313 Molly Gaudry
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/313
AO E313 Molly Gaudry
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Molly Gaudry, author of Fit Into Me, a novel, a memoir. This interview is one of the first ever Molly has given surrounding her adoptee identity, relatable to anyone who has contradictory or missing narratives in their origin stories. Molly shares the complexities of using literary defense mechanisms in her writing to push readers away from her personal truth. We also talk about her brain injury and recovery, how that physical vulnerability and even intimacy [00:01:00] sometimes felt safer to share about than her adoption experience. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adopteeson.com/community. Which helps support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Molly Gaudry. Hello, Molly.
Molly Gaudry: Hi, Haley.
Haley Radke: You're here. I'm so pumped. I've read your work for a long time and so I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.
Molly Gaudry: I was born in Korea in 1981, and there are differing reports on [00:02:00] what happened that led to my being adopted and ending up in Ohio in 1983, which is where I grew up.
I think that what I've been thinking about lately and trying to process in various, writing projects is how long it's taken me to even begin to want to think about any of that. And I have a lot of difficulty articulating or even knowing on any given day what I do or don't want to talk about with regard to my adoption.
And I'm a very sort of slow thinker. I'm better on paper and at this point I think what I'm doing is I'm just really trying to navigate where is that resistance coming from and why [00:03:00] now? Why now am I beginning to question that? Think through that and even wonder. So it's tricky, right? It was even a little bit of a push and pull, deciding to be here today.
I don't know what to say often, and I guess that is the answer. The answer is, I don't know what to say. I don't know how to say it. I don't know if tomorrow I'm gonna feel differently about that. So that's where I'm at. That's the place where I am. And that's like the story. The story is not the story. The story is, I don't know what the story is.
Haley Radke: Thank you for being so candid. I think a lot of adoptees will relate to that and whether it's access to stories, people asking intrusive questions, which I mean, it's a podcast. I do that on here. But just in real life, when people find out we're adopted and they [00:04:00] start, I'm sure you've heard where you from, know where are you really from those kinds of things, especially with our adoptee friends who are racialized anyway, I think it's really helpful to say that you're like, I don't even know. And in that I was wondering about this because you you're private mostly as a researcher. I'm trying to like look for interviews you've done and things I've seen. I found lots of writings, some readings you've done and not your personal story really, but you share very openly and deeply in this new book Fit Into Me about your brain injury and about even hiding it from your academic professional life because of the consequences. And so I found that interesting and I was thinking about [00:05:00] that. With regards to like backing off from adoption stuff, but why now? Why can you talk about the brain injury and your recovery and all that? Do you have thoughts about that?
Molly Gaudry: This is actually a really good question and really interesting pairing. I think one thing, you're absolutely right. I've guarded my private and personal life intensely, while also doing my best for the last two decades to try and be a writer in the public sphere.
Luckily, I think as a slightly more academic writer, not necessarily scholarly, but just a little more like heady and cerebral, less commercial, more experimental, there's a smaller audience for that. So I haven't had to really push, into social media or anything like that. But to whatever extent, over the years it has come up, I've fiercely had boundaries in place for private versus public. [00:06:00] And I think the thing about the brain injury is that it was, for me anyway, it was always so public facing. I was in school, I was getting my MFA and of, of all places. The weirdest thing about my brain injury is that I hit my head in fall, but it wasn't until spring that my system got so overloaded that it just broke and that happened at a AWP in front of everybody. I was at a table in the book fair.
Haley Radke: This is like a big writing conference.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah. Huge conference. I don't even know what the attendance numbers are these days, but back then, I think it was anywhere between, 10,000 to 15,000 writers descending on a city. And the book fair was, where hundreds of small presses showcase their titles. And I was working at one of these tables and so there were just [00:07:00] thousands of people moving in such a huge space with the lights, the sounds, the smells, and visually tracking any movement and looking close like for example, if somebody had come to the table, I would have, they would've been in close proximity to me, and so I might've been showing them some books or just looking at them, but then if something would've caught my eye 20 rows away, that would be so much far looking. So the difficulty I think of toggling between close and far, put a lot of strain on my system. And then again, with all of the sensory stuff. And so in my case, it was in the middle of the AWP book fair where I, blinked and when I opened my eyes, everything was double vision.
