Tethered by Ideology: Faith Healers and Family Ties, with Author Kathleen Blackburn

What happens when your family's ideology prevents you from helping the person you love most?

That's what happened to today's guest, Kathleen Blackburn.

Kathleen Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a 12-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed publ­ic education for homeschooling and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, as Kathleen writes in this searing memoir, “it was like pouring gasoline on the Holy Spirit.”

Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.”

What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked.

Twenty-five years later, Kathleen's memoir, Loose of Earth,  reckons with her past, her upbringing, the loss of her father, and the environmental story that shaped the landscape that for years she called home. Kathleen now lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. 

You'll Learn:

• The difference between shame and regret, and which one is useful
• How literature can be an antidote to violence and silence
• What we do when we're told there's nothing we can do to help someone we love
• And so much more...

Learn more about Kathleen:
Website 
Instagram 

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Transcript

Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I'm so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Before we get into today's episode, I want to share that my book, Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, comes out in less than a month. I invite you to go ahead and preorder it now so you can read it on release day, which is May 7th. Also, if you have any Mother's Day gifts you're going to need to buy, order the book now and your shopping will be all done. 

And now on to today's show. [00:01:00] What happens when the person you love most in the world is suffering and your family's ideology prevents you from helping them? That's what happened to my guest today, Kathleen Blackburn.

Kathleen was the oldest of five children, a 12 year old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the Bible. Then her father, a former Air Force pilot, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 38.

And, as Kathleen writes in this searing memoir, “It was like pouring gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources. a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith healer who led services called Miracles on 34th Street.

What they didn't know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible [00:02:00] environmental catastrophe. Firefighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. 25 years later, Kathleen has written a memoir that reckons with her past, her upbringing, the loss of her father, and the environmental story that shaped the landscape that, for years, she called home.

Kathleen now lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. Her memoir, Loose of Earth, is available on is available now. Without further ado, I bring you Kathleen Blackburn. 

Welcome, Kathleen. I've been looking forward to this conversation, not only since I finished your book, but since I started it because it's so extraordinary and it's such an insight into a totally different world.

So I'm just so thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to you about it. 

Kathleen Blackburn: Jessica, I'm so honored to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Jessica Fein: For those people who haven't yet had the opportunity to read the book, it's called [00:03:00] Loose of Earth. Tell us a little bit about the story that inspired you to write the book.

Kathleen Blackburn: Yeah, this is a memoir that takes place in West Texas, where I'm from, specifically in Lubbock. And when I was 12 years old, I was the oldest of five children, I still am, and my parents, who were white conservative evangelicals of your sort of Reaganite era kind, who were very persuaded by the sort of political movement of the moral majority and this notion of the nuclear family, was the ultimate authority on how children should be raised and how one's health should be managed, were very suspicious of public education and eschewed public education for homeschooling. 

And were also similarly suspect and had distanced themselves from the medical industry. And my father who was third generation air [00:04:00] force. And a healthy man, a marathon runner and a pretty robust person was suddenly and shockingly diagnosed with early onset late stage colon cancer and given a short time to live.

And this diagnosis threw my family's beliefs into an extreme. And my parents rejected the doctor's recommendation that he start chemotherapy and radiation. And instead started seeking out faith healers across West Texas, of which there was no shortage. And they also began a regimen of a very strict kind of clean eating diet, no preservatives, no processed foods.

And the notion was that if you believed hard enough and cleansed the body that God could miraculously heal my father. And this meant that not only was there no room for sugar in the [00:05:00] house, there was no room for doubt in our faith. either. And so at the age of 12, even as I watched my father's body begin to deteriorate from cancer, which it did over the ensuing 13 months, I was afraid that if I doubted that God could miraculously heal him, that I might be the reason that he died.

Now, over 20 years later, in writing this story and in researching it, I discovered that my father, like I said, who is third generation Air Force, he grew up in and around Air Force bases as his father was in the Air Force, and then he himself was in the military for about seven years before retiring and becoming a commercial air pilot.

