 Our next hour is Human Nature, The Way We Are, and it's going to be MC'd by Corey Goldman, who is the Humanities Outreach Officer for Stanford University, and in this position she uses media relations and public relations tools to promote the work of humanities faculty on campus and to mainstream media. Prior to her public relations career she was a television writer and producer, which we may have to ask her about afterwards, working primarily on documentary style programming for television networks, including the History Channel, MSNBC, PBS, and Court TV. Corey invites anyone who's interested in learning more about humanities at Stanford to check out the Human Experience website at http colon dot backslash backslash. I feel like these things, you don't say these things anymore, do we? We just tell you the address. It's humanexperience.stanford.edu. And please welcome Corey Goldman. Good afternoon. So I've been introduced, but I do work in the Humanities Center at Stanford University where humanities scholars can take an academic year to further research in their different disciplines. And we are proud sponsors of this year's Lit Quake, so we're happy to be here. And I am pleased to introduce today's first reader slash presenter, Mary Poles. Mary is author of Accidentally on Purpose, One Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made. For the last eight years she was a film critic for the Contra Costa Times, and Poles lives in Northern California with her son Dolan. If you are interested in learning more about Mary, she has a website, maryfpoles.com. Okay, so I'm cutting right to the chase of human nature with sex, basically. Usually I start reading, I read the first chapter of the book, which is about the One Night Stand. But we have a six-minute time constraint here, so I'm just eliminating all the setup about who I am and going right to the sex. I hope you all enjoy it. I did. Do you want to go out sometime? Matt asked me. I smiled ruefully and told him I was too old for him. Why, he asked. I didn't really have an answer. I could have told him about that last younger man, the one who actually sucked his thumb. But I refrained. Matt wasn't even in his 30s yet. A boy toy, not someone I could really date. Lizzie came back to the bar, the bar is Finnegan's wake, by the way. Before we'd resolved the matter, John had already slipped away too tired to stay any longer. Soon it was closing time, and Lizzie asked Matt if he wanted to come back to her house with us. We opened a bottle of port, smoked some pot, and watched Lizzie get drunker. Eventually she collapsed on the couch next to Matt, nestling her head against his shoulder. He had his arm around her, and I watched his fingers move on her upper arm. I turned away, figuring that the spark I'd seen in his eyes wasn't meant exclusively for me. I pushed aside the disappointment. But when Lizzie announced her intention to fall asleep in his armpit, he seemed alarmed and told her she should go to bed. Together we helped her weave her way up the stairs, and then we went back to the couch. A minute later he was kissing me. Two minutes later he was on top of me, grinding his hips against mine. Three minutes later I realized all of this would be better naked. I'm coming home with you, I said. Matt's apartment was less than two blocks away from Lizzie's, so there wasn't much time to contemplate the wisdom of what I was about to do. However he did give me pause as we stepped onto Coal Street together. He wanted me to know that his apartment wasn't much to look at. I've got to get a new place, he said. Just as long as there's a bed I thought, hell I'd be fine with an easy chair. But not until I get a J-O-B, he added. My slightly stupefied brain cells put the letters together. My first thought was, why is he spelling job? The second was, good God, why doesn't he have one? The third was that I still wanted it to be adorable Matt who saved me from my unwanted celibacy. The last guy I'd considered sleeping with was 46 in a fixture on nerve.com's online dating service. He owned a home in the city that he was fixing up and also a lake house somewhere up near Mount Shasta. He was what my mother would have called a good catch. He most certainly had a job. He also had a big wide ass. I had taken one look at it in his pants and dreaded seeing it on its way to my bathroom nude. Running my hands over Matt's later in the night, I felt many things, none of them dread. Maybe just a little sadness during my internal debate about the wisdom of all this. I should probably stop sleeping with beautiful young guys, the sensible me told myself. But I like sleeping with beautiful young guys, I said back. Yes, but it's not the path to settling down, sensible Mary said. Look, this could be the last beautiful guy who wants to sleep with you, I told her. So just stifle yourself. And there was bliss as well. Although it was not getting any easier to strip off my clothes in front of a man, especially after three weeks of shirking yoga while enjoying a Safeway 2 for 1 special on salt and vinegar potato chips. Matt made it painless. You're beautiful, he murmured into my ear, pulling his t-shirt over his head in that peculiar one-handed way boys have. You're awesome. Awesome? God, I thought please don't call me dude. Then I tossed such concerns to the four winds. I was coming up on a full year without having slept with anyone. After that, celibacy starts to seem less like a misfortune that might end at any moment and more like a habit you can't shake. Yes, the pillows under my picky thread count obsessed head were foam and only half covered with ratty navy blue cases, but I managed to effectively block that out. I knew my head