Poured Over: Danielle Henderson on The Ugly Cry

By Miwa Messer / June 10, 2021 at 12:00 am

The Ugly Cry

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You might know Danielle Henderson as the creator of the legendary feminist Ryan Gosling meme (which she later turned into a book); or from her most excellent recaps of Scandal and other shows for Vulture; her work as a television writer; or as the co-host of the screamingly funny movie podcast, I SAW WHAT YOU DID. Danielle’s memoir, The Ugly Cry, is the unforgettable, darkly comic, true story of her unconventional childhood in the 80s — it’s a complex and wry do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry memoir, and Danielle’s sublime writing is smart and sharp and not to be missed, but just wait until you meet her wise, horror-movie loving grandmother.Featured books: The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. (And hey, if you notice a little reverb with some of the audio, well, it’s us, not you!) Hosted and produced by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.
Poured Over: The B&N Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Poured Over is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories and characters; readers who ask a lot of questions, just like Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer, a career bookseller who’s always reading. Follow us here for surprising riffs, candid conversations, a few laughs, and lots of great book recommendations from big name authors and authors on their way to being big names. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Danielle, thank you so much for joining us in the studio wherever we are.

Danielle Henderson: Thank you so much for having me.

B&N: Um, you were basically born.

DH: Yeah. She said it was the creepiest thing she’s ever seen, which I can imagine. Because they’re kind of, you know, holding me like a football and I was just like nodding my head and looking at her. But it’s true. Like I came into the world just wanting to see everything.

B&N: And then your brother, your older brother whacked you in the face with a wiffle bat.

DH: Yeah, he was instantly like, how about we shut these eyes permanently? Because no way. Well, he had the benefit of being an only child for like a year and a half. And he was adored because he was the first grandchild. My aunt and uncle were still very young when he was born, they were in their teens. And so he was just doted upon. So when I came into the literally into the house, the first thing he did when they when they bent the event over to have to introduce me to him as he went in, you know, he came out of the room with his wiffle ball bat, and just hit me over the face with it. And he tried to kill me routinely until we were about seven years old, does every way you possibly could, he got into my, my walker, behind me and pushed me forward and just tried to like suffocate me, he was truly out for my life from a very young age.

B&N: But I do want to point out, you have a great relationship now. He did outgrow attempting to murder the baby.

DH: We eventually it took us a very long time. I mean, our sibling rivalry was pretty strong through our teens, even when we fall over the Nintendo and all that stuff. But we’ve definitely developed, we’ve always been close, but we became very close as adults. So in my 20s, you know, mid to late 20s, is when we really started connecting over the deeper things like how we were raised. And I think, you know, he’s always been fun and funny. And I joke around with my friends, because you know, and with him, cuz he looks like Drake, but like, 10 years before Drake was born. Gorgeous, and just let people take care of him. So we’ve had very different lives kind of from the same family.

B&N: Wow, yeah, I’m just trying to process

DH: It’s a lot. And then I’m like the goblin little sister who’s like, I like books and staying inside. And he’s outside, you know, like riding skateboards on top of bikes down the hill. And we had very different lives. But we did start really talking about when I was we were both in our 20s about our mom and how we were raised and what our feelings were. And I think that brought us to a different level of of our relationship for sure.

B&N: Can we talk about your mom for a second? Because I mean, obviously her leaving is the thing that really kicks everything off for you. But at the same time, the way society judges women who leave their children, that’s like the ultimate taboo.

