Speaker 1 00:01:31 You are listening to right on radio on cafe in 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected] on Josh Weber. Tonight on right on radio, I'll be talking with David Cutler, one of the coauthors for survival of the city living and thriving in the age of isolation, one of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts joined forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats. Pandemic has only accelerated colors. The Otter Otto Eckstein professor of applied economics and the department of economics and Kennedy school of government at Harvard university.
Speaker 2 00:02:09 And I'm Liz old in the last part of the hour, I will be talking with Laura Davis about her latest book, the burning light of two stars, a mother daughter story. It tells the story of her dramatic and tumultuous relationship with her mother Davis is the best selling author of the courage to heal and the courage to heal workbook, which paved the way for hundreds and thousands of women and men to heal from the trauma of sexual abuse in her lengthy career. As the communicator, she has been a calmness, a talk show host, and a radio news reporter. All of this is more she'll stay tuned for right on radio
Speaker 3 00:03:08 I'm speaking today with David Culler, one of the coauthors for the book survival of the city, living and thriving in an age of isolation. He's the auto X team professor of applied economics in the department of economics at Harvard university. His work in health, economics and public economics has earned him a significant academic and public acclaim. Welcome to write on radio.
Speaker 4 00:03:30 Well, thank you. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 3 00:03:32 So Edward Glaeser, he's the other author of this book has published extensively on cities and the revolution over the last 30 years at the beginning of this book, you admitted both of you admitted to having differences in political histories. One is an east coast Republican and the other herself has engaged with democratic health policy for decades. Yeah. Both of you made compromises about policy decisions in this book. What issue was the most difficult for you to reach a resolution on?
Speaker 4 00:04:01 You know, it's, it's interesting because someone once said that there's no democratic or Republican way to clean the cities to clean the streets. In many ways, what we're dealing with here are a number of technical issues about how do you keep people safe? How do you make communities work? And so I would say when you put aside politics like big capital P politics and you get into, you know, how can you make a city work and help it address things? What we found is that there's a lot more agreement. So for example, take one thing that we look at, which is policing, where, you know, we've told the police for decades, keep the streets safe. And then that's happened that the streets are much safer, but of course not, if you're a African-American or someone who looks suspicious or looks unusual in which case your civil rights are being violated, more likely to be violated.
Speaker 4 00:04:55 And so, and so you, you know, the parties have very different views, but when you think about it, when, when we sort of sat and talked about it, we said, look, what we both agree is that there, there, there's not one mission. It's not a Seesaw. Like you can either be safe or you can respect people's constitutional rights, but that we need both from the police and therefore giving, telling the police departments around the country do one or the other is not right, because it's gonna make people unhappy, but do both. And they will say correctly, we need more resources to do both. And we'll say, fine, we'll give you the resources, but we have to be sure that we're going to get these outcomes. So we're going to have to measure and monitor and do surveys and things like that. And, and so in the end it becomes an issue, not of politics that is, um, you know, I've been more associated with the left and there's no sort of defund the police and ed has been more associated with the right and there's been no, um, uh, you know, the, the book doesn't have a lot of, you know, this is just the way it has to be and, you know, stop and frisk was a great thing, which we do not, which we explicitly say was not, it's really about how do you take your desire to do good socially and your desire to, and, and the, the constraints that you have to do the, to, to, to do the best that you can.
Speaker 4 00:06:09 And that's really where we met on this is, you know, how do you turn what are difficult problems into workable solutions?
Speaker 3 00:06:18 So I want to delve into that more in the book, you refer to a Pandora's box of urban woes that threatened city life, expensive housing conflicts, over gentrification, low levels of social mobility, racially targets, policing, and so on. What is the common root for these disparate issues?
Speaker 4 00:06:35 The most common is that many, not all, but many of them are issues of insiders versus outsiders where, you know, if you think about, uh, police, you know, people who are insiders who have nice houses and nice neighborhoods, and so on what safety, and they obviously have a right to safety and the outsiders, those who are minority groups, African-Americans who traditionally haven't fit in or so on, are sort of then the ones who, who, who get the short end there and the schools, those who need special attention in schools can, can get the short end. And with housing prices, you know, people who are, they're like pretty views and, and small quiet streets and, and, and, you know, lots of open space. And that means that outsiders can't afford to live in an area. So a lot of these are conflicts between insiders and outsiders, and unfortunately in many areas, uh, occupational licensing is another, you know, certainly for some occupations, you need some minimum set of skills, but you know, why is it that in Massachusetts, you had to be a nurse licensed in Massachusetts. You couldn't be a nurse licensed in Minnesota and work in Massachusetts until the pandemic. Is it really that the nurses in Minnesota are trained so much worse than the nurses in Massachusetts that we have to make you get away. It's all just insiders protecting themselves from outsiders and societies. Don't work when they're insiders that are protecting themselves against the outsiders. That's not that that cities are a great avenue of, of upward mobility. And if you're going to sort of pull the Drawbridge over the moat, you're not going to have that.