would survive the night and that some other woman or more likely a girl would have to deal with his bad bedding issues. In the meantime, I had his smooth, slim body, his tenderness and his insistent penis, which he kept rubbing against me even after we'd had sex and I was sleepily, deliciously satisfied. He hadn't come yet and I wasn't sure he would, but I was too tired to ponder the mysteries of the male orgasm. Have you ever read Lonesome Dove? I asked, figuring him for a fan. I can tell those guys from a mile away. My list of former lovers was filled with the kind of romantic, smart souls who warmed to Larry Murtry. Twice, he said into my neck, I finished it and reread it right away. Good, I said, I was going to tell you I'd give you a poke in the morning, but I had to make sure you'd get the reference first. Matt had stacks of books next to his bed. Many I'd read, some I'd been meaning to read, some I hadn't heard of but that looked compelling. He also had a pile of lacrosse sticks in the corner and an array of baseball caps on top of every post of his bed frame. If those were the accoutrements of the boy he still was, the books seemed like the accoutrements of the man he would become. In the morning I snuck into the bathroom, feeling chagrined at my situation. I'd been in nicer porta-potties and in the light of day, the rest of Matt's place was revealed to be more of a boarding house than an apartment, with no living room and locks on all the individual bedroom doors. It seemed ridiculous for a grown woman to be there, an embarrassment, but when I got back to his bed there he was again, whispering that he'd wanted me right away in the bar, making me feel desirable. This time he came too. When I picked up my scattered clothes up off the floor and joked about making the walk of shame back to Liz's place, he laughed and said, how's that supposed to make me feel? I felt a twinge of guilt because of course I was using him. At my feet I noticed the Trojan, still neatly sealed in its wrapper. The night before I'd asked him if he'd had a condom and he'd dutifully gone and gotten one, but then he'd gone in and out of hardness the way that guys do when they're nervous and shy with you, or drunk. Putting a condom on a male with an iffy erection is like trying to catch a butterfly with a torn net. It may simply flutter off and be gone for good. I think my time is up, but let's just say we didn't use the condom and I had a baby. Thank you Mary. Our next reader is Ajah Sharma. Ajah is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, and she's been a fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research and Research Associate at UC Berkeley. Her book An American in Gandhi's India is about her grandfather Satyandh Stokes, the only American to take an active part in India's independence movement and to serve a six month prison sentence for the cause. Ajah? Thank you everybody. I'm just going to read a few passages from the scenes relating to his time in the prison and how he was sentenced, because that is very unusual. As she just said, the only American who was imprisoned during India's independence movement. In the early hours of 3rd December, 1921, two policemen entered a first class compartment of the Punjab Mail at Vagha Railway Station near Lahore in British India and approached a distinguished looking American dressed in a khadi, kurta and dhoti. They told him he was under arrest on charges of sedition and asked him to accompany them to the police station in Lahore. Six hours later, he was standing before the district magistrate, Major Amal Farar, who magnanimously offered to release the man if he would provide a security deposit of Rs. 10,000 for good behavior. The terms were not acceptable to him. The American, Samuel Evans Stokes, originally of Philadelphia, was in fact an Indian nationalist who, following Gandhi's principles of non-corporation, had no intention of cooperating with the colonial government to obtain his release. Even though the government tried to play down the arrest, it made news. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi reacted to Stokes' arrest with a front page article titled, Reward of Adoption in his weekly journal, Young India. This is a unique move on the part of the government. Mr. Stokes is an American who has made India his home in a manner in which perhaps no other American or Englishman has. No one can suspect him of ill will, but that he should feel like an Indian and share his sorrows and throw himself into the struggle has proved too much for the government. To leave him free to criticize the government was intolerable, so his white skin has proved no protection for him. In America, the news of Stokes' arrest appeared in several newspapers and magazines, including the Philadelphia Leisure, The New York Times, The Nation, and The Behive of Germantown. A few days after his arrest, Stokes' mother received the first letter of congratulations from India. Stokes' friend, Dunechan, wrote to her from Ambala. The so-called prosecution against him at Stokes is the merest excuse to either break him away from the movement or to put him in jail. Here in India, on each arrest, congratulations are offered to the relations of the arrested, and in the same spirit, I most humbly offer to you my most sincere congratulations on the noble sacrifice your son has made. His name is one of the honoured names in these days throughout the length and breadth of India. Dunechan's letter was great comfort to Mrs. Stokes, but despite her personal feelings on the subject and the faith of friends, it was not easy for her to make public her son's arrest. She had talked to everyone for the past year of his warm sympathy with