Whit Frick: The Making of On Our Best Behavior

That voice? That's my editor Whitney Frick, and she joins me today for a very special episode of Pulling the Thread, on the eve of On Our Best Behavior's publication—coming May 23. Many of you have been with me as I've written this book, and by osmosis, you probably have some sense of the process, but it felt important to me to celebrate OOBB (as we call it), by bringing you all the way inside. I wanted to do this with the person who knows the text almost as well as I do.

Writing a book is really hard—and it's also incredibly co-creative. As someone who has co-written or ghostwritten 12 books, I'm usually the co-creator, holding the structure for the authors while they revisit their lives and mine it for story. In this case, though, it was Whit who helped me, holding the potential of the book as a guiding light for the process. She took me by the hand, bringing me ever closer to myself as I worked through drafts. We both worked really hard on this book—really hard. Distilling, refining, and interrogating the material until we knew the path was so well-trod, readers would be able to easily follow the book's unfolding, and understand exactly what I was trying to say. To say that I'm pleased with how On Our Best Behavior turned out is an understatement—I'm thrilled, which is not something that's easy for me to say. I believe the book is the best I could write, and I'm so grateful to Whit for getting me there. As we explore in today's conversation, I had a very powerful battle with resistance—and am so happy I pushed through. If you haven't yet ordered your copy, On Our Best Behavior is available wherever you get your books starting May 23—in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia, with more countries to come.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Have you ever done a podcast, Whit?

WHIT FRICK: No, I have never done a podcast, Elise.

ELISE: I'm shocked.

WHIT: I'm much more comfortable, you know, typing an email to you or calling you on the telephone,

ELISE: I know, well this is exciting to have you for a whole hour just to myself.

WHIT: As opposed to the other hours that we have spent together. It's exciting for me to be here with you.

ELISE: Oh yeah, no, I often think of you, I wonder how mentally entrained we've been for three years. And how many times we're actually thinking about the same thing. I bet a lot actually.

WHIT: I think what you've written, your book, has sort of wormed its way into my brain and, you know, now I think I see so much of what you point out in my experience and in the world, so then I assume you're seeing the same things.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, as intended, Whit. I wanted to write an infectious book because as you know, as we know, as we've talked about a lot, culture is contagious and we pass it along, and so the antidote in its own way is also contagious. Hopefully.

WHIT: Yeah. Yeah. I think also one of the things that's been really fun for me as we've been working together is I've gotten to see actually just sort of how similar we are and in the way we were raised and in the way our families are sort of structured. I don't have a brother, but I have a sister, and we have kids who that are the same age. In this three year journey with you, I've found an author and a friend.

ELISE: Whit, I'm gonna cry. And we're from the same part of the country.

WHIT: That's right. I'm a Colorado girl, although I did not grow up with like horses. I mean, I was, you know, in Denver, so.

ELISE: You grew up ski adjacent. We know how that worked out for you.

WHIT: That's right.

ELISE: But that's, it's interesting. I was talking to Austin Channing Brown earlier this morning and we were talking about goodness, and I was curious about how it showed up for her and we didn't do like a step-by-step overlap of our lives, but it was interesting how it was also the same for her. And so my hope is that by doing a personal excavation of this idea or this concept of goodness and how it's crawled my life, that the personal becomes universal. And that even if people don't completely identify with everything that I've written about and experienced, that they've more or less see themselves. And my feeling is that it might happen.

WHIT: Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to me because, just in even the early reads that we've re, that we've seen from readers and you know, people who are reviewing it on Good Reads or colleagues of mine within the Random House hallways. It's been really fascinating because we all have different backgrounds and we come from different places. And actually with, even within Random House, there we're sort of different generations who have been reading this. Like, you know, there's somebody who works on the marketing team who's like Gen Z and my publisher who's sort of Gen X and like, there's still this ingrained kind of good girl mentality that we, we all seem to be carrying and it expresses itself in different ways, for sure. And one of the things that sort of, that working on this book with you has really got me thinking is like, how can I interrupt the cycle when it comes to my daughter. And even something like last night, we had her parent-teacher conference yesterday, and I really had to stop myself from saying, oh, the teachers love having you in the classroom. They say you're really good at following directions. They think you're really helpful. Even though I was sort of personally very happy that the teacher said those things about her, because of what your book has illuminated for me, I don't want those to be the things that she thinks I'm valuing from her parent-teacher conference.

ELISE: Yeah. What's really interesting about that though too, is that when we talk about this book and we talk about these voices in our head and this cultural construct of the sins and this quest for goodness, that so many, all women, I think in some ways are for whether all women pursue this or not is a question, but I think you have to be almost a renegade, revolutionary not to. But in talking about this, even this morning with Austin, we were both distinguishing thinking, oh, this is a familial edict, right? This is our parents requiring a certain performance of goodness from us. And I think that that's where a lot of us stop. I had a performative childhood. I was incredibly high achieving, yada, yada, yada, et cetera.

And then when I actually have gotten closer to that in examining it, I'm like, that's funny because my parents actually sent me to a hippie alternative school that had no grades and no textbooks in so many ways they tried to shield me from this instinct in myself. My parents, as I write about in pride, do not tell me that I am all that. If anything, it's the opposite. And they ignore any success I've had in my life and have anxiety about it, and yet I don't know what I'm trying to prove to them. It's so beyond familial. It's so beyond you enforcing this behavior in your daughter. This is so cultural.