DH: Yeah. And again, it’s like, you know, I asked my mom, since, you know, did she want to be a parent does she want kids she know about birth control and what was going on back in the 70s. And, you know, she really didn’t, you know, it wasn’t really that she was preached, she wasn’t taught abstinence by any means. But no one really talked to them about how to prevent pregnancy or how to kind of, you know, plan a pregnancy. And so she always wanted kids and was happy to have us. But the situations we were in when we were born, we’re just not conducive to her really being kind of her best self. And then she just made really a number of bad decisions that most of us would make in our 20s. It just so happens that she had kids, right. So what’s wild is that she, she left us with my grandparents, when I was 10. So this is about three years after she met, Luke, the man that she would marry who would become, you know, like her, her father of her future kids and all that kind of stuff. And it was weird is that the way my grandmother always phrases it and kind of presents it is that it was the best thing she ever did. So thank God, she left you kids with me. It’s kind of my grandmother thinks of it. Wow. So yeah, because she kind of knew that she was saving us from something. Yeah. And so I grew up with that narrative. And it wasn’t until I was much older that I started to kind of consider how it must have felt for my mom to leave us and touching. You never lived with her again. We didn’t, you know, spend the second half of our childhood with her.

B&N: And she was also very young when you were born right? I mean, you’re Yes, your dad is her high school boyfriend.

DH: Exactly, exactly. So she was 21. Cory was born and 22, almost 22 And I was born. And so yeah, she was really young.

B&N: I mean, that’s, that’s really young. I realized, you know, children, very young, my mother. And I remember what I was doing it for. No. I mean, thank you.

DH: Sincerely. I think I was drunk on a glacier in Alaska when I was 24. Like, there’s no way.

B&N: I can guarantee you I was doing some things in places like There were not many people waiting for me to come home and feed them or send them to school or anything like that.

DH: So, exactly. But that’s, but that’s also a lot of the grace that I had to find in writing this book, which is that I did have to really put all of this energy that I had been putting into kind of thinking about how my mother was at this age and kind of considering her life from a different perspective. And so I did, I had to find that though, it wasn’t something that came very easily to me, because I’ve always had these feelings of abandonment and kind of dealing with the world as it was, and not looking at, you know, her world as she was living it. And so I think that she was, you know, there are some stories in here that I did not include that I could have. But they’re her stories to tell. So I didn’t feel like it was my place to put them in this book. But we have I definitely have a different understanding now about what that time was. And again, we don’t have a great relationship right now. But we’re starting to talk again. My aunt Renee, who’s in the book.

B&N: Okay, I’m sorry. Yeah. Aunt Renee is awesome. I think I wish every woman had an Aunt Renee in their lives.

DH: And this is tragic, almost the cheat she actually died of breast cancer last year. I’m so sorry for that. Yeah, she had stage four breast cancer, but I was able to spend a good amount of time with her at the end, who were both living in California. And one of the things she said at the end of her life was she’s like, you know, I completely understand why you don’t have a relationship with your mom. And I would never push you to do something that you didn’t want to do. But she really felt like I should, she said, I just want you to kind of try just kind of try because you know, she was, again, this very tender point of her life. And she’s like, you know, our family is a difficult one. But she just wanted me to try for my own benefit. And from our conversations, and from her, like I knew, you know, she’s in my life for 43 years. And, you know, from what she knew of me, she wanted, she thought it would be beneficial to me. So of course, typical of my family, her dying wish is literally the hardest thing for me to do. And I’m like, Great thanks. But she was always the coolest like she’s the art who I aspire to be for my nieces and nephews and my god daughter, like she introduced us to Prince and she managed record stores. And we go to concerts all the time. And like she just was so influential to me and in my independence and really encouraged me to get out in the world the way she did.

B&N: But she also gave you space to be a messy teenager. I mean, that’s one of the things that I love. I mean, I will sort of jump ahead for a second and let listeners know that the book ends when you’re basically going to college. So you’re what 17/18. And Aunt Renee is the one who’s just unconditionally she takes your shopping and that hey, and you know, isn’t looking at your hair? What did you space to be that teenager where you know, you’re all ankles and elbows, you’ve got pressure on top of it, there’s really intense experience at home. Yeah, or you move in with your grandparents and even then, your grandparents are supposed to be enjoying their retirement. And here they are raising small children.

