Reframing the Inside Joke with R. Eric Thomas

This week we are reframing pop culture as self-care (or reframing the inside joke) with author R. Eric Thomas. In a wonderfully meandering conversation we talked about faith, office cake, gardening, hiking up (and then running down) mountains, looking to Oprah as a way to prepare for big feelings, and using Chekhov for life metaphors. Finally, we landed on using pop culture references as bridges to help us connect with others. We really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

R. Eric Thomas is a television writer, playwright, and author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America. His latest book is Congratulations, The Best Is Over! For four years, Eric was a Senior Staff Writer at Elle.com, where he wrote a column called Eric Reads the News. This past week he gave Reframeables a shout out in his weekly humor newsletter. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a long-running host of The Moth StorySlams.

Links:
Eric's newsletter
Congratulations, The Best Is Over!
Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America
For more from Eric, check out his website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram

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Transcript

Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat. 

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers. 

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something. This week, we are reframing pop culture as self-care (or, you could call it reframing the inside joke) with author R. Eric Thomas. Eric is a television writer, a playwright, and author of the bestselling Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America. His newest book, that we loved, is called Congratulations, The Best is Over! For four years, Eric was also the senior staff writer at Elle.com, where he wrote a column called Eric Reads the News, and this week, he gave Reframeables a shout-out in his own weekly humour newsletter. All the links are in the show notes. So, with Eric in our effort to reframe humour as self-care, we did a deep dive. We talked about faith, and office cake, about gardening, hiking up and then running down mountains, looking to Oprah as a way to prepare for big feelings, and then using Chekhov for life metaphors. Finally, we landed on using pop culture references as bridges to help us connect with others. We really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. So here we go: reframing the inside joke. 

Eric, this is so amazing, having you here. And we’re going to be focusing mostly on your newest book, Congratulations, The Best is Over! But really honestly, many things could kind of emerge, because I actually started my work with you (you didn’t know this, but I did this) — I started working with you with my grade 12 students. I was a teacher for 20 years, and I used for my grade 12 college class your newsletter as an introduction to satirical writing. And that was sort of like: this is a way that you can be funny and have something to say at the same time, and we don’t have to go back into the ages to find this work — this work is all right now. So, like, how long has your newsletter been around? Because I mean, I’ve been one of your people. 

Eric
Oh, gosh — yeah, it’s been, let’s see… probably about five or six years? Yeah, it was before Here for It came out — Here for It came out in 2020. So I think 2018 is when I started the newsletter. And it’s evolved. I love that you’re using it to talk with grade 12 students. Did they relate in any way? Because I feel like I’m like, “Oh, I’m hip and young.” And then I talk to students, and they’re like, “Oh, interesting. Do you have a TikTok?” And I’m like, “I don’t, no. No. I’m a bard of the written word.” 

Natalie
And — ok, so I will acknowledge that for them that it was like the points where I would laugh (like, out loud) as we’re reading it through, they’d be like, “Oh, Ms. Davey, you’re so sweet.” 

Eric
Oh my God, oh my God. 

Natalie
So they would really resonate with your work because I think we had a really positive relationship, and so there was something really nice there. But they definitely made connections to the pop culture references, which is obviously what we’re going to be doing some reframing work with today — as your, you know, take up of pop culture throughout your very serious written work. I mean, like, you use humour to teach and to share and to love — and anyways, so yes, they were with you. 

Eric
Well, that’s good. 

Natalie
But it is interesting. The youth these days — I don’t know, they’re so far ahead of any of us in our 40s. I haven’t worked now with them for a couple years, and I miss teenagers because they kept me on my toes. And my niece, Rebecca’s daughter, is 15, and she’s the closest — like, yesterday, she mentioned to me that some of the students in her class were NPCs. And I know what that term means. 

Eric
Like non-playable characters? 

Natalie
Non-player character, yeah. 

Eric
Yeah, yeah. 

Natalie
But I was like, “But I need you now to explain to me what you mean by that.” Because I was like, “This is going to be layered.” And she just stopped. She’s like… 

Eric
Oh no. She’s like, “No, you are now an NPC, you don’t get to know.” 

Natalie
Exactly. That’s totally what happened, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is now my new way of being.” Ok, anyways… 

Rebecca
Ok, that’s interesting, though, because she said the same thing to me later. So she’s obviously experimenting with calling people that. 

Eric
Oh. 

Rebecca
I don’t know, she decided it was funny to call people NPCs, or…? 

Natalie
Or she’s just testing out who’s resonating with her language. 

Rebecca
Because we had the same conversation, and I said, “Ok, don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, but I’m a bit stupid. I need to just understand.” And then my first comment was, “I hope you’re being nice.” And then she just was like, “Ok, that’s it. I am nice.” Anyway, ok. 

Eric
Oh my gosh. 

Natalie
You’re allowed Bec, you’re mom. Ok, Eric, in your newest book, Congratulations, The Best is Over!, you open your second essay with (and I’m just going to read this line): “I was in my late 20s, living in Philadelphia, and still in the uncomfortable process of becoming.” And I just have to tell you, I felt so seen in that sentence — like, you could have substituted Toronto for Philadelphia, and then put me in there from, like, 26 to 33, and that was my life. I really felt it. I even wrote, like, a whole dissertation chapter for my doctoral work on the word ‘becoming’ — specifically to do with education. So the word is a powerful word. 

Eric
Absolutely. 

Natalie
So just wondering — I mean, like, you say that you understand the world through the lens of pop culture. So like, what does that mean? And as a writer of pop culture, how has that informed your becoming? 

Eric
So a lot of our pop culture narratives are, I think, about a process just before becoming. It is sort of like a coming of age, you know, or going on a great journey and finding the thing that you’ve been looking for. And there are fewer, I think, about this process of becoming that is I think more about unveiling, about maturing. I think a lot of pop culture is built on “caterpillar becomes butterfly,” — you know, like, “Boom, here I am, I She’s All That-ed myself, I took off my glasses, I got to go to prom.” And so much less of it is about, “Well, I spent a couple of years doing a thing that was not quite what I wanted to do. But if I hadn’t spent those years, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.” And I guess it’s just kind of anti-dramatic — well, it’s anti-Aristotelian, you know? There’s no rising action in that. But I think it is so vital. And now I sort of look for it. I look for it in various pop culture forms. You could say that the sitcom is a sort of exercise in becoming, like, traditionally, because you have to put these characters in the stasis for years so that you have a sitcom. And then eventually they’re like, “Oh, actually, I am in love with my best friend, and we should get married, and the season should end,” you know? 