WHIT: Right. I mean, I think, you know, it's, as you point out in the book, it's very much the air we breathe. I wanna turn the table a little bit and ask you, you know, I mean, I think I know the answer, but like, where did this start for you and, and when you started thinking about this conditioning, where did it first show up for you in your life?

ELISE: I mean, Whit, so young. So with such an insistence on achieving in every sphere of my life and being the best, being good, excelling and an incredible internal drive, which of course was validated by society, but I don't know that it was necessarily me. I've spent a lot of time, even in this post, sort of as the book is done, thinking about it even more, and, you know, really trying to understand the source of this drive in me because it was never satisfying.

It's never like, oh, I'm a math athlete. Let me celebrate myself. Oh, I'm a really good skier. Like, there was still so much anxiety and shame wrapped up in it. And then, you know, I grow up, I pursue my life. I sort of forge a career. I achieve, achieve, achieve. I get married, I have two children, and as you know, sort of, it didn't end for me, but it culminated for me in an anxiety disorder that started really when I started my career in my twenties of chronic hyperventilation and I'd sort of hit a wall in my 40th year, 39th year, whenever that was of feeling sort of like, how am I here? How am I for a month in a period of chronic hyperventilation, feeling like I'm gonna die exhausted, presenting to the world like I'm sleepy, sedate, and extremely calm while inside, I actually can't take a deep breath.

And how have I, after all of this efforting, all of this, proving myself. How am I more swamped in these feelings of inadequacy and not good enoughness? And I'll never feel safe. I'll never feel secure. I'll never feel lovable. How am I here? Because I think I'd spent my whole life thinking that if I just kept running, if I kept going towards this in this direction, I would reach a point where I could feel safe and feel good. And if anything, the farther that I drove into that journey, the less good I felt. And that was really a breaking point, a recognition that I had to turn and face this rather than try to outrun it, and I had to know what it was. As you know, from editing me, I like to use the word it and this.

WHIT: You do. It's funny. You do. You do. That's true. I mean, listening to you talk, I relate and identify and I, you know, it's, I keep thinking about that meme. Like, have you seen that meme where it's like, adulthood is just saying, next week will be better every week until you die.

ELISE: Yes.

WHIT: And I think, I think maybe you hit the point where you were like, I don't wanna just say next week it'll be better. And like, I mean, I constantly, you know, my family is always rolling their eyes at me. Cause I'm like, okay, but once I get this edit done, or once I get this, but there's always more like, it doesn't, there's no, you know, and I rem as a mom, you're like, oh, once they're through toddlerhood. Okay. But then, then there's just more like, so I think you got to a place where you were like, I wanna look at why living feels like this. And as you and I debated at length, the first chapter of this book is really a history.

ELISE: I will be vindicated. It's for people who are, are listening, we had a lot of conversations about whether to keep this chapter or not, and it has a disclaimer that you can skip it, but I hope you don't.

WHIT: Or you can skip it and go back once you've read your way in. But I mean, I think it would be good, Elise, like for, you know, you are a seeker, an investigator, a questioner, you know, we at the office we always say like, oh, Elise is like the brainy best friend that you call to ask, you know, like, well, what do you think? Where did this come from? So it's like Siri or Elise? So, I think, I mean, I think it would be interesting to hear, so you, you know, you hit this place where you were like, I can't, I can't keep living this way and I can't constantly be seeking, pursuing the brass ring I'll never catch. So how did that lead you to this investigation? Like, what did you discover?

ELISE: Yeah. And what's interesting too is that you think about this period of overwhelm, and I think our cultural instinct is to say like, oh, you need some self-care, or meditate or, you know, and I had been trying that. It's not like I didn't have access to all of that. And it's not like I wasn't pursuing relief in with the tool set that was available to me, which was extensive. So to me it was also like pushing past a lot of that programming, which I think is very insidious for women of, you know, oh, it's just a spa. Take a spa day. Take some time for yourself. You know, that to me was not an antidote. That wasn’t helping. It wasn't enough. So I knew that there was something much deeper that that would be, you know, interventions like that were bandaid. Nice. But bandaids to something that was in me in a much, much deeper way. And so it took me a long time to figure out what quote unquote it even was. And so much of this book has been a process of getting closer to the it-ness or the this, you know, and I think it's funny. I have that tendency, it's a joke, but it's not a joke to sort of, and you are great at pushing me to define the “it,” define the, this, what is this that you're talking about? And that's really what I had to push toward. What is this sort of boogeyman? I had to give it a shape that was sitting on me and creating this sensation of breathlessness and not enoughness. And I had to really identify it so I could get my arms around it and I recognize the ways that it showed up in my life, but it wasn't immediately apparent to me what its shape was.

And I think that so often our instinct is to be like, it's patriarchy. It's the men, it's capitalism, it's these sort of systems. But I couldn't find that in the external structure in my own personal life. So I could sense, like, I've only kind of worked for a lot of men. I love my husband, he is a really progressive feminist guy. My parents are not patriarchal at all, I was struggling, you know, in this binary culture that we live in to like find the person to blame and it wasn't there. And so that was one of the sources of the investigation of, okay, I know it has something to do with that, but it's not, this isn't me, this lives in me. This is older than any sort of existing structure, but it lives in me and it seems to live in my friends. And I really wanted to understand too, why, in 2016, for example, or in all the social science that continues to pour forth, women are as responsible for this as upholding this as men. This idea of holding women to a different standard of being really hard on women, et cetera, cause I recognized it was sort of like that as a force that, that force of goodness.