the national cause, his faith in Mahatma Gandhi and his work for Swaraj, but she did not at first have the courage to tell people other than the immediate family and her closest and most intimate friends that her son was in prison. It would have been so incomprehensible to people generally. A political arrest was so unheard of in America that she knew that few would understand and realize that it might become a matter of gossip. It may have been cowardly on my part, but I hated to have it talked about by those who could not comprehend it at all, she admitted. But when the news of Stokes' arrest appeared in the press, all the family friends read about it, and to Florence Stokes' amazement, they seemed to understand it intelligently. She now found many of them congratulating her on her son's arrest and courage and perseverance of an ideal. Oh, how proud I would be if it were my son said one friend, believe or Sam Stokes said another. If more of us went to jail for what we believe, the world would soon be a better place, wrote Stokes' old friend George Gleason. Life in prison was a new experience for Stokes. He had always lived a free and independent life, and to be confined within walls was almost unbearable. The first 24 hours were the worst. There's a horror about the barred gates and windows, the cells in the high walls, that gives one a crazy desire to dash desperately against them and beat oneself to pieces upon them. I never could gauge anything after that first 24 hours experience he wrote after he had spent a month in the prison. What Stokes found most difficult to accept, however, was the jail authorities insistence on treating him as a European prisoner rather than Indian one. The board and lodging facilities for Europeans were much better than those for Indians, and they could avail of many more amenities. Stokes resented being treated differently from his national colleagues. He had already pleaded for a change in his status, but despite all his protests, he was kept in the European world. Thank you. Thank you, Ajah. You might be interested to know that Ajah's book was published in India 10 years ago and was just published in the States a couple of months ago. Our next reader is Claire Lewis. Claire has been a wedding photographer for the last 20 years, and she is the author of Exposed Confessions of a Wedding Photographer. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Hello. The piece I'm going to read takes place at a Napa Valley winery where my assistant Sarah and I are about to photograph a wedding, and the ceremony is being performed by a very strange woman named Ariel. Once the guests were seated and Christian Mitch was standing between two enormous marble urns filled with pink roses, Ariel bowed her head for a moment of silence. Raising her head, she rang a tiny brass bell three times and said, Let the ceremony begin. I open this glorious day by extending my deep love and fellowship to you who are gathered here. I will now read some sweet details from the private letters I asked the bride and groom to write to each other and share only with me. She paused. Christian Mitch looked worried. Do you think they knew she was going to read sweet excerpts from their intimate letters to their 200 guests? I whispered to Sarah. She grinned at me. This is great. She whispered back. I knew this was going to be a good one. Our bride, said Ariel, is a long distance runner who often travels to participate in triathlons, while Mitch cares faithfully for Fleur, their beloved French bulldog. Someone in the crowd laughed and was quickly hushed. The proudest day of Mitch's life, continued Ariel, was the moment when he proposed to Christie at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. This remarkable and public-spirited couple hoped someday to design a vegan running shoe. Ariel beamed at the audience. What? What is she saying? The bride's grandmother asked loudly. She said, Christie likes running, the bride's mother shouted into the grandmother's hearing aid. Running where? The grandmother shouted back. There was more laughter now. Mitch stepped close to Ariel and began to speak to her, his voice mostly too low for Ariel's body mic to pick up for the rest of us to hear. We heard something about, what the hell? And something about, not our letters, lady. I focused my zoom lens in on Ariel's face. She looked like she was melting. Her features sagged. She grew even paler. Her shoulders hunched as Mitch continued speaking to her. A soft moan came through the speakers that were wired to the microphone attached to her collar. She began to sway slightly from side to side. After a moment, Mitch backed away and Ariel seemed to pull herself together. I will now share a reading from The Little Prince, she said. The quote she began reading didn't have anything to do with anything that was going on, but at least things were moving forward. The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen, Ariel continued. Then, suddenly, she stopped. Several of the groomsmen darted in to support her as she swayed dangerously to one side, but she waved them away and began reading again. Unfortunately, she started from the beginning. Three more times, Ariel started her reading, lost her place and began again, and finally she stopped and dropped like a stone. After so many false alarms, the groomsmen had grown careless and no one caught her. The thud as she hit the ground was projected by her microphone to wonderfully dramatic effect. Everyone froze. Oh God, what do I do? Do I keep shooting? Is that right? said a relative with a video camera. Of course you keep shooting, snapped Sarah. Memories are made of this. Christie screamed and all attention switched