Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Why We All Lie & How Honest Can We Be?
April 13, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. I can’t even. I’m just going to jump right into this. We have a treat and a half for you today because today joining us on the pod is Julia Louis Dreyfus. We all know her as one of Hollywood’s most influential, iconic actors and producers. She starred and executive produced HBO’s hit series Veep. She was Elaine Benes in Seinfeld and Christine Campbell in the New Adventures of Old Christine. She has won 11 Emmys with 26 nominations, breaking records for the most Emmys ever won. She was recently honored with the White House’s National Medal of Arts, that was so beautiful to see, the highest award given to artists who advance the arts in the United States. Good job advancing the arts.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thank you. That was my intention.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Yes. It’s so hard to tell who’s advancing it, so it’s good to know. So thank you. Thank you. She just released her new podcast, Wiser Than Me, a 10 part series of candid, witty conversations with Women Over 70.
Abby Wambach:
I cannot wait for this.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so good. We got to listen to two secret episodes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, we did.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so good.
Glennon Doyle:
Her fantastic new film, You Hurt My Feelings, which I just … we’re going to talk about that later because now I’m rethinking the ways that I parent and it’s just really done a number on me, to tell you the damn truth, is being released in May. Thank you for being here.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thank you for having me and for that lovely introduction. Thank you so much. What a treat to be on your groovy, fabulous, successful podcast.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so our new T-shirts that we’re going to wear around the house are going to say groovy, successful-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That is a good thing for a T-shirt.
Glennon Doyle:
Groovy and successful.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Groovy and successful.
Amanda Doyle:
Because you can be successful and decidedly not groovy, and you can be groovy and decidedly not successful.
Glennon Doyle:
Most people who are groovy are not successful.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It’s a good cocktail.
Abby Wambach:
I just don’t know if Glennon or Amanda are groovy.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re not. We’re not groovy at all.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re ungroovy.
Glennon Doyle:
We don’t have a groove to be found.
Amanda Doyle:
Speaking of, I would love to talk to you about women and being funny because I’m funny.
Glennon Doyle:
You are.
Amanda Doyle:
I am not Julia Louis Dreyfus funny, but I am funny enough to have it be one of my favorite things about myself, and I didn’t know that being funny was something powerful about me until I went to college when I was in a total immersion program with these dozen other hilarious women. Before that I had kind of thought my job was to be most attractive when I was adaptable and kind of letting other people shine. I’ve heard you say that going to an all girls school was really wonderful for you because you could be outspoken and a joker. I just wondered what is it about the power of women being funny and about being with all women that allows folks to unlock that. Do you think that that’s true?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Well, it was true for me to a certain extent. I did go to an all-girl school from third to 12th grade, and actually, full disclosure, it was a very conservative school. But there’s something about the all female experience, certainly in terms of being in junior high and high school and being with only women that affords a kind of assertiveness and directness. It helps engender that in a way that I think would, speaking for myself, would not have been the case if boys were there. I would’ve demurred to boys in an effort to stupidly get the boys. When I was in high school and stuff, I was involved with student council and I was president of this class and I did all of these things. I’m pretty sure I would not have gone for that if it had been in a co-ed situation.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
By the way, this was the ’70s too, so different time. I also very much, I think to a certain extent, pushed back against the system there, certainly towards my junior and senior year I was a tad rebellious, sort of against the conservative infrastructure of the school. I don’t know, I think that’s all served me well moving forward and going to college.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think funniness is a way of asserting yourself? Why aren’t we funny when we’re young around boys?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Well, I mean, I certainly hope that we are, and I certainly hope young women are if that’s how they’re built. Not everybody has to be hilarious or anything like that, but I do believe it’s a powerful way to communicate. I think there are certain boys that can be threatened by that. Not necessarily the boys you might want to hang with, but I do think that there is a powerfulness to that that can be threatening. It isn’t always, but it can be anyway.
Abby Wambach:
In my experience, I have found that a lot of men have been jealous. I used to play soccer, so I am respected in a way that I think probably a lot of funny women are in some ways respected by men and then hated by the men who also aren’t funny. Right? Because that’s a standard in our culture that little boys and men, that’s something that they want to be.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s shaming to them?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, they want to be funny.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, interesting.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It’s a way of taking control of a situation too, don’t you think?