And as a result, nauseatingly existing in the world in this moment where everything just came crashing down, I [00:08:00] couldn't understand it. I definitely just thought something's wrong with my, something's wrong with my vision and after AWP. So I struggled through that for a couple of days, and then afterward started seeing different kinds of eye doctors, and that's when I learned, actually, it took a while, but I didn't learn for, I didn't get a diagnosis for quite a while because my eyesight was fine, but vision is your brain and it's how your brain processes what so all of these eye doctors for a long time kept telling me, your eyesight's fine. Your eyesight's fine. Like we cannot help you. At that point I had taken a sort of medical leave of absence from school and for me I felt so, it felt so public facing, I had to ask friends to help me just to get through my days. Like I remember breaking down in a Walgreens or a CVS because I had this migraine and I was looking for Excedrin at the store. I was looking for [00:09:00] Excedrin, and there, there was none anywhere.
And I was Googling, I was trying to think, where is the exec? Where's the nearest Excedrin? And come to find out it had been discontinued and I, it, I just fell apart completely. I had a total panic attack in the middle of Walgreens and I had to call a friend. My, my car was in the parking lot.
I had to call a friend who had to call a friend to come get me up off the floor at Walgreens and one of them drove me home in her car and the other had to take my car. So for me, when I think about that time, it was so public. It was such a public facing event, even if nobody else really. So they're like, oh, Molly, she's having some vision problems. She's fine. She'll sort it out. It'll be okay. It's not that, like even if other people's perception of it was quite different for me, it felt very public. Especially perhaps because I'm so privately guarded.
Haley Radke: Do you ever think, God, if this happened when TikTok was so big, there'd be some video of me crying in the aisle [00:10:00] and it would go viral. It's what's wrong with this poor lady?
Molly Gaudry: Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Haley Radke: So why is that easier to talk about than any adoption stuff, and it's a betrayal of your own body, which is the thing you're supposed to trust the most if you're in a healthy relationship with it.
Molly Gaudry: I suppose there's a part of me that thinks like a physical weakness on, for me anyway. For me, a physical weakness is something I have no shame about, it's to some extent something that I can, I don't know. That's just such a good question. It's it is what it is, and here it is. It's very [00:11:00] it's visible. Even though brain injury, right? It often isn't. But it felt so visible. It felt so visible to me. Whereas, my adoption story, first of all, I don't even know what the story is. There are so many different versions of the story coming from what the story that I grew up with, and I talk about this a little bit in the book, but I grew up having a relationship with my biological grandmother.
We sent letters, we sent gifts, we sent, little voice recordings back and forth. So there was a story that I grew up with and then that changed, that shifted just radically when I was 18 and went back to Korea. So at that time. Different translators had different answers for me asking the exact same people, the exact same questions.
So at this point there are, at least four [00:12:00] different narratives of how it came to be that I was placed for adoption. So that's confusing, and I keep that something I just puzzle over. But yeah, I think adoption, wherever it might. Wherever it might weaken me, it's probably emotionally, and so that needs to be private.
A brain injury with visual complications, sensory complications is not something that I can hide particularly well, and so even then, it took a while to put on the page. But it was easier in, in some way that physical weakness was easier for me to face, to confront, to try to process, try to force into some sort of a narrative, knowing that there is no easy narrative around that.
There's no conclusion, there's no closure, there's it just, it is what it is. And it continues to be, it's like it's work I'm able to do, [00:13:00] but when it comes to the adoption story, I'm not there yet. If I will ever be, I don't know.
