Kelly Williams Brown, EASY CRAFTS FOR THE INSANE
Although Kelly Williams Brown coined the term “adulting” with her first book nearly ten years ago, she realized soon after that she had a lot more to learn from life. After what can be described as a very bad two years, Kelly found that crafts helped her visualize her potential and start putting her life back together each day. Her new memoir, Easy Crafts for the Insane, sheds a light on common struggles humans face but lack the language to discuss, as well as some fun crafts that readers can try themselves. Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books has teamed up with Katie Couric Media and Random House to give away 100 copies of Sarah Sentilles’ book, Stranger Care! Enter the giveaway by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3jdKctA
Transcript:
Zibby Owens: Welcome, Kelly. Thank you so much for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” to discuss Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things.
Kelly Williams Brown: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I’m really glad to be here.
Zibby: It’s such a thrill to talk to you. As I mentioned earlier before we recorded, literally the minute I got that galley, I was like, I cannot wait to read that book. That is a book I would snatch off the shelf at a bookstore. It’s right up my alley. It was so great. You’re so likable in your authenticity and how you just spill it all. You’re funny. You know how when you read a memoir you find yourself really caring about the person after even though you don’t know them? That’s how I felt.
Kelly: Yes, I love memoir. I’m always there too. Thank you so much. I’m glad that my chronic oversharing has finally found a useful outlet, I guess you could say.
Zibby: I am thrilled to be a consumer of your oversharing, so that worked out well. For listeners who might not know, and I will have already read your bio at this point, but tell everybody about what this book is about and how you decided to even write it, especially after writing Adulting and Gracious.
Kelly: Sure thing. I think the quickest way to say it is that I had a bad two years, certainly not grand human suffering bad. I was not a refugee or anything like that. I broke three of my four limbs in separate, unrelated incidents. My father got cancer. I fell into a terribly deep depression that sort of turned me into an agoraphobe that could only see two or three people in my life. I was in a really, unfortunately, bad and toxic for both of us relationship. I got divorced. Oh, I should’ve led with that. The hits kept coming. Then eventually, my depression became so bad, and there were other factors at play, that I ended up in in-patient psychiatric hospitalization, which was really the nadir of all of it. Again, it’s not like any one of these things — all of them are difficult, but it was the combination of all of them all together and just feeling like I could not get my feet under me no matter what I did. I think lots of people have had the experience of thinking that they are a certain person or thinking that their life is a certain kind of way. Then we find out that we were very wrong about that. Then the question becomes, who I am? What is my life? How do I rebuild from all the wreckage around me? This book covers that as well.
Zibby: Wow. What is the short answer if someone just popped in for two seconds and feels like they’re never going to get back on their feet? How does it even happen? How did you find your way out?
Kelly: A lot of work and honestly, partially, just time. The one piece of advice I would give to anyone who is really, really struggling is, just wait. Nothing has ever lasted forever, no feeling you’ve had, no experience you’ve had. Nothing lasts forever. A lot of times, things are just very crappy. I’m hope I’m allowed to say that.
Zibby: You are.
Kelly: Would go for something saltier, usually, but I’m trying to keep it good. Sometimes things are just really crappy and all you can do is just put one foot ahead of the other and keep on trudging with the faith that it’s not going to be this way forever.
Zibby: You also turned to crafts, of course, as one of the things that no matter how bad things got made you feel better, that you could still accomplish. I just wanted to read this one paragraph if that’s okay. You said, “Crafting gives me a sense of accomplishment even when I feel like I can’t accomplish anything. Crafting is tangible proof that I can do something. To craft is to set things correct in tiny ways, to make this crease or that stitch or move that candle over a bit because it just looks better there. And I can almost always affect these changes in the universe. Crafting reminds me that my brain moving differently from other people’s brains is not all a bad thing.”
Kelly: That’s exactly right. Something that I picked up on before I realized the actual mindfulness connection is that when you’re really zeroed in on a craft — you’re working with your hands. You’re looking. You’re being careful and precise and slow. That really is meditation, in a way, as cheesy as that might sound. Also, it’s a healthier choice than heroin if you’re feeling really despairing. I would say given the choice between the two, crafting wins every time.
