the power of belief: nina st. pierre in conversation with jeanna kadlec

on New Age spirituality, the ethics of memoir, and telling the story to ourselves

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Anyone who follows me on social media knows how absolutely obnoxious I’ve been this week, because not just one, but TWO members of my writers’ group have books that came out yesterday. One of those books, that I am so excited to bring to your attention, is LOVE IS A BURNING THING, the debut memoir from the poetic, downright mystical Nina St. Pierre.

nina st. pierre

I could tell you the book centers on a deeply enmeshed mother/daughter relationship, but that’s not entirely accurate. Nor would it be correct to suggest that it’s a solely journey of individuation from the mother, and a slow descent into self-discovery, although it is that, too. I could tell you that it’s about growing up dirt poor, with the occasional whiplash of grandparents swooping in, using money as a bandaid. That it’s a reckoning with the spiritual bypassing of the New Age movement or a devastating portrayal of how mental health shows up in the dregs of poverty. That it’s about the power of our chosen family as much as it is the power our natal ties exert on us. That it’s a love letter to northern California and especially the small towns around Mt. Shasta, where Nina grew up (also, the mountain represented on the book cover). That it’s about fire: literally, with the inciting event of her mother’s self-immolation, and more philosophically, about the powers of destruction and creation.

Love is a burning thing, after all. As true when June Carter wrote it as it is now.

And all of that would be true, but not the Whole Truth. The idea of capital-T Truth is something Nina, generally, rejects here, expertly putting a lot of pressure on culturally accepted binaries, on the Real and the Unreal. She allows for multiple truths to exist at once — the sign of complex thinking in a memoir. She engages with the scientific and the otherworldly in a nuanced way, always grounding us in her own embodied experience and lived knowledge.

These are all things she has been teaching me about for years in our writers’ group. Nina is both a generous reader and friend, someone who has continually challenged me around my tendencies toward black and white thinking. Anyone who is reckoning with that kind of binary thinking, or who delights in work that musses up the Grey In-Between, will be gripped by her work.

This is a long one, in part because we are both elliptical thinkers and speakers, and in part because we just had so much to talk about. A core, foundational tenant we share is, as she puts it here, “the power of belief” — and investigating both the stranglehold and support that beliefs can exert in a person’s life. Our conversation ranges from belief systems and mental health to the craft and ethic of memoir, including how to write about those who are dead and living. I hope you enjoy. I know we did.

this interview has been edited for length

get it here

Jeanna Kadlec: I obviously know and love you, and I'm so excited for you. But in the case that my newsletter readers are not familiar with your work, if you could introduce yourself? 

Nina St. Pierre: I am a culture writer and essayist who was raised in California, currently in Brooklyn. I have written about everything from the Ruff Ryders bike crew to theosophy. It’s hard to define a beat, but I'm most interested in where the sacred and the mundane collide.

JK: I love that in your work. And because we're in a writers’ group together and see each other more frequently than I think we probably see our other friends? 

NSP: More than anyone else. *both laughing*

JK: I see you and

Lilly Dancyger

and Angela and Deena and my partner and that's like it. But because of that, we've been in conversation about that relationship between the spiritual and the mundane for so many years now.

L to R: deena elgenaidi, angela chen, lilly dancyger, nina st. pierre, me! - just this week at lilly’s book launch for FIRST LOVE at books are magic

Something I so appreciate is how we are inevitably, in group, always coming at it from very different angles. My native place is the evangelical church, but yours is — in this really fascinating way — the ‘70s and ‘80s New Age movement. I've learned so much from you through that. 

In the book, it's pretty quickly set up that your parents are Transcendental Meditators, and your mom eventually leaves [that movement for the more syncretic New Age]. But if you could explain a little bit about your spiritual background and how that informs your work, just to set up your lived context? 

NSP: My parents got into transcendental meditation in the ‘70s when it was blowing up in the US. I was born in a Transcendental Meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa, which is sort of the epicenter [of TM], which is another interesting connection between us.

Iowa is the unlikely epicenter of the Transcendental Meditation movement in the United States. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had a smaller movement, I believe, in California in the ‘70s. And then, a university was shutting down in Iowa, and he had this idea to create a consciousness-based university. It was accredited, so they had degrees in business or education. But there were also classes like Forestry, which some old heads told me meant like, going into the woods for a couple days and meditating. It was giving Naropa vibes.

This was just a small Iowa town, and then this influx of Transcendental Meditators came and plunked down and created this university where everyone went to classes, but they also stopped what they were doing every morning and every evening and meditated together in a golden dome. My parents were students there, so that’s the ethos I was born into. It's interesting — I'm thinking of it just now as I'm speaking, that where we were was sort of this combination of these people who were striving toward enlightenment in the middle of this very rural, small town American environment. And that's actually where I ended up with my mom, eventually, in Northern California. 