Speaker 3 00:08:10 So this is a call to action. Remaking, a system built for insiders into an area for empowering outsiders. What are the measures necessary to make that possible? Then
Speaker 4 00:08:20 To some extent, it's going to have to happen through the public sector when you have to be a public sector thing. Um, just to take a few examples, uh, zoning policies are determined at, at local levels and at state levels, we're all in favor of making sure that what we're doing passes cost effectiveness, cost benefit criteria. That is that the benefits exceed the costs, but you can't not do it just because some people don't want to do it even independent of that. So getting rid of things that arbitrarily say, insiders, get to do what they want at the expense of outsiders and saying, no, we're going to decide on a cost benefit criteria. What is the best way to do it? So that's a very clear example. Other things like, for example, Congress may soon pass an infrastructure bill. Well, there's no reason why the benefits of that spending shouldn't go more to areas where infrastructure is going to benefit more people.
Speaker 4 00:09:15 So we should develop infrastructure more in areas that are more hospitable to people moving in, especially to people who are not traditionally insiders, who are looking to move in or get started in a place. So those are things that, where we ought to think about the, the, the, the benefits of legislation that we do as, as targeting them to people. So all of those, um, uh, same as true. So that's about, you know, uh, education policy and housing policy, same is true of medical care, where we have to think about the medical care system and say, you know, what we've learned from pandemic is that we're only as a, as a, as a society. We're only as healthy as the least healthy people because otherwise, um, you know, people who are less healthy are gonna catch pandemic disease more, and then that's gonna spread to all of us. So we have to then invest in the health of everywhere in the community. And, and that's going to be a federal and local and a state and an international, uh, effort. So I think it's, I think, um, all of those areas are going to have to be involved.
Speaker 3 00:10:18 So there's a ripple effect that happens when serious sweeps of progressive change occur. And you give the example in the book of how in the 1960s cities acted like Robin hood to the less fortunate would be no different. Now in defunding the police resulting in wealthier siege, Wellers to uproots for safer suburbs. If crime rates would start to rise, and this would ultimately affect the poor and the vulnerable the most, if this happens, we will see a decline of cities. And instead enclaves the line I have in my notes here is that it'd be a world of which enclaves replaced cities is a world impoverished. I don't think there's a perfect solution to this, but what is the best solution? So
Speaker 4 00:10:57 Th th the so w we have observed that we've observed two things. One is if there's a lot of crime in city than higher income, middle income people move out and there goes your tax base. And second is that if you have high taxes, without showing that the taxes are going for something valuable, people will also move out. So both of those, uh, can happen. The solution, I think, has got to be, we need both safety and civil rights. So we need both of those, and that will require more money. And so societies will, cities will be going to higher income people and saying, we need more money, but the key has to be, I'm going to show you what you're going to get for it. And you are actually going to get something for it. So we are going to get safety. We're still going to be a very safe place.
Speaker 4 00:11:41 In fact, we'll continue to be, we're going to continue to work on safety, and we're not going to have people who feel like they're being harassed and who are being harassed. So it's going to be both of those. And the city is going to be a better place for everyone. Now, why does that work for you as a business? Because you need your employees to be comfortable. You need your customers to be comfortable. You need yourself to be comfortable in all of that. So therefore that's how this is going to work for you. And so we're all in this together, and we need to make this work together. And that's, I think going to be what my hope is, the way this happens is that everyone agrees. There are things we want, and we're going to have to pay more for some of those, but we're going to be absolutely very clear about how we're going to measure it and ensure that we get that other things, by the way, we're wasting money, like in medical care, where maybe we're wasting a ton of money. And so there, we should be spending a lot less, even as we get more,
Speaker 3 00:12:34 Most people who have been afflicted with COVID have survived. However, many survivors suffer, long-term impairments like respiratory disease, cardiac disease, and other complications. How's the similar to cities, maybe a better way to ask this would be what will be the long-term effects following the way in the wake of the pandemic?
Speaker 4 00:12:55 Yeah, so it is quite, quite, quite similar for a city. Cities can sort of have their own lives. I think some cities will do fine. The biggest cities, you know, the new Yorks and San Franciscos and Las and so on, because there's such demand for living there. What I worry about are the cities where businesses are mobile and people are mobile, and there's not much keeping people there. So you could have a couple of big employers move out. And then all of a sudden people move out and, um, city tax revenues go down and then the city can't afford to provide services and more people leave and it becomes a spiral. And we saw that in a number of cities in the 1970s and eighties, and up through the nineties. And then of course there was this huge desire to be back in cities again, and lots of cities did very well.
