Gail Marlene Schwartz isn't afraid of the hard stuff

Unfixed interview

I love that imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. There is sometimes way more truth we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very limited lived experiences.

-Gail Marlene Schwartz, author, queer mom, persistent student of collaboration

When Gail Marlene Schwartz posted a section from her debut novel Falling Through the Night on Substack, I knew I’d found a woman unafraid to “go there.” I fell in love with her characters immediately—unhinged, messy, complex but never far-removed from the love that bonds them to one another. I devoured the novel in under a week and wished upon finishing I could invite all her characters over for a home-cooked meal. And while that didn’t happen, I did get to spend an hour with their sparkling creator and I was equally nourished and enlivened by the occasion. Gail’s passion to explore personal experiences, particularly in relation to motherhood and mental health, through the lens of fiction is so infectious and playful that I’m near convinced to veer from non-fiction myself. Author Siri Hustvedt once said, “Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened,” and Gail’s vast remembering calls in a theater of archetypes who bruise and then embrace, unravel and then mend, each written with such humanity and care that it’s easy to feel an emotional recognition, our own unfinished stories remembering and rewriting possibility in tandem.

Falling Through the Night just won the National Indie Excellence Award in the LGBTQ Fiction category for 2024 so a hearty congratulations is in order. I’m including a synopsis below that may help orient you throughout our conversation, though you certainly don’t need to have read the book to follow Gail’s hard-earned and enduring reflections on identity, friendship, disability, mental health, family and fulfillment.

Audrey Meyerwitz wants to fall in love and have a family. But for this queer 30-something insomniac who’s struggled with Generalized Anxiety Disorder since childhood, it’s a goal that’s far from simple. When best friend Jessica, a recovering alcoholic, helps introvert Audrey with a profile on SheLovesHer, Audrey takes that scary first step toward her lifelong dream. Through online dating, immigrating to Canada, and having a baby with Down Syndrome, she struggles and grows. But when Audrey unearths a secret about her mother, everything about her identity as a mother, a daughter, and a person with mental illness ruptures. How do we create closeness from roots of deep alienation? With humor, honesty, and complexity, Audrey learns that healthy love means accepting gains and losses, taking off the blinders of fantasy, and embracing the messiness that defines human families.

Transcript

Kimberly

Oh welcome Gail, ok this is take 2. We had a rough start here but you look beautiful, you sound beautiful so I think we’re ready to go.

Gail

It’s so nice to be here Kim.

Kimberly

I have had the incredible opportunity to read your book, Falling Through the Night. And thank you, by the way, for sending that to me. I put it on my nightstand and I was actually working my way through a Louise Erdrich book at the time, like I told you. And I actually recommended it even. And then I got halfway through and I was like, I can't finish this. So I picked up Falling Through the Night and I proceeded to read it in about four nights. So I'm excited to talk to you about your characters, the deep vulnerability that you offered in this book. You addressed addiction, disability, uncertainty. I mean, you were tackling really, really hard topics. And what I didn't know until after reading your book is that it was originally a collection of personal essays about queer motherhood. And writing became one of the ways that you explored this journey for yourself. So what compelled you to explore motherhood through writing?

Gail

Well, writing has been the way that I've explored almost everything in my life since this one thing that happened to me when I was about seven years old. And I was the child in my family that acted out tantrums, fits, like lots of anger. And my mom basically made me go to a counselor. And back, I mean, I'm 57 and that's not a time when that was happening for a lot of kids. So I was very angry about it. I didn't want to go. And the man, he was an older gentleman. His name was Dr. Sulky. He was a psychiatrist. And to me, it just represented, you know, the place where I have to go because I was bad. And I did not like this guy. I didn't want to be there. And my mom like literally dragged me kicking and screaming into his office.