I learned that the drinking water at the sites where he had lived and worked had been contaminated. by some very dangerous carcinogenic chemicals. And so this story is both a reckoning with my past, my religious upbringing, [00:06:00] that very intense time in my life, the loss of my father, and my discovery over two decades later of this environmental history that we had no idea about at the time.

Jessica Fein: Thank you for that. Every element you just covered off on is so rich. I feel like this was the merger of what could have been three separate books and you brought it together so beautifully. Tell us about the name of the book, Loose of Earth. What does that mean? 

Kathleen Blackburn: Yeah, that's a really great question. So it's based on a scripture that was a really important scripture to my parents at the time.

It's from the book of Mark in the New Testament. And it goes, “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” And I remember, for instance, when people would pray over my dad, they would say things like, we know there is no disease in heaven, so we [00:07:00] claim no disease on earth, for John.

And the title of Loose on Earth or loosed on earth had always been kind of interesting to me, that scripture had never really left me. And I passed that idea by my wonderful editor Casey Kittrell at University of Texas. He said, well, what do you think about loose of earth? And we loved the way that that changed the words away from the scripture a little bit.

That was a little bit subversive. And it also, I think, gets at this way in which this event was a sort of shattering, untethering kind of event, the way that grief and trauma can be. And I think it also speaks to my father's history as a pilot, the way a plane ascends into the air, and it also gets at this kind of scattering of harmful chemicals into the environment.

So there was a lot bound up in that. 

Jessica Fein: I had picked up on a couple of those strands as I [00:08:00] was thinking about the title, but certainly not all of them. It's really a powerful title. Your mother is such an interesting character in this book. First of all, she's a professional veterinarian. So she herself is in the field of medicine.

And it wasn't really until her fourth pregnancy that there was a turning point in her lack of trust you In conventional medicine, which then infiltrated your entire family. Tell us about what happened. 

Kathleen Blackburn: So like you said, my mother, she's a big character. You know, I say that writing about her almost every sentence, it was like lighting a match.

I mean, and she's like that in life too. She's just kind of larger than life. And she is a brilliant veterinary and she was a kind of a whiz kid in high school. She came into college with a lot of college credit and then had early admissions into veterinary school after two years in college. I mean, this is just a very tenacious.

And so one of the things [00:09:00] that's pretty complicated about her is how do you reconcile this person who is quite equipped in the sciences and an excellent medical professional herself who is simultaneously very dubious about the medical industry, especially when it comes to it. human medicine, and who ultimately came to believe in faith healing and to be what we would describe as a Christian fundamentalist.

And I think many parts of our society think of these as opposing things, that you're either one or the other, but you can't be both. So where were the turning points for my mother? And I want to emphasize, for me, the question was also that, well, where were these turning points? But I think that for her, these were not turning points.

For her, and I'll get into the details here in a moment, for her, her sort of studiousness, the fact that she was a very hard [00:10:00] worker, that she would read her textbooks on infectious diseases, she took that same kind of tenacity to reading the Bible and to becoming a believer in the Christian faith. So for her, they go hand in hand, even though for a lot of people, they're an opposing thing.

She serves herself as both a student of biological sciences and a student of the Bible and reads parts of it quite literally. So, what she went through, I think, is an experience that's actually really common for especially a lot of women, which is that she was having her fourth child, my brother. She was pregnant with him.

She hadn't been very pleased with her experiences in the hospital with her previous three children. And what I mean by that is I think that she just kind of felt like a number and not very much like a woman who Was being listened to by her OBGYNs and by the people who are delivering her babies. [00:11:00] And I think sometimes even though she is a medical professional, she felt condescended toward and not respected.

And so she had considered having a home birth with her fourth child. She had a, um, phone conversation with the midwife in Lubbock, and the midwife had a very lackadaisical affect. I write about my mom saying that the midwife yawned while they were in a phone conversation. 

Jessica Fein: I just have to say, I loved that so much because a lifetime ago, I saw a therapist who used to yawn.

Happened once or twice and I was like, my goodness, I mean, here I'm like pouring, tearing my soul and she yawned, so I laughed out loud at that. 

Kathleen Blackburn: Yes, I love that moment too because like you, you kind of think like, well, I'm in a very vulnerable position here. 

