By Sam Schieren
Sam Schieren
It’s been almost a month that the book’s been out. How’s that been going?
Pam Houston
The main thing happening right now is standing in front of groups of a hundred women and everybody laughing, laughing about this subject, which is just the best thing imaginable. I expected soulful conversations, people shedding a tear, and I knew that would be good. But the laughter has been the thing that’s struck me. Women love to laugh about bad shit and it’s just the best. Everybody leaves laughing. That’s been a really cool, unexpected outcome.
Sam Schieren
Yeah, I was surprised how much I laughed reading the book. Even in the darker sections you slip in a punchline or two that add a surprising note of levity and light.
So, the book is a collection of sixty short chapters, one for each year of your life. How did this structure shape the way you told your story and explored the themes of the book?
Pam Houston
I am always a happier writer when I have an idea of a structure—in particular, an idea of a structure that allows me to keep things precise and individual. I like collecting unlike objects and putting them next to each other and seeing how they resonate, metaphorically and otherwise. That’s my favorite way to write. And I had to write this book so fast for me—so uncomfortably fast. I had a year to write it. Then, of course, I fucked around for six months. So, I had to write fast. Form is the only way I know how to feel safe in that situation. But the sixty chapters was literally a middle of the night thought. I did not come to it after meditating on Sanskrit poems. I was like, “Okay, well, I want it to be in a bunch of little pieces so I can keep changing subjects.” I understood how multiple the book wanted to be in terms of its various voices—Sotomayor’s dissent, the statistics on maternal mortality, the Turnaway study, the Post-Roe Care study, and the poems and songs of my students. I knew it needed a structure where it could change itself constantly. And I knew that it had to be this length, because this is the length that Torrey House publishes. Pocket books, they call them. So, sixty felt like the right number. I was like, I know a number. I’ve been alive for sixty years. And like all structures for me, that made it fun.
Sam Schieren
Where in the process did Without Exception come to be the title?
Pam Houston
At first I wanted to call it Some Sick Shit, which is the name of one of the chapters. I knew that wouldn’t fly, but that’s what I called it in my mind. And then when I had to get serious about a title, I called it Lifespan of a Human Right because of the correspondence of the life of Roe v. Wade to my reproductive life. But my publisher, Kirsten Allen of Torrey House, really didn’t like it. And on a long drive, 150 miles, we spent a long time throwing words at each other. Me not liking anything she said; her not liking anything I said. And then she said, “What about Without Exception?” And I thought, “Yeah.” The reason I liked it so much, personally, is because of all the things that there are to be angry about if you’re a woman in the US, “no exception for rape or incest” seems to me the cruelest part of these abortion bans, the most intentionally sadistic. And it also seems like absolute proof that it was never about the babies. It was never about following Christianity. It’s about wanting women dead without exception, not just for rape and incest, but also for medical conditions that would make pregnancy a death sentence. All three of those stipulations lead to dead women—by suicide, high blood pressure, violent partners, you name it.
Sam Schieren
You say at the beginning of the book that while writing it, you wound up somewhere you had not expected to go. Do you remember where you first expected this to go?
Pam Houston
When I say I had a different expectation, what I really mean is I had some sort of abject fear of what would happen when I started to write it. And because I didn’t have very much time to write it, I knew I wasn’t going to have time to make it elegant. So I thought, “If you can’t be elegant, be honest.” And my honesty led me to some places like that paragraph towards the end where I say if I am being perfectly honest, I guess after twenty-four weeks when medicine agrees the fetus is viable, they should have rights, as long as there’s no endangerment to the mother (155). That is a paragraph I didn’t expect to write. But it’s true. In my effort at deep honesty, I became more fair and less angry—not that I’m not angry. Having to think so hard about what could possibly lead to this moment in 2024, I had to bring empathy for the other side, as well as for myself. That’s just where writing leads. So, I guess I had more empathy for the other side than I started with, and that came as a surprise. I thought maybe I would just work myself up into even more rage, and I didn’t. It was cathartic writing it. But the main thing was being even more confessional by my own Pam Houston confessional standards—there was this aspect of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. I’m gonna bare everything I know about myself, and then you have to deal with me, even if you don’t agree with me. In that process, I had to do the same to my imagined version of the other side.
