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Ayelet Waldman: On Feeling Like A 'Bad Mother'

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli of tvworthwatching.com, sitting in for
Terry Gross.

Like many mothers, our guest Ayelet Waldman has suffered from what she calls
bad mother anxiety. That's why her memoir, now out in paperback, is called "Bad
Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional
Moments of Grace."

Waldman is the mother of four, and is best known as the author of the "Mommy-
Track" novels, a series about a public defender turned stay-at-home mom who
grows frustrated at home and ends up becoming a part-time detective. Her next
novel, "Red Hook Road," is scheduled for publication next month.

Waldman didn't become a writer until after becoming a mother. Like the
character in her series, she was a public defender and really liked the work.
When she was pregnant with her first child, she worked until the last minute.
And when she returned to her job, her husband, the well-known writer Michael
Chabon, stayed home with the baby.

There were times Waldman was in the office with her breast pump whirring while
she was on the speaker phone with a client. Then she'd get a call from her
husband about how he and their daughter Sophie went to the pool and story time
at the library and how he saw her take her first steps, and Waldman started to
feel like she was really missing out. One day, she packed up her office to
become a stay-at-home mom. Terry spoke with Ayelet Waldman last year and asked
if staying home and taking her daughter to the pool and the library was as
wonderful as she thought it would be.

Ms. AYELET WALDMAN (Author, "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor
Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace"): Well, absolutely. It was lovely.
It was, you know, the baby pool and Mommy and Me, and story time at the
library. And that whole first day that I was back, it was awesome. And then the
second day, it was story time at the library and the baby pool, and Mommy and
Me, and then the third day and the fourth day and the fifth day. And really,
within a week, I had started to completely lose my mind.

But I am incredibly stubborn, and I had good reasons for going back. So I
decided that I was going to stick with it and I was going to stay home and I
was going to do this thing, and I wasn't going to give up and go back to work.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Now, you write in your memoir that once you made that decision to stay home,
and then you realized you were losing your mind, that you went on a rant that
we daughters of feminists had essentially been lied to. What was the lie?

Ms. WALDMAN: Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a
consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen
to them. I mean, they went - you know, they did the whole thing. I'm not sure
if they ever actually got the speculum out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they
did.

And my mom and her friends had these incredibly frustrated professional lives.
And what they raised us to do, what she raised me to do, is to live out the
kind of professional experience in life that she had never managed to have.

And they never said how hard it was going to be. You know, they never - my
mother never made it clear that this was going to pull me in as many directions
as it was, because I don't think she even thought so. I mean, she thought that
if I had the kind of professional life that she had always longed for, then
everything else would fall into place.

So I'm 44 years old, and I think I'm part of the first generation of women
raised by these feminist mothers. And when I first was feeling so frustrated
and depressed and angry about being stuck at home, I really kind of turned on
that message, and I said, you know, this was a lie. This whole thing was a lie.
We can't have it all. And at first I was angry, but I think what ended up
happening is that I've - it's not so much that I've mellowed, but that I've
developed some perspective.

GROSS: How would you compare your idea of what it means to be a feminist with
your mother's?

Ms. WALDMAN: Well, you know, at a very basic level, we have the same idea of
what it means to be a feminist. I mean, I absolutely call myself a feminist.
And by that, I mean a woman who believes that your opportunities should not be
constrained by your gender, that women should be entitled to the same
opportunities as men. And my mother feels that way, too.

I think the difference is between women of my generation and my mother's
generation, between my mother and me, is a kind of gradations and shades of
gray. And, you know, in one area that is really obvious, it's in abortion.

So for women of my mother's generation, who struggled so hard to get the right
to abortion, what they needed to do in order to achieve that right and to
maintain it was to describe what they were doing in a certain way. So I - you
know, when they were describing the process of having an abortion, language was
really important to them.

So they never called the baby a baby. It was a fetus. It was an embryo at best,
you know. It was - and this is a quote - "a clump of cells." But to women like
me, who've grown up in the age of the ultrasound, we now have three-dimensional
ultrasounds of our babies from the very beginning, you know, when we can
actually see their features, recognizable features, and their - we can see them
suck their thumbs.

And for us, abortion - even though I think I am absolutely as committed to
choice as my mother is - the idea of abortion and the fact of abortion has
become something very different. And I think women of my mother's generation
are very uncomfortable with how we talk about abortion.

GROSS: If you don't mind, I'd like to talk with you about a very difficult
decision you had to make. When you were about 35, you were carrying your third
child, and because of your age and the risks associated with pregnancy at that
age, you decided to have amniocentesis. And tell us what you found.

