[MUSIC] >> This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Turn your ideas into reality with an Azure-free account. Get everything you need to develop apps across Cloud and hybrid environments, scale workloads, create Cloud-connected mobile experiences and so much more. Discover what you can create with popular services free for 12 months. Learn more at azure.com. That's azure.com and sign up for a free account to start building in the Cloud today. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping Kroger for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouthwatering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings, Kroger fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. >> Hello everybody, welcome to the other people podcast, a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. Thanks for tuning in. I appreciate it. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow me on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. So my guest today is Carrie Howley, author of the book Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. >> What was interesting to me about the vastness of the deep state is how the deep state doesn't even know itself, right? Like it's so large that no single mind can possibly understand all of it. There's nobody at the top who like knows what's going on. It's like life or like nature. Like it's so large and complex that there are pieces of it that are completely unknown to people at the very, very, very top. And so I think that's kind of interesting. It's like this, it has these tentacles that no one can even see. All right, that was Carrie Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, now available in trade paperback from Vintage. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs was a New York Times top 10 best book of 2023. It was also named one of the best books of that year by the New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic. It is a meditation on post-privacy America, the age of big data. And in the pages of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, Carrie Howley attempts to map out this terrain. Primarily by telling the stories of some of this era's most notable and notorious figures, including reality winner Edward Snowden, John Walker Lynn, Julian Assange, and others. This is a bracing, whip smart book, an absolute pleasure to read, and a book that asks essential questions about how we live now. My conversation with Carrie Howley is coming up. A reminder before we get started to please sign up for my weekly newsletter over at Substack. And if you are a regular listener, I hope you will join the other people Patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod. Help keep this show going into the future, patreon.com/otherpplpod. Another great way to support this show is to join my book club. You can do that at the show's official website, otherppl.com. Today's episode is brought to you by The Feminist Press, publisher of the debut story collection Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Serda. This is a collection of linked short stories featuring 13 Mexican women who confront the bitch that is life, and then they become her, from the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking indigenous roots. These women invent new ways to endure, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. This raucous debut story collection from Dahlia de la Serda, one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers, is now available from The Feminist Press. Visit feministpress.org and use the code RES20 and get 20% off of your copy today. Again, that's feministpress.org. Use the code RES20 and get 20% off. Again, the book is called Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Serda, available from the feminist press. So my guest once again is Carrie Howley. Her latest book is called Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. It is available now in trade paperback from Vintage. Carrie Howley is a feature writer at New York Magazine, and she is also the author of a book called Throne, which was a New York Times editor's choice and pick for Best of the Year lists in a variety of publications, including Time, Salon, and Slate. Carrie's work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Best American Sports Writing, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's. She is a Landon Foundation Fellow and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa where she was a professor at the celebrated nonfiction writing program until joining New York Magazine. She now lives in Los Angeles. I am so pleased to have had the opportunity to talk with Carrie Howley about her excellent book and her life and all of her work, and I'm excited to share that conversation with all of you right now. So let's get to it. Here I am talking with Carrie Howley and her book One More Time is called Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. I would say that when I was writing the reality winner profile, I did feel that there was this entire world underneath the visible world of people who knew the extent to which we were being surveilled and just kind of went on with their ordinary lives heavy with that knowledge. But I think the origin of the book comes from this place. It comes from a place prior to that, which is the sense that we've all grown into this world where we know that we're being watched all the time, and we haven't even figured out how to talk about that or think about that. This kind of anxiety that anything I write or say could be taken out of context and a factual portrait of me could be drawn that at the same time doesn't reflect who I am, and we're all living in that world. And I started thinking about that and I wanted to read about it, and so I started looking for books about it. But these books would immediately veer into a kind of obnoxious knowingness and become very political, or it would turn into something else like the history of the Fourth Amendment or a history of surveillance, it would crash into narrative, and that felt to me like a way of not sitting with it. And so this is, I think, is an attempt to ask, what does it mean to live in a world where you know pieces of you are constantly being alienated and can be recombined? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to read this Squares with something I wanted to read aloud in this interview. It's from, I believe, a New Yorker review of the book, and it says, "How these central claim, the thread with which she seeks to string her wide-ranging material, is that American life since the early 2000s has been increasingly marked by two developments. First, the mass collection of personal data by the state withheld from tech companies. Second, most individuals daily participation in this process, as we deposit more and more digital fragments of our life on the internet, some of it notionally private, some posted publicly accessible to the government, this creates a near infinite well of details that can be used to tell stories about us." That's basically an echo of what you just said. And it's interesting to me, at the level of narrative in particular, and I think that's a concern of yours. I think it's a concern of anybody who's into storytelling and writing to see the narrative aspect of data, of big data and of the deep state, and to look at a story like reality winner. You know, these facts about her, like you said, are present. But the story that's told about her based on those facts doesn't really square with who she actually is. And there's an interesting tension there. I mean, what I would say about that quote is I'm actually more interested in representing the texture of this method of this plane of existence that we find ourselves in. So it feels to me different than the texture prior to surveillance. And it's not that I seek to be normative or moralizing about where we are right now, but I feel that it has changed the