Zibby: Even confusing origami steps. I’m not particularly crafty at all. By not particularly crafty, I mean way less crafty than you are, not at all. I don’t think I could make most of these things. In fact, I showed my kids a few of the crafts. I’m like, “Now we can do these together.” They were like, “I don’t know if we can do those.” What do you think?
Kelly: Look, here is my full craft caveat. One, they’re easy crafts, kind of. They’re not good crafts, necessarily. I want to say that. Two, the best way to learn crafting is for someone who does it to be in the room and be like, no, no, not quite. With origami especially, I was taught by — I went to a very international elementary school in Houston. The kids who had moved over, usually temporarily, from Japan, their moms would come in and teach us origami. YouTube videos are very important. It can be very tough to describe, particularly when you have my grubby little illustrations in lieu of actual pictures.
Zibby: I loved the illustrations, by the way. I loved that you put them everywhere. I loved your Love Rollercoaster, let me see if I can find it, where you went up and down for the feelings of falling in love. I loved those.
Kelly: I’ve gotten a lot better at it. I’ve gotten a lot better at a lot of things. That’s the fun part of doing a lot of really intense mental health and wellness work. The relationship at the very beginning was crazy intense. I was super into him. He was super into me. It was like, oh, this is boring. You should be moving into my house by now. Thank you. Super healthy.
Zibby:
Kelly: Sometimes you have that spark with someone. It does not just have to be a romantic relationship. Sometimes just meeting a friend. It’s like, oh, you and me. Okay, now it’s time. Now we’re ready to go. It was really one of those things. Shockingly Attractive Man, who I call Sam in the book, not his real name, is indeed extremely attractive. However, that’s not really what I noticed about him. There was something else about him. I just felt like, I know you. You know me. Now this is going to be real.
Zibby: It’s so crazy how that happens.
Kelly: I know. I’m kind of melodramatic too. I think that helps.
Zibby: No, but I agree with you. I think there’s a knowing, a recognizing, a recognition of people that continues to happen. What does that even mean? It’s the coolest thing, though, because you just feel like, oh, yeah, you. Right, I get it. Here you are.
Kelly: My grandmother was Zen Buddhist. She was very good and faithful at it. I know a little tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a bit. Please forgive me if I explain this incorrectly. There are some theories that we are karmically bound to every single person we meet no matter how long or how short. Whoever is in your field of vision is just teaching you something. Then once you’ve fulfilled the bond to another one, then the relationship ceases. In my mind, I always feel that when I feel that way about someone, it’s because we are meant to play a role in each other’s life that is going to be significant. He was indeed extremely significant in my life and taught me a lot. I think I taught him a lot. Given the choice, probably neither of us would’ve really chosen to get those lessons, but it doesn’t mean we didn’t learn something.
Zibby: There you go. Let’s go back to Adulting. You write about this so interestingly, and then even Gracious when you talk about what that experience was like researching it given how you felt. You wrote this best-selling book about how to be an adult and coming up with this word that you admit you found completely annoying yourself.
Kelly: Indeed. I’m sorry, everyone.
Zibby: You had, basically, all this success that you had to manage while you were trying to figure out your own life and the added pressure not only of your life, but then people thinking that you had it all together. In fact, you wrote the book about it. Tell me about that moment in time. What would’ve happened if you hadn’t written that book, do you think?
Kelly: That’s a wild question. I think that if I hadn’t written Adulting — it’s so hard to say because now we’re ten years past that. Pretty much all of my life is predicated upon having written Adulting. No one’s ever asked me that. Probably, realistically, I would’ve gotten a job in PR or something. I probably would’ve clamored to get married before I did. I would’ve probably had kids. It would’ve been a very different life than the one I have, not a bad one, I don’t think, but really different and unrecognizable to me at this point. It was really hard to — I was extremely clear in both books that these are not my specialties. They are so not my specialty that I wish to learn about this, so I am going to go find people who can tell me, who is not a very good adult, how to do it. I talked even about my failures throughout both of those books. The smell of my fridge alone at times has been a powerful and dark force in my life. People don’t necessarily read all that. They just hear the title. They see your picture on the cover. They think, who does this gal think she is? The answer to that is someone whose couch has way too much dog fur on it.
