Minka Kelly: Reconciling with the Past
While Minka Kelly is most known for playing Lyla Garrity, the All American cheerleader on the hit, Emmy award winning TV show Friday Night Lights, that’s definitely not the most remarkable thing about her. And this role, where Minka played a spoiled, beautiful and rich cheerleader is almost diametrically opposed to Minka’s actual childhood, grounded in trauma and neglect. Minka’s mother was a stripper who struggled with addiction, and Minka couch-surfed her way through her life, unmoored and often untended. At one point, they even lived in a storage unit. Minka tells this story in her New York Times bestselling memoir, Tell Me Everything: A Memoir, which manages something rare: It is both an honest and unflinching revelation of a very challenging and abusive childhood and a love letter to her single mom. This is very difficult to do and a testament to Minka’s strength, resilience, and desire to heal—her willingness to hold her mother close while acknowledging everything she did not receive as a child. Let’s get to our conversation.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Minka, how are you doing? How many weeks out are you from publication?
MINKA KELLY: May 2nd? Where are we? It's been almost a month.
ELISE: Well, congratulations. I just saw you on the monthly audiobook bestseller, so that's hard. All of these lists are hard, how do you feel? Do you have sort of postpartum or feel like you've taken a vulnerability bath, or is it relieving?
MINKA: All of the above. And also congratulations to you too. I'm devouring your book. I love it so much, and as I said, I'm such a huge fan of yours, so it's no surprise. But I did have a bit of a vulnerability hangover at first. I went through all the emotions of, oh my God, why did I do this? What am I doing? You know, spending my entire career being so private about my personal and private life and to then just giving it all up so intimately was scary. But also once it was done, I feel free of all of it, you know?
ELISE: Yeah and I read Monica's piece and The Cut, and it was great to see how sort of lovingly it feels, I haven't read all of your press, but that people have been holding your story, and I found as, someone not nearly as visible as you, but when I am really honest or when I'm very revealing about myself, and then there's no distance, right? There's no chasm between who you are and who you're presenting yourself as. Like the closer that distance gets, it feels like the more protected you are because there's nothing you're guarding and there's nothing to exploit there.
MINKA: Hmm. Wow. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean, that's the whole thing, right? The world makes up their mind about who we are based on whatever it is they see about them, the choices they make, and they write their own narratives. And I feel like I have intimately known what that's like, based on who I've dated or not, so getting to tell my own story and write my own narrative, feels like I am closing that gap that you speak of. And, and going, well, if you're gonna write a narrative about me, might as well have the whole story. And that has felt really nice, to feel like, okay. And, so now you, now you can make up your own mind now that you have the whole story.
ELISE: And there's something, I mean, there's so much, I'm sure you're having this experience with readers who feel very seen in the pages of your book and the sort of reflection of, oh, we're the same person. I mean, as much as they can't be the same as you, but also sort of like, oh, we're the same person, which I would imagine is also in its own way, relieving. I know you write about that as the motivation of writing this book. Like, this is my childhood, and this is where I am now.
MINKA: Yeah. One of the things that really helped me was I have a coach and she reminds me that, you know, shame needs an empathetic witness, and when we share our stories with other women, or when I had shared my stories with people along the way, that gave me the courage to finally share it on this level, each time I was met with someone who didn't shame me in response to some of the stories or even better said, oh my God, me too, we’re the same. I, you know, we don't feel like we're bad anymore. And I think we're all just sort of as sick as our secrets. And the more that we can share these things, the more we realize our secrets are what keep us so disconnected. And, I just, I guess, became addicted to the feeling of being connected to more and more people. And so this response of so many women reaching out to me and even men saying that we're the same, and thank you for making them feel seen. And it's an overwhelmingly really beautiful feeling and reassures me that I did do the right thing in sharing all of this in the way that I did.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, I commend you for telling a really complicated story with complicated characters in what felt overwhelmingly to me, like a love letter to your mother and a deep and very human embrace. Like I can tell, and I, as a writer, I know how hard it is to get closer and closer and closer and closer and how, you know, I have a tendency too to you move right to defensiveness typically, right? When you're like I don't wanna expose some of these core wounds or these things that would make people judge her. Like there's sort of that protective and desire to tell the truth and I felt like you did it really beautifully. And, it's very hard, I think particularly in a culture, which we can get to sort of like drama triangles and victimhood and it's very difficult.