way that we behave and experience our consciousness in ways that, again, we're just beginning to figure out how to talk about. I feel personally a sense of resignation about it almost. Like I use DuckDuckGo. I try, I don't ever accept the cookies or whatever, that little things you can do. On my iPhone, it's like, do you want to ask the app to not track? I always select that. But there is a part of me, like I have a Gmail account. I'm like, they're tracking this, like if they wanted to, they could easily just, right? I mean, it's like, how do you avoid it at this point? I mean, I think the life you live outside of surveillance is a life, it would require such immense sacrifice and disconnection from other people. I mean, at this point, I think the internet is inseparable from surveillance. And so we've accepted this. This is the world that we're inside of. And I'm not telling people to resist it necessarily. I'm just trying to understand it and draw it and depict it. So yeah, I mean, that begs the question, like, where are you on? What are you doing after covering this beat and writing this book and, you know, getting to know reality winner and all this stuff, like how do you behave online? I mean, I don't think I have particularly sophisticated digital hygiene, but I'm aware that it's much safer to speak a secret generally than to write it in any form. So I'm more careful about what I text and email. And I think a lot about, to me, true privacy feels like being in a bar with another person, right? Like that, that conversation is going to stay there between us and our minds. And that kind of, I think differently about like being physically with another person that is now like a kind of sacred form of communication that remains with us rather than being separated from us. I don't think it happens nearly enough. I'm thinking of my own life. So much of it is digital. Even this, you know, even this, like we're talking face to face, but we're on a computer. And there's great value. I mean, I get so much from my group texts, right? Like so much happiness and connection and I don't, you know, I'm not moralizing about that at all. I mean, I think that's absolutely necessary and life-giving. But those things are not safe. And you, I believe we're pregnant while you were, we're reporting this book. Yeah. And a lot, like several of the reviews noted how many illusions there are or like kind of nods to children. Like I think you reference your own children and you, you reference children who might be impacted by some of the issues that you bring up in the book. It's kind of like, it's underneath the text is this concern. And I'm curious to know when you look back on the writing of the book, how being pregnant while you were reporting it might have affected the way you told the story. I'm really interested in the way reality winner's mother, reality winner is a whistleblower in the book who really ruins her life as she knows it by taking a stand and deciding to share some private information with a publication. I think about the way her mother raised her to do what you believe in, like all of these platitudes that we share with our children. And you stand up for what you believe in, et cetera, every version of that. And do we really mean that? Like no, do we, what happens when somebody takes you seriously when we live in a world where that all of these jobs involve people deciding to compartmentalize. And you know, it's not my role to say that. It's not my role to share that. Like I'm seeing all this deeply disturbing information that I'm going to keep it to myself. And that peril of having a child who takes you seriously is interesting to me. Yeah, I mean, there is something kind of pure and noble and maybe a little bit naive about reality winner. She's a very winning person, you know, character in this whole narrative. And she's sort of, I feel like the central figure of examination, there are many, but she's the one I think that you feel most strongly about, like emotionally, maybe. I think there's a lot to explore. She's almost like a Forrest Gump kind of figure in the way that she passes through 9/11 and has changed by it and then crashes into this era and is one of the very few people who expresses to us how much has gone wrong. Well, yeah. And she had a very strong relationship with her father who was like deeply invested in like geopolitics and very opinionated and kind of, I think, gave that to her. And she's a unique young person who, like you said, was affected by 9/11 and then ended up becoming fluent in what Farsi and Dari and Pashto, yeah, she was a very talented linguist. Yeah, but I mean, like, that's not a skill set that most like 19-year-olds have, you know, but she was very impacted and very impressionable and wanted in an idealistic way to make a positive difference. She's also very funny about the way that she is kind of annoyingly moralizing. She's pushy and bossy and she has six documentaries that she really needs for you to watch. And it's great that you enjoy going to see the world, but do you know everything you're supporting when you do so, right? And so there's a kind of like election kind of vibe there and she's completely self-aware about that but continues to do it, which I find very charming. So she's just a really, she's disagreeable in a way that I find incredibly charming and I think readers do as well. She's smart. She's very smart, yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, if you do watch that SeaWorld documentary and I have, I'm not going to SeaWorld, you know, like, watch the documentary, she's not wrong, you know. There are other figures, many of whom I think, or if not all, would be familiar to my listeners that you cover in the book. And these are more high, you know, higher profile people who sort of like reality winner have gotten caught up in this post 9/11 surveillance state, deep state world in one way or another. And I think we can kind of just tick through them and you can say a few words, but John Walker Lind, he might be among, I guess there are others who might be harder to recall, but he was a while ago and a figure of great fascination right after 9/11. Yeah. He was known as the American Taliban and another person who believed, who had, you know, objectionable beliefs, but deeply earnest ones and at a very young age decided to follow the way people are extreme in their teens, you know, and found himself really at the center of the response to 9/11, which is a crazy thing in Afghanistan. And the telling of it, when you get into the minutiae of how he got there, this is a kid from what? Mill Valley. Yeah. Like posh. In California. Yeah. San Francisco Bay Area suburb or San Francisco suburb and, you know, again, idealistic and you trace the line. I mean, I'm going to botch the exact phrasing, but you keep making this point throughout the book about how we are all kind of a web of associations and relationships. We are all kind of a data set and the way you tell John Walker Lynn's story from how he wound up at the American Taliban after, you know, being raised in Mill Valley is, you know, it starts with what Chuck D. He's listening to socially conscious rap music and responding to it and getting ideas from it is introduced to what Islam through that. I mean, you can tell the story better than I, but you start to realize, like, oh, wow, this is a process and, you know, this guy, like it's relatable in a way, like, you know, I think about my own life and it is not relatable in that. I think at that age, I also shared this tendency to take an idea to its logical conclusion without mitigating ambiguities. And he became very convinced that he needed to study Islam and Arabic in their, what he saw as their original form and fell deeper and deeper into this ideology, which wasn't about the United States. It really had nothing to do with the United States, but after 9/11, it became very important to the American state to