Jessica Fein: Am I boring you? Do you need a nap? 

Kathleen Blackburn: I mean, this is just another day in the office for you.

And then it also speaks to my mother who was like, well, that's that I'm not going to have a home birth now. And [00:12:00] went back to her OBGYN, but what she ultimately ended up doing was when she went into labor with my brother, she woke up, went into her bathroom. and gave birth to him there, and my father assisted her.

My understanding is that the labor was incredibly fast, and what she told her doctor later, as he was yelling at her and saying, I will never see you again, was that she didn't have time to get to the hospital. And, you know, it's a really interesting question and what I write about in the book is that I see this as a turning point in my mom's kind of what becomes a pretty almost resolute rejection of medical, some might say authority, others might say expertise.

It was a wholesale embrace of herself as the ultimate authority on what should be done in our family when it came to our health. And it [00:13:00] was, I think, largely of the result of being a woman who was not taken seriously when it came to her body and her reproductive rights and understanding. And even though my mom is a conservative, she is still dealing with those attitudes in West Texas and the way she responded to that was quite frankly by saying, well, I'll show you, I'm, I'm going to go in the bathroom and have him myself. And I write about the conflict I feel in remembering that, which is both, I want to sort of reach back into the past and with one hand comfort her and say, I understand that.

And I even feel like there's some power there that I respect and with the other shake her and say, do not. Do this. You know, I feel some anger about it. Those contradicted feelings I can't fully resolve. Yeah. 

Jessica Fein: Well, it had such an impact not only on your father's care, but really on the whole family. So you mentioned earlier that you all turned to a very strict diet and I loved this [00:14:00] passage you wrote in the book.

This is a quote. “I view the contents of our pantry like a to do list I can manage. Under different circumstances, lentils three nights a week might test a palate raised on Betty Crocker. But should food be a form of prayer, I hold legumes holy. Asked to eat them? I'll lift each spoonful and say, For Dad. Like my parents, I take solace in actionable faith in having something to do. You couldn't pay me to eat an Oreo.” 

I loved that passage so much because I feel like we all, when we are in these helpless situations and watching our loved ones suffer, want a to do list, want a, if you only do this, then. And in your case, it was, if you only eat the lentils and don't eat the Oreo, then.

How did the discipline that your mother instilled help you in your own journey of what was happening to your father? 

Kathleen Blackburn: Oh, [00:15:00] Jessica, that is such an insightful question. Thank you so much for it. What you hear in that passage is some classic oldest child stuff going on, and I think you're right. I'm still this way.

And I think a lot of us are, like you said, in the face of a challenge, and in this case, extreme desperation that comes. When someone you love as a family member, their life is at stake from a degenerative disease. You will do anything and what I just said, we've all heard before, but I think part of what the story of Loose of Earth is about when you're told there's nothing you can do, how you'll go find something you can do.

That's what my family did. And part of what we found in addition to this faith belief was, A very rigid diet. And what I [00:16:00] love about the way that you ask that question is that it did give me a sort of to do list that even as I watched my father's body, he started to lose weight, his skin started to yellow, you know, the signs of cancer that had metastasized to his liver, those signs of jaundice started to appear, that there were these actions.

That I could tell myself were helping him and I think as a child, there was some solace in that, but attached to that solace was also, there was no room to acknowledge the reality of what was happening to him, you know, and so while I did have something to do and That's like such a human thing to want, and there is comfort in it.

We went to the furthest extremes in that we couldn't even say with [00:17:00] words, I'm scared about what's happening to dad, or, you know, what if this doesn't work, or acknowledge the fears and the grief that was already forming. And so I write also about how I was registering those things in my body. But there was a sort of separation, a sort of alienation from what I could tell myself was happening from what I knew was happening.

Jessica Fein: And you were all so connected too. I mean, it's not like you were going as another child your age might have been going off with the friends and spending the time. You were homeschooled. You were sometimes going to work with your mother and she even asked you to all come sleep in the same room. 

Jessica Fein: And sometimes you were, as I read it, stuck in between your mother and your father.

So for example, she decides that he should no longer take the codeine. Even though it's giving him some great relief and one day she's not home. 

