Personal History with Mental Health

This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Moseley. In nineteen eighty, a young woman sat down at her typewriter while her baby slept and tri to become a writer She wanted to write something that mattered. a Madame Bovvery. Instead, most days she folded laundry or fell asleep. That woman was my guest's mother, writer Rachel Avve, who would grow up to become a writer herself for the New Yorker. Avve's new book is a collection of stories about mothers and daughters. She first wrote them for The New Yorker, a young teacher who experienced a mysterious condition that caused her to forget who she was, disappearing for days at a time ino woman who left her nine children to raise someone else's in the U S. When she wrote them the first time, Avve identified with the daughters without quite realizing it And then she became a mother herself, went back and saw how much of the mother she'd missed The book is called You won't Get Free of It, Stories of Mothers and Daughters Rachel Laviv is a staff writer at the New York, where she writes about medicine, mental illness, and criminal justice. She won a National magazine awward for her profiles. and this year she was a Pulitzer finalist for a story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune disease. The New York Times named her first book, Strangers too oururselves, onene of the best books twenty twenty two Rachel Aviv, welcome to fresh air Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for writing this book. I really enjoyed it. and I want to start off our conversation By having you read from the preface of the book, because the very personal and journalistic turn you've taken, you really lay out here support a mother's point of view, canan I have you read that excerpt The novelist Yon Li writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one's mother successfully. In this book, I haveve chosen stories originally published in the New Yorker of mother child pairs acting out this game I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter And now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side too her particular longings and humiliations and needs Thank you so much. I wanted you to read that short excerpt because I think it really encapsulates what you've done here. and What's so fascinating to me is you wrote most of these stories before you had children and then you returned to them after When did you first notice It's changing the way you read your own work that new experience identity of being a mother. I was rereading the first piece I hadd written for the New Yorker when I was twenty eight And I was rereading it because for my last book, I was writing about sort of issues related to psychiatric insight and the first story I wrote for the New Yorker those issues. So I just wanted to reread my notes and sort of see what kind of information I had been collecting at that time. And as I was reading my interview notes, I noticed that the story is about a woman named Linda Bishop who refuses psychiatric care in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire, leaves the hospital and ends up sort of subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse. And in the story I remember I had described her Her mental illness is sort of emerging out of nowhere after a happy harmonious childhood And when I was rereading my notes, I was struck that a friend of Linda's had told me that she had given up a baby for adoption when she was in her late teens And I was amazed that I just had not mentioned that in the piece, that that detail had not registered as an important life event So that was the first moment that I became just aware of kind of the instability of my own authority in a way or sort of how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking and the curiosities I had I actually want to talk about the first story So it's about a young woman named Hannah U. People who don't know her tell us who she was and this mysterious condition she had, disassociative Aained Hannah was a teacher in Harlem um In two thousand eight A very loved person. She had many, many friends And one day she disappeared essentially, and her roommates realized she'd been gone for five days and they called the police and the police began searching for her throughout Manhattan. And no one could find her and it became a kind of New York City newews story where everyone was searching for this young teacher And after three weeks She surfaced in the water of the Hudson River. and she had no memory of what she'd been doing or where she was or even no understanding that three weeks had passed She was eventually diagnosed with disassociateative fugue which is a really rare species of disassociation where people kind of embark on these long journeys. and lose access to their personal history. And sometimes they kind of emerge after months or years and don't know why they have sort of assumed a new name and a new job and a new home and Over the course of ten years, she had two more fgues in which she disappeared I started writing about her when she had disappeared for the third time, and that was in St. Thomas And after that third few She was never found I mean, this condition is astounding This disassociate of Pug state. It's rare, but it happens. Is this another, you know, back in the eighties and the nineties, there was a preoccupation with amnesia and people leaving their lives and then showing up somewhere else as someone else and not having any understanding of like who they were prior and that trauma is what typically caused it This is kind of like a definitive diagnosis for something like that Yeah, and I think it's really compromised by that era in the eighties and the nineties in which people recovering memories of abuse and A later, it was sort of understood that these memories were often unreliable. and that it was a sort of moment of hysteria And I think disassociation in general, like got a bad reputation because of that and The field wasn't really