And I remember the first—he was a child psychiatrist—so the first time that I ever went there, his office, he had a lot of toys and games and books and and he had a child-sized easel, you know, like a two, you know, like triangular shaped easel made of wood. And I remember I saw that in the corner and I went and I picked it up and I plunked it down between his chair and mine and I sat, so I didn't have to look at his ugly face. And no, I was like, really like, I'm not doing this. And so, so he would ask, So how do you feel? You know, that was always the question. How do you feel? How do you feel? And first I was refusing to answer. And then one day, one of the appointments, same thing, went to the corner, took the easel, plunked it down between our chairs. And I noticed there was a pad and some markers kind of next to me. And he asked me that question again, How do you feel? And I remember I took a pen and I took the pad and I wrote M-A-D, and I slid it under the easel, so like to show him. And that was the turning point. And he acknowledged, Wow, I bet you have a lot of reasons to be mad, or something. I mean, that's my memory.

And that was a turning point. And we started passing notes back and forth under the easel. So that was kind of the first time someone had acknowledged my emotional reality and sort of mirrored it back. And it was through writing. And I'm sure that was the reason that that became like my primary tool. I mean, I'm pretty artistic. I paint, I dance, I sing. I mean, I do a lot of different things, but that's been the way that I've kind of translated my experience since I was really, really young. So that was nothing new. That was nothing new. And he was an ally. He became an ally. I went from hating the guy to that being, you know, like my favorite time of the week.

Kimberly

What a brilliant therapist to recognize how you wanted or how you needed to engage. I mean, it's like you didn't even know that writing those words out, those letters M-A-D, were going to feel so good, but he recognized that and then encouraged it, I mean, to pass notes back and forth in therapy. I love that. No wonder he became an ally.

Gail

Yeah, it was super sweet. No, and that's the thing. It's like when you have materials—I’m working with, I do some research and writing for a consultant and it's for a support organization for people with mental health issues and there's art supplies everywhere. And that's the advantage when you have stuff around that people can express themselves. It's sort of a no brainer. So that's kind of what happened.

Kimberly

I was just yesterday trying to write, answer a question where somebody said, the question was, What do you do when you have writer's block? And to me, I was outside walking the cat on a leash and I was thinking, I don't know if I want to call it writer's block because for me, there's this sense of like, okay, well, there's a blockade, but what about like a writer's detour? Because when there's a detour, it's assuming that there is a route, it just might not be what that person needs at that point. It might mean that they have to pick up a paintbrush or take their cat for a walk or you know, whatever it is that is also helping the brain figure out what it needs to say and not necessarily through the like, I'm just typing this out right now on my computer.

Gail

I love that. Yeah, because in a way, right, especially now in the 21st century, writing is not physical. Yeah, we were typing. But, you know, it's not, you know, when you're in your physical in your body more, I think we have access to different—I mean, walking the cat is such a perfect example of—we're in our bodies outside, and the air, and the you know, the moisture and all the elements are there, the animal, it's all very embodied I think, in a way that writing often isn't.

Kimberly

Yes, yes. And I want to talk to you about that a little. Actually, let's just jump into that really quick because, we'll circle back to your characters in Falling Through the Night, but there was something that really interested me. You talked about when you're in an anxious or in a heightened emotional state, it's very difficult to think clearly. And obviously, writing requires engaging that side of your brain. So writing helped sort of translate an experience for you when you were in that fight or flight. But I wanna know personally, are you literally able to write when you're in panic or anxiety? Does that make sense?

Gail

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, I've also never had a panic attack. Like my anxiety manifests really differently than Audrey's and a lot of people who have that diagnosis, I'll go through periods of time, it could be weeks or months or even a few days where I feel that the cortisone level in my body is higher, my stomach is clenched, I'm obsessing and ruminating. I mean, I have those thoughts, but I can still sort of go about my business. I'm not sort of shaking in a corner. And I think that is the experience of a lot of people with anxiety. So, you know, I'm maybe not the most extreme end of that spectrum.

And the thing about writing for me is that I don't think it takes that anxiety experience and shrinks it, but what I do think is like if the anxiety experience is this big, I think it builds whatever's around it and grows whatever's around it so that this thing is proportionately smaller.

For me, one of the things that's been helpful is not identifying, I mean, and this is, again, this is very different generationally, but I don't identify with my anxiety as an identity. And a lot of people do. A lot of my students, I teach at a community college, and they're very, it's very useful. They claim it, they talk about it, they identify as it. And that's not something that I've done in that particular way. I've identified as someone who struggles with mental health challenges, but I don't say, well, I have a generalized anxiety disorder. Again, it's not that I don't experience this, but I feel like myself and my concept of myself is bigger. With my growth and development work it's expanding.

