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

And it scared a lot of people off of the kind of thing that the hippies were up to.

And it gave their enemies a lot of ammunition.

Yeah, he was out in Death Valley.

So that's kind of where the mythic presence of the desert in our family, it was almost as if the desert saved him from being involved.

And Manson was the one who first sent him out to the desert to...

to find a hole for them to wait out Helter Skelter in, you know.

And that's a really good point about there's nothing really countercultural about Charles Manson, maybe except for that he liked to do drugs.

But, like, he was very sexist, very, very racist, you know.

A lot of time.

Well, the way my mom told it, it was because he was very good looking and he was young.

He was young enough to enroll.

He enrolled in Pacific Palisades High School briefly to meet women.

It sounds like in my dad's book he writes about, and it's a tricky thing because it's a co-written book.

I don't know how much of this is actually him and he's not around for me to ask, you know, but

He writes about it as being just like a wonderful time for a kid who's like come of age in a really violent, repressive, like 1950s, abusive, scary house.

When he wanted to leave the family, at first Manson said, okay, that's fine.

Then he changed his mind.

And they were in like a power struggle for a while.

And they were out in Death Valley at the ranches.

And...

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