Sam Schieren
Early in the book, you say that from a young age, you turned to the earth for mothering. What are some of the ways, for you, that the Earth mothers?
Pam Houston
Oh, gosh. As I say in the book, I’m a person who has a lot of anxiety and a lot of sadness. I’ve always been afraid to take prescription drugs. So I get myself outside and go for a walk, even in a city. I just like to be moving through nature, whatever nature it is. Nature, including humans. But it goes beyond that. I curl up in tree wells or sandstone potholes and literally let the earth hold me. I did it when I was a kid, then I stopped doing it because I thought it was weird. Then I was like, “No, that worked. Do that some more.” And I came back to it as a middle aged person. But literally, the earth gives us life. She feeds us. She keeps us warm. She allows us to breathe. Personally, in the absence of warm, loving, life-giving parenting, I felt that the earth was always there for me. And she is such an excellent mother figure. She’s so consistent and ever present. It’s hard for me to explain how literal this is for me. It’s literal. It’s not a metaphor. I go out and put my feet on the ground or I lay in the grass and I feel mothered and held. It’s kind of a shock to me that other people don’t; it seems so obvious to me. One way to describe my life would be, I’ve gone to 80-something countries and let my mother, the earth, show me all these wonders, which is what a mother would do, in the best case scenario.
Sam Schieren
You dedicate the book to your therapist, and you mention him several times in the book. Have you always had a comfortable relationship with therapy? And do you think that therapy has made you a better or different writer?
Pam Houston
It’s funny to go from the earth to my therapist, because they are my chosen parents. There’s Mom and Dad. I mean, I’ve had some shitty therapists. I think you have to have a good therapist for therapy to be good. But this particular therapist, Andrew Loizeaux, saved my life in my thirties. By the way, Andrew just died of ALS, died the shittiest death you could ever, ever imagine. A lot of us went back and spent time with him. Of all the ways to die, it has to be the shittiest. So that was part of why I wanted to dedicate the book to him. But to your more interesting question—did it make me a better writer? I think the answer to that is definitely yes. It certainly made me a different writer. My readers would have a hand in saying whether it made me a better writer. Therapy with Drew in particular gave me the tools to forgive myself for all the things that happened to me as a child, which were many and various and violent and denied my humanity, in many of the same ways that Dobbs denies women’s humanity. It’s all very related. What happens in therapy is that first you learn to forgive yourself for the crimes that were committed against you. Then, if you keep at it, you’re able to extend that out to the rest of the world, starting with your parents. Though, I’m only so-so at that. I think abused children, sexually and physically abused children, can be very self-centered, because they’re so wounded. And I think I was. I know everybody likes Cowboys Are My Weakness, but when I look at that book—and I’m proud of that book, that book gave me my whole career, so I’d never diss that book—I see someone who doesn’t know how to take responsibility for themselves. I see somebody who wants to blame the dudes, you know. And fair enough, they weren’t great. But I chose them. I look at that book and I see someone who had a much narrower view of what it meant to be a human. She was trying. I recognize that. I was trying. But she wasn’t that good at self-forgiveness, and therefore, at taking responsibility for her own life. I’ve gotten much better at that. I’m not perfect, of course. But I’m much better at taking responsibility and at seeing when somebody wants to harm me and cutting it off early. That’s part of therapy, too. This is a little confusing as it relates to my career, because had I not had therapy, I would have written a lot more books like Cowboys Are My Weakness, and maybe people would have liked them more. But I’m not sure I’d be alive today without therapy. So, there’s that.
I’ve been on a long journey of becoming more earnest. I know earnest can be a terrible word in art. I went to grad school in a place where to be sentimental was the only criticism. You could be an ax murderer and it was better than if you were sentimental. As long as you murdered with an ironic gleam in your eye, you were cool. The whole world was saying, “Be this clever, icy, gleam-in-your-eye writer.” And I knew that wasn’t right for me. It took me several decades to work towards sincerity. Even back then, I would say to my very first students, if you’re not risking sentimentality, you’re not in the room. Even at Utah, in the face of those teachers. But in response to these times, with climate change breathing down on us, and fascism in the air, I think there’s a call for writers to be more sincere and not doodle around in clever ironic ditties. I think there’s a call for us to put love on the page and put hope on the page.