DH: Exactly. They had to find and look for people in my life, even outside of my family, to be that guidance for me, because it’s true that, you know, my grandparents thought they were done. They had moved to a duplex, they were renting an apartment, they were done. And then here we come. Like, again, two very complicated kids for two very different reasons. And they took us in their back in and my grandmother who had never been a working, she never worked outside of the home. And she went and got a job. You know, she raised her kids and she was a housewife. And then but when we came along, she went and got a job. My grandfather went back to work. And they really, really modified their lives for us. And so my aunt was kind of the, the person because I was always aware of that I always felt this burden of you know, I’m the reason why they’re not retired. They’re not spending time together. They’re not traveling to California to see their kids and their siblings. And I really felt that a lot as a kid. So my aunt was kind of the one who shepherded me through that and we’re just kind of like you’re allowed to just be a kid. Do your thing, be who you are, express yourself. She loved all the outfits that created from the thrift stores, whereas my grandmother wanted to like crawl in a hole when she saw me.

B&N: You talk a lot about the women in your family and sort of the whole ritual, too, of what femininity present that as and your mother is very charming, very sort of well, flirtatious with a lot of people. But at the same time you do talk about like watching her get ready to go out and I remember watching my mom getting ready to go out or throw a party or when I can still smell her perfume. And little things like that. Or sitting at the top of the stairs. My brother and I would sit at the top of the stairs when my parents were these parties and we were just someone noticed that there were small children. I wanted to be part of those conversations because they were friendly. Of course, you know, there’s cigarette smoke.

DH: Oh, I used to hang up under the kitchen table until somebody kicked me.

B&N: We couldn’t do that.

DH: Oh, yeah. Cuz like, like your mother and her friends would get together and play cards. So they play cards or the smoking movie to the point where there was an actual cloud in the room. And they just be, you know, drinking beers and playing cards and doing their thing. And I just loved the conversation. I loved hearing them laugh. I loved being around that. So yeah, I totally, totally feel you on that.

B&N: I do want to come back to your grandmother, because I’m wildly in love with your grandmother and everything she says, but your great grandmother was also a big part of your life. And I love that multi generational, not everyone gets that.

DH: No, it’s something that I’ve realized was a very special thing because my great grandmother died when I was in my early 20s. And yeah, and she had Alzheimer’s at the end there. So she didn’t always remember who I was. But she was in my life for a very long time. And I think it’s because most of the women in my family have their kids early, that were able to be like, you know, my grandmother right now is 88. I know that it’s not normal for me to have a living grandparent, you know, most of my friends do not so yeah, my great grandmother was a very specific and sort of iconic beauty to me because she was so mysterious. She lived in Harlem and kind of, you know, she worked and lived. She was a city person. Like she really got into the city and there are pictures of her that I have. There’s one picture where she was getting ready to go out for the night. I think she was going to the Cotton Club, but she’s in this beautiful like bouffant sort of like, not bouffant, like a very tool covered a dress. And it’s got she just has the makeup in there and she’s going out for a night. I don’t think I got dressed up that much at my wedding. And she was doing that for a night. She was very glamorous in her own way. And very astute. You know, she took photos, she loved books, she loved to travel, she would go to Africa constantly. She was just great. She was the best. She was another touch point in my life. Someone who told me that I should keep journals, someone who told me that I should read books and that I could have this interior life though. A lot of that came from her.

B&N: Did you call her Sweetie Pie? Did everyone call her Sweetie Pie?

DH: Everyone did. Everyone called, my mom, I guess couldn’t say certain words. But she was younger. And for some reason she called her Sweetie Pie. That’s where she landed it. Everyone started calling her sweetie. Bye. Bye. Well, my mom was the first grandchild. So yeah.

B&N: Well and that’s that’s actually the first grandchild gets to do that. They get the naming rights and everyone because you come from a long line of very cool and and you know your mom’s circumstances being what they are. She did have. I mean, she worked really incredibly hard a couple of summers to get you guys what you need. Yes, she made some bad decisions about other pieces. But you know, she worked overtime and making circuit boards. You could furnish an apartment with it, because you probably see this women who just stepped up and did what needed to be done to take care of their families and then your mom had to eat.

DH: Right, rather than other women in my family stepped up.

