Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

I think the way Mary Oliver phrases it is like, live your one precious life.

Most people would probably describe him as the leader of a cult, a cult of young hippies who were, as Joan Didion says, participating in the paranoia of their times.

And eventually, spectacularly so, it culminated in these murders in Los Angeles in 1969.

My dad was a teenager.

For him, in the beginning, the family was all about music and sex and drugs.

And he'd come from a pretty gnarly household.

And I think... Your father.

Yeah.

And Manson, too.

Not incidentally.

Yeah.

So, yeah, Manson was a lot older than most of them.

A lot of them were young women.

A lot of them had those women, the girls and some of whom eventually committed the murders, they had been, like, given to Manson as children.

So it was a really exploitative scene, it sounds like.

What I would say to people, if they're not familiar with him, he became this, like, boogeyman that showed the culture.

Joan Didion described it, the day of the Manson murders, as the day the 60s ended.

And it became this fable, this allegory about how, like, the countercultural impulse was dangerous.

And...

could only lead to murder and mayhem.

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