portray him as someone who was against the American state. He's the American Taliban. He's a terrorist. And I'm interested in the way, again, that story is constructed from, you know, so like so much of the texture of his life is ripped away to tell this very false story that even George Bush didn't believe. I was going to say, when I read the details of his life, I feel sorry for the guy. I don't find him a threat. Is he still in prison? He's still in prison. Right? He's no longer in prison. And I actually, it's unclear where he is. And so ironically, he's one of the few Americans who seems to have achieved a measure of privacy after all. Good for him. Good for him. I mean, he served a long time in jail. And I think like, however he transgressed, I think he has paid his due to society and then some. He seems like as a parent and as like a former dipshit, you know, when I was 19 years old, I mean, like, I don't think I would have wound up like it. That's just not my, that was not my wheelhouse, you know, to go join the Taliban and the, you know, Pakistan or whatever, but I don't know. He was a kid. He was a kid. And so was reality winner, really. That really is the kind of new model of whistle blowers, not that, not that John Walker Lynn was a whistle blower, but Daniel Hale, Edward Snowden, there are a number of others. They're young people and they're people who are very sophisticated about the internet, but also might feel an attachment to a kind of journalist who didn't exist when our parents were that age. And that creates a new dynamic, because we used to think of whistle blowers as like 50 year old men who had worked their way through some government agency and got mad. But now it's like, it's kids, it's people under 30. Yeah, everybody, you said they were all under the age of 31. That's an interesting fact. And I think it does have something to do. They all are very computer savvy, right? I mean, you think of Snowden, you think of reality winner, I mean, guess anybody in that generation is going to have a level of fluency in the internet. I actually don't. I don't know that all of them are that computer savvy. I think it's more that they're very online, right? That they're-- See, that means the same thing to me. Like I'm a computer savvy, very online, same thing. But yeah, I get it. Well, I mean, you know, before this started, you had to like walk me through a bunch of stuff on my computer. I'm not computer savvy. But I am sadly very online, they're different things. And so there are people who are kind of following the news and know what's going on and are becoming like increasingly frustrated with the information that they see unraveling before them and what they see getting out there in the news. All right, everybody, we are in September, but it's still summertime. There's still stuff happening. We're still going outside. Be sure to fuel up for all of your activities with factors, no prep, no mess meals, with options like calorie smart, protein plus and keto, factors, fresh, never frozen meals or dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes. 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And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices plus extra ways to save like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points so you can get big flavors and big savings Kroger fresh for everyone fuel restrictions apply. So another guy that you've talked about Edward Snowden a little bit, I think most people know who he is, Julian Assange is also touched upon in the book. But a guy that I want to spend some time on who people might not have as much familiarity with is John Kiriaku, or is that how you pronounce it? Yes. And he's an ex-CIA officer who I believe disclosed on television for the first time. I think he broke the news that the American government had been waterboarding detainees post 9/11. Yes, he did. And he also indicated that it worked. And so that is a really confusing legacy because it had not worked. And he identifies very strongly with this role of whistleblower, which ends up creating a bunch of problems for him down the line. But he does ultimately serve time in prison, not officially for that, but probably for that. And later takes a job at Sputnik radio, right? Right. So these trajectories are just so wild to me the way that these people are complicated and they're morally and tonally complex, I would say, and that's a lot of what interested me. I'm talking about heroes and villains, of course. Here you have people who weave in and out of these complex moral questions and justify themselves in surprising ways. So when you're reporting a piece like this, this is kind of like a nuts and bolts, like writerly question. In terms of cultivating sources, getting these people to talk with you, getting to know these people and developing trust. Because I think in particular, you got to know reality winners family. She called you from jail, right? I mean, like, so you have some real connectivity. How do you do that? How do you build sources like that? You know, it's just as messy as you would imagine. It's like there's nothing to learn. It's like there's no method. You talk to somebody and you indicate that you understand a worldview, I think. I know I can understand, I might not agree with it, but I understand this justification you gave. I understand. I think you are mistreated in this instance, kind of meet them where they are, I think, and also just be human. Often I'm very like awkward and I think people respond to that. That works for me, too. Just give an opening, right? And yeah, it's just kind of being out there. It's always surprising to me, I write three stories a year for New York and every single time I'm surprised that people will talk to me, but people want, they want to be out there. They often feel that stories have been told incorrectly. They often have. Of course, there are instances where an interview is antagonistic, but most of the time, it's the other way. It's surprising how much people will share. So do you track down an email address for her? Do you slide into her DMs? How is it done? That was actually really hard to get in touch with her. There was an organization representing her that did not want her story out there as far as I can tell because they felt that it contributed to a sense of militarism against Russia. And so the organization that was supposed to be raising awareness for her was actively trying to keep me from her. And so I spent a long time tussling with them before finally getting through to her mother who was dying to talk to me. To her family, the story hadn't been told because the entire analysis of reality when her story ended with late night show host laughing about her name, her name is reality winner. And so as soon as I got in touch with her family, they were all willing to talk. She was somebody who, she's such a character that there were plentiful anecdotes about her that could very quickly characterize her as this person we were talking about before. It's difficult, but very funny sarcastic personality. And so it was very easy to write in that way. Yeah, there's a line from I think the same New Yorker piece that I quoted earlier where they're saying that reality winner quote represents to a remarkable degree of convergence of Kerry Howley's preoccupations in a single colorful character. And then parenthetically, they say with as a writerly bonus has a name straight out of Thomas pension, which I think is true, you know, I think everybody who heard that name at first was like, what really? And then there it is. And then dropped it. Yeah. But she's I don't know, she's I think, like I've said earlier, a very sympathetic figure and somebody who I think is emblematic of so much of the way we live now and the way we process information now. And I think it's connected to like all of the people that we've been talking about and all of the phenomena that we've been discussing in our online life and in American public life is connected to this rise in conspiracy theories like online, like government public health. I mean, there's no area of our life that it doesn't feel touched by this now. And I think this is part of what the book is doing to trying to like draw a line from the deep state, big data, whistleblowers to this kind of paranoia that has infiltrated every corner of American life and maybe global life. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but it's certainly the case here, right? Yeah. I think people act like something like QAnon, this is not really in the book, but maybe it is, but QAnon came out of nowhere and QAnon centered on Q, this person who's constantly supposedly releasing information on the internet and Q was essentially a whistleblower at someone placed in the deep state, who's not really, but who's like releasing information of people who are hungry for it. And so like clearly the model for that is Snowden and people have learned that there's this entire shadow state that they don't get to know about that is utterly accountable. This is all true that has grown incredibly since 9/11, just untold, ungodly amounts of money, you know, whole office parks full of buildings that you're not allowed to go in. And people know there's so much that they're not allowed to know and that their source of knowledge is individuals who refuse to go along with whatever the state is telling them to do. And so, you know, I think it's a very natural progression as bonkers as it is. And then it gets, because people don't, there's nothing, no, they're there, it gets filled in with all these kind of like grotesque sexual fantasies. You know, like the tunnels from Washington to Canada, filled with pedophiles. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really gets out of control. But the thing is, is that when people talk about the deep state, that's not an illusion. There really is a deep state. There really is this shadow state. And there really is so much that we don't know. And a question that I sometimes have just as a citizen is like, how much power does the intelligence community in particular really have? And the military industrial complex, how much power does it have over the executive and the legislature? You know, like, can a president really just pull the levers of power? What if a president did so in total contradiction to the interests of the deep state? What would happen? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think the executive is increasingly powerful, but what was interesting to me about the vastness of the deep state is how the deep state doesn't even know itself, right? Like, it's so large that no single mind can possibly understand all of it. There's nobody at the top who like knows what's going on. It's like life or like nature, like it's so large and complex that there are pieces of it that are completely unknown to people at the very, very, very top. And so I think that's kind of interesting. It's like this, it has these tentacles that no one can even see. Yeah. I mean, just to kind of like draw this into focus, like the scale of what we're talking about, I'm going to read another thing that I underlined. I think this was from a Kirkus review where it says, quote, "As Halle reckons, a petabyte of data printed out would fill 24 million filing cabinets. And at one intelligence agency, one petabyte of classified data accumulates every year and a half. So 24 million filing cabinets full every year and a half at one intelligence agency. This amassed data is barely skimmed and only a handful of specialists haven't known enough to determine what's secret and what's not. So like you say, it's just- I mean, it's very much like just taking pictures of everything and then when your phone is full or whatever, upgrading phones. I mean, it's just like what's easy to do. It's easy for the state to just collect massive amounts of information. And so that's what we're doing. Are we sorting through it? Are we safeguarding people's civil liberties? Like less good at that. But definitely doing the collecting part. Well, and that's the thing is that these practices are sort of contingent upon like at least enough of the federal government operating in good faith with the American people. And now I'm going to quote you. This is another line. And this is another line I underlined. You write the radical transparency we have accepted step by step these past years is a bet we have made that we and the people with the guns and cages will stay on good terms. That's chilling. And I think because I think there's a lot of truth in it and it's like, wow, yeah. It's nice to think this is just so unwieldy and huge that nobody within the deep state even knows what they've got. But if somebody wanted to, this could be used against ordinary people, you know, say this could turn dark. Yeah, I mean, it's what we call prosecutorial discretion and, you know, just to make things even more disturbing. I don't know much about this, but people have told me that AI is going to make all this much more searchable, which will make us all more vulnerable because in a way we are, we are the inefficiency is what is one more layer of safety that we have. Yeah, that's that that's true. AI will be able to scan this stuff and like it's like Google, it'll be able to scan it in a minute and just locate whatever file or text thread or whatever. That's wild to think about. Yeah. So how did you get into this racket as a journalist? I'm curious. I'm from Connecticut, but not the Connecticut you imagine, like industrial, gritty, white working class, Connecticut, and I went to Georgetown and as I was just like an English and floss major, I had no direction. And I went on journalismjobs.com and I was a senior and I applied to two jobs. One was in Martha's Vineyard, I didn't get that job. The other job was in the military dictatorship of Myanmar and I got that job. And the response was like, can you be here in six weeks, we'll pay for your shots in your flight? And that was my first job and it was kind of a journalism job. I worked for a censored newspaper in what some people call Burma and that I guess that's how I got into it. Okay. Well, that's quite a baptism by fire. People who don't necessarily know that part of the world, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has been for most of our lives anyways, ruled by a military junta. Yeah. There was a brief window where unsung sushi or whatever was in charge or right. And then the junta, I think recently or not too long ago, came back into power. Do I have that right? Yeah. And when I was there, it was definitely junta forward and unsung sushi was under house arrest. And it was really important to me formatively because, you know, whenever you engage with art about a military dictatorship in this country, something that Hollywood would produce, there's one tone and that tone is ominous. And like the, it's literally dark, right? But my experience was one of absurdity and profundity. So it was like very much an absurd place. The junta, there's so much, but for example, the currency was in multiples of nine. You could only publish the weather of yesterday. You couldn't publish the next day's weather because if the weather wasn't auspicious, that might be offensive to the junta. There was, we were seven and a half hours ahead of, you know, wherever we were accounting from. So, you know, there was just like all of these attempts to be incredibly difficult. And we were, we were constantly being watched and, you know, there would be like a taking on the phone and people would say, oh, they're listening and I don't know if that was true. People said, oh, there's someone assigned to follow you. All of this was like, it was the texture of our life there. And it was kind of funny to everyone around us. Of course, it was very dark, but it, none of it reflected like the art that I might have consumed about living in a place like that. And so then, you know, many years later, when I go to write a film about reality winner, I mean, it's a comedy. It's their, the fact of being a whistleblower doesn't like stop the complexity of being a human, right? And I feel like we often just want to see something through a single dark lens. That's interesting. So, I mean, what a first job. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a great experience, but I'm curious to know, I mean, it sounds like you had, it was like a more benign experience than like popular culture might render it. Right. But it's not without its dangers, especially for somebody who's working as a journalist. At a censored newspaper, they're watching. They don't want certain stories told, you're very green. You're young. This is your first job out of college. Did you have a sense of danger that might exist for you? Were you ever concerned that you might be imprisoned or sent to some labor camp or something for saying the wrong thing in print? I felt the intense concern for the locals around me, but I, I felt so, I felt safer than I felt in Washington, D.C. I felt like there were always eyes on me and as I was so protected as an American, I never felt a hint of danger. And then my job was like, I would write an article and then I had to send it to sensors or I had to fax it to sensors who would then fax it back with like big black X's on it. It was just like, and you never knew what would be censored and what was censored would be interesting. Like, one time I think we wrote something about, it was Halloween and we did like a fluff piece about ghost stories and they were like, ghost stories have been illegal since 1960. Okay. I didn't know that. You'd be learning the rules of the place by what they send back. But no, I never felt unsafe until I tried to fly back with the person who's now my husband and they, I had a visa, but they wouldn't let us into the country. Even though we were already there, they wouldn't let us out of the airport and sent us back to Thailand. So that felt, that felt scary that day because I didn't know what they were going to do with us. But what was their rationale? They didn't give one. I never, I still don't know why. Do you have any guesses? I mean, they kept saying, I couldn't make out the Burmese or as a bunch of people shouting over me and they kept saying, me more times, me more times, which is the newspaper I'd worked for. So maybe it was because of my history there. I'm not really sure, but they don't know you in explanation, they can just send you back to Thailand. How many years did you live there? I lived there for two years. It's a beautiful place. I've dying to go there. Like it's sweet people too. It's a beautiful country and it's fascinating and I miss it very much and hope I can go back some day. I feel like knowing that about you makes future work make a certain sense. Like Bottoms Up makes a lot more sense once you, like when you know that Carrie started her career at the Me and More Times, that this might be of interest to you. And to have that on-the-ground experience in a place that is as like authoritarian as Me and More is, but to see it as a comedy rather than like this very straight line drama. Yeah. I mean, of course it's both. Of course, it's also like a horror story in some ways, but it's just as complicated as any other place and I want to grant it that complexity. So you finish up your two years there and this return to Me and More was many years later, right? It wasn't like. Yes. Yes. So you were going back to visit and you got re-routed to Thailand. Yeah. I hope you got a refund on what your hotel and everything, I know. So what happens after the Me and More Times? Then I went to work for a magazine, a political magazine in D.C. called Reason. And that was also very formative in that, you know, I was just, I met all of these young journalists in Washington who are now very much in the world. And I got frustrated though with, I was very interested in sentences and craft and it didn't feel like that's what anyone else was interested in. It felt like I was kind of on my own there. And so from there, I ended up going to Iowa to the nonfiction writing program to get an MFA. And that really kind of re-routed me because right after that, it became a professor of creative writing. This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. This podcast is supported by FX's English teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of what we do in the shadows and baskets. English teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English teacher is now streaming on Hulu all new Mondays on FX. Okay. So you're into the narrative non-fiction of it all and the sentence making of it all. I'm into the prose, yeah, that's where I'm happiest when I'm kind of rearranging a sentence. And I'm very taken by long sentences and I think that we live in a time when the long sentences seem a suspect, so people are very, they're moralizing about subject predicate, like shrunken white. The idea that this is a truthful way to communicate. And there's something suspicious about a melavilion or nub a coffee in or kind of Jane Austin, Dydian, like these long, elaborate, closeted in sentences and in some way we're losing the capacity to even read. I mean, I feel like there's so much that you can do in that container that you can't do with those kind of very direct, shrunken white sentences that editors largely seem to prefer at this point. Yeah. And so Dydian, who else did you mention, Melville, Nabakov, or Nabakov, are these some heroes of yours? Austin. I mean, there are people whose sentences I admire for sure. Are there writers in the creative nonfiction realm that you sort of look to as north stars or a north star? I really admire the work of Michael Cloon in terms of self characterization in particular. Here at Iowa, I worked with John DeGotta, who I think is a genius. So speaking of self narration, in your first book, Throne, which is categorized as a non fiction novel. Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't know. I mean, you don't know about it. No, they won't. But I mean, I saw this and I was like, well, that's interesting. And there's a line that I'm sure you're familiar with since you wrote it, but since it's also a line that I think has been quoted in relation to your work multiple times where you say all narrators are fiction, all the reliable ones have the decency to admit it. Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think memory is incredibly unstable. And as soon as we start crafting a narrative, we start excluding and there's just no way. There's no way to remain, quote unquote, true. Not when the only way forward is to acknowledge the presence of self characterization. That's the only truly honest way, I think, to approach the work. I agree. I think that, like, I think this is, yeah, we got that settled, but I have this conversation all the time on this show about how I feel like, and it's kind of a related thought. It's not exactly the same, but I often talk about how too many narrators seem cool. Yeah. Mm-hmm. There's the cool narrator, but there's also the annoyingly self-deprecating narrator who's like falsely self-deprecating, but clearly, like, has a lot of ego, but thinks they're selling us something about like ability with their self-deprecation. I mean, once you, I taught, you know, creative not fiction for a long time, and, like, you start to create this cast of expected narrators in your head. And so with, of course, their fiction, I mean, you might think it's you, but you're sliding into someone else's, someone else's creation, basically. Yeah. And it's nice when somebody's kind of deconstructing that, like, how do you do it in practice to make sure that you're acknowledging the things that we're talking about? You just... I mean, I think go further, like, like, make your character a character, right? Like, be... That's this is one way. There are, of course, many ways, but the narrator, if thrown, is ridiculous. She's very naive and academic and lacks, like, basic self-awareness. I mean, I think people read that, and they're like, "That's just like you, Carrie. What are you talking about?" That... You know, I was conscious as I was doing that, that I was making those things bigger. And in terms of the narrator of Bottoms Up, I mean, it doesn't feel as pronounced maybe as thrown would be as an example of this. Like, I could feel you in there, like, you're definitely in there, and you announce yourself sometimes, but it's really a lot about who you're reporting on. It's like storytelling. I think that is really written from a position of, like, baffle men, like, what is happening? Where are we in space? What is this feeling? And then sometimes, yes, we get carried along on narrative, but it's much more... It's a completely different character. Well, something that I think both thrown the novel, the nonfiction novel, and Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs have both been recognized for is how difficult they are to classify. I mean, obviously, a nonfiction novel speaks to that, but then several of the big reviews and responses to Bottoms Up have noted that it's like, "Well, what is this book?" It's not like a straight political book. It's not like a John LeCare-type thing. It's like this amalgam of things. And it makes me wonder about the creation process and how you work, because I think when people think of nonfiction in particular, there might be more of a sense of the author going into the project with an outline and this very fixed or planned sense of what they're going to cover because they have to master their subject matter. And just as a writer, I kind of felt in reading Bottoms Up that... Because there's all these interesting associations and things brought together that you might not expect and can feel like this very live-minded quality in it. And it makes me think that you were feeling your way through it as you wrote it, rather than preconceiving it. Like, is that true? I mean, I'm glad it feels that way. I mean, there's this whole world of experimental essay that people don't know how to classify, like Amy Leach comes to mind, Joe Wenderoff, John DeGotta. And it makes people very uncomfortable, because when many readers approach nonfiction, they're like, "What's a thesis? Where's this going? What are you arguing?" And my experience of writing is like an intense feeling of lostness. What is happening? What is this? Why am I doing this? What is my relationship to the forward document? Because, you know, I'm trying to, especially with this book, I was like, there's this texture of experience in which I feel that things are different, because everything's alienability from me. How do I represent that? I don't think I can do it using these containers that other people have shaped and call like nonfiction. But it's also very scary. And I think what I tell my students is your ability to tolerate that feeling of lostness is your ability to write a book. That's where it is. That's the work. Right? And so just being able to wade through that for long periods of time without fully panicking. Yeah. And emphasis on long periods of time, I think a similar term is uncertainty. Like lostness, uncertainty, to live with that is painful. Yeah. Because especially like when you're like a year and a half in, and you're sitting there going, is this going to be something? Or have I just wasted, you know, a huge chunk of my life? Like that is, I think the part of the work that people don't realize when they go into it. And it can be easy, I think, to run into that maybe early on in a career and to think that either you're doing something wrong or that it's just intolerable. I mean, even when I finished this book, I just thought, no one's going to want to read about this. I wouldn't read a book about the deep state, like I firmly thought no one would read this book, but something, it felt, as we've thrown, it felt that there were spatially, there were two things on top of one another, and I needed to get to the thing underneath. And you know, the thing underneath, in bottoms up, is this vast, sprawling state that has beneath notice. And in throne, it was, well, I don't want to say the world of MMA of mixed martial arts was underneath. Maybe it's that the world of MFA was underneath the world of mixed martial arts, and I just had to find this other world. But it felt like it was that I couldn't understand my physical location unless I described this other thing. And so that's what I was working to do. But I was convinced no one cared. I mean, you know, you can never really know. Maybe if you're writing like, you know, an authorized biography of Beyonce or Taylor Swift or something, you'll know there's going to be a readership. But like, if you're working in this mode, you just have to follow your best instincts, do your best work and kind of send it out into the world and see what happens. Yeah, you have to trust that your curiosity will be shared by other people. And it's just such a lovely book to read. I mean, you mentioned how devoted you are to the actual sentence making. But then I think too, just personal taste here as a reader and a lover of this kind of work is the velocity that I feel when I'm reading a work that is written in this manner where you're sort of figuring it out on the fly, I can feel the writer thinking on the page rather than just like delivering information in an organized fashion, which often happens in nonfiction books. And again, when it's done well, I can enjoy that too, but not in the same way. There's like a real velocity. And I think that's why the books has succeeded and has found a readership and has made its mark is that you don't know where it's going to quite go next. And yeah, and it's just so beautifully done. So kudos to you for that. And I guess like just to get even nerdier with it, I know there are probably people listening who might have an interest in writing books like this and who might be wondering like, well, if you're not going to do kind of this sort of stayed formalized, out liney approach to the book, like how do you how do you begin, you know, you have this question, you have this uncertainty, this feeling of like lostness like you describe and wondering where you are in space and wanting to kind of resolve that. But when it actually comes time to making the book, how does that look? I have a very disorganized writing process. It's not like I get up at the same time every morning and start writing. It's like I'll go on a walk and then something will hit me and then maybe a few paragraphs will come very quickly from from that. And then they'll be stitched to some other paragraphs later. It's kind of like I'm waiting for things to coalesce in my head. And it took me a long time to realize that it's good if things come easily. Like I think I had this idea that like it has to be painful. But when things are painful, I think they come off as like, beautiful and bored. And so it's like, I like the word velocity that you used. If it comes with velocity, it comes with that energy, it kind of spills out of you. I think that's a very good sign. And you know, I think a lot about this when I'm thinking about stories for New York magazine, I think it's great to write something you know nothing about because you can feel the enthusiasm and discovery in the writing. So I'm like writing about a story about paleontology right now. And I was just reading that there was this age of mammals and there were beavers the size of human children in North America. And I'm like beavers the size of human children. It's amazing. But if I were a science writer who did this kind of thing, I would just be like, yeah, beavers the size of human children because of shit. And so I need to like connect to that, the enthusiasm of new