So it was a big question that had no definition in my head. And then I really started, as you know, with tapping into this idea of envy. And I had a conversation with Lori Gottlieb, and this was a small moment in “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” but where she says that she tells her clients to pay attention to their envy because it shows them what they want. And that really hit me, Whit, because I recognized that I had never examined that in my own life. And I, in a conversation with her, talked about it at length and I was like, well, how does this show up? Is this…what? I don't like her, is that what that is? And she was like, yes. And I asked her if it was gendered and she said she didn't know. But that in her experience, women are much, much less comfortable with feelings that we find unacceptable. And that, you know, I read that and I thought about it a lot as when we feel something that we're ashamed of before we even let the feeling fully birthed or come up, we just shove it down. We shove it down. I think a lot of women listening will relate to that. It's just too painful to even examine it and feel it. It makes us feel bad and so I started with that thought and I was like, is this envy, is this like what's driving the reason that in 2016, 2017, 2018, so on and so forth, we're still sort of where we're at socially?

And then I had a conversation with Glennon about this very concept of envy. And she said, well, the thing about envy and women and they're wanting is we don't even know what we want because we've been conditioned not to have any wants at all. And that really hit. And so as I kept thinking about this idea of goodness, women wanting, I was like, maybe this is about envy. Like maybe this is what I'm dealing with or contending with. But that didn't feel complete either. And so, of course, being like the word nerd that I am, I was like, what is envy? And where does it come from? And that's when I realized it was a seven on the list of seven deadly sins, which I had to remind myself of because I didn't grow up in any sort of religion. And as I looked at that list, my heart sank because to me, it read as a punch card in my life, at least for every single thing that I police myself about, and all the ways that I try to express my goodness, I don't know, it's funny, as you know, so many times, the things that are most obvious are also the most invisible. And to me, that was it, where I was like, oh, I understand. I see it. I see the system. I see how it's showing up in our lives, and now I need to understand where it started and where it came from.

WHIT: I think it's fun. I mean, as you know, we debated like, does envy go first? Does it go later? And I personally envy did not resonate with me first. You know, and maybe, and I think I've told you like maybe that's because I spend a lot of time like reading in this world, and I have had the privilege of working with Lennon and she's been expressing some of these ideas and I love Lori Gottlieb’s book. And so this was in my air that like, actually, envy can kind of point you in the direction of the things you want. So I think I had been maybe conditioned to kind of lean into envy and be like, oh, like when I feel envious, or when I have that instinct to kind of like roll my eyes at another woman who’s achieving something or who's expressed an ambition, really what that means is like, I kind of want that for myself and I can try to pursue that for me, Elise, you know what, this idea of like, oh, the seven deadly sins or this code that we follow, I was also not raised in a religious family like that. That didn't sort of ring true for me in exactly the way that you said. Like, I can sense that there's a set of rules that I am adhering to, I'm obeying and I'm maybe even without awareness of it, enforcing them for my daughter, enforcing them for my colleagues.

I expect the women in my life to follow those same rules, but I don't know where they come from and I can't really articulate what those rules are. In reading your book, what became so clear to me is that the voice in my head, and like this, I'm gonna describe this voice, and I know I am not alone in having this voice because I know you have this voice in your head. And I now know, having talked about your book with so many of my colleagues, they also have this voice. But like the voice in my head that tells me, set your alarm and get in a workout early in the morning before you start your day. Because that, you know, you gotta do all the things, that voice or the voice that tell that says like, oh, I've been so bad today when I leave my son's birthday party having eaten cake and pizza and I equate that to being bad, or like the voice that, like when somebody compliments me, I like deflect, or I'm like, oh, we just got really lucky. Or It wasn't me, it was the team. You know, that deflection, so those things are like a fear of sloth. Of wanting to not be gluttonous and like, not appear gluttonous in any way, or the deflection is like a fear of pride. And once you kind of pointed out, look like that voice in your head follows these seven, eight, we can talk about that, categories. It was like seeing the matrix. Like I couldn't unsee those things. So it's like once you see it, you can't unsee what is existing in our culture. And then you see it in other women and you see it in the expectations we have around how people behave. I mean, even in like, I've noticed that I believe an email should be phrased in a certain way so as not to appear like too greedy or too needy and like, why am I policing that? Just ask.

ELISE: Yeah. Or too angry or too straightforward. I think it's exactly what you said. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. I agree with you, I think my gift is synthesizing and so a lot of the book, I think, will resonate in part because it's built on the shoulders of so many incredible thinkers and a lot of other women's work in these very specific categories. And so I think we're used to seeing this in the context of gluttony, certainly, and the body positivity movement and the way that we're reevaluating how we talk to ourselves about our bodies. We're used to seeing it, you know, in Rebecca Tracers, Good and Mad, or Saraia Chimal, Rage Becomes Her, et cetera. There are all these incredible, primarily not pieces of non-fiction in all of these different categories, talking about women and achievement and ambition and the way that we're punished for the expression of that. Or you have Sadie Doyle's train wreck, et cetera. They’re all in the bibliography, but what I think what I wanted to do, and I think that this is, is actually pull them together into a system. This is a system of goodness, you could call it internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny. I know those words are hard for people, but really like, oh, these are all connected. We are not dealing individually. These all collide and they're closely connected. I mean, even thinking about you deflecting praise, which is absolutely my intention. I have ghost written 12 books. I like being behind other people. Even this, you know, making you do this podcast with me. And as you know, chafing at the bit at you turning the tables, because I wanna say like, well this is a co-create book and like, I wanna shove you out there first, it’s just my instinct and it's strong.

