00:00:12,035 --> 00:00:15,255 This is a dream come true for me. This is genuinely...I love this part

of the world and to get to interview you

in my favorite part of the world is kind of about as good as it gets

so - thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

My pleasure! lovely to hang out with you again

You are one of the most intelligent and

prolific women I know and have had

the pleasure to meet. You've written 20 books on feminism..

Well i've written 24 or 25 books, but

many of them are not about feminism [Yes]

All of them are secretly feminist and some of them are overtly feminist

...I would say! That makes sense! [Yes]

What drives you to write so

prolifically? I successfully

avoided husbands and children and day jobs. [laughter]

Those things can all really interfere

with your productivity. [laughter]

Amazing! and I'm always

fascinated by...

I find if I have anything to write I procrastinate

magnificently. Do you have

a rigorous writing schedule

whereby you write between this hour and this hour

and you eat this very specific thing and...

is there a routine that kind of helps you

get so much done?

I get up every morning and have tea

with milk on an octagonal tray I bought at a thrift store

many years ago...

and like that has to happen fairly early

and then the rest of it is kind of a muddle and a blur

and I often feel like the most distracted, disorganized person

ever...but books do

issue fourth regularly which makes me think

'if i'm this disorganized, what's everybody else

doing?' [laughter] and...

00:01:50,085 --> 00:01:52,735 But , you know I really wanted to be a writer

I love books and writing was

like one way - even more than reading - to be

with books, in books, about books and so

when I learnt how to read, I just decided I was going to write books

...which is a very easy decision until

you actually have to do it, but

somehow, one thing led to another.

In your bio, you cite that you are a

product of the California public

school system from kindergarten to graduate school.

How did that shape you ? Why did you

want to mention it in that way?

It's actually very funny, I was on a panel with two men

just up the road in Monterey about 10 years ago

and they both named dropped

their ivy league universities. I was like 'your older than me,

we don't name drop our universities'

and then I was like 'that's what an ivy league education

is for apparently!

and I was like well.... can Isay bad words on this?

[Yes, I think so] Well I was like well 'fuck it! if they are gonna name drop...

the ivy leagues, i'm gonna name drop

public education in California. [Yes!]

*Applause*

That's so cool! I sometimes worry that

someday they'll say like 'well we should defund that

because it produced her' but... [laughter]

But I just realized, you know...

we've got to name drop these things. That's amazing! I love that you

did that so incredibly specifically.

Was there one specific moment or

a series of moments that led up to you

knowing that you wanted to be a writer?

I wanted to be a ballerina and then I learnt how to write,

how to read, which apparently happened very rapidly

in first grade.

My Mom says the first week; and then I thought

I wanted to be a librarian 'cos they

spar with books all day - what could be lovelier than that?

Until I realized that somebody wrote all those books,

and books for me, you know it's like a magic

box - until you can read them,

you can open it, but you can't actually

see what's inside, or do anything with what's inside, so

just that act of learning how to read pretty quickly

to my third and final career decision which I've stuck with.

Amazing! Yeah

It's very easy to decide to do something,

actually doing it is a whole other thing.

And it must have been like that with you deciding to be an actress?

You had to act? Yeah...well...

It did happen fast! Yes! it certainly did

I mean, it kind of came out of nowhere

to be honest. It was actually

poems and poetry that really got me and I was on the debating team

because I was really nerdy like that! That was what got me into it...

This feels like a ....

it must be a calling for you. I mean you've truly dedicated your life

to doing this, and I love that sometimes I

email you and I get an "out of office" kind of...

'In order to get anything done, I cannot respond to

emails' and I just love that you

create that.. [I try] Yeah!

The really nice people

listen to those things and the less nice people

continue to chase you around.

Really?! As you know, as you know...

[Yeah] But it's a really interesting thing that

nobody calls you up, nobody emails you

desperately urging you to

do the work most central to your life and your vision

and yourself, everybody wants you to do something other than that,

and a lot - some of it's noble causes

and some of it's favors for deserving friends

and some of it.... you know...

and I believe in service and support of the community

but....

