Original subtitles

SUBJECT: If you're tuned in, life feels like a story.

I was in Australia.

And I was with Hugh, my boyfriend,

and I was with this Australian friend of mine.

And we were riding in the car to a little town

called Daylesford.

And we got to Daylesford and we were having

lunch in this restaurant.

And there was a kookaburra, the bird,

out on the porch of the restaurant.

And a server said, oh, do you want to feed him?

And then took me outside and gave me some raw duck meat

and I fed this kookaburra.

And it just felt like a story to me.

Like, sometimes your life feels like a story.

I went to--

I was in London buying a taxidermied owl,

and all of a sudden my life felt like a story.

I was at this beach house that we have with my family.

And my dad was wearing, like, a Cherokee headdress and my life

felt like a story.

And you have to kind of be tuned in, but every now and then

your subject comes just right to you and sits in your lap.

And if you're awake, you think, wow, there it is, right there--

the thing to write about.

And there's nothing better, nothing better,

than when it comes and sits in your lap like that.

And you can pretty much guarantee

that if you're sitting at home and you're just online all day,

and then you leave your house and you're walking down

the sidewalk and you're texting to your friends,

and then you go to the grocery store

and you continue to text while you're in the grocery store,

that nothing's going to come and sit in your lap.

You need to be in the world and you need

to be engaged with the world.

And every now and then it comes, it comes to you.

And it doesn't have to be a big thing.

It doesn't have to be, we were in a car accident.

It doesn't have to be, you know, your father

is rushed to the hospital with appendicitis.

It can just be as small as feeding

a bird on the other side of the world,

or buying a piece of taxidermy.

But again, you have to be open and you

have to be, you have to be able to recognize it

when it's given to you.

How's your morning going so far?

How was your trip in?

Got any big plans for the weekend?

These are questions.

If it's a question you've heard in a hotel or a store,

forget it.

There's no place to go with those questions.

Those are small talk questions.

I like a question like, do you know many people

in wheelchairs?

Good question, right?

And if people say no, I always say,

well, do you have a ramp in front of your house?

Do you know a lot of doctors is a good question,

because sometimes that can get people to say,

well, I had appendicitis last year,

or yeah, I just had a c-section.

I met a man, he was--

I never learned to drive a car, so he was driving me.

I was on a tour and he was driving me

from one place to the next.

And I said, have you ever run for office?

And he said, I can't believe you asked me that.

He said, I ran for judge 20 years ago in my town.

Why do you ask?

Why did you ask me that question?

And I don't know, I'd never asked

anybody that question before.

I don't know, just from talking to him

I just got this sense that he had run for office.

I met this woman one time and I said,

when was the last time you touched a monkey?

And she said, oh, can you smell it on me?

And it turned out she worked at a center

that trains monkeys to act as servants for paralyzed people.

And she invited me to the center,

and I went, and I was in a room with 13 monkeys.

And all of them, they were reaching

into every pocket I had.

Monkeys are thieves.

But I never would have known that if I

hadn't asked that particular woman that question.

I'd never asked anybody that question before.

Sometimes I'll hear something that's

just surprising to me, or delightful to me,

and I'll write it down.

But I don't feel like--

I mean, it sounds kind of cold, but you know what?

As a writer, you're sort of exploiting everybody

you come into contact with.

And that's not just me--

it's part of the job description, really.

But you're not always going to hit gold.

No.

But that's not any reason to give up.

That's not any reason.

I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't go

through the line at the grocery store and not ask that person

a question.

I don't want to live in that world.

You know, I have friends who will be on their phone

or texting somebody while they check out of the grocery store.

And this one friend of mine, he said, this is my shield.

It protects me from small talk.

And you know what I say?

It doesn't have to be small talk.

You can decide what it is.

As long as I'm still having encounters with people,

I want them to be meaningful to the extent that they can be.

The thing I find is, you know, when you say no, everything

shuts down, so I say yes a lot.

In my last book, I had an essay.

I had a tumor on my side.

It was called a lipoma.

It's just a fatty tumor.

I went to a doctor in France and he said, oh, it's nothing.

Dogs get them all the time.

And it was like a deviled egg underneath my skin,

right on my right side.

And I went to a doctor in North Carolina

and asked if he could remove it.

And he said, yes.

And I said, great, because I want to feed it

to a snapping turtle.

Just because there's snapping turtles near our beach house,

and I thought, wow, they would really love to eat--

like, if I had my tonsils taken out,

a turtle would be so happy to eat my tonsils,

or eat a finger, right?

So I thought oh I'll feed my tumor to a turtle

and it'll be fun.

And the doctor said, it's against the law for me

to give you anything I remove from your body.

So I just thought, OK, then forget it.

It seemed so unfair to me.

So I went to El Paso and I was onstage and I repeated that.

And a woman came up and said, I'll cut it out of you tonight

and I'll let you keep it.

And she said, I'm not a surgeon, but I'm a doctor.

And if it's above my pay grade, I'll just sew you back up

and send you on your way.

And I said, that sounds fantastic,

I said, but I have a book signing.