Jessica Fein: And you know where that codeine is [00:18:00] and he's asking you for it and you're really stuck in the middle. Tell us about how you navigated that. 

Kathleen Blackburn: Yes. Yes. You're talking about the nadir moment.

You're so right that it was like a univocal experience as a family growing up, there was, at least on the surface of things, no, I, it was we and us. And I think that my siblings, I don't want to speak for them. I'm careful not to do that, but I think they would agree that that was their experience. And it certainly was mine.

And yet there were these moments where that we. would get fractured, where I would, you know, sort of be taken into my mom's confidence or taken into my father's confidence, and they would sort of break away from that collective narrative and share something with me. And then my own individuality found moments to sort of express itself.

So my father, the tumor in his [00:19:00] colon would expand and he would have to have these laser treatments that would sort of cut it away. And that was. It's a very painful procedure, but my mom and dad both agreed that it was a necessary one and like would give him a little bit of relief while God worked his miracle.

That was sort of the logic there. The doctor who did the procedure gave my father a prescription of coding to help with the pain. And I write about that. I saw my dad most relieved in moments of prayer and when he would take the coding. But my mom thought that my dad acted strange when he was on the coding, and he wanted more and more.

The cancer was very painful for him. At one moment, once she found him looking for the coding, and it's my understanding that they had an altercation. She said something about, you're taking too much coding. You shouldn't take so much coding. And he got in her face and said, don't tell me what to do and punched a hole in the wall.[00:20:00] 

And she pulled me aside and she said, we need to hide the coding from your father. And she told me where she put it. And she said that she believed that the coding opened him up to evil influences. So, I became aware, even in that moment, and as I look back now, that the coding became a test of faith. Not only for my father, but really for me.

That if I were tempted to give my father the coding, that again, it could go back to this narrative of, I could prevent him from this miracle coming to him. It sounds so outlandish now, but within the logic of our belief system, it's where we were. It's where I was as a child, even though at this time, I was 13 years old.

So my mother went to work one day and my father was having a particularly painful day. And he started to call for me and I knew what it was that he [00:21:00] wanted, and I tried to hide from him, actually. And when I finally could ignore his cries for me no longer, which were both cries of pain and cries for me, I came to him and he asked me essentially where the coding was, and I acted like I didn't know.

And I believed in that moment that if I could withstand this test, maybe this would be the final test. This was a few months before he passed away. Maybe this would be the final test after all the prayer services, after all of the healthy eating. It had come down to me and him. So, I said, let me call mom, and he said, don't call your mother, but I ultimately ran into the backyard and called my mother at work, and I told her he's in so much pain, and I said, he's the same person, there's nothing changed about him, and she told me just wait until I get home.

And I knew, Jessica, when I hung up the phone, that when I went back inside, my father would not be [00:22:00] healed. When you talk about the way we were all so intrinsically bound together, that moment was a deep and permanent fracturing moment, where the narrative began to fall apart for me. For me, because the power of the ideology.

This is something that actually I have goosebumps every time I think about. When I wrote about it, it was one of the most painful chapters I wrote. I loved my father, you know, the poet Diane Seuss has this beautiful line about the way we love as children. She says, you know, I loved all the way. I loved my father all the way.

And yet I was still evil because of this ideology. To deny the person I loved all the way relief from his pain. That still leaves me almost speechless. It's just the shame, the, the pain I feel at that still, and the awe I feel at the power of ideology to do that. The terror I feel. But when it didn't work, [00:23:00] when I walked back in, and he was still sick, and he was still in his recliner, unable to walk very far, still in pain, Some part of me knew, this isn't working.

I started to break away from the collective narrative. 

Jessica Fein: You know, it's interesting because I think when we break away from the family unit, around adolescence, we, we begin to do that in any event and to form our own ideas, our own identities as separate from our families. But it strikes me that from a very young age, you were treated in many ways like a confidant, like an adult.

You didn't really have the opportunity. To be a kid, at least as a reader, that's what I took away. And in fact, as the oldest, you were often left in charge of the whole brood. From a very young age, did you ever have a chance to be a kid? 