B&N: And then there’s Ryan Gosling, you owned the internet for a little while back to your career as a writer, you owned the internet. You owned the internet for a while, Danielle. You really did.

DH: What’s wild about that, too, is that I was in the middle of my, I was at the start of my graduate school studies. So I didn’t really have time to enjoy it. Because I wrote that book over my first winter break. I started Feminist Ryan Gosling because my theoretical homework was too intense. I’m like, This is not fun. There’s no joy here. And I’m someone who just really trucks in humor as much as possible. And I wanted to make it fun. So I would remember what all of these theorists were saying. So that’s where that was born. And I put it on Tumblr, which was, you know, the big thing at the time, like the best way to kind to, you know, do social media. And it literally took off overnight, I put that four of them up, went to bed, went to the farmers market. The next morning, this was when I was living in Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin, I was where I was going to school, and I was on the way home on the bus. And I started getting all these text messages from friends, like, you’re on Jezebel, you’re on this, you’re on that. It was genuinely overnight. So it was a little overwhelming. But it was kind of funny that I’m like this is I’m gonna keep doing this as long as it makes sense for me to do it for my framework. Like I hate to burst the bubble, but like, you know, Ryan Gosling was in the zeitgeist at that moment, but I kind of loved him in two movies, but never really saw was like a heartthrob. For me personally.

B&N: I think I’m the only person who didn’t get Drive. I just, I’m sorry. I’m just gonna own it. I saw it and the whole time. Okay.

DH: That’s one of the ones I loved. That one and Lars in the Real Girl.

B&N: And I really, I wanted to like him.

DH: Yeah, I think he was definitely like, you know, he was in the forefront of our culture at that point. And this is back at the point where he was, you know, when he was in New York and like pulling women back at a traffic who stepped off the sidewalk, but he was really like this kind of folksy heroes or, and I just thought he was, it would be fun and funny. And it was and it really literally helped me with my homework. And that’s all they wanted me to experience. So the book and everything else was was gravy on top.

B&N: And I just want to be clear for listeners, too. We’re talking about Foucault. And about like, not kind of, I mean, I liked the references to the Yellow Wallpaper. And you know, Mr. Rochester, those are fun, but I mean, I was looking at this guy. Oh, wow. I mean, it is stuff that at some point you hopefully have experienced during college, and it’s just like, oh, wow, right. That.

DH: Yeah, it’s an intense way to be. And it’s, you know, to bring it back to your question about, you know, the women in my family and their influence on me. I was always inspired to be curious. And I think that also ties back to the 80s. So we were talking about earlier that I was really encouraged to figure things out on my own. And at first, it seemed kind of mean, you know, you’d ask somebody, like, how do I do this, like, figure it out, you’re like, I’m seven, please help me. But then as I got older, I realized, it wasn’t meant to be mean, it was kind of like, I think you can do this, I think you’re smart enough to figure this out. And you should, and it really gave me this independence that helped me later when I went back to college, and, you know, kind of helped me throughout my life up to that point in my 20s, I worked, you know, two, three jobs, because again, I come from small men and women who just make it work. So if I didn’t have enough money from one job, I got another job. Or I would do dog sitting or I would do whatever I had to do to kind of survive, and I was in, I was in survival mode for a very long time for like most of my adulthood, up till my mid 30s, I would say, and that’s something I had to learn how to how to unpack in therapy, because there are some ways of being in a survival mode is useful. But there are other ways we’re like it’s emotionally really destructive and distracted.

B&N: Bringing it back to the book. I know, we’ve been laughing a lot, as we’ve been talking about this. You use humor in the narrative in a way where it does allow for you, there are moments where reading your story, and something would happen, and I don’t want to spoil things. Why did you decide to do this now? How did it feel for you personally? I mean, there’s a lot in here. So how did you not tear all of your hair out?

