Megan Falley Knows What Love Is
December 12, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is a special episode with just me because I requested this to be just me because I had such a emotional, special and important experience reading and experiencing our guest’s art. So today our guest is Megan Falley and she is a nationally ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry. Most recently, her book Drive Here and Devastate Me, excerpts from her memoir in progress, have won several national prizes, and she runs an online writing workshop called Poems That Don’t Suck, which has been heralded as a degree’s worth of education in five short weeks. You might remember Megan from our Double Date episode with Megan’s partner Andrea Gibson. So go back and listen to that.
Glennon Doyle:
Megan, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you for doing this with me today.
Megan Falley:
I could not be more excited. Thank you for having me.
Glennon Doyle:
So I want to tell you one interesting thing that happened to me as I started reading your work because as I’ve mentioned before, in my eating disorder recovery I got to kind of a stuck place where I wasn’t making any more progress. And my doctor’s prescribed to me your partner’s poetry, Andrea Gibson’s poetry, like as medicine. And it worked, okay?
Glennon Doyle:
But I didn’t know your work. And so I started reading you to prepare for our double date, because that’s the kind of nerd I am, okay? And this really interesting thing happened, which I wasn’t sure I was going to even talk about today, but as I read, I fell more in love with your writing and with the themes that you explore. I felt such a connection to you and to your experiences in life, which we’ll talk about later.
Glennon Doyle:
But I also felt this feeling of surprise that you were so good. And then I kept thinking I was talking to Abby about it like, “Why am I so surprised?”
Glennon Doyle:
And Megan, I think that I have internalized femme bias. And I’m a feminist, a femme queer person, I’m embarrassed to explore this part of myself. But I think I looked at you and Andrea and thought, “Andrea will be the badass one.”
Megan Falley:
Little did you know.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s so interesting because it drives me nuts when people do that to me. People will come see me speak on stages and afterwards say to me, “God, I can’t believe how smart you are. I can’t believe you’re such a good speaker.”
Glennon Doyle:
And I’m like, “But I do this for a living. You came to see me.”
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think that that’s a thing, that we internalize this idea that the femme will somehow be less powerful?
Megan Falley:
100%. I feel like I’ve encountered that and I don’t know if it’s, yeah, femininity. It’s interesting how you hold it in a queer relationship as well, like the patriarchal dynamic. But I said to a friend yesterday about this interview and podcast, I was like, “I’m so excited. I’m going to do great.”
Megan Falley:
And she was like, “I love your confidence.”
Megan Falley:
And my initial thought was that I didn’t actually take that as a compliment because if Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to go into a competition or something and say, “I’m going to win this,” or whatever, nobody would say to him, “I love your confidence.”
Megan Falley:
They’d say, “Hell yeah, you are.”
Megan Falley:
And I exactly have felt that and I’m sure have done it myself, but yes, that’s real. It’s almost like, “You’re so photogenic.”
Megan Falley:
I’m like, “No, I’m beautiful.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Or you post a picture of yourself in a bathing suit and a bunch of people say, “You’re so brave.”
Megan Falley:
Oh my goodness.
Glennon Doyle:
And you’re like, “Whoa.”
Megan Falley:
Yeah. I’ve gotten that a lot when I would get on stage like, “You’re so brave to do that.” And I’m like, “Does that mean it would scare you to be me in public?” It’s fascinating. So I’m not offended. Thank you for sharing that.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so interesting to me because I think it’s a self-hatred thing, that’s all it can be. The bias we have against other women is really like I don’t believe in myself either. So it’s so exciting for me to see it and get it out of me. I don’t feel guilty about it because I’m conditioned to feel that way. So it’s cool to notice it because that’s a process of getting rid of it.
Megan Falley:
Absolutely. I think it’s out of me a lot because I almost never see a man.
Glennon Doyle:
I know.
Megan Falley:
Our community is just, all women are so queer. And so yeah, I get really strange when I see a man. I think it’s almost the opposite of me. I assume men don’t have a lot of the intelligent things to say at this point, and I almost have to unlearn that too. I get quite surprised.
Megan Falley:
And then I might do a thing where if a man does a simple gesture that a woman might do every day, I will be like, “Oh my God, he’s incredible.”
Glennon Doyle:
We do that with our kids. Our boy will pick up the dishes and we’re like, “Oh, he’s such a good boy,” but our girls are doing it reflexively. It’s in all of us.
Megan Falley:
Glennon, I literally do it with my boy dog, and I’m not kidding.
Glennon Doyle:
Give me an example.
Megan Falley:
First of all, we didn’t know if we would love a boy dog. He kind of came into our life and he’s absolutely our favorite, and we just can’t stop talking about how good-looking he is all the time and just what a sweet little muffin he is. It’s so wild.