Speaker 4 00:13:37 So I, um, uh, so I, I worry about those cities and I think the solution, you know, it's not, um, unlike COVID, we can actually treat it. And so, and so we can, we can do things to try and prevent it, but what it's going to require is a really good management capacity at the local level to say, we've got these problems, we need to address these problems, but we also can't do it by driving people away. We've got to do it by being inclusive about the problems, about solving the problems, and we know how to do that. So for example, businesses like trained labor. So if you say, how do we train more people so that they're meeting the skill needs of the employers in the area, and how do we set up markets in the areas so that it works and transportation systems in the area so that it works so that all of those are things that we can do that benefit people and the firms that are in those areas.
Speaker 3 00:14:31 An interesting fact, many people don't consider with the differences of political opinions between city dwellers and rural residents is that urbanites need more government than residents of lower density to America. I'm wondering how would you convince someone living outside the city or beyond the suburbs to care about public management or public policy decisions and cities?
Speaker 4 00:14:53 So, you know, one of the things about cities is that people recognize the need for government, much more. You know, you, you know, just from everyday things about, you know, how do you get the sewers working in the water system working and so on? You know, there's just this intimate relationship with government. Um, the, uh, I think there are things for which people in rural areas do actually want more government, but are they where they need government to help? So let me take a clear example of that, which is medical care is much less, uh, high-tech medical care is much less available in rural areas than in urban areas. And yet there's no reason why we can't have a broadband link from urban areas to rural areas to pick, you know, so that if people need a more sophisticated care, that can at least be on the line, rather than even if not in person fully, that's going to require government to help it out because only the government is going to be able to build the broadband capacity and set up the system infrastructure and payment models and all of that to make that work.
Speaker 4 00:15:49 So my sense is that there, there are things for which there is demand, but, and people don't know to demand it of government because it hasn't traditionally been seen as a government thing, but it's actually quite, uh, quite important. I think also in the COVID-19 space, thinking about how do we prevent pandemic disease. Worldwide is again something that people even outside of urban areas, you know, COVID-19 does not discriminate. It, it spreads more when people are in close contact, but it's certainly not spared rural areas of the country. And so those are, that's another thing for which thinking about the global response to pandemic is something where government is important. Even if one has a, has an aversion to government in principle,
Speaker 3 00:16:31 By your estimation COVID-19 will cost the U S economy, $16 trillion. Once it's done, you believe it's worth to potentially spend billions to avoid future pandemics. And I think that's a good idea. I was just wondering, how do we ensure it's spent effectively?
Speaker 4 00:16:46 So that's always a worry. So yeah. So one of the worries always is when you spend money, you know, are you doing it effectively? One of the interesting things that's happened is our ability to monitor what goes on has actually improved. So for example, you know, we were talking about, you know, police, we can now monitor police what police are doing all the time in real time with cameras and things that we didn't used to be able to do. So we can observe more about what happens when low income minority populations interact with police than we were ever able to do in the past. Similarly, at the global level, we have knowledge about various possible pandemic threats and actual threats in different areas. So we could set up organizations and say for many of them, not all, but for many of them, we can monitor how things are going. So one of the basic tenants of economics of economic management is that if you don't measure something, you never work at it. You know what, you, you, you, you, you, you work at what you measure. So, so anything for which we really want something different and better to happen, we're going to have to measure it and say, this is a part of what we're going to look at and are we getting to where we want or not? And if not, how do we change things so that we do,
Speaker 3 00:17:59 You suggest establishing a multinational anti pandemic agency to monitor for new outbreaks? How would you propose building this NATO for public health?
Speaker 4 00:18:11 Yeah, so we, so what we propose is something that looks like NATO, or at least is inspired by NATO. NATO is probably the most successful international Alliance of, uh, certainly our lifetime. Um, it's, what's interesting about it is, uh, at least from our perspective, it was given a very clear mission and a budget that was appropriate to that mission. And that wasn't that, and the budget, like doesn't depend each year on what, whether you said nice things or not. So the mission was to prevent the west from attack by the Soviet union. That was the mission. And obviously if there was an attack, it would have been a failure, a failure to prevent it. But you can also, you know, you, you, you then say, okay, look, we're going to, we're going to give you this mission. We're going to give you this budget. Now we want to see the performance on it.
Speaker 4 00:19:04 I think for a global health organization, in some ways it may even be a little bit easier because you can monitor things like, are you taking the steps that the world has identified to reduce the risk of pandemic disease? I think what's really going to have to happen is that the rich countries will have to get together just like they did with NATO and say, we are going to pay for it because we have to pay for it. Cause that's where that's the only place where the money is going to come from. We're going to pay for it, but it's not just a blank check. Here's what we're going. Here's what we insist on. And here's how we're going to monitor it and then make it be not a political issue about you need to be nice to these people and not nice to these people, but make it be a scientific issue, which is what are the things we need to do.
