Jessi Hempel: The Closet of Inauthenticity
Jessi Hempel is a long-time media and technology journalist, an award-winning host of the podcast, Hello Monday, and author of the new memoir, The Family Outing. Her book is a profound telling of family dynamics, offering lessons on accepting one's truest self. Specifically, it’s the story of a family who comes out of the closet to embrace their queer identities. Even Jessi’s mother, who is straight, lives in a type of closet, Jessi explains, as she nearly became the victim of a serial killer as a teenager—this unconfronted trauma affects her entire family’s life. In our conversation, Jessi shares her journey to emphasize the detrimental side-effects of shame and the non-linear path to liberation.
Our conversation explores the value of authenticity and navigating parts of ourselves we have not yet learned to face. She believes that when we“step into ourselves,” culture has the capacity to shift, allowing us all to live more gracefully. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Jessi, congrats on your book. It's happening.
JESSI HEMPEL:
I know it is totally happening, and it feels a little different to me than the books that I usually hear you talk to people about, but I'm really glad that you are talking to me.
ELISE:
No, of course. I wanna talk to you. I feel like we had a very, we spent, in retrospect, maybe it was at the time, what has come to be a very meaningful day together in Miami.
JESSI:
Yes, we did Elise, I mean, truly very, very meaningful.
ELISE:
And it was funny when you were emailing me because I guess we were talking about how you needed to write a book. Is that right?
JESSI:
No, it was way weirder than that, Elise. And you make sense of it that you make. But during this weekend that we were at this event in Miami, and I, for one, it was my first event. You know, I go to a lot of conferences. It was my first conference I'd gone to after becoming a parent. So I hadn't been out for, you know I has a baby who was about a year. What I didn't know is that it would be the last event that I went to for a long, long time, because it was the end of January in 2020, or maybe even the beginning of February. I don't remember exactly. And we met, I was supposed to interview you on stage at this digital media conference, and we were a little bit different than a lot of the people there in that we were women. And that was, you know, like that was, par for the course. I covered technology. It wasn't that unusual, but I just found you absolutely delightful to talk to. But truthfully, we didn't talk that much because mostly I would run up to my hotel room where I was busily finishing this book proposal, and I didn't even know if I quite had the courage to submit the book proposal, but I just was like, Okay, I'm just gonna finish it this weekend while I'm away from my family. And I told no one. And then as we were leaving, you know, we were like, we should keep in touch. I really, really enjoyed talking to you. It was so great, and you were turning to me and you suddenly said, and you should write that book. And I was like, what the heck? And so that is why a couple of years later, I felt the need, you know to be like, so, you know, I did it.
ELISE:
So yes. Second on how interesting, strange, that conference was, that media conference, after we left the stage, I don't know if you remember this, but Scott Galloway was on and he was making fun of me, which all of it felt slightly hostile. And it was not only the day that the press embargo was lifted on that TV show that I was in, so I was like, really getting it. But I left you to go to Glennon who, this is, you know, months before Untamed came out. But we did her podcast interview, and it was her first press about her book. And I was so relieved to see her because I was having a vulnerability bath.
And I, you know, I've ghost written so many books, 12 books at this point. And I was talking to her. I had this idea in my mind that I wanted to write a book about envy, but I had never allowed myself to have a dream of writing my own book. I had always told my agent, I don't have a book in me. There's no book, no book. I'm not interesting, and I have no imagination. And, so I had spoken to Lori Gottlieb about, she was talking about Envy and how it shows us what we want. And then I asked Glennon about that, and she said to me, well, I think that it's because we don't even know that we have wants, we've been conditioned not to want anything at all. And I was like, oh, that hits. And I went to the airport, I had a sad meal at the Miami Airport, and I got it on the plane, and I emailed my brother, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna write a book. This is funny. I was like, I'm gonna write a book about envy. And he was like, That's, nobody wants to cultivate more envy in their life. And I was like, Okay, okay, okay. And then on that plane back to LA, the idea for my book came to me. So isn’t that funny. All in the span of 24 hours.
JESSI:
It all came together. And by the way, nobody wants to cultivate envy, but just saying the word envy makes me sweat a little bit.
ELISE:
I know.
JESSI:
Tell me something I don't know about envy, please? Because there just has to be more to know. So that makes, that makes all the sense in the world to me.
