Nick Viall

Yeah, like writers write about their real life all the time, but they don't say it's theirs.

I'm like, okay, well, that will be that'll be next.

I have to live more life before I write about my life anymore.

Yeah.

That's what's scary about, you know, writing a memoir before 40 is like every year that I, that's part of the reason it took so long.

Cause I, I was changing and my perspective on my father was changing and my perspective on what I was talking about in therapy was changing.

So that is the intimidating thing of like, when I'm 60, I'm probably going to like want to burn all the copies, you know?

Yeah.

Well, memoirs are really important for me in realizing how many secrets I had in my family walls that I just felt like untellable and like I'd be burned at the stake.

You know, this idea that like dysfunction is singular to one family and everyone else is not going through it.

And reading David Sedaris and reading like Mary Carr and

you know, Jeanette Walls and Augustine Burroughs and all these memoirists that are like tragic and so funny was a revelation for me.

It was freedom.

I was like, okay, not only are they okay because they went through, you know, a crazy time that they're being honest about, but they're also making it funny and they're alive and they wrote a fucking book.

Like, that's so cool.

So it was a real, I think that's partly why we wrote Pen15.

It sort of started to be like...

you know, carrying your own torch for yourself and your stories, whether they're shameful.

And I found that I really like writing about shame.

And it's sort of cyclical when, you know, people come up to me, they're like, I thought I was alone in that.