Sam Schieren
Do you think that therapy would relieve certain men of their strange obsession with controlling women’s reproductive rights?
Pam Houston
It might. I think good therapy, in the simplest terms, makes you take responsibility for yourself. And I think men—men who want to control women’s bodies, but men in general, and white men in particular—have been at the center of power for so long that they can’t imagine not being at the center. And they are never really forced into the kinds of corners that women and other marginalized groups are forced into, corners that might send them to therapy. In therapy, you quickly realize the healing comes when you take responsibility for your own actions, and then beautifully and wonderfully, you start expecting other people to take responsibility for their own actions. And that’s why somebody like JD Vance seems like such a cartoon. He’s a cartoon of not taking responsibility for his own actions. And he’s one of us, you know? He’s a writer, who wrote a completely false narrative of himself, and now he is making a zillion claims about people he has no experience with. I’m not talking about his fellow Appalachians. I’m talking about women of color, or menopausal women. He is the classic example of somebody who needed to go to therapy and didn’t. Or if he did, he had the wrong therapy. And I don’t think therapy is the only way to get there. Some people trek across the Himalayas. Some people go to prison. There are a lot of ways to learn that taking responsibility for yourself is essential to being a contributing human. But I think the more power you have by virtue of the body you were born into, the less pressure there is on you to do that.
Sam Schieren
I’ve read a number of writers say they have to be angry to write. Anger ebbs and flows through this book. Was your own personal anger useful, an obstacle, both?
Pam Houston
That’s such an interesting question to a female writer. I would say my anger was useful. It wasn’t an obstacle. That chapter called “Angry Woman,” where I muse on this subject—boy, I looked at that chapter a lot of times—saying, “Do I cut this? Is this an apology? Is this a justification? Am I just doing that same old thing and saying, hey everyone, sorry I’m angry.” In the end I left it because in the end I left almost all those things. I just thought, “Here I am. Here I am with all my contradictions. Take me or leave me.” I’m thinking so much these days about unlikable female characters, not personally in my own work, but in my reading and my teaching. I have a student right now at IAIA, all her female characters are so unlikable as if to be almost incomprehensible on the page. And we’ve been talking a lot about that in interesting ways for me as a teacher and as a human. Here’s the answer: I’m trying to figure anger out as a tool, as a writing tool but also just as a tool in my life.
Yesterday I visited my friends Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell in Telluride. Just before leaving, I was telling them what their friendship has meant to me over the years. We were standing in their front yard and I was saying, “I know we don’t see each other very often, but I think of you guys all the time. Not just who you are as people, but who you are as writers, and what a shining light that’s been for me in my life. To know you’re out there doing the same thing I’m doing,” more or less. And they had this house guest, a guy, a needy, needy guy who hasn’t been to therapy, and he was upset to begin with that I was even there taking their attention away from him. Before I even finished my sentence, this guy said, “Get in line!” He practically growled it. And I thought, “What an ugly thing to say.” Two months from now, as I’m on my anger journey, I might have just said, “Wow, that’s a really ugly thing to say.” But I didn’t. I said goodbye and got in my car. Then I steamed about it for two hours, until I could let it go, which I clearly haven’t, because here I am talking about it. But that’s a great example of a guy who can’t take responsibility for his own self, who can’t stand there on that porch and say, Pam’s leaving and she wants to say this sweet thing to my friends. Instead he says, this is making me feel a little jealous that I might not be the number one friend during these fifteen seconds, and I can’t handle it, so I’m gonna ruin this moment. This is a man in his sixties, and he can’t get there. So I spent a lot of time in the car thinking, “Is the person I want to be the one who says something in that moment, or the one who buttons my lips and gets in my car.” I spent literally an hour thinking about all the ramifications of that decision. That’s where I am in my anger journey, in life and on the page. Do I make more of a point if I act angry or do I make more of a point if I rise above my anger? And you can translate all of that to the writing of this book, because it happened all the time. That little do-si-do and humor, as we mentioned at the very beginning, really helps with that. You can slide a lot of anger in under the guise of humor.