firmly back to the bride. Guests leapt up to support her. Bridesmaid scattered in a flurry of flowers and ruffled skirts, Mitch backed slowly away. Christie, slumped in the supporting arms of her maid of honour, looked down at her collapsed efficient. How could this happen? she gasped. I don't understand how this could happen. Finally, a doctor among the guests actually thought to check on the condition of the fallen Ariel. She's all right. Please don't worry, he said, though no one appeared to be worried. They were all far too busy with Christie. The doctor helped Ariel to a chair. I want to finish the ceremony. She insisted weekly their souls are not yet united. I elbowed Sarah, who was doubled over with laughter. Ten minutes later, with the support of two groomsmen, Ariel rose from her chair and slowly made her way back to the ceremony site, and to Christie, who stood waiting there, pale but determined. I can do this, Christie said to her mother. Where's Mitch? Mitch was over near the ornamental fountain, chatting to the prettiest of the bridesmaids. Christie's lips thinned a little. Baby, we're ready to start again, she called. Mitch looked up. It's about time he gave the bridesmaid a wink and headed over. Ariel started reading her quote from the little prince. Sarah groaned. Skip to the vows. Oh, no way is she gonna make it. Look! Ariel had already stopped reading, and we watched as she turned very slowly toward Christie. I am so sorry, my dear, she said politely and vomited massively down the front of Christie's pristine Vera Wang gown. Christie looked down, her lips moved, but no sound came out, and then it did. Get it off me! She screamed. Get it off! Get it off! Get it off! She kept repeating this as four of the groomsmen lifted her up, her body forming a crucifix shape, head lolling back to give us one last view of her mascara-stained face as she was carried from the scene. Ambulance sirens were heard in the distance. Wow, said Sarah. Thank you. I'd like to see the pictures from that wedding. Thank you, Claire. Our next reader is Victoria Zakheim. Victoria is editor of Anthologies, The Other Woman, and Forkeeps, and author of The Bone Weaver, a novel. An instructor in the UCLA Writer's Program, she is developer and scriptwriter of the documentary Tracing Thalidomide, The Francis Kelsey Story, and scriptwriter of More Than a Lord's Daughter, Ada Byron Lovelace. Welcome, Victoria. I have never been introduced by music. I have to tell you. It's quite an experience. Thank you. As much as we like to believe that we have full control of the circumstances of our lives, love, health, relationships, we don't. No matter how successful we are, no matter how many books we've written or children we've launched, no matter how many business deals we've closed, illnesses or injuries we've overcome, life continues to remind us that the control we fight to attain can so quickly slip away. And while many of us are able to regain that control, we cannot ignore the message that hovers out there just beyond the coast of consciousness. Our bodies are forkeeps. No matter what life brings us, we must forge ahead and celebrate life. In my first anthology, Forkeeps, we tell the truth about their bodies growing older and acceptance. Twenty-seven exceptional women shared some transformative event that reminds us of the importance of accepting ourselves, our bodies, and living joyful and productive lives. I still read these personal stories and find myself nodding, laughing, sometimes gasping in disbelief that all of us, aged mid-thirties to late seventies, were willing to reveal the most intimate reflections on how body image, illness, injury, and growing older have changed in so many ways even enriched who we are as women. So much of that is about control. For example, Luisa Armolino addresses the loss of control with dignity and humor in Death Becomes Her. She writes, My mother is dying in her bed across the street. My husband is in the hospital defying the medical prediction that he has six months to live. It's been ten, and we're still counting. Me, I'm going back and forth from the hospital to my mother's bedside to my job at a celebrity fashion magazine. Is Nicole Kidman wearing Zach Posen? And did she really buy her lasagna pan at William Sonoma? Many of the women in this book have experienced complicated and sometimes grating relationships with surprise, their mothers. Carrie K. Back writes, I am the source for much needed admiration and adulation. She is insatiable. Oh, my poor daughter, mom would say. She has toxemia, but I didn't. I was roundly eight months pregnant, and she was ashamed of me. I'm totally in awe of this woman, in love with her, depended on her. She made me like this. Our physical being, more than we'd like to admit, can determine our self-image. Liza Nelson writes about living with breasts so large that whenever she crossed a room, she felt like an ocean liner. And then everything changed. She writes, As I type these words, I'm wearing Levi jeans without a belt, a long sleeve stretchy black v-neck shirt, a wool scarf, striped socks, red sneakers, silver loop earrings, white cotton underpants, and reading glasses. What I am not wearing is a bra. I have not worn a bra since the morning of my double mastectomy. If you're reading this litany and thinking, oh, poor woman, don't. I love feeling unbound, with no straps biting into my shoulders and no elastic squeezing my back. I love that no unwieldy chest is pulling the rest of me forward and down, as it did from age 12 to 51. I like. No. I love my new almost flat chest. I certainly don't qualify for sisterhood with cancer survivors. I was more of an evader. What for those other women was a