And I'm not unusual as a woman, in part because pride and envy are incredibly closely connected. And when I've spoken about this book and these concepts with women, they say specifically, I'm scared to be celebrated. I'm scared to be seen. I'm scared to win an award as a doctor, I'm scared as a speaker, et cetera. I don't want to go out there because I recognize I'm gonna trigger other women's envy and they're gonna come for me, I'll be excluded, I'll be left out, I'll be isolated, et cetera. So the whole thing starts to collide and crash together. But in a good way, because I think that hopefully this is, by making the system visible and giving it shape, and creating a framework that we can start interrupting, this cycle with each other and recognizing it in ourselves, stopping ourselves in an email as we're trying to downplay or override our confidence with an expression of our competence, which I think is a strong instinct in women, not because we're not confident but because we recognize it will be policing us if it's expressed. So we are, you know, adding all of that language. I just wanted to say, I'm sorry. I'm sure you've already thought of this, I’m sorry, you know, just add another point here that I'm sure you've thought about and have probably already addressed, and whatever it is, it goes on all the caveating, I think any woman is familiar with it—this extreme self-consciousness to make ourselves more palatable to exist, to live within the parameters of like what is comfortable, obedient, pleasing, compliant behavior.

WHIT: I think one of the big revelations for me in reading the book is that you, I mean, as you said, you show how it's a system and you know, this what I keep saying, this voice in my head, the rule obeyer in me after reading your book, I see that that is not me. It is a culturally imposed, foreign thing that is living in me, and I can be the decider. Like I can choose to listen, I can choose to override it. I can choose to ignore it, and that feels empowering to even just realize like, oh, it's not me. It's something that's been put in me and I can choose if I wanna obey it, you know?

ELISE: Yes. And what I think is really important is that the editor in you, the inner critic, the voice in your head is very similar. It comes from the same source or is of the same source as the one in me, and in the one in what all women know. And the reason that these modes of behavior are perpetuated throughout time is that we continually enforce this in ourselves and in each other. And so part of doing it differently is to recognize it, diagnose it, interrupt it, and then support each other as we pull this, these roots out of ourselves. As we silence these voices, change the channel, tune to a different frequency, choose your metaphor. You know, I'm gonna add, five or six.

WHIT: Talk about the process of writing this book. Aside from me saying choose one metaphor, Elise, like you have to define it, you can't just say it or that like you got it. Tell the reader what we mean.

ELISE: No, it's sad. It is. Before it ever got to you, my brother went through and circled every single this and it, and some still made it to you. Anyway, go ahead.

WHIT: Wait, do you know what else is sad? And this just shows that I have not fully been deprogrammed with by working on your book, is that I, so I mean, I assume people who listen to your podcast regularly know that your brother is a very, very wonderful book editor and like hugely respected in the industry and I admire him so much. So I edited your book thinking, I really hope Ben is impressed by me. Like, what? Why shouldn't I just like, want you to be impressed by me? I mean, this is where it's like, okay, I gotta, you know, be good. I do work hard.

ELISE: It’s so perfect. Well, Ben was very impressed by you, in fact, I'll tell you a little bit about the writing process, but to close the loop on Ben, he probably read it once or twice before I sent it to you. And he kept cautioning me, you know, it needs to be really close. It needs to be at the 80 yard line, which it was not, by the time it gets to Whit, because you'll get one attentive turn and that's it. And so you cannot tire her out. You cannot wear her out. There's just a limit to her willingness or ability to work on this book.

WHIT: Oh, but he did not fully know how afraid of appearing slothful I am.

ELISE: He did not know. And so you blew his mind in terms of your willingness to work on this with me. And he was very impressed. I will speak for him. He was really, I think maybe honestly a little ashamed that he does not, I don't think, go to nearly those links for his writers.

WHIT: No, he does. He does.

ELISE: He is a great editor, but yeah.

WHIT: Talk about that process?

ELISE: So in some ways, as we were laughing, it's funny, there’s some things again that are so obvious, and then only when you work on a project like this and as a ghost writer, when I work with people, it's deeply therapeutic. And I have been on these rides with people who don't really know exactly what they're getting into. But as you begin this process of excavating your life, shit happens. So like I knew that a little bit going in, I have been not participant, but like people's relationships falling apart through the book writing process, et cetera. Like all this stuff comes up and it needs to be dealt with. So I was kind of prepared to do this with myself, but when I wrote the proposal and was so happy that you were emerged victorious and that I was working with you because I knew that I can spin out in complexity and nuance, I knew you would ground me and that you would pull it down from me in a way that I knew I really, really needed.

So we'll get to that part sort of when we get to it. But when I started the process of writing this, I didn't really know how much of myself would be in it. Though, I knew there would be a lot of cultural criticism, a lot of research, a lot of synthesizing of other people's work. And I didn’t know how much of myself to bring into it. And so I didn't really know how therapeutic it would be or how hard it would be to really evaluate my own relationship to these sins. I thought I could stay in this slightly clinical, slightly abstract space, and as I started writing, I recognize like how much of my own stuff I needed to work through. And a lot of this is in the book, not all of it, only because of nobody wants to read a massive book, but I had to process it as I wrote, as I wrote this book. And so the the drafting in some ways was very fast. It took me about, a year, year and a half, in part because I had, in many ways been working on this book my whole life. It was funny. I don't even know where we were in the process when I was like, oh my God, my college thesis, both of my college thesis thesis was about, they were both about this, my art thesis was about women fairytale and archetypes, and my English thesis was about Andrew Milton John and

WHIT: When you wanted the beginning to be about Snow White?