able to kind of preserve the aspects of disassociation that were Um sort of enduring and didn't relate to that particular cultural moment. that was sort of Disassociation manifesting as this almost like cultural syndrome, but disassociation has always existed and been observed And I think psychiatrists have been kind of Tentative partart because it does have that sort of mystical whiff There is a detail that you left out of the first essay. It is also about the loss of a baby. So before Hannah was born Her mother Barbara had given birth to a baby too early, and that baby only lived a day And Hannah's disappearances kept happening around that baby's birthday. And now you cut that out the first time in that first essay because you felt it was too symbolic What made you Trust it the second time You know, I think there was some feeling that it felt too sentimental or like almost a cliche. And I think on one level I feel like this sort of grudging acceptance that there's a reason cliches become cliches. They like they're real. On the other hand, I think It almost felt like it couldn't be true And I think maybe one of the things that I was interested in when I went back to it was the way that It didn't really matter like how true it was the first time, but then it sort of installs itself as this family myth. and the story that Hannah has these fugs at the same time of year as her mother's lost baby does sort of work on the people. You know, works on Hannet, works on her mother, and maybe then it influences it in its own way. So Because just to make a point of clarity, the mother Barbara this as a belief for herself that every time my daughter, Hannah disappears, it's around my first baby's birthday. So she took meaning This. So right, like how much did Hannah absorb about that fact or was she responding to her mother becoming depressed at that time of year O, you know, maybe her mother had been feeling depressed always around that time of year, which would completely make sense. And Hannah grew up with a particular sort of mood around that time of year, which then influenced There are so many ways in which that can sort of filter into the family life and the family narrative, even if it wasn't explicit. What does that tell you about the deep connections between mothers and daughters? Because on one hand, journalistically, I could see why you would cut that out. I mean, I think a journalist might think it's too much of a coincidence It's kind of woo woo, this idea that there's some sort of fsychic connection there. Yes. you know. Yes, I think that's what it was. Thank you for saying that. think I think it felt too mystical to woooo And Felt. Like the umbilical cord was still there on some level. like you cannot separate the mother's sort of cycles and traumas from the daughter's way of moving through the world and it felt like byy whatever chain of response It was occurring, It had been sort of absorbed by Hannah on some level And whether it was a coincidence or not didn't feel that meaningful because it had become a story that the family told and that did on bothoth mother and daughter Let's talk a little bit about Alice Monroe It is the last story in your book. you know, Alice Monroe is uch a highly regarded writer She's a Nobel prize winning writer Can you briefly tell us came out about her for those don't know and what you ended up writing about her So in july twenty twenty four, There was an article in the Toronto Star about how Alismonroe's daughter, Andrea Skinner been sexually abused by Alice Monroe's husband, Jerry Fremlin. and Alice Monroe had that sort of never sufficiently acknowledged it to the degree that her daughter, Andrea was estranged and could no longer sort of bear to be in her presence Munroe, she didn't just look away from her daughter though. I mean, she used it. The abuse goes into the fiction. One of her daughters Jenny has this devastating phrase that her mother put everything through Qote a machineine that turns things into gold. and Can you talk a little bit for a moment what this had done to Andrea, what you found as you interviewed her and delved into this story that really spanned decades So Andrea was sort of a fan of her mother's writing. She was proud of her mother's writing. and there were some stories that transparently about a sexualized daughter who is in pain and sort of sacrificed. And at first Andrea felt Oh, this is great. My mother is dealing with it. She's processing it And as time went on and Alice Monroe continued to write about it in various ways Andrea saw that She wasn't actually processing it. She was using it. She was like turning it into amazing art, but wasn't like it went one way. It was sort of channeling outward towards the work and not back inward towards her own understanding of what Andrea was experiencing. It was this incredible act of like, disassociation in a way where she could play with the ideas as if they were just sort of interesting themes And yet these were the themes that for Andrea had sort of She destroyed her young adulthood and childhood What was the most disturbing part of this story for you There was one audio recording between Alice Monroe and her biographer. And her biography did not mention the sexual abuse at all. And she had asked for a meeting at a diner with her biographer And he recorded it, but he didn't use it And she basically said Yes. My husband sexually abused Andrea. It's awful But I will be destroyed if anyone knows. It will become who I am. I've worked so hard to be who I am And I can't give that up And it was just so stark and There There was no excuse she was even offering. It was just that. It was like, I have traded my daughter for my career and my art This actually went to court. He pleaded guilty to the sex abuse And there is a moment where she Alice actually says The fear is that this would sort of take over her career. that if people knew that she was with a man who abused a daughter, like she wouldn't want this to cloud the story of her life. Well, she passes away and