Zibby: We have — it’s not even my dog. My sister-in-law’s dog was in our car a while ago. I still have all of that, the white dog hair from that dog, and my dog. I was like, this is so embarrassing. Finally, my daughter’s like, “Why don’t you just clean this?” I’m like, “Why don’t you just clean it?” As soon as you get out of the car, you forget that it’s messy. You go onto the next until you get in again and you’re like, oh, no.
Kelly: Then you remember. Eleanor’s fur — I have a big Saint Bernard mix. All of her hairs are like six inches and wavy. They look like they’ve been crimped. They sturdily weave themselves through every surface in my life. Eventually, I was like, you get a clean home/car or you get Eleanor. Eleanor’s the choice, but doesn’t mean I don’t feel like a grubby little baby all the time.
Zibby: I’ve seen lots of pictures of Eleanor on your Instagram. Thank you for that. I feel like you should write a children’s book about her.
Kelly: I would love to write a children’s book about Eleanor. Eleanor really does her best as she galumphs through the world but has a lot of troubles and a lot of anxieties and a lot of trouble knowing what she’s doing with her mouth and whether it looks insane to everyone else. I think that’s something that kids could relate to.
Zibby: Exactly. You can have the Miata picture, Eleanor in the Miata on the cover. Life Lesson from an Oversized Dog or something like that. I don’t know.
Kelly: I’m a Big Dog in a Little Bitty Car: The Eleanor Story.
Zibby: Exactly. Well, you can do that this afternoon.
Kelly: Just whip it out.
Zibby: Just whip it out. It’ll be fine. The bad year, I’m so sorry for all the things that happened, by the way. I should’ve said that when you first started talking about your bad two years, rather. Is there any part of it that you’re like, if that hadn’t happened, maybe it would’ve been okay?
Kelly: This is an answer that I think some people will really get and some people who don’t feel this way will find very alienating. The election of Donald Trump felt like a really destabilizing force in my life. I’ve always been someone who follows politics incredibly closely. I almost went into political reporting until I was like, my own personal feelings are so strong that I can’t be totally objective about this. It was just really upsetting. I know that people on the other side of the aisle have had a similar experience when someone that really is upsetting to them gets elected. I feel like I am a little bit alienated from my own country. I felt really upset about the racism and the xenophobia and his obvious hatred and disdain towards women and the fact that he just didn’t seem to take what I thought was a very serious job very seriously at all. Everything felt chaotic and like it could spiral out of control at any minute. That background noise of chaos I found bled more and more into my life and my outlook on things. Then again, I also — this is another one of those beliefs. I believe the world is exactly as it must be, that there aren’t ways for it to have occurred other than exactly the way it did. Therefore, things have meaning. I don’t have to understand the meaning of it for that to be the case. It’s a lot easier to say that now that we’re sort of on the other side of the pandemic and that I feel like the chief executive of our country isn’t picking fights on Twitter with people who have tremendous arsenals. Again, I know that’s alienating answer, but it’s true one.
Zibby: This is your time on the mic here. I don’t think that’s alienating. I think that’s a commonly held feeling. Whether or not you agree with it or not, I don’t think it’s so left field that other people don’t totally relate. Do not worry at all.
Kelly: I know why people have different feelings on it. I think everybody gets to have their own opinion. That just happens to be mine.
Zibby: Tell me a little more about right before you were hospitalized and the hitting-bottom moment that precipitated that if you don’t mind.
Kelly: No, I don’t mind. There is certainly a content warning in this book for suicide attempts and hospitalizations. Essentially, and truly, the really worst thing that happened to me throughout the course of the book was the loss of the friendships of these two women who I was incredibly close to. We were just a trio. Everywhere we went, we went together. One of them was living in my house with me. I don’t get into the details of why that estrangement happened because it’s really personal and also because I tried really hard throughout the book to not really spill other people’s business. It’s really important to me when I’m writing about people to remember that they have no way to respond in kind. When it came to a question of, do I want to mention this thing they did that I don’t think was great? The answer’s usually going to be no because I’m not writing this to put people on blast, which is a challenge in and of itself because that way, people can very easily become sort of paper dolls, these flat, one-dimensional characters where they don’t say anything wrong. They don’t do anything wrong. They’re just awesome. I just list the things that I love about them. Then I’m like, oh, and we’re not friends anymore. It’s like, wait, why, though?
It was the loss of those two. They were really the people that I saw in addition to my then boyfriend Sam. I was all alone in my house. I was utterly, utterly alone. Also, I was having a really terrible reaction to a new anti-depressant that I had been on. You know how they list suicidality as one of those side effects? Turns out they weren’t kidding. That is actually something that can happen even to people who are not suicidal like I wasn’t. It culminated in an attempt that obviously and fortunately did not work. Then I was in a psychiatric hospital. That’s just really not something that I had thought, necessarily, that my life would contain. At the time, I spun it. I was like, hey, you’re a writer. Every writer needs at least one trip to the sanitarium. Get booted up. Get back out there. Everything is copy. That was the very lowest point in the book. The loss of those friendships still really hurts more than the loss of any romantic relationship I’ve had in my life. I had no more assumed that those relationships could go away than I thought my sisters could divorce me. It had just never occurred to me as something that could happen, but it did. It was the very worst thing. At the hospital, they described it as catastrophic loss of chosen family. I’d been going through this turmoil, this anguish, this grief, this tremendous, pressing, terrible grief for a month and a half at that point. Before that, I didn’t have the language to — I was like, what do I say? My friends don’t like me anymore. I don’t totally understand why this happened. That made no sense. Then when they said that, it really clicked into place. It was like, yes, these are the people I cook and eat my meals with. These are the people who I plan vacations with. These are people who, in one case, lived in my house; in the other case, was always over at my house. Now they’re gone. No wonder I’m bereft.
Zibby: I’m really sorry that happened.
Kelly: I’m bummed too. It was really hard. It was really a bummer. That said, my life today is so much happier than I have ever been in my life. If you went to me and said, “You’re going to lose these two friendships. You’re going to break off with this chunk of people in your life. Your life is going to be better than you ever imagined,” I would say, you’re insane. How could I be happy without this? The truth is that I am much happier now. It hurts. We all just have things that kind of hurt. This is definitely the one thing from the book that still hurts for me.
Zibby: It’s really, really hard. The people that form the bedrock of life, when they’re whisked away, everything feels so unsteady in so many ways. Everything else just takes on new dimensions. It’s not to be taken lightly.
Kelly: It’s not. I found that we don’t have a lot that talks about the grief of losing female friendships. It can really be complicated and intense. I’ve done a lot of reflection. I see a lot of things that I wish I had done differently. I think that’s the case at the end of any relationship that ends with a breakup. You think, what if this? What if that? On the other hand, I’ve also thought through every angle of the situation. Even though I’m sad that it happened, I have a lot of what I feel like is peace and understanding of it, which is usually the best you can do when something terrible happens. You don’t have to like it, but you can be like, okay, that happened. I can see some reasons why it happened. I can see some ways in which I can hopefully try to prevent something similar from happening in the future. I can see some things that I’ve learned. I can see some things that are, honestly, maybe, red flag-ish in other people. Then you move on. You just hope that you’re going to do better next time.
Zibby: There’s this memoir I read recently by Quinta Brunson called She Memes Well.
Kelly: I just listened to that interview.
Zibby: Of mine?
Kelly: Yes.
Zibby: Oh, cool. Thank you. The book is really great. One part of it is that she was going to school and all of her friends turned against her. It was so painful. She literally could not get out of bed. She ended up having to change schools. It was this huge life event for her. It’s nice to have it aired more publicly that these things happen, and the impact of them. Especially even for people’s kids out there who all of a sudden, that whole people turning against them, that is real pain.
Kelly: Oh, yeah, oh, my gosh. That was the other part of the situation that made it kind of hard for me to articulate and talk to people about. It sounded, no offense to me, very seventh grade. These two friends don’t like you anymore, and they’re not really telling you why. The whole thing felt, on a certain level, kind of childish. On the other hand, again, if my boyfriend had dumped me and I was really bummed, then I would know exactly what to say to everyone about that. Taking a step back, I think a lot of the stuff I put in this book are things that are not uncommon human experiences, but ones that we don’t have great language for and ones that we don’t feel comfortable talking about publicly. It’s just funny that some troubles and travails and illnesses or whatever are things that we have a very definite script for, and some we don’t. I was more interested in the ones we don’t have that script for.
Zibby: What was it like writing this, the actual writing?
Kelly: Terrible. Thank you for asking.
When I turned it in, I really didn’t have my arms around it, unlike my other books where I started it and I really knew, this is the book I want to write. I might not live up to that vision, but I knew what I wanted to write. This one, I really wasn’t sure. It kept shifting. I thought, is it about this? Is it about that? What are we doing here? She really saw what it should be. She really steered me in that direction, but it took a very long time. I think we probably did at least six, arguably up to ten, rounds of edits. It was a true labor. People sometimes compare having a book to having a baby, which in some ways makes sense in so far as you’re really focused on only this one thing and you don’t totally care as much about other things that are happening. Of course, it’s extremely important to you, but not quite as important to everyone else. It’s this very inward world. I sort of disappeared into it. On the upside, the summer of 2020, my schedule was pretty clear. That was a great time to truly delve into my own trauma memoir and be like, I don’t know if enough sad stuff is happening, so I’m going to also time travel back to the worst parts of my life.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You had a funny — not funny. How can you be funny about the pandemic? But your conclusion about it and even the little star telling you it was all going to be okay. You’re like, well, if I was ever worried about being stuck at home alone, this is not exactly the right thing to have happened here in the world.
Kelly: I know. It’s funny because I did pretty well throughout the pandemic because I was so used to just, well, now you exist in your house and you don’t see other humans. This time, I wasn’t terribly depressed, so I did a much better job of it. It was hard because I had set up all these things in my life as bulwarks against depression and against loneliness. I started leading a Girl Scout troop. I started a trivia night in town. I got a part-time job at a nonprofit so I had a reason to get up in the morning and put on makeup and see humans and not just be here trying to live the stay-at-home writer dream. Then all of that stuff just left within a week. Not that the pandemic is about me at all, but on a personal level, it was kind of tough to have all of those things taken away, just like it was tough for everyone to have our lives taken. I was glad that I was able to spend that time building relationships with my close neighbors around here. Now I know kind of everyone on my block. We would sit outside in each other’s yard and just chit-chat and really get to know each other. It’s a very wide-ranging group of women. I’m probably the youngest. I think the oldest is in her late sixties, early seventies. Most of us are single women who own our own homes. Just a wide range of life experience and personalities and beliefs and all that sort of stuff. A good lesson there was that I always try to find the silver lining.
My mom told me a story when I was little. There was a boy in a proverbial small town or a village who was always way too optimistic about everything. The villagers decided to try to take him down a peg and told him that there was a big present waiting for him in the barn. Then he got there, and there was giant, giant pile of horse poop. He said, “Oh, my gosh, oh, boy,” and started shoveling frantically. They were like, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “With all this poop, there’s got to be a pony somewhere.” I feel like that’s the attitude I try to cultivate in my life. There’s got to be a pony somewhere. Even if there isn’t, I’ll lie to myself and tell myself there’s a pony somewhere. In this case, there was a pony. That was developing close friendships with people around me who I see face to face, who it’s not just an Instagram like or something, who I am genuinely invested in their lives and vice versa. We have a great group text. If something is wrong with any of us or one of us just needs to borrow something, we throw it out there. Someone can help.
The night of the wildfires here in Oregon when it was coming really close and I was trying to get ready to evacuate, in an extremely on-brand move, I fell down the stairs and severely sprained my toe. I couldn’t walk while I was trying to pack, which as you now know having read the book is just really something that would happen to me. Two of my neighbors are nurses. They came over. They checked it out. They were like, “You just got to rest and elevate and ice.” They splinted it together. To have the experience of hurting myself in the middle of an emergency but still feeling safe and still feeling like I do have this family in a certain way and that I knew that if it really got dire, someone would throw me and Eleanor in their car with the stuff I’d packed and we would go — it’s not like I was just going to stay at home with a broken toe while there were wildfires. That really made me realize the fruits of everything I’ve been doing to try to rebuild my life and try to rebuild relationships and really engage deeply in the world. That felt pretty good.
Zibby: Gosh, I got to get some nurses around here. I’ll see what I can do.
Kelly: Oh, yeah. Nurses are the best.
Zibby: Two last questions. I want to know what you have coming up next in your life and what you’re working on now and also what advice you would have for aspiring authors.
Kelly: The answer to that first question is pretty boring. I don’t write or do projects because I should or because of timing or because I have that natural forward momentum that a lot of people do. I write it because I want to write a book. Otherwise, it’s truly not worth it since it’s such an unpleasant process. Right now, I’m very focused on restarting my trivia night, which I’m pretty jazzed about now that we can do that. I’ve just got some lovely summer plans. I’ve got a little bit of camping on the books. I’ve got a couple days away at the Oregon coast, heading out to New York to see some friends for my birthday.
Zibby: Happy birthday.
Kelly: Thank you. It’s in August, so we’re pretty well ahead.
Zibby: What day in August?
Kelly: August 6th.
Zibby: I’m the 22nd.
Kelly: Oh, so you’re very cusp-y then, aren’t you?
Zibby: I am. I’m right on the edge there.
Kelly: I’m a pure Leo baby, but I love a Virgo too.
Zibby: I identify as Leo, just FYI.
Kelly: You seem like a Leo. I would’ve guessed Leo. Yeah, you’re a Leo, one hundred percent. I’m trying really hard to not make the things I look forward to in my life about a specific career success because that, in general, hasn’t brought me a lot of pleasure, or not pleasure, but contentment and stability. So nothing big to hype. I mean, I do have a book coming out in a week, so I’m well-focused on that.
Zibby: Easy Crafts for the Insane, yes, that counts a hundred percent. That is what you’re doing. There’s so much more to having a book come out than anybody might ever possibly think. It’s incredibly time-consuming, so there’s that.
Kelly: It’s not un-time-consuming. As far as aspiring writers, I started off as a journalist, and this is something that I always said when I would speak with classes and stuff. This is my philosophy. This does not have to be everyone’s philosophy. My philosophy is always that I make things because I want other people to read and hopefully get something out of them. There’s an argument about art versus craft. I’m not going to unpack that all here. For me, when I’m writing a book, I don’t think about, what do I want to say? I think, why would someone want to hear this? What would they get from this? What am I doing to justify the time they’re spending with me and my ideas? What am I giving back to their life? It could be as small as just a joke or something that makes them giggle. I also really want to write things that are smart and useful and funny and true because those are my favorite kinds of books, the ones where I walk away with something new, with a new understanding of the world or myself or whatever it is, or just comfort. I’m truly hoping with this book that it brings people who are having a hard time, which is a lot of us a lot of the time, some good comfort.
Zibby: I love that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kelly. It was so nice to talk to you. I’m so glad I got to your book, finally, after having it for so long and that we got to have this nice conversation. I’m sorry for all the stuff you’ve been through, but I’m really grateful that you shared it. You’re a really great writer. I’m just really glad our paths have crossed.
Kelly: Me too. Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. Don’t feel too bad because a lot of people go through terrible stuff and don’t get a book deal.
Zibby: True. Very true.
Kelly: I can’t complain too much. You know what I mean?
Zibby: Okay, I don’t feel that bad then.
Kelly: Don’t feel too bad. I’m glad to be on the other side. Weird as it sounds, I’m grateful for those things happening because I feel like, at least in my life, I have noticed that when hard things happen, they are terrible, and then on the other side, I feel a little bit more capable and a little bit better at the very difficult and messy work of being a human. If I could wave a wand and having those things not happen, I wouldn’t.
Zibby: Perfect. Now you can start getting ready to write a book called Middle-Aging. You could send that my way when you’re ready.
Kelly: Ooh, I’m there. I’m ready. I’m ready for some settling down. Awesome. Thank you again, Zibby, for having me. Take care.
Zibby: Thank you. Thanks, Kelly. Buh-bye.
Kelly: Bye-bye.