Haley Radke: In the book you do share like these different versions of your time in Korea, and I thought it was so well done 'cause I'm taking notes as an interviewer. Okay. I'm taking notes about what am I gonna ask her about. And so I'm like, I have all these notes. And then it shifts and I'm like, oh my God. I can't ask her about this 'cause then she's gonna think I didn't actually read it 'cause it says it's different. And so then I'm, and I take all these notes and then it shifts. I'm like, oh my God. Which it felt so jarring in a good way as a reader. And I thought, wow, this is what adoption is. We don't know. You don't know. You said [00:14:00] you have four different narratives, this is what it's like. I love that you did that.
Molly Gaudry: It's what it's like if you even have access to somebody who can provide those answers. In my case, there are people who can provide the answers and they do so in very confusing and complicated ways. But I think also there, how I actually think how much more confusing is it when there are no answers? That's something I think about a lot.
Haley Radke: The phrase, the ghost kingdom and all of these fictions we create for ourselves, especially as children who may be fully I was in a fully closed adoption and so I had, some ideas, but not really.
And you were in an open adoption, meaning open. Open and closed adoption. Closed adoption. Neither party knows identities of the other, open the other parties, they at least know some sort of identity, whether or not there's communication [00:15:00] there was in your case, but that's such a good point that for those who have no info, you can create world upon world in your imaginings.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah.
Haley Radke: You wrote in Your Name is Rose, adopted children are self invented.
Molly Gaudry: Oh, that's so interesting. I'm actually trying to think back to that piece that comes from Gertrude Stein. She said she has a children's book is, and I think it's called, Your Name is Rose. Oh gosh. The world is round. It's like pink and blue. In my memory this book is. It's really fun and it's illustrated, it's perfectly Gertrude Steinian, and yet somehow it's like she's brought it down a level for children. So the, like the sound play is there, repetition is there all the sort of markers of like picture books, children, books chapter books. They're there, but it's still, it is just very Steinian [00:16:00] and yeah, so one of those repeating lines throughout that book is the little girl Rose and yeah your name is Rose and what is a rose and it, if this is a rose then what am I? So that book is doing like that kind of work.
Adopted children are self invented. I, if I had to that's you really did your research. That makes sense. The piece was way back. I'm certain that the piece had some collaging element, which does carry through too in this book as well. And in that piece, that little girl is trying to figure out who is she and what is the story and how do you put it together, and really just trying to unpack language.
Haley Radke: I'll read just a couple of sentences around it. Rose was your name and would you have been Rose? Namely the autobiographical mode of writing, adopted children are self invented. If your name had not been Rose because you have to be, fiction was as [00:17:00] fiction still is. There is an absence.
Molly Gaudry: I think that those are collaged lines, I think. Not one of those words is mine.
Haley Radke: Talk about that because you, in the book, you talk about this process you have and collecting words and pulling them out of a Ziploc bag and you have quotations from all these different pieces, and they're footnoted, so you don't exactly know what's the quote and what's not. And I'm talking about your new book now, not your not this piece.
Molly Gaudry: I actually really love that you uncovered that piece. I bet. Betting that I wrote that in a conceptual literature course is probably an assignment and it could have been collage a, a collage assignment or mashup or something.
I wish in this moment I could identify what, where each of those lines [00:18:00] is from. I really do. I really do.
Haley Radke: Soon as we get off this call, Molly's like going to her old file folders and pulling all these things apart.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah. And, but. It's so interesting. You know what's so interesting to be reminded of that piece is that while the new book, which began during that period, I began writing this book back then.
Not 100% of it is not quotation. Whereas I'm certain that with the Rose piece, I'm certain 100% of it is quoted text. But in this book, there's a deliberate move to indicate what in any given sentence to indicate what language is mine and what language is quote. Initially, this actually took years to figure out and we actually spent a fairly decent amount of time in my dissertation defense thinking through this.
Initially [00:19:00] I italicized, I didn't put quotation marks around, but I italicized the quoted text and then footnoted the, so the citation on the page. So you definitely knew. You knew where my part of the sentence ended and where the quotation began. And I think that might've been the version that I submitted for my dissertation.