So I was born into that, and I got what they call a “word of wisdom” when I was three or four years old. It’s a little kids mantra that you get. A kid's not going to sit and meditate for 20 minutes, so what you would do is ten minutes a day, you would do “silent playing.” So during this time, you were supposed to be repeating your mantra in your mind. You could move around and be active, but you were silent and thinking the mantra.

JK: Did you silently play and think the mantra?

NSP: I probably did, [but] being silent was hard for me. 

I left Iowa when I was about five, and I didn't really have memories of it. But I went back when I was 30, and my dad showed me around town and took me to places that I had lived and said, this is where your mom and I fought about X. This is where we fought about Y.

JK: That's so real, though, like going back to a place and it's marked by the major fights in your relationship.

NSP: This is where she cried in the bank parking lot. This is where she said she wanted to have a child. It's like, oh, wow. Okay. 

My dad took me to this place that we used to live in — this old house, which was now home to a Floating Bed Factory. And he said, when you got your word of wisdom, I thought it would make you less intense. I guess implying that I was an intense child. *both laughing*

He said, but all [the word of wisdom] did was organize your intensity. So you would still go out and be focused and pick every single flower in the yard. But now you just had a system.

JK: Knowing that you're a Virgo rising, it's like, they just gave you an organizational tool.

NSP: A way to organize my Piscean waviness. 

I think there's something telling about that too. Not to flatten my dad; he’s a multi-dimensional person. He's not written about as much in this book, because it's not about him. But it speaks to his belief, which I think continued for many years, that this practice that he's so invested himself in and so believed in, he thought could fundamentally shift the nature of what it is to be a child. Children are naturally intense and chaotic. They’re little Tasmanian Devils. 

JK: They have so much input coming in. But that's so interesting that you say that though — that he was really living his worldview in that sense. It wasn't just the macro where he was like, oh, we can collectively meditate our way to a new world. I forget the exact language of TM with what they're trying to achieve with that — enlightenment?

NSP: Enlightenment is a general term. Their highest level is unity consciousness. But essentially it’s oneness.

JK: Like, his translating that to the micro that a mantra could, like you're saying, shift your lived experience as a child, like how you're literally inputting information into your child brain. That’s very telling. 

NSP: Yeah. My parents were very devoted to that, and my mother was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. But then my parents split, and by the time I was four, going on five, my mom left for California, and eventually, I went out there with her. My father stayed in Transcendental Meditation, and he eventually moved to another TM community outside of Austin, Texas, where he lived until pretty recently. Almost 30 years. That’s where I spent my summers growing up. But TM was a daily practice for him and his wife. 

It’s not a religion. My dad is actually a Baha'i, and his wife is Catholic. So they have their respective religions. But to me, in terms of lifestyle, Transcendental Meditation really dictated a lot of their daily life: how they lived, even how they kind of ate and made choices, according to the Ayurveda. So to me, it felt more like a belief system than their actual religions. 

With my mother, she left TM, we went west, and then she proceeded to kind of try on every thing from — and I don't just mean “try on” in a flippant way. She would learn these practices, really devote herself to them, and then kind of take what served her and leave behind what didn't. So I would say over decades, she was accumulating this syncretic, bespoke devotional practice — and there’s plenty to say about that. But that included anything from A Course in Miracles, to the I AM movement, which is very specific to rural northern California, to Christian Science, to the tarot to channeling, to astral travel. You know. Just name ‘em.

JK: The way that you talk about it in the book, too —  I mean, because every child's lived context is just their world. And so the way that you just grew up with, and we talk about astral travel. And we're pulling tarot cards. That being the background for your life is, I think, so well represented in the book and also probably so intriguing to a lot of people currently who are discovering certain practices, some of which are more appropriative than others, in terms of current anti-organized religion movements here in the US. 

I don’t want to jump the gun, but I also want to ask: what do you think about the current New Age trends? Like, watching Instagram witches and people get into crystals and astrology. How does that feel to you, as someone who has been in this world — and a skeptic in this world — for so long? 

NSP: Now we’re gonna play hardball! 

It's almost like a double ended experience. At first, I felt some propriety over it, which was really a strange feeling because honestly, as readers will see in the book, I have been incredibly critical and cynical about many of these practices for most of my life. Honestly, it wasn't even until my mid early to mid 30s [that I started to be interested myself], and now I'm 43 and I'm still kind of like, okay. I'm accepting that some of these things are a part of my inheritance. 

I definitely have always had an insider's/outsider's view on things. I felt that I was my mother's filter, in a way. We would stop by an evangelical tent revival or randomly go to Baptist churches, and she was just so open. And I felt like I became the discerning one. Certain things, I'd be like, that shit's weird, that feels dark. This energy is all off, mom. She’d be like, it's cool, we're grooving. And I'm like, let's get the fuck out of here.