Sam Schieren
Hard 180 here—you advocate a lot for mercy and grace in this book. These are rather religious words. What role did those two words and feelings play in writing the book?
Pam Houston
You say it’s a hard 180, but it really isn’t. Ideally, we’re allowed to feel the full spectrum of our feelings, right? Mercy or grace might be the very next step after anger. Anger or despair might be essential to getting to mercy and grace. Here’s therapy again. [Emotions] won’t kill you. Feel them. You move to the next one. I think that’s healthier than trying to stop whatever it is. I am a very faithful person. I never know what to say about whether I believe in God, which is a question I get asked all the time. If I had to say yes or no, the answer would be yes. I wouldn’t call it God. It certainly wouldn’t be a dude with a beard. But I believe in something larger than us. In the book I talk about being on that boat with the guy who said he disproved the existence of God. When he said that, I thought, “Honestly, even more than JD Vance, this might be the most pathetic man. To have to go around and say, you disproved the existence of God. What kind of desperate insecurity is that? That is such next level insecurity it falls off the bottom of the insecurity continuum into some deep hole of self-hatred that I can’t even imagine.” So, mercy and grace are two ways that I believe God, or the divine, or spirit, manifests in us poor, selfish, frightened humans. When we rise above ourselves to show someone else mercy and grace, that is when spirit comes through us and becomes manifest in the world. Animals do this all the time. Horses show us mercy and grace all the time, and we accept it without even making note of it. The horse does not buck us off. The horse takes us through a swamp bravely even though his hooves are sticking in the ground. A horse knows when we’re sad and comes and sets its head on our shoulder. This is all mercy and grace. Animals do it so fluidly. Everybody’s had a dog who knew when they were sad and came over and put their head on their laps. Animals are so good at mercy and grace, even though they’d probably call it something different. To me, those are two big things to strive for as we march toward climate collapse and grapple with the fascist element in this country. Isn’t that what all their rhetoric is about? They want us to completely lose the muscles that show people that are different from us, or even people that are the same as us, mercy and grace. We resist that descent into fascism by stepping back and saying, “How can I show this person who’s different from me mercy and grace right now?” And that’s kind of what I was talking about at the beginning, with Without Exception. It forced me into corners where I was like, “Oh, I have to do this too, even to these people who wish me dead.” And I’m not the Dalai Lama, so I didn’t do it very well. But the urge toward that was in there.
Sam Schieren
You draw a lot of connections between women’s bodies, the right to abortion, and the ethical treatment of the earth. Could you talk a little bit about the connection between those three things?
Pam Houston
If you look at the Exxon brochure that was telling its stockholders why they needed to frack the Arctic Sea and then you look at a pro-life flyer rallying people to come to an anti-abortion event, I think you would see a whole lot of the same language—the language of ownership. There are T-Shirts frackers wear that say, “Frack her till she blows.” That, to me, is the whole answer to this question. But there’s so much overlap in the language of ownership. We own women’s bodies. They’re here to make babies. When they can no longer make babies, they become unuseful to us. We are here to frack the gas out of this coal seam. When we have taken all the gas out of this coal seam, we can just let the ground collapse from an earthquake because we’ve taken out all this stuff that allows it to hold itself up. Nature is here for us to tame and make safe, because we’re so afraid of wild things. We’re such scared little boys. We’re afraid of women’s bodies. We’re afraid of the mystery of birth. It goes back to the mother question. The Earth is a woman’s body. I can’t see it any other way. This idea that you cancel the mystery of it by bending it to your will, taking everything you can get out of it for your use, then leave it to collapse in on itself—how is that not a description of a Catholic mother who’s been forced to give birth sixteen times?
Sam Schieren
I think of writing and storytelling first and foremost as an act of imagining. What role does imagination play in your activism?