Glennon Doyle:
The man worship in all of us is so intense.
Megan Falley:
I know.
Glennon Doyle:
And then it’s this double-edged sword of worship. But also, it’s interesting what we’re both saying. It’s like we either put them above, they’re above human, or we put them so below we think, “Oh, you can’t have a conversation.”
Glennon Doyle:
I am really trying. I really want to in this next part of my life undo all of that shit and try to approach everybody as if they are just human, not super or sub.
Megan Falley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
On our Double Date, you said something that I’m still thinking about, which is that you have, and I’m going to say it wrong, you fix it, but you struggled a lot with the way your body looks and feels your whole life.
Glennon Doyle:
And then you were talking to your partner Andrea after they got a really serious cancer diagnosis, and they were struggling with sickness in their body and they said, “I just so badly want to have a body,” and that that rearranged some things for you in terms of worrying about the shape of your body.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about where this whole body thing started for you? Maybe talk to us a little bit about the brochure you found on your kitchen table when you were a little one.
Megan Falley:
Yeah, so the first time I became aware of my body as different in any way, and I do think it’s a really poignant moment to ask anyone, “When was the first time you were made aware of your body or made to feel ashamed of your body,” so much happens from that moment, and I was nine years old. I can remember exactly what I was wearing, exactly where I was standing.
Megan Falley:
My uncle said, “You’ve got a real pot-belly over there, don’t you?”
Megan Falley:
I was nine years old and I looked to my mom who then rushed me upstairs to safety away from this comment. And sometimes I wonder now what it might’ve been like if she was like, “Oh, whatever.”
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm.
Megan Falley:
It was almost like when a child falls and they look to their parent to confirm the damage, I think my mom’s reaction amplified it in my mind. And since then it was maybe sort of a magnet, but I was bullied for my weight as a kid and throughout my adulthood.
Megan Falley:
I was 11, I think, yes, 11, and I went downstairs one night. My mom was out at work and she’d left a brochure for a co-ed children’s weight loss camp on our kitchen table. I had heard of the camp before and knew what it was and was completely mortified and so angry with my mom. It felt like my own mom had stuck a kick me sign on my back. And it came with a VHS tape, and for whatever reason, I took it into our den and I put the video in the VCR and I watched it. I was crying the whole time and just having all my little 11-year-old feelings. I was also so much wanting to be an after picture, that when my mom came home, I told her that I wanted to go.
Megan Falley:
I went that summer. I turned 12 there. I went for five consecutive summers till I turned 16, and they were always my choice. I think I held a lot of anger with my mom for that place, for what it solidified in my psyche about what my problem was as a child. I hadn’t gotten my period yet, I was a baby. But when I think about it now, my mom was one of the most loving moms ever. Andrea says, my biggest problem is that I was loved too much.
Megan Falley:
And I think what was really happening is that it wasn’t necessarily that she wanted me to be thin in the way you might see, I don’t know, the sort of militant mothers who’re really in control of their daughter’s bodies, and that feels like a reflection of them. I think my mom so badly wanted me to be happy, and she saw how much teasing I was enduring, how many times I cried to her about this, and that was her solution. She was absolutely doing the best she could to give me the most love that she could. So I can hold all of that now.
Glennon Doyle:
All of that now?
Megan Falley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s such an interesting… There’s so many of us that are looking back at how our moms, and by the way, we always blame the moms, right, the dads always somehow get off the hook, but how they dealt with our weight stuff. I know I have had so much anger about it, but it was such a different consciousness then. They looked at us and just wanted us to be safe too. They felt like it wasn’t safe to be a fat kid or a fat woman and so they did everything they could to protect us, I guess, from it. It’s beautiful that you can hold both of those things.
Megan Falley:
I think the narrative was for my mom that if you were fat, it was almost a fat woman, you didn’t get to choose. You didn’t get to choose the partner, you didn’t get to choose the job, you didn’t get to choose the life that you wanted. You just sort of sat around waiting to be chosen.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us about your mom.
Megan Falley:
Well, my mom is incredible and she is the sort of mom where everybody wishes she’d been their mom. She makes beauty everywhere she goes. We didn’t grow up with a ton of money and she really wanted a Persian rug, and so she painted a rug onto our hardwood floor. My favorite part would be if some workers came to fix a furnace or something, I’d watch them actively avoid getting their work boots on the rug because that’s how realistic it looked.
Megan Falley:
She is an incredible person who I think has grown with me through this process. We can have the conversations about the past and she can, I think, honor that she was doing the best that she could and also acknowledge why that would’ve been damaging.
Megan Falley:
Also, she grew up so poor that her parents owned a candy store in Brooklyn and she lived in the back of it. She grew up there. I think she maybe had some sort of princess fantasy of being saved from that by a man. And so I think for her beauty was a survival mechanism. It was life or death that she would be swept up and taken care of. And beauty was interlocked with that. 100%.