DH: Well, I am wearing a hair wrap. So you don’t know that I haven’t. Well. Yeah, it started for me again, part of the part of the low self esteem and really just complete lack of self esteem that I felt for most of my life made me think that it wasn’t that important for me to tell my story. That I didn’t experience anything that other people hadn’t experienced that there are other people in the world who have actually experienced much worse than what I experienced. And so for a long time, I just kind of, I wouldn’t say denigrated, but I really just downplayed what happened to me, even though I was I would talk about it with friends, I talk about my life in the course of you know, meeting people. But it was kind of just like, well, you know, everyone goes through something, what really happened to just flip that switch for me is that I was working for Rookie. I was as an editor at Rookie Magazine for a bit, and starting to write about my stories and you know, a way that could translate to a teen audience as people who might be currently going through some of the things I’d already gone through. So that kind of started a very slow train of moving towards telling a deeper story. And truly, my my agent, Christopher Shelling and his husband, Augustine Burrows, we are friends like we met I’m friends, very good friends with one of Christopher’s other authors. And we all just went out into you know, for dinner in New York, when I was first time I met Augustine. And he was like, You are fascinating. Like, these stories are incredible. And then I went to visit them at their, their house in Connecticut and same thing sitting around the dinner table, just like talking and laughing. And, I was telling them how hard it was to be a freelance writer, because it’s really a difficult way to earn a living. And it’s just so heavy. And Augustine kind of turned to me and he was like, You should write a book. Like, write a book. Take some of the pressure off. Even if you get a small advance, like just, he’s like your stories are unique and incredible. And to have him of all people say that, I think it made me give it some more weight than I would have. And that’s not to say that, you know, his opinion is more important than anyone elses. But just but to truly have someone that I admire and respect and is the kind of memoirs that I love to read. It just meant something different to me to help me consider my story in a different light. And so I talked to Christopher and I said, you know, I think I kind of want to do this and he’s like, Well, just send me just write down the stories you told around the dinner table just write down like two of those just a word doc. Send it to me. And so I did that and like so me another one like that story about this is like write that down. So I did it. I just wrote it out. And then he said, You know what, I’m going to your, your bio in front of this and surprise, you have a proposal. And I was like, what? And so he really helped me because again, I think a lot of people there’s there’s so much demystification that needs to happen around the publishing industry and how to get in. Because I think that you can, of course, publish yourself, publish a blog, do your thing. But traditional publishing is still pretty much the way it’s always been. So without that guidance, and that foothold, I don’t think I would have been able to do this. But he did. I wrote up this proposal, there were three or four chapters of my life, and you know, some more information in front of it. And we sold it and it was wild is that we sold it originally to Simon and Schuster. And then about two months after they signed me, I was already starting to work on the book, two months after they signed me, they signed Milo Yiannopoulos. And so I said, I don’t want to publish with you anymore. And I didn’t, and they wouldn’t let me out of my contract. So I just had to let the year lapse. And then once the year lapsed, I took it back out and landed, you know, ended up picking Viking, which was the best decision of all time. But yeah, there was a full year from signing to starting, that I wasn’t able to really work on it. And then I started working with Viking, and it was just fantastic experience. But at the same time, my television writing career was kind of ramping up. And so a lot of time was kind of taken away from the book writing. Because of that, and I had an agent at the time who was very eager to, to sell and option my book, and I’m like, I haven’t written the book yet. But we did. We took we took it out and you know, optioned it. So it was optioned as a TV show. And you know, Paul Feig was gonna direct and you assigned on the produce. And I just, I’m like, I haven’t written this yet. It doesn’t feel right to me. And because they’re not getting, they will be getting the show that they think they’re getting, I think they’re getting like a laugh track version of my grandma, and I’m telling like the intense story of myself. So that did not end up working out. But it took a lot of time away from the book to write these episodes in this proposal and kind of dig into the TV side. And then the other thing that happened is that my grandmother started to show signs of dementia that got progressively worse. And so all of this is happening when I’m trying to write this book. And it really took a lot more time than I thought it would, because I was dealing with my real life in the middle. And thankfully, Viking was very patient with me. But I think that’s probably why the tone of the book is kind of that, that mix of humor and, and trauma and everything else, because it really is the way that I live in the way that I write. Yeah, so I think it took it took a bit of time, much longer than I thought. But it took in the end exactly the amount of time it needed to take, especially with again, don’t want to spoil it. But that last chapter was something that came out of me during the beginning of the pandemic. And actually, this is before the pandemic started in earnest. It was like January when I wrote, I really took that much time for me to synthesize everything that was happening in my life and everything that was going on. So I think it’s true that you know, the book that so part of the reason that I thought to write this is because I finally started to get some value to myself into my stories. But I also started to realize that I didn’t have to tell the story up till this point of my life, I break it down. And you know, just my life up to 18 is interesting enough, and there’s enough there to tell a complete story. So that’s kind of why I decided to dig into that.

B&N: I was thinking, I’m gonna have to put this down. Because like, oh, no, oh, no, I know, she’s an adult with like, a house and a checking account and all these things, but I need to know that this little person is okay. And I had said, there have been other books that I’ve read feeling that way too. And other authors where I’ve said to them, like, you know, is this character okay? They’re looking at me, like, lady, you’re talking about a fictional character. And I’m like, I know. I am fully aware. That’s the kind of reader I am, where I get so invested. And here I am really invested in little Danny.

DH: Little Danny turned out fine. Yeah, she’s okay.
B&N: Yeah. What was the book that made you say, aha, this is it. I want more.

DH: I mean, as as a voracious reader, which I still am, you know, I still just devour books. I love, love, love to read. And as a kid, it was always now that I look back I can paint it with this brush, but at the time I didn’t I just thought this was a good story. I loved kind of escapist stories that involve children in peril or children on adventure. So things like you know The Secret Garden or like James in the Giant Peach like I love that stuff. And then as I started to get older, and I started to discover people like Jamaica Kincaid when I first read Girl, I just It blew me out of the water like it blew me way, and to see this kind of poetry come out of how someone could conceive of an entire personality was just so inspiring to me. And same with, you know, Toni Morrison, which I know is not necessarily a mind blowing answer. But when you’re young and Black, and you don’t get to read a lot of Black women telling stories about their experiences, fictional or otherwise, it really it made me stand up and take notice. And so those were the things that inspired me early on, but then again, you know, reading these memoirs, like, you know, reading, Running with Scissors, that was the first memoir I read, where I felt like, this is something new and different and wild. And I get it, and famous, you know, Me Talk Pretty One Day like just all these now classics, but at the time reading of just thinking, you know, sitting on the subway laughing so hard at somebody talking about, you know, really traumatic stuff. And it made me realize that this was kind of how I am. And it’s kind of how I read, but it’s also kind of how I write. So I think that it’s strange, because there’s not one defining moment that made me think I’m a writer, I just always did it. And I always kept journals. And I always kept notes. And I’ve always, you know, scores of notebooks that I’ve kept throughout the years. And I really, you know, I started blogging very early back in the movable type days when I had to learn code in order to like put words on the internet. So I kind of really always love this sort of closer sort of confessional writing. And it was deeply inspiring to me to be able to, to connect with people through writing. And that’s what made me feel like, you know, those first pains of like, I might be a writer, is when other people that I didn’t know, would respond to things that I was writing. So that kind of that helps a lot. It’ll kind of buoy me a little bit to be able to go forward. But I would. And I know, it’s easy to say this, now that I have a book coming out and other things going on, and I write for a living, but I would 100% still be writing, even if nobody read it, you know, I just I really enjoy the act of translating my feelings to the page. So that’s kind of how it began. It’s really young, reading the stories of like, kids who are messing up and freaking out, doing really tough things. I mean, now we know why I did that. I gravitated towards those kinds of things. But that was really the beginning of the for me.

B&N: Harriet the Spy was great and Little House on the Prairie. And I loved all those things. And I just at the same time, there are certain groups that absolutely change your relationship with either people or places where they fundamentally change you. And that love about reading, because the potential is always there. You just don’t know. I’m also a person who doesn’t finish a book. I don’t like I am not by any stretch of the I’m just like, No, we’re good. Thank you.

DH: don’t mind dropping it. But I also have, because we’re close in age. And I think this is true of you too. But we didn’t have young adult books. That’s a newer adventure now. So we went from Little House on the Prairie to the whole library. Like that was just a defining moment was when you got that different colored library card when you were like 11 or 12. It was like alright, yeah, you can we trust you to use the rest of the library now. So I could pick up Peyton Place and read it and nobody was monitoring me. Because it was a book, you can just read it. So yeah, I think that was also hugely informative, because I would just go through things I used to read, you know, I think George Carlin, you know, kind of comedians who had books out that I loved and I read everything. I read everything I could get my hands on just because I could.

B&N: And also you had a grandma who really introduced you to heart, say everyone have a Grandma Carol in their life. But she has a thing for horror movies. And I have to admit I am not good with me either. But she saw them as sort of a maybe this is just luck. But it sounds like grandma was using horror movies as a manifesto for living.

DH: Yeah. No, you’re completely right about that one. 100%. She told me so years later, I interviewed her. And I do play a clip of that in the first episode of my podcast, I co-host a podcast with Millie de Chirico. I Saw What You Did, the film double features. And I played this clip because people do not believe me sometimes. I’m like, this is truly what she believes. And I asked her flat out, do you really think that horror movies are a good tool of training for parenting? And she said, Absolutely. And she would tell me things like, oh, yeah, she would point to things. We were watching Creep Show and it was one of the stories where like the sludge crawls up through these cracks on a floating thing on the lake that these kids are just kind of hanging out on and eats all the kids and she’s like, see those kids were out in the woods do what they shouldn’t have been doing they’re out and like we go to the lake all the time now the spray the lake, I’m not afraid of monsters, I’m afraid of the reality that I live in. So yeah, she really really loves harmony. She always has. I’m asking my great grandmother, my great aunt, her older sister who’s gonna get 90 soon. She said, Yeah, your grandmother just first in line to see King Kong. First in line to see all of these movies, she loves them. To this day, The Walking Dead is her favorite TV show. She absolutely loves it. She loves to watch things like Naked and Afraid. She really likes people in peril. She really loves being scared. And she doesn’t see it as like, I don’t love gore. I can handle a psychological horror thriller. She loves carnage, she loves gore, she likes to see the blood and the guts. There was a Thanksgiving about three years ago, four years ago, I’d come home for the holiday. And we were going to a family friend’s house for dinner. And I kind of came out of you know, the the bathroom and I was ready to go and, and she was sitting in front of the TV and I’m like, What, are you ready? She said, almost, I need to finish this. And I look and she’s about five inches away from the TV just riveted. She’s watching this thing on the Sci Fi Channel where these zombies are in a spaceship and she’s like, they’re just gonna eat the last person and then we can go to Thanksgiving. And I’m like what? How, how, how? She is ingrained like part of her DNA. So yeah, she absolutely showed I wrote about it in the book, but she showed me Halloween. Halloween ll, she used to love love Nightmare on Elm Street. Love Nightmare on Elm streets so much. She just really loves disgusting movies. She does. She still does. And I cannot stand them.

B&N: Yeah, but she also really. And that comes out in the book. And I think that’s a really tricky act. Not everyone understands that balance, you can talk about the terrible. And then I’m absolutely not terrible. And you don’t make light of that. But in order to process usually makes you need to be able to stories of being their own stranger danger. And that’s a big part of the book for me. Like it’s always clear, even when your grandmother is rough with you. Even when your grandmother’s rough with your mother. There are some moments where she goes on to say, Listen, what is it?