And she said, that's not a problem.

I'm a night owl.

So she came at 1 o'clock in the morning

and cut the tumor out of me, and I fed it to a turtle.

And that wouldn't have happened if I had said no, right?

Another thing I like to do is go to another country

and get my hair cut.

Because my hair, it doesn't really matter, right?

If you give me a bad haircut, it's

really no different than a good haircut on my head.

I remember I went to Japan and I got my hair cut and the barber

had shit on his hands.

And every time he raised the scissors, [GAGGING] I was,

I was, I thought--

I worried I might throw up.

And he was the loveliest man, and he was so patient

with my Japanese, and we had this conversation.

And I don't know, I guess he'd been to the toilet

before he cut my hair.

And that was one of the most interesting haircuts I've had.

So I would just encourage you to just, I don't know,

take a chance to do something that you wouldn't normally.

And I don't mean, like, do something you'd normally never

do, like water ski.

Like, you don't say yes if someone you don't know says,

you know--

if you're drunk and somebody you don't know says,

come to my house.

I mean, you don't say yes to that.

I just figured, you know what?

If I live, I can write about it.

That's how I've always thought.

I was in London and I was in a taxidermy shop.

And the owner of the shop showed me these owls

that he had for sale.

And then he showed me a pygmy skeleton.

And then he showed me an amputated arm.

And then he showed me a girl's head.

So he had some human things that were for sale.

And by that time, my life really felt like a story,

like it was writing itself in my head.

But you don't want to end it, and I

knew that if I pulled out my notebook everything

would have ended.

But part of it that comes from experience

is not disrupting the beauty of it,

not halting it, not calling attention to it,

and just letting it play out.

I wrote an essay years ago.

I'd just moved to Paris and I was on the subway in Paris.

And Americans go to Paris all the time

and they act like nobody speaks English, right?

Like, they'll talk about someone right in front of that person.

And not only do a lot of people speak English,

but chances are that's an American

or a British person you're in front of.

And this man and woman boarded.

And the man lived in Paris and he was trying

to show this woman the ropes.

And this woman had a really ugly purse, and I looked at it

and he said, that guy's a pickpocket.

Be careful.

He's a pickpocket.

He's after your wallet.

And I wrote about it and so many people have come forward

and said, why didn't you say, I'm not a pickpocket

and I'm not French?

But I would never have said that.

I didn't want to.

I wanted to see what happened next.

And if I were to say something, then

the thing that would happen next would be he would say,

oh my god, I'm so embarrassed.

And I would say, that's OK.

But that's not my ending, so I just let it play out.

You know, one beautiful thing about living in another country

is that people don't think you really count, in a way.

People don't think that you really understand

what it is that they're saying.

They often don't count you as a complete human being.

And personally I love that, because people

are more apt to be--

there was something I was reading the other day,

that your character is based on how you treat the people you're

allowed to mistreat.

Right?

So like, when you see somebody shouting

at a busboy who speaks no English, you know,

or a hotel maid who comes and knocks

on their door, somebody who is kind of powerless to complain

about them.

That says a lot about that person's character, to me.

But it's fascinating to be that person,

to be that busboy, to be that hotel maid,

and to have people treat you that way.

For me, it's like they're handing me money.

I mean, I absolutely live for it.

But again, you kind of want to get in there

and you want to set the record straight

and say, actually, no, this is who I am.

But then you would ruin the moment.

I used to live in Normandy in France.

And this woman told a neighbor of ours

how there was a man who walked by her house

all the time, looking at pictures

and talking to himself.

And that was me walking by her house.

But what I had, every day I would write 10 new vocabulary

words on index cards.

And so I wasn't looking at pictures,

I was looking at my index cards and I was repeating the words

on the index cards.

And now I live in England, and a woman introduced herself to me

at a little village event not long ago.

And she said, you know, I heard somebody talking about you.

And she said, oh, that man, he just walks around

and he picks up garbage.

I just pray no one takes advantage of him.

And often the people in my village in England,

they just treat me like either they think

that this is my community service

and that's why I'm picking up.

And I would never set them straight.

I find it--

I absolutely love that my actual life is a complete--

I'm pretty much the complete opposite

of who they think I am.

And I love for that to be my secret.

So I don't mind it when they treat me-- when

they pull their children close.

I'll pass somebody's house and I'll say hello,

and they'll just turn their back on me.

Or somebody will say, there's some over there

that you missed.

You want to go clean that.

Or, look, I live on this road.

Come and clean up my road.

And I feel so fortunate that it's

like having a disguise that allows you,

or having special glasses that allow you to see what people

are really like, because they're not counting you

as an actual human being like they are.

They're identifying you as something beneath them

and treating you accordingly.

And so they're exposing themselves

in a way that they wouldn't if they thought

that you were their equal. they would never

expose themselves that way.

So, to me, that's a beautiful thing.

I don't know how beautiful it is if you

don't have an outlet for it.

You know, if you're a busboy who speaks five words of English

and someone's screaming at you, you're

just going to go home and probably

feel bad about yourself.

But, for me, there's nothing better.