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like the opposite. If the ideal little girl way is to be unassuming. To be funny assumes a lot. You’re like, “I am assuming that the eyes should come to me. I’m assuming I have something to say. I’m assuming that it might go well.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s such a risk too.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It is. It’s always a risk. I mean, it’s always a risk to put yourself out there, but it is definitely a strong way of communicating.
Amanda Doyle:
Speaking of risks, when your mother was 60, she wrote you a letter and she was talking about some things that happened in your family, and she said, “I wish that we could talk about what happened.” You called her and said, “What’s stopping us?” That’s how you started therapy with your mom when she was 60.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
No, not when she was 60. When I was 60.
Amanda Doyle:
When you were 60?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
So that’s how you started therapy with your mom when you were 60.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
When I was 60 and she was 87.
Abby Wambach:
Get out of here. That is awesome.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Swear to God. She wrote me … it was around the time … my parents were divorced and I really had no memory of them together as parents. They were very separate and everybody was doing the best they could, but there’s stuff there that had not been unpacked, and so it was around the time, I believe, of my dad’s birthday. He’s passed, by the way, and my mom wrote me something like, “I know this is your dad’s birthday and he’s on my mind and I wish we had been able to talk about certain things.” Then I said to her, “Well, what’s keeping us from doing this?” So we did it and it was really a wonderful experience. Hard, hard, but also ultimately very gratifying and I feel blessed to have been able to have done that with her.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
Did you have confidence when you said that? Because I’m just astounded, there’s all of these unwritten rules in families about what we talk about and what we don’t talk about. In this case, it was a written rule. Like, “Sorry, we can’t talk about this.” Were you surprised when she was able to go there with you and agreed to go to therapy and begin it?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
No, I wasn’t surprised. I think looking back on this, I was surprised this hadn’t come up earlier. My mom is a very thoughtful person and is certainly doing a lot of what Jane Fonda talks about actually. I know you guys have spoken with her and she’s talking about the three acts of life and doing a life review and my mother is very much of that same mind. So I was sort of surprised. It was like, “Oh my God, why haven’t we done this before?”
Glennon Doyle:
I’m 47 and I have so many friends who are now looking back on their childhood. I always talk about this New Yorker cartoon that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s like this guy who’s probably 70 and he’s laying on the couch, he’s in therapy, and he says, “I had a really hard childhood, especially lately.” It’s like this idea that you wake up and you’re like, “Wait a minute. That wasn’t normal.” But most people, when they start to bring it up to their parents, there is this no, thank you, like a fragility of, “I can’t look back on that because I did the best I could and we cannot dredge it up,” and because parents are desperate to believe that they were good parents and they think that their kids are saying you weren’t good parents. Was some of that in therapy? How did it go?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
She talked about the lens through which she looked at life back then when I was young growing up, and I did the same, trying to fully understand our respective points of view of our life together in a way that maybe really hadn’t been discussed in great detail. I know what you mean about … I mean, I’m a mother. If I do anything in my life, I want to have mothered my children in a way that it was nurturing. However, having said that, nothing’s perfect. You are going to fuck up as a parent under all circumstances. That’s life, man, and coming to terms with that. I’m not implying my mother fucked up, but-
Glennon Doyle:
No. No, we all-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
But what I’m saying is as a mom, you want to do the right thing, you know? You really do.
Glennon Doyle:
I just think it’s beautiful to normalize the idea of the review of the actually being open to later with your adult children saying, “You tell me your perspective. I’ll tell you my perspective.” It’s a really beautiful … we should see more of that couple’s therapy.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes, absolutely. It’s not just married people that should go into couples therapy. It’s siblings. It’s a great resource if one has access to it. I also think that as a working mother, because I was really working when I gave birth to both of my kids, and I mean, I worked my whole life, so I really had a career in addition to being a mom. That was always a struggle for me and I think that if I were to talk to my kids about that, I think honestly I would be in fear of them saying, “You weren’t there enough for me,” or something, because it was this balancing act that was just completely impossible, to tell you the truth. There was no-
Glennon Doyle:
Completely impossible.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It was just impossible. It’s impossible.