And I think we talked about that. Why not quotate? Like, why not quotation marks like standard, why italics? And somewhere along the way I made the decision to remove those italics, to not put quotation marks and to make the language more seamless, but it was very important to keep the citations on the page as opposed to so footnotes as opposed to endnotes, [00:20:00] because I didn't, there was like, it's so funny.
There was a point to which I was willing to go, and then beyond that I was like no the citation needs to be there. People need to know that this is quoted text cited text. But I think, coming back to the rose piece, coming back to private and public, it's so interesting to think that when I might have first begun writing about adoption, I could not do it with my own language. I could only do it by collaging other people's language about adoption.
Haley Radke: My intrusive question that I'm going to say out loud is why?
Molly Gaudry: Oh.
Haley Radke: And you choose whether or not you wanna answer it, and I'll keep going.
Molly Gaudry: It's funny too because I said that I'm fairly certain that piece came from conceptual lit and so conceptual lit, from week to week there were different concepts, that we were playing with. So yeah, certainly collage would've [00:21:00] only been a week, I think.
But I remember that class and I remember working on different pieces from week to week and in memory, all of its quotation. I actually, I even remember there was a YouTube video that I transcribed. Oh my God. I really wish I could remember. And it was like, how to know you're a whitewashed Asian. And it was like, like 10 different things, maybe any number of different things. And I quoted all of them. That was one piece. It was entirely just this like list essay where the number followed by the text that was the quoted component. And then I responded in with other people's language.
But I definitely remember one, the reason why I was so obsessed with that particular video is because one of the items on the list was, but if you're adopted, you get a pass. Like it, it's a like how to know you're a whitewashed Asian [00:22:00] was like, oh. But okay, but if you're Asian and adopted no worries. It, you are off the hook. And so for some reason that's what made me put that list in there. Another piece for that little collection was. I was in a Facebook group for adoptees, and maybe something popped up in there about, maybe somebody asked a question and it resulted in a lot of different answers, but it was like, what are the questions that you're most sick of hearing?
Or what is it that you just wish people would stop asking? And it was just, and it wasn't, just transnational adoptees. It was the typical ones, right? Like you you should be grateful because otherwise you, you would've died in that dumpster and yeah, I think that the entire, every single piece that I wrote was language from other sources.
And so why would I have done that? First of all, I would've had the excuse because it's conceptual lit. I would have had this built in sort of access [00:23:00] point. You gotta do something for this class. Really interesting. It's really interesting that a conceptual literature course might have opened the door to me finding my way toward this book, which now actually changes the narrative of the book, because that's not part of the origin story that's written in this book about this book.
So there it is again. Like the narrative is just shifted. But why would I have just, again I, it's me processing pieces. You and I were talking about this before, there's something really restorative about taking things that are broken, things that are in pieces, and putting them back together.
And so it feels like the collaging impulse that I had that semester of gathering all of this language about adoption from adoptees, from things like that YouTube video commenting on taking the liberty to comment on adoptee experience, that all of that needed to be together. I needed to be able to [00:24:00] see all of that in a package several short pieces written.
And that maybe by the end of that class I was able to begin to think my way through that. And then even then, I did not go on to write, my adoption memoir. It's not like it, here's the puzzle. You put it together and now you're ready to go tell your very commercial, memoir version of this. That was not me. I did not do that. So it helped, but maybe only to a point. It's really interesting. I am, I'm definitely, you nailed it. I'm definitely, as soon as we hang up here, I'm gonna go search my files.
Haley Radke: I knew it. Okay. At a reading I watched you do on YouTube and then there was a little discussion after. You said you use a quote, literary defense mechanism, and then you allude to this. When I get [00:25:00] close, I drop a quote and then I walk away. Which as seasoned listeners may hear, Molly's continuing to do that with us in this conversation.