So I commend you to hold someone very closely while also giving an honest reflection of what it was like without rushing to, I mean, you were a victim, of course, I don't wanna like diminish that, but the complexity that you bring to it and the way that you have transcended it or moved it is really difficult to tell the truth and to also say, this is what happened. And this is not, it's defining, but it's not, you're not stuck in a trap. So congratulations. Very hard to do.
MINKA: Thank you so much. I worked really hard to do that very thing, so I appreciate that so much because, and even the word victim makes me uncomfortable.
ELISE: I know.
MINKA: But it's hard to deny that, I guess at an age where you don't have control. Some of those, some of the things I experienced, I was victimized. Sure.
ELISE: It's so hard, but it's okay. We all move in, in and out of victimhood, and we can talk about that too.
MINKA: Well, I think to be a victim insinuates that you don't have control. Right. And so I'm very much in control now and I work so hard to make sure you know, one that I'm in control and also to surrender control, which are both very important, but you know, I just I'm not a victim now. I'm not a victim anymore. And, I worked really hard to make sure that I didn't tell this story from a place of being a victim. And also to make sure that I didn't villainize my mom for making a lot of really poor choices, but to also see the humanness in her and maybe why people make poor choices and maybe aren't the best parents, because maybe they're just also ill-equipped on their own and, and did the best that they could.
I don't think anything is binary or good or bad. It is complex. It was hard and it was, there was trauma, but there was also deep love and fun and so that was really difficult. And, and I mean, I had a therapist that I talk about in the book tell me that my mother didn't love me and that she was bad and I refused to accept that. So the thing I asked the most often, every time I would share my writing or how I was going was, what do you think of her? I don't wanna make her bad cause she wasn't bad. So thank you for noticing that and acknowledging.
ELISE: Yeah. I work sometimes with this woman who coaches the Enneagram and she works also with this conscious leadership group idea of below the line and above the line. And below the line is the drama triangle, which is victim, villain, hero. And then above the line, those ideas are transformed into creator, coach, and challenger. And, but what's really beautiful about the work is that we sort of move within the drama triangles in our life. And at times your mom was the villain. At times she was the hero. She was the victim. And this is all very natural. This is normal. And so Courtney's point is that it's not about moving beyond the drama triangle and only living again, like suppressing what's bad and hard, and so that you can just be the creator or the coach. It's to move between the two and be conscious of sort of the dynamics that you're caught in. And it's not to, to that end, you know, you mentioned about your grandma's passing and sort of the pact that they had that they were gonna raise you together and how that obviously didn't work out. And then you mentioned your grandfather at the end, and in the sense of being the same as you,. I used to watch procedures at the hospital. My mom was a nurse. She really wanted me to be a nurse so that I would have job security, could work anywhere, honorable career. So I also was like, oh yeah, I could scoop vomit out of someone's mouth. I'm not at all freaked out by the body. But you only mentioned your grandfather then, but as, as you've lived this book and you ask your mom these questions at the end, which obviously she can't answer and maybe couldn't have answered in this life, do you feel like you're getting clarity or getting closer to your whole line, all of your ancestors, like, have you come closer to sort of her childhood in any way, or is that inaccessible to you?
MINKA: I think that's what I've tried to do as best I can is get as close to or as like intimate with her childhood and her up bringing to the best of my abilities with as little information or that I have. I'm not in touch with any of her family members, so I can't ask a lot of questions and I never knew the questions to ask when I had her. But with the information that I do have, I do feel like, you know, and also this is so much therapy that I've had, that have helped me with this. You know, I mean, I did Hoffman process, which is all about getting in touch with what made your parents and all of the pain and patterns that were passed down to them that are then passed down to you and, and so then you can find forgiveness for them. And that is a big part of this whole healing journey and this book and making peace with my mom. You mentioned earlier about the hard parts and you said something just in the beginning of this about facing the hard parts and it just made me think of, you know, how programmed we are to resist the darkness. And how important it's not to resist the darkness and the hard parts, but to stay curious about them. And that has been a big lesson for me to embrace all of that and be curious about the whole spectrum of all of those levels. Also how important it is to be cautious of when you do learn these things.I went through a process of every time I would learn something, I would wanna be the, the teacher. I have to resist being like, well, do you know what that means? That that actually means this? And, and have you unpacked that? It's like, be careful because not everyone is, is ready to unpack things that you think they need to unpack. And so, I've also had to learn to go to, to bite my tongue and learn how to love the people in my life with this acronym that I just learned for love being let others voluntarily evolve. It helps me bite my tongue when I feel like I have something to teach someone.