Glennon Doyle:
You were the one to walk your dad home at the end of life, and you’ve talked movingly about how hard it was to lose him, and you’ve also been very open about how he was a narcissist and extremely hard on you. I was reading about how after your first appearance on SNL, he called you to read a bad review.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
He didn’t read me a bad review, but he himself, he was not impressed with my performance.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, he had a bad review.
Amanda Doyle:
He gave you a bad review himself.
Glennon Doyle:
He gave a bad review.
Amanda Doyle:
He had written you a bad review.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Looking back on it, I’m sure he was right, but it wasn’t delivered kindly or thoughtfully. And also he was right, so there you go.
Glennon Doyle:
First of all, is that a voice in your head, like that voice telling you that you weren’t good enough? Is that a voice that gets stuck in your head and is that the voice you’re speaking back to all the time?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
The voice in my head. There’s a thing, a sort of a self-loathing thing, that can overcome me. If I don’t like something that I’ve done, I can’t let it go. It takes me days to relax about it, and that’s not a good feeling.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us a little bit about your dad and what it was like to be loved by him and get to the place where you were accepting him for who he was?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Totally. He was a wonderful man in so many ways. Very successful businessman, but really, he was a poet. He wrote a lot of poetry. He was published and he was incredibly charismatic, very funny. He was a big liberal Democrat. He was on Nixon’s enemies list. He was very proud about that fact. In fact, the article in which he’s listed as being on Nixon’s enemies list was framed and hanging in his office.
Abby Wambach:
That’s amazing.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I am now the proud owner of that artifact from his life.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s beautiful.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It is beautiful. He was highly intelligent, a real intellectual guy, and also very much a narcissist. Everything was very much about him. But the thing is that he was super interesting and his opinions were meaningful. They were informed. Like I said, he was hyper intelligent, but he was also sort of not available in a lot of ways emotionally. But I reconciled that, I think, at the end of his life, just by being with him and understanding his limitations. He had a very, very, very unhappy childhood. Really, I think, borderline abusive, if not abusive. So he had a lot of stuff in his life that was unresolved. The more that I understood that about him and what his limitations were, the more I was able to … is forgive the right word? Relax. Relax.
Glennon Doyle:
Dan I’ll take that.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s good. Just relax about it.
Amanda Doyle:
I love that you just used that word because it’s the same word that you used when you were talking about how it takes you a couple days of self-loathing to relax. It’s interesting.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Guys. I sound crazy on this show.
Glennon Doyle:
No, you don’t. Are you freaking kidding?
Amanda Doyle:
Welcome. We’re all crazy on this show.
Abby Wambach:
We’re going to take a left turn. I want to talk about your son, Charlie, because he played basketball at your alma mater Northwestern, which is very cool.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
He sure did.
Abby Wambach:
That’s no joke. It’s D1. That’s like the real deal.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
You betcha.
Abby Wambach:
I can imagine you have sat on a lot of sidelines watching him play throughout his life.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Parents on the sidelines should be a comedy sketch all on its own. Did you experience that? What were you like on the sidelines?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes, I did experience that, and I would like to say that I was well-behaved.
Abby Wambach:
Wow. Good for you.
Glennon Doyle:
You’d like to say that or you can say that?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I can say that.
Abby Wambach:
Nice. Good job.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
But that does mean I didn’t scream a lot. It was so much fun to go to his games. Oh my God. He went to the tournament. His sophomore year, they went to the tournament.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
They didn’t get past the second round, but they did get past the first round and it was just totally thrilling. I’ve never been so terrified, and I was so nervous. I can’t sit next to my husband watching a game. That’s the only thing that I could not do.
Glennon Doyle:
Why?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I don’t know. I can’t describe it. I needed space to have my own anxiety about the game that wasn’t connected to his anxiety about the game. But I really just loved every second of it. It was such a great experience.
Glennon Doyle:
How old are they now? How old are your kids?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
20, 25 and 30.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God. Okay, so we’re right behind you. We have 20, 17 and 15.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh, wow.