ELISE: Yes. I did 18, you guys 18 introductions.18. My college thesis is John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden. So wild. But like, it never occurred to me that I was coming back to these themes. So it took me about a year and a half to draft it. And I had a couple of friends who are novelists, read my brother, edited my mom. And I delivered it to you because I, in my mind, I was like, I'm gonna hit the original targeted deadline, even though I'd never missed a deadline. This is part of my own experience too. And I gave it to you and you came back to me and said, I need you to, essentially, you were like, this is too much work for the reader. It's like a junk drawer, a little bit like of good treasure, but it's too much work, you have to create, you need to bring people through a journey. You need a formula, you need all of these components are missing. And in that moment I was like, we'll talk about my resistance because that's important. But also that you were right, that I had jumped right past all the cultural proof of these sins and I was missing like all the easy layups.

WHIT: If I remember correctly, I think you ran as fast as you could to the thing that you're more comfortable with, which is other people's research, other people's ideas, showing the connection between historical ideas and current, you know, thought leaders and the way they were operating. And so, and what I felt was that you, Elise, was missing. And I think what I really wanted you to do, and this is what I meant by like, show us your journey through these things, is I needed you and, and you got there, to filter and to sort of act as guide for the reader showing us what you were realizing as you were bringing and making these connections and synthesizing all of these other thought leaders, and, you know, expert work because that's the journey we need to be on as reader. And I mean, let's talk about resistance, cause I don't think you wanted to put yourself in there as much as I wanted to push you to, and I think you got there. So that has to have been a process for you. What was that?

ELISE: I mean, a big process. And we're gonna put this idea of other people's scholarship in a parking lot because this was a big part of it for me. I mean, I remember shortly after, cause essentially you were like, I can't, I'm not gonna line edit, I'm not gonna like edit this until you restructure it and make sure you are. bringing me through a process. Like you have got to hold my hand and bring me through all of this material. And I had dinner with my friend Taylor, who's a screenwriter. One of my oldest friends. Really good guy friend who is viciously honest with me. I don't know, vicious isn't the right word because it's very loving. But he has always told me the truth and made me say the truth too. And I had dinner with him just, it wasn't intent because of this reason and he asked me how the book was going and I was like, oh, like, I'm so upset. I feel like it's wrong. It's gonna like, you know, my book is not a formula. And he was like, I haven't read a word and your editor is right. And he was like, you are experiencing resistance. You are in the belly of the beast. You are coming, you're driving following me home. You are in the belly of the beast and you are gonna thrash here and tell you breakthrough. And it was a really, I think anyone who has experienced this and maybe didn't know what it was called, this is that moment of where you push to the next, you push any work, any creative work to the next level. And there is that moment of like, this is good enough, I'm tired.

You know, part of it is, I had been living it for probably two years and I was like, I'm tired. I know that I am a good writer. I know that this is like good. Pretty good. Like there is just that moment where you're like being called or being pushed to elevate it and I thrashed, I cried. I like pulled a blanket over my head for a couple of days. It was really hard. And then I came out and then I sort of knew, took a certain amount of time, honestly, because also my instinct, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, is to rush to work. Particularly when things are uncomfortable for me, I'm like, I'll just get to it. I'm just gonna start. And Ben also is like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Slow down, slow down. Like you are moving too quickly into the next iteration of this book. And so I had to like sit with my resistance, even though all I wanted to do was make it go away. And then there was an opening, honestly, where I was like, oh, I see, I understand. I know exactly how to do this. And I could go back into the draft mercilessly. And my friend Ramon Elam had very much been there before. He was like, you need to print this thing out. You need to cut it up. You need to identify and label sections and thoughts, and then you're gonna get down on the ground and you're gonna start rearranging and  the gaps will be clear.

And that's what I did. I did a huge art project in my living room of physically moving parts of the book round. And that's when I was like, oh my God, there are these major things. Cuz as you know, as well, I can skip. I'm fast. Like I will just, I think people are with me and I've moved very quickly in the progression of my thoughts.  And so it was an excellent way for me to say, oh, I realize this makes sense to me and that 80% of people are gonna be like, what the F? Where, what, how did you make that sort of cognitive leap? I'm not bringing people with me. So that was that stage. And so I restructured, added like some significant architecture, including a lot of the history I had written. So I wrote the history, then we pulled it out of each chapter and put it into its own chapter. And then I needed to go a tiny bit back to it in some chapters to remind people of where some of these ideas came from. And then we got into the editing, which was really where I had to confront my desire to hide behind everyone else's thoughts. And, you know, you were quick to point out like, it's okay, some of these are your ideas. You don't need to go searching for someone who had the same idea 10 years ago so that you can cite and reference them.

WHIT: I think there was a moment where I said to you like, can you please just put your books away? Like just write it. You wanted to like do hours of research.

ELISE: To say what I already knew.

WHIT: Yeah.

ELISE: And then a big part of it, people will know, it’s funny when my friend, when Sarah read the book, an early .pdf and it was on her Kindle and she finished it and then we went for a walk and she was like, I'm so sad. I thought I had 20% of the book left to go. And then suddenly it was over because that's how many end notes I have.