ELISE:
Yeah. You were not at the beginning of your journey. You were ready to send out the proposal, but that was the beginning of my proposal. I started working on it maybe two weeks later. Wow, and here we are.
JESSI:
Wait, so where are you on your journey?
ELISE:
My book is in production, Hallelujah. It comes out, I think officially May 23rd, 2023 as of yesterday. I mean, these things can always change. And as you know, it's like a production nightmare. Weren't you supposed to come out this summer?
JESSI:
No. Everything fell exactly as it should. And I just luck, I don't even want to say that out loud, because I know that's not really the way that it worked, but I didn't, you know, I didn't have much say over when my book would come out. You know, it was actually very originally, I think supposed to come out right after Labor Day, and then it bumped a few weeks. But weirdly, the book came out on my kids' birthday. So it feels like, you know, oh, you know, I guess this is the date for me. This is when I launch new ventures.
ELISE:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, this date, which I didn't choose, and it's not right on the money, but, and this is probably dark for some people, but my best friend, my brother's husband died and it'll be six years and two days from when my book comes out. And this feels very much like a Peter project, this whole book. So that also feels appropriate. Maybe it should be by his birthday, but his death day is very meaningful to me too. So these things align, and I love that I just did a little channeling for you right at that moment.
JESSI:
And that is truly how I think about it.
ELISE:
That's amazing. When you think about this book, which obviously is a very beautiful and thoughtful and loving excavation of your life. And so obviously I'll intro you, but it's called The Family Outing for a reason, right? Your mother came out of her own closet. I loved that part at the end where you talk about how we're all in a closet. I think that's so true, right? Particularly now, but did you write the proposal? Did you start the book as a therapeutic process of trying to make sense of the threads or how this might have been obvious to other people and wasn't obvious to you all?
JESSI:
Well, I think, you know, what happened is shortly after I saw you, it was March of 2020. And everything I thought I understood about myself shifted overnight, right? I was a professional working in New York City, had a very busy life, big extrovert. And then I was somewhat afraid of losing my job, living in my wife's parents upstairs, you know, deep introvert, just overnight. And in that time, I did that thing that I think a lot of people did for the first couple of weeks where I like Zoom partied my ass off, right? Like I Zoomed yoga, and I Zoomed cocktail houred. And after all that zooming, very quickly, I was just done. And I wanted to speak to no one, not really even my friends and days would sort of pass in a blur, but I was talking to my family even more than I talked to them, which was kind of a lot.
I was Zooming with them and talking with them on the phone pretty much every day. And we were quarantining in four different states in five different homes. And I thought, Well, that's weird. Because if you'd asked me 20 years ago, I think I would've told you I didn't like my family all that much. We had a pretty difficult time of it. So how is it that now these years later, we’re close? And so I'd already started on the process of writing a book proposal that was a little bit more academic and intellectual and in approach in some ways where I was actually interested in fundamental questions about, well, you know, why are we all queer and what does that mean? I stopped being interested in that as much and became much more interested in relationally. What did the fact of our coming out do to the way we were able to know each other? And could I try to trace that over the course of two decades? And the answer is sort of, maybe the answer is the book, I guess.
ELISE:
Yeah. So interesting. Follow me, this is sort of tangentially related, but I was listening to Anderson Cooper's new podcast about grief, which like, don't put on mascara and listen to the podcast. He was interviewed a good friend of mine, BJ Miller, a palliative care physician, on the third episode, I think. And they both had siblings who died by suicide. And one of the threads of the conversation was, I thought I knew my sibling, right? Like, did I know them at all? Et cetera. And this pain of that, were we ever close, was that a delusion? And it's so interesting. You know, my brother is gay. He came out, he sort of forcibly outed or accidentally outed himself in at the very end of boarding school. And the rumor mill got to me before he got to me. And I remember feeling so upset, like, so sad, not that my brother was gay, but that he didn't feel like he could tell me. And that I heard from four gossipy high school students. And obviously my brother's alive we're very close, closer than we've ever been. But this, like, was it all a lie? It's interesting how it's really not in my business. I don't actually care about my brother's sex life at all. But it is interesting how these huge questions of identity shake the foundation of what we think we know about our siblings.