Molly Gaudry: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting too because for a long time, you know what's interesting? So I'm a cross genre writer. I write across genres. I write in every genre, but at some point so some of this book is about me being a PhD student at the University of Utah, which is one of the PhD, programs in the country where Experimentalism is, encouraged and they really push you to your limits on that. So there I could be for the first time actually because in my MFA program I was studying poetry. And I was only reading poetry, only talking about poetry. And for me, like the workshop [00:26:00] experience because at the time I was writing novels in verse, I could only give one page, one poem for workshop.
But essentially it was like the first paragraph of a chapter, or a section like a part of a novel. So it was very compressing to be in a poetry program. I was grateful for it. I was really grateful for it. I loved my experience there and I loved studying poetry.
It very much contributed to the writer I am today. But going to Utah was a dream because I could be me, I could be cross genre, and there were, faculty and fellow students who were on board for that and challenge, up for the challenge of reading in that way.
So at a certain point toward the end of my PhD experience and as I began to face the academic job market. Nobody's asking for full-time employment. Nobody is asking for a verse novelist. Nobody is asking for an experimentalist, right? They want a [00:27:00] fiction writer. They want a non-fiction writer or a poet who might be able to work in a second genre or multi-genre.
But at some point I had to pick a lane and I turned away from fiction. I had been a fiction writer for a very long time, but I turned away from fiction and I leaned into nonfiction and I got really interested in white space. I got really interested in the lyric essay, which is, another hybrid form gathering that sort of the lyric impulse from poetry and then including narrative from essay.
But the lyric essay. Makes use of white space, makes use of juxta, but juxtaposition. And so the way that I was theorizing, why am I interested in the lyric essay? It was because of those white spaces of where the writer gets close to a subject and for any reason they don't know where to go from there. They don't know the answer, they don't know the rest of the story. It's just too [00:28:00] painful and they don't wanna talk about it. That white space could be used as literary defense mechanism, he can back off. And it's, this has become a joke at this point, but like often in like lyric essays of a certain era, like after white space, because there's be something very intensely personal and then a white space and then according to
the Encyclopedia Britannica, blah, blah, blah. Or according to Miriam the definition of this word, the etymology of this word is blah, blah, blah. That is so clinical, it's so dry. It's so factual that to me, that completely read like defense mechanism. Oh, we got way too close there. Let me just back up a second. I'm not even willing at that point. That's maybe where I stole this from. Really it's this, it's a very common maneuver in lyric essay to drop that quote, that dictionary definition, that encyclopedia thing and go clinical. It's [00:29:00] very interesting. I and I, for a while, like I, I just, I got very obsessed with that.
So yes, for me I've, it took, it, this book has been a long time in the making and I started this book over 10 years ago, so it's really interesting to think about the convergence of a lot of that thinking that I was doing at the time and how my perception of the project, my perception of this book in its final version, in a way, is removed from those early experiences.
It is actually very interesting to think about, but yeah, I guess if I, when I think about the book now in these terms, the entire thing is like deflection. The entire book is me saying, no, we are not talking about this. And the brain injury. I don't, I, I don't fully know why to revisit that earlier question, but the brain injury is but we can talk about that. I'll let [00:30:00] you, I'll let you in on that. And in fact, when I was editing this book with Abby and Kathleen at Rose Metal, they pushed me farther. They actually asked me to fill in a lot more details about various of the quote unquote nonfiction parts of the book. And it was only in those brain injury sections where I really flesh things out a lot and that's the juxtaposition is we can talk about this, I'll tell you about this, but we're backing off in all of these other ways about everything else.
Haley Radke: I think you're more open-handed with infidelity confessions, intimate moments, the brain injury, all of those things than adoption.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And for a kept person, that's what I call them now. I think it's helpful. It's instructive in some way because often [00:31:00] that's the most interesting thing in quotation marks that they would see about us. And so to look at me as all of these other things this is me as a person, but you, that's private. You don't get, I think that's very interesting.