Ms. WALDMAN: I had just turned 35. So it was sort of up in the air whether I
would have an amnio at all, but I am, by nature, very pessimistic. So I decided
that I had to have one.

And the ultrasound at the amnio was very, very normal. We saw the baby. I
remember we - they gave us a photograph of his feet, just sort of like - almost
like footprints. And then we came home. And about 10 days later, we were
leaving for a family vacation in Hawaii, and I decided I was just going to call
my obstetrician to find out, you know, get the kind of clear, go-ahead, the
clean bill of health, just so that I wouldn't have any worries when we were,
you know, floating in the ocean.

And I called her - and this experience is so - it's so clear in my mind in such
a strange way. I called her, and she said, are you sitting down? And at that
moment, I kind of felt myself lift out of my body, and I almost felt like I was
watching what was happening in this very detached way, almost like hovering up
on the ceiling.

I remember having this thought: Oh, wow. When something terrible happens,
people really do fall on the ground and scream. And I had fallen on the ground,
and I was holding the phone and just wailing. And my husband, Michael, took the
phone out of my hand and talked to the doctor. And then we embarked on this -
that was a Friday - and we embarked on these three days of just misery.

We went to the genetic counselor, and we found out that the baby had a genetic
abnormality that's rare. It's a trisomy, a triple chromosome, but not Trisomy
21, which is Down's Syndrome, which is the most common trisomy, but a different
one and a much more ambiguous defect.

On the one hand, there was a decent chance that the baby would have this
genetic defect but would be unaffected, that you would never know, that he
would lead - and it was a boy - that he would lead a very normal life, that you
wouldn't be able to tell. And there, on the other hand, there were chances that
he would be mentally retarded or be predisposed to cancers of the kidney,
things like that.

GROSS: So, you know, when you have amniocentesis, you usually have it with the
idea that if it came back with bad news, you'd have an abortion. Otherwise, why
bother to go through with the amnio, in a way. Maybe that's faulty logic?

Ms. WALDMAN: Absolutely. No, I think that's definitely true.

GROSS: But when you were slapped in the face by this really bad news, was the
decision obvious to you about what to do?

Ms. WALDMAN: You know, in one way, the decision was really, really obvious to
me. I mean, I knew as soon as I heard the news what I wanted to do, what I was
going to do. But the decision was - you know, there's your decision, and then
your decision as a couple, as a family. And my husband is as much of an
optimist as I am a pessimist, and he heard the statistics, and he thought, all
right. We're good. We're safe.

And so we spent three days kind of trying to come together as a couple. We
weren't arguing at all. It was almost the most intimate experience of our
marriage. But at the end, I remember we were sitting at the kitchen table and
crying.

We'd been crying pretty much for three days. And he said, you know, if I - if
you are wrong, and there's nothing wrong with the baby and we have this
abortion, I will always love you, and our relationship will continue
unaffected. But if I'm wrong, and we have this baby and he is, in fact,
mentally retarded, I don't know if we make it.

And it was this, you know, moment of terrible honesty, and we both just cried.
And then the next day we went, and we had - these abortions take a number of
days - and we had sort of the first step of that two-day abortion.

GROSS: Can I stop you? When your husband said, if I'm wrong, and the baby is
born mentally retarded, I don't know if we make it, what did that mean?

Ms. WALDMAN: I think he meant - I mean, I think he meant two things. I think he
meant that our family would be forever changed. But I think he also meant - and
I know he meant this, and I think he meant that he didn't know if I would be
able to forgive him. And you know, in a way, that was a very harsh thing to
say, but he was right.

I mean, he knows me more than anybody - better than anybody else in the world
knows me. And at that moment, he was saying, you know, I know you and I love
you, and, you know, I want to make sure that this doesn't happen. And it took -
you know, I had to look in the mirror at that moment and look at the ugliest
side of myself, too, and say, you know, you're right. It's not like I wouldn't
love him, but I don't know if I would have forgiven him.

GROSS: So you decided to have an abortion. You were four months pregnant. This
is past the first trimester.

Ms. WALDMAN: Yes. It was the second...

GROSS: What were your options?

Ms. WALDMAN: Well, we had a D&E, which is a dilation and extraction, which is
they, you know - and here's another point where, you know, my mother and I
differ completely on this. You know, my mother, when she describes a procedure,
she doesn't describe the details. And for me, I needed to know exactly what was
happening. And in this procedure, your cervix is dilated, and the baby is
extracted, and the baby's extracted, essentially, in pieces from your uterus.