That's the best way I have of explaining it. It doesn't like take it away. And that was, that was another turning point. I have to say to something I related very much to what you've talked about in Unfixed where I stopped trying to get rid of it. I stopped seeing anxiety as the problem. And that did a couple of things. It enabled me to understand some of the superpower of it and some of the reasons it probably landed in my body in the first place and also to relate to it differently and to relate to it as a friend and to relate to it as an ally.

Kimberly

Again I’m going back to this visualization of your brain, you have this vast experience of who you are and anxiety gets to be sort of a character in the theater and actually like you said, even a friend at times. And I want to talk about that in relationship to fiction because as you said, you are taking some of these qualities from your own life and applying them to your characters in Falling Through the Night, and specifically your main character, Audrey, struggles with anxiety and it contributes to her terror and the challenges of wanting to start a family and not wanting to repeat some of your own experiences of childhood. I just would, I'm curious if you're open to sharing why you chose to write about some of these experiences through the lens of fiction?

Gail

Well, this is super interesting because I started out when I first published, I was publishing nonfiction. I was publishing personal essays. And I also did a play based on my direct‚ it was an autobiographically based play about myself, but playing different characters. It was called Crazy: One Woman's Search for Sanity. And that was directly autobiographical. And there were some issues because I was talking about other people, you know, and that's one of the problems when you're doing that kind of work. But when I was working on this piece, that actually wasn't the reason. I actually, I had a collection of these essays, “Queer Motherhood with Anxiety,” I had about eight of them, and it wasn't coming together. I just I wanted to make a book and I was thinking, a collection of essays. I mean, that's what made the most sense. And I just couldn't get my head around it. I wasn't interested. So I hired a developmental editor to work with me. And her name is Betsy Warland. And she's a very well-known lesbian feminist writer from Canada, which is where I was living at the time. And I remember she's very old fashioned. She printed the manuscript out. She was giving me notes with like pencil on them, which I loved because pencils are physical.

And I was at her apartment and she had the manuscript. It was sort of scattered all over the floor. And we were sitting there and looking at pages and it all felt sort of chaotic. And I was very overwhelmed. And she just looked at me and she said, she just kind of looked up and she said, Do you think that this material might want to be a novel?

And, you know, we all have these moments, you know, with our projects. Like that was this moment where I was like, I was like, simultaneously like, Yes, of course it does. And no freaking way. I'm too scared. I'm not, I could never write a novel. No, I'm not, I do not have it in me. I'm not good enough. I'm not this enough. But it was thrilling because I really understood that these experiences were interesting. What wasn't interesting was me as a character. I don't want to write about myself.

I love the imaginary world and I feel like imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. And that's why I like the Siri Hustvedt quote so much. Because I think there is truth, there is sometimes way more truth that we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very, very limited lived experiences.

So, that was kind of the story behind that. And the second I had that, the second I was like, I get to create these people and they can populate these experiences and they can live them differently than I lived them and they can go off in these other directions. Then it was like, there was no stopping me. I was still terrified. I still didn't think I could do it, but I was engaged and I knew it was creatively the right choice.

Kimberly

That is so exciting to me because I'm a little bit on that edge right now for myself.

Gail

Do it, Kim, do it, do it, do it, do it!

Kimberly

I'm totally terrified. So did you feel, you felt liberated? That Siri Hustvedt quote that you talked about is “Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.”

Gail

I get chills when I hear that.

Kimberly

I love it too. So you got to go into Audrey's character and almost flesh out experiences for her that you wanted to have for yourself?

Gail

Not even necessarily wanted. I mean, there's things in Audrey's life that were actually harder than my experiences. But the second I, it's like when I'm writing fiction, it's like I watch it as a movie. It's like it happens in my head and I kind of just watch and it has a life of its own. A lot of writers talk about they're just taking dictation.