Speaker 4 00:19:44 And are you global community going to do them or not? You know, how are we going to get them done? And they're con they're then going to be consequences if they're not met. So a country, like, for example, if China, you know, if you need to reduce, uh, wet markets and things, and that's not done, then there are consequences because you just can't have access to the world in the same way, if you're at risk of spreading pandemic disease. So it's, so that's, I think that part of the, uh, rules of the road that are going to have to be laid down just like the rules of the road that were laid down with respect to preventing nuclear war and pandemic diseases, it is if anything more complex than nuclear war and we devote less attention to it.
Speaker 3 00:20:23 I think it's a really good point. You discussed in the book, how defunding the police won't accomplish anything. You'll neither make more safety nor more respect within the community with poor police departments. The answer would be not to funding, but defining the mission of police to include crime reduction and upholding civil rights. This means paying more for policing, correct?
Speaker 4 00:20:45 It does mean paying more for policing, you know, as an economist, you, you, you, you get what you pay for it. Um, and if you want an organization to do something different than what it's doing, if you want it to do what it's doing now, and then more, you need to be, you need to put into the resources to make that happen. So there's no way you can say, I want you to do more with less. I'm going to, you know, unless you can identify what that less is that you, you know, that thing that, that you don't want them to do is so realistically, we're going to have to say to the police police across the country, we want safety and we want civil rights. We're going to monitor them. Here's how we're going to monitor them. We understand that costs more and we're going to put more in, and that's just the way it is. And, and, and, and, and if we want to have that, that's how we're going to be
Speaker 3 00:21:33 A large focus of your research was on those affected by COVID-19 were those who lived in colored, lower income communities. I was wondering you to talk about the reasons for this.
Speaker 4 00:21:44 Yeah. So unfortunately, those that were hit the worst were those people of color people in low income communities, people in high density areas, there are different layers of answers to why, you know, so on the one hand it's because obesity rates are higher and lower income populations know obesity is a risk factor for COVID and living in dense housing is a risk factor, and low-income people are more likely to live in dense housing and taking the subway or the bus to work as a risk factor in low income. People are more likely to take the subway or bus to work. So on the one hand, there are sort of those events that way. On the other hand, I think that's also too simple of an explanation in the sense that, um, we observed those health differences about not just COVID, but everything. So everything, you know, health across the board is, is worse for low-income than for high-income people and for racial minorities compared to, uh, compared to racial majorities. So it's, it's, it's not fair just to say, it's COVID that we have to address all of these racial issues in society.
Speaker 3 00:22:49 And America has built a public health insurance system that spends $3 trillion annually on medical care. However, it wasn't able to build a system to fully protect and promote the health of the public. In one part of the book, you mentioned that the focus of health care systems for nearly all world governments focus on individual care over public health, however, all developed countries with the exception of the U S have a universal health insurance healthcare is sickness country. How do you think we should help it?
Speaker 4 00:23:20 Healthcare is sick in this country. Of course, we knew that before. COVID what we didn't know before COVID is that it was unprepared to have to do much in a pandemic either. There, there, there are a couple of different ways to think about it, but the way I would put it primarily is that healthcare in this country is basically designed as a private healthcare system to pay the bills, help you pay the bills when you get sick. So that's mission is private insurance to help pay the bills when you get sick. And what we need is a system that is focused around the public health care issue of keeping all Americans as healthy as we can be for as long as we can be and doing so at, you know, at, at the lowest cost at can. And that's a very different mission and involves different funding structures and different system, organization, and different goals on the part of providers and so on.
Speaker 4 00:24:11 And so we're going to have to move that one part of that is going to be that everyone has to have insurance coverage, because you can't have a system where people are afraid. It's many people were of going to the doctor for COVID because maybe I can't afford it. Thank God we made it free. Even though, then some people didn't go. So the insurance coverage is going to have to be a part of it, but it's still going to require much more than that. It's not going to be once people have insurance it's, you know, what we observed is that even with insurance had difficulty accessing medical care in the co you know, in the best way for COVID and they still had difficulty, we still have difficult to get in contact tracing and isolation and testing, RightScale testing and so on. And so there's, and so there's basically, there's going to be no alternative to thinking about taking a healthcare system that's devoted to helping you helping pay the bills and keep, keep the, um, you know, keep the medical system afloat when we're, when we're sick and taking that and saying, no, no, no.
Speaker 4 00:25:07 We really, really need to focus on the population health as well.
Speaker 3 00:25:11 And my last question for you, I believe you bring up a concern in the book about the future of cities. Following COVID. Many people are opting to work at home since it was possible during the pandemic, what will happen to downtowns if people and businesses conclude it's cheaper and more productive to have people work from home and telecommunicate for all their company needs.
Speaker 4 00:25:32 So I think some companies will, um, reduce their footprint. They won't need as many people in at the same time and they will. Um, and they, they, they will, uh, take up less space. I think in some cases that will be difficult, particularly if there's not much demand for being in the city. And therefore that reduces, um, the, the total amount of, of activity in the city and tax revenues. And so on for a lot of cities, there may be some unexpected benefits I can think of two, one is young startups that have been priced out of the market because rents are too high. So those people may now say, oh, gee, I can start the new business. You know, the space isn't so tight, I can think about a new business or a new opportunity somehow. And so that's part of what may happen.
Speaker 4 00:26:22 And that would be good. That that would be good in a lot of ways. The other thing that may happen is that some commercial land could get turned into residential land and in a lot of areas of the country, rents are too high and they haven't been able to build enough and build enough new housing and so on. And so that could be great, particularly for low-income people for younger people, who to live in cities who don't care about that much space, who just want a chance to do stuff and get ahead and are finding themselves priced out of a lot of cities. This could really help them a lot. So I think that taking some use away from Suburbans and established businesses into kind of scrappier younger, starting up things could be very good assuming that the city can sustain that and that it's not just going to be a depopulation population of the city.
Speaker 3 00:27:11 We are out of time, but you've been listening to my conversation with David Culler. He's one of the co-authors of the new books, revival, this city living in an age of isolation. Thank you for your time, David.
Speaker 4 00:27:23 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 3 00:27:25 And now this,
Speaker 2 00:27:43 Where are you there?
Speaker 5 00:27:46 Yes.
Speaker 2 00:27:47 Hi, Laura. How are you doing?
Speaker 5 00:27:51 I'm doing just great.
Speaker 2 00:27:52 Great. Uh, tonight, we're going to be speaking with Laura Davis author of the burning light of two stars and many other books that you'll be familiar with as we talk. Um, but let's start with a little introduction to the book, a little synopsis and a reading she prepared.
Speaker 5 00:28:13 Okay. So the burning light of two stars tells the story of my embattled relationship with my mother, our determination to love one another and the dramatic and surprising collision course, we ended up on at the end of her life. Um, when I was in my twenties, my mother and I experienced a terrible rift and we spent the next 20 years struggling to find our way back to each other. And I thought that we had reconciled, but then my mother grew old and she called one day to announce that she was moving across the country to live in my town for the rest of her life. And suddenly he no longer had a 3000 mile buffer between us and she began losing her mind to dementia and her decline triggered every button I had. How could it not? She'd made those buttons and caring for her, brought up all the issues that had never been resolved between us, but I had made a promise to care for her for the rest of her life.
Speaker 5 00:29:16 And so this memoir, my story describes what happened next. Um, despite everything was capable of becoming the daughter, she needed me to be, um, could I find it in my heart to love her unconditionally? Um, the piece I I chose to read is, um, a little bit after my mother has arrived in California, um, she's across town from me. We're kind of at war over her independence, which often happens. And when a parent has dementia, she felt she could take care of herself. I felt she wasn't safe and was going through the motions of being a good daughter. I was doing all the tasks and things I needed to do, but there still was such a wall between us. And, uh, one day I went to see her. I was helping her do some things, and she basically confronted me about how cold I was.
Speaker 5 00:30:10 And this is what I wrote afterwards, three decades earlier, I had erected an impenetrable wall between us a fortress with narrow slits. So I could watch her approach. I ensured that my defenses were prepared anytime she came near me, I always had an escape plan. It's true. We later reconciled. And the fact that we were able to create a functional relationship was a miracle, but it wasn't an intimate miracle because I never took down my wall. Oh, I taught myself to be kind to her in a fake it till you make it kind of way. But I still held her at bay. My wall just got subtler. It wasn't permeable. It was hard and opaque and there was no door. We only met in the anterior chamber, the common room where guests are received. Only my polished self was on display, my masked self. And only in the Anta chamber.
Speaker 5 00:31:16 Mom never saw my inner sanctum and I never saw hers. I got as close as I could within the constraints I had established, but closed is closed and a closed heart is a lonely one. The price I paid to keep my mother out at first with withdrawal later with an armed fortress. And finally with the polite rules of detente was love the pure unfettered love. I longed for the pure unfettered love. She craved that day in the kitchen when I couldn't comfort her, I had to face it. My mother was still a stranger to me with tentacles of need. I was loathed to touch. I want it to be more than kind to do more than merely what was right. I wanted to love my mother just once freely and what the relief of a lost exhausted child beyond words and beyond all pretense. I wanted to lay my head on a place that was safe just once before it was too late.
Speaker 2 00:32:24 Thank you. That was a reading from the burning light of two stars by Laura Davis. Um, let us talk first about, you have written another book about your relationship with your mother. I thought we'd never speak again. And I'm wondering how long ago that was, how you changed between the two books, how they're different and how they're the same.
Speaker 5 00:32:50 Um, the, I thought we'd never speak again, came out 19 years ago. So it's quite a long time ago and it's much more of a, um, kind of how to book about how to reconcile a strange relationships. And for that book, it was inspired by the fact that my mother and I had done a lot of healing in our relationship, but I went out and I, I interviewed, um, like Vietnam veterans who had gone back to Vietnam. I interviewed people who had used restorative justice. I interviewed all kinds of family scenarios where people had successfully reconciled or not, or had found peace with themselves or with the other person. And so the book really goes through, what are the elements of reconciliation? It has lots of other people's stories and it talks about four different pathways to reconciliation that people can achieve. So it was, it was really a guidebook.
Speaker 5 00:33:47 Um, and there was a little thread of my story with my mother, but it was, you know, like 2% of a hundred percent of that book. And, um, this story is a memoir. And so it's a hundred percent the story that just was barely hinted at, in that book. And you know, that story, um, in the first book, it ended when my mother with my mother's 70th birthday party, which was kind of a celebratory event and this story really picks up 10 years later and covers the end of her life and what it meant for me to be a caregiver, to someone who had really betrayed me in the past. And you know, what that challenge the reward, um, what I had to go through. I really tried to give an honest rendering of being a caregiver. Um, especially when there's this kind of wound also that you're coping with.
Speaker 2 00:34:40 Talk some about your relationship with your mother early in your life and when did it change and how did it change and was it a sudden change or was it gradual?
Speaker 5 00:34:52 It was definitely gradual. You know, I think when I was a little girl, my mother was a wonderful mother in many ways. Um, and I think as long as I was kind of a good little girl, uh, you know, when I was a young child, we got along well. Um, but as soon as I began to assert being different from her, you know, kind of an adolescence early adolescence, I am a very strong personality. I grew up in the sixties and seventies. I was a counter-culture kid. I was, I dropped out of, you know, the expectation, the things that she expected me to do, you know, I quit college three times. I, I went into an Ostrom, uh, with a guru. Um, when I was 23, I came out as a lesbian. I did a lot of things. My mother was horrified by. Um, and so, and she felt that I was doing them to spite her, you know, in her mind it was all to make her suffer basically.
Speaker 5 00:35:49 And so we just, you know, as I started making these choices that she couldn't, um, get behind, and I think I was quite challenging daughter to have, we just got more and more estranged. Um, you know, when I came out to her, I was 23 years old and her response was you've confirmed my worst fear about you, you know? So it was very hard to be close to someone when that was her response. And, um, and then, you know, several years after that, I began to remember that I had been sexually abused as a child by her father, my grandfather, um, and that when I came forward with that, that was kind of like the, the final straw, because I desperately needed her support. You know, it was, I was going through the worst crisis in my whole life. Um, and she insisted that I was lying and she was just as desperate for me to recant and to say it hadn't happened.
Speaker 5 00:36:45 And so, you know, neither one of us was willing to back down. Um, and then on top of that, I went ahead and ended up writing a best-selling book called the courage to heal, which was a guide to healing from child sexual abuse. And it became this underground bestseller. And suddenly not only was I saying this, but I was on national TV thing, you know, and I was speaking to giant audiences of women who would come to hear me speak. And so, you know, I went very public with this thing that she was certain had never happened. And that, that was really the final straw, but I think there'd been a lot of cracks in the relationship before that time. Um, but that really was kind of that was it
Speaker 2 00:37:28 Talk a little bit, we don't want, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 5 00:37:33 Well, just, you know, that, uh, you know, we were very bitterly estranged for a number of years and, um, it was when I had my first child, I had, uh, a son at when I was 36 years old. Um, that really helped give both of us the impetus to want to really try to work on this relationship and see if there was any way to find common ground. And I would say that his birth, um, he's 28 now. So I would say his birth was really the beginning of a reconciliation process between us, but that was very slow and took many years and had a lot of ups and downs and a lot of walking on eggshells. Um, but you know, we gradually got closer, but we were able to have kind of, as I described in that passage, a functional relationship, but not an intimate one.
Speaker 2 00:38:26 Let's talk just a tiny bit about the courage, the heal, actually, I'm mostly interested in how working on that book, informed your work in this book, uh, about the healing and about some of the things your mother said to you in regard to not believing you about the abuse. And, um, how did that help you, that you had written that book before? How did that help you get through writing this one?
Speaker 5 00:38:56 You know, I don't really know how to answer that, but that the courage to heal was published 33 years ago. So it was really a long time ago. And I think it definitely, I crossed a line when I published that book in terms of, um, standing up for what I knew to be true. Um, and I think, and my mother couldn't deal with it. And I think, you know, her denial, um, was so typical. I think one of the things that was, I guess, helpful is that having interviewed hundreds of survivors of abuse, uh, you know, family reactions, like hers were pretty typical. So, you know, this wasn't unusual. Um, so I think, I think that was helpful, but I think, you know, I, I have been committed to a healing process my whole life, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a person who likes to keep growing.
Speaker 5 00:39:46 Um, and I think, you know, one of the things that enabled me to begin to reconcile with my mother is that I really committed to the healing work I needed to do. Um, and at a certain point, you know, probably in my mid thirties, I didn't really want to be identified with this terrible thing that had happened in my past. And I, I wanted to start asking myself, well, who am I now? Like, w what do I want to do with the rest of my life? I've dedicated, I've gone to therapy. I've gone to these support groups. I've really, really healed this or worked on healing it. And now who do I want to be? I don't want my life to be a reaction to this terrible thing who was, I meant to be before this ever happened to me. And I really want it to discover that one part of that was becoming an author. Part of it was becoming a mother. Um, part of it was having a family and ultimately becoming a teacher, you know, there's, there's the, the way I express myself in the world, I think is probably how I was meant to do. Um, and that the courage to heal was the first, the first step in that path of being, becoming an author,
Speaker 2 00:40:51 Boundaries seemed very important in this book, uh, boundaries with your mother and other ways that you would want to, uh, have a safe space for yourself, uh, without other people impeding into it. Uh, talk a little bit about the boundary thing, especially with your mom.
Speaker 5 00:41:12 Well, you know, at first I had to create really rigid boundaries, you know, and I think, uh, when we've been injured by someone, um, the first thing we need is we need to create those kinds of boundaries so that the injury is not continuing. And so that we can perspective, we could do our own healing. It's kind of, you create a protective space, but I think as time goes on and you go through that healing process, the boundaries can get softer, you know, and, and I experienced that with my mother. I think one of the things we did that was really helpful, um, is we agreed to disagree. You know, there was this huge, terrible issue between us that we could not agree on. And we, for years, we were trying to convince each other, you know, I was trying to say I was right and that she was wrong and she was doing the same thing.
Speaker 5 00:42:00 And I think we both got to the point of realizing, you know, let's leave the unresolved stuff sitting there. And what are the other ways in which we might be able to forge a connection, you know, similar, if you, if you have a blockage to your heart and the arteries are blocked, um, then new capillaries begin to grow so that the blood continues to flow. And so we did that, you know, we, my mother and I both loved the movies. Um, we both loved theater, so it would go to the movies or we would go to the theater. And one of the things my mother did that I thought was really critical is that we were living 3000 miles apart. And, um, when I had my son, she began coming to California for a couple of months, every winter. So she crossed the country, she would rent her own apartment.
Speaker 5 00:42:48 And first I was not very welcoming. You know, I, I was very ambivalent about her being there, but she would come, she would live her own life, make her own friends, but we have the opportunity because we were in proximity to start doing things together that would build some new tendrils of connection. And I really give her a huge amount of credit for taking that step. I think it made a really huge difference between us and as she wrote to me one day, she said, you know, if we never see each other, all we're going to have is a really crappy 20 years, the last 20 years, and that we need to start generating some new experiences. So, you know, and I described that process, you know, in great detail in the burning light of two stars. And then, you know, when she got old, it added a whole other level of complexity.
Speaker 5 00:43:40 Um, when I was caregiving her and when the, the dynamic of power shifted between us and suddenly I was the one who had control in the relationship and she needed me. And, um, it was very poignant. It was very challenging. Um, it brought up a lot from the earlier years between us. Um, but you know, I think one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story is I wanted people to understand that sometimes even the most challenging and difficult relationships can reach a place of some kind of peace and resolution, you know, even, you know, I did write a book called I thought we'd never speak again. And I, at one point I did think that, you know, but I was at her deathbed and I really wanted to be there. Um, so, you know, th there was a huge shift that happens over the 20 or 30 year period.
Speaker 5 00:44:32 And I really wanted to document particularly the last seven years of her life when she came out to California and really write about what does it mean to caretake someone, you know, what is it like to get old in this country? Uh, what is it like to, um, watch someone that you love declined? Um, and, you know, in the midst of, I had teenagers at the time, you know, I was just squeezed in that sandwich generation, like so many people are. Um, and it's a, it's a stressful period when you're in that position of caring for so many different people.
Speaker 2 00:45:08 Would you say your, your desired, well, obviously we always want everybody to read our book, but I'm wondering who you were writing to as you wrote the book. And, uh, what kinds of, uh, messages did you want people to receive from reading this book?
Speaker 5 00:45:31 Well, you know, that the kind of like the book isn't quite out yet, it was delayed because of, um, you know, COVID supply chain problem, like many books right now. So, um, it'll be coming out November 9th, but I have had, um, some early readers and I've posted the first five chapters up on my
[email protected]. And so people have been reading the first five chapters and then writing to me and the kind of feedback I'm getting, people are saying things like, you know, I know I'm going to have to take care of my mother and I've been dreading it. And now I'm looking at it as an opportunity, you know, or they'll say, you know, I'm thinking about my mother or my daughter in a whole new way. Um, one woman even wrote and said that she, uh, picked up the phone and called her mother for the first time in 18 years.
Speaker 5 00:46:23 Wow. So, you know, I think I was, I was writing for people who are experiencing distance or a strange moment from any family member who really long for some kind of resolution to that situation. Um, I was writing for anyone who had been healed from sexual abuse, who wanted to know what is it like 30 years later, or 40 years later? Like, what is the really long-term picture? So I felt like that was part of the audience. Um, I, I, I, you know, I think it's also, I really worked hard to make it read like a novel. So I think anyone who just likes a well-told story, uh, where you have to keep turning pages to find out what's going to happen. I think, I don't think you have to have any of these issues. Um, and I was thinking of people who are caregivers, you know, who are dealing with aging parents or aging parents who are having to deal with giving up their independence. So I think for all the, you know, people dealing with death with dignity, anyone who has a, someone with Alzheimer's or dementia, so there's a lot of potential people I think, would find this, this book meaningful. And I, I, I really primarily wrote it as a story, but when people tell me that it's touching them in a deep way, of course, that makes me really, really glad.
Speaker 2 00:47:43 Well, your book humanizes people with dementia and Alzheimer's, um, I think many people just have a, uh, just idea in their head about what it's like, and they don't really understand. And your book really humanizes people. I got a real deep, deep feeling for your mom and what she was going through and what you were going through too. Um, well, I want to talk a little bit about structure. I, I th I found the structure very interesting and really a page Turner, as you said, um, it's not chronological. And sometimes you drop in the, uh, the story of the letters that you were reading, uh, that your mother and you had written to each other over the course, sometimes as this period of time, when you were, uh, pretty strange, you still wrote letters to each other. And I'm wondering how you decided to do that structure. What, what prompted you to do it that way rather than some other way?
Speaker 5 00:48:45 Well, I, you know, I wrestled with the structure, uh, for years. I mean, it took me 10 years to write this book. I tried to write it as a play. I tried to write it actually exclusively as a book of letters of an epistolary memoir. And people told me that they felt like it was a private conversation, and they were only outside the letters. It's pretty interesting because, um, when my mother died, I found this cache of letters, um, and she had saved every letter she had ever written to me. She had copied it, um, because this is pre-internet. She had copied the letters. She had even saved, like the first draft of letters that she never sent to me. And I had saved the same. So when I put together all the letters I had saved and all the letters she had saved, there was this like huge stack of letters.
Speaker 5 00:49:37 And I kind of dreaded reading them. Um, but I did, I forced myself to sit down and read them. And it was, um, it was a confrontation because what I discovered was that I had had this storyline, that I had told many people for many years about my mother is this way. And this is what happened between us and we didn't speak for seven years. And then when I read these letters, I saw that we had been corresponding that whole time. And suddenly the story I had been telling began to fall apart, and I saw that this story that I needed to prop myself up was just, it was true, but it was only part of the truth. And when I read these letters, there were definitely letters that were angry and bitter and accusatory, but there were also letters from her that were incredibly loving and generous.
Speaker 5 00:50:27 And so it was, it was kind of mind blowing really, really mind blowing to read these letters. And, um, I always wanted to include some of them in the book. And almost every editor I worked with told me, get rid of them. It's just like, there's, this book is too complicated. You're, you're in the pasture and the present you're in the future, get rid of the letters, but I just insisted, and I paired them down. You know, there's not very many of them left, but I think I'm really glad they're still in there because it's really the only place my mother gets her own voice that is not modulating through my interpretation. You know, it's not my version of what she said to me, but it's actually her real language. And I think it's great that she gets to speak for herself.
Speaker 2 00:51:13 We have unfortunately run out of time. I'm enjoying speaking with you, women speaking with Laura Davis author of the burning light of two stars. Um, and you said once, but why don't you, uh, say again, how people can reach you?
Speaker 5 00:51:30 Yeah, the best way is my website, which is www Laura davis.net. Um, and if you go there, you could find out I'm a writing teacher. You could find all about my writing teaching, but I think most importantly to this conversation, I have posted the first five chapters of the memoir online for people to read for free. Um, so you could go read it, um, and you know, if you want to, pre-order it, it's coming out in just a couple of weeks. You there's all the buttons where you can buy it and it will be a nice little gift that will arrive in your mailbox a couple of weeks from now.
Speaker 2 00:52:06 Great. Thank you so much. This has been a really enjoyable, wonderful interview. And, uh, so we've been speaking with Laura Davis and, uh, we'll, we'll have to say goodbye at this point. Thank you so much for the interview.
Speaker 5 00:52:23 Thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to
Speaker 2 00:52:24 You. Oh, thanks. And now this
Speaker 1 00:52:39 You're listening to right on radio on cafe 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. Like to thank our special guest tonight, David color, and Laura Davis. Plus you, our listeners, the, your sport and donations cafe would not be possible when you find more news and info about right on radio, on <inaudible> dot org. Plus listen to your recent episodes on our recent launch podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Google podcasts, anywhere podcasts can be found. Now stay tuned to <inaudible> Minnesota.