Glennon Doyle:
We judge people now for thinking that way, but there’s also the element of they weren’t wrong.
Megan Falley:
Yeah, 100%, she wasn’t wrong. I think that’s a really good point of we’re trying to operate outside of the culture while still in the culture.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Megan Falley:
So how can you successfully do that? How can you be anti-capitalism in a capitalist country? All of it. How can you fight patriarchy within the patriarchy and still survive it? It’s more complex. But I think my work in the world right now is wanting so badly. I think we’ve come into a time where we are seeing things so black and white, and we’re becoming fundamentalists of what is right and what is wrong. And even the most liberal people are capable of becoming fundamentalists in this way.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Megan Falley:
And camp for me, Andrea compared it to a conversion camp, and I thought that. At the same time, I was like, “That is brilliant and that’s not true,” and they really argued with me about it.
I think what it came to is, while I don’t think that children’s weight loss camps should exist, I don’t think they’re good, I think that they promote, at least in me, it promoted this idea of total distrust of my body and out of controlness. That I needed to live somewhere where there was a gate and counselors and any so-called temptation was just not there. I needed to be forced into exercise and forced into eating a certain way. It built a distrust of my body and my intuition in a lot of ways.
Megan Falley:
And at the same time, those were the best summers of my life. The girls that I met, it felt like we were all intimate in knowing each other’s wounds. That understanding was just there. And I think because the acknowledgement was that we were all fat and that common denominator was settled, and so we weren’t the fat kid in any circumstance. So we were allowed to be other things. And I think I found so much of who I was out outside of my body there as well.
Megan Falley:
And how do you hold all of that being like, “I want to burn these camps down,” and “Would I have survived without them,”?
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Megan Falley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It is interesting thinking of it as a conversion camp because it is like sexuality is innate in us, and an energy, an appetite in us. It’s human. And both of those things feel dangerous in our culture, our sexuality being free, a woman’s appetite being free. And so it’s the place you go to shut down your humanness.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, I feel like my eating disorder is tied to my queerness in so many ways, and I haven’t undone it. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I just know that that’s true, that they’re both things that were shut down really early, and that when you don’t trust your sexuality in your body, you don’t trust your appetite in your body. You just shut your whole body down.
Megan Falley:
I relate to that so much, Glennon, because I didn’t know I was queer until I was literally in a woman’s bed kind of by happenstance making out. And it was the night before my college graduation, and I went to a really liberal women… There were a lot of queer women around and I would’ve had a better experience had I figured this out at least a year before.
Megan Falley:
But I think what happens is when you’re told so much that your body is wrong, I totally disassociated from my body. I would’ve preferred to be a floating brain. And so I thought of attraction as, okay, well, who’s stereotypically attractive? Who does the media tell me to lust after?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Megan Falley:
And my body wasn’t… Well, I can look back now and see that when I followed this girl who was a Jehovah’s Witness to do bible study with her, that I had a big old crush. I can look back and see all of these nods to being 15 or being queer young, but because I was so in my head, it did not occur to me. I also thought that to be a lesbian would mean to be masculine. That was all that I had seen at the time, or like sports, which certainly wasn’t going to happen.
Glennon Doyle:
You might have to camp.
Megan Falley:
There were no gay Disney Princesses and I wanted to be a Disney Princess. I mean, I think what I really wanted from the Disney Princess idea was to be loved at first sight. And I have listened to you talk about objectifying yourself. And oddly, this is the first interview or anything on a podcast I’ve ever done where I hid my self-view because that resonated with me so much of you saying that. I was like, “I just want to be completely present and with Glennon and not worry about how my hair is looking,” or whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Megan Falley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Megan, when I’m doing interviews, I’m looking at myself a lot of the time.
Megan Falley:
Yeah, same.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m like, “Do I look like I’m responding?” It’s like my, “Abby, do I look comfortable?” Like what the fuck?
Megan Falley:
Yeah. And it just creates another layer where you can’t be fully present. You have this other awareness of how am I appearing? And we already have so much of that, but just being able to see your own face, imagine being in a conversation and just holding a mirror.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Megan Falley:
Yeah, it’s quite similar. So this actually feels really good to just look at you.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell me about how you learned that men love women and women love men from your parents’ marriage.
Megan Falley:
I didn’t learn a ton about love from my parents’ marriage because I had never even seen them kiss. They divorced when I was 11 or 12. And my mom would always sort of say the phrase like, “Women marry men hoping they’ll change. Men marry women hoping they’ll stay the same,” and maybe that’s true, I don’t know.
