[inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. I am a library to room i welcome all to the city of fairfax regional library. Thank you for coming. Todays event is part of the Literary Festival at the festival runs through friday, september 30th. Be sure to pick up a program or visit for information about other author events about the region. The website also has an app you can download on your phone or tablet. Please help us also by filling out a survey over there. At the end of this event, books will be available for sale and signing at the book sale table at the door there. Thank you all for providing us with the service. Claudia calvin is a local journalist and author who specializes in the field of medicine, Mental Health and science. Her articles have appeared in newsweek, smithsonian, Scientific American and numerous other publications in print and online. Features cover stories for newsweek for 17 years on a variety of subjects and reporting has won numerous awards including a front page award from the news womens club of new york were a cover story girl or boy. The new science of selection. Originally from hong kong and the daughter of an american journalist, child has been steeped in news says compelling storytelling and is known for combining indepth and serious reporting with engaging and accessible writing. Her book, andy wahol warhol was a hoarder inside the minds of historys great personalities published earlier this year had a tremendous number of reviews on a shocker well written psychiatrics. To know, Charles Darwin certainly makes for some very entertaining speculation. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming claudia kalb. [applause] thank you no match for the wonderful introduction. Thank you for the book festival and all of you for coming out on a rainy night. I am so thrilled to see everybody here. So i wanted to tell you some stories tonight, and some reporting stories you may not i know them in the book and give you a sense to begin with but what this book is. I covered medicine, health and science as chris mentioned for about 17 years and wrote some wonderful stories but most of them had to admit about a page, two pages, three pages. This book gave me opportunity to delve into a subject im passionate about and that is the mind and rants, what makes us tick. Why do we behave the way we do . Why does this person do that and this person do Something Else . What do the behaviors we exhibit mean about ourselves . The journey to this book began about three years ago pittsburgh. I took a trip up there in the fall day. It was pouring rain kind of like today to go visit the warhol museum. I dont off anyone has been to the work on the unit but its a fascinating place. One Museum Dedicated to one artist. I went for an event that was oneofakind event that day. This is the warhol is the impact audience in on the stage under the bright light with a box in the box is a Cardboard Box kind of rough to get it looked exactly like a box you would have in your basement with all your your papers than that, something he wouldnt have looked at and there were two from the museum. This is a big event as it was one of warhols 600 plus time capsules. So warhol, for many years filled mostly card were boxes with stuff. You can call it junk. You can collect memorabilia. Some of it was worthwhile. A lot of it was in. They were odds event. There was junk mail. There were old toothbrush containers that were empty. They were empty prescription bottles. The two catalogers had blue club sign that they put on like they were about to do surgery to protect their handlers can do anything to the contents. They began in this box. One of them very appropriate from the editor if you were president what would you do first . There was a prescription bottle in there. There was an outdated that had not been to his life. He was shot and barely survived and the poor surgeon had to keep sending overdue bills to warhol thing and pay up, pay up. This amounts to 3000. They were old magazines, eat the dough, old bread. Anything and everything thrown into the period that was the beginning of the journey the beginning of the question what was going on with andy warhol. In Mental Health is american notion is that the latest American Psychiatric manual just hoarding disorder. It is new is a standalone disorder and the symptoms and characteristics lineup with many behaviors exhibited. So he was in endless consumer shocker. He spent days and days in new york city going from lowend flea markets too high and art shops any bias so many things at his townhouse is chockfull when he died in the appraisers came in to look above was there. They could not enter some of the rooms. The dining room was jammed with stuff. Some of it not been against the fireplace, there was a picasso stuck in a closet. There were jewelry gems inside the bed. They were 175 cookie jars, thousands and thousands of items. Warhol said in his writings he wished he could throw stuff out, he just couldnt do it. He wanted cleaned base. He didnt have it. He kept bringing stuff home. A collector likes to display 100 teacups, commented event. Theres a beautiful collection. Importer has trouble with the amount of stuff. Its messy and they dont invite people over to look at the goods in this was classic for warhol. To warhol collected in many ways and hoarded not only staff, he taped conversations. Her thousand hours of audio tape of conversations, everyday conversations. Not special once, just everyday. It went around in groups and always appeared places with an entourage. His painting but the multiple images. There is some sense he was more comfortable with the law. Connecting warhol to wording was the beginning of a story of trying to figure out what was behind famous mind about what was going on inside and what dont you know when did we know about the people without we did. I then proceeded to spend lots of time in libraries or peanut biographies, autobiographies, calling Mental Health experts to talk to them about Mental Health conditions and talk to them about these famous mind. It was a treasure hunt. It was looking for letters, looking in the case of