Glennon Doyle:
What is it like to have a 25-year-old and a 30-year-old? What’s happening now?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Well, it’s pretty interesting. Okay. So your 20-year old is not at home anymore? No?
Glennon Doyle:
No, he’s in college.
Amanda Doyle:
He’s a sophomore in college.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Sophomore in college. Wow. That transition when each boy went to college was ginormous for me. I was gutted by that. I think that’s because raising them, I never thought about them leaving. There was kind of a denial there. I was like, “Oh yeah, my boys, they’re here.” It never occurred to me that they were going to go. Then when they left to go to college, that was a monster transition. Like monster transition. But the really nice thing is that once I got over the grief of that, and I was pretty grief-stricken, then all of a sudden a new thing emerges, which is they’re young adult men, and there’s a whole new way to be together now, which is incredibly exciting.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I’m just so pleased to see them operating as adults and I’m so interested in their point of view. Not that I wasn’t before, but I’m learning from them. It’s just a … I love it. Fortunately for me, both of my boys live in California and so we see them frequently, thank God. But I don’t know. I think being a mom of adult kids is more fun than I had ever considered it would be. You’re in for a lot of fun. For real.
Glennon Doyle:
It feels like when they go and come back, because I’m having a little bit of that with a 20-year-old, when you say their points of view, it’s like you suddenly see them separate from yourself. I feel like I’m like Geppetto, I was making him the whole time and then suddenly he came to life at 20 and I’m like, “Whoa. You’re walking and doing things and talking.”
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
“You’re a real boy!”
Glennon Doyle:
That’s it. Yes.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Right. Exactly. Isn’t that wild?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so wild. It’s so wild and wonderful. It really is.
Abby Wambach:
Another question I have, I think it’s really hard to be young and when we’re growing up, we believe that we know everything, but in reality, we don’t. We know nothing. We know no things.
Glennon Doyle:
We still don’t.
Abby Wambach:
We’re just like trying, failing. Your new podcast Wiser Than Me invites us into conversations with women who are older than you. What are some things that you’ve learned from them? What are the joys that you can tell us about getting older?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
What inspired me to even embark on this thing was I saw that HBO documentary Jane Fonda.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. So good life.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It’s so spectacular.
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Right? She’s had such a remarkable and varied life. Right?
Amanda Doyle:
She’s had like six of them.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
After I watched that, and I was pretty sort of stunned by how remarkable she is and the life she’s led has been, I thought, “Why are we not hearing from older women? What’s happening?” The more I thought about it, I really do believe that older women are this demographic, as it were, sort of an untapped natural resource that we have as a culture and certainly as a woman, I really do want to hear from these women about their life experience. What can you teach me? What can I glean from your life? What tips can you send back to us from the front lines of life, which is where they are. So that was sort of the notion for it. I also spoke with Isabelle [inaudible 00:21:32]. I don’t know if you guys ever had a chance to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
We haven’t talked to her.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh my God. She is so extraordinary and the way she was talking about 80 and how pleased she was to be 80 and to be living the life she’s currently living, it made me want to turn 80. I was like, “Oh my God, I cannot wait to turn 80.” She made it so appealing. In fact, we didn’t even start talking about her writing, because she’s this extraordinary writer. We didn’t even get into her writing until an hour into the conversation, which may speak to what a terrible podcast host I am. I’ll own that if that’s the case. But she was a journalist and she didn’t write her first book until she was 40 years old. What do you think about that?
Glennon Doyle:
These are the stories we need. These are the stories we need.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Exactly. Exactly. The pressure to have figured it out in your 20s, the 20s are so fucking hard.
Glennon Doyle:
The worst.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I mean, the worst. They are the worst.
Glennon Doyle:
The absolute worst. Made worse by the fact that everyone’s telling you they should be the best.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
“The best years of your life. Yeah, you’re so young. It’s all vibrant. You’re fabulous.” No.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Same for 30s to a certain extent. Anyway, the fact that she really embarked on this in her 40s was just totally remarkable to me. Every single conversation was … and I guess this is probably your experience too during your podcast, but it got intimate, it got personal, and I like the way that women talk to each other. I like that. I like the experience of speaking with experienced older women. I could do that for the rest of my life.