But, like, I just don’t think we have a paradigm. And I think it’s really important — especially, you know, you’re in your early 20s, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m wild, and I’m, like, trying to find a job, and it’s more about a bunch of internships,” and then you get, like, maybe an ok job, but it’s not the best, and people start to filter out and do other things. Some people start to, like, build families or move away or go to law school, or whatever it is. And then you’re sort of stuck in that hazy late 20s period where you’re like, “Did I miss the boat? Did I miss the call?” And I feel like nobody talks about, like, that period being kind of just this soup, you know? And some people are making a soup in an instant pot, and some people are making a soup, like, I don’t know — like, in a cauldron, like a stone soup, like a Strega Nona cauldron on a little fire. And that was me. I was the Strega Nona. And I was like, “Is this thing on? Should we add another log?” I don’t know. 

Natalie
With, like, the pasta you do with your thumb. 

Eric
Exactly — yeah, exactly. “Not al dente yet. Alright, I guess I’ll keep moving.” 

Rebecca
This is just a tangent, but have you heard of this thing in New York where these people get together and make soup together, but you each bring an ingredient? So you’re making a communal soup, but you don’t tell each other what ingredient you’re bringing. I think it’s to make a stew. 

Eric
Oh, wow. I mean, that’s truly, like, the stone soup model. Like, I love that as a scam — like, stone souping. Like, “Well, I got the stone, what do you have?” I really want to do that for all parties, being like, “Well, I brought my personality.” I had not heard about that, but also, I feel like there are so many things that are kind of popping up now that are basically ways of fooling people into being social, because I think we’re losing some of those skills. A couple of friends of mine wrote about this in the newsletter a couple of months ago. They had a soup party. 

Natalie
The soup party, that’s right — yeah yeah yeah. 

Eric
Yes. It was truly one of the best evenings of my entire life. You know, they were like, “Everybody has to bring their own soup.” And it’s a competition, you have to bring your own instant pot or slow cooker, whatever you want to do, and it was mostly gay people. And so all of these gays traveling across Philadelphia. 

Natalie
With soup. Eroc: With squashing instant pots — like crazy. But we all took it so seriously. We were so committed. And also, it was so much soup to eat. I had like 13 soups that night. I went into a coma of joy and socialization. And it was like, instead of just being like, “Hey, do you guys want to hang out?” we had to, like, put a structure on top of it — so I love that. 

Rebecca
Yeah, the structure. Nat — ok, we’re really going to do that. We do these events sometimes with the people sort of adjacent to the podcast, and we were talking about doing the soup. But now I really want to do the soup thing together. Because that — that’s cool. 

Eric
People love soup. 

Rebecca
I really appreciated in your book how candid you are about your moments of dissatisfaction in your life, because I struggle with that deeply. I think I’m in a moment right now of dissatisfaction — and just how you talk about sort of being above your life. I interpreted this, but in your life, you’re sort of observing your life. I just like to talk about that with people because I feel like I don’t know that people are that honest about it. And I felt like you were so honest, especially for someone who writes about pop culture. I could see you trying to avoid that honesty to put on some pretense of whatever we want people — I mean, like with our Instagram culture, where we want to show all the good parts and pretend like… I mean, I’m not of that mindset that I want to hear people talk about their depression on Instagram, either, but… 

Natalie
There’s got to be a balance. 

Rebecca
But I feel like you did it so well. Like Nat’s saying she felt seen, I felt seen in that — just that you were just open. That you’re not saying life is bad, and that you have lots of wonderful things in your life, but you’re saying, “Sometimes I struggle, and I’m…” 

Eric
Yes. Oh my, it’s my favourite thing. It truly is. No, I just feel like there’s such freedom in saying, “This isn’t going the way I thought it was going. This isn’t going the way it maybe looks like it’s going.” For most of my life, I have not necessarily felt like a person who people look at and say, like, “Oh, he’s got it all together.” You know, like, I spent 10 years, like, waiting tables at the Hard Rock Cafe. No one was looking at me being like, “That guy is living the dream,” you know? And so I felt like a failure for much of my life, and it was very sort of small victories. It was like, “Oh, I made 200 dollars in one shift tonight, victory,” you know? Like, and my wants were so big, and they felt so far away, that to be a little bit closer to them now, it almost feels dangerous. It almost feels like, “Well, then why aren’t you giddy with happiness every day?” And it feels really freeing. This is one of the gifts of therapy, I think, to be able to say, “Yeah, but life is still complicated and hard, and I continue to change and grow as a person, and I have a lot of questions.” 

Ok, I did this thing the other day. So months ago, I applied for this very big fellowship locally. It was an invitation-only, so I was thrilled to be invited. And it was a lot of work, and It was very stressful, and I don’t really know what I’m doing applying for stuff like that. Like, cause, you know, they’re like, “Who are you? Toot your own horn. Talk about why your art is important.” I’m like, “Well, I make jokes.” And so I figured out why it was important. You know, I got some great feedback from some colleagues of mine. Submitted the whole thing. It was going to be, like, a lot of money — so like, you know, enough money to, like, help clarify some financial questions that I have about the next couple years. And I didn’t get it. And, you know, months went by, and then I got an email just randomly that I didn’t get it — like, oh, I was crushed. I was crushed. And I felt like such a failure once again. 

And minutes later, the hat that I ordered for the Beyoncé concert showed up in the mail. And it was this bedazzled baseball cap — you know, just had, like, studded sequins all across the front. And it was delightful. I was like, “This is exactly what I was looking for.” And so I put on the hat. I had this, like, strange feeling of, like, joy and anticipation and utter failure. And so I got on Instagram, and I took a picture of myself lying in bed in the hat, and I was like, “I didn’t get this thing, and I’m really sad, but I’m also festive. So I’m going to be festively despondent.” And so many people wrote to me, and they were like, “Thanks for sharing, you know, the places where it’s hard.” People have said, “You know, it seems like you’re somebody who’s always winning.” And I’m like, “No, I just only post the wins on Instagram because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” 

But I think that the value of pop culture, for me, is to give you the full range — to say that there are times when you are listening to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, on repeat, and you’re like, “Cry for help. This is a cry for help. Just letting everybody know.” And there are times where you are putting on your Beyoncé hat and you are like, “I’m living my best life.” And there’s all this stuff in between. But it’s hard. It’s hard to put those things into words. It’s hard to put into words, in framing our lives. You know, it’s hard to show up to a party, and people are like, “How are you?” And you’re like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m very worried about my money situation for the next couple of years. And I’m stressed, you know, about my aging, and I just don’t know about my place in life. Did I make the right choices?” That tends to turn people off a little bit. And I love that. I mean, like, it’s weird — you know, don’t come up to me at a party and say that, because I’m going to be like, “Oh, you’re… mm… err…” But if you can get to that generous place, it opens so much stuff up. And I think that’s why I like talking about pop culture so much, because you can’t necessarily say, “I feel unrealized as a person. I don’t know what happened.” But you can say, “You know, that scene where Emma Thompson is listening to Blue by Joni Mitchell in Love Actually? Do you identify with that at all? Because I do.” And then go from there. 