So I think it was interesting for me to feel that I had some ownership over those practices when I had basically rejected them. I’ve always felt a little bit on the fringe of culture. In a lot of ways, I'm not; I’m very much part of the dominant culture. I’m white, I'm cis, I'm formally educated. But in terms of the spiritual and existential, in terms of how we view and frame life and what is possible? I was on the edge of the cliff all the time. My mom was there, and I was trying to pull us back. Just like, I'm a child. I need to listen to Paula Abdul and do dance routines. Let's act normal, you know?

JK: Yeah.

NSP: I was always trying to live in reaction to that and create stability and push away from the edge of what is possible. Then, seeing that centered, becoming closer to the mainstream, and also seeing people do it in ways that felt… I don't know if performative is the right word?

JK: I would affirm that word. 

NSP: Okay, yeah, I'll take that from you, because I feel like you're very much in this landscape more than I am. 

There’s a lot of that [in New Age-adjacent practices], like there is in anything, right? People are performing it. Then, there became like the Instagram-ification of it, the meme-ification. It's become commodified. And I just thought, wow, you guys don't know shit. *both laughing* Which was not my place to say. But I was just like, what do you know about this life? 

It’s so interesting because one of my close friends grew up in a very strict Catholic home. Everything traditional was expected of her, but she's a very spiritual person, and she came to these things later in life on her own. She will have these experiences that are very transformative for her, and [for her] it's kind of like, oh, wow. You know, this is a new way of thinking. [Whereas] to me, because that was the norm, it's like I noticed that I was begrudging people their own discovery of these practices. Why should I feel that way? So it was an interesting thing when that first started happening. 

JK: I hear you on the things that you feel proprietary over that are no longer in your life in that full way that they used to be. But it's like, oh, but other people are discovering this for the first time? That’s a very real friction that comes up. 

It [also] so highlights the way that you were raised by a true believer. 

NSP: Yeah.

JK: No matter what she was believing in, it was very true in that moment, is at least my impression from what you've shared and written [over the years]. And this book is still so much you being the filter, and you finding the container that all of this goes in. 

I know that I personally have a very difficult time writing about spirituality, because language for it is hard. I wanted to ask how you approached writing about these practices, just writing about what that feeling of being at the edge of the cliff all the time is like. Inasmuch as words are containers, how do you find the right filtering? 

NSP: Agreed. I'm continuously revising my language for what this category of thing even is, and I've been lately thinking about it as like altered, or ineffable, states. Things that are not tangible, so it’s not just the sacred, but anything where there’s a slippage between worlds, or a reality and an unreality. 

Finding words to capture that in a way that still feels grounded was the challenge of this [book] for me, and — funnily enough — is the challenge of my life. 

Back to [earlier], I had a chip on my shoulder. I’m trying to think of other corny phrases. 

JK: That's a good one.

NSP: I had beef, okay? I had beef with a lot of the umbrella of the metaphysical, New Age spiritual world. But that beef was not articulated by any means. It was just this sort of amorphous ick. You know? And as anyone who walks around with a chip on their shoulder and has not deconstructed it will eventually find when they're forced to pry it open and look inside,  there's a lot going on. 

So I think that this book — at least, it's the volume one of what's inside. Let's open the box and look inside this shit. And writing is what slows me down. It lets me unravel my thoughts. I'm a very elliptical speaker in person, and I may write that way, too, but [the written word] is crafted, it's refined. It allows me to go back over and over and over and to return to my own flag post for myself and be like, wait, what did I mean by that? It was a constant act of writing this stuff down, almost a conversation with myself. There’s so much implied knowledge, even phrases that I would put in the book that I would have people read. Like the cosmic da da da, whatever, and readers would be like, what does cosmic even mean? 

So even being forced to consider a general reader forced me to define my terms. By defining the terms for them, it really started to bring clarity to me. What specifically am I talking about? Do I have issue with this belief system? Do I have issue with the fact that I felt that there was spiritual bypassing going on, which was a term I did not have at the time, but definitely felt in my life. Do I have issue with the fact that my mother chose to pursue enlightenment over retaining a stable home? 

This book really allowed me to both define my terms. I didn't study this stuff. Everything I know about astrology, tarot, metaphysics is very baseline.

JK: But also, you do know a lot more than a lot of people.

NSP: Okay, I have an intermediate knowledge, which I learned via osmosis. Sure, I read stuff here and there, but most of the things that I know, I absorbed because I was the oldest child of a single mother who was very poor and constantly moving. She just read what she was reading, and she did her tarot readings, and her practice was part of our daily life. And I absorbed those things. 

So in the book, then I had to say, oh, what am I really talking about? Okay, what are the belief systems that she actually followed? What do I think of those things? And where do my issues actually lie? In some parts of the book, you can see I'm working out my issues with this. I'm defining what those systems were and exploring their histories a little bit more, [like] oh, I can see how my mom connected The Course in Miracles to Christian Science. There's a lot about self-determinism. 