dark cancer cloud was for me mostly a silver lining. In these two anthologies, I've had the pleasure of editing women who write with open hearts. All of us have stumbled. This is after all real life. Cheating husbands, our own extramarital affairs, insecurity, recrimination, guilt, no guilt. It's all covered in my second anthology, The Other Woman. Twenty-one women here write not about their body's infidelity, but the infidelity of a mate, a father, even their own infidelity, with a few unexpected takes on the subject. Imagine how Mary Jo used to spell when her actor husband left her for Tory Spelling, three weeks after they'd adopted a baby. Some of the women in this book write poignantly, others with rage, quite a few with humor. Jane Smiley writes, I could have paid better attention to the signs. For example, I could have noticed that both the first time around and the second time around, my husband Steve wooed me by detailing his exploits with other women, then flattering me by comparison of all these women, dozens, hundreds. I was the ultimate. Nevertheless, when he told me there was another woman and that she was our dental hygienist, I at first didn't believe him because not two weeks before telling me he'd remarked with a straight face that should I ever find myself in a vegetative state, he would keep me and even cherish me in the living room of our house so that he could personally fulfill my every unconscious need. But this is only context. He left me for the other woman. It was a shock. I vowed never to get into another other woman's situation again. And here's Aviva Layton writing about her life with three-time Nobel-nominated poet Irving Layton. If you're going to be the other woman, then traditionally at least, you should have the edge by being both younger and more beautiful than the wife. I told the first part of that equation, but not the second. Not that I wasn't passably pretty. Perky was the word often used to describe me. Perky and lively and bright and articulate. His wife was not only a serious beauty, she was a talented artist. They seemed to be the perfect couple until her husband started sleeping with me, that is. Did I feel guilty? No, not for a second. And then finally, Pam Houston. Let's say for the purpose of this conversation that the other woman lives in a foreign city. Let's say it's Istanbul, though it is not Istanbul. Let's say she's married to the minister of economics, although she is not married to the minister of economics. Let's say that when the man in your life went over to the city that is not Istanbul to visit her, the man who is not the minister of economics hired other men in trench coats to follow them around. Let's say one or another of these trench-coated men approached the man in your life in a coffee shop and told him that the price of a life in the city that is not Istanbul is $100 US. Let's say the man in your life told you this story with an impish grin on his face, his palms raised to the ceiling like, what is the poor American boy in love with an unhappily married Turkish Muslim mother afford to do? Thank you, Victoria. Our next reader is Elias Aboujadeh. Elias is a doctor and directs the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. His research has been featured in The New York Times on CNN and on NBC. In his book, Compulsive Acts, a psychiatrist's tales of ritual and obsession, he tells harrowing tales inspired by memorable patients. He has treated for a variety of compulsive conditions. Welcome, Elias. Thank you, Corey, and thank you all for making it today. Like most psychiatrists, I'm always coming across powerful stories of people who are up against some major adversity, people who are trying to make sense of some incomprehensible experiences. And there's a lot of inspiration and many lessons to be learned from these stories. But for the most part, they go untold. For the most part, they stay in the doctor-patient relationship and in the private medical chart. And of course, there's a very important reason for that, patient confidentiality. But if you have the writer's bug in you as I do, you try to find an ethical way to get around this and what I have done in compulsive acts and what many doctor-writers before me have done is to try to stay faithful to the essence of the story, but to try to change all the identifying characteristics to make the subject that you're talking about unrecognizable. So that's what I tried to do in compulsive acts. And so then one aspect that's common to all these stories is that they all inspired me to share them with a wider audience. But another commonality is that they all feature patients who have a compulsive condition of some kind. Now, you're all probably familiar with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. But by itself, OCD affects only about 2% of the population. Yet as mental health professionals, we treat a whole range of other compulsive conditions from compulsive gambling, compulsive shopping, so-called internet addiction, kleptomania, all these are considered compulsive disorders. And I try to cover all of them in compulsive acts. And if you combine all these conditions together, then the prevalence in the population is closer to 20%. So in other words, as extreme as some of these characters I talk about in my book are they're hardly alone. And we all know someone would want or more of these conditions. So with that, I'd like to give a quick taste of compulsive acts by reading an excerpt from the first chapter, a chapter titled Psychiatry by the Dumpster. George was special from day one. I can still remember Don, my clinic clerk, paging me at 1.45pm, three-quarters of an hour after his first schedule appointment, to