Natalie
So it’s like a bridge. Oh, my gosh. 

Eric
It is a bridge. Yeah. 

Natalie
It’s like the Bifröst. 

Eric
Like the Bifröst — look at you. 

Natalie
Like, that’s what it feels like. 

Eric
It truly is. It truly is. And we’re all just trying to get to Valhalla, or wherever — is that where they live? 

Natalie
Yeah. Over there. 

Eric
Yeah yeah. 

Rebecca
Ok, that strikes really interesting for me, because I actually am the person at the party that would definitely start there. 

Eric
Amazing. Amazing. 

Rebecca
And then I, like, think, “Where is everybody? Why am I lonely again? Where did my friends go?” So I am really hearing the idea of: maybe I need more bridges. 

Eric
Well, I think — you know, it’s weird, because I think about that a lot. Because I want to be that person at the party where people are like, “How are things going?” you know? Every party I go to now, people are like, “How’s the book tour?” Which is, like, a nice question to ask, but also, I can’t be like, “Well, it was actually really exhausting, and I feel very unsure about my place and literary pantheon.” Like, no, I can’t do that. They want to hear, like, “Oh, Nashville was great,” you know? But then, you know, in books, you know, I do write sort of just, “This is where it is. This is where I was.” I do think it’s a balance, but I also think it’s like you can build that language with people around pop culture, but I think it does make it easier later on to just sort of show up and skip the bridge — I think. 

I don’t know. It is such a fascinating thing. I just wonder why we are so resistant to truth and authenticity. I think it’s scary for a lot of people. I think there is this feeling of oversharing. But I also hate small talk so much. One of the reasons I love doing podcasts is because it’s an escape from small talk. You’re not going to build an audience being like, “Wow, you you do anything fun this weekend?” you know? You build it by being like, “Here’s the real deal. Here’s the marrow.” I don’t know — I don’t know what the aversion to that is. 

Natalie
People compliment us often on our leaning into vulnerability, and so we’ve just kind of taken it. And I don’t know if it’s like a real compliment, or just sort of like a statement in awe of what they don’t choose to do for themselves, but we’re like, “Well, that’s what we do,” and if people are listening, then that says something about people’s desire, right, to maybe move towards authenticity at whatever level they can do. That’s my hope for humanity. 

Eric
Yeah. 

Rebecca
But it does seem like it’s true that we seem to do it more in private, right? Like, we’re doing it through podcasts, as you say, which is this really intimate, private thing. But out in the world, we do seem pretty afraid of it. 

Eric
There is sort of the desire, the need to feel like you are not messy as a person, and vulnerability can seem messy. It’s one thing to be Brené Brown and walk into a room and be like, “Everyone, I’m having a vulnerability hangover.” Which I don’t know if she does or not — I would love it if that’s who she was. She was like, “Ouch. Hello, it’s me Brené.” 

Natalie
Courage! 

Eric
Oh my gosh. But I do think that it’s harder to read the room around vulnerability. I don’t know. I think it’s: you never want to be in a room where you’re like, “Oh, this situation has gotten out of hand,” you know? 

Natalie
That’s church — but we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that in a second. 

Eric
Yes. 

Natalie
I want to start with Chekhov because our family, my mom, Rebecca, and I, we all went to a Chekhov play for mom’s Christmas gift, maybe two years ago. It was Uncle Vanya. And at one point, you know, like in all the sadness, we all sort of looked at each other and went, “Mm-hmm. This is it.” 

Rebecca
“We love this.” We were like, “Oh, I love this.” 

Natalie
And it was this funny moment where, like, the three of us are like, “Oh, we are related — like, we really are being met here in this space, not just by each other, but also by these characters.” And you obviously feel some sort of kinship to, I mean, when you’re talking about your proposal, and you’re talking about the three sisters, which we’re going to ask you to sort of like share about in a little bit — but just there is something about Chekhov for you too. So maybe you could sort of share with our listeners about your proposal, because it was so beautiful — and what our reference is here about the Chekhovian and sisters. 

Eric
Oh my gosh. So my husband and I are very sort of different. I’m an indoor cat, he’s an outdoor cat. He’s an Eagle Scout. He grew up, you know, sort of adjacent to woods. And for school, he went to have, like, an agriculture… I don’t know what the shortened version of that, but an ag school attached to it. You know, his classmates would, like, leaving in the middle of the day and go pull up turnips or something, I don’t know. And that’s just not who I am. I grew up in the city. I grew up around sirens and marble front steps and brick, and we had a little patch of grass in the backyard that was maybe two feet by four feet. We never had a mower, you know? You didn’t need a mower. 

But when we got together, we found a lot of commonality. And one of the big things that we found in common was that we both sort of were very serious about moving to the next phase of life — getting married. And so we started talking about it. And we had these different visions for getting engaged. I always wanted to get engaged at a sushi restaurant where they have, like, a little conveyor belt of sushi — you need to take a little plate off, and they charge you for it. But I would go in and put a ring on one of the little plates, and it would come around and have, like, a name on it, maybe a sparkler, and you would be like, “You’ve got to take that sushi,” and you would take the sushi and then it’s like, “Ahh!” That seemed, like, really, really great, and something that would take about two hours, tops — which is great. My husband David wanted to go back to his hometown of Oregon across the country and climb up this stratovolcano called Black Butte and then get engaged at the top of that. And I was like, “Ok, well who’s going to make the sushi,” you know? So we acquiesce to his plan because it did seem more I guess, romantic. 

Natalie
Instagram-worthy. 

Eric
Instagram-worthy, truly — which is, you know, gotta show the wins. Gotta show the people. 

Natalie
Yup. 

Eric
So we go up to Oregon, we fly into Portland, and we drive out to Bend, Oregon — about maybe two or three hours west of Portland. And we drive into a town called Three Sisters, named after this trio of mountains. And I was like, “Oh, I’ve heard of the three sisters. I know three sisters. I love Chekhov so much.” Because Chekhov’s plays, there would frequently be stage direction, you know, “Laughing through tears,” or, “Crying while laughing,” you know? And Three Sisters especially, you know, it’s about these three sisters who just want to go to Moscow. They don’t live in Moscow. They are so good at expressing dissatisfaction — oh God, I love it. They’re also kind of jerks. And at one point, their brother’s wife who they’re very mean to, she doesn’t have as expansive a set of wants as they do. And that, to them (and I really identify with this) indicates that she doesn’t live as fully as they do. And so they look down on her, and I get that as a pop culture snob. And so she gives them a silver samovar as a gift. 

