Chapter 1: What led Krista Vernoff to reassess her life and career?
I go in for the results and the doctor says, you have the lungs of a 30-year-old swimmer. Are you an athlete? And I go, what? Like I haven't stopped coughing in four months. And he goes, you do not have asthma. You do not have any condition that I can diagnose. And I said, what do I do? And he goes, I swear to God, I just think you need to take some long walks and look for the hummingbirds.
Oh, wow. you're not walking you're not breathing you're not you're not in awe you're not looking at nature you're not present you're not present yeah yeah you have to do something different than what you're doing Krista, welcome to Reclaiming. Oh, this is it? We're rolling? Yeah, we're just, it's super like... It's super, okay. It's super chill here. We're super chill. It's conversational.
There's like the opposite of gotcha. Thank you. Exactly. That's what you can do is just... Yeah. Take a breath. Thank you. So, you know, you have had such an illustrious career spending a large portion of it on Grey's Anatomy for how many seasons? Because you were... I was there for the first seven seasons. Right. And then I was gone for seven seasons.
And then I went back as the showrunner for six seasons. Oh, my God. So I don't do math, but I think it's 13 years. Oh my gosh. But I mean, you've also show run. What's the past? Is show run, show ran? That's a good question. Yeah. You were the showrunner. I was the showrunner. You were the showrunner on many other shows and had worked on other shows. You'd worked on Charmed before, right? Yes.
I did three years of Charmed. Right. And then also did a little Law & Order and Rebel, right? Yes. Yes. And then in your last, in the last, when you were show running, show running, see show running is easy. Show running works, but show ran. Whatever. When you were the thing for the thing the last time at Grey's Anatomy, you were also then the show runner for Station 19 at the same fucking time.
Yes. And Rebel. Rebel. Okay. At the same time. For one year, all three of them. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Okay. Did you sleep? I only slept. Like, I only slept and worked and played with the kids sometimes. Okay. I did not have what one would call a life, you know, like the younger generation say, like, work-life balance. And I worked hard. I worked and I slept. I have to sleep. Right.
I have to sleep where I can't function. Yeah. Like how long sleep? Are you an eight hour sleeper, 10 hour, five hour? I would prefer 10 hours of sleep a night. During those years, I was maybe getting seven or eight.
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Chapter 2: How did Krista's upbringing influence her creative process?
Yeah. But lately in the recovery from those years stage, which has been almost three years now, I've I've been sleeping nine or 10 hours pretty standardly. Good for you. Good for you. And I feel like the idea of looking at rest as a pillar of, yes, there's always been sleep stuff and how do you sleep better and pay attention to your sleep, but that idea of rest-
Actually being slightly different. I don't know. Does that resonate with you? It's so wildly different. And rest and sleep are so wildly different. And that's been ā I've also had to learn about myself in the last few years that for me, rest ā Like, just stop is not restful. Like, just stop and rest is not restful.
When your nervous system is as jacked as it has to be to work in television in general, just stop doesn't work. So what I did is I took up surfing. And that gave me the terror and adrenaline and joy, the high highs and the low lows that I got running television shows. And it exhausted me so that I could rest. How interesting.
Did that just happen or did somebody kind of lead you to this idea of finding a healthy substitute? Yeah. No, I had been surfing like on vacation for maybe 10 years. I started in my like around early 40s, I think. And then I left ā when I left Grey's Anatomy and Station 19, Rebel had been canceled the year before. So I was down to running only the two network television shows. Lazy.
I had reached a point ā I had reached a breaking point physically and emotionally to some degree. I was ā I had just worn myself out. And I was having ā multiple physical mysteries.
One of which was I coughed so hard for so many months that the three doctors who work in the writer's room at Grey's Anatomy, Zoanne Clack and Nasser Al-Azari and Michael Metzner all got together and came to me and said, you have to go see a pulmonologist, Krista. We've been watching you cough like this for months. You have to go see a pulmonologist. And the irony is I spent
all these years of my life on Grey's Anatomy. Therefore, I'm terrified of doctors. But I listened to them and I went to the pulmonologist. And the pulmonologist said, well, maybe it's asthma that went undiagnosed for five decades because you grew up in LA and your dad was a smoker. And we're going to do all these tests. They did a whole battery of breathing tests.