I mean, it has become the story that is her life. and your story is a big part of that How have you thought about that when you think about her entire decision making was wrapped around her career and the perception around herself cost of her children, namely her daughter, Andrea I was thinking about the quote, You won't get free of it, which is quote from one of her short stories where she describes a mother who has abandoned her children for a man And I think the era in which she was working was important. it was very rare for a woman to leave a man and sort of pursue her career And we're tal about the seventies, right? Right. So what she was doing felt new and felt brave And in a way, it was almost as if in the spirit of feminism or whatever, as she felt she was justified in freeing herself from the burden of her daughter's abuse Um And I was just struck, you know, that she felt she would not get free of that abandonment of a child or she articulated that in a story And that has become her legacy, that she is not free of the way that she abandoned her daughter As a short story wrriter, were you yourself a fan of Alice Monroe's writing It was interesting. I've written about artists or writers who have done things that really complicate their legacy or their work. And I did find myself feeling more respect for Alice Monroe's sort of craft and writing and The stories were not fading for me. They were incredible, like works of art for me Um It was like it felt like the moral universe is such that you would think. that there should be some sort of shift in her career in her writing and she'd be like punished aesthetically for turnurning her daughter's abuse into art. But the strange thing was the work got better. like it was more complex. it was more frarought, intense and sort of written from multiple perspectives. It wasn't better morally, but aesthetically, maybe it was. How do you sit with that I guess you don't read writing because the person is good. I don't know. I think I was less interested when I was writing the piece about sort of what to do with her legacy to do with sort of the bad artist or the monster artist And just more interested in how the monstrous acts was converted into this new form that she almost created What had been the feedback though, especially from maybe feminist writers, those who kind of held her to an extremely high esteem You know she won the Nobel Prize, which speaks to something greater about a person's character, notot only just the writing, but you know, who they are is embedded in their writing in a way that we we hail, we see is like aspirational Did you receive any feedback from your writing First time it published I think The initial news of Alice Monroe's silencing of the abuse was the moment when a lot of people who had seen her as this feminist icon felt a real sense of you know tragedy and almost heartbreak. Um, and and I was upset to find that as I reported the story what else Minroe had done seemed in a way worse than I had expected. Like it wasn't that I was finding justifications and sort of reasons. it was actually even more cold than I had expected her reaction to her daughter being abused Yeah, it felt quite cold And yet her two other daughters like just felt She unconditionally loved them. I I didn't doubt at all that her other two daughters felt that love. and yeet Andrea felt Her mother had been totally stony toward her Um, and and it was moving and sort of tragic to understand that Monroe had had her own childhood experiences of abuse and sort of had conditioned herself to deal with it in this very compartmentalized way where she could not Allow it to have been something like truly ht in her life. She kind of dismissed it att least in conversation, I think in writing, she like allowed it to assume portions in a way. But then she sort of repeated that with her daughter where she was sort of like, arerenn't you over this already? L I couldn't understand that this was still the defining trauma for Andrea's life Our guest today is writer Rachel Avve from the New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is F fresh air This is Fresh air. I'm Tanya Moseley. And my guest today is Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at the New Yorker who writes about the places where the mind, medicine, and the law collide She won a National magazine awward for her profiles, and this year she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune disease. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves was one of the best books of twenty twenty two on several lists, including The New York Times. Her new one is a collection of essays called You won't Get Free of it, Stories of Mothers and Daughters. do want to ask you about A mother and daughter bond It expans the ocean. It's about this woman named Emma in your essay as if they were my daughters. Tell us who Emma is I met Emma at a advocacy organization for Filipino domestic workers Emma had come from the Philippines. She had nine daughters, and she could no longer support them. So she moved to New York City. And she became a nanny for other people's children and When I met her and some of her friends I was amazed to see how kind of casually and how normal it had become that they were going years, even decades without seeing their children. They had made this incredible sacrifice that in order to support their own children and to allow them to live full lives They needed to abandon them, essentially and come to America and take care of other people's children This is a phenomenon that's just heartbreaking. and Emma this notebook of the books that she loved and then she would mail them to her daughter in the Philippines, Roxan to read to her grandson and There's a thing that Emma had to do herself to survive this job. She had to kind of like transfer her love for her own children onto the children that she was taking care of. She calls it displacement. And could you just talk a little bit about what that displacement looked like I mean she became