darwin find it. Darwin hunt so many symptoms of various kinds of mental conditions as well as physical conditions. He was constantly complaining about stomach aches and headaches and nausea and vomiting and shaking hand fatigue on west. He cap jayhawk diary that was almost obsessive, no take whether he was a day or for that day. It was very concerned about his childrens health. He was a bit of a hypochondriac concerned about his own house. He had a little bit of panic disorder is diagnosed by some Mental Health experts who looked at his conditions. Before he left on his big journey, he was symptomatic with anxiety. He worried about how the journey with no end if you claustrophobic on the boat that he thought he was going to have a heart attack. Is a lot going on we may not know looking back thinking about his great writing and the works he produced and during that whole time. He was suffering. He was very much suffering with a multitude of victims. Some of i would talk about a few characters and themes that developed as i started researching in this book. George gershwin is one person i want to talk about in connection to a theme on childhood conditions today. Gershwin was as a child a very, very energetic rambunctious boy. He ran out into the streets. He didnt do his homework. He would listen to teachers to skip school. Energy poured out of him. I went one day to hear a psychiatrist who also happens to be trained as a pianist by the juilliard. This is a brilliant man on psychiatry and music. His name is dr. Richard cohen and he was doing a performance at a beautiful art center in new york about gershwin. It was a wonderful room with velvet seats and they came out and proceeded to talk about gershwin five and about his mind. As he described his childhood symptoms come dr. Cohen raised the proposition that worker shred alive today, it is almost certain he would have been at least referred to a School Psychologist and if not diagnosed with a condition like attention deficit hyperactive disorder. He was not saying he should have been diagnosed for raising the question in the issue in todays time take that historical figure and brings him to now 2016 and if likely that a young counterpart or named George Gershwin would have gone off for an assessment possibly be prescribed a medication like ritalin. Gershwin story in the energy that poured out of him is fascinating. He one day woke up and ran an article said there would be a big concert at olean hall in new york city and the list of the performers, composers and musicians playing. Theyre on the list, George Gershwin saw his own name and it was to know my gosh moment. He did not remember having committed to this concert in the concert was going to be happening in about a month. He had nothing. Maybe an idea, but he did not have a piece. The story goes that see got on a train in new york and took the train to boston and along the delay as the list into the propulsion of the train, the clacking of the wheels on the rails, and shooting of the horn, the whole noisiness of the trade by the time he got to boston they had the entire plot of rhapsody in blue worked out in his past he went back to new york and within three weeks he had produced innovation idea. He said he heard music and noise. Gershwin was somebody that needed in some ways that noisiness around him to focus. When i called up an expert on adhd to talk to him, he said a lot of people believe that adhd that you are unable to focus and its actually that you can focus better than even people without the condition if you find your passion. With gershwin of his music. He even said it took music to make me from a bad boy to a good boy. It was when he found music as a child he was not coming from a musical family. He founded by hearing it on the street and learned to play on his own. When he found music he found his passion. He was energetic, busting with energy his whole life. They tap dancer alligators. A price they can spend the whole time knocking her in the residence although, couldnt sit still. She remembered black and blue. That was gershwin up late into the night, entertaining, pouring out the energy. That question raised about gershwin and adhd raises the question as well have gershwin been diagnosed, highly potent put on a medication like ritalin. Would we have had rhapsody in blue and its a great question to ponder. There is another person in the book i profile, albert einstein. He also falls into this thing ive taken historical person from the past and look at them in todays environment. What is going on with einstein as a child. He was somebody who was not socially engaged as a young boy. He did not speak until he was about three or four. His parents were very concerned. They took him to the doctor. He was somewhat isolated in the sense he did not connect with his cousins. He was more interested in holding card towers 14 stories high when his father got him a compass as a gift, he was immersed in that object. What did it do, what did it in, much more concentration than a typical five or six year old at the time. Throughout his life, he himself talked about not being all that well connected in terms of socially to other people. He could be brash. He didnt do so well as a teacher. He was kind of disorganized. There is pretty much no doubt that given his characteristics, the late talking and the social issues, that today he would have gone in for an assessment. It would have raised a red flag for autism, autism is somebody everything knows about. Pediatricians are on the lookout because treating early helps. Hindsight today has also been somebody who would have been diagnosed and treated and whose life may have been different. I want to just share another great reporting story about einstein because this is so much fun. I went to philadelphia because i heard you can see einsteins brain in the medical museum in philadelphia, it only got there a few years ago and donated by a scientist who herself had received this, she worked at the hospital in philadelphia and this box of slides, there are slides of brain tissue, they are not chunks of the brain, in a case that looks like a cigar box and theyre very