Molly Gaudry: Boundaries.
Haley Radke: Boundaries.
Molly Gaudry: I got walls built up.
Haley Radke: Molly's next appearance. She is going to be instructing us on boundaries. No. Okay. Let's go to another quote. I think, I guess I'll read a paragraph if that's okay.
Molly Gaudry: Okay.
Haley Radke: From Fit Into Me. And this citation is fellow adoptee author Jeanette Winterson. So I'm not sure which section, but you'll know. You'll know. Okay. Because a crucial part of our story is gone and violently like a bomb in the womb the baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of story. Of course, that is [00:32:00] how we all live. It's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing.
Molly Gaudry: I love that. I'm a, I'm like a little right now, you know what is it right now? It's October and the squirrels are running around, like gathering their nuts and burying their nuts. That's me with quotations. Like every time I read something I'm like, whoop, gonna grab that and put it, bury that one where I need it later. So that quotation, I remember reading that. It's so interesting because Jeanette Winterson to this day is one of the few adoptee writers that I can fully read. There's never been any resistance. I have never resisted opening either of her two, quote unquote memoirs. And it's interesting, I think we'll probably talk about this a little bit more later, but she's super hedgie too. You know that the first one, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. She also convinces the reader [00:33:00] that, that, here's the story, here's my story, and then just as easily, just as quickly says but it's not, right and I'm not gonna tell you where it is or isn't. And so then, you know what, a couple decades later her other memoir came out, why? Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? And that one's presents anyway, it presents as much more straightforward and she does share parts of her adoption story and finding people from her biological family, and she revisits oranges. And continues to play the game. She continues to say, but I'm not going to tell you what is or isn't true. What really did or didn't happen.
Haley Radke: Is this, your trajectory? Is this, what is that gonna happen in the next book?
Molly Gaudry: Goodness.
Haley Radke: Which is already written, so I know you could answer this [00:34:00] potentially.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah, I I have a novel on submission now. It's called the Time Loop, A Speculative Memoir: A Novel. It's fiction. It's a novel, but it presents as a speculative memoir.
And that question for the narrator is what if I got stuck in a time loop and wrote that as a metaphor, what if I wrote about that? What if I speculated on that experience and made it a metaphor for being stuck in grief and not being able to move forward? She is an adoptee, but she doesn't shy away from it in the way that I do. I don't know, like in this moment, I don't know to what extent it is or isn't part of her identity, her own, conception of herself, but. And the way that I wrote it was her aunt is the one that raises her oh and also the aunt is adopted. [00:35:00] So I have an adoptee who was raised by an adoptee, and that's.
Haley Radke: We haven't mentioned that yet.
Molly Gaudry: That's the story of, of that book.
Haley Radke: But your dad was also adopted?
Molly Gaudry: Yeah, my dad was adopted. Mine's, international adoption his is domestic. So for me, I, and I guess this is part of Time Loop, this is part of her story too. There has always been a resistance on my part. Even now I feel like I shouldn't really be taking up space in discussions, community adoption communities, adoptee communities, because I grew up with a parent who understood so much about what it felt like to be adopted. And because of that, it felt like there was so much connection for me and my dad growing up. He even had dark hair. He was Caucasian, but he had jet black hair and I have black hair and I, in every way [00:36:00] I could feel like I belonged to him. That feels like something that in, in, for years I have felt like other adoptees don't have that.
And so that's a, it's a huge contributing factor to me, not facing, confronting writing about, thinking about entering into adoption spaces. But yeah, clearly I'm working through that. I'm really trying to puzzle through that, because now that's in two books.
Haley Radke: I love how your writerly brain is taking you to all these places that maybe you're, emotional side if we're going like, split your brain into pieces is yeah, we're not actually going there. That's funny. Your writerly instinct is tricking you into processing all these things. That is so
Molly Gaudry: I think that's, I think that's right. For sure.