And so like, I would sit during my sessions and especially with Jessica, I would just watch and listen to them. And it just went places I could never have predicted, planned, plotted, whatever you could, it just, it went where it went. And then, and then I shaped and edited, but you know, in that first draft frame of mind where I was just watching and getting it all down. And yeah.

Kimberly

Did you start with Audrey? Obviously she's the protagonist in the book. So it was sort of the first character that you began to flesh out?

Gail

I started with her, but her best friend was there from almost day one. And I'm very drawn to the best friend archetype. I mean, I think I've had best friends throughout the years, but I think there's a way that I would love to have a friend. And there's a way that I want to be a friend, neither of which I have realized fully. But I'm very attached to this sort of like very close sisterly, family-like, you know, this, this, it's really just an archetype. And so Jessica showed up right from the beginning. And, and I had a very close friend who was my best friend from college. And I lost her to suicide. And so that was kind of in my consciousness during the time that Jessica kind of appeared.

Kimberly

That relationship was so real. I loved the way that they interacted with each other. I mean, there was so much play between the two of them, but it was fraught, you know, because Jess was navigating addiction and the codependency that was there. It was just such a rich relationship. I almost, you know, well, let me ask you—the pain that they experienced together never negated the love. And I think that's what I loved about it. Why did you choose to write the friendship arc the way that you did?

Gail

I just feel like that's like for me as a human being, that's a healthy relationship. And I think what Audrey doesn't ever really see until the very end is that Jessica was her family. Jessica was her chosen family and she just kind of missed it. She had that, you know, she had it and she couldn't, she just couldn't see it. She was very fixed on this partner and kids thing that we all get swept up in and you know her family was right next to her the whole time.

Kimberly

I just got goosebumps all over my body. You're so right. That's a deep pain that Audrey carries in the story of the longing for family. And it's right there in front of her.

Gail

And that's so human. Like we all miss things. Oftentimes we're just like, we're looking at this thing that, you know, this thing we want to attain this goal, this journey. And it's hard, you know, when I started doing Gratitudes with my family, this was before the pandemic, but we were more into it. And I was with my ex-wife at the time, who's my son's other mom.

But that was such a great exercise in this, you know, the Buddhist talk, but the practice of what is and to continually reflect on that, because I think we have, I tell my students there's the negativity bias and that's evolution. Like we wanna know what to do when the bear comes, you know, we have to know. It's evolutionarily advantageous for us to be scanning. Where's the bear? Where's the bear? Where's the bear? But if our whole life is where's the bear, we're going to miss, we have a kitty we need to take for a walk. And, you know, like, we're going to miss our life. We don't want to miss our life. So I think that is something that we're, especially in countries like the United States, where we're just so driven by you know, this consumer desire and it's just, it's pushed on us. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? Well, what about what I have? Like, I wanna sit with that and I wanna enjoy it and revel in it. And I wished that for Audrey. I wished she had seen that.

Kimberly

I do too. I wish there, it makes me think a little bit of, also going to our culture right now, we have this huge movement in, life coaching and there were New York times just did an article about that. And there's obviously high sides to that and people, you know, able to address, some of these goals that they want in their life that they are not achieving, but it's also, I think the dark side of it is that always thinking that there's something else to achieve instead of recognizing that this life is singular and extraordinary without all the accessory things that we think we're supposed to have in order to be happy. The people that are constantly seeking in my life are the least happy.

They're like, what now? What do I need to achieve now? What's my next goal? And there's a simplicity to just going, And I'm not negating the need for growth by any means. But I think we're not comfortable as a culture with the opposites, with two things existing at once. And I think mental health and chronic illness are great teachers for those of us that are lucky enough to have them, to experience the tension of those two things existing at the same time. And I wanna know, because I experience you as somebody who can live in that tension, when did you realize, was it a turning point in your life when you realized your anxiety and your pain could live alongside your fulfillment and your joy?

Gail

I think it was around that time when I stopped looking at anxiety as a disease or as something I had to get rid of where, and I think that was probably the time when I started working on that play called Crazy. And I think that actually that was when I got my MFA at Goddard through Goddard College in Vermont and it was a wonderful program. Unfortunately, the college is closing, which is really devastating.