Megan Falley:
But I think what I really learned about love through my parents was that they stayed friends after their divorce. My dad would come over for brunch on Father’s Day and me and my mom would maybe cook it. I was just in Florida visiting my father, and my mom flew out as well, and the three of us went out for dinner, just us. And that was so important to me that they were able to do that. I’d had friends whose parents were divorced and they could not be anywhere near it, couldn’t be in a football stadium together. And as a kid, I think I was worried about what it meant that the love that had made me, died. That stuck with me as a kid.
Megan Falley:
And one of the things that I fell in love with Andrea about is Andrea’s entire community is their ex-girlfriends, the house that I live in, they bought with their ex-girlfriend. Their manager, ex-girlfriend. Their first girlfriend ever comes to stay with us a couple of times a year. My entire community of support throughout Andrea’s diagnosis has been like five or six exes. And I think in Andrea I saw this inherent knowledge of love, not necessarily leaving us, but changing shape. And I think that is what really drew me to Andrea.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. So you think of your parents, the love that made you did not die, it changed shape?
Megan Falley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Whoa, that’s beautiful. What are you thinking about now in terms of bodies and yourself? I know you’re working on a memoir and I can’t wait. I just want you to hurry up about it. I’m just interested in all of it because of your ability to hold two different things so beautifully, because I think so many of us, we just are in this idea of presentism where it’s like I’m judging everything in the past based on right now. And that’s why we’re so mad at our moms for doing it wrong.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re also talking a lot about bodies, fat camp. Do you ever feel scared because you’re thin presenting now? I think about that a lot. I talk so much about my eating disorder and eating, and I’m a thin person, so I have tons of thin privilege and all of that. How do you balance all of that? And what are you thinking about now, like this month, when it comes to your body?
Megan Falley:
So my body’s completely different right now than it’s ever been. Through Andrea’s diagnosis, I lost about 60 pounds. A lot of people have, I think, wondered if what was happening for me was like I was so depressed or something I couldn’t eat, when actually the opposite was true.
Megan Falley:
Andrea was bald and they had no eyebrows and no eyelashes, and what’s true is I still found them so beautiful. And we look back at photos now, now that their hair’s back and we’ll be like, “Whoa, this is a little alarming,” but at the time, as I was with them every day, I never felt that. I just felt their beauty always.
Megan Falley:
But when somebody around you, so close to you, is facing their mortality, you can’t help but to do that for yourself. And when Andrea said they just wanted to have a body, they didn’t care what it looked like. I thought, “I want to have a body. I want my body here. Does that mean that I love my body? And then what would it actually look like for me to act accordingly?”
Megan Falley:
And for the first time in my life I had been so all or nothing that I would either be on this militant juice cleanse and restricting everything, or I would become a human garbage disposal and every single Oreo, Dorito in the house had to be gone so that the next day I could be good again. And it was this horrible cycle. And what I realized was sometimes to love myself meant I would eat a healthy nutritious meal and sometimes to love myself meant I would have birthday cake. I think once I decided not to take anything off the table and operate as if I loved myself, my body really changed after that.
Megan Falley:
I will tell you, even though my brain was so toxed with every New Year’s resolution would be like lose weight, whatever, I never actually thought that it would happen. And so I was writing this memoir about my body never thinking of the plot twist, that I would end up losing this weight or that this thing would happen to my partner’s body, or there would just be this whole shift. And I did feel scared initially that the audience I’d originally connected to might feel abandoned in some way.
Megan Falley:
My poetry career sort of sparked with this poem I had called Fat Girl, and I’d been called Fat Girl in a derogatory way my entire life. And I wrote this poem and it was reclaiming it. And I got to stand in the spotlight because I did performance poetry and receive applause for it. And it felt like, “Oh, I’m getting something good out of this.”
Megan Falley:
And I was in poetry slam, which is a competitive art form where you actually get scored on your poems, which I have so much to say about that as well.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m sure you do.
Megan Falley:
Assigning numerical value to art. And I mean, it was an incredible art form, but I think it also really had its downsides. But I would read Fat Girl and get 10s and the instant gratification of finally being rewarded for this thing that you were ashamed of. And then I had this experience. So I think it’s important to note, yes, I wouldn’t read the Fat Girl poem now, but when I was 60 pounds heavier, I was reading it all the time and a video of me reading it reached half a million views.
Megan Falley:
And I went online one day and saw that it was being reposted by body positive feminist activists in my community who were saying, “This girl is not fat enough to write this. She is co-opting this story and this isn’t hers to speak on,” and then they were making attacks on my body, body-positive feminists.
Megan Falley:
And they were writing, I mean, I won’t forget it stuck with me for so long, “You’re not fat, you just have a shark body,” whatever that means. I took it to mean shapeless, I don’t know, and, “You’re not fat just because you don’t have a chin.”