Haley Radke: It's funny. I think that's [00:37:00] funny. I'm on the side of processing, so that's fine. Okay. If you're okay to go to the personal, just briefly before we do recommended resources. You shared earlier that you went to Korea when you were 18, and you share about that more in the book in this in and out kind of way. But can you share with me and our listeners just a little bit more behind the curtain? Your thoughts on that 'cause I think, part of that will be extremely relatable to many.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah. So this sort of, the origin of that, which is interesting is not in the book. It's, there's not even a little bit of this in the book, but when I was a kid I went to one of those summer camps for Korean adoptees and I know that a lot I like personally, know a lot of other adoptees that did not enjoy that experience, but I did and so I went, from the time I was like a [00:38:00] little kid, like six, maybe seven. When I turned 13, I became a junior counselor, and then I, even for high school, I left home. And so I even came back in the summers to continue to be involved with that camp and that camp was in the Midwest. It was like a tri-state, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. One of the counselors when I was in high school, one of the counselors was from LA so I think actually maybe several of them were from LA, but one of them particularly was from LA and the summer before I left for college, she reached out and she said a spot has opened up on a Korean homeland tour for adoptees.
If you'll let the LA Times, my friend at the LA Times cover your story, you can have that spot. But do you have a visa? You're gonna need a visa. And I didn't. And somehow the Korean consulate in Chicago, where other counselors were [00:39:00] from, somehow that got fast tracked and I was able to go on this trip.
So I did. I was, as an adult, the, my first time going back to Korea was on this tour for adoptees and it had that Korean culture camp vibe because it was, all of us were adopted and I just remember like the, one of the most fascinating things about that tour, gosh, one of the most interesting things about that tour is I was on my flight left from LAX and what is it, like a 14 hour flight? I, it's a really long flight and there were all these Korean people around me, speaking not English, and I 100% just figured, oh, they're speaking Korean. And then we get off the plane and there's somebody there with a big, welcome Homeland tour, sign.
Come here and all of these people from my flight are coming with me. And as we start to [00:40:00] gather, I realize that oh my God, they're speaking German. That's French. That is I come to find out Norwegian, Swedish, like people from Belgium and that was just one tour one. Korea was at that time, Korea was doing this week after week after week, multiple tours.
And mine was just one. There were, I think a hundred of us, 50 from the states and 50 from the rest of the world. And at the end of that tour, more people that I knew from culture camp, from some just other places in my life. Led to me being able to set up the option to stay longer and reunite with my grandmother and my aunt, both of whom I had met before when my mom and I went back [00:41:00] when I was still a kid, like six or seven years old or something. We went back, we met my grandmother, we met my aunt. But at 18, when I went back on this tour, that was an invitation that was open to me was to be able to go meet them again. And so I did. I stayed longer, and when I met them, they said your father wants to meet you.
Can you come back? And I was like, what? So this is what we're talking about. Before that the story had shifted for as long as I had grown up there was, the reason I was given up for adoption is because my father dropped me off at his mother's house and vanished. Nobody had heard from him seen him for all this time. And somewhere along the way, somewhere along the way, the story was that he was a roadie. He was just on the road all the time and, yeah. Had no interest in being, a father. So [00:42:00] at 18 I go back and these two women are like, your father wants to meet you. And I was just like, what? What? So I did. I did. And he I'm 18. He is at the time married and had two children, and those two children were a lot younger. I think I, I think six and nine, so easily, a decade. He started his family a decade after I had come along, so I stayed there with them for a while, that summer.
And then I was invited to go back the following summer, and so this is what's in the book. I went back the following summer and somehow my stepmother's kindness and her open arm welcome and her willingness to integrate me into her family, what I regard to be, her family, her children.
I hit the brakes hard. Like hard. I hit the [00:43:00] brakes. I like, booked a flight back to the states and basically promptly forgot about that for years. I was a mess in college. It was just a disaster. And I can, with clarity, say now that I was a disaster because I didn't know what to do with any of that.