And then I went back and I was so scared that my friend came with me. And the doctor who was like the best pulmonologist in LA and he was like an older guy and he was so lovely. And I was so afraid of sort of this kind of Western medicine, like what's the diagnosis going to be? And then how am I going to... make myself sicker with the medicine and then die young. You know what I mean?
My dad went to the hospital sick at 56 and was dead two weeks later. So there's fear. And so I go in for the results and the doctor says, you have the lungs of a 30 year old swimmer. Are you an athlete? And I go, what? Like I haven't stopped coughing in four months. And he goes, you do not have asthma. You do not have any condition that I can diagnose. And I said, what do I do?
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Krista face while showrunning multiple series?
Wow. So I took up surfing in that way because it puts me in a state of awe. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And also terror. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm sort of like, I'm such a weird person in this way. I love, like my happy place is by the ocean, is at the beach. Yes. The sound of the water. Yes. My happy place is not... in the water or on the water.
So the idea of surfing is like, yeah, no thank you. No thank you. No thank you. I love it. I grew up in Venice Beach though, boogie boarding. So getting tossed in the waves, that's what scares people. But for me, that's like a roller coaster. Right. Okay. I think because I grew up in LA too. And so I remember actually being not at Venice, but Santa Monica Beach, basically the same thing.
I don't even know where one ends and one begins, but whatever. And I got caught in a small undertow, you know, and my dad was right there to save me and all that. But the fear of that, and I think the enormity, that kind of feeling of almost like when you go in an airplane for the first time and you're having the experience of, the vastness of the sky, like feeling it in a different way, right?
And that's sort of the ocean to me. I want to tell you that everybody I told that I was doing your podcast, and I mean everybody, from my teenagers to just everybody, always said the same words. She's so cool. She's so cool. Oh, that's so cool. She's so cool. And I just wanted to say that to you because you were tortured by our society and by our culture.
And I was thinking, why is it that combination of words? Why does everyone say she's so cool? And I think it's because you're an alchemist. I think it's because in magic, alchemy is the coolest. It's the coolest magic, right? Water to wine or hay to gold. And you were hit with so much awful energy and you survived and you alchemized it into healing for others. And it moves me. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. So you're so cool. And I'm so happy to meet you. I'm so not cool, but I'm glad that that's what I, you know, and the alchemizing that is, I needed to hear that today. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. That's really beautiful. I think you're amazing. Well, just get to know me. I don't know you. I don't know you. But I did like I watched the whole 2018 docuseries. Wow.
Oh, yeah. And I Clinton affair, the Clinton affair. And I have to say like, I'm in awe. I'm in awe of you. I'm in awe of how much came at you and how you survived and how you alchemized it into healing other people. I just think it makes you, I'll tell you what one of my favorite healers would say. She would say, because you ended that docuseries, you said, I still face regret every day.
I still meet regret every day. And I thought, oh, Linda would say to her, it's a reflection of the quality of your soul. That you committed to embody this archetype for all of the women on the planet to be battered at that level and then to survive and to see it begin like you were the beginning of something that is still in process. But that takes time.
That takes just a tremendous spirit, just a tremendous soul to choose that lifetime. Just so much strength. Thank you. Yeah. I've had people say versions of that to me at times. And I think that it is very hard to metabolize. Like in my dark decade and the deep healing work that I did,
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Chapter 4: How does Krista use writing as a healing modality?
It was punctuated in some ways by these experiences that I had of just moments that I couldn't quite accept. You know, I didn't quite know how to do with it, like what to do with at the time. One was my graduate school professor sort of telling me that, like, I had no narrative.
I'd let the narrative run away like the people in power owned my narrative and that there has to when powers involved, there has to be a competing narrative. Otherwise, there's nothing. And I just sort of couldn't really take that in. And then my friend Anne had been meditating on a pyramid in Mexico, as one does.