I couldn't possibly do everything i'm

asked to do

and if I did

half of it, I would never write another book, so there's

this interesting thing [love that!]

I think if I had been popular as a young woman, I would have

had a much easier time with people wanting things from me, but

you know, I was like hiding in libraries and

reading a book a day.

I love that 'the work most central to your vision.'

That's such beautiful way of

putting it - which makes sense

because you're a beautiful writer! so, that makes

sense. In 'Whose Story is This?

Old Conflicts and New Chapters', you

talk so brilliantly about how

power determines who gets to tell their story

and who gets to be believed.

Are there

stories, or

people that you really wish we were hearing

more of right now, beyond those that you cite

in your book?

I think everybody in this room,

everybody listening to this recognizes that

women, people of color, non-straight,

non-cisgender people

have not been sufficiently

allowed to take center

stage to the stories, to determine what matters

to set the priorities, and that's changing in some ways,

but something I always feel, and I read about in

the introduction to this book, before we get all like

'they were a disaster, but now we're

awesome and we're so damn woke is...

I feel like...

next year, next decade, next

century, we'll be like 'Oh my God

those people in the year 2019

so completely missed this and now we see...

now we include this thing we excluded, so I feel

there are things we don't see yet and we always have to

recognize how finite

our vision is and how much more is out there

and you know there are other things coming along

and we have to be grateful to the people who woke us up

and who taught us to see these other things as i've

been taught so much by indigenous activists,

black lives matter, feminism

and...

a life blessedly spent among the gay men of San Francisco

and, you know etc...and the drag queens

and the dykes.

Have there been moments, are there things that you've written

that you look back on that you feel

gosh, I ...you know...

I had a blind spot here? or...

Are there things that you would, you wish

that retroactively or in retrospect you could go back and add more

context to? It's interesting because

there are a bunch of things, including my first book which was

about the visual artists who are part of beat culture, who I feel like

I kind of surfed a specific layer of

the culture and you go deeper...

you know I didn't have the

equipment to go after the massive misogyny of that era,

although some of it, as I was talking to

people of that generation was being targeted at me.

The memoir I have coming out that's in your lap

you know, takes care of the beats very

thoroughly as

people will presently see. So you revisited?

Yeah, so I feel like there were things I

understood better and that were clearer

you know, and I don't feel like any of those things is a misrepresentation

but it often feels like I both

have space to say things I might not have earlier

and that it's really

kind of when you tell a story you decide which layer

you're going and that i've been spending

a lot of time the last decade on the feminist layers,

the gender politics and

things which I was gentler about in some of

those earlier books. Interesting.

Of those 20 books

that are part of this

anthology, is there one

particular one that

stands out to you as the one you are most

proud of? Or that you feel...

If, you know... Oh Emma! Impossible, it's like choosing children!

I know, I know!

and it's really ...they did different things

like, my book 'Hope in the Dark'

I wrote in the bleak era

after the bombing in Iraq started and it was

written to

encourage people of what a writer friend of mine reminded me doesn't

to, you know pet people on the head, it means literally to

instill courage and

it played a role in people's own

political lives that was really important to me

my book 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'

is a much more introspective personal book

that has also been meaningful to people

and a lot of artists have made art in response to it

and stuff - so there's that.

You know, I love the swath

'Men Explain Things' has cut through the Universe

and....you know

and right now the book i'm writing

after the memoir comes out

that i'm working on now, that'll be out

possibly in 2021, maybe in 2022

I'm just like madly in love with,

but they all have a function and they all represented something -

all of them are something I really wanted to say

and I really wanted people to think about,

so, there's a couple that I think didn't turn out

great, but there's a lot of

you know...

I strongly disagree but...

[laughter] You just haven't read those ones yet! [laughter ] Okay...

I chose 'Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters'

as the book for my book club

'Our Shared Shelf' along with your take

on Cinderella.

The bit that I loved so much, well

I mean you talk about this across your work really - you quote George Orwell

in 'The Prevention of Literature' where he writes "totalitarianism

demands in fact,

the continuous alteration of the past and in

the long run, probably

demands a disbelief in the very existence of truth."

It seems