Kathleen Blackburn: Oh, you know, that's an interesting question. You know, we each get the childhoods we have.

And I write about, you know, after that [00:24:00] episode with the coding, after my mother took me into her confidence that way, my father started to take me into his confidence. They were some of the most wonderful, profound conversations I've ever had in my life. Really sacred. Where he began to confess that he sensed his death coming and he began to say things that I think sort of in a really amazing way anticipated what I would need to know, what I would need to hear.

And one of the things was. He said, I'm sorry we made you grow up, which was such a beautiful moment of grace between us. Truly. I think that being left in charge of my siblings was certainly an enormous responsibility, but they were a lot of fun. There's a moment that I write about with my sister and it has to do with when I'm watching her.

And, you know, she just never accepted me as a maternal figure. I was her sister. And I think I write about, you know, asking her to come help set the [00:25:00] table. And she's working on a Lego tower. And she lifts her finger to tell me that she's not going to because and only because I asked her to. So I feel like that was like a quintessential childhood moment.

I also write about a wonderful friend that I had. Who I call Eden in the book, who is my childhood friend. And she was this country girl who lived right outside of Lubbock, who made sure that I got some of those quintessential coming of age experiences. She talked me through how to rebel against my mom and shave my legs.

She asked me when I planned to kiss the boy that I had a crush on at church. She made sure that I had slumber parties, you know, and I, I think there is this way in which as children, other children sort of save us, you know, and find each other and make sure that we get to have those kid experiences with one another, whether it's our siblings or our best girlfriends or something like that.

Jessica Fein: You [00:26:00] mentioned the conversations you had with your dad, and there was one that really struck me. Your father is wondering about the decision that he is being cared for at home and not being hospitalized. And he's saying, maybe I should have been hospitalized. He says, "The nurses would have taken care of me. Then it would have been them instead of you and your sisters and your mom.” You write, “Dad's face creases with pain, his verb tense changes from present to past, in a grammar of longing, as though he is speaking from beyond the grave already. I whisper into our séance, at the hospital, they wouldn't have loved you. I have lived now 25 years since I said this to my father,” you wrote, “and since I heard his voice. One thing I do not regret. Is that I said it.” 

So first of all, I'm so glad you said it. I'm so glad that you have that peace of mind, that you were able to communicate that to him. But it did make me wonder, that's one thing you don't regret, what do you regret?[00:27:00] 

Kathleen Blackburn: Gosh, in writing this book, I revised a lot and you, you have a book coming out in May. I'm sure you know all about it. Yes, intense, but those conversations with my father and I think it must have something to do with the way different memories are stored in different parts of the mind. You know, we know enough from like trauma studies and that sort of thing that if it's a traumatic memory, it doesn't necessarily get stored.

stored in the same part of the brain where most of our other memories get stored, they sort of get placed in this capsule that once you tap into it, it's sort of like fresh. And those conversations with my father, I had not revisited them really until I wrote this book. And so that conversation, once I drafted it, I didn't really have to tweak it too much.

I think the notion of regret is such an interesting one, you know, we've talked about that moment with the codeine, which I call [00:28:00] the nadir moment. I felt profound shame about that encounter with my father. free years. I couldn't tell anybody about it. It took me about 19, 18 or 19 years before I finally talked about it in therapy.

I'm a big fan of the writer, Andre Dubus, and in his memoir, Townie, you know, he talks about a moment that creates profound shame for him. And what the immediate outcome of it is, is violence. He turns himself into somebody who can externalize that shame through violence. You know, he writes about this in really smart ways.

I don't want to overgeneralize, but I think men inherit these scripts and one of them is one of violence. And I think women often, the script we inherit is one of silence. And that way that I handled my shame was silence for so, so long. The reason I'm tying that into this conversation about regret is that so [00:29:00] much of what I write about in this story are actions, my own, my parents, my grandparents, that I think are tethered by regret.

Which is to say, I think a lot of us would do things differently if we could. I'm not sure exactly what we would do. I don't think the answer is clear, but I find regret a very worthwhile sentiment. I don't want to be someone, you know, when I talked about that ideology being so powerful and terrifying. I think that I want to be someone that regrets some things.

