Conversations with Friends #2: Sarah Marshall

in which we talk about weird things we eat alone and look at Sarah's notebooks

Conversations with Friends is a new feature on The Unexpected Shape newsletter in which I have a free-flowing chat with someone who is truly a friend. For this edition, I decided to call up Sarah Marshall, who is a brilliant journalist, Satanic Panic expert, and the host of the critically acclaimed and wildly popular podcast You’re Wrong About, which addresses issues that the public is misinformed about (I recommend starting with the Kitty Genovese episode). She also co-hosts the podcast You Are Good, “a feelings podcast about movies.” I am lucky enough to call her someone I know and love.

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Sarah Marshall. Part 1 went up yesterday.

[Part 1 ended in the middle of Sarah and I talking about the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial.]

EW: There was also this incredible memefication [of the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial] that could only happen in our current time. In terms of, like, Oh, look at this one facial expression Amber Heard made. Let's watch 10,000 TikToks make fun of that one five-second moment.

SM: And have them still be going around a couple of years later.

EW: I think all the bullshit that surrounded the trial was so significant that even the "backlash" that came later, when certain documents were unsealed—

SM: When Johnny Depp fans paid to unseal documents and then were like, Oh no—

EW: Yeah. Even that doesn't remain in my memory as strongly. I'm not sure I could describe to you what those documents contained that was so damning.

SM: Which is how life should be. I think it's nice that we don't retain these things. We have past etiquette errors to obsess over, after all.

[laughter]

EW: Something that was really interesting about that whole Johnny Depp/Amber Heard moment was that the episode we did for You Are Good about Gone Girl had to be tossed. I remember being surprised at the time when you told me. But I think now that more time has passed, I'm like, No, that's actually not that surprising. Can you talk a little bit about what the thinking was behind that?

SM: Yeah. I mean, it was not my idea to scrap it. I tend to just kind of ignore what the public thinks and do what I want to, as long as it doesn't seem insensitive in a significant way. But in this case, it was like we had done this episode—I don't even remember anything that we talked about at this point. We had done an episode on Gone Girl, which is a movie that I really enjoy and like talking about in a vacuum because Gone Girl is about a woman who fakes her own death in order to get her husband convicted of her murder as revenge for him cheating on her. Which is just kind of a fantastic fantasy-level kind of thing for women along the lines of Ms. 45.

EW: And both Nick and Amy Dunne are just awful. I was the one who suggested that we do the movie because it's actually one of my favorite movies.

SM: I find it incredibly enjoyable to watch.

EW: But you were talking about why it ended up not being aired.

SM: My thinking after the fact was that in the Summer of Amber Heard, you can't talk about Gone Girl without centering the conversation on, Why do we envision the female mastermind in this way? and how can we dismantle this? and how is it being applied in this case. I feel like so many people, from what I understand, were referencing Gone Girl and the Amazing Amy thing that summer. Also, to me, what's really satisfying about Gone Girl is watching Amy pull this scheme off, which is like watching any heist movie— it just tickles a part of my brain to see that kind of hyper-competence.

That five-minute montage where she explains how she did the whole thing is a real high for me as an audience member. To me, the most thrilling part about that movie is that to me, I feel like it represents Amy studying what makes a perfect victim, understanding that she can sort of play that part for the media, and murdering the false self that she’s been performing for everyone this entire time. How anyone who wants to cause destruction and wreak revenge on that scale—that their desire for self-destruction is stronger than anything else. It just feels like too interesting a text to have to talk about while the entire time being like, No, I don't think actual women do this.

EW: Was it [co-host Alex Steed] that brought that up, or was it both of you who were like, Hey, we need to talk about this episode in that context?

SM: I love to put out socially irresponsible episodes because I just don't think I can really help people to be any smarter than they're destined to not be at this point.

EW: Rest in peace to our Gone Girl episode.

SM: We could always do it again.

EW: But it’s the same problem...

SM: Yeah. I say that now, but then there'll be another high-profile woman we hate and have decided to call a mastermind case. And then we'll be back where we started.

Something that I think I brought up in the episode and which always comes to mind for me is that people were saying Amber Heard is this mastermind, and we know that she's a mastermind who's systematically destroying Johnny Depp's life, or at least trying to, by making him more beloved than ever. We know she's doing this because she's mentally ill. And it's like yeah [sarcasm], that's what mentally ill people do. We are so in control of everything.

EW: I loved—and when I say loved, I also mean with much sarcasm—I loved how everybody suddenly became an expert in everything from body language to psychopathy. In that period of time, I listened to a podcast that had a "body language" expert on it, and the body language expert had all of these alleged accolades.

SM: From Body Language University in Boca Raton.

EW: Yeah. She had written many books and was considered a huge body language expert. She was so cocky about how she interpreted what was happening on the stage in that court case. And I all of a sudden was also seeing all these things about narcissistic personality disorder, which I really feel has become another huge thing that I would love to hear a You’re Wrong About about, actually.