And what had come to her was around that because I had been in so many people's consciousness, that when I shifted my consciousness, it would shift a little bit of theirs. And that was like, oh yeah, no, I can't take that in either. Like that's bunkers. And so it's... But also you did reclaim your narrative. You reclaimed your narrative. That's the name of your show. Exactly.
And, you know, reclaiming it's all the... Yes. And so, but I think those were moments in the process for me that like I couldn't take in. And then eventually sort of they, you know, they planted his seeds and I think they... They grew a bit. And so I thank you for what you're saying. It's weird for me to take in. Right. Well, we're of the same generation. Yeah.
So I will say to you that the harm that was done to you was done to the collective. Yeah. And then you reclaiming your narrative helped all of us go, oh, wait, wait. All of that was a lie. That was a lie. That was a lie. And it helped us reclaim our narrative. Mm-hmm. I've been writing this novel. I know. The Marriage of Alice Breyer. I'm like obsessed. And I was like, wait, what?
That's the end of the two chapters? What? I need more. Give me more. I said to my husband, I don't think I gave her enough. Can I send her six chapters? And he goes, you have to wait till she asks. Yes. Please, please send them to me. Because you're ā it's because there's a twist after six chapters, which you're waiting on. Well, I'm waiting already after two.
I'm sort of just like ā there are certain ā but you've just drawn these characters so beautifully that it's ā I think one forgets like really good writing in very little time with a few amount of words can paint an entire lifetime for someone. Like, you know, their whole lifetime. So it's just, I like Alice and Nathaniel. Okay. What's happening? Where are we going? I'm so excited.
It means so much to me. You're the first person outside of my inner circle to read. And I also want to tell you, just on a personal level, that this invitation to come to your podcast has been a part of the writing of this novel in the following way. I think I was invited onto your podcast nine or 10 months ago. And I was like, yes, I'll do it.
And then your producer wrote and said, do you have anything you wish to promote on the podcast? The prep questions. And I was like, Like I was in it, right? I was in the writing of Alice Breyer and I thought about you because Alice is, the logline of the novel is over the course of one extraordinary magical day, Alice Breyer wakes up to an entirely new reality.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Krista share about the impact of her shows on social change?
So I postponed, I think, three times. I rescheduled and then frantically wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And the reason that's a gift is because I've been in TV for 25 years. And you have a deadline. They're shooting what you write. So you write it. You get it done. And I require a deadline. I require adrenaline to keep writing and a deadline.
And your podcast and my desire to talk to you about this book was a huge driving force. Oh, my God. Right? Come on reclaiming. You'll write a book. That's amazing. Oh, my gosh. Well, I am so flattered and I'm so glad. And if you need to write another one, you can come back. Thank you. Thank you. I'm hoping it's a series. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Please send me the next chapters for sure. Okay. Bye.
You know, it's interesting because you were saying about us being similar ages. And as I was prepping for this and realized that you went to Boston University, that I almost went to Boston University and would have been in theater because I was going to do costume design. Yeah. So psychology major and costume design minor. And so you were in theater. I was like, we 100% would have been friends.
100%. Where did you end up going? I went to Santa Monica City College for two years and then to Lewis and Clark in Portland, Oregon. I also lived in Portland, Oregon. I moved there after I got sober. Okay. So you got sober at 20? I got sober at 22. Okay. And I moved to Portland at 20. I think 23, 23. Yeah. Right. Do you talk at all about the period that before that led you to sobriety? Is that?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I can talk about that. I was I drank and did a lot of drugs between the ages of 11 and 22. Wow. 11. 11. My dad was a cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. And so there was a lot of access to a lot of drugs. And then I moved out of LA and I moved to upstate New York where there was just a lot of access socially to a lot of alcohol.
And my family, there was a lot of chaos and there was a lot of pain and there was a fair amount of abuse. And so my nervous system was jacked from a very young age and alcohol and drugs came in like medicine for me. And I honestly think they're part of how I survived. And then they turned... And then they turn, right? Like they are your medicine. You're self-medicating.