Toward the end of the book, it morphs into, what do I believe? That was the great gift of this book, is that it actually brought me to another cliff. I'm at the edge of my own belief, and I get to have belief. 

For a long time, subconsciously, which I didn't really realize until working through this book, belief felt like a threat to me. It felt like a threat to my safety and to my security. Some people might think that's overdramatizing it, but if you haven't lived at the existential edge of the world — it’s a destabilizing place to be when you didn't choose it, and when you're a child. 

This book was not therapy, but it was very restorative for me because where the book ends, my own journey into my beliefs begins. 

JK: It’s very clear that that’s what’s happening as a reader, and it's really cool to witness that. 

I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about the writing process of the book, since memoirs don't just come out fully formed. 

NSP: They don't!

JK: And like you said, writing isn’t therapy, but it does have therapeutic qualities. So to that extent, if you could talk more about the process of writing it? 

NSP: The writing of memoir. What to say. *both laughing*

JK: How did you get to this place where the book is a self reclamation, in a lot of ways? Like, you get to exist at the center of this really intense set of experiences that you've had, being at the edge of the cliff with a mother who was a tornado — and all of the incredible ways that shows up, the awe inspiring, but also the destructive, and not always particularly mindful of baby Nina and baby Chris [Nina’s younger brother] and what they might need. 

NSP: It’s so interesting because she's both intensely aware of that and then in other ways, not. 

JK: And that came through in the book.

NSP: I appreciate it knowing that, because that was a hard balance to strike. 

I will say that this began as… not a book. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I had gone through a big breakup. I was living on my own for the first time in my life. I was doing food writing and working in a restaurant and doing local reporting for little newspapers and all kinds of odd jobs trying to start to make a living as a writer, which is, as you know, incredibly hard. My mother had died, and I was thinking about these fires that she had started, and I was fixated on that. So I just started writing. I had this little apartment. I didn't have any electronics in my apartment, so I had an office space where I had my computer, where I would go to work. And every single morning I was doing The Artist’s Way. This was my first time of being like, I'm going to read self-help, spiritual shit. And I was so grossed out by myself. I was like, oh God, you're not going to be her! Because I tried my whole life to not be her. But there she was, creeping up.

I was reclaiming some stuff I had lost in relationship and in my mother, and I sat down and I would just write every morning on this typewriter that had no delete key. So if I needed to delete something, I would just X it out or put a line or just keep going. It was an old typewriter with sticky keys, you know? So I would sit down every morning, make coffee, and I would just write on that until I was done. 

After a year, I had 300 pages, and they were chaotic. I read them, and I just felt like I was reading a novel. It was like someone else's life entirely. It was a very surreal experience. And as I was reading the things, I started to process what had actually happened in my life, seeing where I had almost dissociated or disconnected from the reality of what was happening on the page. Seeing here’s the event, and here's my reaction to it was really stark. 

So for the first couple of years that I was working on this, it was really just me telling myself this story. I didn't think this was a book. I didn't think this was for anyone else. I never wanted to write about myself. I didn't want to talk about these things, actually. And that's true, actually.

JK: And that’s true, I think, in your general professional life, in a lot of ways. You do these amazing interviews. Amazing features. I mean, you have personal essays, but that's not your bread and butter.

NSP: It might be now! *both laughing* 

I came to this very hesitantly. It wasn’t an intention, because there was a lot of secrecy around these things in my life. I actually had a writing group at the time that was more about food writing. 

JK: Oh!

NSP: Yeah, it was very different than our group. 

I shared little bits of it here and there, and they kept being like, this is more. This is a story. There’s something really poignant here. This is for more than just you. This is really meaningful. I almost had to be convinced into it. 

So I started taking these workshops at a community writing space in Portland called The Attic. One of my very first workshops was with

Cheryl Strayed

, before Wild came out. It was me and a bunch of other women in their 60s, and I submitted one scene from the book and I just said, is this a story or do I just need to go to therapy? Cheryl was so generous, as she is, and she said both. Probably both. *both laughing* 

JK: Do you remember what it was that you submitted? 

NSP: It was actually a thing that didn't end up in the book. It was about the first time I flew on an airplane alone at four years old, because my father lived in Texas and my mom raised me in California. This was back in the ‘80s, so airplane rules were different. I went to visit my dad every summer in Texas, so [my mom] would put me on a plane alone from four years old on, and I would fly across the country and back every summer. 

So this was a retelling of that first airline flight. But it ended up being cut. I mean, I probably cut a whole ‘nother book's worth of material from this book over the years. 

So yeah. I got a therapist. *both laughing*

JK: Very important.

NSP: And I took another class at The Attic with a writer named Jennifer Lauck. Then, Jennifer invited me to a master class of hers, which was a more intensive, invite-only workshop. And I thought, okay, maybe I have some chops? And Jennifer taught me how to write a scene. She showed me how to look at a page and go, these three lines? That's a scene. We’d pull that out, and she’d say, now write seven pages [based on those lines]. I’m like, what? And she’s like, write a scene. Who was there? What did it smell like? 