Amanda Doyle:
We hope that you do. It is missing from the world and we don’t have any first person accounts from that. We only have these caricatures of what an old lady is like from-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Right, and the word old lady, it sort of sounds pejorative.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
But an old man, a wise man, that trope is in place, but not so much for the women. So we’re trying to sort of stick a pin in that. Diane Von Furstenberg said at one … I asked her how old she was, and she said to me, “You shouldn’t ask people how old they are. You should ask them how long they’ve lived”, which I thought was a different lens through which to think about age and aging. I hope people dig it. I had fun making it. I’m still making it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s been fun. Do you guys find it’s a lot of work to do this podcast?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like the actual conversations, if we could just do that, that would be the most fun. It’s just the-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Getting ready for the conversation. I know.
Amanda Doyle:
You want to, want to get people, and you want to be like, what makes them light up and what’s the things that they want to talk about?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I know.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a lot of work and also the best work. Getting out of my own head and soaking myself in somebody else’s world for a week. It’s wonderful, actually. It’s wonderful. I’m a writer, so I’m used to being alone all the time and so to be able to do something with other people feels like I’m cheating or something. It feels so much less lonely and we’re all family, the three of us, so it’s a good gig.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
It’s nice.
Amanda Doyle:
It is a good gig.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That’s nice.
Amanda Doyle:
Speaking of wisdom gained throughout life, it was five years ago, almost six, I guess, in 2017, the night after you won your first Emmy for Veep. The next day you got a call with your breast cancer diagnosis. Do I have that timeline right?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes. It wasn’t my first Emmy for Veep, but I had won an Emmy. Actually, in retrospect, it was the last Emmy that I won.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, yes. It was the one that broke the record.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes, and then the following morning I got confirmation that I had breast cancer. So talk about the yin and yang of it all, right?
Amanda Doyle:
It’s just amazing. I’ve heard you talk about your journey with breast cancer and you liken it to this story of when you were snorkeling with your husband and he called you back to the boat, which I have thought about that story 1000 times since I heard it. Would you be willing to tell us that story?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Sure. My husband and I went on a trip back when we were in our 30s actually, and we were on this boat and we were doing this really cool stuff on this sailboat and swimming with dolphins and doing research. It was a really neat trip. Anyway, I was in the water. My husband was on the boat, and I was pretty far from the boat, just sort of swimming around, paddling around, and we’re out in the open water and he comes to the bow and he yells out to me, “Jules, I don’t want you to panic, but there’s a shark in the water and you need to come back to the boat now.”
Amanda Doyle:
That was not my reaction, Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s the nightmare of the world. That’s the nightmare of the world.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That’s right. So what I did was I didn’t look in the water, I didn’t look down, I didn’t look around me. I just started to swim towards the boat. I saw the ladder at the end of the boat, and I kept my eye on the ladder and I just focused on the ladder. It took so much personal … what’s the word?
Abby Wambach:
Chutzpah.
Amanda Doyle:
Grit, determination.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Grit.
Abby Wambach:
Just all your being.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yeah chutzpah. I kept my mind on that ladder and I’m getting to the ladder and that is what I’m about and that’s the only thing I’m thinking about is that I’m getting to the ladder. I got to the ladder and I liken that to my journey with cancer because I just wanted to get to the ladder. It was a bit of a wicked swim to get there, but I got there. In fact, my son had a teacher when he was in fourth grade, and it was the year that they were sort of giving them sort of longer term assignments and papers that were a little bit extended. She used to talk to the kids about doing their work in manageable parts. It’s sort of the same idea, just breaking it down bit by bit and tackling it one stroke in the water at a time or one chemotherapy session at a time, and just ticking it off and keeping your eyes on the prize. Everything else fell away from me during that period of time, except sort of getting better.
Abby Wambach:
It’s an elite athlete’s mindset. It’s compartmentalizing and becoming really hyper-focused on what is important.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh, really?