ELISE: Yeah, that's a good acronym, that's a hard lesson.
MINKA: It really is.
ELISE: It's really hard. Yeah. I also like to fix and like to be the hero in that drama triangle. I like to come in and make everything better.
MINKA: Exactly.
ELISE: When you think about your mom, what I also thought was really beautiful and I know you've in some ways come back to this and you can think about sort of temple priestesses and the cult of ISIS and sort of the sacredness of sexuality and, and sexual dance, it didn't seem, at least in your telling, like your mom felt victimized or traumatized necessarily by her line of work. I’m sure there were really bad moments. I'm not trying to gloss over it, but it seemed like she was more a victim of poverty and addiction and that she actually really enjoyed the creative act of the bad lady dance made me laugh. But that she didn't hate what she did. It's complicated and I know. It's again, we get into very tricky ground in this country about what's joyful, embodiment and what is taking advantage of vulnerable women. But it's nuance, right? As all of these things are, it's complex. Like how do you think about your mom and her relationship to her trade?
MINKA: You know, she tried so hard to, it's funny, I'm like contradicting myself in my own mind before I even get my thought out, just because of how complex it is. But while I did feel a lot of the burden of her pain and stress, and heartache, I also am very aware of how much she tried to hide it from me. So often I let her think she was hiding things from me so often I did play dumb when she lied and I knew better. But it's interesting, I don't recall her ever expressing anything but fun for, with what she did for work. It did seem like she was having so much fun. But now that I'm an adult and I'm more aware of what goes on, I have to assume it was also very hard and especially hard when she got to an age where she either had to realize on her own or maybe someone told her, you’re too old to be on stage. It’s not sexy anymore. We're gonna move you to the bartender that had to be so humiliating and so hard for her to accept that your beauty has now expired. Men don't find you desirable anymore. You not have to be behind the bar because you're too old and you don't have a skill to get yourself outta this. This is your only currency or source of income. There's no other choice. That had to be incredibly hard for her, but I never saw that. I never saw that part. She never shared, she never shared that, she didn't know how to be vulnerable. I don't even know if she was vulnerable with herself. I think, which is why maybe the addiction of always constantly suppressing those hard feelings and it's okay, everything's okay. Just maybe numb the pain with distraction and drinking and making the most and the best of any hard time.
ELISE: Yeah. I wanna talk about sort of desirability and beauty and the currency of that. Cause I know it's followed you and defined some of your relationships or your idea of your own value and then I wanna talk about the sisterhood, this community of women that is so insistent, right? Throughout your whole story, both for you and for your mom, and for you through your mom. So, but let's talk a bit about what work have you done to work on that feeling of like, that your desirability is your currency? How have you managed to move past that? I mean, obviously you're a highly skilled actor. You're also a highly skilled surgical nurse, but how do you process that so that you can break that pattern?
MINKA: I'm still working on that and, you know, because my job, the industry I'm in constantly reminds us of those things, of our looks fading or our aging and that being our currency. I think the ways I've tried is just by working so hard at educating myself and reading as much as I can because I have such a deep insecurity about that, about not being able to have a conversation with someone like you, I’m constantly in fear of not having something eloquent to say. I’m just constantly, even now, I'm so aware of making sure that I have something useful to contribute and look, I'm still struggling to find my words as we speak right now in, in trying to answer that question. So I clearly still have a lot to work to do around that.
ELISE: But that's why I think your book is also so beautiful and so moving to watch it reach and, and it's only just beginning, you're only one month in. But sort of to have people sort of apprehend or be like, oh, that's the beautiful, like probably really wealthy cheerleader from Friday Night Lights, right? And then to actually have them move into something that is very real and very you, I would hope it would be also a very validating experience. It's a beautiful book and beautifully told. And, again, really I've read so many memoirs and I've certainly read memoirs of people who I'm like, oh, I think you're gonna regret this because there's still so much process rage typically at the mom because we women always bear the burden and then sort of a lot of relieving of the men and in a way that is so unprocessed and unhealed.
