society, some have great healthcare coverage and some have none, some people can telecommute from home and the whitecollar jobs and some are workers who will lose their apartment if they dont show up and work even if they are worried, even if theyif are sic, there has been a bunch of people, this is not my original point noting that a better case for all, paid sick leave, a bunch of other stuff cannot be made by this pandemic which i think also makes a great case for Elizabeth Warren sadly. [applause]e] my people. [laughter] saying really smart things about the pandemic and the economic crisis last month and saw it coming then of course Elizabeth Warren can be a beautiful segue to the fear and silencing of women in american society. Im going to pick up on something that you said a few minutes ago about how when you were a young woman thinking about what meant to be political to you then that you neither felt that you had power nor were you deeply in touch with thehe feeling of having things inn common with others and us connecting that, the portion of what you read when you talk about one of the really core ideas in the book to be a young woman to face the prospect of your own annihilation in both of thosehi maybe think of one of te really compelling origin stories in the book that would be a great point of departure which is the story of your writing desk, the concrete literal coming from and you tell the story that im hoping you might share with us, receiving the desk as a gift from a friend who had experienced trauma and i wonder if everything i had ever written as a counterweight to that attempt to reduce the young woman to nothing and so i wonder if you could tell us the story and how inflected the writing that happened on it. The book has a pretty mild start after the opening passage, its a sunday after Ronald Reagan inauguration, the moment when the economy was going to turn away from the new deal in the Great Society and the social safety net and become the monster that now destroy so many lives in this country, i was househunting, my parents cut me off a few years before i was 19 and i was really poor, i was looking in the want ads in San Francisco and there was a 200 a month apartment and i called the number in the building manager told me too come look at it and i made an appointment and so i started with the story that is a really positive story about a complete stranger in a old black man who saw how much i wanted and needed this apartment and a place of my own and went out on a limb to make it possible for me too have it in a talk about the apartment in the neighborhood and the spiritual neighborhood and you know objects in the house which become to the opening of the third chapter which is something completely different, it begins with furniture, this is the chapter about my experience as a young woman constantly harassed on the street and elsewhere in a society that would not acknowledge the existence of the violence except by telling me that i just had to accept as a given and adapt myself to the fact that lets of men want to kill and harm and torture integrate and intimidate and insult woman all the time and we are not going to do a damn thing about it, you just have to go there, not do this and not be out and not talk to these people not wear that dress the in this litany of things that women are not supposed to do because of men that we end up having in our lives so much. The chapter begins from a segway of the stuff about my apartment of my writing desk and describing it, it was giving after i moved into the apartment by a friend of mine i known for a few years who had left her boyfriend the year before and to punish her for daring to leave him endearing to choose what she needed rather than what he wanted, he stabbed her 15 times and left her to bleed to death. And because somebody came along because there was an ambulance and transfusions in the hospital, she did not die, although the police blamed her in the school she was blamed her and everyone blamed her fors wt happened and there was no justice. So she moved far away back to San Francisco, gave me the desks that have been given to her by a woman who was evicted and this is an really interesting thingin about writing that it makes me look harder, go deeper and everything i ever written, arrange chairs, i write on airplanes, i write in bed, you know i write everywhere but mostly i written at that desk since i was 19, i was only writing this book, everything i okever written has been writtenn a platform given to me by a woman a man tried to silence forever and therefore i think everything ivefo ever written which was pretty early on about feminism in my punk magazine story covering 1985 andt wonder last and so many things85 since then has been a counter to that attempt to make women nobody and nothing and dedan silent and powerless and it was kind of shocking and now i know i cannot get a bigger desk either. For a while. And you been riding on a really big desk the whole time, thats a great way to think about it. The desk has been bigger than you. His legs go all the way down to the bottom of the story. They go all the way down. I was thinking about how in writing and has a counterweight to that attempt to silence a woman and how you make choices around what the writing involves and i think certainly for me as an admirer as your work in somebody whos been really influenced by your work and im sure i speak for many people in this room when i talk about the admiration, one thing that i love the most is the way that your work to totally erase this distinction between what it means to talk about the personal and political and that the