warn me. Oh, Dr. A, you're going to love this one. Please don't tell me the patient just showed up, I said. How am I supposed to do a full intake in the remaining 15 minutes? I know Don answered, but I couldn't just let him go. I don't know what to say, but he's how should I put it? He has his reasons for being late. He's special, even by our standards in this clinic and even after nine years of doing this. I had to go out into the parking lot to check him in. That should give you an idea. You went to the parking lot to check him in, I asked, outside? Yes, outside, Don answered. He can't come in, he says. Our door isn't wide enough for him. Our door isn't wide enough, I queried, wondering whether I was the right doctor for this patient. Did he mistake us for the gastric bypass clinic? How heavy is he? Oh, he's not heavy at all, Don answered. In fact, his wife tells me he hasn't done anything. He's just, I don't know, something about his nose. He won't let anyone or anything close to it. He was so worried about his nose, he wouldn't even come into the car this morning. How did he make it to our clinic then, I asked. I thought he lived in Belmont. That's 15 miles away. He does, Don said. He walked here. His wife drove, but George walked. He walked, I asked in disbelief, all the way from Belmont, and Don replied. That's why I can't simply send him back and ask him to reschedule. Anyway, he is checked in now and waiting for you over in the far corner of the parking lot, exactly three feet from the dumpster where I might add his wife spotted your old squeaky office table and asked me to help her pull it out and put it in her trunk. I'm no doctor, but she's not right either. What use could she possibly have for that table? Anyway, what would you like me to do now? Well, I guess my only choice is to come right down, I said. Meet me by the dumpster. I walked toward Don, who was standing in the far corner of the parking lot. Nearby, an awakened handicap spot by our recycling dumpster stood George. In the adjacent spot, having managed with Don's help to squeeze my old filing cabinet into her trunk, stood his wife, trying unsuccessfully to push the trunk door shut. His wife started the conversation. Dr. A, thank you for coming out here to see us, she said. I know this is not standard practice, but it's very difficult to get him through doors anymore. Things have gotten completely out of control since it's grown to three feet, three whole feet. I was intrigued by the three feet, but realized that I had not yet introduced myself to George. However, before I could formally do that, George preempted my handshake. I don't mean to be rude, doctor, he said apologetically, but please don't stick your hand out. I can't do handshakes. That's okay, I understand, I said. I'm pleased to meet you anyway. Your wife just mentioned that it's grown to three feet. What is it that has grown to three feet, George? The radius around his nose, his wife answered, the quiver in her voice betraying her anxiety. He needs that much clear space around his nose at all times now. In the good old days, it used to be that nothing could come within a foot of his nose, and we could joke about it, but when the radius grew to two feet, it was anything but funny, and we started needing to make lifestyle modifications, having to sit alone in the back seat of the car, trying to sleep standing up like a horse, not to mention, if I may go there, the challenging sex. But then she continued, even two feet weren't enough. It had to grow to three feet, and at three feet it has been, well, impossible to accommodate. So the rest of the story tracks George's progress and the progress of his wife who, as you may have guessed, had more than a touch of OCD herself, and I go on to describe treatment options for OCD and other compulsive conditions, and then move on to some other compulsive disorders in the following chapters. Thank you very much. Thank you, Elias. Our next reader is Bridget Kinsella. Bridget is the author of Visiting Life, Women Doing Time on the Outside. Her work has appeared in publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Writer's Digest, and has also been featured in her work. She lives in Northern California. Welcome to Bridget. Wow, the music is amazing, isn't it? What I'd like to tell you that my day job is that I, for 15 years have worked for Publishers Weekly magazine covering book events such as this, and so this is quite a thrill to come full circle. I covered Litquake the first year that it opened. So this is pretty amazing. Thank you. And I'm going to start at the beginning. My book is about a very unexpected relationship I had with a man in prison. Not something I recommend, by the way. It's a very hard thing to do, and like I said, nothing I ever expected to be a part of myself. I'm just going to read the beginning of the book because the first question always is, how did that happen? So I'm going to start at the beginning. The first time I walked into a maximum security prison, I dressed like a lawyer. Though it wasn't my intention. Let's just say there are a lot of rules of what a woman can and cannot wear inside a men's maximum security prison. No inmate blue denim and no cop green khaki seem the most important ones. I figured it best to have a modest hemline and thought to the need was plenty modest. The guard didn't agree and sent me back to my car to change. The last time I changed clothes in my car was the summer I worked two jobs and went to night school. Somewhere stopped in traffic along the New Jersey turnpike between my job at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson and class at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I decided