Megan Falley:
I was developing all of these new insecurities now. They were making fun of my hair on these websites. Women that I really admired. And I understood it in a way because they were much larger than me. And when I have a friend who is much thinner than me call herself fat, I wanted to murder her. So I could understand that. And even in that body, I still had been privileged technically. I could sit on an airplane without being accosted by the person next to me, or I could for the most part, at least as an adult, go to the doctor and not have it be just about my weight.
Megan Falley:
It was a real thing that they felt. But I think that the way that they went about it to attack another woman was hard. And so my thought was like, “Okay, so I’ve been called a fat girl my whole life. I’ve finally reclaimed it. Now I’m not allowed to speak about it. And then I’m writing this memoir and then telling the story of my body. Do I have to wait for the arithmetic of my body to be correct for me to be able to tell my story?”
Megan Falley:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
The good news is there’s no correct. You’ll never win.
Megan Falley:
Well, it was so interesting because, for me, there was a point where I loved the body positivity movement. I thought it was just so incredible. And my Instagram feed and algorithms were diversifying with bodies, and I could see myself in the lexicon of beauty. I could see myself represented and considered beautiful. And I still had 20 years of this trauma of something telling me the opposite of that.
Megan Falley:
I would see people post, “Any time that you intentionally lose weight, you are succumbing to the patriarchy,” or there would just be these messages where it started to feel, to me, body positivity was equally as pressurized as, “You should lose weight,” and both made me feel like a failure as a female.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it is very much like that idea that rebellion of a thing, the opposite of a thing, is just as much a cage as obedience to the thing. It’s like neither are freedom.
Megan Falley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
If we have an ideology or a dogma and then we replace it with the opposite ideology and a dogma, we still have an ideology and a dogma, which still creates people who are in and out. And so what does the third way with bodies look like? What is the freedom of it all?
Glennon Doyle:
I do feel what we can say is that the culture that was manifested in your family, that put that brochure on your table, that convinced you you had a problem, that there was something wrong with you that needed to be fixed, and that thing was the thing in your body that wanted food. That was appetite. When you were cut off from that, you were cut off from all the rest of the wisdom in your body. You didn’t know about your queerness. You didn’t believe your appetite. You got yourself into some dangerous relationships later.
Glennon Doyle:
Talk to us about Ace.
Megan Falley:
Yes, Ace, which is a good pseudonym, little card up the sleeve. I was 21 when that happened. I dated a man who was quite a bit older than me and was in a position of power over me. I think he was so gregarious and so out loud in his love and celebration of me in the beginning. I actually was dating somebody at the time who was really quiet in his love for me, but really good and a really loving partner. And I got swept up in this Ace character, I think because of the part of me that needed to be celebrated so bad in such a gigantic way.
Megan Falley:
And yeah, I mean, that ended. I did get a restraining order against him. I look back and think, 21, I think I was a kid. I do think that came from this need to just be loved in this gigantic way. I mean, he would pick me up when he saw me and spin me around. And so even that, to feel light, to feel like I could be carried, I think it all connects.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Do you think that your separation from the messages in your body allowed you to be influenced above your own inner wisdom by an abusive man?
Megan Falley:
Yes, I do. And what’s interesting is I was already in a way using food to cut off the wisdom I had as well. Even as a kid, I was eating to not have feelings. I was in a fugue state.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, you’re right. That’s what it is. It’s cutting off your inner wisdom, yourself, cutting it off.
Megan Falley:
Yeah. And I heard you speak in one of the podcasts about drinking, I think, as a way of not knowing something that you know, or trying not to know something you know. And that resonated with me so much. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I didn’t want to know.
Megan Falley:
I mean, my parents were divorcing, my brother was getting into drugs. I don’t fully even know what was at the root of it, but I can look back and say, “I think I was making myself so full that all I could feel was I’m so full, I’m going to explode,” so I didn’t have to feel whatever else the thing was.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Megan Falley:
So yes, I can say culture, 100%, it cut me off, but I come from a line of addicts to different things, to gambling, to heroin, to alcohol, to sex, and I think that was my way of finding some kind of oblivion of trying to survive.
Glennon Doyle:
You have some poems and the way you arrange them in your books, it’s so what you do, which is the and both of things. So you’ll write one thing from one perspective like about your dad, and then the next poem will be the other perspective. It’s so beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
When you got that restraining order from Ace, it felt so important to me through your writing of it. It felt like the whole world was telling you to not do that, that you should protect him by not doing something so dramatic. And you have this poem where you talk about all the things that people said.
Glennon Doyle:
“If you hadn’t have done it, if you hadn’t have done it, if you hadn’t have done it would’ve been easier for him. It would’ve been easier on your whole family. It would’ve been easier,” and then at the end you said, “But there would’ve been more of us.”