WHIT: Now I worry. Now I'm like, uh oh, we better go look at the end and make sure it like feels satisfying.

ELISE: It was totally satisfying. She was tracking her progress and she thought that she had like a lot more time with the book and then it was over because, yeah, 25,000 word and notes. And the book is about a hundred thousand words. And because I had to move stuff into the back of the book, I’m sure people who are listening can relate to that too. It's really like finding the line between a good experience for a reader and wanting to honor everyone who is part of this, was a harder line. You did a great job of making me both clarify my thinking, and also move things to the back.

WHIT: Thank you. I wanna go back to, actually, I feel like something in the story you just told. About that period of resistance feels so illustrative to me of like the way these sins are working in our lives. So I just wanna unpack it for a minute. Cause it's interesting, like your instinct in that period, in that moment of discomfort and like, ugh, like do this thing. I don't wanna do this thing. I'm tired. Your instinct then was to like, I'm gonna do it as fast as I possibly can. Like I'm just gonna get this thing done. And I think that is the behavior that we're talking about that is ingrained in us, particularly as women, where we're like, the answer to whatever this discomfort or this problem is like, do, do, do. I'm gonna just do it. I'm gonna deliver it, I'm gonna get it done. And I think your brother's advice to like, no, no, sit. And just don't go so fast. Give it a minute. Marinate in this so that you can see more clearly what's gonna come. You talk about in the book, Elise, how, like by rushing, by trying to constantly do by like putting more items on our to-do list and then trying to check them off, which like, nobody loves a to do list more than I do, we deny ourselves full opportunity for creative experience. And I know you tell this story in the book of Lin Manuel Miranda thought up Hamilton while he was on vacation. And if you don't give yourself the pause, the rest, if you don't marinate in the discomfort of the creative process and you try to just turn it into something that you can just get done, you miss it. And think I wanted to like go back to that to show how once you see these ideas at play in your own life, you can see how how the instinct to, you know, not appear lawful to just do denies full creative expression or the opportunity for surprise. And anyway, so even the process of writing the book, I think ended up expressing so much of what lessons that are in it.

ELISE: No, it's so true.I'd never thought about that. But this, the book more or less, is about the psychology of women and everything that we perceive as bad that we suppress or stuff, or hold in our shadow and as we actually allow, you know, we were talking about in the context of envy or this is a good example of sloth, of this feeling like, I don't know what to do, so I'll do something. Or we definitely experience it with anger, which is very difficult for a lot of women to access and feel. Our instinct is to paper it over, move on, get busy throughout our emotional lives because it's really scary and disorienting and unmooring to let these quote unquote bad feelings come up. But they are such a gift. They're full of information and as you said, create a possibility really, if we stop spending all of this energy holding them down. And in some ways, you know, not only does this potentially inhibit us from the full expression of our gifts, but in many ways I think it makes us physically ill.

And every single sin, sloth, pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, anger, there is an immersion of an emotion that women have been coded to suppress, deny, repress, ignore. That is such an essential human instinct. So important. So animating, so restoring and for many of us, it is going to be a period of feeling unstable and disoriented and unmoored. And slightly chaotic as we start to actually let these things come up. But I can say is having a couple of years head start on this work, although I think that the work will greatly speed up the more we experience it together, there is a lot more freedom on the other side, and there's a lot more like self-love and tenderness that I feel towards myself as I experience I actually am stopping to experience everything that's been alive in me, but not acknowledged for 43 years.

WHIT: I mean, so, okay, the book is gonna come out on Tuesday. What is your hope for how it lives in the world?

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, you know so much, I mean, I know somewhat just from having so many writer friends and loving authors and interviewing them for, I don't know, 10 years now, more than that, that the trajectory of books and how they live in the world is so different. Some books come out of the gate really hot and then stay that way. You know, obviously you lived Untamed, or some come out hot and die and some just sell and burn over time. And I guess my hope, my greatest hope is to get enough momentum out of the gate that the book really like feels a pulse and has a quickening. And then my greatest dream is not to go blasting out like a fire hose, but for it to spread from women to woman primarily. Although I really think men will like this book and would benefit from reading it as well. It's a whole other conversation. But I would be very happy if women read this book, tell their friends, book club it. And it's funny, I think so much of my speed in a way and wanting to like write the book and work on it intensively with you. And probably some of that resentment, despair was this is work that should be done with other women. It's personal, yes, but it's also like, I really wanted to talk about these things with you and I really wanted a partner in processing. And that's what's been so fun is doing podcast interviews for this book, speaking to groups of women, watching how it comes alive and other people, and then what's possible when you actually start saying things that have been too scary to say, like, oh, the reason I don't, I think I don't like that other mom at drop off is not because she's the worst, it's because she seems to be an incredibly present mother. Her kids are really kind. Her kids are really good citizens and students. She is also, you know, the ceo of a company, whatever it is, but starting to actually talk about it is so relieving and beautiful. And, it’s the breaking of a curse because I think what also happens to women in, in that cycle that I was just talking about, where we criticize each other for having, not recognizing our own envy, our own wanting, and what it is that that woman is doing that's pushing on a dream we have for ourselves is that then when we sit in a clutch at coffee and we condemn someone or judge someone, we feel really bad. It feels so gross. It feels awful. And so we’re just in this horrible, vicious cycle where we're confirming our own badness and we're, you know, staying sort of in enmeshed with this like quest for goodness. I don't know. I, I think that that's, as we start interrupting those cycles, I think that it can bring Great relief, and I do think it's personal work, but it is community work. Hopefully that is my dream, is that the book sort of infiltrates the lives of women in positive and powerful ways and just lives being past from friend to friend, mother to daughter, daughter to mother, um, and that it just has, has a life in that way. What's your dream for the book, Whit?

