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

Eventually, there was a night that he describes in his book where he opened the door of the cabin where he was staying with a couple other people who had also defected from the group.

And Manson was like squatting there with a knife between his teeth.

And so he thought he would be killed.

And he walked that night across Death Valley, basically probably around like 50 miles or so.

But he fled for his life and then went to the police, went to the Inyo County sheriffs.

And I think he was trying his best to get safe.

He had heard about the murders, but at that point people had been kind of like,

gossiping or alluding to them i think he was just like getting you know a very very hard reality check and realizing that um this was not the like loving paternal guru that he thought he had what did your mother know about his involvement with the manson family when they met and fell in love

You know, my grandma met my dad first the night before.

He was a bartender and she had gone out to the bar.

And I think she told my mom something like, there's a really cute bartender out there.

He was in some cult, but he's really cute and you should go and like chat him up.

And my mom did that.

And my understanding is they talked about it right away.

I think everybody in town pretty much knew.

Yeah, I think she understood that people make mistakes and can be lost.

I mean, she definitely like made her share of mistakes.

I think some of this was that eventually they got involved in like 12-step recovery, you know, where you...

are part of the medicine from recovering from addiction is just to be honest.

So I think they had a pretty profound philosophical and spiritual tradition that was helping them navigate the complexities of what I mean, that's just being a human.

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