DH: Yeah, and it was her own kid. Yeah, that’s something that’s always been very front of mind for me is that my mom was my grandmother’s daughter and to look at it from you know, to give my mom some grace, I also had to give my grandmother some grace and to say, you know, your kid is actively doing things that you never taught them. You never taught her to be this way in life. And, not in a disappointing way, but just in a really jarring way that is really upsetting for her. So she she she is tough when she needs to be tough. But she’s, to me, the purest definition of tough love. And it’s more love than it is the tough. But I do think that, you know, I’ve been in therapy for a while. And occasionally, you know, had a therapist say, Well, you know, your grandmother, you shouldn’t let her off so easy. She was really hard on you. And I’m like, I’m not explaining this the right way. But she was awesome and loved me and was great. And I do think that yes, her delivery could have been better for some things. But she helped me out of the deepest and darkest part of my life just by being herself. And by using the tools that she had in her toolbox to teach me how to be a person that could take care of myself and get out of this depression, to get out of these hard things.

B&N: And also, you’re the first person to get a driver’s license in your family. I think that’s really exciting. You were 16 you had a Junker.

DH: I had a total Jonker, I babysat for freedom.

B&N: But that Junker was yours, and you bought it for $200 from babysitting.

DH: Yeah, yeah, it was mine.

B&N: You could go anywhere.

DH: This is where I did start to realize, I bet this happens to other writers. I don’t think I’m unique in this way. But the themes of this book weren’t immediately apparent to me, but they did come later. So this this notion of freedom is something that I really dug into in this book, because that was incredibly important to me, as as a child and as a teenager. And so this car, which was literally falling apart down that like leaving parts on the street as I drove it, but it got me somewhere, even if it just got me across town if it held me in some way. And so that was always really what I was looking for. As a kid. I wanted some forward momentum. And it was important to me to know that I could get out of, you know, where I grew up.

B&N: Reading is a hopeful act. Reading and writing always acts of hope.

DH: Absolutely. To their core, yeah.

B&N: Is there anything that we didn’t hit that you want readers to know about this book?

DH: I don’t think. There’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t spoil something or other. I think what I want people to know, though, is that, like, it’s important to me, you know, once you write a book, it’s not yours anymore, you know, and I’m completely fine with that, like, I love to the process of working on this book, because that part of it was mine. But I hope that people come to this, reading, the humor, and the trauma, and everything is a complete package and not really parsing it out. Because that, to me, is the point of living a full life is that you’re able to present every side of a story or every side of an emotion, and that it’s all it all works together. It’s very cohesive.

B&N: And also the level of detail that you have. I mean, you can and I alluded to this earlier, where there are moments in the narrative where the details will shift enough where you’re like, and there’s the before moment and the after moment, and it’s all in the details. And a lot of that does happen around your mother’s boyfriend. There’s a very clear line of demarcation before Luke and after Luke. How your life shapes up. And it’s these are just these layers of detail layers. A lot of them come from your grandma, but something that also comes from you just observing.

DH: Yeah, and the details were, that’s the primary way that I wrote this was through the details that I remember. And I started there. And I think that again, like it’s something that most people have access to where you don’t, you might not remember specifically what was said, or the whole scope of what was said, but you do remember the moments, you remember how something smelled, remembered how something looked, you remember how you felt. And so that’s really the way that I was able to write this is to say, what were the stories and that, you know, this is a story, you know, my brother and I, you know, with our swimming pools, that’s a story. That’s something I remember.

B&N: I love that story. I was laughing so hard, I’m sorry.

DH: But those moments became you know, then I found the way to kind of bridge the gaps and do the transitions and all that. But I wrote to the story, and I wrote to the details. And that’s why I think it felt good for me to do but I also think it will feel good to read.

B&N: I would like to keep going for like 15 more hours, because also you’re just great. And I love this book. You wrote another book about your time in Alaska. And when is that ever coming back into print? Like, are you working on something new that has the Alaska stuff in it?

DH: Yeah, I moved to Alaska when I was 23, after the World Trade Center, you know, the 911 happened. I was working for the United Nations. And I was like, It’s time for me to not live in a city where I’m terrified. I was really freaked out. So I sold everything I owned. I bought a car and I drove to Alaska, and I was on the road for a couple of months. And it is 100% going to be in my next book. You will know the story one day.

B&N: Oh, I’m so excited. However long it takes. Well, anyway, Danielle, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.