WHIT: I have met my, you know, I feel like we've had some really incredible conversations about ideas in the book and I've had moments where I've really learned about a colleague or like, come to just really love a colleague in a way that I hadn't been able to see or access before getting to talk to them about this book. My hope is that like readers get to have that shared experience. I mean, I think you're so right that, you know, I described that like voice in my head that you helped me to realize is not me. It's like imposed upon me, and that voice in my head feels shitty. I don't like it. And there is this relief that comes when you can see like to separate yourself from that, you know. Rule dictating voice, and that that relief, as you just described, like it feels good and it feels really good to get to share that with someone or to see someone also experience it. That would be my hope. You, I mean, yes, of course I wanted to sell and sell and I want us to make lots of money and all those things that I'm supposed to do because I'm like, you know, a cog in a large publishing corporation wheel, but what motivates me every day is this idea that like, you know, you wrote this book alone in a room and a reader is probably gonna read it alone in a room. But the experience around this book for me has been shared with all of these people on my team. And I hope that for readers it is shared with the other people in their lives too. And then it starts to feel, you know, like a light that's passed or something.

ELISE: Yeah. And I think too by offering a framework. I hope that that becomes sort of an easy way in a, in a, even if people don't necessarily relate to exactly the evidence I use or my own story, but that the framework lives and that we can all use it as sort of a quick reference guide of, oh, right. I am policing my eating, I'm policing my body because of the way that we're culturally conditioned to equate thinness with virtuosity and goodness, or whatever, you know, whatever it may be.

WHIT: Or even, I have like walked into negotiations now where I've been like, I don't need to be afraid to negotiate this. It's okay if they think I asking for a lot, like I'm allowed to ask for that. But you helped me to identify greed and like unpack why I have been conditioned to be so afraid of appearing that way, and then to sort of move past it and see what might come if I like, accept, or lean in to seeing it as like a place of power.

ELISE: Exactly. And that's what I think is also really important to the book is that I didn't want to write, let's go wild. Let's all be, you know, the antidote to this is to be greedy and gluttonous and I mean, sure. The point of the book though isn't that it's actually we each have to examine our own relationships with each of these sins. So for you, for greed is a big one for me. And this feeling of like, I already have a lot, therefore it's very gross space. Awful for me to even contemplate wanting more, right? Greed is a really tricky one, but the point of the book is like, how do you actually use these human basic instincts, desires, appetites, wants, as a way to get closer to yourself as a way to actually honor what you want and to not, it's not about flinging around to these extremes. It's about balance, it's about honesty, it's about, you know, a complete and full expression of who we are. It's interesting cause part of the antidote isn't just like go be lustful, right? It's much more.

WHIT: The pizza.

ELISE: Eat it all.

WHIT: Do your job and sleep all day.

ELISE: Yeah. But I think that that's like one of our cultural instincts is to then go to the other binary or like live in those extremes.mBut the real work is in the middle. There's no relief in the extremes. There's no relief in denial, self denial, and there's no relief in, I don't know, almost disembodiment or almost like, I don't know indulgence. Pure indulgence. That spectrum or that really understanding what that means for you so that you can clearly go after it.

WHIT: We talked about like my urging you to put yourself into this a little bit more and to use your own experience as a guide. And I think that was sort of a two-part request. And part one was like, as a reader, we just wanna hear it, feel like you're taking our hand through this. But the other part of that request is like, I really believe that like you're the only person who could have written this book. So what about this felt personal to you and like why is this the book that you stepped out of ghost writing to really come forward to write?

ELISE: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, my agent will tell you, and she's been my agent since I was a baby, since I was you know, 24 or something, and I started ghostwriting and she really took me on as a favor to my brother and Peter, cause they all went to college together. And, you know, at a certain point I had done probably at that point 10 books. And she was like, okay, we have breakfast. And she was like what are you doing though? What are you doing, Elise? Like, why, why are you choosing this and when are you going to? Jen is like hysterically the least mystical and least spiritual person I know, and which makes her the perfect agent for me and my whackadoodle theories.But it was a in some ways a spiritual conversation of when are you going to step into who you are and into your, into your fate? Like what are you doing? And it was right after Peter died. It was a kind of the shaking that I needed to be honest. And his death obviously, which I write about in sadness, was the shaking I needed too.

I didn't get right to it. It's just like she cracked open something in my mind. And, cause I had always said, I don't have a book in me. I don't have a book in me. I don't have a book in me. And she was like, what are you talking about? But she sort of lodged, she cracked open a door that I wasn't willing to even consider or open or walk through for a few more years. But it was a really, I knew it was there and I knew at some point I needed to open it and I didn't in her point, to me it was like, how many more books are you gonna collaborate on before you recognize that this is lunacy? And so I knew that I wanted that. I wouldn't write a book until it felt like I was maybe this is, well, this is the pro. I knew that with all that cultural conditioning, I knew I needed to feel like really pregnant. And this book, the minute I honestly was like, I need to address this part of my life and I need part of it, part of addressing this part of my life is letting myself be the thing and not no longer only being in service to other people's ideas. I still love that. There's no shame on that. I still love that. But the minute I recognized that, whatever, however, I was outsourcing all of my security to other people, the way that I wasn't owning that part of my journey, the minute that I really said okay. I'm in, I'm game. I know I need to do this, I need to address this instinct in myself to hide. That's probably very closely timed to the arrival of this book in me and I, and it felt not only worthy of spending what will probably be, you know, five years of my life, cause these books are not, it's not a small thing to do this and enter into this sort of engagement if you're really gonna honor the idea and honor your participation in it. In a way this book is, has been everything. And it's been funny because I've had this instinct also with which my friends Richard Christensen and Scott Sternberg have been like watching me very carefully for a move of being like, well, I need to figure out what I'm gonna do next. You know, they're like, no, no, no, stop. You’re still engaging in the same cycle of busyness that you have written about. And part of it is like, you gotta let this book live in you and allow it to be your life. As scary as it is for any of us, to put ourselves fully into anything that's been this book for me. And that's scary because I would much rather minimize it and bury, not bury it, but move on, you know, find the next thing. All of these.