JESSI:
I think that's so true. And I think it's because they actually shake the core of what we think we know about ourselves. I mean, growing up, I understood myself first and foundationally as somebody with a younger sister, and then another younger sister. And then I remember that when my brother came out to me as transgender, by the time he came out to me, I'd already been out as a gay woman for five, six years. I lived in the Bay Area. I fancied myself very progressive. I had a shaved head. I had trans friends. And I remember he called me up and he said, you know, when I come to your grad school graduation, I'm gonna be using male pronouns, and I would appreciate it if you could call me Evan now. And I immediately minimized it. I was like, Evan, I'm your big sister. I know you, you were wearing a dress at Christmas time. I remember that dress. I remember what it looked like. I know this is just a phase. And now I look back and I just feel so sad for my poor brother, and also disappointed in myself because you would think I, having come out, having asked the world to step up and give me more in a better reaction than that, you would think that I would've gotten it right. Right? That I would've, instead of immediately making it about me shirking back in fear and therefore minimizing his experience, that I would've found this space to say, just simply tell me more. But my first reaction was to just shut him down. And I think that's actually often what we do, because when we learn that the most fundamental aspects of the people who are closest to us, and by closest, I don't even mean emotionally closest, I mean like physical proximity, like our parents, our siblings. When we learn that their sense of self actually is misaligned with our view of them, we have to then reshift how we think of ourselves. That's a lot of work.
ELISE:
It is a lot of work. And I mean, this was a while ago, too. So far less cultural context than we have now, or understanding, or conversation, or support. So I don't know. I'm sure similarly I would've been like, I don't understand this and I don't know what you could possibly mean, right? The cognitive dissonance, I feel like particularly then, I would've probably had the exact same reaction.
JESSI:
Yeah. And how do you move forward with it? And my brother, as a trans person, was asking me to take an expansive view of what that meant. My brother, even then, even my brother at 22 years old knew that eventually he wanted to carry a baby. And so I, being a fairly binary thinker, and I want to take everybody back to what 2003 felt like for you. 2003 is almost 20 years ago, Elise, right? And what culture was like in 2003 and what you saw around you in 2003. I was like, well, how can you be trans and want to carry a baby? I mean, isn't that the most feminine thing that one could want to do with one's physical body? And my brother's response always was like, you're so narrow minded here. Why can't I be both? He would always turn the question back on me and bless him, he had so much grace, he never shut me out or got angry at me when I would ask these questions. But his answer always was like, Why do you need to define me? And of course, now, in 2022, where we are now, this idea of being non-binary, this idea of being expansive in what gender even means, and being the one to make the call yourself and centering your own experiences, it's something that we talk about, but not then.
ELISE:
And we don't really understand it. I mean, it's almost like an idea of androgyny or, like above gender. It's interesting, to me too, as sort of an outsider to this conversation, but watching it unfold and trying to understand it's this like, I am superseding gender, I'm above gender, I'm non-binary, do not define me. And then the language, we have such inadequate language, but instead acknowledging that there's this desire to define the two seem at odds, I guess, or it's a paradox to me. Our language is inadequate. And so, does that make sense? And then the way that we're trying to be so specific about the language, about something that we cannot actually define.
JESSI:
Yeah. It's a mess, Elise. Right? And I think even, you know, so I've got a son and a daughter. My son turned four this week. He's little, and he has started pre-K last year and had a non-binary teacher. And so I was like, you know, okay, I’ve got to get their pronouns down. We're gonna go with they/them, I'm going to get it right. And I really don't want Jude to mess this up. So I sat down Jude and I told Jude, you know, this is your teacher. His name is so and so, and this is your teacher, their name is so and so. And I only had to tell Jude once, and there was never a moment where my three year old thought about it.
ELISE:
Couldn't get it. Yeah.
JESSI:
Got it. Right. Like, snapped right into it and never had a problem understanding it. And I think that I have grown up in this culture so deeply entrenched in the binary, that while I may be proficient in the ideas that are coming to the surface right now, I will never be fluent in them. It's like I can see the revolution and I want to make space for the revolution, and I once understand that it is not mine.
ELISE:
I love that, Jesse. That's beautiful. And I agree, I'm with you. Where the language trips me up. I mean, I'm sure I mess up all over the place, and I'm not aware of it, how do I, not even dodge the conversations, I think that conversation is so fascinating and interesting and important for all of us. And as someone who is a more masculine woman, won't surprise you, I get misgendered all the time. Which is interesting to me. I mean, it doesn't affect me. It doesn't hurt me. I don't really care. But I also similarly am like, as a culture, why do we have gendered language? I mean, it's not as bad as French, but why do we have different words for things, whether you're a man or a woman, and why does that matter to us so much? And how do we get above that? You know?
JESSI:
Yeah. Well you let me know when you figured that out. I know I’d love to figure that out.
ELISE:
I'm trying to write a book, or I wrote a book about, in part, about the balance of masculine and feminine and divine masculine and feminine, and what it would be like for those energies to be balanced within each of us. Because I think that's what we want. Right? You know, your brother wanted to embody the feminine and care. He wants to be a nurturing parent. And it's unfortunate that that biologically is relegated to people who have the anatomy of a woman, but men have that capacity too.
JESSI:
Yeah, deeply they have that capacity and like, and so much it's the work that we choose to do, it is the communities we put ourselves in. You know, even as a gay woman, so many people said to me, oh my goodness, you wrote a book in the same year you had a baby. And my response to them would often be jokingly, well, you know, I have a secret weapon and my secret weapon, it's that I have a wife <laugh>. And, also it's true. And I wish I lived in a world where it was less true. And I do know some incredible artist, female friends, one in particular who have male spouses who assume the sort of head of household role within the domestic sphere. But it really is not the norm even in my very progressive circle, in my blue state life.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, but hopefully, I mean, that's obviously what we're being called to do. So let's talk about your parents and your mom. Your mom was the most fascinating character. I mean, I know she's not a character, I know she's your mom, but her story, and you obviously explore this, and I'm not a psychologist, but reading about her early experience, her glance with a pretty incredible danger. Right? And then the way, you know, you tell it, which is a very understandable, your dad presented himself as like a perfectly viable, lovely, smart, handsome alternative to living with her parents. But you also have to imagine when something like that happens, and I know she's done trauma work, but that she must have come to distress herself and her own intuition so dramatically, right?
JESSI:
Completely right. So there's my mom, and she's living in 1960s, Midwest, right? Ypsilanti, Michigan. And during the period that she is a teenager, there is a murderer in town who is killing basically people in her community. So it is the assistant art teacher at the high school. It is the deacon at the church's secretary at work, all people that she has a direct connection to. And this happens over a course of years, and people get more and more frightened. And all of the men in town become volunteer police officers, my grandfather included. And you know, all of the young women, particularly if they look anything like the women who are being targeted, i.e., exactly like my mom, They're encouraged to keep curfew. They're encouraged to be careful and not go with strangers. And my mom's life is unfolding against this backdrop. And even if you didn't have her experience, I think you were shaped by this if you grew up at this time in Ypsilanti.
Then my mom, at the place where she's working, she has a crush on a guy, and the crush begins to be realized, and they start kind of flirting with each other, and they're kind of maybe about to start seeing each other. They talk on the phone a lot. Right. And Mom goes to hear him play music, and then, it comes out that he is somehow involved in the killings. And I won't give it away exactly, because it's actually worth the read. But what this does immediately for my mom is it terrifies her. And it also makes her stop trusting herself and her sense of judgment in any way. And her parents who loved her very much in the middle of the 20th century, when I think that this was the norm in parenting, said to her, This is horrible. You're never gonna talk to him again. Please don't talk about this again. Let's just not talk about this at all ever again. And so she didn't, she put it away. She met my father, the effeminate son of a minister. She settled down. She had me.
ELISE:
Her pride and joy.
JESSI:
I don't think that she anticipated I would go on to write a book about my childhood. So I don't know, talk to her next week.
ELISE:
And it seems like, you know, and then your father goes on to ultimately come out right after you.
JESSI:
Well, and I'll say, you know, my childhood was a childhood in the closet. I had some good things. I had some bad things, like living in the closet is, you know, not always terrible. It's simply not the greatest expression of, of who we have the capacity to become, I think. But for my parents, you know, as my father went along in my childhood, he became more and more withdrawn and kept trying to do the right thing, was closeted even to himself. This was a secret he was keeping even from himself for most of my childhood. But it made him kind of a lousy partner. Right. My mother's experience was just a very, very lonely experience. Her life looked on the outside exactly like it was supposed to look, we lived in a nice community. She was married to a lawyer, or, you know, we looked great on a Christmas card, but it felt cavernous, just vacant and left with so much time on her own, she really struggled not to let her memory present her with things to work on. And that led her to be very depressed throughout my childhood. So really until the moment that our life spontaneously erupted, and we all came out, things were just dark and stayed, felt like a very long winter.
ELISE:
And you felt the weight of that depression, most specifically.
JESSI:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I reminded her of my dad. My dad and I, we're just alike. We just, we talk alike. We have the same annoying way that we ask the same question over and over again. We’re just alike. And my dad was really troublesome for her, but to really confront that would be to shake the foundation of their marriage, which was not something that she could envision doing. And so instead, she just got very mad at me all of the time. And, that, you know, grew to become emotionally manipulative. It occasionally was violent, never anything, all that significant. But mostly I just didn't understand why I was targeted and nobody else did either, really.
ELISE:
Right. Yeah. And as your dad was distancing and being avoidant, did you, I mean, you write about this, but it didn't read to me like you felt like you had to carry the secret of being gay for a long time, or queer. But was that a burden for you?
JESSI:
I mean, look, I kind of knew all along that I was gay, but in the eighties and nineties, I didn't have a term for that. There were lots of gay people around me, we just never talked about it. So, like much later on, I learned that the church organist was gay, and that my mom's guitar student was gay, but we just never named it. And so I just was like, well, I'm just gonna hide this part of me. I'm just gonna hide it. But then, you know, I turned 18, I went off to college. I landed at Brown University where I had lots of positive role models of people who had come out of the closet. And it took me about five minutes to be like, Well, this is pretty good. another five minutes to shave my head. And I was like, off to the races. you know, I was very lucky that I had a great experience. And, Elise, I told my parents in a car on the way home from college, everybody was seat belted in. We were looking straight ahead. It seemed like a good enough time. And I remember I was in the backseat, and my mom in the passenger seat started crying. And then she said, well, you know, I think your cousin's gay. He's very emotional. He was 11 at the time. <laugh> Like, okay mom. And then she was like, you know, I totally love you. We're gonna figure this out. I just, I love you no matter what. Which, by the way, is totally a right thing to say. Like, when you don't know what to say, just go back there. You know, my dad said nothing. And the next morning he came into the kitchen and he poured himself a bowl of cereal, and I was eating breakfast. And he said, oh, you know, I thought I was gay once, too. And I said, really, Dad? What happened? And he said, oh, you know, you make choices in life. And I married your mom. And then he walked out of the house. <laugh>. I was like, oh, oh, dad's gay.
ELISE:
So you knew then?
JESSI:
You know, I suspected then that was the moment where I was like, Oh, you know, he did get me the, like six CD Barbara Streisand collection when he got me my first CD player. I was like, Oh, there's a lot to unpack here. And it's very possible, but still, it didn't seem to me like anything could shake the foundation of my parents' marriage, which I didn't really understand. But I didn't understand that much about life plus, I was an adolescent. I wasn't interested in many people apart from myself, deeply. But three years later, my sister was home from college and she was messing around on the computer and she tripped into some messages for my father that revealed that actually he had male lovers, definitely online, maybe in real life. And that was the moment when he basically got kicked out of the closet. That's really the best term for it. He tried real hard in that moment to, you know, deny it, to put the genie back in the bottle. Terrible metaphor. Didn’t work anyways. Eventually, you know, my parents' marriage was in question. They went to therapy and that started the chain reaction where the therapy brought up for my mom, the things that she hadn't spoken about. And she finally had the opportunity to do the work around the events from her adolescence, which my dad didn't even really know about before then. And then, you know, in that period too, my sister came out as bisexual. I did the thing I do very well, I minimized it. I was like, Oh, Katya, you just wanna be like everybody else.She married a woman. She has a great life right now. She has a couple of kids. She's very happily settled in Oregon. And then of course, my brother came out as transgender. And all that change really happened in a very short period of time, or at least did initiated. But like to me, the most interesting thing is what happened after that as we all did our own work on ourselves. How we were able to, you know, to know each other better and differently and to move past things that seemed like you could never move past them.
ELISE:
Yeah. One of the parts that I thought was so touching is, you know, your parents determining that they were going to stay married and that your dad was gonna explore his gayness, which obviously didn't last for that long, But you write, “Mom's permission here is crucial. Dad accepts it and he begins to attend. He drives to Boston twice a month for more than a year. Through the group, he learns just how many original approaches to marriage people can take. At the time, I don't think to look for a support group for mom, a shared community of women whose husbands are coming out. That's the thing about coming out as queer, it's hard, but you're also entering into a community. There are people there to catch you if you look for them. When you are the spouse of someone who is coming out, it's hard and you are being left.”
I thought that was so, you know, throughout the book, really feeling like with and for your mom and this idea of everyone entering into their real identity, or new identity, or coming closer to themselves, right? And this idea, I thought was so beautifully stated of you guys weren't leaving her, but her husband's leaving her and the very fabric of their relationship in many ways. Again, I think we culturally, we go straight to, oh, then it was all a lie, right? And that's not true either and love is complex and about so much more than sex, but yeah, I really like feel for your mom in that moment.
JESSI:
You know it took me a beat to get to that. And when I got to that, it felt like the most true thing about the book and about my mother's character and about what it is to be the straight person in a relationship and which one person leaves, because they're queer, which is that you didn't ask for the reinvention here. It's being foisted upon you and you don't get a club and you don't get a rainbow flag. And even if you do get a club, because I'm sure actually if I'd looked around I could have maybe found a support group for my mom, it's not a club you actually want to stay in for that long. It's people who share something that you don't like about yourself and that you don't understand about yourself. And I really felt for my mom and I still do. You know, at the end of the book, I just basically, because she's got this point of view that is so persistent that not to include it would be not to tell you the whole story about my family, which is just that she was somehow wronged here and she still is angry about that.
And her anger needs to be recorded. And I, as her daughter, I'm like, yeah, but can't be, can't get over it? It's been 20 years. So much of your life that you've made, made since then, and there are so many things that make you happy. I don't understand why you still have to carry this anger. And then toward the end of the process of reporting the book, I finally got it. I didn't have to understand it for it to be true for her. That she was angry. She was very, very angry, and that is her truth.
ELISE:
And is she, not that you understand necessarily, but is she most angry at your father or at herself?
JESSI:
Her expression of it is that she is most angry at my father. My father is a very convenient person for her to be angry at because she doesn't have to see him. They live in different states across the country, each other, and have very few reasons to interact anymore. You know, do I think that she might be angry at herself as well? Sure. But like, again, oldest child, armchair expert. I have a friend's kid who has a name for this. She calls it the main character syndrome. My main character syndrome.
ELISE:
Yeah.
JESSI:
Have you heard of this?
ELISE:
That we are center to ourselves. Don’t we all?
JESSI:
Always.
ELISE:
Yeah. And this might be too dramatic of a reading though, but going back to Ypsilanti and your mom and the music, the night that she goes to see him play, she goes save her own life in some ways. I mean, who can say what's to happen? But her intuition, at some point she was like, I'm going to go, I'm not going to stay untill the end of this set and maybe kiss this boy who I have a crush on. Right? She leaves.
JESSI:
She does, she does. And I think it's worth noting, right? She goes, he invites her to hear music all the time. She finally goes, she gets a friend, they get into this bar where he's playing, they listen, it's getting late, it's getting close to curfew, which I believe is around nine o'clock. Then she knows her parents will be waiting up for her at home, or she uses that excuse really, she just gets a sense that she shouldn't stay to the end. She doesn't need to find out what's going to happen. And that, that works out for her. But the thing about that Elise, right, is that, you know, when you are a woman, a young woman in the world, you are vulnerable and crediting one's intuition for saving one in a moment like that suggests the opposite is possible as well, that should it have gone the other way, it would be somehow your fault. And with my mom in particular, you know, she perseverated over the last woman who was murdered, who is a woman who got on the back of a guy's motorcycle for a ride and then was killed. And she's just so angry at this woman, and she is angry at this woman because to think about it in any other way would suggest that we all as women in the world, and particularly as young women are just vulnerable out in the world, living our lives. And that bad things can happen to us and we may not be able to control it. And the truth of that is just too much to stomach.
ELISE:
Yeah, so important and such a strange thing, this life, Right? Particularly and maybe they're not more complex, but as you're living your life against a backdrop of so much social programming, right, particularly your brother, but you as well, clearly your father, particularly in the scenes with his dad were stunning, I thought, we can talk about that in a minute, but that sort of lean back or lean forward, am I supposed to drive this or is this supposed to unfold? Is one of the most difficult questions in life, right? Like for your mom, it's your dad, who sort of falls into her lap, right, As this exit strategy or this good choice or this optionality. And at a certain point it's like, when do you lean into your, I mean, so much of it is a crapshoot, right? But we're also being asked to more and more create or figure out who we really are in the context of what the world would suggest that we should be. And it's easier now, but you can sense your mom's lean back or hope and a prayer, right? Of like, let this unfold in a way that is safe.