to wiggle out of my work skirt and into my student cutoffs without looking to see if there were any truckers who might get knifeful. This time I'm more conscious of changing in the open as I shimmy out of my pale green dress deemed inappropriate and into a black and white number I think will pass prison scrutiny. How did I get here? I ask myself scanning the myriad fences, razor wire and looming guard towers of Pelican Bay State Prison. Yes, Pelican Bay. Whenever anyone writes or speaks of this notorious prison in Crescent City, California, they usually call it the worst of the worst. They mean the worst criminals and the worst treatment. I think back to my 20-something self, cruising along in my white with red vinyl roof Pontiac Sunbird as my 39-year-old self changes shoes in my rust-colored Chevy Cavalier. Not much bigger than my first beloved set of wheels. The older I get, the more I realize we never actually shake off the internal image we have of our younger selves, but hopefully evolve from them. You know, I'm like really shaky. I haven't done this in a really long time. I don't know if I can continue. I'm sorry, I've just been distracted this whole week and I'm covering an event over across the bay. It's the Northern California Independent Books Association and so I've been distracted from this and I forgot how emotional this is for me to read. I'm shaking. I really don't think I can read anymore. I'm sorry. I won't read one thing though. I am shaking. Wow. This is just this man in prison, Rory, who I call him. What we did for each other is we saved each other. He found redemption and I found healing. I moved to California seven years ago after a painful divorce and I was on the cusp of turning 40 and I was realizing I may never have children and this guy let me say it out loud and let it go. I'm so sorry. I'm shaking. I really I'm just going to read one more sentence because this sums up as I realized I was healing. Thank you. So I realized I was healing. I knew I needed to tell this story and I went to my mother who watched me go through so much and so many years of pain because I really wanted children so bad and my mother said to me, well you're this is good and I promised her I wouldn't marry the guy and I don't. Wow. This is really hitting me. Anyway, I said, Mom, I want to tell the stories of some of the other women I've met because whenever these women are seen they're always seen as stereotype, as stupid and my mother said, that's great. You're going to give voice to people who aren't even seen. So this next thing I'm going to read, oh God sort of sums up the whole thing for me and at last there's Ludquake. It's the only thing I read. Early in my prison going experience I noticed that two things, both for their omnipresence and for their absence hover above the visiting room, God and sex. Thank you very much. I don't know what Thank you for that Bridget. I have to say now that I'm completely intrigued in reading the rest of your books so that's a good thing. Our final reader today is Susan Griffin. Susan's latest book wrestling with the angel of democracy on being an American citizen is about the inner life of democracy named by Utney as one of the 100 important visionaries of the new millennium she has written 19 books including A Chorus of Stones and The Private Life of War which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize let's have a nice welcome for Susan Griffin. Well this is a book, it really is a book about the inner life of democracy and I sort of outlined it something that I think of as the psychology of democracy and then the psychology of monarchy. I think we're facing a struggle between those two things right now in our country. And what I do is I juxtapose a kind of story of my life as a citizen with American history so the book begins with an incident from my childhood one of many such incidents where I have a conversation with my father and he and I'm I'm objecting to something he said to me and I ask him why he won't allow me to do something and he doesn't say because I said so he gives me a reason and I describe that as sort of a democratic child rearing and I experience the other kind of child ring from my grandparents which is because I said so so I knew the difference I experienced the difference very clearly but I'm going to leap ahead now since we have such a short time to read and I'm going to read you something from the fourth chapter which is called jazz I think of jazz as the quintessential art democratic art form for many reasons I think that's obvious why that would be and all the music, the American music that came out of jazz and all the way from rhythm and blues to hip hop so I'm reading a section from this chapter on jazz I've been telling the story of Jolly Roll Morton which takes place at the turn of the century and he was one of the founders of jazz he's one of the people who invented it like the current and then I leap to my own experience as a high school student and very soon to go to college very very deeply influenced by jazz myself like the current that comes from changes in a magnetic field new movements in a culture produce a powerful electricity earlier in the evening on the same night when I first met my best friend Bran I could feel a charge in the air as we all assembled in the dining room of her house the furniture had been removed which allowed us all to sit in the floor in a circle so that two young men could address us they were slightly older having already spent a semester at the University of California at Berkeley from which they had returned for the holiday break when I see them now in my mind side as almost as if they were burnished with gold or at least adorned