It keeps me humane. It keeps me on watch for belief systems that might lead down that road again or a different road that might look different but actually isn't. I think that I've made room in my life for regret, which is different than shame. I can speak now, you know, around the shame. The regret, though, I think it can be a gift.

I did have this moment with [00:30:00] my father, though, that is totally free of regret, where I feel like we spoke honestly to each other. Truthfully, we acknowledged that he was dying. And, for once in my life, I said the right thing. 

Jessica Fein: How did you extricate yourself from this ideology? I mean, it was so powerful and I'm curious, that's part one and part two.

What about the rest of your family? 

Kathleen Blackburn: It was not a sudden process. In the book I, I talk about it as like a fissure, you know, a crack, and even from my identity as an evangelical fundamentalist, and it was a slow process. In a family like mine, especially as a young person, to fully abandon the faith would have meant a loss of the family too and family connection.

Now, over the next 10, 15 years, my beliefs really unraveled. And what happened was a sort of gradual walking away and walking [00:31:00] toward, honestly, literature, which is a space for paradox. Contradiction, uncertainty, which I think that some religious spaces offer, mine did not. But that's what I wanted, was a place to explore the mystery and the uncertain and paradox.

And I found that in literature. I found that in writing. Andre Dubus talks about being able to move away from violence when he found writing. And I think I was able to move away from silence by finding writing and literature and by entering college. My siblings are each on their own journeys. None of us, I will tell you this, none of us are regular church attending folk.

Jessica Fein: But you mentioned going to college and after growing up in such an insular environment, what was that like for you? And then of course, you pursued this career in academia, going from being homeschooled. So tell us about that. 

Kathleen Blackburn: Yeah, I went to college and I never left. You know, I [00:32:00] write about in the book on Friday afternoons in Lubbock, there was this skate rink called Skate Ranch Number One.

Homeschoolers got a discount between one and three o'clock, and then we would all scurry off before the public school kids showed up. I met a lot of other homeschoolers there. And I have to say, you know, at the time in the 90s, and especially in West Texas, a lot of the people homeschooling were doing so for religious reasons.

And a good portion, at least of the people that I knew, I don't have like statistics on this or something, but we're people who kind of had defected from the whole notion of public education. Further than my parents had, which is to say they had no intention of their kids going to college whatsoever.

They just thought we can just kind of make our own world and continue to perpetuate within that world. And we'll have family run businesses and that sort of thing. And that's what we'll do. But I was very fortunate and my siblings, we were fortunate that our parents. [00:33:00] And so it was never a question of whether or not I would go to college.

Having said that, I had varying degrees of what we would call college readiness. I was a decent writer. I was well read. I was fairly good at math. But there are a lot of things, as we know, and as everyone talked about during the pandemic shutdown, that have to do with why being in the classroom is so useful.

The socialization, the kind of group learning, the conversation, the work with different kinds of teachers and specialists in a field, and so on. And so there was a learning curve. I'll never forget in my first college class at 9 a. m. on a Monday morning, just a very shattering sense of imposter syndrome.

And we went around the room and the icebreaker was, where are you from? And when I said I was from Lubbock, the professor said, well, where did you go to school? And I said, I was homeschooled. And he just kind of rolled back on his heels and said, and you made it to college. [00:34:00] And I was just, you know, like a puddle in my chair.

But it was also just a completely exciting, wonderful experience. And like I said, I've never left. Right, exactly. That's why you never left. 

Jessica Fein: Why did you decide to write this book now? 

Kathleen Blackburn: Yeah, it was through a series of events. I started out with a lot of reluctance. The first person I ever told any part of this story to is my partner.

At the time he was just my boyfriend and we went on this long road trip from Texas to Nebraska. And it was while driving back, you know, we kind of ran out of the surface level things to talk about. And we were going through Kansas, I think passing by a lot of like anti abortion billboards. And I just started talking about my past.

Jessica Fein: How long had you been together at that point? I wonder because you mentioned that in the book and I was wondering. Was this like, you know, you'd been three years and he was like, hello, why didn't you tell me? Or was this like date number two? 