Kimberly

Another casualty.

Gail

Devastating news. The small liberal arts colleges, it's just really a terrible thing. But I was in that program at the time and our advisors really encouraged us to use whatever was happening as fodder for artistic practices. And I'd done that in the past, but I hadn't done it to that extent. And I certainly had never focused on something that personal or stigmatizing. I don't think I would have thought about that until I was in that program. And then it just started changing my relationship with that experience. It was less black and white. It was less about me being a problem person or me being crazy or me being this, me being that. But it was like, okay, this is a set of experiences that can have lots of different kinds of meanings and they're interesting and what might they be.

So that was part of it. And also just embracing the idea of pain because I was working with one therapist who had the theory that anxiety is blocked emotion. And I learned a lot from her. And when I do IFS (Internal Family Systems) work, oftentimes if I have an IFS session and I'm in the middle of this period where I'm really struggling, like the anxiety will go away in that particular period. So it's like the expression, you know, lots of big grief and anger. And when those more primary emotions can just like manifest and, and make themselves known and expressed, and they always have a good reason. They're not just coming for no reason, both the reason in the present and the reason in the past. I'm just more in touch with what's actually happening instead of trying to be good and trying to push it all down. It just got much more complex.

Kimberly

So if I'm hearing you right, it also sounds like the act of being curious and creative with it was part, it's almost like you went in, I'm gonna make this play, I'm gonna do this production. Was it a monologue?

Gail

Yeah, it was a one-woman show. Yeah.

Kimberly

Okay. And it's almost like the discoveries happened as you were making it. It's not like you had this aha moments and then you decided to write it all down. But so the creative act itself was a way to integrate, reintegrate this anxiety, PTSD, pain into the theater of Gail.

Gail

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting too, because there was this one exercise I did during that time when I was developing material for that show where every time I had something come up around my anxiety or pain or whatever, I would turn my video camera on and I would film myself experiencing it. Terrifying. And I never, never, never, never, never thought I was going to... I mean, to me, this was like, it was like video journaling. I never was going to show anyone.

And then I was, as I was going through the material, I was thinking about this thing of, We don't see pain in this culture, which makes us afraid of pain, which makes people not share it even more. You know, it's one of those sort of spiral things. And I ended up taking some still frames from that footage. Let's see if I remember this. Yeah, I integrated some still frames in a video montage. And then I also played some clips in slow motion as I was, I was riding this child size bike and I was singing the sun will come out tomorrow because I was a kid who loved Broadway show tunes. And in the background on the big screen, there was a black and white image of a close up of my face in slow motion crying. So that was the two things.

Yeah, it was super cool. People were not comfortable with it. People like when I had the audience talk backs, you know, one of my questions was were their parts that you felt uncomfortable. And that was almost always tagged like, just see that kind of pain. Like I didn't want to see that. I didn't want to look at, you know, not in a rude way. So that was.

Kimberly

Hmm. That makes a lot of sense to me. Can we see this somewhere? Is it, was it recorded? I'm thinking, I'm like, wow, this sounds powerful. Okay.

Gail

Well, I don't know. Let me see. It was a really long time ago, but I probably have it somewhere. Yeah.

Kimberly

Well, I relate to what you're saying in the sense that, you know, I've been doing these documentary projects for Unfixed for four and a half years. And sometimes it's like pulling teeth to even get some of my closest friends to watch these. And if they actually stepped in and started watching, they'd realize these are stories that are enlivening and they are nurturing and they are universal. But the idea of watching someone immobilized by ALS or somebody who has these facial pain disorders that are excruciating. They're like, No, no, no, no, no, I don't want to see that. I can't watch it. I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry. I've gotten a lot of that. So you're right. People, we don't want to talk about this stuff in our culture. And you do. You do.

Gail

Well, and also people, I mean, I think the, frankly, the bottom line is I think we don't want to talk about death. And I think that's, that's the root of it. You know, if we, if we're talking about disability, if we're talking about people not having control of their bodies, well, look at where, that's where that's leading, right? I think we need to, that's to me, the bottom line, we need to get more comfortable with death. We need to see death. We need to talk about death. We need to integrate death into the normalcy of living.