with laurel wreaths their eyes wide with the same apprehension as others who have traveled to another world and returned eager to describe what they have seen they had been several times to the city they said meaning San Francisco across the bay from the university they had been to coffee houses they said this was enough to startle and intrigue us it was the end of the fifties and though we had heard of places that served European coffee and hosted serious discussion few of us had been in one of them they had even been to jazz clubs that was the most but what was most exciting was that in these clubs and cafes they had heard not only jazz but poets who read poetry to the accompaniment of jazz there a man named Lawrence Ferlinghetti and one named Jack Kerouac had read their poems to jazz as had the poets Kenneth Rex Roth and David Meltzer it was a woman named Ruth Weiss who started the whole thing when she stood up spontaneously to recite while the musicians were playing at an underground club called The Seller finally they told us they had brought back books from a new group of poets called The Beats they had one slim volume and they wanted to read from it to the accompaniment of a jazz record they put on the turntable the book they told us had been banned it was called Howell I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked the poem began the room was suspended as if at the edge of a future whose arrival we were all witnessing everyone was riveted by the words and the rolling rhythm of the long sentences which as with the list of grievances against King George and the Declaration of Independence outlined an angry protest and yet with a music that broke ordinary syntax and like jazz sounded blue and full of grief so I'm going to read one other short section but the the you know if you read the Declaration of Independence as I've done many times in the course of writing this book because I begin the book with Jefferson writing that declaration and then you read Howell in a way I invite you to do that because you'll see that I'm sure that Ginsburg was consciously copying that list of grievances and it's very powerful to do that I'm I'm now leaping ahead to I tell a story in the book the two narratives come together at one point when I become a part of history and I join a protest I joined a protest against discrimination at the Sheraton Palace so I tell that story and then I and then I go back in history and then forwards to the civil rights women but I go back to which I was part of I go back to a period in which Angelina Grimke who was a famous abolitionist who was also a feminist was active there is an implicit sense of connection to wider worlds in all struggles for justice this is made clear whenever any single form of injustice acts as a metaphor for other kinds of oppression the founders of the American revolution often borrowed language from early movements to abolish slavery they use the word slavery and bondage to describe the injustice the colonies suffered under the governance of Great Britain in this way the word freedom has been forged in the American mind with the image of a man breaking the bonds of slavery the alchemy through which empathy with the suffering of others leads you to recognize and then protest against your own with the alchemy that I'm sorry I'm so distracted because I'm looking at the timing I know you're doing a good job there but the alchemy through which empathy with the suffering of others leads you to recognize and then protest against your own can be seen in the story of the abolitionist leader and feminist Angelina Grimke at the dawn of the 19th century she was born to an elite southern family that held many slaves as a small child what she witnessed in her own household disturbed her women forced to sew and mend late at night by lamps that were so dim they had to stand to see what they were doing the men and women who served the family sleeping right on the floor without mattresses or bedding Angelina's mother was a hard taskmaster in her home with both children and servants obedience was bought through punishment mother Angelina wrote in her journal rules slaves and children with a rod of fear after her father died and her brother became the head of the household the atmosphere became even harsher he beat one house servant so severely and hit him so often on the head that the man developed epilepsy it was not only at home that she witnessed such cruelty but throughout her community one of her young friends lived close to a building where slaves were taken for punishment and often when she visited her friend she could hear the screams of slaves under their torture on one memorable occasion in the upper class school she attended she watched a young black boy who had been so dreadfully whipped that he could hardly cross the room to open a window the state of his soul worried her as much as the conditions of his body evident in what she described as his heart broken countenance in such circumstances where suffering and injustice are clear why do some respond sympathetically and others with increased brutality it is a question that bears on democracy a form of government that rests on reciprocity and some degree of empathy thank you so much Susan and thank you to all of our seven readers today I can say for one there are seven books I now want to read for sure and I think it was great to hear about all these different ways that writers process the human experience for themselves and for other people that they interact with I've been told to ask everyone who's interested to stick around for the next hour which is a mystery hour theme and I believe that's the last hour of today's presentation thank you