And, you know, when I read this in high school, I was like, “What’s the deal?” And my teacher was like, “Oh, no, this is just a very sort of déclassé gift, and the sisters, like, read her for filth.” They’re like, “Oh, a silver samovar? Mm.” So I was obsessed with these, like, discontented beautiful, wanting, longing sisters who are just sort of curdling with their desire to be someplace else. I feel that. I felt that so much. And I felt, as I drove toward these mountains, that I was both moving toward Moscow, but also very much away from Moscow, because I don’t want to hike up a mountain. And so I say to him, I tell him all this — you know, literally word for word. I’m like, “Then the silver samovar.” And I was like, “So it’s named after the three sisters, you know — Irina, Masha, and, mm… Olga.” And he’s like, “No, they’re called Faith, Hope, and Charity.” And I was like, “Who? Never heard of such a thing.” So it was terrible. 

Anyway, we hike up the mountain, and it takes two hours to the top — which is about, mm… an hour and 15 minutes longer than any hike should take. And we get to the top, and I was just, like, overwhelmed. I was complaining the whole time, and then we get there, and I was just overwhelmed by the beauty — both the beauty of the moment, and also the beauty that was all around us. And the sun was just hitting the horizon, I could see it, you know, touching down on Faith, Hope, and Charity — whoever they are. And he read some words to me that he had written, and I guess I was also supposed to write words, too — I didn’t realize. And I was just overwhelmed by the idea that this person loved me, and travelled the country to find me, even though he didn’t know I was out there. And then traveled the country back with me to wherever we were going — to Moscow, to Portland, to wherever we were going. And I started to bawl — and then I started to laugh, like a Chekhov character. 

Natalie
Oh, that’s so fun. You did have a line, though, that really struck Becca. Do you remember that one, Bec, in that proposal piece? 

Rebecca
Oh — “Wanting something more doesn’t make it come closer.” 

Eric
Yeah — and that’s the thing. 

Rebecca
Because I want — I’m so full of want. So I was like, “Oh, yeah, again — Eric.” 

Eric
Well, that’s the thing. We are told, “Oh, we just didn’t want it enough.” Oh, what a phrase, what a terrible phrase. And I spent all of my late 20s, and by this time, I was 35 — so all my 20s and my early 30s just wanting. Wanting love, wanting security, wanting to feel a more expansive experience of the world. And that didn’t bring the world closer to me at all. And that’s so frustrating. And that’s something that I still have to remind myself. I want so much, still, even though I am both the three sisters and then I’m also, you know, a character in Cherry Orchard who’s, like, gotten the cherry orchard. He’s gotten everything he wants — which, you know, spoiler alert: doesn’t end well for them. Oops. 

Natalie
Nope. 

Eric
But I think want is so crucial, because if you stop wanting anything, what are you doing? You start to stagnate, I think. I don’t think contentment is bad, but I think there’s so much room for desire and for questioning yourself. But I also feel like just because you want it doesn’t mean that it’s moving any closer to you. And that is so frustrating, because then, like, what do you do? You know. 

Rebecca
Even though it seems like — would you guys consider The Secret part of pop culture? 

Natalie
Yes. 

Eric
I think so, yeah. 

Rebecca
And The Secret, basically — is it in my mind because you talk about it in the book? I think you do. 

Eric
I do mention it a couple of times, yeah. 

Rebecca
Ok, that it’s like that if we just want it, it’s coming? 

Eric
It’s UPS — yeah. 

Rebecca
It’s on its way because you want it. 

Natalie
But the tracking is not working. 

Eric
The tracking is not working. 

Natalie
You can’t click on it. 

Eric
You know, look, I get it. I don’t know very much about pop psychology, I can’t say for sure — I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But, like, there is this idea that you can put an intention into the universe and it creates an energy that is attractive about you. Ok, sure. But then that puts the onus on you, you know? And I grew up, you know, adjacent to prosperity gospel and evangelical Christianity, which is kind of a similar thing. Where it’s like, “Well, if you’re not rich, it’s because you don’t love God enough.” And I grew up in a very poor church. And you know, they weren’t necessarily teaching prosperity gospel, but you know, I grew up in a poor black church and a lot of the white big churches that we would sort of visit or that we would listen to in the radio, they were preaching that — and it’s like, “Oh, that’s the only difference between us and Joel Osteen,” you know? It’s like, well, there’s a whole, like, history of race in the United States, and capitalism in general. 

I don’t know, I think that in a capitalist society — not to, like, put on my Karl Marx hat, but, like, I just think that, like, creating an energy around yourself is not enough. That’s just not how it works. But I do think that that is something — people talk about success breeding success. And so I think if you create an energy around yourself, you then have to figure out how to sell that energy. Whether you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got this great new product, and I’m going to go on Shark Tank, and I look like I’m successful,” you know? Or, “I’m part of a multilevel marketing scheme, and I’m trying to get all my friends to buy yoga pants. But I drive a Cadillac, so the energy around me must be incredible.” Or, “I’m trying to find love, and so I put on the best version of myself on Hinge.” And that looks like — that’s what attraction looks like. I think it’s a two-part process. But it ultimately becomes about selling the product, not just putting that energy into yourself. And that’s where it gets a little weird for me. 

Rebecca
And now, some housekeeping. Hey Reframeables: do you get something from these conversations? Would you consider becoming a supporter on Patreon? For as little as $2 a month, you could help to keep this show going. It’s meaningful financially, and relationally — it feels like a hug. For our Patreon supporters, we do mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. You could also tip us on our Ko-fi account, where Natalie’s recipe book is also for sale. Oh, and tell us what you want to hear more of — listener messages make our week. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Nat and Bec. 

So you’re married to a pastor. And I misread one of the lines in your book — I was like, “No, Nat, he’s not married anymore.” And Nat was like, “No, you misread.” So I was almost sad. I was like, “I don’t think he’s married to him anymore.” And then… 

Eric
No, no — we’re still married, yeah. 

Rebecca
And Nat clarified, and I was like, “Oh, good.” 

Natalie
We went back to the line. 

Rebecca
I feel invested in both of them now. Ok, and your grandfather was a pastor? 

Eric
Yeah — my father’s father, yeah. 

Rebecca
You have a lot of church people in your life. Our dad is a minister, so we’ve grown up very much in church communities. I always want to talk to people about, like, what do you do with your connection to all of this God — but yet picking up from your book, you’re not necessarily at home in any church now, would you say? Is that true? 

Eric
That is true. 

Rebecca
And then you talk about feeling a moment of truth — that you’ve accessed some truth when you went to see a show. Where do you find truth now? I love it when people talk about — this is my next favorite topic, next to depression. 

Natalie
That’s true. It really is for her. 