And then they become the problem. And they had become the problem. And when they really became the problem is I had never done cocaine because my dad had bottomed out on crack in the 80s. He had gotten in the habit of using his own products and I had seen that deterioration. He was just my favorite human.
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Chapter 6: How did Krista navigate her journey through burnout?
And so I had a line, right? I had my line of like what drugs I would do and what drugs I would not do. Right. And I crossed that line when I was 22. And very quickly, cocaine brought me to my knees. Wow. I went from functioning and bartending and like a functional 22-year-old alcoholic to not okay. But I'm so impressed by your ability to sort of catch that and to be able and willing to ā stop.
You know, I mean, like, that's a, I think it's my senses. And I've had, you know, food issues, but I've never, I think my mom had told me she was like, oh, I smoked pot in college once, and I ate an entire chocolate cake. And I was like, that was all I needed to not smoke pot. Because I was like, ah, my weight, my weight, my weight. And so I just feel like the stories we hear are not
Drugs become a problem for someone, alcohol and drugs become a problem and in a short period of time, they get help and become sober. There's usually a longer runway. Yes. I give my parents, ironically, a fair bit of the credit. And that is because they had a longer runway. And I got to see where I was headed.
My mom was an active alcoholic in my teenage years and my dad was an active drug addict. And then in my early 20s, my mom quit drinking and modeled that for me. And so... I was shocked to even discover that was a possibility. And also the first time I took myself to any kind of a meeting and said, I'm an alcoholic, I was young. I needed help. I was not okay. And nobody was paying for therapy.
Nobody was getting me treatment. That was not in the vocabulary of my family or in the financial reality of my family or, well, or like, also my dad was making a lot of money dealing drugs and it could have been in the financial reality, I imagine, but he was then putting that back up his nose and then he, you know what I mean? It was just like, there was no adults.
Yeah, was that terrifying to kind of see your dad It sounds like because it sounds like there was an evolution, right, of him going sort of like not being a drug addict to then taking his own products. Or do you only remember him as. I only remember my dad as a drug addict. But I adored him. He was he was I loved my dad and he was high all the time. But the drugs escalated.
So his the fun of someone who's high on weed versus someone who's high on crack. are two very different dynamics. And I also want to say that my dad went through this journey and he also went to law school when he was 50. Wow. Okay, interesting. My dad died at 56, but he had turned himself around. My mom had turned it around.
I had the modeling of people turning these patterns around, and I was ambitious. I wanted... I wanted to. My dad had always wanted to be famous. He had always wanted to be. He was a he became a cocaine dealer because he was a songwriter. He's a really beautiful songwriter. And he had a story that if he sold cocaine to famous pop stars, they would hear his songs. okay, that's kind of amazing.
And that's how he would break in. That was, that was the, that was sort of what he had convinced himself of. But that's very Hollywood. It's very Hollywood. And by the way, there are people who that's their backstory to some, I mean, it's not the craziest thing in the world, but it was pretty crazy. Right. I think outside of LA, it probably sounds a little crazy, but not in LA. Not in LA. Right.
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Chapter 7: What role does self-care play in Krista's life after leaving network television?
I know I I know you're selling cocaine. And my dad goes just like this and goes. You're so smart. I knew you'd figure it out. I knew you'd figure it out. Your stepmom, she thought we could keep it from you. But I knew you would figure it out because I had just moved in with them. I was living with them for the first time. I knew you'd figure it out.
But babe, you can't tell anyone because I'll go to jail for like ever. You cannot tell anyone. You can talk to me about it, but you can't tell anyone. But it's only for a little while till I break in. So this is the beginning of a really serious anxiety disorder. Yeah. Yeah. Understandable. I mean, you lived through a thing you weren't supposed to tell anyone about either. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
It's not really okay to have to hold great big secrets in your nervous system. No, it's not. And so what do you do at that age? You start smoking weed and you start drinking the boxed wine in the closet. Right. Well, secrets become a way of life, you know? Yes. And so I think that that is so interesting. It's, I mean, painful, but what a kind of rich background. Well, it makes you a writer. Yeah.