So I feel like the fact that you are showing what it looks like to be like, yes, that was hard, that was really hard, you know, obviously you talk a lot about being a burden, which I wanna get into too. Cause I think a lot of people will relate to that through sort of the abject neglect that you experienced. And this being sort of moved around, but what I thought was just like, beautiful about the story and the way that you honestly juxtapose it against this instinct that you had to sort of abandon yourself to boyfriends and abandon yourself to men in the same way that your mom tended to do. But the backbone of your book, the structure of the book is held by Claudia and Angel and all of these women in your life who took you in, loved you, and I thought that was so and still, it seems like you have that today and that's so beautiful.
MINKA: I agree. I just wanna respond to everything that you say, cause you first talked about, you know, releasing the book and being, and telling the truth and being seen and there's no better feeling in the world than being seen for who you truly are. And after feeling so misunderstood for a really long time and then finding enough courage to really reveal all of these truths and shameful and scary and embarrassing experiences and receiving love for it and feeling seen, it is a beautiful, I don't even know how to describe the, that feeling. It feels really nice. And the thing of feeling like a burden is something, you know, all of these things, what I've learned is feeling like a burden or trying to get rid of this idea that my looks are my only currency, all of these things that are so deeply ingrained in me will always be with me, all these patterns, the thing I've learned is that they don't ever go away. They'll always be with me. I just learn how to better manage them. So when that thing comes up for me about, I'm feeling like a burden right now, don't take up too much space, make yourself small, I can at least notice those things now and make a different choice in how I react to that feeling, right? So I feel I can notice now when I feel the urge to make myself small and not take up space. And then instead I'll react by actually make making sure that I do take up the space that I'm feeling inclined to take up and not feel like I have to apologize for it.
ELISE: It's hard. I thought that that scene, I don't know if it was your very first acting class or you'd been lingering in the background watching people, but can we talk about your voice and that amazing intervention, from your acting teacher and sort of what was happening, what would happen? I'm quite obsessed with the voice and girlhood and woman, how disconnected so many of us are from like even moving it deeper. Right. So will you tell us that story?
MINKA: So I just arrived to LA and I haven't been here very long, so I still have all of the sort of layers of masks that I had acquired to survive my childhood, which is a lot of makeup and hair, my voice was really high pitched. And I knew I navigated a lot of my childhood by making myself small and sounding like a little girl to manipulate people into wanting to take care of me as opposed and as opposed to hurting me. And, and I was in my first acting class and I was doing an exercise with a guy on stage where we face each other, it's a Meisner exercise, it's called a repeat exercise where you are sitting across each other and just observing and experiencing what you're getting from the other one. It's an exercise in learning to listen and pay attention to your fellow actor as opposed to being concerned with yourself. And I was doing what I had seen other people do. I was just doing what I thought I saw them do. I wasn't actually in the experience. I was performing the experience, and I was in the middle of it. The teacher stopped and she said, stop, stop, stop, stop. And we looked at her and she goes, what the fuck are you doing? And I went, who? Who? Him? she goes, no, you. What are you doing? You, you're talking like a little girl and you're manipulating him. Why are you doing that? And I was like, I don't even know what manipulating him means. How do you manipulate someone? I didn't know? And she goes, were you abused as a little girl? And I went, I don't know. I had never even considered that I had just been going through all the motions. I never stopped to wonder and to answer that question in a room full of students watching, quite literally with a spotlight on me on stage was horrifying and embarrassing and humiliating. And I started crying and I said, I don't know, or something. And, and, and she knew then, and then she changed her tone and said, okay, you can come down. And I think one of the things that has gotten me here through all of that is knowing when something might be good for me, even if it's tough. You know, I went through a big period of my life thinking tough love is how you grow. And I've, I've since graduated from that mindset now, I also talk in the book about how I prefer gentle love now. But at that time I was really excited by just someone paying that much attention to me. You know, her seeing me in that way was scary and it was embarrassing, but it also felt good and also felt like, oh, I think she loves me. She said, there's a woman in there, let her out. There is? What does that even mean? And that's how I became an actress, was just this first introduction to peeling back the layers and learning who I am. It was like my introduction to therapy. It was therapy for me, at least at the time. I didn't know that. I just knew I needed to keep going back and absorbing more of what this woman was offering.
ELISE: And it's so interesting to think, I mean, when when you told it, it gave me chills and it gave me chills when I read it too. And yes, being seen, but I would imagine we gaslight, and I think we were much worse about this when, when we, you and I were growing up, we're about the same age, if you don't acknowledge what's happening, then it's not happening and the child, as you said, you continually lied to your mom about, you had a much deeper understanding of everything that was happening. And I'm curious, did any adult, any of these women or you know, in the sex trade who took you in as a child while your mom was in the Philippines or wherever, in jail? Did any of them say, I know this is hard, or did anyone validate your experience? Or even did you even know like, this is abuse?
MINKA: No, I just thought this was how you discipline. This is just, it, it all just is what it is at that age. And, you know, I think it's also why I'm also so sensitive to the idea of gaslighting today and why I'm so addicted to and so inspired by the truth today and people telling the truth. And, you know, even I have adults in my life who I did know then who are still struggling to admit ro me that, that was hard then. Because I think the generation before us don't have that language or those tools to be vulnerable enough to go, I'm sorry, that must, that was, that was really hard. And I had a hand in that. I was a part of that. And, it's too hard, because I guess I don't know what the fear is, is what will happen if we tell the truth, where that generation I feel was just so programmed to gaslight and to lie and to make perfect and everything is okay. And that's so confusing as a child when you know something's wrong here, but your parents are saying, nope, everything's fine. It's hard too cause, cause depending on the age, their little brains can only handle so much truth and you are supposed to protect them from a lot of bad things. But at the same time, I think we underestimate how smart kids really are.
ELISE: Oh yeah. They know everything. They can feel it, they can feel the dissonance but I think when you sort of snowplow over that or you don't acknowledge it or you don't try to repair, but I think even just saying, I know this is chaos and I wish it weren't. And, we will get through this, but like, I think, you know, we know better now, but this certainly, I don't think how anyone was practicing parenting at all. Much less my parents or your mom for that matter. It's really interesting. I'm gonna go back to sort of that, this idea of currency because this idea too, that it's a cultural rule that if you have a conforming body, if you have a beautiful face, if you have money, all of these things that we value so highly socially and culturally that you, nothing can be hard. Right, what do you have, how could things possibly be hard for you, Minka? I think the more people like you who crack the veneer right, the more freedom I think people can find and whatever it is that they're experiencing, it's really interesting and I think it's more compounding for women, certainly. Right. There's just more pressure on us. When you think about Hollywood, do you see it evolving and changing, or do you still feel like women are just iced out? Or become invisible. I can't tell. I don't like study it and I don't follow it closely enough to know whether anything is changing.
MINKA: I think there is some change. I don't really know myself either, but I do feel inspired by, you know, the women out there who are insisting we hear stories from women, you know, like the Reese Witherspoon of it all, and Carrie Washington who are all working so hard to make sure that, you know, Margo Robbie are just working so hard to make sure that there is a safe space for women to tell their stories and that we deserve equality, but you know, of course there's still a really long way to go.
ELISE: This might be like an oddball question and we can cut it if it is, but I always think about actors. It gives me like some anxiety to think about you guys as sort of these channels, vessels, right? Where you're bringing in characters, you're telling other people's stories, you're inhabiting other people's lives in a way. How do you keep yourself safe and how do you keep yourself separate in a way? Like how do you not merge? I don't know, as an outsider to the practice. Like, I wonder if it, I also wonder about this with, with fiction writers as well. When you're sort of bringing, you're bringing through characters. Do you have a process for sort of being like, this is Minka, this is my character, or maybe it, or is it ever healing?
MINKA: The first thing that I think of is I wonder if actors like Daniel Day Lewis are able to actually separate, like real, proper character actors that really are, are on a whole other stratosphere. I wonder that question for them because for me, I feel like I just bring so many parts of myself to my work. And so I am able to feel all the things deeply and then let them go. I do, and I have gotten a lot of my stuff, my pain out in my work. But, for me, it is really healing to access a lot of the pain or the things I've been through when I'm at work, cause it's a safe place to put it. It's where I'm supposed to have these big feelings. It's where I won't be bad for having them. And then once you feel them as big as you do, it all just goes away. So, you know, I was working on something where this woman had to, was experiencing being gaslit and lied to and cheated on and all these things. And I got to really air out all of that experience that I actually had in my life and access those things. And it was really healing for me. Cause once that job was done, I felt all those wounds were farther away from me. And I think that's what we sort of do as actors is we collect all these experiences in our lives, all these little bruises and pains, and we just kind of store them in parts of our body, which is not healthy. Then we access them when we go to work. Like, I'll bring that one up and I'll put that here.
ELISE: Yeah, that makes sense. You at the end, you sort of mentioned, I mean, you write about sort of the therapist who told you that your mom didn't love you, which is wild to me. I feel like that’s breaking some essential bond but what has been, and you mentioned Hoffman, I know you've done Ayahuasca, EMDR, and I don't know if it's been a journey where did you feel like you had to sort of break down? I mean, ayahuasca is so, I've never done it, but I'm terrified. What for you has sort of been the most significant in allowing you to go back to your childhood and get close, get close to your mom, though I would argue you were never not close to your mom, even though you were alienated from her at times?
MINKA: I think the, one of the biggest lessons you mentioned, ayahuasca, and I think I touched on this a little bit earlier, but the biggest lesson was preparing to do ayahuasca, which was, I had a friend who's done it a whole bunch of times, and they're the ones who said, if it does become dark and scary, don't resist it. Don't try to push it away. Don't try to shut your eyes. Don't wish it away, but stay curious and, and ask it what it's here to show you what it, you know, if you see, sometimes see people see big, scary insects or animals and you don't wanna look, but it's in those moments specifically that are there to show you the most, to teach you the most. And we're all so programmed and taught, because it's how we survived, to suppress pain and not face dark, scary things. But so for me, and what was really helpful was that lesson of don't resist the darkness. Don't resist or be afraid of the hard stuff. Stay curious. What is it gonna teach me? What is the lesson? And I think that's still the most profound thing for me in my life is to not bury my head in the sand when something is hard, but to remain curious.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and, you know, I'm always cautious in our culture where we sort of wanna, I don't even know the right words for this, but sort of celebrate struggles. Although I do think that we should, in some ways it's complicated, but again, to not dwell in the victim narrative or for people to feel, oh, this is the other really critical part of the above the line and the below the line is that when you’re below the line, and to be clear, we’re sort of above the line and below the line in, in the course of every day, but when we're below the line, we feel like we're sort of. The world is affecting us. And when we're above the line, we feel like we're affecting the world. We're in control of our own narrative. And I would say what's definitely shine through, and tell me everything, is your durability and the fact that this was really hard. And yet here you are. I know it's still hard, I'm sure it's still hard, and I'm sure you miss your mom and probably wish you had, had a slightly different childhood. But do you feel like in a way, like what, what would you have wanted and what would your mom have wanted? As you dig sort of beneath the addiction, what do you think that she wanted? You mentioned she'd sort of done a tiny bit of acting and that it was like thrilling for her to sit in video village and watch you act, but what do you think, what do you, what did you sense that your mom really wanted for her life?
MINKA: It's interesting cause you mentioned it being hard and it made me think like when you're in it, I don't think you have time to think this is hard. You just, especially when you're young, everything just is what it is. The hard part is when you're an adult and you're unconsciously finding yourself in these loops of dysfunctional relationships and hurting your friendships and being so reactive to your emotions and being so defensive all the time and constantly looking for signs that someone's gonna hurt you and that hypervigilance of finding it, and then the confirmation bias of any hint of someone not being who you thought they were telling you, you're in danger. That's the hard part, unpacking all of that and, you know, seeing life as it is, not as you are, you know, and knowing that everything isn't happening to you, it's just happening. And that's howI got myself out of victimhood was I just thought everything was happening to me and everything was about me. And, and once I was able to go, ah, no, I observe happening around me. It’s all happening no matter what. Nothing has anything to do with me. That was a really freeing thing to learn. And I think maybe to answer your question, my mom probably would've loved to have learned that herself, you know? And because she really was very much a victim. And everything was happening to her and everything was hard. And it was, but she didn't have the tools to persevere and get out of that cycle of victimhood and helplessness and she was very strong, but she didn't have a lot of tools and there wasn't a lot of tools being offered back then. We didn't have the language we have now. We didn't have access to the information we have now. We were in a little bubble in Albuquerque just trying to like live every day. And I am not thankful for how hard it was. I don't believe we have to suffer to be great people. I do believe great empathy and depth and love come from all these hard parts. Yes. But I don't think that their requirement for empathy, so when it comes to the narrative or the adage of, I'm so thankful for this painful thing, it's a great way for us to survive these painful things. But I resist the urge to be thankful for how hard things were sometimes, because what I think of is, man, if I'm this, despite all of that, who would I be had all of that not happened. Had I had proper guidance and education and a parent who nurtured my interests, what kind of instrument would I be playing right now? How many languages would I be speaking right now? What companies would I be running right now? You know, because when I tap into certain things in the world and my curiosities when I'm living, I think, God, I'm good at this a little bit. Wow. I wonder what I would be capable of, you know? So that makes me begrudge the hard things. It doesn't make me thankful of them. It makes me go, God, what if?
ELISE: Yeah. Yeah. That was beautiful. I think, you know, a book like Richard Roars, like Second Half of Life, you know, this stuff's for, it's not for children, you know, this is for adults, this is for me, you know, having had a really stable and solid upbringing and having a lot of opportunity, particularly around education. Now I'm ready, I'm equipped, but yeah, I think the suffering shouldn't, doesn't belong to children at all. And it's one of our great failings as a country, I think that so many children are victimized by poverty and abuse and neglect and lack of opportunity and an inequitable school system, all of it. I mean, it's interesting. Will you write more? I mean, you're clearly also on a perpetual path of educating yourself and going deep, deep into this world?
MINKA: Constantly. It's my favorite thing is this growth. I mean, that's why, I'm sorry, but I love your book so much. I feel like your book is like the next level of my book. You talk about everything that I talk about in my book, but in such a beautiful and um, educational way that is so exciting and fun to read. I feel so seen in all of the stories you share in your book. I could read so many things that I've highlighted where I'm just like, yes, yes, that part where women are being pitted against each other and not understanding the difference between jealousy and envy and being comfortable with envying and how that's such a dirty word. And all of these complicated, I've had so many complicated relationships with women, and I've been saved by so many women in my life. But I've also been hard on a lot of women in my life because I thought tough love was the way to go, and brutal honesty was the way to go. And I've also witnessed women in my life do the thing you talk about in your book, which is, Ugh, she bugs, I don't like her. And you're like, but why? Because she's big and she takes up space and she's beautiful and she's successful. And that threatens me because if she has that, then I can't. I don't know where we learned that.
ELISE: Yeah. Scarcity. It's sort of what is in the water. And it's interesting to think, you know, what I was trying to do is distill and synthesize sort of the cultural realities of what it is to be a woman, regardless of, You know, I grew up in an upper middle class family in Montana, and you grew up between LA and New Mexico and like that, we all have sort of the intricacies of our own lives and our own childhoods, and yet this cultural programming, I think is the most insistent voice in our heads that tells us there's only gonna be one. If she's the prom queen, then you're not, this rivalry and competition that doesn't exist in the same way for men particularly.
MINKA: I remember even being in high school, I wasn't allowed to be pretty, so it's this really complicated journey with being pretty, you know, that I'm sure a lot of people would scoff at going, oh my God, you've had this career, you, um, it's solely probably because you're pretty
ELISE: No.
MINKA: well, thank you.
ELISE: I contest that.
MINKA: It has helped and I understand that. But it's wild because in junior high school and high school, it was, oh, you think you're pretty, oh, she's conceited, I was constantly, no, I'm not. I don't think I am. I'm not, look at how, I'm not, I dress like a boy. I hide myself. I make myself small and, and I'm still unlearning that.
ELISE: Yeah. Well it was powerful at the end that you and your friends went and decided to do a pole dancing class with former strippers as your instructors, women who you would've sort of recognized as like an archetype from your childhood. And that there was this, you know, I mean, I write about it, I don't know if you've gotten to the chapter on, unless, very curious for your thoughts on that, but yeah, similarly, like I dress like a boy of short hair. I do whatever I can to not, I mean, I'm in my forties now, so it's not, it's different, but not putting my body on display and, you know, I think as women we vacillate wildly. I mean, I certainly haven't always been like that, but that back and forth of like, do I let this be a thing or do I keep this to myself? Do I conceal, reveal, conceal, reveal? And who is this for? Is this for me or is this about sort of that edict that we all get to be desirable but never desiring? So I thought that was also really beautifully told in your book, sort of like the, and even just the fact that you worked in a peep show and, but the glass, like the way that you, that your intro is stunning, the way that you set that up for readers, like in a glass cage doesn't make you safe, oh, it's so intense. I feel like you could write many books, just about, about that. Because I don't know of all of the things for girls now today, it's like what's for us and what's for the world and how do we decide and when is it empowering and when is it not? And I don't know. Have you, do you feel like you've come to peace with that?