Kimberly

Yes. Are you familiar with

Chloe Hope

on Substack? Her Substack is called Death and Birds. She is an end of life doula and a baby bird carer. So she works on both ends of the spectrum and she does these short short essays every other Sunday, I believe. And she has a massive following. And it has become everybody’s Sunday church. I mean, literally, you can't read her words without feeling like somehow you've just been washed with truth. And for whatever reason, on Substack, everyone flocks to it. We’re are an unusual community. We want to talk about death and birds.

Gail

Pun intended, right? Pun intended.

Kimberly

Yeah, flock to it. Yes, exactly.

Gail

That sounds amazing. I definitely want to get her.

Kimberly

I'll send it to you. Speaking of what nobody wants to talk about, let's talk about disability because this is something that is close to me. My husband, I have a stepdaughter, she's 30 now with intellectual disability. My husband pretty much raised his on her own until I came into his life. And you have this theme in your book and it's a touchy subject and I'm, I want to go there because it's touchy. But Audrey makes the decision, your character makes a decision to give up her newborn Down syndrome baby for adoption, the twin of Adam, who is the other, the other son that she ends up keeping. Can you talk about some of the complexities that live in you around offering your son up for adoption and why you chose to tackle this really difficult subject.

Gail

Yeah, this was a fascinating thing. So my first personal connection to this was I had a girlfriend who was adopted, who I was seeing while I was at Goddard, and she talked a lot about adoption trauma and how her adoption experience had been the root of a lot of her struggles. And I had been kind of obsessed with being adopted since I was young because I always felt very alienated from my family. And I had this sort of idea of like, maybe I was adopted and that explains, you know, I just had these fantasies, which had nothing to do with the actual experience. So after that relationship, I just I just kept having this little be in my bonnet around. I want to do some research about this. I want to write about adoption. And then when I got pregnant, I did—my ex, Lucy and I, Lucy is my best friend now, even though we're not together.—but we found out that one of the twins that I was carrying had Down syndrome. And we were in Canada at the time. And we got so much pressure from the medical system to have an abortion.

And when we decided not to it got even stronger. So this was really wild to me. And I found out that there was something like 95% of women who have amnio’s and they get that news, they choose abortion.

And we didn't want to do that for a lot of different reasons. One of them being we had a social worker that we talked to who was in charge of special needs adoptions. And she said, I could have a line of 10 families waiting outside your door tomorrow. Families that are called to work with special needs kids and Downs kids are super rare and they're really in demand.

So to me, it was like, well, if this child can have a wonderful life with another family, there's no issue. But the pressure was immense. And I just started thinking, where is this coming from? Like this kind of stigma taken to such a point where the society is basically giving the message, these people should be aborted. So I really wanted to talk about that in some way. And when I “discovered” that Audrey was adopted, I was thinking, well, Wouldn't that be interesting if she had that experience because she was adopted as a special needs kid in her mind. What if she had to be on the other end of that? And how can, like, wouldn't that be a very different experience?

I mean, it was hard for us to deal with it, but it would be hard for her to deal with it in a really different way. And that it would, it would force her to confront some of the stuff from the other side that she experienced as an adoptee. So I really wanted to explore that and, and also that this thing of like, if she made this decision, how is that going to impact her relationship with her adoptive mother?

Kimberly

Do you know Andrew Solomon, the author?

Gail

Yeah, he's a hero of mine. He's a total hero.

Kimberly

Yes. Did you read Far From the Tree?

Five times.

Kimberly

Yeah. Okay. So one of my favorite, and in fact, I don't even know if he said it in the book, but it was in a Ted talk or something, but people were asking him Why in the world are you writing this book about all the horrible things that can happen to a child when you know when you're writing well because he was in the process of adopting at the time himself and he said “You know this isn't a book about all the things that can go wrong in a human life or a human being, this is about the love that is possible when things do go wrong?”

And I will never forget that justification for why he was writing that book, because I think we so quickly go to that binary, something's wrong or something's right. And similar to you and what you did with your anxiety, it's like, No, this is here and look at everything around it that can come in and be creative with and embrace and love.