Kathleen Blackburn: We've [00:35:00] been together a year. You know, one time a previous boyfriend, my college boyfriend, he and his roommates had rented the documentary Jesus Camp and they were watching it.

And they were mocking it and this is a, you know, documentary about fundamentalist evangelicals and I think that it aims at some pretty low hanging fruit because a lot of it is features children who have these beliefs, but they're kids, you know, they're just doing with the adults around them, right?

Exactly. I just thought, Oh, gosh, this guy's got to know he's got to know about who I am. I said, we need to go get a drink. And we went to this bar that served pretty strong gin martinis. And we had one and then we ordered a second round. And I said, I need you to know about my past. And I started to try to tell him and I'll never forget.

He reached over, touched my hand, stopped me and said, You're not that person anymore. That says a lot about how hard I was trying not to be that person anymore. It says a lot about who I was surrounding myself with so that I didn't have to be. I ended up marrying a very different kind of person who, as soon as [00:36:00] I started telling him a little bit about my life, he said, you know, that's a book.

And then about a year later, I was taking a workshop with the great writer, Luis Alberto Urrea, and at the start of that workshop, he had this writing prompt for all of us, which is to write a writer's manifesto and to start it right there at the table. And the question was, why are you here? Why are you writing?

And you couldn't like go home and come up with something. You know, put your persona out there. And I had recently read an interview with Amy Hempel talking about working with the controversial figure Gordon Lish, and he used to ask his writers something like, what's the thing about you that if people knew it, it would undo your identity?

Jessica Fein: Oh my gosh, I love that question.

Kathleen Blackburn: Isn't that a good question? In an age of, you know, our public persona so out there to be really [00:37:00] curated. And so I had that question in my mind when Louise asked, Why are you here? And I have goosebumps as I say this to you, Jessica. I wrote, I'm here because I was with my father when he died.

And that's the thing about me, that if people knew it, it would undo 18 years of silence, curation, becoming an academic, you know, a lot of work, a lot of work. And yet still, it took another year, another year passed. So now we're about two years since that road trip, a year since the workshop with Luis and my manifesto.

My mom had every home video. Digitized and put on a thumb drive. I write about this in the epilogue of the book and she gave my siblings and I each a copy. And when I watched the opening footage, it was of a video letter my dad made for his parents when he was stationed on Guam. And when I was an infant, and just seeing him, hearing his voice at 25 years old, and the [00:38:00] other things kind of preceding that, just opened up something inside of me, and all these memories came flooding back.

So it didn't exactly feel like a decision. I kind of believed that I got to a point where some part of my brain knew, okay, she can handle it. Let's let it rip, you know, and then all these memories came back and I wrote that first draft in 2017 and then I've spent the next six years working it out, researching and writing what the book is today.

Jessica Fein: Well, first of all, what a gift that was when your mother gave that to you. That was just tremendous. But also I'm just so glad that your partner planted the seed while you were on the road trip and then you went to the workshop and all of these things happened that led you to writing this book because it truly is just beautiful and powerful and everybody should go out and get it.

Thank you for sharing so beautifully and honestly with us and thanks for being here today. 

Kathleen Blackburn: Oh my gosh, thank you. This was such a wonderful conversation. Thank you for your really insightful and compassionate [00:39:00] questions, and I'm so excited for your book in May. Can't wait to read it. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Kathleen.

Number one, when you love someone who's suffering. And you're told there's nothing you can do? You'll go find something you can do, no matter how unlikely it seems. Number two. Ideology can force us to deny even the people we love all the way. Number three. Regret can be a worthwhile sentiment. Kathleen says it keeps her humane and on watch for belief systems that might lead down a path she doesn't want to travel.

Number four. Literature is where we can explore the mystery and the uncertain and the paradox. And number five, a great writing prompt or conversation starter, probably with somebody you know well, what is the thing about you that if people knew it would undo your identity? Thanks so much for listening.

Remember preorder Breath Taking today. Wherever you get your books and you will have it on its release May 7th. Have a great day. Talk to you next time. 

music: I've got the whole world at [00:40:00] my fingertips. I feel like flying. I feel infinite. I know that we're the kind to think along some other lines, but we'll be fine.

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