Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

My boyfriend, he's the most talented painter

I've ever known.

But he'll go to a museum, and go to an exhibit, and come home,

and say, I can't paint.

And it's like, well, you can't paint like that person,

but you paint like yourself.

I think a lot of that has to do with needing to be perfect.

And that's a real curse, needing to be perfect.

I mean, you need to do the best that you can do.

And then you need to take the best that you can do,

and you need to rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it,

and rewrite it.

Feeling the need to be perfect doesn't make you perfect.

It just makes you paralyzed.

So let go of that, because you're not going to be perfect.

And if you're very lucky, you'll learn to be yourself.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you're in school, you're taught

to have a topic sentence.

So a topic sentence for a story like "Understanding

Understanding Owls" might be, I don't

know if you've ever tried to buy an owl,

or, it's not as easy as you might think to buy an owl.

But I can't bear openings like that,

and so I had to unlearn everything

that I had been taught, right?

Another thing you're taught, especially

it was on the radio a lot was like, let's get to it.

Let's get to the story.

But I preferred to go over here for a while,

and then to go over here for a while.

And eventually, I'm going to get to the story.

It's sort of like "The Simpsons" to me.

Most television shows, you watch the first three minutes

and you say, oh, she's going to get her finger stuck

in that bowling ball.

But "The Simpsons," I defy you watching the first two

minutes of an episode where it's going to wind up.

I mean, if you've never seen it before.

So sometimes, I kind of knock over here,

and that doesn't let me in.

And I knock over here, and that doesn't let me in.

And I knock here, and that doesn't.

And I can not proceed with an essay

unless I have an opening line that I feel

confident to some degree with.

I mean, it'll often change.

But I can't get to the second sentence

unless I feel sort of steady with the first sentence.

And it can take days.

It can take weeks.

Because your opening is going to determine your entire essay.

An example from an essay I wrote called "Understanding

Understanding Owls."

And this was my original opening to the essay.

On a high shelf in our Paris bedroom,

there's an illustrated book with a catchy title,

"Understanding Owls."

Hugh bought it maybe 10 years ago.

And though I rarely open the thing,

I refer to it constantly.

You know, I'll say, there's something about ours

that I just don't get.

I wish there was somewhere I could join me

for a little help.

What kind of help, Hugh will ask.

And a few minutes later, after I've considered everything

from the Audubon Society to a National Geographic video,

he'll say, actually, if it's an understanding you're

after, I have a book, you might want to look at.

As part of the joke, he'll pull it from the shelf.

Then, because he is who he is, he'll

spend the next hour reading it and making appreciative noises.

The way my friend Lyn is a dog nut,

Hugh is an owl nut, the only difference

being that he doesn't have one, or at least not a living one.

So that was an original opening.

And then I thought, well, gosh.

Let me try something else.

So, doesn't it sometimes happen that you look around your house

and find that it's been completely overtaken by owls?

That's how it was with me, and it came as a real shock.

I said to Hugh, how did this happen?

It was, of course, a ridiculous question,

as how do these things always happen?

You're out shopping and, see I don't know,

some cocktail napkins with the little owls on them.

Not wearing glasses or doing favors for Harry Potter,

but just standing on a tree branch or something.

Well, that's cute, you think, so you throw it in your card

or whatnot and bring it home.

A few weeks later, you might see an owl-shaped candle.

And again, you say to yourself, why not?

The beauty of both candles and cocktail napkins

is that they're functional.

You use them, you throw them away,

and then you move on with your life.

It's that in between period that causes trouble.

People come for dinner, notice you have more than one

of something, and think, a-ha.

Now, I know what to get them for Christmas.

And then the final version that ultimately

ran in "The New Yorker" and in the book was, does there come

a day in every man's life when he looks around

and says to himself, I've got to weed out some of these owls?

I can't be alone in this, can I?

And, of course, you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

Therefore, you keep the crocheted owl

given to you by your second youngest sister

and accidentally on purpose drop the mug

that reads, "Owl Love You Always"

and was sent by someone who clearly never knew

you to begin with.

I mean, mugs with words on them.

Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins.

Ditto, owl candle.

Owl trivet, take to the charity shop,

along with the spool-sized Japanese owl

that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him

into your computer.

Just when you think you're making progress,

you remember the owl tobacco tin and the owl tea cozy.

Then, there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas

ornaments.

This is what happens when you tell people you like something.

For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits.

When she was in her late 30s, she got one as a pet.

Before it had chewed through its first phone cord,

she'd been given rabbit slippers, cushions, bowls,

refrigerator magnets, you name it.

Really, she kept insisting, the live one is enough.

But nothing could stem the tide of crap.

Amy's invasion started with a live rabbit,

while Hughes and mine began in the late 1990s

with decorative art.

I felt like the opening line in the book

and in "The New Yorker" was much stronger

than the original essay.

It was just talking about this book that Hugh and I had.

Does there come a day in every man's life

when he looks around and says to himself,

I've got to weed out some of these owls?

I mean, that's sort of ridiculous to suggest

that day's going to come in every man's life.

But insisting that it does, insisting that it will

is just funnier.

It's just a funnier way to open the essay.

You're insisting that you and the reader

have something in common.

But what you're insisting you have in common is ridiculous,

and it just seems all-around just a better

way to break into the story.

I would never think to do that formulaically.

For the essay that I'm working on now, for me to say,

does there come a day in every man's life

when his first beach house is destroyed by a hurricane,

and he has to move into a second?

Like, no.

It just seemed like a one-time thing.

But also, it never works really for me to, like,

break that wall, right?

There's a way, I suppose, to do that.

If the entire essay was that way,

and you were almost making fun of it, it would work.

But it's tricky.

It's tricky to make that work, too.

It just often feels amateur to address the reader in that way.

It's something you would do in high school,

and it would be OK.

But really, after that, the only way to do it

is to do it ironically making fun of it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I bought a taxidermied owl in London,

and I wrote about it in my diary,

and I wrote about the experience of going to the store.

And I wrote about seeing the human parts

that the person had for sale.

But that was just an incident to me.

But when I reflected upon it, I thought

what was interesting about that was

I felt as if the taxidermist had looked into my soul.

And so many people in the life are going

to get you all wrong, right?

People come up to me and they say,

is that your car parked right there?

I've never driven a car in my life.

I'm shocked when people might mistake me for a driver.

Is that your wife?

The worst.

Is that your dog?

I would never have a dog.

So people get you wrong all the time,

so it's pretty amazing when somebody gets you right.

And I'm sure that a lot of people

walk into this taxidermy shop and they say,

I would like to buy that kitten.

And the salesman wraps it up, and takes the money,

and that's the end of it.

But I walked in, and he recognized something in me,

and brought things from high shelves,

and from the back room.

And he knew exactly who I was, and so that's

what it ultimately wound up being about.

Because if it was just a diary entry

about walking into a taxidermy shop

and seeing these strange things, it's not enough.

You know, I think we all like to believe

that we can hide ourselves whenever we choose, right?

And we can, from a lot of people.

But there are others out there who are just our type,

and they can recognize you, which

is kind of terrifying and kind of comforting at the same time.

So then it was an essay.

Then, it was no longer just an incident.

It was something bigger.