counterweight you are describing very much involved invoking both in trying to document the constant conversation between the personal and the political but i was really struck by a moment in this book when you describe coming out of the background of an underground that was more focused on journalism and shifting or pivoting away from the more objective language of reportage or the motive of the oped first trying toto find a more personal language that can get specific about various kinds of harm that society was inflicting particulate on women in all sorts of ways, i wonder if you could talk about what the evolution was like away from the objective editorial journalistic mode, not that you abandoned the message by claiming the role that a person complaint and narrative and the political import. How that evolved and how you think about the question of invokingab the personal. I was influenced by the postmodern assertion that theres no such thing as a neutral position that everyone is invested every position is political and all of us speak from a particular place that has to do with who we are in values and consequences because before that there was such a sense theres something neutral and usually pretending to some weird rationality but what i was really doing back then in the 80s was ridingg in three different types, was trained as a journalist at berkeley which was a great training so doing journalistic work, i was riding and working as an art critic where you assume authoritative tone but that is clearly personal in your opinion but very externalized and that these are my opinions and associations but this is my most historic, i was writing much more personal essays and i felt like three things that were really a far apart and then with actually be an activist that changed everything, we so often talk about activism being a brockley that you should be with implications that its mildly unpleasant and so love virtue signaling but a lot of the things. [laughter] a lot of the best things that happened to me came to me in the best people that ever happened to me were because of activism so in 1988 i started going to the annual spring action in the Nevada Test Site were more than 1000 new car bombs have been detonated. Experiences that became part of it comes up later and it was such an externally experience you hadpe mormon down winters, atomic veterans, nuclear physicists, japanese survivors of the atomic bombs in japanese buddhist monks, the wonderful franciscan priest and nuns who were radicals, kinda like a lesbian pagans because it was still the 80s. [laughter] and anarchist and more anarchist, guys who tried to hug you and we were dealing with the rehearsals for the end of the world in the dusty remote place, very few people had ever seen was where the cold war was being enacted and it was also a shoshone land and became as the land right struggle which was one of the most transformative and eyeopening and wonderful thing that ever happened to me, i did a few things for them but they did so much for me. It was the complexity of all the layers of meaning western attitudes and civil disobedience through gandhi and the antinuclear activism, all the other layers that i realized i needed every tool that i had and that meant the journalism, the critical analysis because you can actually take the tools it you make for criticism and apply them to the politics of the nonrepresentation in the representation of Nuclear Weapon and were in the coded masculinity and anthropologist was decoding in among nuclear physicists, you can use all those tools but also the personal experience, what waspht like standing in handcuffs watching the most beautiful sunset in the world and i cattle pin with 500 people who care about the same things that you do, i realized i bought into the idea that these were three different types of writing but they can all be one type of writing in the personal was experiential what was it like to be at this place in camp next to a nuclear creator and what was it like to be handcuffed and driven 70 miles in the ritual, what is it like to unlearn the versions of western history that are race native americans, what is it like to join the indian wars in the 1990s manifestation, thatik was actually my one big litter larry breakthrough, they all belong together, that produced my second book savage dreams so yeah in a way your answer to the question and ask the very thing youre describing by invoking those particular examples of being handcuffed in the cattle pen and watching the beautiful sunset with 500 people who care about the same things that you do. It gives me chills in a way that feels quite related to what youre describing as a personal experience that you can bring your ideas to life with a particular abstract. There is a beautiful passage in the book where you describe trying to write an essay along essay about so much of the book is people are getting is about you coming of age of the writer and not becoming of age one but becoming over and over again, you talk about adulthood of process of evolution rather than the single threshold, you describe trying to work on the essay of walking alone at night you are looking for a way of the poetics of what you wanted with the politics of whatnt obstructd you from having it or reaching and i was so struck by that desire to wed the poetics of desire with the politics off obstruction and it made me think about the role of poetics in your work in particular the role of beauty in your work and was curious to hear you speak to admit moves through this book, what role you think the beauty has, the production of beauty and beautiful language in the arti