It's horrible. It's - the photographs that you see that the right-to-lifers
show, you know, they're real photographs. I mean, that's really what it's like.
And I say this because I feel like I can't support a woman's right to choose
unless I'm willing to look at the darkest side of it. And that was the darkest
side of it.

So one of the things I asked the incredibly generous, gentle doctor who did the
abortion was, I asked him if he would make sure that the baby didn't feel
anything. That was - sorry.

GROSS: That's okay.

Ms. WALDMAN: That was really important to me, that he be dead, essentially,
before that grim process took place. And the doctor promised me that he would
give an injection that would make that happen.

GROSS: So what were your feelings when the abortion was over? Did you feel
different about it than you did going into it? Did you have doubts that you
didn't have before? Do you - were you okay with yourself?

Ms. WALDMAN: No, not for a while. I mean, almost immediately, I decided that I
had been completely wrong and Michael was right. The baby was fine. I had done
this horrible, horrible thing. I had killed a baby because I was a coward.

And I sank into what was really a five-month-long depression. I have bipolar
disorder. So I tend to cycle, but I have a very mild case. And I had never been
really what I think of as clinically depressed until that moment. And I was
just profoundly depressed. I was furious with myself. I just felt like the
worst mother in the world. And it was only when I got pregnant again that that
depression lifted, and it lifted almost magically.

I mean, as soon as I found that I - it was five months later that I got
pregnant again. And as soon as I found that I was pregnant, the anxiety and the
fear for that baby, for the baby with whom I was pregnant, did not dissipate -
not until I held her in my arms nine months later. But the sort of self-
loathing and the just trauma of it just kind of floated away.

BIANCULLI: Ayelet Waldman, speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview from last year with author
Ayelet Waldman. Her memoir, called "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes,
Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace," is now out in paperback.

GROSS: You were talking before about the difference between how you see
abortion and how your mother sees it, and how you think for your mother and her
generation, it was this black-and-white thing, that in order to fight for the
right to have an abortion, you had to call what you were carrying a fetus and
not a baby. You had to not acknowledge some of the darker sides of abortion,
because if there was any gray area, you'd lose. You'd lose the fight.

But you see gray area. You had the abortion anyways, but you see the pain, you
see the gray area. Do you think if you had an abortion when you were in
college, before you were married, before you became a mother, that abortion
would have seemed different to you?

Ms. WALDMAN: I've never said this ever, I don't think. I had an abortion
before. No, I have never told that to anybody, you know, outside of my
girlfriends. I had an abortion when I was much younger, and it was a first-
trimester abortion, and I did it without a moment's hesitation, without a
moment's anxiety. I knew with utter certainty it was the right thing to do, and
I can safely say it had no emotional affect on me.

I was also about four weeks and three days pregnant. I mean, really, I had had
the test the day that I missed my period, and I had the abortion three days
later. So it was very different, you know, with this - what happened with - we
called that - the baby that we aborted - Rocket Ship. That was the name that my
son had given for the - when I was pregnant.

With Rocket Ship, I felt him moving. I saw him on the ultrasound. But this was,
this really was like my mom and her friends said. This really was a clump of
cells, and it had no emotional resonance in my life afterwards at all.

GROSS: And does it now?

Ms. WALDMAN: You know, no, it really doesn't. I mean, I am so certain that it
was the right decision, and it was so early. I mean, I do actually think there
is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first
trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester,
in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached. I think there's a
real difference, and I think that my reaction is probably pretty common.

But I also know that there are people who have very early abortions who then go
on to feel, you know, a certain amount of trauma from that, too. So I wouldn't
want to, you know, denigrate that experience, either.

GROSS: Do you mind if I ask how you and your mother discussed the abortion and
if you used different language and if you had different, you know, emotional
ideas about it?

Ms. WALDMAN: My mother was – I mean, my mother's so devoted. She's just the
warmest, most lovely woman, and she ached for me. I mean, she just ached for
me. She wanted me to feel better. She just couldn't stand how much pain I was
in. And one of the ways she tried to help me was to say, you know, this wasn't
- it wasn't real. It wasn't a baby.

And I don't think she understood how much I needed not to talk about it like
that. I don't think - it didn't make sense to her how - she thought I was just
being unnecessarily self-flagellating when I would talk about him and what he
looked like and when I held those - you know, I kept those ultrasound pictures.
I have them still.

There was this great divide in how she felt like I was making my pain last
longer by dwelling on this side of it. And I felt like it was not that - it was
irresponsible not to accept that part of it and to really acknowledge what I
had done.