[laughter]

SM: Oh my God. We really have to, because we've been dancing around it for a long time. I think we have a lot of language in our conversations about personality disorders, but border on eugenicists or border on eugenicism [about it]. I get that, because it's a really common thing for women, in particular, to realize that we've been victims of narcissistic abuse. I think that we're right about that. But then I think that in order to go through the process of understanding that what happened to us mattered and that we have been harmed and traumatized and we didn't deserve any of it—we have to then sort of inflate the narcissist as a figure of great evil. I don't really like to use the term evil generally because I think that it distracts us from understanding the deeper and more understandable issues.

We have this language we've cultivated. We feel like we're being enlightened because we accuse people of personality disorders, but then we act as if that is an absolutely innate and inborn characteristic and that they're doomed to never be able to love or something.

EW: It's like what Susanna Kaysen says in Girl, Interrupted about having a defective personality come off the line [at the factory]. I especially feel like women do get accused of narcissistic personality disorder, but on the flip side is borderline personality disorder.

SM: Which we recently started to accuse people of—like, I learned a new thing to accuse people of.

EW: I feel like I've been hearing men call their exes borderline personality disordered for years.

SM: Oh boy. See, I've been running with a more crass circle of annoying men.

EW: I knew this guy who had a copy of I Hate You, Don't Leave Me by his bedside table.

SM: That doesn't send a great message.

EW: It was all about how it was helping him to understand his ex. But yeah, no. Not a great message.

SM: I would read that in the living room.

EW: Yes. Come out in the open and read it somewhere public. It's like how if you're gonna meet somebody for something that could be seen as a crime, you should do it way out in the open, like in a park or in a diner.

SM: I didn't know that. That's good advice.

EW: I use this app called Drafts, which is really just my way of not wanting to use the Notes app. [And so I have some pieces of advice in there like, If you’re going to commit a murder with someone, you have to really trust them.] It’s in a note called Random Notes. Sometimes I just wake up, and I write random things that are floating around in my head. This is another thing I wrote immediately after waking up, which was: “Mrs. Wu, please put the gun down. It simply assures that one of us will be using it.”

SM: Wow. That's fantastic. You should write a play based entirely on stuff you write down immediately after waking up.

EW: Do you have a document like that?

SM: I write stuff like that down in notebooks, but I don't really keep much stuff on my phone. I had a bad experience with Evernote twelve years ago, where it deleted everything I had for some reason, and I haven't really used that stuff since.

EW: That's awful.

SM: It happens, though. I left a notebook on a plane once, too. That was very sad. There's something much better about losing a notebook than about losing some online document.

EW: A notebook’s got energy and a vibe. What types of things do you write in your notebook?

SM: I’ll go grab a notebook. I write lists of episode topics I'm thinking about. I write down what I eat if I'm trying to kind of have accountability for eating soon enough in the day and regularly because I have that classic ADHD thing of getting too overwhelmed by the process of getting the day started and eating something, but I'm trying to find ways to circumvent that. I'm always trying to log what I do so I can see what kind of use I'm getting of my time, but I don't keep that up all that much.

EW: There’s an author named Laura Vanderkam who loves to have women log their time, and then she writes books about it. One of the more well-known books she's published is called, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time, and she also has other books that are similar, like What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast or 106 Hours: You Have Time Than You Think, or Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. You see the theme here. She assigns women to keep time logs down to tiny, tiny chunks.

SM: I like doing that, but sometimes I get to where I want to log everything, and then my day becomes logging.

EW: Yeah, it's not ideal. It's like when you were talking about logging food earlier. I did that when I was having a lot of disordered eating… Did you find a notebook?

SM: Hold on. [Flips through notebooks.] So If I'm preparing a You’re Wrong About episode, I'll do an outline and will write down sort of points in history and quotes and stuff because I sort of learned to remember stuff by writing it down.

EW: How much stuff do you generate in this course of preparing for a You’re Wrong About episode?

SM: 10 or 20 notebook pages. I'm gonna [text] you a picture of a page of notes. For the Cottingley Fairies episode.

EW: What do you feel like your working habits are like as a journalist outside of your podcast work? Like the long-form pieces that you've done for The Believer.

SM: I like to spend a lot of time, like months or years, researching and thinking about something. Then I have a concentrated research phase, and I’ll be inside of the piece for a few weeks or a couple of months, and have this heightened cohabitation with it until I finish it.

EW: Do you have to go to a different physical space or do anything ritualistic or habitual?

SM: No. There comes a phase of the actual writing and revising where I can't really be thinking that hard about anything else.

EW: [is looking at the texted images] I love these notes. Am I allowed to post any of these?

SM: Sure. Yeah, you can do that.

EW: What I find very interesting about these pages is how you space things out on the page.

SM: I get overwhelmed very easily.

EW: I just think of it as an interesting way of structuring your thoughts because it makes me wonder, like if you have a column of thoughts—like here you have paganism above labyrinth/goblin on top of indifferent nature—are all of those three things therefore connected in a way that they're not to ghost, which is on the other side of the page?

SM: It's funny because I don't really think about that consciously a lot of the time. But I'm sure there is something there because we have fallen angels and ghosts together. And that’s the “ethereal” category. And maybe that's just the luck of the draw on that page, but it's just as I'm going through and preparing what I want to talk about. I like to write down phrases that are cues for my memory, in a way.

EW: Do you ever find yourself looking at your notes, and you're like, I have no idea what I was trying to record here?

SM: Totally, because they're only usable for as long as I remember what they refer to. So these make sense to me now, but in three years, I think probably a lot of them—I wouldn't quite remember what I was connecting these thoughts to.

EW: I'm looking at one of the pages, and it says two with a circle around it, 1917, and the next to it is three with a circle around it that says 1920. And it doesn't seem to be referring to anything else.

SM: There were two photos of the faeries taken in 1917 and three in 1920. That's kind of a guess at this point. I have a couple more to send you.

EW: I was just writing a piece in my Substack not that long ago about my process nerdery.

SM: This is the day when I actually wrote down most of what I did.

EW: Is what you're texting me not specifically relevant to a project?

SM: No, this is just, like, a day.

EW: Just life stuff. It makes me happy that you wrote Yakult, because we just bought a big pack of Yakult.

SM: It's so good.

EW: One of my nieces is very noisy and small, and my mom told me over the phone the other day that you can get her to sit still for 30 minutes if you keep the Yakults in the freezer and you give her one with a chopstick. She’ll deliberately scrape away at the frozen Yakult and eat it for a very long time.

SM: That does sound really good. I just drink them like an idiot.

EW: I recommend that just freeze the whole thing. Now that I'm an adult and grotesque, I stick the whole thing in the freezer. And instead of using a chopstick, which is what you do when you're a kid, I bite and chew the plastic until it rips. And then I use my fingers and peel away the plastic. I chomp on the frozen parts with my teeth.

SM: That's fantastic. You know what I did last night? I made a bunch of beet rice just to have for the week.

EW: How was it?

SM: Oh, it was great. It doesn't really have any flavor, but it's a nice pale pink color because it's been infused with beet water and no beet flavor at all. And then I made guacamole, and so I was eating rice and guacamole together, and I was like, I just want to eat this with my hands. It was really nice.

And sometimes you know when you're like in a hotel, or you get takeout, and they forgot to put in utensils because you didn't specifically ask for them? Often I’ll simply be unable to stomach another interaction because I haven't allocated the budget for that emotionally. I'll just eat it with my hands. And it's always so nice to just eat noodles with your hands. It feels great if your hands are clean.

EW: I have an aesthetic/sensory thing that bothers me about that. But what I will do is then I will then frantically search around the hotel room for something that I can potentially make into a utensil. So I'll be like, Ooh, I can use this, I don't know, floss kit that they left me in the bathroom. I can use the little floss pick to scoop the guacamole and rice into my mouth just by lifting the bowl and using the floss pick.

SM: There’s an episode of “Veep” where Amy is having colleagues over for dinner to try and win them over, and she has cooks making gourmet food in the kitchen. She's taking out the potatoes, and the cook says, “You can't really eat them by themselves." And she's like, "I've eaten hummus with a pen cap. Don't tell me how I can eat."

EW: I'm sure I've eaten something with a pen cap. There's a genre of book about things people eat when they're alone. Do you know about this? I discovered this genre of book accidentally. And I cannot tell you how much joy I derive from learning about the "weird things people eat when they're alone." What would you say is a weird thing that you eat when you're alone?

SM: I love to just have like a piece of American cheese with just like some hot sauce on it.

EW: Do you have it flat and then put the hot sauce on it and eat it like a very delicate pizza? Or do you roll it up?

SM: I do like to do a delicate pizza. You do a nice zigzag of hot sauce on it.

EW: Do you snack when you write?

SM: Yeah.

EW: What do you like to snack on? I ask because my best friend snacks a lot when she's writing, and I'm not really a snacking writer.

SM: I really like to have a bunch of little things that I can just keep my hands busy with. A big bowl of grapes or a big bowl of popcorn. I love to get a movie or an audiobook going and just peel a pomegranate. They first showed up in grocery stores that I noticed when I was in sixth grade. And I thought it was very crass to just cut one in half. And honestly, I still kind of do; you have to do whatever makes sense for you. But I was very into peeling it back with your fingers gradually from the blossom end. And now I like to make little incisions around it. The experience of peeling it, pulling apart the sections, and pulling the skin off? And then pushing the seeds off, and the little snap they make when they come off of the pith and into the bowl.

EW: There's a part of me that finds this very appealing, but then the part of me that has trypophobia gets really freaked out by it.

SM: If you could do it in the dark, maybe it would work.

EW: Most things would probably be improved if they were done in the dark. ♥