Abby Wambach:
When you have your life obviously at risk, it’s really something to hear you talk about that. Because the amount of times, though my life wasn’t in danger, I can vividly remember complete focus. Everything else falls away.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s funny. You’re thinking that’s an elite mind … and I was thinking that’s an alcoholic thing. I was thinking about sobriety, just like the next right thing, the ladder is just one more day of sobriety.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh, interesting. I also think that mindset can be applied to work. Not that work is scary, but for me, when things are … the engine is really running work-wise, all pistons firing, is sort of the same thing. Everything falls away. Everything else shuts down and it’s a laser focus. For me that actually from a work point of view is those are my most joyful moments, which is funny. It’s a mindset. It’s a tool. It’s a something that has been applied a lot in my life.
Amanda Doyle:
Because it’s not just what you’re doing, it’s what you’re not doing. Because in that instance, it was a 10-foot bull shark that was in the water.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes, it was.
Amanda Doyle:
If in the other instance it was a terrifying breast cancer. I mean, if you were to decide to look away from the ladder in either of those instances, that’s tempting, right? You want to know where the shark is. You want to Google the cancer stuff, but to do that, that’s just feeding the thing you can’t control, right?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Correct.
Amanda Doyle:
The only thing you can control is your movement and your focus.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes. The only thing you can control is getting to the ladder. That’s what you can control. That’s exactly right.
Glennon Doyle:
Is there also … because you said what you’re not doing, sister, it made me think, is there something about those moments where we also just don’t do bullshit things. Like what doesn’t matter is gone. I have a dear friend who just went through losing her mother, and it was a harrowing time, and she’s finding the after more harrowing in a different way, because at least during that time, she knew exactly who she was and she knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing and every single morning she woke up and there wasn’t anywhere else that she would be.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That’s right. Exactly. It’s like giving birth in that sense, everything else falls away. It’s funny how life gives us these opportunities to exercise that kind of focus. Interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
Speaking of what you’ve learned about that time, I don’t want to do the kind of silver lining that people do, but I have a dear friend who is going through cancer right now, and she’s fighting really, really hard. I swear to you that when I am in her presence, I have a distinct feeling of this woman knows something that the rest of us don’t know, that she just has access to a different way of seeing the world because of what she’s going through. But do you know something now that you didn’t know before having walked through and fought through what you did?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yeah. I will answer that in this way. I was in production at the time that I was diagnosed on Veep, so we had to shut down. Normally, I would never, ever have talked about this publicly. This would’ve just been my thing and I would’ve done it and whatever. No one would’ve known in the public. But because I had 250 people working on the show, et cetera, et cetera, I had to make it public. The benefit of that was that, first of all, it gave me an opportunity to talk about healthcare and people’s access to healthcare and to highlight how lucky I was to be a member of a union and to be provided with healthcare through my union and how unthinkable it was to me and is to me that anybody who would be diagnosed in this situation would not be covered is like mind blown.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
So there was that, but the other thing that happened is that certain people started reaching out to me. First, I started reaching out to others. I have a couple of friends who had cancer and who spoke with me very honestly about their experience and, talk about wiser than me, giving me a lot of encouragement and advice as to how to manage this and what to expect. Then I had the experience of being able to do that for others. I met some people post my or even during my cancer treatment or just after my cancer treatment that I could help them get through their cancer treatment. I have to say something, I mean, I know it sounds kind of Pollyanna-ish, but it was incredibly comforting for me to do that, to be able to provide help and encouragement and comfort to somebody who was going through what I had just gone through.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I found that for myself to be very nurturing, and I still do. I will say that having a brush with something as scary as a cancer diagnosis, again at the risk of sounding sort of … you’ve heard it before, but we’re not here forever, and I don’t take my mortality for granted. I’m aware of it and in a way that’s good, I think.
Glennon Doyle:
We watched your new movie last week. We settled into the bed and I thought, “This is going to be a light romp, we’re going to giggle and laugh.” What you need to know about me-
Abby Wambach:
We did. We giggled and laughed a few times.
Glennon Doyle:
But …
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yes?