Eric
I love this. You know, I had this moment sitting in church as a kid — my parents went to church very regularly, you know, they still do, they go to a sort of different little less conservative church that is non-denominational, but I grew up Baptist. And I had this moment of realization where I looked at my parents down the pew, and we were singing a song or something, and I was like, “Oh, we all sort of believe in the same thing, the same God, but the God that exists in each of their heads is different.” I was like, “Oh, my parents are like, really, as a united unit, they, like — they are simpatico. And they’ll never know what the version of God or truth or holiness or spiritual connection is for the other person. You can put it into words, but you never really know what it is.” And that was very freeing for me, because I kept thinking I was getting it wrong. And I think a lot of that was, like, sort of realizing but not realizing I was gay and feeling, like, not quite aligned. 

So now I’ve spent years kind of looking for the church where I would feel aligned, and it never really hit. And I thought, “Oh, well, you know, I didn’t marry a pastor to get there.” It seemed like maybe it’d be a nice byproduct very early on, and then it quickly became clear that being married to a pastor is being sort of clued into the nuts and bolts of the whole thing — which is fine, which is great, but I’m a kind of magic-seeking person. I don’t want to necessarily hear all the politics. I mean, I do — I absolutely do want to hear all the politics. I want to hear every bit of drama. But I don’t necessarily want to be thinking about the church as a nonprofit, and as a business, and as a community. I want to be thinking about it as this space of transformation. 

But when I think about spaces of transformation, when I think about moments of transformation, I do think about going to church as a child and listen to the gospel choir and feeling lifted out of myself and seeing people that I knew turn into different versions of themselves, so overwhelmed with feeling and emotion and passion. And and seeing that elsewhere in the world, seeing that at other concerts, seeing that in the theatre, seeing that in really rousing speeches, and knowing that — you know, obviously there was dogma that I think is important to some religious traditions, but there is also this connection to something that is bigger than the humdrum of everyday life, that is bigger than ourselves, that can teach us who we are. That is just truth, and passion. 

And I think similar to the sort of showing up at a party and telling the truth about where you are in life, there is something so powerful about opening yourself up to an experience that is going to take you outside of your body, and letting whatever comes of that come of that, and asking yourself, “Why don’t I feel like this all the time?” you know? I don’t think you can vibrate on the sort of Beyoncé concert level of intensity all the time. Maybe, I don’t know — you know, I don’t think even Beyoncé does that. But what if you felt it more, you know? I’m not a drugs person. I think a lot of people find that in drugs, you know — like, I don’t know. I think there are some downsides to drugs. But I think that there is a seeking that can lead us to the truth, and I think a lot of religion tells us, “Don’t seek. Listen to this one person. And if you’re not feeling it, you’re doing it wrong.” And I just — I don’t know, I don’t know that I can live like that. 

Natalie
It’s interesting — so years ago, when I was young, I married what was essentially the youth pastor. Like, he and I became the youth pastors. I mean, like, we really did sort of present as kind of like the perfect Christian optic there from the front. And it didn’t work out, and it was a really interesting thing to navigate. So we split — he left, I stayed because it’s my dad. My dad’s the pastor, I’m sort of the lead singer. I feel like I would want to support my parents. But I think, when I really dig into why I stayed (because Becca’s asked me that at different points), because not everybody was nice to me at that time in that space — a church is a complicated space full of complicated people, and some folks were really lovely and some weren’t. And why did I stay, and why did I keep singing? Like, it’s why I would bear all of it from the front every Sunday for so many years? And I wonder if it’s that kind of constant return to that search for that feeling that you just described. And it’s, like, never about necessarily the people or the space. It’s like a combination of all those things, but there’s also just something about, like, the really tall ceilings, you know what I mean? Like, the drawing up or out. 

Like, the other day, my son and I walked, and my husband’s an atheist, so I mean, he doesn’t come. And he, at dinner, he’ll sit there and go, “Ok, so what sound issues did you all have today?” Because, like, that’s what he’s used to — is, like, hearing when we all come back for, like, a family dinner, what were sort of, like, the nuts and bolts things. But yet when Frankie and I walked in last Sunday, we hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks during the summer and he came back and he looks at me and he goes, “Smells like God.” And I was just like, “I don’t know what that means,” but I’m so happy that my nine-year-old could, like, you know, find something that’s sort of almost, like it’s in the body, but beyond the body. 

Eric
Right. 

Natalie
I don’t know, there’s something there. And maybe at nine that’s, like, a good place for that to have started. 

Eric
Yeah. 

Rebecca
He’s, like, tapping into something transcendent. 

Eric
I mean, gosh, to build that emotional vocabulary in, like, a nine-year-old, especially a nine-year-old boy — like, it’s rare. And I do think that so many people are not socialized or taught to name the thing that feels bigger than them or confusing, or feels beautiful or hard or complicated, or the place where you put all your anger. And so, like, that is the church, that is the church-building, and that is maybe, like you say, why the ceilings are so high — so you can put all of that in there. I remember when David and I, we were engaged and I wasn’t really allowed to go to his church when we were dating because it didn’t feel right to introduce, like, somebody to his congregants who maybe wasn’t going to stick around. And it wasn’t about me, it was just like, you know, that’s kind of the rule. So, you know, I found this very open and accepting church, and then I wasn’t allowed to go to it. And I was like, “That’s a metaphor.” 

Natalie
For a lot. 

Eric
Right, that’ll preach. And so then I was able to go and I met the people and I was part of the community, but I wasn’t really because I was the new member and I knew the pastor, you know. Once we got engaged, we had decided we were going to get married at that church. And I would sit there on Sundays, and we knew we were going to get married before five o’clock in the afternoon. And I would just, like, take note of when the light was most beautiful in this huge stained glass window. And part of it was, like, just me being a logistics person. I was like, “Well, ok. So let’s see, it’s this time of year, at 4:30. This is perfect. Oh, no — ahh, we lost it. Ok. Not this week, next week.” 

So it was really me just thinking about the position of the Earth in the universe in relationship to the sun — which, that’s church too, I think. And part of it was me sort of seeking something that connected me to the root of love through the sun and the glass and the work of these people who have been dead for a long time, and my own marriage in the future. I don’t know. I just think we’re all just trying to feel something, and I think we’re in a world that’s telling us, “Don’t feel. Don’t express it. Feelings are embarrassing.” And church, whatever church form church takes, tells you, “Oh no, you have to feel. The feeling is the difference between being alive and dead.” And so you have to feel for as long as you can, as much as you can. I hope that extends past noon on a Sunday — I hope so, oh my gosh. 

Natalie
That’s so interesting that you’re talking about feelings. That really does segue so beautifully into our next question, because that one section in the book, there were different parts where I was crying laughing — like, the Vanya character, like, I fully was. But the one that really got both of us was your hype man getting everybody ready for The Wendy Williams Show. Your description of that — it was just brilliant. And I mean, honestly, I can’t wait for people to go buy the book and just experience that chapter with you. And yet, it’s followed by a really quite tender description of your own sort of love for and, at the same time… I don’t know, would you call it problematizing? But, like, definitely unpacking of the Oprah’s best things episodes, and what that is calling up in us around, like, a desire, certainly your desire, to lean into big feelings. 