like the surrogate mother for these other children and she also found herself with so much more time to kind of shower them with attention and sort of educational goods So her children were like, well, you know, why did you never read read us books. Why are you reading this other child books? and her children really struggled with holding these two facts, one of which was that their mother went to America because she wanted the best for them. And the second was that Their mother was building a new life away from them and they had No contact with her except through Facebook Um, And so they couldn't help but feel jealous of these American toddlers who were receiving their mother's love when this essay first ran huge You called it the cost of caring. That was the title. And then you renamed it as if they were my daughters, which speaks to this thing of this displaced love towards these children that she's caring for. and And you also you changed the ending a bit Yeah. So what did notot only renaming it, but like reending it What did that let you see that you couldn't see the first time or you saw, but like you omit it for the first time I think the way I rewrote it was thinking about The kind of fantasy of reunion. It was about Emma's desire to reunite with her children and her children's desire to reunite with her and they had this fantasy of what that would be like And there was a way in which I was sort of thinking about it as more of a universal fantasy that there is this like bace of safety and being held and cared for that Everyone holds as this like almost primitive fantasy. and I think I was aware of how unreachable it was in Emma's life, both because she didn't plan to come back home And also this strange thing happened where she felt like she was self actualizing. like she actually was enjoying herself. She was making friends, and she didn't know that she wanted to go back to the old life. and her children didn't know any more what it even felt like be in a physical space of their mother. So This idea of the reunion became more and more abstract and sort of fantastical and I think I wanted to capture that more and to end on that note because it felt continuous with sort of many of the other or fantasies in the other pieces I see the thread in a few of the essays of these mothers reaching towards self actualization of being a person outside of being a mother and the challenges, the cost of that. You know, it's an old story, but it's not one that like we talk about in contemporary times because now we kind of have this falsehood that like, you can have it all, you know? Yeah In the beginning of the book, I talk about how I noticed The two pieces I'd written had almost the same scene. One was about the philosopher Martha Nusbaum. The other was about the psychologist Elizabeth Loftis. And someomehow I had written paragraphs that were very similar that were both about how They were either giving birth to a baby or trying to get pregnant, and they refuseed to step away from their work. Like they Martha Nusbaum brought philosophy texts to read so she could sort of prove to everyone that she had not changed, that she was sort of still the same hard working star that she'd always been. I think what I was struck by was how much I was sort of romanticizing that idea that like you become a mother and you remain like stoically the same And I don't know why that was such a value, but it was. And I remember I had a my editor at the New Yorker was like you're not actually that happy now. Why are you trying to stay the same? And I remember thinking that was a really good point, but like it wasn't also it wasn't penetrating me Can you kind of talk a little bit about what you were thinking before you became a mother and then how your thinking kind of evolved from this binary overblown way of thinking There's a really good book called Transformative Experiences by the philosopher L.A Paul. And I remember reading that when I was pregnant And it's kind of about how You cannot possibly make a decision to have a child that is rational because conditions of your life and your understanding of values will change so radically that like it sort of explodes the idea of a reasoned decision. And she compares it to the decision to become a vampire I think I found that like incredibly frightening Maybe because like I had spent so much time as a young adult, like feeling like I needed to establish this identity and then kind of cling to it nervously. Yeah, I guess I look back on that and it's not that I feel I'm so changed probably I wish I were changed more, but think I do think that sort of holding on to sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened. And I would love to know what Martha Nesba and Elizabeth Loftis think now about what they were doing during birth. L at the time I kind of glorified it or romanticized it. and I would like they're both You know, in their seventies or eighties, I would like to know if they think they were too brittle and that they were too afraid of change and that they didn't realize how long life actually was If you're just joining us, my guest today is writer Rachel Avie from the New Yorker. Her new essay collection is called You Won't Get Free of It. Stories of Mothers and Daughters. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air This is fresh air. I'm Tona Moseley. And today I'm talking with New Yorker writer Rachel Avve. Her new book, You Won't Get Free of It, gathers seven stories of Mothers and Daughters, esssays she first reported for the magazine I want to talk about something that you wrote about in the preface of your first book, Strangers to oururselves And it is about when you were six and you stopped eating Andum. You were six years old, so you had never really heard the word anorexia But became, they told you later, the youngest child ever hospitalized for it Can you tell me what you remember most about that time in your life I remember the children that I was with, it was sort of this old school Anorexia Award, where I was surrounded by older Slightly older girls, like twelve felt old to me because I was six. And I remember learning from them and understanding what anorexia was, not because I was sort of bringing the paltte of symptoms to the table, but because they were telling me things like You know, you're supposed to exercise. That's how you burn calories or um, like do jumping jacks, look at your stomach, these things and it was such a strange kind of competitive environment in which girls who all had some form of related distress or together and then began to Exress that distress in increasingly similar ways. And you're learning from each other. You're learning these bad habits from each other. Yeah Yeah, can you Just a little bit about what you remember about yourself when you stopped eating and what what you were telling yourself about not eating I think I felt very proud of myself like I had done this very this like severe act of self discipline and that there was something like noble and it was proof of my sort of strong individuality So I think I knew it was bothering everyone, but I must have felt like on some level they secretly respected it because I think that's how I felt about myself for a while that like I had shown how strong I was Do you remember what you were responding to Well, it's hard because, you know, I had like child therapy and there were theories floated then that I have now taken as my own Um But I think yeah, I think not eating is like the most profound way to separate yourself. Well, actually, I mean, that comes from my therapist. I remember her saying as a child that like and it was overwrought and she was like this I trained as a psychoanalyst, but I was sick, so it was sort of ill fitting. but I remember her saying like the mother symbolizes milk and you're rejecting the mother and sort of asserting your own boundaries And I don't know about the milk part, but that has some resonance. You write about this. It's the preface of the book. so it's just the way for us to enter then these stories about mental health and mental illness. And in the same way that you do this with the story of you and your mother for this latest book But I wondered how that experience shaped your interests in these underexplored, but also pretty complicated stories because you don't really shy away from stories that don't give a clean, you know narrative I often think, I mean, after I was released from the hospital after six weeks I was required to go to therapy three times a week. so that was from first grade to fifth grade. like Three times a week, forty five minutes each sort of psychoanalytic therapy And I have no idea whether that was sort of emotionally useful, but I do feel like intellectually was useful in some way. Like it taught me a certain way of talking about the mind and thinking about the mind and not assuming that the surface layer of behavior is true or sort of alwaysways like feeling that there is something underneath that surface layer or that there are conflicted feelings. It just gave me a different kind of language for appreciating like how complex people's minds are. So I sometimes think that those five years of therapy, which I found like humiliating and invasive. really shaped the way I think about people because so much of your writing kind of sits on the edges of mental illness and Brain science in particular I think I heard you say It was an opit where you said that a woman once told you Describing her mental illness is like describing a dog's bark to someone who'd never seen a dog Tell me about What intrigues you most about trying to bring language to that experience, to mental illness in particular I have thought about that so much and I think that woman who said that to me shaped so much of the way I approach sort of psychological experience because especially with psychiatry. It is so hard to communicate the experience And so you kind of reach for the available language. And when you reach for that available language you are also kind of distorting the original experience you had because it's like conforming or mapping onto symptoms or psychiatric language Like it feels like there's a core of distressing experience that we sometimes like aren't bothering to articulate because we're relying the diagnostic language or the kind of like advocacy language, I think with sexual abuse, that was an experience I had where You know, someone can say I felt violated and that feels familiar. And of course, it's like getting to the heart of it But there was a way in which Andrea, Alice Monroe's daughter spoke in which I felt like I was just appreciating like the corrosive nature of not just the abuse, but sort of what it means to sort of not be able to speak about that abuse and that there is value in trying to describe it in part because other people It kind of gives language to other people who feel like they're the only ones in the world who've had this experience you know, books come out and they speak to a particular moment. What do you think your book in this particular moment It' sort of telling us or allowing us to see about ourselves Why meditate particularly on stories of mothers and daughters in this moment and in ways that complicate our notions or what we've traditionally read about mother daughter relationships. I mean, motherhood is definitely politicized in ways that become very binary and simplistic and I have thought a lot about sort of how to write in this particular moment because everything is happening so fast and Nothing rises to the level of corruption that is sort of happening right in front of us. L whatever you're uncovering kind of pels no one's hiding anything anymore in a way. And I guess I'm just like, it's been a struggle for me and for other journalists I'm friends with to sort of think about what constitutes the story these days is I think like complicated stories that hold different viewpoints that don't take the kind of expected predictable argument are something to hold on to and that feel at risk And so I