Pam Houston
In my activism, and in activism generally, you have to be able to keep imagining the world you want. If you lose that vision, you’re going to become an angry, bitter activist. Nobody will want to work with you. I volunteer for, and have left whatever is left of my money when I die, to this organization called Best Friends. They’re the largest animal rescue operation in the world. They have 3,000 acres in Utah, and satellites all over this country and in a few others. A bunch of best friends started it. It’s grown and grown and grown and grown. They send people to rural shelters with no funding. They teach interns how to organize adoption days. They’re incredible at outreach. They have a whole lot of staff. Over 3,000 volunteers, including me, who come and clean stalls, pick up dog shit, take dogs for walks. Anyway, it’s run by one hundred gender-fluid-late-twenties-beautiful humans, who like to do nothing but kiss animals and clean stalls and do the hard work of running the place. I hold that as my vision as I’m doing activism. Everybody’s there for the sake of something greater than themselves. With animals, as I said earlier, it’s very easy, because there’s the animal right in front of you giving you all this love and grace and mercy. So I imagine, when I’m doing activism, “How can I make the world look more like Best Friends?” In terms of writing this book, you know, there was some imagining. Empathy is imagination, or imagination is empathy. I’ve never written too far away from things that have actually happened to me. But imagination comes into my work in the form of character building and empathy for situations and people.
Sam Schieren
A lot of the book is about freedom and freedoms. Have your reasons for not wanting kids changed throughout your life? Was it always about freedom?
Pam Houston
That’s the bottom line, and always has been. As soon as I got away from my father’s house, I loved my life. I never wanted to give up whatever I was doing in the moment. In my late thirties, I was like, “Okay, are you sure?” the way I think many women do. And I was like, “Yeah, pretty sure.” So, it has had different shades, but really it was about the freedom to travel, to jump on my horse and go up into the national forest or get on a plane to Mongolia—freedom of movement. One of my lifelong friends wrote this piece about going running in circles around her house because she was a single mom, and she was going so crazy, and she could hear the baby monitor if she left all the windows open, and I was like, “Whoa, no, not me! Couldn’t do that.” So, for me, it’s really freedom of motion, and with that motion comes the pleasure of encountering cultures, landscapes, animals that are different from the ones I live around—a vaster diversity of experience. Also, of course, having time to give to my writing and to my students.
Sam Schieren
That being said, you say you would give birth to a leopard cub instead of a child, if you could—do you think you could successfully raise a leopard cub?
Pam Houston
I do! Because animals come out knowing how to run, you know? I’ve watched a handful of horses be born in my life. They come out, they get licked by their mom for about thirty seconds, and then they get up and sprint across the pasture. That’s one reason. I think it would be really fun to run around the savannah with my leopard cub.
I’m really, really interested right now in animals and what we can learn from them, what we learn about being human from them. That’s my current subject. I taught a seminar at Davis in the more than human world. I’m writing animal essays. So, animals are on my mind, like always, but they’re my main project now since I finished Without Exception. I’m so capable of giving the kind of love to animals that people expect mothers to give to their own babies, but I don’t know if I’d be capable of that for babies. I don’t even want to hold them. I don’t feel that draw to babies that I do to puppies or kittens or foals or any other baby animal, including a leopard cub. I would be all over snuggling that leopard cub.
Sam Schieren
What do you think animates the anti-choice people? What emotions characterize their movement? And how do you think they would feel about your book, if they read it?
Pam Houston
Lots of people at my readings want me to understand that they do not feel the same way I do about many of these things. But then they go on to tell me that in my honesty, they found they could relate to me, like they’re giving me permission for the book after the fact. I don’t know if that means they’re full-on anti-choice. It might mean they think motherhood is the greatest thing they’ve ever done. But, it is so hard for me to imagine how a woman could want for another woman not to have this choice, because women know the freedom they give up. For some, that’s the thing they want more than anything. And I say more power to them. But many of them—they’re in my classes, I’m reading their memoirs—think it’s going to be one way, then they are shocked by the freedom they give up. They may talk themselves into the fact that it was the greatest thing, or not. Or they run away and go surfing and leave the child with their husband. But certainly any woman who has done it knows the massive life change it brings. So how could they possibly want to make that decision for someone else? Or want Brett Kavanaugh to make it? Or Donald Trump? How could they possibly think that is okay? And I just don’t know. I can’t imagine it.
Sam Schieren
I think the data point that stuck with me the most from your book was that 61% of abortions are had by mothers.