Eric
You know, if anyone’s ever watched the Oprah’s Favorite Things shows, you know, back from the late 90s, early 2000s, you’d see people feeling so much, because she reveals you’re on the Oprah’s Favorite Things show and you’re going to win all these things. And I think also just being at Oprah in general makes you feel like, “Oh, I’m in the palace of big feelings. I’m going to cry and I’m going to laugh and I’m going to get a new car.” But the biggest feeling was that show. And I always watch it and I think, “Oh, this is the root. This is people who are tapped into the root of humanity. They have felt every feeling shoot up through all of their veins and all throughout their body.” But I didn’t realize until I went to The Wendy Williams Show that when you make daytime television, you have to go in like an hour and a half early, and then there is a hype person who is there to get you to that level. And that’s sort of like it’s a Wizard of Oz moment where you’re like, “Oh, there’s somebody behind this curtain.” 

And I went to Wendy Williams because I was writing an article for Elle magazine. I was profiling her, and I wasn’t really a Wendy Williams acolyte, you know, but I respected what she did, I guess. And so I show up and I’m seated first. I was the journalist, so I didn’t have to wait in line outside. And I’m in a blazer because I’m a journalist. And people just show up. It’s a very diverse audience. It’s like, you know, 60-year-old moms and their adult daughters and like gay men off work — I don’t know. And, you know, black women in tiaras and going out dresses. Everyone’s just, like, dressed for the club, and they’re blasting music, and this guy, Marco G, comes bounding out toward us like he’s a one-man invading army. And he’s like, immediately, like, screaming at us. He’s like, “I need you on your feet. I want to hear you scream.” And I’m like, “Excuse me?” And he is running through the paces. It’s like a Barry’s Bootcamp for how to respond to Wendy. He’s like, “Clap. I want you to scream. I want you to twerk. I want you to turn to your neighbour and give him a high five. I want you to turn to your other neighbour and say, ‘How you doing?’” It was deranged. I’m, like, truly sweating. Like, I sweat a fair amount — like, I’m like Whitney Houston in that way. You know, in many ways I’m like Whitney Houston. 

Natalie
It’s a shine. 

Eric
It’s a shine that then transfers. It’s, like, 9:30 in the morning. I’m truly, like, I’m soaked. He’s like, “Who needs a drink?” And everyone’s like, “Woo!” And I’m like, “We do not need a drink.” It was so intense that I started to feel it. I was like, “I am excited to be here. I do need a drink.” There was a woman next to me, she looked like she was maybe, like, 65, 70, had her arm in a sling, working it out. She was twerking for the gods and I was like, “Ok, well, I guess I got to beat her.” And then like after Marco comes out, there’s another woman, Suzanne, she’s the producer and she’s like, “Look at me when to respond. Don’t look at the camera, look at me.” And she’s like, “When I want you to laugh, I’m going to laugh.” She went, “Ha ha ha ha.” And we were like, “Ha ha ha ha ha.” It’s moved from, like, Barry’s Bootcamp to, you know, a kidnapping, like a little bit. Like, we do have things that we have to do in order to be released from this show. And those things are to laugh, to gasp, to cry. When Suzanne’s like, “You need to weep,” we have to Meryl Streep it. We’ve got to give it to her. And so an hour of this, and then Wendy comes out. 

Natalie
This is making my face hurt. 

Eric
Me too, that’s the thing. My hands hurt so much from clapping. My face hurt. I was sweaty. I was, like, exhausted. And then Wendy Williams comes out and she’s like, “Hello, let’s start the show.” And we’re like, “Ahh, release us.” 

Natalie
Oh my gosh. Ok, the whole thing. But just to say though, like in terms of that whole experience, when you connect it in your writing, the hilarity of the first section, like the Wendy Williams description, and then to, like, the power of the unpacking, I guess, of those big feelings that were showing up in the Oprah studio. Was there sort of, like, a summary takeaway that you would hope, not for the reader necessarily, but for yourself in the spelling out of that essay? Because I do feel like when I write essays, I’m often, like, looking for something for myself as I exit. 

Eric
Yeah, I think that for me, it’s important to honour the ephemeral and the powerful. And that’s sort of what I locate in the Oprah experience where it’s so much bigger than you and so much bigger than the moment or the gifts that she’s giving to these people in the audience. But also to know that community or connectivity or authenticity, it takes intention. Somebody has to make that space. And so yeah, Oprah was making that space and I’m sure there was a hype person who was like, “Guess what? What if you got some free stuff? Are you going to scream a little bit? Are you going to cry?” Like, I don’t know. I don’t know how they prepare them, but somebody has to prepare. 

And so for me, it is about always trying to cultivate a space of preparation in my life to be ready for the big feeling. Because I think a lot of life says, “Put on an armour. Don’t go around the world feeling open to experience. Don’t show up as your true self.” And I think that if I am showing up prepared, whatever that is, whether it’s hyping myself up with music or conversation or, you know, thinking, journaling about things that really stuck out to me, then I show up ready to feel bigger and to share that with other people. You can, I guess, just roll into any environment and be like, “What’s going on here? Give me the full transformation.” But I think that it helps to be ready. 

Natalie
Oh, I really like that. I mean, it’s really just making space for the new things that are coming. But there’s something in that — like, preparing for big feelings. Well, I guess it goes back to how cool it is that Frankie has a little bit of, like, some emotional vocabulary to describe a feeling about God, because maybe we’re starting something right. 

Rebecca
Do you guys just need to quickly talk about free cake? 

Eric
Always. 

Natalie
Ok, this is the only point where you and I are maybe, in this book specifically… I mean, as much as I’d like to pretend that we’re besties, the free cake thing that you were really going hard on in the book (like, you’re like, “I’m here for it…”), I honestly… 

Rebecca
Office — we should say office, like free cake in offices. Office culture. 

Natalie
Free cake in offices, right? Office culture. I would, like, avoid the office space where the cake would show up in my English office. And I was the department head and I was like, “I fucking don’t want this cake.” And I would, because I felt pressure. 

Eric
No. 

Natalie
Like, it felt like there was a pressure to feel excitement for this box cake that was, like, so not my jam. 

Eric
Oh yeah. Yeah, see here’s the thing: I am unfortunately indiscriminate when it comes to cake. I’ve eaten so many bad cakes in my life, and I know they’re going to be bad. Every time I go to a coffee shop, I buy a blueberry muffin if it’s on sale, and they almost are always on sale. (Or for sale — they’re never on sale, ugh.) And I know that they’re always going to be bad. There’s very few blueberry muffins that I’m like, “Oh, mm, my compliments to the chef — Chef Panera.” But I buy it anyway. I think that’s some sort of food thing I need to unpack. But it’s also just sort of like, maybe it’s a Proustian, what is it, madeleine where I’m like, “Well, this reminds me of better cakes.” 