This is about the love that is possible.

Gail

I have a story related to that. So when Lucy and I were, we were trying to figure out what to do and I was, you know, I was still going into my appointments and getting my ultrasounds and all of that. And I was pretty confident that I wanted to give the baby up for adoption and Lucy wasn't sure. And we went in for an ultrasound and it was one, you know, when you, especially when you have two, they often don't cooperate and you're sort of like laying there for this, trying to get the baby to roll over and you know, can't see the, whatever they're trying to look at. And so we were there for, I don't know, 45 minutes, an hour with this technician and the techs don't know anything. So she was like, Have you, have you named them? And, and you know, that's tender when you have a baby who you're about to give up. But we had named them. But, you know, I tend to overshare and I'm like, Yeah, well, one of them is going home with an adoptive family. And she's like, Oh! and it just opened the door for us to have that conversation. And so she was asking us and at that point, the social worker had actually found had found a family and this was a really cool part of our story. So the family that she found, it was a couple in their twenties who had had a Down syndrome girl, which just rarely happens to young couples. And they were looking to adopt a Down syndrome baby for that child to grow up with. R

Kimberly

Wow.

Gail

So, so, so Catherine, our social worker had had had located this couple and so we're talking to this technician and I'm talking because Lucy's an introvert and she was sitting listening and processing and dealing with her, her conflicting feelings and and the tech said, “Well, you know, that sounds like a that sounds like a happy ending for everyone. It sounds like a very happy ending for everyone. And then she disclosed that she was the mother of five special needs boys, after she gives her basically her blessing to us, no judgment, none. I mean, she knew I was older. Like we were just talking about all of our issues with her and she was just, and so Lucy says That was the moment when my mind was, was made up—with that woman giving us her blessing. Then she felt like she could allow herself to be okay with what I think she was…

Kimberly

Yeah, here's somebody that has chosen to keep all five of her kids with intellectual disability or some sort of disability. And she's giving you her blessing after all that experience. That's, that's remarkable. Because it was, I mean, you really, it sounded like everybody was winning. It was a good story for everyone.

Gail

And the doctors were they were stuck when I went back from my checkup after my kid was like I don't know three four months old you had to go back and see the doctor I went to see the nurse and she said So how's it going with Benjamin, was the day we gave him,I said they're doing great It had a wonderful ending for everyone and she said Make sure to tell the doctor that.

Kimberly

…and did you? Yeah. Yeah.

Gail

Yes, of course I did. But there was some activism involved in that. It was appalling. It was appalling the way that they totally devalued that little person. And I definitely support the right for women to choose, absolutely 100%. But when a woman decides not to, that right needs to be supported and embraced just as much.

Kimberly

Absolutely. And I think the doctors are coming from largely a place of ignorance unless they've experienced, I mean, how do you know unless, I mean, Andrew Solomon's book is, I don't know how many cases each chapter is a different child with some really horrendous disabilities. And the challenges, he doesn't gloss over how hard this was on the families too, but there is always some sort of calling in the family that wants to rise up and and and find the love that is possible” in it. Wow, I'm so glad you were willing to talk about this I listened to some other interviews that you did and no one brought it up and I found it to be such a It's a huge part of the story. I mean and use as you said Audrey herself had a disability so it's it's something that I feel like as politically correct as our society, as woke as our society is, we still tiptoe around this one. We see it all the time when we take our daughter, Syd, to the grocery store and, you know, people sometimes know how to interact and other times, many times, it's a challenge to know how this society can work with variations on what it means to be human.

Gail

Yeah, that's really well put Kim really well put. Yeah.

Kimberly

This is such a wonderful conversation. Thank you for everything that you do. I love your vulnerability and I love how much you love to share. I still see that little girl writing MAD and shoving it underneath her easel.

But you have something coming out. You're releasing a collection of essays this year called Boyhood Reimagined. So I wanna know, I think that I haven't read it yet, but I imagine there's some pretty wonderful themes that you tackle. Can you tell me about a theme that you're particularly excited about?