things, like a baby, like you're everything's new, right? At the same time, if you're too new to something, then when you start writing, you write in these like, it's like, you're just regurgitating the last thing you read. And not everything has recombined to make something like super cool and new. So it's like you kind of have to find this balance between being deeply immersed in something such that you're synthesizing a bunch of different things, including your own experience, but also still really excited about it. And you feel like you're a great surrogate for the reader, usually. I would say nine times out of 10, the reader doesn't know about child size beavers either. Right, exactly. Yeah, you need to keep that relationship to the reader. And if you're working in this way, like you say, it's a messy process, there's got to be a lot of stuff that you call, right? You're just sort of like working your way through it, putting stuff down or do you, or are you like a plotter? Like I'm kind of this way where you're working really slowly, but by the time you get done, the draft is pretty much there. Yeah, I'm like that. You are. Okay. But it takes a lot to get those two paragraphs. Yeah, you just sit there staring a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not one of those people. And I have students, so I understand there are many people who work well this way, where you're just filling pages of pages and stuff I'll never use, but I don't think it gets from my mind onto the page unless it's actually somewhat polished. And in terms of the relationship between the journalism work, I mean, we talked about how bottoms up is kind of an outgrowth of profiles that you did of whistleblowers. Do you find that, I guess so far, how many books have you done? Just two. Okay. So like the books that you've done so far have both been connected to the work that you've done as a journalist? No, Thron is about two cage fighters in Iowa that I wrote that while I was getting my MFA here and it doesn't have a journalistic connection. Although when I started writing it, I started kind of writing it in my journalistic voice and I had to realize that that didn't work. How did you get into cage fighting? Again, I was here in Iowa City and I knew that there were fights going on in the same place, but that no one in my world knew anything about them. And when I would talk about it to other people in my milieu, they were like physically disgusted with me, which I thought was interesting. And there was something connected to my, I was turning, I was like in my late 20s and I was very conscious of aging and there was something really incredible about watching two men just beat the shit out of one another, like no concern for the kind of physical priming that I myself was undergoing. And so I started going to fights here and got to know some people and became very interested in the interplay of all those issues. It's like a, it's a self-consciously absurd book, but I think it reaches, there's something about the fight that I think is actually connected to something underneath the surface of things. I think that very earnestly that it's like a portal into some other way of consciousness and that's what I was ultimately getting at. Are you an MM, like a fight fan now? Do you watch fights? I was at that time, but after I write about something, it's like completely ejected from my consciousness. So I, I haven't really watched it since 2014. Yeah, I get that. Like in this book, I think before we came on, you're like, look, I wrote this book a long time ago. I get, I hear that over and over again. It's weird that you can spend, yeah, years of your life, but people, like people who don't write might think like, oh, you know your book by heart. And it's like, actually no. And like, oh, you must revisit it and no, I had like, I wrote a book many years ago. I haven't looked at it in more than a decade, you know. Yeah. And then people are like, what's up with this issue now? And I'm like, great question on a Google it. I can't tell you. It's like a snapshot in time, you know. So are you working on, you said you're working on a magazine piece about paleontology? When is that coming out? In a couple of weeks. Oh, it is. Okay. Can you give hints? I'm just going to, I know we have the giant beavers, but like, what is it? What is it about? I'm curious. I probably shouldn't say more about that, but I'm also working on a book and the book is it comes out of the experience of reading science books to my son. He's very interested in quantum physics and he's 10. And so because his brain is so plastic, the unity of space and time makes a lot more sense to him than it does to me. And so it's a book about, it's a book about space and time. Is your son a genius? He's a, he's an unusual child. In a good way, in a good way, we need kids like that. Wow. The unity of space and time. If he could explain that to me, I'd appreciate it. I'm trying. Yeah. Right. So that's what the book is, but sounds kind of spiritual. So, but just like connected to what we're talking about before about just needing something utterly different, you know, after you finish a different world that you can approach with that enthusiasm that is the world right now, because what is more unknowable than time? I mean, it's, it's like the ultimate confusing abstraction. Yeah, or space. I mean, you look out. I don't do it enough, but everything, you know, it sounds kind of hokey, but like you look up at the sky, you're like, what the fuck is going on there? You could spend a lifetime writing about that, but you live in Los Angeles. Yes. So you're from like went to Georgetown, East Coast, Connecticut, Iowa. And now how did you wind up out here? How did I wind up in Los Angeles? Yeah. I was teaching at the University of Iowa as an assistant professor, which I absolutely loved. But then I got this job offer from New York magazine, and that job offer came with the opportunity to just write, to not do anything but write, and that was very appealing. And they, you know, I wasn't tied to the university where I could live wherever I wanted. So we just picked a city that we love, a gorgeous city. You like Los Angeles. I like to hear it. I like to hear it. I like Los Angeles too. Yeah. People usually have complicated feelings about Los Angeles or oftentimes they do, but I think it's a great place. I think the natural beauty is kind of like overwhelming. Like I do. I do love that about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. And you also screen write, which you touched upon earlier, but can you talk about that? Yeah. I adapted the reality winner profile into a coming of age comedy, and that premiered at Sundance, and is coming out wide release in September. It's called winner. It's called winner. Yeah. I love how, because there's, I saw the film with, oh God, who's the star, Sydney Sweeney. That one's called reality. Yes. And then yours is called. We all get to create it with the names. I was going to say, but that's good. We need one for each name, you know, but, but like to differentiate the films, and I got to say, I haven't seen your film, but I have seen reality and quite liked it. I'm like, I'm like, Sydney Sweeney can act. Yeah. She's great. Like, I thought she was excellent in that film. And interestingly, because I think I read in your bio that you had written a screenplay about the reality winner thing. And I thought, wrote the screenplay. I was thinking, I was confusing you. That's just it. I was like, she's a genius. You got paid for that? But yeah. So the Sydney Sweeney movie called reality, the script is literally just born of the recorded interrogation of the, like, what is it, FBI agents who showed up at her house when she was arrested. And the interrogation in which reality winner is incredibly charming and hilarious and vulnerable. So it is a very, very good idea. So it became an off-Broadway play, and now a film. And your film, you keep calling it a comedy, is it different? I don't know if the producers would call it a comedy, but I call it a comedy. It's fictionalized, it's much more of a, like, traditional feature coming of age story. It's coming of age story. And you like screenwriting? I do. I've always really loved structure. I love the puzzle piece nature of it, the logical game. And I love dialogue. So it's kind of a pretty natural transition. And now you live in Los Angeles. And now, I mean, yeah, it's everywhere. So are you going to do more of this? I think so, yeah. Yeah? What are the projects in the works? Not in the works enough to talk about, you know, everything is in development. Okay. It's classified, right? Right. Right. I have to ask the CIA. That's right. That's right. They clearly have all of this. They know. It's in their little, their Utah data center. Yeah. By the way, we didn't talk about that, but these data centers freak me out. I mean, it's interesting how hidden everything is and yet how massive, right? Like that data center is unbelievably huge in the middle of the desert sucking in all of this water. I mean, it's not a very well kept secret. And yet the real secret, the real maintenance of the secret is that we've just decided not to think or talk about it. Yeah. It's like, and it's very corporate seeming these big office parks and like you say in the book, there's hundreds, thousands of people who go to work in these places. Maybe their families don't even know that they work there, you know, depending on the level of classification or whatever it is that you have to be secretive about. And it just, it just happens and nobody, I have no idea what goes on in there. You probably don't have, you might know a little bit more than me, but not that much. It's just a big question mark. It's, I mean, I think it's a lot of like wearing machines that are, that are just storing more and more data for, for something. Are you optimistic about the future? I don't know why to answer that question. I don't think I feel either way about the future. I think I feel kind of like baffled and floaty most of the time. And so I'm not forming judgments about it. I'm just kind of sliding through it. How do you feel about the future? I often say, maybe this is like an easy thing to say, but I'm like, as a parent, I don't have the luxury of like really do me pessimism. Like, how can you be like that and then turn around and be like, hey, kids, like if you have exactly put your shoes, let's go. I mean, I feel like you have to sort of believe that things can be good if you're going to raise children. I mean, one thing I don't believe is, you know, I think that our generation is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with this situation of total surveillance because that's when we were children, it was different, but I think our kids are going to have a totally different relationship with it. So our relationship doesn't reflect what theirs will be. What's, I'm 40. I just turned 49 yesterday. So I'm, I think I'm older than you are, but just a little, okay. So you had an analog childhood? I can remember getting like AOL, right? I can remember like the word of the modem and, you know, I can remember it starting up. Yeah. Yeah. I can remember. I totally can remember. But I do also have a memory of like rotary dial telephones, like, you know, it makes me feel old, but I feel a sense of gratitude for knowing what the world was like before all this. And I think I've had this conversation with others in my age range who feel similarly. Like, oh, it was nice to know what it was like when you actually had to like call somebody up and talk to them and make a plan to meet up and instead of just like texting and then like bailing on dinner, like the way everybody does. You know what I'm saying? Like it was maybe, I don't, I don't long for that world, but I do, it's really important to me that my children like have sensory experiences outside of the digital world. And I do worry about like the kind of flattening that happens when everybody's too online. So I often want to like yank them back into like touch some grass kind of thing. Do you do social media? Are you allowing them? I mean, I'm just asking as a parent because I have too, they're too young for to worry about that. Yeah, but I'm not going to hold them back from social experiences. It's important to me that they connect with other people, how other people are connecting. I'm the grumpy. No, no, there's no wrong answer. I'm just like, I'm the grumpy dad. My daughter's, you know, 14, I still won't let her, like she's not going on TikTok. Oh, yeah. Well, TikTok's going to be banned soon, so it's not going to be banned. Is it going to be banned? You think? I think so. I'm not sure. They have to sell it, right? I know there was like a law passed, which basically like you have to, the Chinese have to sell it. Yeah. And it'll be sold to, what's his name? Steve Mnuchin. That'll solve things. That'll be great. That's awesome. Yeah, perfect. Oh, thank God. We took care of that. Something to look forward to. It is a delight to meet you and to talk with you. Your book is, like I said, like just super smart and so beautifully written and so like consistently surprising on the page in the best possible way and a book that I'm happy to have read because it illuminated these kind of shadowy, like dark spaces that I know are there, but I don't really understand and this helped me to understand them a little bit better. So thank you. Thank you. Your questions are helpful and understanding and this has been a total pleasure. I really enjoyed speaking with you. All right, folks. There we have it. That was my conversation with Carrie Howley. Her book is called Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs. It is available now in trade paperback from vintage. For more on Carrie Howley and her work, visit carryhowlie.com. Follow her on social media, Twitter, and Instagram. Again, the book is called Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs by Carrie Howley out there now in trade paperback from vintage. Get your copy right now. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen. And follow me on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. Sign up for my newsletter over at Substack. Join the other people Patreon community at patreon.com/otherpplpod. Help keep this show going into the future. Give this show a rating wherever you listen, rate it, review it. It helps the podcast find new listeners. If you would like to sign up for my book club or get another people t-shirt, you can do that at the show's official website, otherppl.com. And finally, if you want to read my latest book, it is a novel called Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, available in trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions. I narrate the audiobook, so check it out. If you want to, it's a novel. It's called Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. So I think that does it for today. We're all done here. Our work is now complete. I'll be back on Thursday with a new episode of Brad and Mira for the Culture, the pop culture series that I've been doing with Mira Gonzalez since the late spring. So get ready for that coming up on Thursday. Stay tuned. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] How did American politics and our economy become so corrupt? Hi, I'm David Saroda, an investigative journalist at The Lever, former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, and Oscar-nominated writer on the film Don't Look Up. Join me on my new podcast, Master Plan, where we expose the secret scheme hatched in the 1970s that legalized corruption for the wealthy. With the help of never before reported secret documents and a few special guests, we'll look back at where it all began and figure out how to move forward. Listen and subscribe to Master Plan wherever you get your podcasts. (music)
