The Whole Enchilada
The Frankie and Duke Fox of newsletters welcomes author Catherine Newman! A chat about anxiety disorders, the hilarity of hate mail, and the secret to raising kids who will like you…eventually.
We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadable Delights,
A number of you have told us you love
, especially after reading her recent, highly lauded adult novels, 2022’s We All Want Impossible Things and this summer’s Sandwich (which btw offers the most accurate portrayal of menopausal rage flare-ups we’ve read yet). But those among you who, like, love-love her tend to be the ones who have stuck with her the longest, from her early days on the digital frontier, where Newman first hit our radar as one of the first motherhood bloggers who really told it like it is, but who also (and it’s a distinction worth making) wrote really great—memorable, moving, life-savingly humorous—prose. Not long ago, a Spreader told Rachel that Newman’s early-aughts posts on Babycenter.com and, later, her memoirs, including Waiting for Birdy (that’s her daughter), “helped me survive postpartum depression.” That’s the kind of writing you never forget. Also unforgettable: Newman’s more recent piece on cold plunging in the arctic waters of Amherst, MA. Yes, Newman and Maggie are fellow residents of the Pioneer Valley; yes, this essay has become local canon; no, that doesn’t mean your Spreaditor has worked up the nerve…yet. Thank you Catherine for gabbing with us about (most) of the above for the latest Spread Interview™!Rachel & Maggie
P.S. You pressing that little heart button up top is an act of service, a word (okay, emoji) of affirmation, and a gift.
First up, a quick’n’dirty yet ever-so-delicious list of the week’s reads.
When Tressie says “psychopath,” she means it. Editors at the Independent were obviously listening in when Spread idol Tressie McMillan Cottom and her fellow “Matter of Opinion” thinkers Michelle, Ross, and Jessica got going on “Diddy and Our Culture’s ‘Himpathy’ for Powerful Men.” They got her to go deeper on the anecdote she told on the pod, about going to Combs’s mansion for a 2021 Vanity Fair cover story on, barf, “Love”—at least according to the rebrand he was pushing at the time. She reviews the tape, so to speak, on their sit down in light of recent revelations. Read it here.
Naomi “Noomi” Fry eviscerating the Great Book that is Melania? Yes, please. “As I read, I kept flashing back to scrawling ‘How so??’ and ‘Example plz!!’ for the hundredth time in the margins of a student paper, the tip of my pencil threatening to go clear through the page in barely suppressed agitation.”
When Mer-vay met Sal-lay: In a very pretentiously laid-out Q&A in the Paris Review, the Anne Hathaway of public intellectuals, Merve Emre (an eldest child), meets novelist-obsession du jour Sally Rooney (a middle child) and gets into the constraints of the novel and the roles we get trapped into playing in our families. While we’re on the subject…anybody else listening to the audio version of Intermezzo and wondering whether the narrator actually sounds like Normal People star Paul Mescal, or if that’s just a reflection of your very limited repertoire of Irish actors? Also, it’s important that you know that the strangely magnetic Mescal is currently promoting Gladiator 2 on the cover of GQ looking not at all like a conflicted, sunlight-deprived Rooney character, ifyouknowwhatwemean. And we think you do.
Come on in, the water’s warm! Her Imperial Highness of Establishment Media has joined the Substack party with a pub she’s calling
(yep, all of those words because, hilariously, there are at least three other plays on Fresh Hell already in this Substackverse!) and boy is she taking it seriously: “This is just an extra something I’ll be doing on a Monday afternoon,” she said in an interview last week,” she told Jessica Testa.Meanwhile, veteran food journos
and are answering the age-old question, what the hell should you feed your family? Their new ’stack, , is like if Cook’s Illustrated was written by Emily Oster, i.e., low-fluff, research-based, and journalistic. Neurotic parents with young children (hi, hi), this newsletter is for you.Atossa Araxia Abrahamian—the woman we’ll always remember for the definitive article about placenta eating she wrote in 2011— is back at it for the Cut with an essay about the “accidental daycare” that materialized inside her Brooklyn two-bedroom when her kid’s facility closed. Cut editors, more Triple A articles, please! (Atossa, better late than never: May we call you Triple A?) Related, we’re always here for a Stephanie H. Murray parenting screed, and while we liked her Atlantic article on the trouble with car culture this summer, we loved her X thread this week even more.