MINKA: No, not at all. I go back and forth and I'm constantly unpacking my entire programming around that, you know, and my rebellion to what my mother was, how comfortable she was with her sexuality, and using her body as her currency. And my rebellion was to do the opposite and to be afraid of doing that just because I saw her it go away and not be currency anymore. I saw that, you know, so maybe to some detriment to my career. I don't know, maybe I'd be a little more successful if I were more brave in sharing more of myself in that way. I have gone back and forth of giving myself permission to be sexy and then regretting it and wanting to take it back and wanting to prove to myself that I can be successful without using my body. But then also being so proud of seeing women so confidently and comfortably sharing their bodies on Instagram where I'm clutching my pearls, but simultaneously going, fuck yeah, go girl. I've spent too much time judging my mother for doing it, and while I'm still too afraid to do it, I'm so proud of how we're all becoming a more sex positive place for women to do whatever it is that makes them feel confident or empowered. I'm still figuring that out still.
ELISE: Yeah, I think it's so big. I have no resolution around it either and it's so nuanced, obviously, because our culture is not particularly safe and not particularly kind to women like your mother to women who are quote unquote asking for it. We've such a terrible culture of sexual violence. The just one final scene that I thought was so beautiful was when your birth father, when Rick came to support you in supporting your mother's passing, that moment where she walks, she sees him, actually recognizes him in her shirt and her diaper, and just curls up on his lap, was so beautiful that that's really what she wanted, right, was just to be held.
MINKA: The whole time. By him in particular. Right? And so I think of all the time she expressed hatred for him and didn't wanna ever see him or be around him where you're like, oh, but deep down she was just so in love with him and insecure and didn't feel worthy of his love because she would be so intimidated of some of the conversations that she felt left out of, you know, that him and I would have, and she would just remove herself from the room because, you know, she was jealous of me being a sponge to him and being in such awe of his wisdom and everything that he had to teach me about. You know, he was really one of the first people to teach me, my dad was one of the first people to plant the seed of loving and finding compassion for people who hurt you. So, you know, a lot of people would ask me, aren't I mad at him for not being there for the first 17 years of my life? But I'm just so thankful that he's here now because of the many wisdoms that he has given me. That being an example and I also talk about how he handled his divorce and taking accountability for your side of things when things go wrong, the, and not being a victim. I just think one of the biggest things for me is just resisting the urge to be a victim in any way, shape or form, and not blame anyone else for things going wrong. And, and knowing that it takes two in these relationships and, accountability and honesty and vulnerability are the most inspiring and sexy things to me. In friendships and in relationships just in life, period. You know? And like this book is like my little, I wish we could all come with a handbook of like, hi, these are all my bruises entangled up bits and how I'm trying to heal them. Do you wanna hang out and talk about it?
ELISE: Anytime. Oh, well thank you, Minka.
I’m proud of Minka. I think telling the truth about your life in any way is hard, but I think the way that she exposes her insides to the world, and her mother and the nets who caught her as a child, she does it very deftly. I will say it is not trauma-porn, even though so much of what happens to her is stunning and sad and you’ll want to reach into the book and hold this child, but it is not told for that effect. She is writing from a place of a scar and not and open wound. And it is really hard to hold people’s open wounds or to make them useful in the world, and clearly she is not entirely resolved and is still working through everything that has happened to her and everything to come. It is a book of healing and I think it will offer healing to a lot of others as well. After she loses her virginity, she thinks this is how it’s supposed to work, that she’s supposed to trade virginity for protection for an arm over her shoulders and she writes: “I’d spent a decade and a half seeing how mom found men to protect and care for her. For years, I have been trying to do the exact opposite of what she chose so I wouldn’t fall into the same traps. I knew I didn’t want a life like my mothers, so I worked hard to graduate from high school to show I was not like her and every choice I made I selected the opposite of what she would have done, and that’s the weird thing about families, even though we want to follow a different path then our parents and in real time we think we are doing just that, we see later that we were, in fact, following in their footsteps the whole time. As Carl Jung says, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,’ only I didn’t know that then.” Alright, see you next week.