What? I did become a writer, you know, and I loved my dad and it was messy and hard. to love somebody who's somehow not able to love themself. Yeah. Yes. And I mean, not that we have to, not that I'm looking to get into all the details, but did you ever come to understand his upbringing and his background of what would have led him to, like, did that then all make sense to you?
Especially now that we talk about transgenerational trauma and All those things. That's a big theme in my book, generational trauma. And yes, I do have an understanding of some of what my dad went through as a child. And what I have found fascinating is that I have...
uh unknowingly and unconsciously i relived or recreated things that my dad went through as a child before i knew my dad went through them as a child and i also have watched my daughter recreate some things that i went through without knowing that she was recreating and like the way we repeat those patterns and the way they're wired into us and the
Do you know about the generational trauma and the study on mice with the color orange? Have you read that? No, I haven't. They did a study with mice and they showed them the color orange. And every time they would show them orange, they would shock them. And then those mice had babies and then the babies had babies.
And two generations of mice later, when they would show them the color orange, they would jump. Wow. That's how cooked these patterns are into our DNA and into our nervous systems. And we are, we are cooked. This is cooked in. And so, and. Well, it's, I mean, I think just sort of threading back, not to make the conversation about me, but threading back to, to something you were saying before too.
I'm so happy to talk about you. Yeah. I'm so not. But I think like you were talking about that, you know, what happened to me happened to the collective, too, in that way of that, I think, especially women our age, Gen X women were very much collateral damage of what happened, whether it was cautionary tale or abuse. Or just a sense of how do you find your identity?
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Chapter 8: What future projects is Krista Vernoff excited about?
don't want, desire, and pursue sex at the same level that men do. It has done damage to all of society because it paints women as victims and it paints men as perpetrators if we're not supposed to want and desire sex as much as men do. And first of all, why would that be true? Just like
If the species has to propagate and women have to be willing to make a human being in our bodies for nine months, why would we not be given drives that would lead us to pregnancy? We have sex drives. We are allowed to like and want and desire sex. And we're still not. But that is one of the shifts that has to take place, I believe.
And when we talk about the trauma that happened to our whole generation because of the way you were treated by the fucking patriarchy. Like, let's just name what happened to you. All of these comedians that I so deeply admire, seeing the clips of how they spoke about you and what happened to you in that documentary was really painful and jarring.
And I imagine you've received some apologies and not enough apologies. Maybe not. I mean, for real. It's jarring. But at the time, the conversation was not about consent versus not consent. No, no. The conversation was you were over sex. You liked sex too much. That was the... I was somehow unattractive, but then also the temptress. Right, right. You were both. I was somehow both.
How do we slander her into... Full culpability and responsibility so we can keep really admiring the men. And everybody look over here. Don't look at the man at the center of it. Don't look at the man at the center of it. Look at all the women. Let's blame them, which is all we do. It's like our national pastime. We say it's baseball. It's not. It's hating women who've stepped out of line. Yeah.
Yeah. And that is an addiction. That is a cultural spell that we're under that I think we have to break and that you were at the beginning of the process of breaking it. But I will say at the time we weren't, there wasn't a conversation about consent versus not consent. And now what we understand about power dynamics.
Right, I think that, and that's really where, I think where so much of the conversation has evolved is around power dynamics. And you wrote some very powerful pieces in 2017 and the years following around with the blossoming of the Me Too movement and Hollywood being complicit. The culture of complicity. The culture of complicity. Thank you.
I think that, you know, we were just starting to almost like origami or not origami, but the question. You remember that question thing as a kid, the open and this sort of opening that way. Yes. Unfold. Having all my Gen X memories in this episode. But the unfolding, I think. What was consensual and what wasn't. Right. I think empower.
But you wrote in this piece, when I'm handed a bad script full of old tropes, falsehoods and stereotypes, it's my job to take it away. Note it. And when it's really bad, rewrite it. And I thought that that was a really interesting, just a sort of interesting marrying of the cultural landscape. And an expertise that you brought in. Yeah.
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