Impatient for Catherine? Cool your jets, she’s right here!
THE SPREAD: Catherine, your kids are grown up now. You did it! Good job. What's the upshot of having written about them a lot throughout their lives?
CATHERINE NEWMAN: Oh yeah, [parenting] is completely done now. (Laughs.) One thing is, they weren’t written about throughout their whole life. When they got to be big kids, I didn’t feel like I could keep writing about them and give them space to be actual human subjects rather than writing fodder. I started writing recipes with some stories about the kids, I did that for years—mostly writing about the kids in the context of dinner, and I seemed to have plenty to say, but it didn’t feel like I was exposing anybody. And now I write fiction, so that’s it. They’re out of it! (More laughter.)
When you were writing about your kids, what were your rules for yourself—what did you not allow yourself to write about?
This goes without saying, I think, but I’ll say it anyway—I was only ever really divulging anything about myself. The kids were always kids doing totally regular kid things. I did not share their, like, deepest, darkest secrets online. The only person I ever pathologized was myself. I look back and think, Oh, I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder for, like, the first 10 years of parenting. And that’s what I wrote about a lot—this kind of drum beat of anxiety that something would happen to the kids. I still have it. I was interviewed by the novelist Rufi Thorpe, and she said, “being afraid your kids will die has been your central artistic preoccupation.” I was like, Oh, shit, that’s totally true. People who don’t like Waiting for Birdy—it’s because they’re like, What is wrong with this woman? And that’s a perfectly reasonable question. What was wrong with me is that I was having an anxiety disorder.
How did you pull yourself out of it?
I take an anti-anxiety medication, and it has changed my entire relationship to being on the planet. And maybe time…I was about to say that maybe the longer your kids are on the planet, the more firmly you imagine they’re tethered there, but even as I was gonna say that, I’m like, I’m too superstitious, I don’t really think that.
What was your experience writing about personal stuff online, when that was a new thing?
I was assigned that column before blog was in the lexicon. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. It paid $50 a week for 800 words. Even then, that wasn’t good money. But I felt like I was getting paid to document the stuff I wanted to document anyway, which was becoming a mother. It was like a frontier, in a way; I was inspired by Anne Lamott, who really did write the book that made everyone feel like it was okay to feel like you were decompensating after having a baby. It seems quaint now to think that saying motherhood [is really hard] was ever confessional or controversial, but it truly was. I mean, I would say something really benign about, like, lying on the floor feeling bored while [my kid] played with trains, and get actual hate mail about it. Which is so hilarious.
What’s so cool about your work is that it’s evolved with you through the phases of your life. Now, in your novels—how much of that is based on you and your kids?
Here’s evolution for you. I went from Baby Center, back in the day, to just now I was interviewed by AARP. So there’s my career, the bookends. Fiction is great. It makes me feel like I can write the absolute truth, in a way that in memoir you never can because you’re going to hurt or expose somebody. In fiction, if you have something you want to say about an experience or a feeling you’ve had, you can fictionalize it and divulge it. That is such a gift. I don’t know why it took me so long to get here, but it’s the most truthfully I’ve ever been able to write.
You’re not just good at intergenerational dynamics on the page. At your reading in the Amherst area, every mom in the room was thinking #parentgoals, watching the banter you had with your daughter, Birdy. You seemed to have a beautiful acceptance of the truth of each other—a frankness that felt powerful and modern. As mothers of young children, we need you to show us how to build something like that.