Natalie
Oh, that was really good. And that’s why I’m avoiding it over there going, “I’ve never had a cake. There’s never the right cake.” 

Eric
Oh, no, it is true. Like, I think right before you bite into that office cake, I always remember, “Oh, there was that one time the cake was, oh-so-good and the icing was exactly the way I like it. And then the cake was, like, light and fluffy and, like, just a little bit stale, so it had, like, a little bit more attention to it. It was like the third slice of wedding cake where you’re like, ‘I don’t even know if this is good anymore, but I’m having a great time.’” And then you bite into it and you’re like, “Oh, this is not that one, but it’s free.” And to me, it is like communion. I used to love going to communion because we’d do grape juice, and I love grape juice. And, you know, we would do crackers, it wasn’t great. But then David’s church does challah bread. So you take off a piece, tear off a piece as big as God’s grace and then tear off a little bit more because there’s always more grace available — that’s what he says. Beautiful — ah, bravo, theatre. So you take over a huge chunk of challah bread and he dunk it in this grape juice. Delicious. My compliments to the chef, God. And I’m like, “I get to eat challah bread and grape juice. Whoa, how delicious.” I don’t even know where I was going with that. 

Natalie
It doesn’t matter, it’s delicious-sounding. 

Eric
And it’s like — yeah right, and that’s what office cake feels like to me, where you’re like, “Take a piece. It’s yours. It’s for you.” And maybe it’s a cracker instead of a challah bread. But every once in a while, it’s so good. And I haven’t worked in an office six, seven years now. I’ve had to buy all of my own cake. And that is truly, I think, the pit of the core of my depression, I think — is that, like, no one has given me a mediocre slice of cake for no reason. Oh God, oh gosh, I’ve received so little grace. 

Natalie
Ok, you know what? I’m going to have to talk to my girlfriend about this because she always loved the cake, so she’d head straight into the office when I was heading out. And I know she didn’t actually love the cake — like, I mean, nobody loves the cake, but she must have loved the experience. And you know what? I was very down at that time. 

Eric
Oh no. 

Natalie
So maybe, maybe I was avoiding the cake because I was avoiding the grace. So now I have to do some thinking on this. Oh my gosh, ok. 

Rebecca
It was your rigid period, Nat. 

Natalie
It was my rigid time. Now I’m all, like, loose and feeling and ready to go. You left Elle.com at a certain point. You had had this wonderful column — I think I found you on Twitter, like I think it was one of those, right? Like, where the paths sort of take you. So I hadn’t been like an Elle reader per se, but then I became one because of, like, my enjoyment of your tweets, and then… now what do we call it? 

Eric
I still call it tweets, I’m sorry. 

Natalie
Yeah, I’m sticking with it. 

Eric
Yeah, I don’t respect Elon Musk. 

Natalie
No. Like, I’m not doing that. Like, you can’t take my word away from me. Anyways, when you were contemplating leaving Elle, you wrote in this book: “If I’m not heading towards a place where I can feel joy, then hope in the present has nothing to hold onto.” And I thought that was a really powerful line. My own recent book, it’s an education thing, but the title is Finding Joy, and the reference in that piece is multifaceted, because our cousin who has left us, her name was Joy — there are layers to that piece. But you also then go on and describe joy as, like, this too-small word. And I love that, because I just think it’s like, again, layering of this piece. So do you have a word now that, like, better encapsulates those big feelings in your space today? 

Eric
I think that is, like, kind of the core of my writing struggle — is that I have yet to find the right word, you know? It’s like the merger was too great and so the antitrust commission broke it up into sub-corporations, and so one of the corporations is contentment, and that’s a thing I work on a lot with my therapist (and defining contentment is different from happiness). But contentment is fine, but it’s boring. And then there’s exuberance. There’s excitement. There’s transformation. So exuberance I think feels temporary and ephemeral and transformation, transformation is I think the thing I seek, you know? Joy as a chemical reaction. Joy as a phase change. Joy as changing me from liquid to vapour — that’s what I want. That’s what I’m seeking. That is what I find sometimes. And that’s what I reach for a lot of the time. There were moments in writing that column where I felt such electricity. I felt so aligned with a part of my purpose, and so connected to so many people. 

And so just writing on the exuberance of humour, this madcap humour — and then it became harder and harder and harder to find, particularly in the years of the pandemic, because the column was about pop culture and politics. And there was very little pop culture, and politics was very bad. Early in my tenure, one of the things that people really loved for me to write about was how hot Justin Trudeau is. And then people would also write to me and say, like, “Can you look at his policies for a second?” And I’m like, “Oh, I have to do my due diligence here,” you know? It is funny to just write about the thirsting after a world leader, I guess, but then you have to ask yourself, “Well, what does that normalize?” It was important to me that my seeking of joy didn’t create the opposite of joy in other people. And it’s not about being politically correct — it’s about being a citizen in a humour ecosystem. 

So leaving Elle — and it’s so funny. It’s been enough time — it’s been almost three years now, and I almost feel like I’m, like, sort of closing a chapter. I’ve been talking a lot in interviews about, like, “What if I went back? What if I wrote the column again, or my newsletter or something?” You know, it’s like that was a thing in a different world, and so I don’t know. I’m chasing a high. It definitely felt like it was a high, and I definitely had the lows of a high. I had to spend all day long on Twitter, and that is not something I will do to myself anymore. So then where do you find it? You know, where do you find that phase change? I don’t know, you know. 

Rebecca
And you also have a garden now, right? In the second half of the book — is that a spoiler? 

Eric
No, no, it’s not a spoiler. 

Rebecca
So you moved to the suburbs. 

Eric
Yeah — well, the thing is, I was unsure quite where the book should end. And I wanted it to end on an ellipsis because that felt true to the journey of the book. But after the book was finished, we actually moved away from that house, for various reasons. 

Rebecca
Was it your neighbours? 

Eric
No, no — it wasn’t the neighbours, who definitely seemed like they were part of a paramilitary organization and would have, like, bonfires every night. Oh, I didn’t even write about those people. Yeah, there was another house down the road. You know, there’s, like, a huge Trump house across the street. There’s another one that had, like, a Don’t Tread on Me flag and they would have these, like, big bonfires and it was clearing all this wood, all this forest space, and I was like, “What are you building down there?” you know? And meanwhile we’re, like, building a pond in our yard. You know, I’m trying to, like, make room for more hostas and a hydrangea bush and St. John’s wort. 