don't want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done Rachel Lviv, thank you so much for this book in this conversation. Thank you so much Rachel Levve's new essay collection is called You Won't Get Free of It, Stories of Mothers and Daughters coming up TV critic John Powers reviews the new comedy series Alice and Steve This is fresh air. The offbeat new comedy Alice and Steve tellells the story of decades old friends who have a bitter falling out when Steve gets romantically involved with Alice's twenty something daughter. Critic at large John Powower says the show drove him crazy in a lot of ways, but its best moments kept him watching. I grew up watching episodic shows on network TV Nearly all of them formulaic But some indelibly great But then, like everyone else, I moved into the days of what my colleague David Ban Cooie dubbed Platinum TV where series like the Sopranos and The Wire and Fleabag aspired to something higher Both these eras had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted If they had an internal logic toneone that held them together In recent years though, there's been a proliferation of shows that posossibly obeying some algorithm Care less for coherence than sensation They lurch among tones, from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness stirring in random plot twists along the way bouncing all over the emotional map These shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction A great example is Allison Steve An entertaining but sometimes exasperating six part British comedy on Hulu about two fifty something best friends who turn on each other afterfter he gets involved with her twenty six year old daughter The premise is juicy It's also a tad yucky. And I'm mainly tuned in because its title characters are played by performers Jermaine Clemment from Flight of the Concords and Nicola Walker Whom I've raved up on this show more than once The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend's funeral. always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact As Clement and Walker braay their lines, we learn that Steve's a divorced celebrity hairirstylist who can't find a girlfriend Well, Alice is a clothes designer with a doting younger husband, nicely played by Joel Fry, a sweetie pie of a teenage son, this Tyres Eaton Dice Of course, that twenty six year old daughter Izzy who has inherited her mother's willfulness. Played by Yale Topo Margalite. Is he kickstarts the plot by flirting with Steve Aortably, he succumbs Almost immediately, they think they're in love Well, the weak willilled Steve wants to hide their romance He knows it's inappropriate. Izzy just blurts out the facts to her mom Alice flips And from here on in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hangdogs Alice drives the action betetrayed and violently angry, she'll do whatever it takes to break them up. No matter who gets hurt Her antics unleash Steve's own malice We're in beef territory Here, early on, Steve and Izzy are walking to a dinner party organized by Alice pretending to have buried the hatchet. You do realize this is probablyrobably a trp Or she could be trying to work out Yeah Yeah. No, you're right, this is definitely a trap Yeah Do you think Daniel's going to punch me? Right, It's if Daniel would ever punch anyone Maybe we could show her that this is a good thing. I like her best friend. and how nice that she already really, really loves the guy I'm dating. Hm. Yeah You nervous Yeah. Terrified At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones. It's a fascinating subject, which may be why I found the script by Sophie Goodhart so frustrating I wanted her to dig deeper Well, the show's got some very funny bits Alice's sharp tongued mother is a blast It's often annoyingly lax If Steve really does the hair of Charlie XC X, How come he's a clueless older guy whose pop culture references are Willie Nelson and Woody Allen? If yes he truly adores her mother as she claims Why did she keep rubbing her relationship with Steve in her mom's face Halfway through, one character nukes the other's career But this life shattering event has no real weight It's barely even mentioned for the rest of the series That said, Alis and Steve is worth seeing for scenes like the one in which Steve spinelessly sells Izzy out orr the lacerating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasps that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge. Not a man she likes hanging with Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice, wise for once smmooths a romantic crisis between her son and his would be girlfriend H were are the show's emblem of hope For once, we understand why people love her Well, most viewers will find Steve more likekable than Alice The show takes pains not to make him appear predatory or creepy The roule doesn't give Clement a whole lot to do except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort the show gets its galvanizing Zing from Walker. A beloved star in England with amazing luminous eyes Alice is the kind of complicated volcanic heroine that you don't see in movies, and rarely see on TV One who shows her apocalyptic rage freely and in many different forms At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, Man, is this show a mess But that wasn't a deal breaker kept watching. After all Life is messy too John Powers reviewed the series Alice and Steve, now streaming on Hulu To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air You can now also watch some of our interviews on YouTube at this is Fresh Air Freshher's executive producer is Sam Briger Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham Engineering Help today from Adam Stanishevsky Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myyers, E Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krinzel, Theeresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Theya Challiner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shherac directs the show. with Terry Gross I'm Tanya Moseley