Glennon Doyle:
Was that restraining order an important reclamation of you, of your own protection of self and listening to yourself? It felt like it in your writing.
Megan Falley:
What’s true about Ace is that I wasn’t the only woman he’d harmed or been harming. And I felt in that courtroom like I was many women. I knew that it would end up being a public thing, that I had this restraining order, and almost as if I was taking one for the team, I guess, in that it could no longer be speculative about was he harming people or not. It was decided. Not that I put that much complete trust in the legal system, but it was decided in this way.
Megan Falley:
And yeah, it’s really interesting because there are things that he’s done that aren’t mine to forgive. But what’s true is I can look back and I’m so glad that it came across that I was looking at the world then through multiple lenses, because I think I consider myself a recovering slam poet. And because it’s an incredible art form, it’s so exciting. You’d pack the house with thousands of people coming to hear poetry. It’s just completely electric and magnetic.
Megan Falley:
But what we eventually saw happening was that the judges who were randomly selected audience members could not hear a poem about trauma and score it poorly, even if it was bad, because the audience members would say, “You’re a misogynist,” whatever. So eventually what became rewarded was your trauma and how hurt you were. I think we then started writing poems that that was what we uplifted and that was what we valued in each other.
Megan Falley:
And so there was a way that the restraining order was hard, and then I got power from it. And since moving into writing prose… I mean you can only perform for three minutes and 10 seconds with a slam poem, so that’s the amount of time that the judges have to make a decision. So, of course, things are going to be make a snap judgment. Here it is. And writing prose has been a miracle for me because the nuance that I’ve always wanted to explore, I have so much more time and space to do that. I say, you sit with the whole story. My father delivered the restraining order and he shook Ace’s hand when he did.
Glennon Doyle:
I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget that part of your poem. I’m so glad you brought that up. He delivered the restraining order to Ace?
Megan Falley:
Yeah, he brought it to his apartment, and I don’t know why he told me this, but he shook his hand. It was like, “Don’t do this anymore,” and then it ended on a handshake and it baffled me. But this is sort of an interesting story. I hope you’ll stay here with me.
Glennon Doyle:
Forever. Take your time.
Megan Falley:
I did a Zoom show in the beginning of the pandemic, and my dad was in attendance. And I, for the first time, read prose about fat camp and what I’d experienced and how 10 years later my mom had finally paid it off. I think I wrote, “She paid it off in dollars and I paid it off in skin.”
Megan Falley:
I was 50 pounds heavier than when I left camp when I was 16. And her coming in waving the check around that she finally paid it off, it just crushed me. And so I read that story and I read it on Zoom and my dad raises his digital hand and he comes onto the camera in full Brooklyn accent, no care of where the angle of the camera is, he’s like eating a sandwich.
Megan Falley:
He comes on and he is like, “I got two stories for everyone about Megan. One is she came home from camp and how good she did, how well she did at that camp. And I brought my beautiful daughter some new outfits,” and it was just like this… I swear I could hear 100 people cringe on mute.
Megan Falley:
And it was this moment of like, “Oh, you don’t get it.” It was almost amazing to have all these Zoom faces as witnesses.
Megan Falley:
And then I was totally stunned and saying, “Dad, I don’t think any kid should’ve gone there. I don’t think that was a good place for kids to go.”
Megan Falley:
And he gets a moment of fluster and then he just goes, “What can I say, Meggie,” That’s what he calls me. “Meggie, I’m so proud of you. I can’t wait to go to Andrea’s Zoom show next week. And what can I say? You’re the love of my life.”
Megan Falley:
And I’m holding all of that. And I feel like in a slam poem, you just get the first part. You just get, “My dad doesn’t get it,” and you don’t get the second part of the complete lack of homophobia of, “I can’t wait to see Andrea’s show,” and all of his love for me.
Megan Falley:
There’s photos of me and Andrea kissing on his fridge. And I just am so much more interested in the holding, the nuance and the complexity of people. And even, I’m trying to do that as I write Ace. And sometimes it’s hard, but I am trying to find that too. And isn’t it more heartbreaking when you have it all rather than just one side?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, um, yeah. Okay, um.
Megan Falley:
What’s going on, Glennon?
Glennon Doyle:
I just think I struggle with this. I do think that I tend to think in black and white more, and I am trying to figure out, I feel like I’m in this weird place where I’m looking back on my parents and my family and I am thinking, “You don’t get it,” like the first part you just said and I want to prove all the ways that they didn’t get it.
Glennon Doyle:
But there’s all of the other stuff too. There’s the pictures on the refrigerators and the, “You’re the love of my life,” also. Just as much, just as true.
Megan Falley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I just think that right now it’s almost like a cultural, I wrote Untamed, you make your island and you don’t let anything on it no matter who’s bringing the shit to you. And I still believe that, but this next part of my life, it’s like I had no boundaries and then I over-boundaried myself.
Glennon Doyle:
And now I’m like, there’s no formula for any of it. It’s not like right or wrong or good or bad. There’s no way to protect yourself from love and fear. It’s just all mixed up.
Megan Falley:
And there’s no one way to heal.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Megan Falley:
I think that’s crucial. There’s almost arguments about what healing looks like. Healing is weighing whatever you weigh and being in a bikini, and then you have other people saying you’re glorifying obesity. And then say that same person decides to lose weight, then they’re like a toxic person. And we’ve agreed that one size doesn’t fit all with clothing and then we’re applying ideologies onto each other as if there’s one size or one way to do it. And it’s bonkers to me.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I just love your and both of everything, of healing too, of like I want to be able to say what was fucked up and I want to keep my people close. And the picture of that for me is you telling the truth on a Zoom with your dad with a sandwich.
Glennon Doyle:
Like, “Yeah, I don’t get it, Meggie, but you’re the love of my life.” Shit. We’ll just have to take the rest of this offline, okay? Clearly I have some work to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to me about how you said, “When you look like I do, you don’t so much come out of the closet as you do a revolving door,”? Can you talk to me about what you meant by that? I mean, I know what you meant by that, but just…
Megan Falley:
Yes, I wear Andrea’s name on my neck in a necklace, and if I go to a barista or something, they think it’s my name. And it’s interesting, whereas I can’t imagine Andrea would go in with a necklace like that that said Megan and somebody would think that they were wearing their own name. And basically just the assumption because I am feminine presenting that I am straight, and I’m constantly having to contradict that with people just wherever on planes.
Megan Falley:
It’s always assumed like a he pronoun if I say, “My partner.” Even, “my partner”, which to me is such a gay word, it’s always, “Oh, what does he do?” It’s a constant process. You don’t come out once. You come out little ways all of the time to everyone.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm, and it makes you feel left out.
Glennon Doyle:
You said, “When I see two women holding hands and I’m alone, I just start smiling at them, wishing for some kind of secret code or handshake, so I can say, ‘Yes, me too’. But I’m just a weird smiling homicidal freak unless I have a butch there to validate me.”
Glennon Doyle:
I feel that all the time. I am the smiling homicidal freak hoping that the two gays holding hands will somehow recognize me as one of them.
Megan Falley:
Unless Abby is there, I’m sure.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh.
Megan Falley:
And isn’t that interesting to then be validated as who you are with a more masculine presence?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Megan Falley:
Always.
Glennon Doyle:
Always.
Megan Falley:
Full circle.
Glennon Doyle:
Always. Full circle. I just want to read this that you said and you can comment on it or not. I don’t think you even need to.
Glennon Doyle:
“When I pass for straight, I feel like I fail something else. Myself, mostly. But what keeps me invisible often keeps me safe. Though there are streets where I’m not sure if I’m safer with hair long enough to pull or if a shaved head would make them want to prove my woman to me. Does the beast prefer girl flesh or queer?”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so I’m going to say this and you probably don’t. I think I have more internalized shit than you do, but sometimes when I’m at a place, like say I’m at the dry cleaner or something, and I go to the thing and then the man behind the desk says, “Are these your husband’s shirts?”
Glennon Doyle:
There’s something inside of me that wants to correct him, but I don’t because I don’t want to ruin the good girl moment that we’re having. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t want to rock the boat of that moment too much. Do you know what I’m talking about at all or do you correct everyone all the time?
Megan Falley:
I don’t correct everyone all of the time. And I think if I’m in a situation where I might feel unsafe not to, I won’t correct somebody. I usually go for the route that’s going to entertain me most. And so I think if I were at the dry cleaner and someone said, “Are these your husband’s shirts?”
Megan Falley:
I’d be like, “They’re my wife’s,” like that to me, it wouldn’t necessarily be rocking the boat.
Megan Falley:
But I will say I also think I grew up where there’s just more safety, not 100%, but queerness is more in our vernacular and there’s more acceptance. And so maybe there’s a freedom in doing what would entertain me the most that I sort of grew up with that.
Megan Falley:
But I mean, the other night we had an Instacart shopper come and Andrea was walking around the house just in their underwear and band-aids over their nipples, which is what they used for a bra. And they had their laptop open. And then I’m in another room and I just hear Andrea screaming and I’m like, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
Megan Falley:
And they’re like, “The Instacart shopper just saw me naked.”
Megan Falley:
And then the Instacart shopper writes and was like, “I’m sorry, I came to the door. I gave a knock because I didn’t want anyone to be freaked out, but I think I startled your boy.”
Megan Falley:
I’m like, “So you think that Andrea is my nine-year-old son?”
Glennon Doyle:
My son.
Megan Falley:
That was your interpretation. And so to me, the most entertaining thing that I could do, I responded to him and wrote, “Oh, that’s okay. He’s easily startled.”
Megan Falley:
And so I think it depends each time, but mostly I do what will make myself or Andrea laugh the most, if it feels safe enough to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God, that’s so awesome. Can you tell us the story of rediscovering your old friend from fat camp?
Megan Falley:
Yes. So I don’t like porn and I was trying to figure out why I don’t like porn. I thought there was something wrong with me to not like it. And so my best friend Olivia and I were watching this queer feminist porn.
Megan Falley:
I’m like, “Maybe I just don’t like the straight porn.”
Megan Falley:
So we’re on this site and all of a sudden I see in a thumbnail, I was like, “Oh my God, I know her,” and I double clicked.
Megan Falley:
And there was one of my first friends from fat camp, my first bunk mates. And she was in this really involved porn scene. And it was like watching her have sex and she was bigger. She was large, and she was just enjoying her body so much and in this wild sexual dynamic. And I was so moved that I felt like she’d found a freedom in her body that maybe not all of us had found yet.
Megan Falley:
It’s so funny because when I figured out, okay, the reasons I don’t like porn, first of all, I’ve been a romantic since I was three. And I realized that what I wanted to type into the search bar was love. That’s what I wanted to see. And also that as a person who is disembodied, I mean a queer woman, I mean I consider myself pretty gay, I know I’ve had a lot of talk about a lot of boyfriends, but I feel pretty solid in my gayness now. And when I had sex with men, so much of that was outside of my body that I felt like I was looking in on a performance.
Megan Falley:
And so that’s what porn had felt like to me too. And just another way that the disembodiment manifested. To not enjoy my body sexually, but to feel like how does this look or how is somebody else experiencing my body?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And then when you saw this girl, woman now, you said everybody would say, when you’d tell people, “I saw my friend from fat camp on porn,” they would say, “What does she look like now,” knowing that what they meant was, “Is she still fat,” right?
Megan Falley:
Yeah, the most supporting question.
Glennon Doyle:
But you wrote, “What does she look like now? Great. Larger than this starving culture. What a feat this is. Here she is taking space like a comet. Here she has roared an internet wide, “Fuck no,” she is my favorite after picture. She looks free in a way that I envy. The way sometimes I look at birds.” What did you mean?
Megan Falley:
Well, the line break in that part, “She looks free in the way that I envy, in the way that I sometimes look,” I think I wanted my reader to think she looks the way that I look. But no, it’s not the way that I look, it’s the way I look at the freedom of something else.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh. Yeah, wow. What is love to you?
Megan Falley:
There’s this video that I saw many, many years ago, and I don’t even think it’s an English-speaking child, I think it was captioned. And this little boy is realizing for the first time that the meat that he’s eating comes from animals. And he’s talking with his mother about it and he starts crying and he can’t believe it. And then the mother starts crying and he says, “Why are you crying? Am I doing something beautiful?”
Megan Falley:
And I don’t even know that I can put words to it, but that to me is what love is when somebody is the filter of how can we walk through this world and not stop and look at every tree and be just completely amazed. We’re desensitized to what’s incredible. And I feel like love is when that partition is sort of split open or whatever it is, and we’re just moved by the beauty, the immensity, and we’re shocked into presence. I think that is it. I mean, it’s so many things, right? Bell Hooks said that our culture’s problem is that we don’t have a common definition for love.
Glennon Doyle:
I think you’re just wonderful and I’m so happy to know you. I’m just happy to know that you exist and I can’t wait for your memoir. I think that your insistence on the whole story is world changing and a shift that we really desperately need. So thanks for sticking to the tension of that. It’s something that’s missing and we need, and thanks for being so present with me for this last hour. I’ve loved every minute.
Megan Falley:
Thank you, Glennon. Thank you for being so femme and beautiful and so intelligent.
Glennon Doyle:
I just want to make sure that everybody knows, okay, I have right here these are the books that you must go get and just keep on your coffee table all the time as medicine. Drive Here and Devastate Me. This is the most recent, is that correct?
Megan Falley:
Yeah, that’s my favorite.
Glennon Doyle:
Drive Here and Devastate Me. Unreal. Redhead and the Slaughter King. Unreal. And After the Witch Hunt. Just so gorgeous, Megan. Your writing kills me and brings me back to life. Thank you. I love you. You did amazing. You were right to be so confident and brave.
Megan Falley:
So photogenic too.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Bye, Pod Squad. We’ll see you next time.
Glennon Doyle:
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