I loved that garden so much — and I hated that garden. I was so bad at it. And I hated weeding and mulch and terraforming. It was painful to my body. I got tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow at the same time. And I went to the physical therapist and, you know, it was still during the time where, you know, everybody’s wearing masks at all times. It’s weird to go to the doctor and they’re not wearing a mask anymore. And I’m like, “You know there are sick people, right? Your whole job is sick.” But I’m not gonna get into that — don’t send me a letter about masks. I don’t care. So I’m at this physical therapist and I’m wearing a mask that’s too tight, so I sound like Bane from Batman. I’m like, “Uff uff harro, uff uff uff uff uff.” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow.” And also my back was all messed up and they were like, “Oh, are you a big sports person?” And I was like, “No, I planted a butterfly garden, and that has ruined me.” But one of the things I think about, I miss the rhythm of a garden where it comes alive, and then you get to be in it. And then it goes away. I do miss the meditation of being out there, but it wasn’t meditative. It felt like I joined a cult. 

Rebecca
A garden cult? 

Eric
It really did. It was hours. I asked somebody the other day, I was like, “How long do you spend in your garden?” And she was like, “I don’t know, you know, half day every other day or so.” I’m like, “Half day every other day? Ok.” I don’t have that kind of time, so I don’t know. My husband still has, you know, our backyard now (we live in the city now), and he has a little vertical garden, there’s plants all over our little table back there and there’s plants all over the house. And so it’s nice to see, and I am trying to figure out how to reconnect myself to that part of myself, even in a small way. 

The garden also felt like such a failure constantly. Plants would fail, crops would fail. It wouldn’t look right. It wasn’t pretty. It was too weedy. And I think there’s probably a lesson for me in accepting failure — or accepting that nature is not about failure or success. Nature is not like, “Oh, this acorn tree is ugly. I am so sad.” No, I’m part of a process. I’m part of an ecosystem. Ugh, it’s hard. 

Rebecca
Although people do come into your yard and think those things. So you’re right, to think… 

Eric
Truly, truly — and then I go into people’s yards and I’m just like, “So y’all going through something or what?” 

Natalie
“Because these weeds won’t weed themselves.” 

Eric
Truly. 

Natalie
You and your big feelings. 

Eric
Right. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been saying this a lot on tour: one of the lessons that I learned in the book, in the writing of the book, is that you don’t plant a garden for yourself in the moment. You plant a garden for the future — and that a lot of what you plant will outlive you. You know, there were seeds in the garden that we uncovered that probably were a hundred years old, you know? Plants that came out of nowhere, weeds that came out of nowhere — and they didn’t come out of nowhere, they came from whoever came before us and the people way, way back, you know? And I write in the book about even the guy who bought the house before us, he didn’t do anything in the garden — it was a mess. But he had put in this slate path, and then he just let it go — like, there was such an erosion problem in the garden that it just got covered in mud. And so then I had to dig these pieces of slate, hundreds of pounds of slate, out of the ground, and it was just like, there. When we bought the house, we had no idea we were standing on Stonehenge. 

Everything that I do, everything that we all do in life, I think it is for now, for an experience of truth, for an experience of transformation, but it is also about, like, there will be a flowering and a blooming and then a dropping of seeds, and those seeds we have to let go of because we don’t know where they’re going — but they create something else: a forest, a garden, a Stonehenge for our kids, our nieces and nephews and niblings, our people that we will never meet. And that’s really exciting to me, as much as it is hard to think about. But it is a reminder that I just need to bloom now, you know, because I can’t drop seeds if I don’t bloom. 

Natalie
Ok, last question, because it was such a lovely ending to read the acknowledgement section of your book. It was so fun, and I actually enjoy that for a lot of books. I think that not as many authors as I would, like, put that sort of time into really sort of spelling out who they love — because part of getting to just enjoy, you feel like you’ve spent time with this writer, right, who’s now put their life on the page. And so it’s like: I want to know what you’re going to say to do. 

Eric
Right. 

Natalie
Like, I just think it’s so beautiful. And all the others, right? All the other important people who you love, that we now love. So is there sort of a community that you have now found in just where you are today, in where you’ve moved to — like, just this whole journey that you made with the book was in many ways a searching for, was it not? 

Eric
It was — it was absolutely a searching for. And one of the things that’s fascinating about the journey is that I don’t know that the journey itself was successful, but the place that it led us was, I think, a better space — where it was a space of being more intentional and more aware about community. One of the reasons that we moved back to Philadelphia, where we live now, was because we realized that the desire behind the house, to fill it with people and fill the yard with people — you know, we had this long driveway, we could fit, like, five or six cars in the driveway, and it wasn’t, like, an expensive house. We got lucky, but not lucky enough. And people didn’t come out, you know? And it was also the pandemic. 

But we realized that, like, to live the lives that we wanted to live, we had to be much more intentional about our community, about finding our community, cultivating our community, building that big old church, finding the light when it hits the stained glass just right and calling everybody inside. And so part of that was moving back to a place where we have deeper roots. And then part of it is also being much more solicitous. We just came back from vacation (this is why my nose is a little burnt, which feels a bit racist to me — I should not be getting sunburns, but I did, and we’ll have a conversation with the sun). And we met people we hadn’t met on vacation and we had some people that we knew were going to be there. And we walked into this house the first time and it has this just gorgeous, like, Nancy Meyers kitchen and an outdoor table. And I felt the desire so strongly. I was like, “I have to host a dinner party. I have to, it’s required.” 

And so on vacation, I went to the market and I bought all this food, and I had a dinner party and we invited people that we knew, and then people we had just met — like, a day or two earlier. And then people kept saying, like, “Oh, can I bring my friend who’s hosting me?” “Sure.” “Can I bring my other friend?” “Sure.” People would just, like, show up at the door of this house that I do not own, people I don’t recognize, and I’m standing there, like, tearing lettuce for salad, and I’m, like, looking through the glass door and there’s a person I’ve never seen before in my life, and I’m like, “Come in, come in.” And it was transformational to me. It was extraordinary. And it started for me because I saw a space of possibility in that kitchen. And this was a very well-appointed vacation house kitchen. They had a stand mixer — like, it was, like, they were ready. And I was like, “Oh, the space is ready for me, and that means that I can pull a community in, and I can keep saying yes.” And that’s really what I’m about, and that was what the book and this journey taught me. Ugh, I wanna live in that dinner — for all of my life, I really do. 

Natalie
Eric, thank you. Thank you for everything. This has just been such a treat — oh my goodness. 

Eric
This was such a joy to me, and you all are just like — the spirit that you bring into this conversation is just so fulfilling to me. I really appreciate it. 

Rebecca
Oh yeah — well, same, same. I really resonated with your book so much. I haven’t laughed like that in a while, so thank you. 

Natalie
Ok, thank you for everything. 

Eric
Thank you. It was really a real pleasure.