Glennon Doyle:
So I am a mother memoirist. Okay? I am inseparable from my sister. I am obsessed, a little bit unhealthily, with my 20-year-old writer son who sends me his … Pod squad, what I’m explaining to you right now is the fucking plot of this movie. This person in this movie also has a voice inside of her head that maybe tells her that she’s not good enough, so she’s constantly do-gooding and trying to write better and better things so that the world will tell her she’s … and then she’s trying to undo the voice in her head from her father with her partner, getting her partner’s approval, and then she at some points figures out that while she’s desperate for her husband to tell her the truth-
Abby Wambach:
We don’t want to give this whole thing away.
Glennon Doyle:
That she maybe is not-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
No, it’s all right. It’s okay.
Abby Wambach:
I just want to make sure.
Glennon Doyle:
That maybe she hasn’t been telling the truth. I’m just talking about me. That maybe she hasn’t-
Amanda Doyle:
Is it Glennon’s plot? Is your plot? One can’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
… been totally telling the truth to her son. I actually didn’t know which part of this to ask you about, but one time my friend Jen said to me, “Glennon, my whole life my parents have been telling me that I am excellent and it took me my 20s, 30s, and 40s to finally understand that I am medium.” Can we just talk about one string of the movie, which seems to be that we keep telling our kids that they’re amazing and excellent and the best at things because we think that’s love, and then they spend the rest of their lives feeling like failures?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Talk about bad mothering, right? Feeling like failures when they don’t quite live up to those accolades, as it were. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I mean, to give the pod squad an idea because you don’t understand, everything that you do, this movie, your demographic is here. Those are the people that are listening to … the entire pod squad-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
We need to just talk. We just need to keep talking for the next 85,000 hours and we just keep them on board and we’ll just all be one big happy family.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
But the story of the movie You Hurt My feelings is … it’s a very small story about some very big human emotions and human relationships, and Nicole Holofcener wrote and directed the film. We’ve worked together before. She’s extraordinary, not only as a writer, but as a director and as a human being. She’s a good friend, I love her desperately, and I’m really proud of this movie that we made together and I’m so happy to be in it. But the notion that her husband has not been telling her, my character, Beth, and her husband, whose name is Dawn, played by Tobias Menzies, my character realizes that her husband has not been telling her the truth about her writing and has been in fact lying to her about his impression of her writing. It’s like worse than having an affair. That’s how gutting it is to her, and I totally get that and we made a movie about it.
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
You sure did.
Abby Wambach:
You asked me right away, you go, “Do you like the way that I write?”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, I’m so paranoid now. I called my mom. I need everyone to tell me the truth. But then I’m like, “Do I need everyone to tell me the truth?” Because actually, it’s not that he didn’t tell you the truth, it’s that he didn’t tell you his opinion. Because what if his opinion is not the truth and that discourages you? It’s just an incredible exploration about truth and love and is unfiltered truth what we need or is love the filter that we put on the truth?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Correct. There’s lots of little lies and things throughout the movie. I think relatable little relationship lies. Small, tiny little things that I think we probably all participate in. Probably. I’m guessing. I mean, what? What am I talking about? We do.
Amanda Doyle:
Some of y’all liars do it.
Abby Wambach:
What’s the last lie you told?
Glennon Doyle:
I lie all the time, I think. I mean, I don’t even know.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s really beautiful. I mean-
Abby Wambach:
It really is a great, great movie.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s a scene.-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh I’m glad. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
… where you just are trying to protect your son from something and you actually climb on top of him to cover him, and I was like, “That’s it. That’s my parenting strategy. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That’s mine too.
Glennon Doyle:
Is it?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
That’s mine too.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh God, it was so good. It was so good. I really loved it. I’ve never seen a piece of art exploring that, how much do we tell each other the truth, and you did it. It’s beautiful.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thanks, Glennon. I appreciate it.