Without being dramatic, I feel like it’s pretty hard-won, honestly. I would say that the thing that I did really well was be totally available and reliable and trustworthy while she was pushing me away and differentiating in that super-aggressive way that teenagers do, where they can’t believe you’re, like, breathing in oxygen and they’re stuck with your fucking CO2. Somehow we maintained this level of trust through it, which meant that when we were on the other side of that phase, there was this real depth of love and trust. I think the banter comes from the absolute trust that we’re not going to hurt each other or be cruel.
That’s one of the hardest lessons of parenting—learning that sometimes all you can do is be really open, honest, and present as whatever situation they’re in unfolds.
When Birdy was struggling [as a teenager], I was so heartbroken, I thought I would die. You know that mom thing you do, the vibes-monitoring of like, waking up in the house and feeling through the air that there’s an unhappy person? I woke up like that every day, maybe for a year and a half. It [felt] so pointless that instead of just her suffering, I’m suffering also. But I have, like, nothing to offer this person—just this, I’m here. Then this past spring—so we’re talking about a 21-year-old—she said to me, “I think about that time, and how you held so much of that; it meant that I could let some of it go.” It turns out it matters. On the off chance anyone is feeling like it’s pointless to suffer so much with your kids—I don’t think it is. Maybe it’s really the only thing we have.
Hard pivot here, but this summer we had just narrowly survived reading Miranda July’s All Fours, the ultimate “perimenopause novel,” when we started your latest novel, Sandwich, which is largely a “menopause novel,” including lots of scenes of irrational (if charming) rage and a terrifying line about the protagonist’s blood clots escaping her pants and hitting the ground. All to say, menopause is very much having its cultural moment. Was there something you wanted to say about that you felt that wasn’t out there?
I feel like that hadn’t even started yet when I was writing. But what I felt was, I wanted to actually say what this is like, because I haven’t read a book like that. Also, I wanted to write about a particular way that, for women who’ve been sleeping with men, there’s this accrual of injury over decades of injury and trauma—it’s almost just a fact of reproductive life, but I feel it doesn’t get spoken of much—that by the time you’re 50, you could write a 10-page bulleted list of the injuries and infections and, like, sequelae from your life as a reproductive person.
Was this always your master plan—to progress to novels once your kids were grown?
It wasn’t. [But] when I look at the way I write novels, I have to do it with this almost unreal amount of momentum. I just didn’t have that kind of time or headspace when the kids were still home. You know where, like, you write for a half hour and then someone’s like, “can you read my email to Coach?” And you’re like, oh my god, I’m dying. I did not know I was going to write fiction. I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure. I’m glad that I was brave enough to try, because it’s the thing I like the best.
You’ve always been a real working writer, from your column in Real Simple to publishing essays to writing your books and now your Substack
. Has being a successful novelist changed the economics of that?It has actually materially changed my life. I’ve been writing professionally for 25 years, and 2024 is the first year I’ve said no to things, ever. I’m not exaggerating. I have written every single thing that’s ever been assigned to me. And this year I’ve written a little less for, like, the random alumni magazines of schools I didn’t even go to.
Wait, Spreaders—one last tidbit before you go!
We try to stick to fresh fodder here in the Spread, and we try to resist recommending multiple New Yorker stories in a single (short) issue because, yeah, duh. But screw it—if, like us, you inexplicably slept on Michael Schulman’s profile of Bowen Yang, you gotta fix that now. Delightful! Revealing! Insightful! Yang pulls back the curtain on his emotional inner workings to a degree that made us want to cover him back up a little…and you will not believe the stunning lengths his family has leapfrogged in two short generations. Savor it here. Apple News subscribers, we loved the audio version.
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The best line of the day:
"....in the Paris Review, the Anne Hathaway of public intellectuals, Merve Emre (an eldest child), meets novelist-obsession du jour Sally Rooney (a middle child) and gets into the constraints of the novel and the roles we get trapped into playing in our families."