But learning how to write a scene was very fundamental. Do they even teach how to write scenes in writing classes? 

JK: I know that a lot of people who teach nonfiction are always hammering on their memoir students to write more scenes. Garrard Conley talked about that when I interviewed him, and him being like, I knew that I needed more scenes, because I teach my students that. 

For nonfiction writers, pulling something into scene gets at the ethic [of the genre]. It gets at, how are you representing other people? How are you representing your perspective versus theirs? The dialogue you recreate, you know? 

NSP: Recreate is the key word. [People] are like, oh, you remember that? I can't believe you had a phonographic memory. And I’m like, I don't! This is a recreation. Obviously. I wasn't there recording this when I was seven years old. 

So fast forward, and then I was in another program that was like a year-long sort of MFA alternative again through the attic. The Attic in Portland really was my writing foundation. There was an instructor there, Lee Montgomery, who I was working with. When the year-long program was over, I was doing prerequisites to apply to Clinical Psychology PhD programs because I was like, writing is wild. I'm never going to make any money. I can't do this anymore. I need to get a real career. And so I was taking pre-reqs, and I was going to apply to those programs, and then I told Lee that, and she was just, absolutely not. Apply to MFAs. You need to take this writing thing as far as it can go. And she was like, you're 30-whatever. No one wants to take advice from a 30 year old.

JK: I mean… that’s true.

NSP: At the time, I was semi-offended. But then I sat with it for a couple weeks, and one day I just burst into tears. I think that moment was me believing that this could be a thing, and that it wasn't just my story anymore.

I did apply to MFA programs. I got in, I moved to the East Coast and went to Rutgers. That was really the moment at which the story became for everyone els. It went from me working through this and telling myself what it was about to something bigger in the world. And after that, it took over my life. *both laughing*

JK: As memoirs tend to do!

NSP: It took over my life, but I really feel like it was a vehicle into a whole new world. I went to grad school, and then afterward, I moved to New York. I've been here now almost eight years, and I've been working and doing many other things along the way. But the driving force of the last several years here has always been to get this book published. 

JK: You’ve had such a literal journey [with this book].

NSP: It took me across the country. And also, the question of the book [drove me] — I kept thinking, how do I get this right? How do I get this right? Because in my mind, it was so multidimensional. I wanted readers to feel the complexity of it and not jump to judgment or easy binaries. And I knew that I did not have the chops. I read incredible work, and I was just like, this is what I want. I wanted to have people experience certain emotions or things in their body. I wanted them to question their own preconceived notions, and I just thought, I don't have what it takes on a craft level to execute this. So that is what made me a writer, really. The standard that I held for what this story had to be propelled me through all my writing, creative writing education, and into a new life in which I wrote myself into this existence, to be honest. 

JK: But you did. And what you're saying, too, about when your taste outpaces your craft, and like, does that motivate you as a writer? Is that going to propel you into writing yourself into a new life by chasing that standard, or — as [is the case for] so many of our peers at this point —is that going to de-motivate you? Like, oh, I'm not good enough yet. Because that question can so easily sour. 

Did it ever sour for you? I feel like I know the answer to this question.

NSP: From beginning to end, from the first day that I sat down at that typewriter and started typing to the day that this book will come out — [it’s been] 13 years. I'm a whole different person, not just because of the book, but because of life, relationships, etc. 

But there were periods of time in which the book was de-centered, which, I'm talking a year or two, right? There were periods of time in which I felt like, this is an impossible book to write. I can never do it justice. I can't answer all the questions. I can't make all the statements, I can't do it. 

Once my craft was up, it was less about the craft. At some point, I started to feel like, I have what it takes to write this. Actually, I'm the only one that can write this! 

But there the unanswerable-ness of it, and that's what would lead me to the despair or the souring moments. That’s when it got really meta, and I was like, am I becoming insane? Is this method writing?

JK: Oh my god, that's such a horrifying question.

NSP: I mean, I'm not kidding. At times, I was on the edge. At one point, I was in Joshua Tree. I rented this old miner's cabin that was painted robin's egg blue. I went out there, and I was like, fuck it, I'm going to the desert. It's a little on the nose.

JK: Going to the desert in a mystical journey. Yeah. 

NSP: I went out there for five, ten days. I don't remember. It was early June, so it was like the very beginning of the heat. It was very aesthetic, too, in the sense that I was not drinking. I bought cucumbers, seaweed and salmon. And then all I had was hand-rolled cigarettes and black coffee. It was hot, and I would just wear shorts and bare feet and pace around this cabin. It was hot and dusty and the winds were intense. I would just sit out there and smoke my cigarettes in the wind. I had these big papers that I was plotting out the whole book with. 