Glennon Doyle:
Did Nicole … did she know you very well and did she write it about you because the stuff with the dad and then-
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
No. No. I mean, Nicole and I, yes, we worked together many years ago. We did a film with James Gandolfini called Enough Said, and we’ve been friends ever since. So yes, she knows me very well. I know her very well. But this was completely out of her brain and she’s a writer and she could relate. She told me this premise a couple years back now, and she said, “What do you think of this premise?” and I was like, “Ugh, I love it.” The premise being finding out the most significant person in your life doesn’t like what you do. That is a gutting premise and I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s do it.” So I think she did write it with me in mind, but this was maybe more about her personal experience than mine, I think.
Glennon Doyle:
Your adult sons, if they wrote something, how would you approach that? If they gave you something-
Amanda Doyle:
They do. They go to you for feedback.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, that’s right. So how do you give them feedback? How do you approach love and truth with your family?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Geez, how do I answer that question?
Glennon Doyle:
Probably lie about it, if I were you.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Yeah, it’s a cinch, Glennon. It’s so easy.
Glennon Doyle:
You just climb on top of them.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
I love everything everybody does all the time. It’s perfect.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. Great. Then they go out into the world and just get eaten alive.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Eaten alive. But the other thing too is that when there are people that you love and you want to love what they’ve done, that can be the kind of fuel for understanding their work, and in a way that can sometimes be bad because you have expectations going in. You want it to be great. If it’s not quite what you thought it was, then how disappointed are you because you were expecting … it’s so complicated.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so complicated.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Relationships are complicated. We’re all a mess. Can I just say it?
Amanda Doyle:
Thank God. It took us almost an hour to get to that.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
You guys are a mess, I’m a mess.
Abby Wambach:
Thank God.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s really the headline.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Don’t give up, but we are all incredibly fucked.
Glennon Doyle:
Actually, that’s the T-shirt.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, there it is.
Glennon Doyle:
Fuck the groovy thing.
Amanda Doyle:
Don’t give up, but we are all incredibly fucked.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Groovy, successful and incredibly fucked. That’s the T-shirt.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re talking about people who love your work and partnerships and you and your husband, I’m obsessed with y’all. I mean, 36 years married.
Abby Wambach:
It’s amazing.
Amanda Doyle:
You are each other’s champions. We just had the honor of interviewing Michelle Obama and she was talking about how despite about 10 years there where she couldn’t stand her husband, she’s really grateful to have made it through to a long marriage. What is the unique gift of a long ride with somebody? What do you find at 36 years that you couldn’t have found otherwise?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Oh, man. We’ve been through it. I mean, what can I tell you? We have been through so much life arm in arm, and that is just magnificent. I mean, warts and all, by the way. Really difficult stuff, really joyful stuff. But we’ve been partners and there’s something about now having that history together. I mean, I’m almost embarrassed we’ve been married that long. I want to say like, “Oh, we’ve been married 15 years,” and that feels … but 36. You’re just like, “Oh my God.”
Glennon Doyle:
How about how long has your marriage lived?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. How long has your marriage lived?
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
My marriage has lived for 36 years, or soon to be 36 years. I found the right guy. I could have fucked up because we got married … I was young, he was young, and I could have picked the wrong guy, but I didn’t. So that’s good. I had a good instinct there. I have pretty good instincts.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, you do.
Amanda Doyle:
I’d say it’s worked out all right for you.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll see. I don’t know. You got potential. You got potential.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thanks, guys.
Glennon Doyle:
Just thanks for you.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thank you guys. It was really, really nice to talk to you, and I was, a delight to have this conversation. I feel like there’s so much more we could be unpacking, but I don’t know what it is at this point.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, you let us know. I mean, we’ll unpack for you all day.
Abby Wambach:
I just want to say, because I was a big Seinfeld watcher, and to see a woman in so many of those male dominated spaces on that show was a big deal, and for you to carry scenes, that was big for me to be watching when I was a kid. I just want to say I know that you have had to go through so much bullshit being a successful woman. I just wanted to say thank you. You walked a path for us and it just means the world to us.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thanks. That’s so nice of you to say, Abby. I really appreciate it, and I was lucky to play that role, and it was unusual for its time. There’s no doubt about it. But I appreciate that so much. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Julia Louis Dreyfus, unusual for her time. Thank you, pod squad. We’ll see you next time.
Julia Louis Dreyfus:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do each or all of these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios.