Embracing Your Weirdness: Allison Landa on Self-Acceptance and Social Stigma

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:01]
Well, hello, Allison. I am so excited to have you on the Writing Your Resilience podcast. Welcome.

Allison Landa [0:07]
Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:11]
The pleasure is mine. I was so excited when I saw you at the San Francisco Writers Conference, back in February of 2025, and I got to hear you read from your book, Bearded Lady, which I’m going to hold up for people who are seeing this on YouTube. And, oh my gosh, I fell in love with your voice, and I knew immediately I wanted you to be on the podcast. And I always like to begin by giving people a chance to say what they’d like us to know about the book and about you.

Allison Landa [0:44]
Other than I’m five foot zero and can barely reach the top shelf, the book is basically about what makes you feel weird in the world. You know, it’s about what you’re thinking about when you walk into a room. What are you self-conscious about? What do you carry with you in the world that makes you feel like you’re a different person, or that other people will notice you and judge you somehow? And I feel like everybody has that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:26]
Yeah, weird in the world. And I think that’s one of the things that I really connected with in this book. My weirdness was different than your weirdness, but I think there’s something that happens when you walk into a room and you’re wondering what people are saying about you, how people are thinking about you, and the story you tell yourself about who you are in relation to their responses.

Allison Landa [1:56]
Absolutely. I mean, that’s, you know, obviously, for me, it was the very dark, obvious facial hair, and we’ll get into that. But it was basically just what makes you feel different and kind of out there to be judged.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:17]
Yeah. Now, I think that was one of the things that really struck me about this book—was the cruelty of adolescents, and I think that I’m just looking for the right word right now… entitlement, that people have to know your story or to ask you questions like, “What’s going on with you?” or, “Tell me this—the reason why X, Y, and Z is happening to you.” And I saw that so flagrantly through your book, and yet I also know this is what people do, and that it has a profound impact on us.

Allison Landa [2:58]
Very much so. And I’ve never heard it described so well. Like, it is a definite entitlement to information. It’s an entitlement to a lack of privacy. And it’s sort of seeing somebody as coming out into the world to be asked questions. That was really frightening to me, especially as a kid.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:24]
Yeah, I was trying to inhabit this narrator all the time, which you make so easy because of the way you write. I mean, you’re an incredible writer. People are going to get to hear some of your voice today. But yeah, when I was thinking about especially those school experiences—just the things people would say—and how you and I talked before, and you said this in your intake: weirdness is what unites us. And yet, there were so many ways that what I saw in this book is that weirdness was what separates us. How do you reconcile the two? Especially in… how did you recognize—how did you reconcile that when you were writing this book?

Allison Landa [4:08]
Um, God, that’s a great question. Well, there’s just something to being united and separated at the same time, simultaneously. There’s a thread there that sort of ebbs and flows. I mean, you know, for example, when friends would ask, “How are you? What’s going on?” there was a union of some sort because there was concern, there was connection. But then there was also me pulling back a little bit. So, it was my perception of being weird, and I think, honestly, I was the one who judged myself more than anyone else did. I hope that comes clear in the book: like, I was very self-judgmental. I—yeah. And no matter what anybody said to me, whether it was good or bad, I would take that as a personal thing, as a judgment. “You’re weird, you’re weird, you’re weird.” And I feel like that, in a way, being close to somebody also meant that I was pushing away from them. So, it would unite me with somebody, but it also really, really pushed me away from them. If that makes any sense.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:25]
Yeah, it makes total sense. And I was cheering all the time for your friends who stuck with you through everything. And yeah, I think that when we carry shame, especially about anything, it impacts our capacity to be seen, to be helped, to have people be a part of our story. And I’m going to ask you a question first, and we’re going to get to that shame piece, you know, at the end of this book. I always read things from beginning to end. So, this is in the acknowledgments. It says, “And to Wesley Gibson, brilliant rat bastard, for your proclamation of sweetheart. Go for it.” I did, Wesley. I did. So, at what point in your writing career did you know this was a book that you had to write? Because I always feel like, you know, especially in memoir, it’s not just, “Oh, I want to write this book.” I’m haunted by something that I have to write. When did you know that? And how did you know this was going to be a linear narrative versus all the different structures you could have chosen?