JESSI:
Yeah, yeah. Entirely. You know, I do hope we get better at making decisions in the moment as we grow as a culture to know ourselves more authentically, which is what I believe is happening across the board right now in North America, at least. That we are being invited to step into more authentic ways of knowing ourselves and that this gives us better tools to make decisions as we go. But we will still trip along and live our lives in real time, right, we won't conduct them from some future version of ourselves. And so I don't know that we'll make better choices or even though that there are better choices for us to make, we'll just become more graceful as we live.
ELISE:
Let's talk about your grandfather's name was Ed, right? And at the end of Ed's life. And he was a, was he a minister?
JESSI:
He was a Methodist minister.
ELISE:
And at the end of his life and your dad is making his trips to see his dad and all of these people, you know, just the, the torture of those events of people who are around in prayer circle with Ed and this desire, right? It seemed like, I don't know if it was a compulsion, a desire to tell his dad the truth about who he is and then ultimately not having that chance and deciding that it's the more ethical thing. I think those were your words or his words. The more ethical choice was that your grandfather just didn't want to know. Such an interesting and heartbreaking moment of like, wanting to be seen and then recognizing someone doesn't really wanna see you like that.
JESSI:
Yeah. You know, my grandfather knew his son. My grandfather knew his son when he sent his son off to Christian boarding school in order to try to make him straighter in the eighth grade. And that probably wasn't going to change. And my dad felt like that was true. My dad was 50 years old when he came out. My grandfather was already well into his late seventies and into his early eighties. He had Parkinson's. He wasn't healthy. Even in his sort of poor health, he would go and campaign pick it at the local bookstore because they had LGBTQ literature.
ELISE:
Wow.
JESSI:
And so you can guess, and I certainly think that maybe part of that was just his extreme reaction to understanding this truth about his son, because I just believe intuitively he did understand it. And I think that my father understood that he was never gonna get the reaction that he wanted from his father. And the thing that he wrestled with is did he need to come out to his dad anyways for him? Did he need to tell his dad his truth so that he felt absolved in some way? And my dad decided he didn't need that. This was an older man, this man was gonna die. If my dad shared this with Ed, it would be very unsettling for Ed. Ed probably wouldn't accept it. He never accepted that my dad divorced. And they would only grow less close and you could say that that closeness was already tainted by this big secret that existed. But my dad would only know him less in those last few years of his life. I don't think that my dad had fully come to a sense of what he was going to do before he lost his dad. He was pretty close. He was pretty certain that he wasn't going to say anything. But then of course my grandfather died. And I think what is most relevant is the fact that he doesn't regret his decision at all now.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, you have this line in the end, “His piece won't come from Ed anyhow. Dad's acknowledging that he will find it on his own,” which is about powerful statement, right? Because so often we seek peace from other people or we want that validation or that recognition and this idea of, I mean, certainly your grandfather could have given it to him in some way, but his refusal to accept it wouldn't have helped, I would imagine. I don't know.
JESSI:
I mean, it just would've probably been more torture, right? Like my father, when he visited his, his father, often there would be people from the church praying in the living room, and his father would always announce his son had arrived and then announce his version of my dad's identity, oh, you know, in the case of the chapter in the book, “Today is his wedding anniversary,” at which point my dad would say, “Well, yeah, that's true, but we're divorced.” And grandpa would say, “Well, no, but, but still today is an important day because it is the anniversary of his marriage.” You know, that doesn't make a person feel great, Right? It's terrible. Right. And, so how do you weather that? Well, hopefully you have a therapist on call and you've got your best friend in the wings and you have somebody to buy you a stiff drink and you like do all the things, you know, to take good care of yourself and be gentle to yourself in the process. And I think that my dad did do a good job of that. But you're not going to get what you want in that situation if you demand that that person step up and accept you for who you are.
ELISE:
Right. You know, recognizing that you, your family and the way that you describe it sort of in this distancing, avoidant way, I loved, I loved Ron your dad's husband who passed and the way that he seemed to teach you all in some ways, or at least you and your siblings and maybe your dad, like how to be a loving family. Right? I thought the way that you wrote about him and the way he gave you this mantra: “You sit next to your mother at her sister's funeral.” Another way of saying it, you show up. Will you tell us a little bit about Ron?
JESSI:
Oh, he was so great. Yeah. He was my dad's, um, my dad's first husband after he divorced. He came into our life a few years later and Ron had lived his entire life with HIV, had been diagnosed in 1987. And when we met him, which was, I don't know, maybe 2006, he, you know, he lived his whole life thinking he was going to die and he kept not dying and the drugs came out and then he started living and he felt like he had a second chance at life. But as a result of this, he had never had a family and he really wanted children. And so when he fell in love with my dad, he also inherited the three of us grown up kids and we were like the bonus prize. I would even say we were actually the prize. And my dad was the extra after a little bit. I mean, first of all, he was the kind of guy that everybody loves, but also we started to see our family the way that he saw it, which was amazing, just so lucky to have children, to have sisters, to have a father. And it was contagious. And also he was the dad we always wanted, he picked up the phone every time we called, and he wanted to hear every single thing. And he showered us with attention. And he asked about our emotional lives and then he died. And I say it like that because, well, first of all, that was really not fair. He, you know, he eventually succumbed to cancer that he got from the original cocktail, which was very, very strong in the nineties. And so a lot of people developed this liver cancer that eventually killed him. But the other thing is that he died before we had to have any of the rough things that eventually happened when you're close to people. Right. We were still so thoroughly in the honeymoon phase of being in love with Ron and then we lost him.
ELISE:
But his legacy is important in the sense that it seems like he, maybe you already knew, but well, maybe not, right? This is before you met your wife, like before you understood what it is to be in a secure functioning relationship. She forced you into a different way, lovingly. But I loved the short lens into Ron. You weren’t close to your aunt, Right? Who died, and you were like, I don't want to go. And then he was like, No, no, no, no, you go, you go, you sit by your mother's side at her sister's funeral, you show up.
JESSI:
Yeah. I mean, I just remember that funeral because it was, it was more a function of it was $500 for the ticket, which at that point in my life seemed like so much money and I was going to have to miss work. And all of those reasons seemed like reasons not to go. And if I didn't go, nobody was going to say, well, you know what, Jesse should have been there and she wasn't there. It wasn't the kind of thing where somebody would say that. And so I remember talking it over with my dad. Who was you? Just very like, well, you could, you know, you could go, or you could not go and then Ron was like, Oh no, the answer is so obvious, you go. Yeah. And I've never regretted it by the way. It's been, you know, more than a decade. And I still feel so grateful that I got to sit next to my mom.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well I want to keep you on your book schedule. I loved your book, Thank you for writing it, and you're a great writer, so it's just fun to read these snippets and little moments into your life.
JESSI:
Thank you. I have to say, I love being in conversation with you. And I actually follow you and I listen to your podcast not every time, but sometimes because I just, I so appreciate the conversation and it makes me feel like I am in this continual conversation with you, and I appreciate it.
ELISE:
Thanks, Jesse. Well, I can't wait to see what more comes from you.
JESSI:
I'll talk to you again. I mean, definitely in May of 2023, but maybe before that.
ELISE:
Yes. Okay. I hope so.
JESSI:
Take care.
ELISE:
So interesting talking to Jessi, who I adore, not only because the trajectory of her family is fascinating, but that she is such an objective observer in some ways. And she talks a lot about, she calls it, “The Project,” and the way she is fact checking herself throughout the “reporting” of her own life story to ensure it is true, but memory, as we know, is nebulous. And we are often left with the emotions and the feelings and what’s not said, which if you listened to the episode with Galit Atlas, is passed on. We whisper it into each others ears. So all of that trauma or unease that her mother is carrying, and what her father refuses to acknowledge, even as his deepest truth about his identity, is passed on to the kids and certainly makes them question their own reality, which is why I think Jessi is so attuned to fact checking her own story. She writes, “When I was a child, I believed there were things I couldn’t reveal about myself. Things that made me despicable, unloveable, these were notions I inherited from my own parents, who had embodied these beliefs without understanding where they came from. Deep self-knowledge wasn’t a mainstay of our culture. Nobody taught me to listen honestly to others. No one taught me to listen well to myself.” Thanks again for listening.