GROSS: Well, Ayelet, I really appreciate how much pain this abortion caused and
what it's like to, you know, reveal the first one you had. I just want to thank
you for, you know, sharing that part of your life with us. So let me tell our
guests who I'm speaking with.

My guest is Ayelet Waldman, and she is probably best known for a series of
crime novels that she's written called the "Mommy-Track" novels, where it's a
mother-turned-detective.

So it's about motherhood and amateur detective work at the same time. She's
written other books, as well, and her new book is a memoir. It's called "Bad
Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional
Moments of Grace."

There's another, like, really difficult topic that I want to talk with you
about, if you don't mind.

Ms. WALDMAN: Sure.

GROSS: And this was - you know, you mentioned that you're manic-depressive, and
it's a, you know, fairly mild case of it. But still, you know, when you were
diagnosed, you were put on medication - which was very helpful. And right after
that, you found out you were pregnant.

Ms. WALDMAN: Yeah, like weeks later. I mean, almost immediately.

GROSS: Yeah, and then you had to decide, you know, should you stay on the
medication, which would be good for you, or should you get off of it because it
might be bad for the baby you were carrying. And this is something that women
go through with coffee and wine, let alone, you know, let alone biochemical
kind of drugs.

Ms. WALDMAN: Yeah, and I had stopped the coffee and stopped the wine and wasn't
eating tuna and was, you know, carefully making sure I got sufficient Omega-3s
and doing - you know - sleeping on the right side, you know, doing all the
things that you're supposed to do in that kind of crazy, neurotic way that
contemporary American motherhood has told us we have to treat pregnancy.

And then I was taking this medication that I knew was crossing into my baby's
bloodstream. You know, my doctor - I went to my obstetrician and I talked to my
psychiatrist, and they all agreed that it was safe. The problem was that after
I had the baby, it turned out that there were these research studies that
showed that, in fact, it wasn't as clear-cut. I mean, there are - babies who
are exposed to SSRIs in utero are born with SSRIs in their system, and they go
through SSRI withdrawal.

And Abraham had a whole series of problems when he was born, really, which -
none of which you could actually say was a result of SSRI withdrawal. He
couldn't nurse. He wasn't gaining weight. And while the studies showed that was
a side effect, he also had this kind of bubble palate, almost - if it had been
a little higher of a bubble, it would have been a cleft palate. So that was
most likely the cause of his difficulties.

But to have taken those medications and then to read those studies and then to
know that my baby - for another reason entirely, but still - was suffering from
those very symptoms was very difficult, and I don't know if I would make the
same decision.

In fact, I don't think I would make the same decision again. I mean, you know,
I'm not - it's not impossible that I'll get pregnant again - although, you
know, God forbid, as my mother says. But I would not take medication when I was
pregnant now. I would try to kind of go it alone, although it would be hard. It
would definitely be hard.

GROSS: So was this your third or your fourth?

Ms. WALDMAN: That was my last baby, my fourth, Abraham, who's six now - and
who's fine. I just have to say he's totally normal, you know.

GROSS: Good, good.

BIANCULLI: Ayelet Waldman, speaking to Terry Gross last year. Her memoir, "Bad
Mother," is now out in paperback. We'll continue their conversation in the
second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I’m David Bianculli in for Terry Gross, back with
Terry's 2009 interview with attorney and author Ayelet Waldman. Her memoir, now
out in paperback, is called "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor
Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace."

In part it's about leaving her job as a public defender to become a stay-at-
home mom and still suffering from bad mother anxiety. Waldman is now the mother
four. She's married to the writer Michael Chabon.

GROSS: You know, you mentioned the mild - relatively mild case of bipolar
syndrome that you have, which is, you know, contrasting highs and lows, you
know, depressions and manias. The manias are, of course, very productive and
the depressions not so much. You say something really funny in your book, that
you can always spot the other bipolar person at the party. She is the one
regaling the room with a hysterical tale of her husband's virulent herpes
outbreak.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. WALDMAN: Yup.

GROSS: And you say sometimes, like when you get into the manic phase, like you
talk too much, you say too much, you reveal too much. Do you feel like you ever
did that like on your blog or, you know, or in a novel or something...

Ms. WALDMAN: Oh, always. I mean, welcome to the world of the memoir, right?
Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that
whole over-sharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder.
And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of
being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift. I mean, if we didn't
have people who were missing a very clear line-drawing impulse that normal
people have, then we wouldn't have these articles and essays and memoirs that
we can all - that we all look to to identify with.

I mean, I get - most of the mail that I get is from people who say thank you
for saying that, I never would have said it myself but it's so nice to read it.
And you know, lucky them, I'm crazy.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Give us an example of something you said that got that kind of comment.

Ms. WALDMAN: Well, I mean, the whole thing about the abortion that we talked
about, you know, that maybe that kind of over-sharing was part of writing about
that. But probably - I mean, certainly most infamously was when I wrote an
essay in which I said that I loved my husband more than my children. That was
definitely the most over-sharing moment, particularly since I went - it was an
essay about sex and about sexless marriages. And I talked about my very not-
sexless marriage in far more detail than one should, probably certainly than my
husband ever would have, let's just say.

GROSS: Yeah, and the premise of the article was, you know, you knew so many
mothers who weren't having sex any longer with their husbands, and you were
trying to figure out why, and...

Ms. WALDMAN: Right. The only reason I wrote that article was because I was
writing it for an anthology about, you know, all these different mothers
writing about different things, this anthology called "Because I Said So" - and
the editors came to me and they said, okay, we've got moms writing about cancer
and about divorce and blah, blah, blah, and we don't have anybody writing about
sex, and since you're the only person who's having any, it's got to be you.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: So you were trying to figure out why is it that like so many mothers
don't, you know, don't want or even have sex anymore, but you and your husband
were enjoying a sexual life, like what was the difference. And your answer was?

Ms. WALDMAN: My answer was that all of these women were good mothers. They had
made this kind of erotic transference when they had children. They shifted all
of their ardor and their passion and their devotion from their husbands to
their children. The children had become the center of their passionate
universes. And I'd never done that. I mean, I loved my kids like crazy. And I
love them still, even though some of them are turning into teenagers, but I had
never sort of shifted that passionate focus. And I still loved my husband as
much as I had, with the same kind of crazy devotion, and that - if a good
mother was a mother who loved her children more than anybody else in the world,
then I was a bad mother because - and here was the line - I loved my husband
more than my children. Buh-dum-bum.

GROSS: And then you said, and I might as well quote it here: If I were to
lose....

Ms. WALDMAN: Go for it.

GROSS: If I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my
children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband. But my imagination
simply fails when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death.

Ms. WALDMAN: Yeah, that was the killer. You know, what was going on is, I had
just finished this novel called "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits," which was
about a woman whose baby dies of SIDS. I'd just finished that novel. And I had
spent a year in the head of this woman trying to get over the death of a child.
So I felt like I had the capacity to imagine that. But I couldn't imagine
writing a novel about a widow, and I still can't imagine writing that. I don't
know, you know, the extent of that, that experience just seems utterly
incomprehensible to me.

So that's really why I said that. But, you know, of course what - when one
reads that, the kind of logical interpretation is that, you know, I'd throw my
kids in front of a bus to save my husband, and that's just obviously not true.
I would throw myself in front of the bus, and then they'd go on to lead very
happy lives without me.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. WALDMAN: You know what I thought of when I read this, is that, you know,
sometimes - well, I used to think to myself, when my parents were alive, who
should die first? Like, one of them is going to have to outlive the other. Who
would be able to survive outliving the other better? Which would I would be -
how would I, you know, who - who would I better survive, you know, if one died
and the other lived, like how would I, you know, manage it? Then I - once I got
to that - these horrible thoughts - games like that slip into your mind. But
once I get to that point, I'd kind of stop, because I thought like, wow, I just
can't go on with that, I mean, it's just, I can't - I can't - I can't work that
one through.

And then sometimes it's like, even like really stupid thing pops in my mind,
like if you had to be blind or deaf, which would you choose?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. WALDMAN: Right. And that's like...

GROSS: Right. It's like...

Ms. WALDMAN: ...that's like constant - I've done that my whole life.

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. WALDMAN: That's just called being Jewish.

GROSS: Maybe, maybe. But then once I put that premise on the table, I think
like, I'm not going to play that game. That's a really stupid game. You don't
have the choice, you don't have to make the choice. You'll never have to make
that choice. So why even put yourself through it? And I never go any further.
But it's like you followed that one through, that worst-case scenario, you had
to make the choice thing. You put it on the table, you made a decision, and
then you put in print and...

Ms. WALDMAN: Oy.

GROSS: Oy.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. WALDMAN: Well, I think, you know, first of all, we were talking about that
over-sharing impulse. But also I think because, I mean, what I was responding
to was, what I saw was - you know, in a way I was saying, look, I'm not the one
who set up this hierarchy. But if we were playing the game of hierarchy, well,
I think you're wrong.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. WALDMAN: So that's sort of how I did it. You know, it's so funny because
everyone was so afraid of, like, what do my kids think? Poor children when they
read that. So I got very nervous about what my kids would say. And I just sat
down my older daughter and - this long explanation, told her what was in the
essay. And this is what she did. She looked at me and she went, duh, and walked
away.

GROSS: Well, Ayelet, I want to really thank you a lot for talking with us. I
really appreciate it.

Ms. WALDMAN: Oh, thank you so much, Terry. It's so exciting for me.

BIANCULLI: Ayelet Waldman speaking to Terry Gross last year. Her memoir, "Bad
Mother," is now out in paperback. Her next novel, "Red Hook Road," comes out
next month.
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Paul McCartney: From Pop Music To Prose

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Former Beatle Paul McCartney doesn’t need any more awards or accolades, but
just got another one - the Gershwin Prize, awarded to him this week at a White
House ceremony and concert honoring his lifetime of songwriting.

Many of McCartney's song lyrics are collected in a book called "Blackbird
Singing," which also includes samples of old and new poems. Here's the song
that inspired that book title, "Blackbird," performed here by its composer at
an MTV Unplugged concert in 1991.

(Soundbite of MTV concert)

Sir PAUL MCCARTNEY (Musician): (Singing) Blackbird singing in the dead of
night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only
waiting for this moment to arrive. Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take
these sunken eyes and learn to see. All your life, you were only waiting for
this moment to be free, Blackbird fly. Blackbird fly into the light of a dark
black night.

BIANCULLI: Terry spoke with Paul McCartney in 2001, when his book "Blackbird
Singing" was published. She asked him about meeting John Lennon, his
songwriting partner in the Beatles.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Do you remember what the band was playing the first time you heard John with
the band the Quarrymen?

Sir MCCARTNEY: Yeah, they were - they had a repertoire of kind of folksy sort
of bluesy things mixed with early rock 'n' roll. And John and the band were
playing a thing called "Come Go With Me," which was a record for a group called
the Del Vikings - it was an early rock 'n' roll record. But John obviously
didn't have the record, and he probably heard it a few times on radio. And
being so musical, he just picked it up. And so he was doing a version of it.

But what impressed me was, even though he didn't know the words, he would make
them up and he'd steal words from sort of blues songs. So instead of the real
words, which I don't know, but he was singing: Come go with me down to the
penitentiary.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Sir MCCARTNEY: Which was more off Big Bill Broonzy or somebody, you know. But I
thought, you know, that's inventive. That's ingenious. So I warmed to him
immediately hearing that.

GROSS: And how were you invited to play with the band?

Sir MCCARTNEY: Well, they were doing two sets. There was one in the afternoon
when I, first of all, saw them, which was outdoors. And then there was to be
one in the evening. And meantime, they had all this time to fill. So they went
into the village hall where the evening gig was to be. And they were sitting
around, and with all this time on their hands, John, who was one and half years
older than me, had got hold of some beer from somewhere and was having a little
drink. And we were sitting around and just playing various songs. And even
though I was left-handed, I kind of learned to turn the guitar upside down and
just about play songs, ‘cause(ph) my friends wouldn’t let me retune their
guitars, obviously too inconvenient for them. So I had to learn this left-
handed method.

So I turned the guitar around - I think it was his guitar - and I played a song
- an early Eddie Cochran song, which was called "Twenty Flight Rock." And I
must have done it quite well, because a couple of days later I was cycling
around Walton, which was the area where I met John. And one of the friends, a
guy called Pete Shotton, cycled up to me and said: Hey, we were talking about
you. You know, we enjoyed that "Twenty Flight Rock," and would like to be in
the band, you know?

So I said, well, I’ll have to consider this. You know, this is a big move to
me. I'd never been a professional outfit before. I'd never actually even hardly
sung on stage before. I think I just did it once at a holiday camp somewhere.
And so I said I’ll get back to you on that one. And a couple of days later I
did and said yeah, you know what, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

GROSS: You have a poem for John in there. It's called "Song for John." It's
actually a lyric for a song that you recorded in 1982. I was wondering if you
could read it for us.

Sir MCCARTNEY: Okay. This poem is called "Here Today." It was originally a song
I recorded for John Lennon.

And if I said I really knew you well, what would your answer be if you were
here today? Well, knowing you, you'd probably laugh and say that we were worlds
apart, if you were here today. But as for me, I still remember how it was
before and I am holding back the tears no more. I love you. What about the time
we met? Well, I suppose you could say that we were playing hard to get. Didn't
understand a thing, but we could always sing. What about the night we cried,
because there wasn't any reason left to keep it all inside? Never understood a
word, but you were always there with a smile. And if I say I really loved you
and was glad you came along, then you were here today for you were in my song,
here today.

GROSS: When did you write this?

Sir MCCARTNEY: I wrote that shortly after John died.

GROSS: What was the night that we cried that you refer to in the poem?

Sir MCCARTNEY: I seem to remember we had some time off in Key West, Florida,
and it was because there was a hurricane and we'd been diverted, I think from
Jacksonville. So we had to spend a night or two in Key West - that’s where we
ended up anyway. And at that age, with that much time on our hands, we really
didn’t know what to do with it except get drunk.

And so that was what we did. And we stayed up all night - talking, talking,
talking like it was going out of style. And at some point early in the morning,
I think we must have touched on some points that were really emotional, and we
ended up crying, which was very unusual for us, because we - members of a band
and young guys, we didn't do that kind of thing. So I always remembered it as a
sort of important emotional landmark.

GROSS: Do you remember what you were talking about that led to that?

Sir MCCARTNEY: Probably our mothers dying, because John and I shared that
experience. My mother died when I was about 14, and his died shortly after -
about a year or so after, I think. So this was a great bond John and I always
had. We both knew the pain of it, and we both knew that we had to put on a
brave face, because we were sort of teenage guys, and you didn't talk about
that kind of thing where we came from.

GROSS: Now, that's the kind of thing that John really acted out through his
music. I mean he had a couple of songs that were really about that and were...

Sir MCCARTNEY: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...were very emotional. It's not the kind of thing you really did
though. None of the songs as far as I know were really about your mother.

Sir MCCARTNEY: Well, no. Mine's veiled. My style is more veiled. And also, at
the time the songs were written that you’re talking about, like "Mother," John
was going through primal scream therapy.

GROSS: Exactly. Right.

Sir MCCARTNEY: And, you know, that's going to get it out of you.

GROSS: Right.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Sir MCCARTNEY: I didn’t actually go through any of that. So my stuff tended to
be more veiled, or I would tend to talk to friends, relatives, loved ones about
it in private. Mine would emerge, I think, probably in songs like "Yesterday."
It's been put to me, although it’s kind of subconscious, but it's been put to
me that the song "Yesterday" was probably about my mother: Why she had to go, I
don’t know. She wouldn’t say. I did something wrong, now I long for yesterday.
That's yesterday, all my troubles were so far away.

I'm sure that was to do with my mother dying. But, as I said, kind of age group
we were then, it wasn’t a done thing to talk about things like that. And it was
much later when John got into therapy in America that he wrote some songs that
directly dealt with it.

GROSS: Now, your songs were co-credited, you know, in the Beatles era. My
understanding, and correct if I'm wrong, that many of the songs were written by
one of you or the other, although the other would do some editing on the song,
but a few of the songs were actually true collaborations. Is that right? Is
that accurate?

Sir MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Well, what happened was, in the early days they were
pretty much - the very earliest days were separate. We wrote one or two
separately before we actually got together. But when we got together and
actually started writing the earliest Beatles stuff, everything was co-written.
We hardly ever wrote things separate. But then, after a few years, as we got a
bit of success with the Beatles, and didn’t actually live together or weren't
just always on the road together sharing hotel rooms, then we had the luxury of
writing stuff separately.

So John would write something like "Nowhere Man" sort of separately in his
house outside London. And I would write something like "Yesterday" quite
separately on my own. And as you say, we would come together and check them out
against each other. Sometimes we would edit a line of each other's. But more
often we'd just would say, yeah, that's great. And very often, a line that one
of us was going to chuck out we would encourage the other not to chuck out
because it was a good line. I had a line in "Hey Jude" much later that said:
The moment you need is on your shoulder. And I thought that was me just
blocking out the line. And I said I’ll change that. He said you won't, you
know. That's the best line in it.

And similarly, I would encourage him to keep lines in his songs that he didn’t
think were very good. And I'd say no, that's a really great line. There was a
song of his called "Glass Onion," where he had a line about the walrus, here's
another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul. And he wanted to keep it but he
needed to check it with me. He said, What do you think about that line? I said
it's a great line. You know, it's a spoof on the way everyone was always
reading into our songs. I said here we go, you know, we give them another clue
to follow. So we would check stuff against each other, and it was obviously
very handy for our writing to be able to do that.

BIANCULLI: Paul McCartney speaking with Terry Gross in 2001. This week he was
rewarded the Gershwin Prize for songwriting at a White House concert honoring
him that will be televised by PBS in July.
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'Splice': Your Results May Vary (And Be Scary)

(Soundbite of music)

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

The Canadian director Vincenzo Natali had a cult hit with his gory 1997 sci-fi
thriller "Cube." His new film, "Splice," features Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley
as scientists who create and attempt to manage a constantly transforming part-
human life form.

Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: Creating new life, it's a messy business - so said Mary
Shelley in the early 19th century in "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus."
You'd think, given all the gene-mapping and cloning around, that horror movies
would be lousy with Frankenstein scenarios - cautionary tales in which
technology outpaces our understanding of how to use it. But mostly we get
splatter, torture porn, lame remakes. In that context, Vincenzo Natali's
"Splice" beckons to us like a luminous laboratory beaker, an alluring new brew.

It's set in Toronto and owes much to David Cronenberg, especially his films
"The Brood" and "The Fly." Throw in "Splice" and you have an Ontario subgenre:
faceless, sterile modern settings, wintry and blue-lit, in which new kinds of
flesh are grown or hatched.

In "Splice," Canada's own Sarah Polley and long-faced Adrien Brody play Clive
and Elsa, celebrated nerdy researchers for a pharmaceutical company - called,
in fact, NERD, for Nucleic Exchange Research Development. When we meet them,
they're delivering a new life form from a pulsing ovum in an incubator - a
giant, wormy mass from which they hope to mine all kinds of patent-worthy
medical processes.

But then company bigwigs put the kibosh on future research. Use what's there
and generate capital, they command. That's when Clive and Elsa think: Why not
mix in human DNA and see what grows? After a lot of tinkering, the implant
takes. The fetus - a kitchen sink of species - comes quickly to term. And then
we hear the words immortalized by Colin Clive in the 1931 film of
"Frankenstein."

(Soundbite of movie, "Splice")

Ms. SARAH POLLEY (Actor): (as Elsa) It's alive.

(Soundbite of squealing)

Mr. ADRIEN BRODY (Actor): (as Clive) Get out of there. I'm going to gas it.

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) Wait. You'll kill it.

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) Elsa, get out. Okay, I'm hitting the gas.

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) I'm not going to hurt you.

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) In three, two, one...

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) Clive, I said don’t.

EDELSTEIN: Clive is about to gas the lab and kill the infant creature, but to
stop him, Elsa has whipped off her oxygen helmet. That's the first sign the
couple will approach this child from different angles.

What's endlessly fascinating in "Splice" is trying to get a handle on what the
creature is. Elsa calls it Dren, nerd spelled backwards, and it's seemingly
female.

Now it's a pile of flesh with eyes on either side of its head. Then, quickly,
since its growth is accelerated, it looks humanoid, albeit with other
components, from amphibious to avian - plus a long tail with a lethal spike. It
has no language you'd recognize - clicks and rattles and chirps.

When Dren makes too much of a racket, Clive and Elsa sneak her down - she's
wearing a cute little dress - to the facility's dank basement.

(Soundbite of movie, "Splice")

(Soundbite of squeals)

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) Open the door. Just stop it. Shh. I'm starting to feel
like a criminal.

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) Scientists push boundaries. It's important
(unintelligible)

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) Yeah. Sticking to a few rules isn't always such a bad
idea either, you know.

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) Nobody is going to care about a few rules after they see
what we just made.

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) See what we’ve made? Is that what you just said?

Ms. POLLEY: (as Elsa) Yeah.

Mr. BRODY: (as Clive) Nobody can see what we made.

Ms. POLLEY: (Elsa) Don’t you think the world is going to want to know what's
next? Do you think they could really look at this face and see anything less
than a miracle?

EDELSTEIN: You know no good will come from this, right? But the way in which it
all goes bad has a distinctly human dimension. It turns out that Elsa, so
militantly maternal, had an abusive mom - and as Dren grows over a couple of
months and becomes more assertive, like a mischievous child and then a
rebellious teenager, something dark and scary in Elsa takes hold. And Clive,
who wanted to destroy Dren, begins to soften. Soon this high-tech
"Frankenstein" acquires a vein of freaky, low-tech Gothic psychodrama.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are thoroughly convincing when their characters
are smart, and only slightly less so when they turn crazy-dumb. The Paris-born
actress Delphine Chaneac plays the maturing Dren with help from creature
effects designer Howard Berger, and she has her own mythical beauty. Her head
tilts, birdlike, as her wide almond eyes take in her new world.

I'm sad to say the climax of "Splice" is too rushed. But if gene-splicing can
give us monsters as poetically strange as Dren, it bodes well for our horror
movies - if not necessarily for our species.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine.

You can see several clips from "Splice" and download podcasts of our show on
our website, freshair.npr.org. You can also join us on Facebook and follow us
on Twitter at nprfreshair.
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