Allison Landa [6:45]
I feel like I decided—no, it decided me. I remember standing in the grocery store one time waiting to be rung up and thinking, “Oh, God, am I going to be misgendered?” And at that point, I knew this is my story. This is what I want to put out into the world. This is something I need and want to say. And that really firmed up when I was in graduate school at St. Mary’s College of California, which is where I met Wesley. And he was my mentor. He was amazing, and he really cemented that for me. I was in a workshop with him, and he said, “I’m going to do something we don’t often do in graduate school for writing, and we’re going to ask you to write. And I want you every week to add something to what you know, to add a chapter, add a paragraph.” And I thought, “Oh, shit, I’ve got to write this.” And then I thought, “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this.” And I thought, you know, if I don’t do this now, I never will. And it’s a great question about structure. I played with so many different elements of structure. I played with braided narrative. I played with different contextual ways of telling the story. I had a character called “The Girl Who Is Not Me,” who I eventually killed in the book. And my husband read it and said, “You don’t need any of that. You have a story. Tell your story.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Tell my story.” And I thought, you know, there’s enough complicated stuff here that I think a straight, linear narrative is the way to go. And so, after all these different ways of messing with it… I mean, this book took a long time to come into fruition, and I messed with it, messed with it, messed with it, finally made it a linear narrative, and it just worked so beautifully. It was like, “Wow, okay.” It was almost as if I had to go through and write all these different ways of doing it to come into the way that worked best for me, and that was just a straight, linear, linear story.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:54]
I love that story that you just shared about structure, because so many people ask me this question. I bet you get asked it too, because I know that you also teach writing: “What is the structure for my book?” or “What’s the right structure?” And what you did is you played. You gave yourself permission to play around, to try different things, to not be bound to what would be the “quote, unquote, right answer,” and then it led you to the right answer. And I love this as a straightforward, linear narrative, because when I think about, you know, how do I want to connect with a book like this? Yeah, I want to learn things, which you do—teach us some things about what was going on with the narrator, medically—but more so, I want to connect at a heart level, right? And we think about things like shame, or we think about resilience. Sometimes that straightforward and linear narrative that keeps you in that heart space allows you to connect with a reader in a way that some of these, what I call “fancy structures,” can’t do too. Sometimes when you get an essay collection that’s really “thinky,” or you try to do a mosaic, or something that’s fractured, or some of these, you know, more complicated structures that people sometimes use, they can be great for certain things. But I remember Carmen Maria Machado, I was reading this interview that she had done about her book In the Dream House, which is a gorgeous book, and oh my gosh, I saw her deliver a keynote, and I could not keep up with her—like, her mind was so fast and just does so many brilliant things. But one of the things she said about that book, which deals with a lot of really hard topics, is that she wanted to keep the reader in their head. And the more complicated the structure, the more likely you are to stay in your head, right? But you let us stay in our hearts, which lets us touch your heart.

Allison Landa [10:58]
That’s beautiful. Thank you. That’s what I wanted. I mean, a story is not just told by the author. A story is also told by the reader. And I wanted to sort of leave a lot of it in the hands and the hearts of the reader. I didn’t want to over-tell the story. I’ve read a lot of books that sort of overwork the dough, if you will, and just really tell the story too much, and it’s like, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. Just leave it in the hearts of the reader and let them figure it out. And they will. I mean, readers are smart. They’ll get it, and our hearts are smart, and they get it too.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:42]
Absolutely. And I love this idea of overworking the dough. And we don’t have to slam anyone’s book here, right? I’m not into that, but I think sometimes we can talk about this: this is what overworking the dough looks like. So, is there a book or something you’re thinking about, even like, you know, writing that students have done, where it’s like, “Okay, this is what overworking the dough looks like or sounds like?”

Allison Landa [12:09]
I’ve definitely worked with people who had a structure that was a little bit more scattershot, if you will. “I’m going to write about this, and I’m going to write about that,” and it was almost like the popcorn version of a story, and it’s like, you know, that’s great, but it’s not, it’s… you need a little bit more restraint, and a little bit more… we do need to make decisions about what we want the reader to know, to understand, to feel. I think things do need to be curated. I think things that look deceptively simple are not. And I think that, conversely, structures that are a little, you know… if the dough is overworked, sometimes you can really taste it in the cookie. I mean, it’s really challenging. And that’s not to say that I don’t love other types of structures, because I do. I’m a particular fan of the braided narrative. I really enjoy flashing back and forth and doing that. But I think everything needs to be in service of the narrative. Yes, and if you’re just playing with it, that’s awesome. Play away. I tell my students all the time, like, throw it on the page, don’t, you know, don’t hold back. But when you’re editing, there’s a real curation process that I think absolutely has to happen, regardless of what structure you choose.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:34]
There has to be a lot of restraint. And yes, things that look easy were often really hard to pull off, and you pull this off so well. And my cat, Foxy, agrees. So, you did this so well, and you allowed us to stay in our hearts. And I want to get back to that shame piece, because for me, when I was reading this book and thinking about, you know, what are the threads that are kind of being pulled through this? There’s this thread of being seen and not seen, right? This desire to be seen by parents who will attend to what’s going on with you, or, you know, a love interest, and yet also this need to defend against being seen in these ways that are unwanted, which often is around shame. And so, when you were writing this book, what role did shame play in both just things you had to confront inside yourself as you were writing, and what you wanted to put on the page?

Allison Landa [14:44]
Oh, it was all over the place. I mean, shame is so characteristic of our culture and of us as human beings, and especially when it comes to something like this. And what I chose to do is use it for the narrative. Rather than try to, like, push it away, I wanted to use it in a way that was effective, where I was like, “What… what shame?” It’s kind of like putting it back at the reader and asking the reader, “Well, what shames you? What do you—what makes you feel that shame? What makes you feel that shame? What makes you feel that difference in who you are and how you show up in the world?” And there—and being seen and not being seen, I think, is a huge part of the narrative as well. I mean, obviously, my parents were not good at seeing me, and they were certainly not good at seeing what I needed in ways that my friends did see and did call out. And yes, it was a challenging thing to hear, but it was also, I think, a good thing to hear. And then later, the world would like to call it out. The world would kind of call out, like, “You need to do something. You need to do something.” But in the end, it was just me that decided I needed to do something. It wasn’t because anyone in the world shamed me into it. So, ultimately, I think that I use shame as something that is not—it’s not something to look for. It’s not something to go, “Shame me, please.” Like, I don’t… right? I don’t think that’s helpful. And I never even wanted to shame my parents. It was like they had their own issues.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [16:35]
Mm-hmm, yeah, and that’s what I see in this book is that everybody’s operating from their own space of pain, yes, and then it’s just how those spaces—how that pain intersects and interacts with each of the characters that leads to various results.

Allison Landa [16:58]
Exactly, exactly. And everybody’s got—I always say, everybody’s got something. And when I talk to people about the book, it’s like, “Look around this room. What do you think people have here that…” I mean, because we’re not the only ones, you know? It’s funny because you’ll meet somebody, and you get to know them, and it’s like, “Oh, you really see what makes them tick, and you really see what troubles them,” and that’s what really brings you close to them. Because you feel less… you can feel less alone. It’s like, “Oh no, you have something too.” Like, there’s an empathy that arises with that. And I have empathy for my parents too. I mean, my mother also had what I have, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, but she was not treated. She was not diagnosed, and she had a far less serious version of it than I have. So, I think her attitude was, you know, I don’t want to, like, shame her in a way—she didn’t want to shame me by talking about it. And I really believe that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [18:09]
Yeah, and as we’re having this conversation, I’m thinking about your book. I’m wondering if, and this is not to let her off the hook by any means, because there are things that happen that are not okay, but that if she had acknowledged what was going on with you, and she had treated it, she would have had to acknowledge it in herself. She would have had to acknowledge that in herself if she had acknowledged it in you, and that might have compounded the shame that she already had, that she was operating from.

Allison Landa [18:47]
That’s a really good point, and I think it’s not letting her off the hook. I think it’s just seeing her as a person, and that’s something that I really had to do in the narrative itself. When I first wrote this book, my mother was a caricature. I mean, my mother could be very big in her personality, and she could kind of come off almost caricature-like, and it took some doing to nuance her and to understand, well, she had her reasons for doing what she did and what she did not do. And it really was important to me to sort of understand that, because, in a way, it lets me off the emotional hook of being angry and resentful. It’s like, you know, maybe she just was a person like everybody else, the same with my dad, and let it go. And that’s taken a really long time. I mean, I moved out of my childhood home when I was 18. I’m coming up on 51, so it’s been some time, but it’s happened over time, which is great.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:52]
Isn’t there something good about being… I’m almost 51 myself? Hey, awesome. If you don’t mind, what month?

Allison Landa [20:04]
April 15.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:10]
April 10!

Allison Landa [20:10]
Hey, we’re both Aries!

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:10]
Yes! Love that. Awesome.

Allison Landa [20:10]
Yeah.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:10]
So we bring the fire.

Allison Landa [20:10]
We do!

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:12]

It’s the bad-ass piece of us, and you brought that to this in both seeing your parents and also you just have these really succinct ways of describing them and creating this shorthand that helps us see their characters, you know, see who they are without telling too much of their story, which I think sometimes, you know, when we have parents in particular who behave badly, right, from dysregulation or all the variety of reasons why people behave poorly, we can begin to tell a lot of their stories, which we don’t have permission to tell—and you don’t do that. You give us enough to humanize them, to treat them with compassion. We see both bad behavior and context for that behavior, and, we see their pain. Yes, but I love the way you write, and that’s what made me fall in love with your work and made me want to have you on the podcast. And I’m wondering if you can read the first couple of pages so that we can get a sense of these characters.

Allison Landa [21:22]
I would love. I would love to. This is my copy, and it’s like all done up with all the different, all the different sticky, sticky things that I always wanted to put on there for readings and stuff like that. I always wanted to… I’d go to readings, and I’d see an author with all these, like, sticky notes, and now I have my own book with one, which is cool. So, I will go ahead and read from the first couple of pages of Bearded Lady.

Allison Landa [21:53]
1985
Don’t expect to understand my family. You’ll have better luck comprehending the history of the Middle East or a Rubik’s Cube. The answers there may not be formal or finite, but they at least exist. When it comes to my family, there are few answers. We live in northern San Diego County, a casually affluent burn zone decorated by waves of red-tile roofs. Here, people think they can beat the inevitable by waving magic wands: money, image, designer dogs. Sometimes it works. Sometimes they wind up with their homes reduced to ashes.

My parents have charm. They use it as a strategy, a way to beat back the flames. A grin can flash into something darker or remain in sunshine. You never know.

My mother is Joan, but I occasionally call her Nails. She has talons the shade of blood and hair the color of rust. She is prone to crying fits and lengthy explanations. These ride on one premise: once she had dreams, then she had kids. She regrets moving here from the East Coast. She claims my father forced her into it so he could pursue his perversions. He wants to do threesomes. My mother says, speaking in italics, “wife swapping.” I tell him he can play a nice game of hide and go fuck yourself.

My father is Steve, but I often think of him as the rooster. His comb-over flaps in the wind in the outside world. He is cordial; at home, he can be every bit as aggressive as the barnyard animal. His eyes are black as midnight. When he yells, they turn almost violet—violet and violence. Somehow, these two came together to form me and my brothers.

I am 12. Middle, so called because he is the middle child, is 11. Jonathan is a year old. He is the accident, or, if he’d rather be more tactful, the surprise. When he pisses me off, I call him the birth control poster child. It doesn’t seem to phase him.

Middle and I go to public school, but in the county’s BEST district. In school, the teacher asks, “What does your father do?” My classmates answer: doctor, plumber, pro football player. Then it is my turn. “He drinks beer,” I say, “and watches Hill Street Blues.” Later, my mother explains, “Your father is an engineer.” When I ask what that means, she shrugs. It’s not that she doesn’t know; it’s more like she doesn’t care.

I imagine him at a desk doing something called paperwork, just as he does in his den for hours with the door shut and locked. Engineers must take home a lot of work. It must be important. Just as our homework is important to us, I know why work is important. It makes you money. Money means a lot to Nails and Rooster. It’s how we have our house. And our house is serious business. It’s a style my mother calls “French Country castle.” She has a name for it, just as I have a name for my family: Joe, Joan, Steve, Allison, Middle, Jonathan. The house has a persona all its own. It is haughty and, in a laughable way, too big for its own britches. It is high on its own square footage. It prides itself on this prestige.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:07]
Beautiful, thank you. You pack so much in. We get the whole lay of your family land—like, who’s there, what are they like, how does the narrator interact with them? Then you have this beautiful metaphor of the burn zone. And then, you have these nice descriptions of the blood-red nails, the rust-colored hair, the violet, and the violence, right? And all those things are related to colors of fire. So, I mean, you pull all of that together so well. I’m curious: how many times did you have to write that?

Allison Landa [25:45]
That was something that came out fairly quickly and stayed fairly consistent, just because that was my opening salvo. Like, that was what I wanted people to know. And I absolutely agree when you talk about parents and, you know, sometimes you tell the backstory that doesn’t necessarily need to be told. I mean, I’ve read a lot of books where it’s like, “Well, my grandmother was born in 1846…” It’s like, “Oh God, I’ve got to get through this, to get through you, to get to you.” Okay, so I want to just get there. And it was important to me to introduce the setting. It was important for me to introduce the stakes. And I’m a super impatient person. If I can’t see that in a couple of pages, I’m, as they say these days, I’m DNFing it. I’m just not going to finish it. And so, I really wanted to make all those things clear straight away. I definitely wordsmith it. I definitely edited it, but it kind of came out and stayed the way that it stayed, just because it was something that I thought about and thought about so much over the years that it was like, “Ooh, boom. This is what a way I want to say it.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:56]
I love that you trusted that, because that’s part of that, not overworking the dough. Sometimes things do come out in their best format. The original format is the best format. And yes, you have to wordsmith and do like little things, but that to trust that that sometimes is the right way to go. And I think it was the right way to go. I mean, it hooked me. And like you, I can be impatient. I want to know, like, why are we here? Why are we going? And I’m getting ready to write this post for the Jane Friedman blog, so this will have come out by then. I’ll link it. And it’s about time. And what I started thinking about was being six years old and feeling like time went on so long. Like, I have this very specific memory of the last day of school, and thinking, “My God, this year took forever.” And of course, now that, you know, everything goes by so fast, right? But my point is, and that I’m bringing into this essay is that, you know, time is this fluid thing. It’s an illusion that we create within our stories. And one thing that we don’t want to do is give the reader an experience that makes them think the same things I thought when I was in first grade, which is, “My God, this is taking forever.”

Allison Landa [28:21]
I have a nine-year-old son, and he’s like, “Man, school just takes so long. This year takes so long.” So, I totally relate to you. No, I don’t want people to feel that way. And some of the best feedback that I’ve gotten on this book is that it’s actually, I don’t want to say a quick read, because when people say that I’m kind of like, “Oh, does there, is there not enough substance?” But that it’s, it’s a read that flows. And that’s what I went for. It’s like, you know, I want a book that you can, that you really can, like, get through and come away with something. I didn’t want people to go, “Oh my God, you know…” Like, right now, I’m reading a wonderful book that, by its subject matter, is really a slow read. It’s Cold Crematorium, and I believe the author is Joseph de Brezhne. He was a Hungarian man, and he talks about his time in the Holocaust. And it’s like, just by the very nature of the material, it’s like, after a few pages, you just have to stop and reset. Yes, and that makes it sort of a choppy read, even as it’s a wonderful book, and I had the liberty of, thank God, having somewhat lower stakes and that I could play with it a little bit to where it was like, “No, I want this to go at a pace where a reader would feel like, ‘Hey, I’m right there with you, and I’m keeping up with you. I’m right there with you, and we’re just going together.'” I’m not looking at… I’m not checking my email for the 12th time, which I do so many times. I just want people to be there and hang out with me while I tell the story.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [30:11]
Well, I can raise my hand and say I was, and I would say it was a pleasurable read. It was a read that when I put the book down in the middle of the next day, I was thinking about your book, you know, what I had read, what might happen next, and “Is she going to find someone?” Like, you know, “Is such and such going to happen with this character?” Like, I don’t want to give away things, because I want people to read your book. But, you know, there were certain points where I was like, “I’m a little worried about her here,” and I would be thinking about this in the daytime, and then, of course, at night, you kept me up. Too many, too many late nights. I’m going to blame you for that.

Allison Landa [30:50]
Well, I hate to say it, but I’m glad. No, I mean, I, you know, it’s the kind of thing where I want people to stay with the narrative, and I want the narrative to stay with people after the book is over. And to me, what’s important are higher themes. That’s essential. Because everybody’s been able to tell a dinner party story, like, “Hey, this happened to me and blah, blah, blah,” but if I don’t have higher themes in there, it’s not necessarily going to connect with you and keep you up and keep you interested. And so, I really wanted to work those higher themes also, because it’s such, like a, for lack of a better word, it’s kind of a weird premise. It’s like, “Oh, bearded lady.” Like, immediately you think of, like, circus act and all the shit that goes along with that. And, you know, all the stuff I heard when I was 12. And right, like, “No.” You know, I wanted it to be as much about you as it is about me, and the way that I do that is to make it a lot more about life than about this one thing. Weirdly, I kind of learned that from writing about real estate. I’ve done a lot of real estate writing in my freelance career, and I would write the same stuff over and over. I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so boring,” but really, what you’re selling is a lifestyle. It’s like, “Oh, you’ve climbed to the top, and now, you know, you can relish your view,” and meanwhile, you’re writing about some tiny condo in the middle of San Francisco, like, but it works.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:26]
Yeah, and that sense of striving, I felt that throughout, this idea of, like, am I going to get to this place, or I want these things? And, yeah, I think I want to go back to something you said about, you know, DNF’d, like, did not finish reading. You know, the difference a book like yours, which in linear narratives, and something more complicated is that you don’t want the pacing to get tired. You don’t want the reader to feel like, “Oh, I’m ready for this to be done today.” There’s that piece of it. But then sometimes there are books where the content is difficult and you have to put it down, like, it is going to be a slow read just because of the content. But that’s different from, “Oh, there’s something missing,” right, or too much of something. Because I think of The Fact of the Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. To me, that was a slow read because of the content. It was brilliant, and I love it. It’s a great book, but I had to put it down. But there have been plenty of books that I’ve read where it’s a slow read because it’s lost my interest, and you didn’t do that. And I think it’s because you added in those higher themes, and because there are ways that you portray your characters, and then they change, there are these shifts that happen. When you were thinking about your parents and how they’re portrayed on page one, versus how they’re portrayed later in the book, how has all of that changed for you?

Allison Landa [34:10]
When I first started writing this book, I was in my 30s, I was unmarried and had no intention of having a child. That’s all changed, and so that in itself, just my life circumstances have changed, how I see them and what their constraints were, and what they needed to do, or I should say, what they thought they needed to do and what they thought they needed to escape from. In writing this book, it really helped me to understand everybody has reasons for doing what they do, but only sometimes do they actually know what those reasons are. And I really think that was true with my family. My family was very reactive. It was like, “Oh, something’s happening to her. Or we don’t know what to do about it, so we’re not going to do anything about it.” And, yeah, that can be seen as—like I was—once did a reading, and this little, tiny woman who looked like Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls came up to me and said, “I read your book, and I want to punch your mother in the face.” And I was like, “Whoa. Okay, well, I actually don’t… I mean, that’s great, ma’am, you can punch my mother in the face if you want. But for me, it was like, I understood, even if I didn’t agree with what they did, with their philosophies around it. I tried to talk to them later around it, and it didn’t really go very far. I sort of handled this on my own. I think they were a little ashamed, if you want to talk about shame, I think there was a little shame there. And my attitude is, good, there should be a little shame around that.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:58]
Yeah, I agree, because there were times when I wanted to punch a mom.

Allison Landa [36:04]
My mom took a lot of metaphorical punches from readers. It really was funny, yeah.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:07]
I mean, there’s just times where I was like, “Oh my God, like, What in the world?” You know, I did, and then I felt some softness toward the end. I definitely had this transformation, but it wasn’t complete. I still wanted to punch her a little, like, wanted to punch her a little and I was like, “Oh, you need a hug.

Allison Landa [36:29]
I really see that. And I mean, for example, my son has autism and ADHD, and my attitude is, I’m going to try to make things as manageable for him in his life as possible. And I think my parents did not do that, and so in a way, I learned inversely from them. I mean, my joke with my husband is, “What should I do here? Well, what would my parents do? Let’s do the absolute inverse of it.” And that’s been pretty bulletproof. I have to say.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:10]
Sometimes that is the best, the best advice and the best way to operate. Well, you shared something at the San Francisco Writers Conference about your mom and this book. People will ask me, like, “Okay, there’s the writing of the book, and then there’s the getting the book published, and then there’s what happens afterward when people get to read it, right, including family members.” Would you be willing to share just a smidge about what that experience was like?

Allison Landa [37:40]
Oh, absolutely. I had an excerpt published online, and I put it on Facebook, completely neglecting the fact that my mom was my Facebook friend. So, I’m sitting in a cafe, my phone rings, and I run outside because I’m that kind of person—I can’t talk in a cafe, so I run outside to answer it, and she’s crying, and she says, “It’s beautiful.” And I almost fell over. I was like, “My God, that’s…” And this was, actually, I believe this was the section that I read that she read about herself, and she said, “It’s beautiful.” And I was like, “Wow, that’s really cool.” Like, I really appreciated her, her take on it, and her ability to see it for the art that I hoped it was.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:27]
That is such a gift. Not everybody gets it, but I am so glad that you did. Thank you, and that just speaks to her character as well, right? So, there are the negative sides, but also that’s huge, that she was able to see that as beautiful art and appreciate it, versus getting defensive or many of the other responses people might have while reading about themselves.

Allison Landa [38:57]
I mean, it’s hard to read about yourself. It’s hard to hear about yourself, you know, the same as when you hear your voice on, like, a recording, and you’re like, “Is that what I sound like?” It’s like, “Is that what I’m really like?” I mean, my son will critique me. He’s good at that. And he’ll say, like, “Mommy, you know, you try to make people laugh, and that’s not funny.” You get really, like, defensive, like, “Really? That’s how I really am?” Oh, my God. So, I feel like, I mean, I give her a lot of credit. My father has not read the book. He wanted to. My brother had it. My father said, “Can I borrow it?” My brother said, “No,” because he knew how my dad would receive it, which is to say, not terribly well, but my mom took it pretty well, I have to say.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [39:45]
And that says something about your dad, that he actually followed through. Because he could have bought a copy.

Allison Landa [39:50]
He could have, but he would have had to spend money. So, I mean, that’s a whole other thing. But, no, he could have bought a copy, and he chose not to, and I think he was respecting those wishes, which I appreciate very much.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [40:04]
Yeah, and that shows that even in problematic relationships, there’s still love, right? There can still be love and respect and dysfunction. It’s not an either or. It can very much be a both/and, and part of life is living with that.

Allison Landa [40:24]
Exactly, exactly, and it’s nuanced. You know, I’m not interested in black and white, except in photography maybe, I like things are nuanced. And I like characters who are nuanced. I mean, when I talk to my students, I say, there’s characters and there’s people—give me people, don’t give me a character. Give me a person. A person is somebody who’s much more filled with contradiction and maybe self-doubt and what’s weird for them. And those are the people that I’m interested in reading about, so I really got that from my parents, who are not caricatures, though they certainly come off that way at times—they are not. And people don’t want to read about caricatures. It’s boring.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [41:18]
I often find like, this is something that I will tell especially beginning writers that more experienced writers, they’ve had enough things happen that they get it—that you can’t make yourself the total good guy, who’s the awesome person on the page, and then whoever has done you wrong, usually that’s the one who gets this treatment, can’t be all evil, because do that, readers will call bullshit, and they’ll be like, “Uh, that’s not how things work.” And then what does that say about you? And I find for some writers, especially writers who have had really difficult life experiences, you know, where maybe they’ve dealt with narcissism and they’ve been gaslit, that’s so hard to take in, and yet it’s also so necessary.

Allison Landa [42:10]
Oh, very much so. I mean, life is going to do what life does, and our job is to put it on the page, and as seemingly unvarnished as possible. I really believe that. But I say seemingly that’s where craft enters. You know, we do have to think about like how it’s put on the page, the fact that there is an arc there, the fact that there is character development there. I mean, I think art and life are sort of kissing cousins, but they’re not entirely the same thing. And I’ve never even thought about that until I just said it. But I think that there’s truths of that. I mean, the way that the story comes off in the book, I believe, is the emotional truth, but I’m not going to lie. I mean, when you’re writing memoir, you don’t know what dialog was said when you were 12 years old. I mean, there’s veracity there, but there isn’t always 100% accuracy.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [43:20]
Yeah, and even the truth that we can capture is from our lens. It’s not capital T truth. And, and the truth that you capture on the page, five years, 10 years from now, is going to be very different, like the story that you would tell at 61 is going to be different than the story that’s published now, because life has happened and your lens has changed, and so yeah, we need to be really gentle with that, and allow for some flexibility and allow for really good storytelling. And you and I could be talking about this book and writing forever. I can already tell, and I love that. I’m going to wrap up with two final questions.

We are in 2025. We’re recording this in the last week of March, which March has been bananas in so many ways. I always ask people, how are you nurturing your resilience? How are you taking care of yourself? And then I feel like, right now, I’m like, wheel of fortune, and that, you know, Wheel of Fortune, if anyone has ever watched that show, there’s like the final board, and then they give you all the letters that everyone has always said over the years. So, I’m going to give you that version. Like people always tell me, I go out in nature, I take a hot bath, I journal. I’m curious to know what is the—and I’m going to use the theme of your book weird—a weird way that you care for yourself, or that you’re caring for yourself now in the midst of 2025?

Allison Landa [45:03]
Oh my gosh. What is the weird way that I’m caring for myself right now? Part of it is really being in the midst of it and reading, reading too much, and that’s not caring for myself, but it’s almost like the way I react to the bad stuff that I do, the doom-scrolling, the freak outs, the, “Oh my God, maybe they’ll like accept us in Thailand if we can’t live here.” When I walk away from that and I take a deep breath, it’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s almost as if I have to walk through that fire in myself where it’s like, “Oh shit. What the hell is going on? This is insane.” And I make no bones about thinking that this is so wrong on so many levels. And I get all fed up about it, and then I stop and take a breath. I’ve done a lot of meditation, also humor. I think that I, like, I crack wise about this shit all the time. There’s, um, you know, he’s—Trump is going after NPR and PBS, and I posted it on Facebook, and I said, “Big Bird could kick his ass.” And I really believe that’s true. Humor is a huge thing for me. Being with my family is a big one for me, which is funny because they drive—they drive me fucking bananas. But I love them dearly, and being with them, watching dumb shit like Gordon Ramsay—sorry, Gordon, it’s true. You know, watching Hell’s Kitchen, that sort of thing. But also, yeah, taking a walk, being with friends is a real big one. I’m also writing a new memoir about living overseas. I lived overseas for six months in 2002, and I’m infusing a lot of talk about fascism and, and I lived in the Czech Republic, so they dealt with a lot of communism and living under a regime. So, I write a lot about that. So, part of it is kind of getting in there and kicking around with it, and then part of it’s like, “Oh, no, you’re not going to do this to me.” Does that work? I’d say about 45% of the time. But that’s a decent percentage for right now.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:18]
Yeah, it is. I don’t think that any of us are getting A’s. It’s a really good way to put it, yeah. And I think if you can get a D plus C minus, you’re doing good.

Allison Landa [47:30]
I’m passing the class. That’s enough.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:35]

For me, like, my weird, I don’t think it’s weird, but other people might think it’s weird is, you know, I learned this when I got my Master’s in Counseling, like, the importance of clearing your energy, because everybody has their own energy, and when you’re taking on someone’s story, you’re taking on a bit of that energy as well. That’s just kind of how things are. I am clearing my energy multiple times a day, and what I’ve learned is, because I’m a very strong Empath, like, I will soak it all in, like, all the weirdness, all the like stuff happening out there, if I’m not intentional, I will suck it all in, in addition to all the work I do with all my clients. I actually have this crystal selenite wand that I like, that’s my intentional thing I do. And, and I don’t know what my neighbors think of me, because I’m always doing it in front of a window, because I have an altar, like, I’m a Buddhist, and I have my altar where I do my meditations, and I’m over there, like, doo doo doo. And, but you know what? It works.

Allison Landa [48:48]
I love that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [48:51]
Like, I’ve got to do me, and this helps me stay present, because then I can hold space for other people’s stories. And I feel like all we can do is, like, be the drop in the bucket. We can’t be all the water in the bucket right now. And so, I’m clear about like, this is how I can be of support and help to other people. I keep myself as grounded as possible. I’m working on my own stuff. When I’m angry, I allow myself to be angry or whatever the emotions are. I’m doing the work so that when I sit in front of you, or I sit in front of my clients or anyone else, I can actually sit in front of them and not be in 1000 other places.

Allison Landa [49:34]
And I want to say thank you for that, because that’s a great energy to put out into the world. I think that’s awesome.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [49:42]
Well, thank you for all you’ve done with your book, and I want everyone to get a copy, because it is truly so beautifully done. So, what are the best ways for people to connect with you, to buy copies of your book, and to know what you’re up to?

Allison Landa [49:58]
First of all, thank you so much for having me. This is absolute pleasure. I would say, stay away from Amazon, please. If I can say anything, that’s what I would do. My book is available on Bookshop.org.  It’s available on my publisher, Wood Hall Press, and they have it available on their website, I believe, but Bookshop is a very good way to get the book. I’m live and online @allisonlanda.com and I welcome people to contact me. It’s so exciting when somebody contacts me and says, “Hey, you know, I read your book,” or “I’ve heard about your book. These are the questions or the thoughts that I have.” That means everything to me. It’s about communication. And my mentor, Wesley, once said, “I write to communicate.” So, I’m very, very open and excited to hear from people. My email is just allison@allisonlanda.com.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [51:00]
Well, all of that is going to be in the show notes. And yes, people should let you know how they’re doing. And what I will say about Amazon, this is, like, the one little thing I’ll say about Amazon is, buy the book from Bookshop.org, also order it from your local library. Do those things, yes, but leave a five-star review on Amazon, because those things actually matter.

Allison Landa [51:24]
Thank you. You’re right. Absolutely. I think the reviews are very, very important. So, thank you for remembering that. When I started, I let it go, because Amazon is like, “Ah, Amazon,” but it’s really great to have the reviews. So absolutely, I agree.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [51:39]
It’s about claiming power within the system that is right now, because if you’re a writer, it’s hard to get your book out sometimes, and to get it into readers’ hands. Anything we can do that supports that, I think, is so important. And I love that you focus on reader connections, because that’s what really matters. Numbers are great, like for the number gods, like the people that value that. But at the end of the day, on your deathbed, what are you going to be thinking about? Whatever your metrics were on some day, or whatever, or are you going to be thinking about, “My story touched people,” and these are the things they said to me?

Allison Landa [52:24]
Absolutely. That’s the most important thing to me, and it’s like gold when I hear from people, I love it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [52:32]
All right, listeners, you know what your jobs are, and be sure to connect with Allison. And Allison, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Allison Landa [52:41]
Thank you, Lisa, it’s been my pleasure.