Pam Houston
That just shows how the messaging has infected the country—that women are going out and having wild, unprotected sex every night and having a series of abortions. The numbers completely dismiss that as a talking point. Also the idea, and I personally bought into this one, that once I had my abortions I was going to be depressed, scarred, damaged. I had a female massage therapist, who I had not mentioned any of my abortions to, tell me she could see the ghost babies around me, and no wonder I couldn’t get healthy, because they were haunting me. That was a woman who told me that. And, man, I held on to that. And I was older, I was forty-something. I had had all three by then. I walked around looking for the freaking ghost babies for months. And honestly, I also think there’s this element of, I have compromised my life severely in this way, so you should have to, too.
Sam Schieren
Many people empower themselves. Most of them don’t, then dedicate themselves to empowering others. You have. When did your mission become an effort to free others?
Pam Houston
To go back, I think that’s all related to a level of self-acceptance that allowed me to open my eyes and understand, not only that there were a lot of people around me I could hold space for, but also that that was the thing that was going to make me happiest. I mean, honestly, when Tommy [Orange]’s book exploded, and I happened to read chapters of that book before anyone else, that felt absolutely just as good to me, if not better, than when my book does well. It’s purer. You can just be purely ecstatic without thinking, “Oh, now they know about my Weight Watchers or whatever.” But even on a small level, even when I just give somebody a pep talk who is having a hard time writing or is blocked or is afraid of what their mother’s gonna say after they read their piece that’s about to be published in whatever magazine—even those acts of support make me so happy. It makes most people happy. I’m not unique. It makes so much sense that if you’re helping someone else, you get the endorphin rush. You get the hit. Late stage capitalism trains us to be in competition with each other, but I don’t think that’s anybody’s key to happiness. Witness Donald Trump and JD Vance. Are they happy people? They are not happy people. Who’s happy? Who’s happy is the woman working in the soup kitchen. That’s who’s happy. So, first I had to notice that I could actually help, and that there were people who would benefit from me holding that space or making these connections. These days I have had so many students that are so great that I’ll be at a conference and I’m making all these sub-deals in my head. I’m like, “If I invite that person to dinner, and if I invite that person, maybe they’ll connect over this, and this person’s hiring for this.” I have become a shameless combiner of people who I think might in some way hit it off, who might in some way do each other good. I don’t ever simply go with the flow anymore. I’m always strategizing. And I love that role. It makes me so happy. Then when I see these people hit it off, I just think, “Oh yeah, this is going to be beautiful somehow.” So, first, therapy—had to get out of my own way. And then, reading Baldwin, meeting Toni Morrison, teaching at IAIA. Huge impact. This is a generalization, because there are so many different native nations, but native people are generally so much more about the collective than they are about the individual. Being around that for eleven years now has been like—it’s like Best Friends all over again. We are here to help. That’s such a happier life than thinking, “Oh, I’m so bummed that so and so got nominated for the National Book Award or whatever.” Like, what a terrible existence. And I am proud of this book. I’ll be proud of my animal book. But I just feel like these younger voices, particularly voices from marginalized communities, these are the books that need to be in the world, and anything I can do to help them is my real work now. It just feels like the right course of a life.
Sam Schieren
You point out the dominant culture’s fear of mystery as a cause of much that is wrong with our society. How do you think that we can cultivate a greater comfort with mystery and uncertainty?
Pam Houston
Go outside. Sit next to the tiniest creek and just start to think about where the water came from and where it’s going, and all the things it’s encountering on the way. Or you can fly to Iceland and ride a horse for 340 kilometers. The mystery is everywhere. I’m looking at a stack of books here. The mystery is in all of these books. My first two thoughts when you asked the question were, “Go outside and read.” Those are my answers. I’m thinking about the US and westward expansion and this idea of taming the land and all the destructions that have been created. Well, now the land is tamed. There’s no more taming necessary. And we are tamed. So how can we go in the other direction and re-access the wild? Everyone has to define what mystery is for themselves and move toward it. That’s certainly good for art. It’s good for the spirit. It’s good for the heart. But I wouldn’t want to prescribe what to do about somebody else’s mystery. For me, I go outside and read.