beautiful, they look kind of like tea leafs. She herself a scientist was by another colleague who was getting over and decided he had been holding onto slides when einstein died the brain was preserved and cut into pieces and the slide landed at various labs around the country. One of them being with the doctor who then was in philadelphia. He came in one day and gave this box of slides of einsteins brain and when she turned 80, she decided she was going to donate them and i met her and what made me, i couldnt belief that she had stored the box with einsteins in a cabinet and there were right in there and she was told to donate them to the museum but einsteins brain for all to see and worth the trip. There were other themes that emerged as i where this book and reported on the various individuals, so another theme that comes up is childhood and the impact on a persons life, so Marilyn Monroe, everybody can picture her. I opened that chapter with her singing to jfk in new york city, madison scare garden on her byrd and if you look it up on youtube you can see the video of her coming out in a sequence dress glittery from head to toe. It was marilyn in the dress sparkling and out she came and she sang and just a few months later she was gone at age 36. Marilyn monroe despite this glamorous and vivid and su ductive appearance that she had on stage and that i think we all remember and can conjure up she was a troubled woman. She was born to a mom that had mental conditions and could not care for the baby, norma gene was her name, marlines name. She was taken to foster home where she lived about seven years and her seventh year her mother took her back and try today care for her. Marilyn was delighted, thrilled to be back with real mom and she couldnt do it and within a number of months the young norma gene witnessed her mom having a breakdown, coming down the steps of the house screaming and crying and laughing and she was taken off to a Mental Health institution where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and marilyn talked about a feeling, didnt know who her father was, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, she didnt have an internal and she just didnt have the identity. She was on a quest throughout her life, a search for identity and this is the fundamental characteristic called borderline disorder. Borderline has long had reputation as being difficult to treat and certainly when Marilyn Monroe was struggling in the years that she was with the impulsive behaviors that are characteristic of this, she had treatment that experts now know is not the way to go. So she had treatment with classical psych analysis where there was a lot of dwelling in the past and pain. If Marilyn Monroe were announced with borderline personal disorder, she would receive a much better for that condition treatment which is much more handson. It is difficult for difficult past to acknowledgment. Its also saying we need to learn skills and figure out how to move on and cope. Its possible i asked and what about Marilyn Monroe, could she have had a different life story if she had been around and treated and he said, yes. The other childhood story, beautiful homes, architecture that stands out as just stelar and will last forever the Creative Genius is seen everywhere to office buildings, he designed to homes, including homes right here in virginia. When he was born, he was the favorite of his mother. She was his first he was her first son, she had a couple of stepchildren. Her first child and remembered that as a baby she had hung in the nursery images of cathedral and determined that this boy would be an architect from the very beginning and there was unfulfilled wish, this is something that an expert told me about that in the case narcissistic personality disorder, there can be unfulfilled wish list thats passed onto parent to child. Its not possible to say one way or the fer. But the stories and are phenomenal. Feeling always that he was right. Every characteristic listeds listed narcissism and much more having much more of an impact on the people around the person. So the stories that emerged, if anybody has been, you know that its built around this wonderful spiral that you go up. So when he designed the building, the original design had the spiral but the paintings because of his design were going to be slanted in presentation. You can imagine that you would walk up the walkway and as a viewer you would have trouble because the paintings were going to be in an angle. This was just representative of esthetic vision over everything else. Forget about the client and practical needs of the viewers, this is my vision, this round stirway has to be this way and it got bad enough as as being built, 21 artists signed a letter of complained is you calass the disregard. All sorts of things that didnt make clients happy but yet they were meant to be filled with gratitude for living in the right home, he designed several buildings in terms of stories, sinogogue. He designed and astonishing pads, very skinny tall polls to hold the roof up but the roof had continuous problems with leaking so much that the workers had five gallon buckets on the desks at all time to catch the drops and the head of the johnson wax building also had home designed and one night he was having a dinner party and the story goes he says, the water started dripping on on his bald head and he called in the middle of the party and said the roof is leaking and he said, move your chair. [laughter] so the stories go on and on. Im going to read you so you know its not me saying this but i have a letter from Arthur Miller, an interesting connection but Marilyn Manroe who called. He came up and he then did send them some plans. Years later Arthur Miller wrote a letter that was collected in a election of reminiscence about what happened of this house. I will read you a blur. It is a gray afternoon. Taking him to the spot. It was a gray afternoon by the time we got up here. He and i walked to the high ground where there was old orchard which faces north but has endless view. He take a good look and peed and said, good spot. Vitality was amazing. Never drew a dee