WHIT: Right, right. Well, it's more comfortable, right? To like put the next thing on the to-do list so that you can be like, I'm separating myself from attachment to the thing I just finished. I've got these next things.

ELISE: Yes.

WHIT: yeah. I mean, I feel like just from watching, it feels to me that you, you have all this input, you know, you were interviewing these amazing thought leaders, and I always say, Elise, like one of my, like, the thing I love most about you, and like one of the best things you've brought to my life is a truly democratic acceptance of everyone's ideas. And like, I have a tendency to be like, ah, that's so woo woo blah. Or like, I'm never gonna do, you know, I put people in categories and decide which categories apply to me. And you have a willingness to be like, yes, I'll try that. I mean, even I made my husband watch the video of you with a cockroach on your face from your son's birthday party. Because like this willingness to like, I'll try it. Sure, I'll try it. And so anyway, I think you had lived for 10 years interviewing everyone really being at the forefront of like, yeah, I'll try it. Like this type of therapy, this spiritual medium, Brian Stevenson, everybody has ideas to offer. I'm gonna put them in this stew that is inside of me. And I think you got to a place in your life where you had it all churning and it wasn't making life more comfortable. Like if anything, you got to a point where all of these ideas were like bubbling up and making your actual lived experience uncomfortable. And I think that’s what you describe as being really pregnant. I think that's when the, the book was ready to emerge, right? Because then it was like, okay, got these ideas. I can feel them under the surface and I can feel that the way I'm living right now is not comfortable I want. And, comfort is not the goal, but it's like it I don't have to live in this pain.

ELISE: Yes, it's gonna break me. Yes and the a desire to take a minute, not even a minute, years, to organize and to think about like, what is this paradigm, what is happening? And to, in that way, identify that it's been brilliantly elucidated and clarified for us what systemic racism looks like. It doesn't have to be something that you consciously agree to or abide by willingly or with any awareness, but this is how it's baked in. And then culturally, individually reinforced in our lives, I knew too that that had to be, there had to be a version of that for misogyny. That all of these sort of constructs, these force fields that we can feel, but don't feel like we're necessarily choosing or subscribing to, but our present, I knew too that like, that was a calling that I needed to figure out the contours of this and identify how it lives in our lives, without, I haven't signed up. I did not choose this. I did not hit subscribe but it is alive in me and I think alive in all of us.

What a joy to share the brilliant Whit Frick with you. She is an incredible editor who I knew by way of the acknowledgements I heard long before I met her. My friend Joel Stein, who is hilarious—he used to write that column for the NYT magazine—he joke that the only people who read the acknowledgements are those expecting to be thanked. But I love the acknowledgements, I feel like they are always so telling and illuminating about the people who have shaped and informed an authors life. And the way that gratitude is expressed is always a little bit of extra insight into how someone moves through the world. I had seen Whits name for years and years, she has edited so many luminaries, so many people I respect and now she leads Dial Press, which is a storied in-print and she has been breathing so much life into it these last few years as part of Random House. She leads a team of editors and I am so grateful to be among the company I am with, a certain kind of sisterhood. She is Glennon Doyle’s editor and has been since the beginning of her life and Melissa Urban, Chelsea Handler, Laura Lynn Jackson, Holly Whitaker, and on, and on, Tara Schuster—I could keep going. So, you all who are listening know me, I wanted to turn the tables on Whit and talk to her about the editorial process because as much as I am an editor in my life, I am not an editor in the same way. I feel like I was the stone and Whit was Michelangelo and she has to chisel it out of me and this very much feels co-creative—she is all over it. It is in the place that it is in because of Whit and her brilliance—leading me by the nose and showing me what is possible. I really had to get closer to myself and really didn’t want to, guys. So, Whit is in this book and I knew I wanted her to be it’s editor, even as I was writing the proposal, for all those reasons. She felt like she could really do this for me. That between us, she could make this book land in the bodies and minds of women and she could prevent me from spinning out into abstraction and theory and all the stuff that I love so much. So, I am deeply grateful to Whit. I also had a big fear and anxiety that the book would be good enough—I am a very clean writer, I am fast, and that honestly I think a lot of editors would have accepted my first draft and taken that through publication. So I am really grateful to her, that she didn’t, and that she really pushed me to refine and clarify. So I am glad you got to hear from her and someday she’ll come back and let me interview her about editing, distilling ideas, finding the nut. Because I think we could all benefit from being more of an editor in our own lives. Thank you for listening to this very special episode. Please, please, pre-order On Our Best Behavior. Alright, I’ll see you next week.