JK: That's a scene in a movie, like the writer goes to the desert and is alone and is smoking and drinking black coffee. That’s a whole montage. 

NSP: It was very stripped back, and I was just like, this is where I'm going to find the answer! 

By the time I left, you know, I haven't washed my hair in ten days, and my feet were covered in dirt, and I didn't have the fucking answer. The snake was eating its own tail. 

I think that I spiraled and went down many research rabbit holes because I thought those were going to save me. At the end of the day, that's my comfort zone, is, here's an idea — let's look into it. Who else has thought about this? How can I evade my own feelings and [avoid] making any statement of my own about this, or working through it by seeing everything else that anyone else might have said?

JK: I am in this picture and I do not like it!

NSP: I know, it’s like you’re getting physically uncomfortable. *both laughing*

JK: Well, it reminds me of something that my agent Dana told me, maybe the second time we were working on the Heretic book proposal? I think it was after the big rejection year, and then we spent a year working on it. I didn't realize I had this tick at the time, but I would close a section with a quote from someone else. To your point — what has someone else researched about this? Because that's a little more comfortable, because that also makes me feel more grounded and more supported and like what I'm saying is real and true and I'm not just making it up in my head, like so many people I grew up around did.

Dana just kept telling me, I don't want Toni Morrison's words. I don't want Judith Butler's words. I want what you think. Memoir really forces you to step into your own authority in a lot of ways, and so much of what you're talking about sounds like the journey to step into your own authority. That you have a right to tell the story, and that you know how.

NSP: That you know how to tell your story best. And that's so interesting about the quotes — it’s like always wanting to give the last word to someone else, versus having it be yours. I totally relate to that, and what a journey it is to step into authority and to become the authority on your own life, and to claim that for all its peaks and valleys, all its pitfalls.

It can be hard if you feel that you're having to represent or speak for many different populations, or you're not wanting to hurt people or offend them. I think my diplomatic nature was incredibly challenged by this project. 

I think I've told you this in group, but when I was reading my audiobook, I was fixating on things that I had wished I'd edited differently in the manuscript. I was having this kind of dual consciousness, reading the book for the audience and also critiquing what I had written at the same time. 

The last couple years [working on] this, especially once it went into publication, was me writing and rewriting and continuing to tweak things that were probably already done and fine, and doubting myself and trying to update them. Is this nuanced enough? and just cycling through all that.

But when I was reading the audiobook, it occurred to me: This is never going to be done. Like, why am I still fixated on this? Why can't I just let this go? And I got to a certain section in the book that was me questioning how I could have not known that my mother was struggling with mental illness. 

And I thought, oh. I'm trying to solve, in this book, what I could not solve in my life. And that was. *emotional pause* That allowed me to let go and to understand that the reason I was so fixated on getting this right for so long was not just my ego and wanting it to be complex and well crafted, but because at the heart of this story is something that I couldn't understand, I couldn't help. And then my mother died when I was 23, so there was just no way to ever go back and rectify these things. There was no way to ever have that heart to heart with her, to really understand it. 

I was trying to work that out for many years, [but] there are just some unanswerable things. 

a fire nina started & tended at our 2022 writers’ group retreat

JK: I think that that's an incredibly specific concern with memoir, because [in] telling ourselves the story, we are also trying to make sense of things that can't make sense. All narrative is, is trying to put linearity into a decidedly non-linear life and experience. And obviously, you know, we do that for a reason. And maybe some things can be made sense of. But like you're saying, there are always unanswerable at the end. The book has unanswerables. And that's okay. 

NSP: A book is a container. It is finite. But you are not going to streamline all the complexity out of a life lived in, in any one book or in a collection of work over a lifetime. This is what I've had to come to terms with, is what Patrick Rosal, who is a poetry professor I worked with at Rutgers, was trying to tell me a long time ago. He was like, write this book, get on with it to get to the next one. He said something like, and I'm paraphrasing here: you're always going to be writing the same book, so let's go. 

And I was like, hell no! I'm never fucking writing this book again! Well, now I've really become a writer in the process of this, and I understand that I'm going to be writing this book forever and forever in different forms. Maybe not the book, but the themes. The questions that I'm concerned with are mine. 

JK: 100%. Like, are you going to write this specific story again? Obviously not. But are you going to be writing about spirituality and mental illness and all the rest for — like, yes.

NSP: Ugh.

JK: I know, dude. It’s horrible. I feel that way about religion.

NSP: I’m sure.

JK: Like, I get to write about religion for the rest of my life. Hate it. Love it. Can’t get away from it. 

NSP: And mothers. I remember at some point, I was like, I keep trying to not write about my mom. And then it's like *addressing her mother* why are you always here, dude?

JK: She's always around. To that point, though, what you're saying with your mom, and you did answer some of it already, but to explicitly tease out what your ethical concerns were with representing your mom who, like you said, is no longer with us, and hasn’t been for some time. Like, what are the ethics of representing someone who isn’t here? And then the ethics of recreating dialogue with people like your dad and your brother. How did you think about that and approach representing people in your life, who you love, on the page? I feel like everyone approaches that question differently. 

NSP: There’s a few questions that are central to memoir, and this is the one, because it's such a soft science. We don't have to fill out a form and become certified to do this. But you know what, neither do parents? *both laughing*

JK: Say it.

NSP: Honestly, I wish I had thought about it more, but during the process, because it was such a long, Winchester Mystery House process of a book, I had such an insular experience of this. 

To be frank, I really didn't think much about the ethics very intentionally until the last couple years, really until I had a book contract. By that point, I've been doing it so long that it felt like my little Frankenstein. I would go into the laboratory and tinker, and it was just like, she's alive! *both laughing*

JK: That's the best image for memoir. It’s the Frankensteined parts of a life.

NSP: Totally! Just a funky little monster. And I kept trying to look to the outside world, like, is this how you make a monster? Is this how you make a monster? Is this it? Nobody? Okay I don't know, let’s just smush it all together. Which is what my mom did with her belief system. So this is my 2.0 version of that. 

But that's all to say. It was very insular. I was very focused on the feeling of it, the crafting of it, and I thought very little about the ethics until I had a book contract, and then I realized it would be a thing in the world, which was hard to believe. Then I started reading it through that lens and was like, holy shit. 

JK: But that's also, to my mind, like the right — not like there's a right way, but I feel like when people are too conscious of the audience and of how people in their life will perceive it before, that can stop a book from even getting written. Whereas you compartmentalized that and then just wrote the thing, and then [checked in] at the stage at which you're like, oh, this is going to be in the world. I feel like that’s very healthy timing! 

NSP: The thing is though, considering it so late — I do think it allowed me to write the book that is written, which is full. I'm not hedging a lot in the book. But I think that having it come later was in some ways detrimental, because there’s things that to me are sort of a throwaway detail about someone else's life [that] they might have some big reaction to. So I do have concerns about that. 

But because my mother was dead, and she is the one who really gets exposed here — which is something that I will have to reckon with her in the spirit realm, so I hope she understands why I did this — but because she was dead and because most of her family is dead, there was a certain — and I don't mean this in an ooh, goody, but there was a certain freedom. I have to just reimagine this stuff. I have to recreate it. In a way, I was freer than a lot of people might be, because it's mainly my mom and her family who are really written about in this. In terms of my dad's family, I largely left them out. 

The person I was the most concerned about was my brother, because he was a minor during this whole experience, and he's the only other one who went through these things. We've talked a lot about it, but he, I think, would prefer if this did not exist in the world. He’s not mad at me, but I wrote my brother very minimally, too. I chose to write him in the same way as my father. At first, he was a stick figure, and [readers] thought, that’s weird, why is your brother not a real person? And I realized that could come across as erasure, when for me it was protective. I was trying to not put him on the page to protect him. [Ultimately] I flushed him out to a certain extent, but I think anyone who reads it, especially if you're a more sophisticated reader, will probably have a sense of, oh, there's a lot you're not saying in here.

JK: For sure, but I relate because I did the same thing. I felt a lot more freedom in my own book with people who — and my parents are both living — but in representing certain people who are no longer really present in my life. There’s still concerns, but there was more freedom in that than in, say, my sister, who, also when you're the older sibling who was in a particular dynamic where it was your job to protect that younger sibling, and then you're writing about that period — I feel like some of those feelings just get brought up of, well, I have to protect them in the book, too. For a variety of reasons. My sister is in my book, but I think she's more of a stick figure. [As a character], she’s not particularly fleshed out. Because I didn’t want to do that! We're very easily Googleable people, and I didn't want to put anything on her.

NSP: Yeah, I totally relate to that. In some ways, I wish that my brother was in there more, because it's almost like by protecting someone you, it almost feels like it was a disservice in some ways, because there's so much more dimension and character and personality [that you’re not showing]. 

I just hope that readers understand that and have grace with that and appreciate that this story is not about [him], really. [He] didn't choose that. But then, inherently, you're reducing their complexity. So I don't know. You have to pick or choose.

JK: And you're always the one holding yourself to the hardest and highest standard with that. 

NSP: Yeah.

JK: I think it still reads really well, but also, your mom is such a vibrant figure and obviously she is in many ways the other star of the show. Not a lot of attention is on anyone else but her and you in the book, which is how it’s designed to be. She, even in representation, continues to command a lot of attention. 

NSP: She’s a Leo.

JK: It comes through. 

One thing we haven't talked about explicitly is the really prominent interplay in the book between spirituality and mental health. Something I so admired about how you handled it is the way that you don't discount people's spiritual beliefs because of the particular Venn diagram that can sometimes exist at that intersection of a mental health issue. 

Your handling of it was so mindful and really tender, I thought. But I wanted to ask how that process was for you, like you were talking earlier about all the research you did. What responsibility did you feel around talking about your mom’s mental health and that intersection [with spirituality] in how you grew up? 

NSP: There was something pinging in my mind about the ethics question, and I think this was it. 

Beyond worrying about the protection of my family and my brother in particular, writing about my mom's mental health felt, ethically, like the most murky terrain. In the book, I’m speculating that she lived with paranoid schizophrenia or at least experienced schizoaffective psychotic states. But that’s conjecture. That's me researching and then talking to my therapist at the time and saying, these are the things. 

And I mean, if you line things up, they are pretty textbook. However, as my therapist told me at the time, she could never diagnose someone without treating them. It's just not done, and it's not ethical. So I felt a lot of ethical murkiness even in the copy for the book. Like, we don't use that phrase that much. 

JK: We workshopped that in group, the literal book jacket copy describing your mom's mental health. Was it undiagnosed or untreated? 

NSP: We talked a lot about the difference between those. So I feel that that's murky. As someone who's not a part of that community or has had those experiences, I did worry about speculating on that. I did what I could.

JK: What you're saying, too, is like: you did the research. You had conversations [with mental health professionals]. You also spent 13 years working on this book. I so hear what you're saying, and obviously this is your mom, but even when it comes to moving back generationally in family stories. Like, nothing in my family — I would guess — is as extreme or affecting as schizoaffective disorders, but you hear stories from your grandparents or whoever and realize, oh, that person was fucking depressed! But they never would have called it that. The language of diagnosis itself is so new.

NSP: 100%. It was so different. There were so many euphemisms for mental illness. So I'm very here for — in a cultural way, at least — naming things we might have. Sometimes, the pendulum swings. But as someone who is not living with mental illness, and who is not having my mother's experience or am part of that community, I try to tread lightly about how I talk about it.

JK: But in terms of the ethics of it, with representation, you’re always centering what happened to you. What was your experience of certain instances where your mother may have had a psychotic state? But your interpretation is always foregrounded. You're never guessing what's going on in her head. You know? So to my mind, it's also tread very mindfully. It would be a  very different story if you were fictionalizing your mother's POV for this whole book. 

NSP: I didn't have to because she just told me everything. *both laughing*

JK: Isn’t that the story of an enmeshed daughter, though? It's like, I, I already know.

NSP: I don't have to speculate. She was telling me all this shit.

At some point in the book, the driving question was, was it mental illness or did she actually have access to other realms? Was she having a metaphysical experience? 

That binary, which I ultimately did not land on and tried to sort of blow up a little bit, was how I began. For most of my life, I took her experiences not as my truth or the truth, but that they were possible, you know? So I thought, okay, that's my mom’s experience. That's one way of seeing the world, all these different belief systems. So I just took that at face value. When I started exploring it, and I came to understand that there may have been mental illness going on, that became a very clear container for me for a while. I thought, oh, it was actually this, and that was helpful. That really stabilized me. But then I kept going, and I was like, well, actually that has limitations. And that does not allow for her lived experience to be validated. 

Her experience was what it was. However we call it. Individually, culturally, or even however she framed it — it doesn't change the experience, right? So I think ultimately, I land at something more complex. But what's interesting is the question for me at one point was, was it mental illness or was it spirituality? and now that question has split, and I'm interested more so in, what does it look like to — within spiritual communities — address or have a mental health reckoning? 

What happens when things get taken too far? What happens when you don't have proper spiritual boundaries and guardrails? What happens when that intersects with potential brain chemistry or traumatic histories? So if there isn't a mental health component in spiritual communities, there's a tendency to lean into bypassing and to just say, manifest it away. Meditate it away. And I think that's really harmful. 

On the other side, in a more clinical mental health, if spirituality, religion, just belief in general is pooh-poohed or minimized, there’s something really reductive about the human experience there. It’s really ineffective, because people's beliefs drive their lives more than anything, whether those [beilefs] are religious or metaphysical or not. If we can’t  create a mental health system that takes into account people's beliefs, and works with them where they're at, then that is also failing.

JK: That’s so nuanced.

NSP: It’s kind of radical. 

JK: I so fucking resonate with what you just said. I think it's so powerful to have a book like this, at this moment, especially where — like you were saying at group the other week — who would have thought that suddenly, self immolation is in the news? Like, what the fuck? There are so many events and themes of this book that are so relevant for our modern culture, but especially speaking to this question of the role of spirituality, how seriously we take it, how it converges with all these other things. It’s very powerful. 

NSP: You and I definitely share the complex understanding of this. Whether or not we believe in [other] things or have issue with them, I think you and I both really respect the power of belief. 

JK: Yeah.

NSP: We see how [belief] drives everything around us, and understand that we underestimate that culturally, I think, at our own peril. 

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LOVE IS A BURNING THING is available everywhere books are sold. You can follow Nina on all the major social platforms.