Gail

Sure. Well, it's a collection I'm actually co-editing with my friend, Dr. Jennifer Marlowe, and we've basically collected essays and interviews from other queer moms of sons who I'll identify as feminist. And there's quite the range, but one of the themes that's really kind of funny and fun to talk about in different ways is the way that our son's masculinities have kind of popped up in ways that, you know, people say, girl babies and boy babies are just different. And we're like, No, they're not! You know, that's all socialization.

My dad tells the story of he and his wife run a bed and breakfast and they had this couple come from, he said they were raising their child on a remote mountaintop somewhere. The child was homeschooled and you know, like no influence from the outside world. And apparently one day when the child was like three or four, they got served a tuna sandwich and they like cut the sandwich into a gun and they held it up and said, Bang, bang, you're dead, mommy. I don't know whether I believe that or not, but just this idea that like, that's a boy child. So it's innate.

But so many of us have had similar types of moments. Like I remember I was taking Alexi to the park and there was a big cement truck, you know, with the spinning thing. Man, he just like, he's like, We gotta watch that. So we like stood there for, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes watching the cement truck pour cement, I'm just like, Is this my life? It's like, #boymom, you know? And at the same time, so like that's sort of a stereotypical moment. And a lot of us have moments like that where these little boy children are acting like boys. At the same time, my son was obsessed with the vacuum cleaner. So he was an equal opportunity machine. He just wanted to see how things worked and he was fascinated.

But yeah, a lot of those essays, you see boys doing things that are, you know, the feminist queer moms are like, Wait a minute, I thought all of my socialization is gonna, and I think our socialization has had a deep impact on them. And there's also the differences that there's something in there for some of our kids. And again, it's not to say all boys are X way or all children assigned male at birth are X-way, because there's a lot of variation. But those stories are fun.

It's a great mix. It's a great mix. I mean, there's a lot of there was older women who raised their sons before a lot of the new laws came into effect that are protecting queer families. There's a lot of young women and different situations. Yeah, they're there. It's beautiful writing. It's beautiful stories and really wonderful storytelling and a great cover.

Kimberly

When does that come out?

Gail

That will be out Pride, it's a year from now. That'll be 2025, June 1st of 2025 with Motina Books. That's our publisher.

Kimberly

Okay. Wonderful. Well, Gail, thank you. This is just such a joy. I'm really looking forward to reading your next collection and anything else that you create. I'm imagining you're probably going to stick in the fiction realm, or do you find yourself?

Gail

Well, these, you know, the essay collections, those are essays. I also started a journal, a fiction art and literature journal called Hotchpotch Literature and Art, and we publish exclusively fiction, and we publish twice a year. That's a free online digital magazine for people who are, who just want, just want to read some short stories. And we use, we collaborate with artists who give us images, and the images are the prompts for writers.

So we'll pick a painting, we'll say, I'm going to write a story in response to that.

Kimberly

Oh that's excellent. I will end with, are you familiar with

Ben Wakeman

’s work? He does, so it's just starting and you may want to do this. It's called Same Walk, Different Shoes. It's over on Substack and it literally came just out this morning so it's fresh in my mind and I haven't done it yet because I'm scared to write fiction. But so everyone that's participating sends in a prompt and it has to be some sort of experience that they had. Doesn't have to be sad or depressing, it can be funny, whatever. And then he mixes those up in a hat and submits them to all the writers so that someone re-imagines that story for that person. And then turns it into fiction. So you kind of get to feel heard, but in a completely different way. And then I think the first time he did it, everyone gathered at the end over zoom to chat and talked about what that experience was like. And it's really an exercise in empathy. The way he describes it, it's just trying, you know, walking in someone else's shoes and trying it on. So yeah, he's taking prompts right now through Sunday.

Gail

I totally want to do it. And that's nice because it's just another thing that kind of straddles the line, right, between sort of the autobiographical and fictional. It's a really interesting space.

Kimberly

Yeah, it's a fascinating project.

Well, thank you, Gail. I'm going to close this up.

Gail

Thank you, Kim. I so appreciate, I really appreciate the conversation. You're a hero of mine and just to be able to talk to you is a real honor. So thank you.

Kimberly

Bless you Gail!