So somehow her saying to me, I accept you, you are one of us. Anytime we are here for you, and, the specifics are in the book. But her saying that I just, I could not, I, I don't know why I couldn't handle that. I still don't know why really. So there are no answers about the book doesn't offer any answers about why, I did that, but I left Korea.
I've never gone back. I've had no communication with anybody over there. I just complete 180. I have regrets about that. I regret not the adults, but I regret popping up for two summers in the lives of these two children and then just vanishing. And I think some of that regret comes through in this book, [00:44:00] but I do wish I hadn't done that. I really wish I hadn't done that. Adults fine, but not I just really have not come to a place where I can forgive myself yet for having two kids out there. Who was that? Who was that that came here, and then where did she go?
That feels in some way, not exactly the same, but in some way that kind of experience about family and vanishing, no answers being gone like in some way. That's me doing to them what has been done to all of us. So I don't know how to deal with that.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. My little two cents is, so the price you had to pay to go possibly get more answers was publicity LA Times coverage.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah. I don't even remember though what happened with that. I, that was the deal, [00:45:00] but I, in my memory. I don't know if we ever did that story or if I might have answered the questions, but there is no story.
Haley Radke: There's no story.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah. Probably I was a mess and it probably, I don't know.
Haley Radke: There's no happy sellable story here. There's no adoptee reunion porn that audience are gonna bite on.
Molly Gaudry: Probably, yeah.
Haley Radke: Oh good for you not giving them that. Okay, Molly, thank you so much for pulling the curtain back a little bit for us and you mentioned earlier when this releases, your book will be out into the world, Fit Into Me a novel, a memoir.
I love that you're a hybrid genre author, this is experimental and my favorite thing that you do in the book is you hint at these little things and the payoffs are so big when [00:46:00] they come. I remember, I gasped at one. Like I'm not gonna, I won't say any of them. No spoilers. No spoilers here, but I was like, oh my gosh. She knows what she's doing, manipulating me. And I loved it. And of course, you, this is contains a novela within, which is. I'll say part three to your other books, We Take Me Apart and Desire a Haunting. And I just found that so intriguing, how you wove those all through. So I hope folks will give it a read.
Molly Gaudry: Thank you so much. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Is there more to say about it that you wanna let people know that I have maybe perhaps missed?
Molly Gaudry: I guess what I'll say is, echoes a lot of what we've talked about here. I have a very complicated relationship with this book. I like, I want it to be in the world, and yet I wonder, I wonder what's, what might happen as a [00:47:00] result.
I've gone from loving this book to hating this book and enjoying the process of revisiting the book through edits and really hating it. But I guess, it's so funny. I was gonna, I was just going to say something. I was gonna say something like if it doesn't suck a little bit, then it's probably not worth it but I actually remember another writer, Renee Gladman, I had said something like that to her.
And she was like, that's not right. No. She was like, no where does that come from? She was like, no, actually, things don't have to suck for things to, for you to accept it. Anyway, yeah that, I have very complicated feelings about the book. I do want people to, I want it to be in the world, but I'm protective of it. So we'll see what happens.
Haley Radke: Can I tell, I'm gonna tell you my favorite line from it, because. I just recently had a conversation with fellow adoptee and therapist Mirella Stoyanova, [00:48:00] and she gave me this insight all of us. And I was like, it's one of those things where you thinking about it for days and days, and every time I try to explain it, people are like I don't know what you're talking about.
And you. Talk about this. You say orphans are a tangible reflection of the fear of abandonment that all humans experience. And that's exactly what she was trying to tell me. And you are trying, I'm like, yeah. Exactly. So although I, we, I joked around with you about this and we seriously talked about this. There is a lot of adoption in this book and I think there's a lot of very insightful. And relatable things that folks will get from this. Molly, what do you wanna recommend to us?
Molly Gaudry: So actually Haley, I'll tell you that's a quote.
Haley Radke: No, it's not. That quote is from hyphen Molly Gaudry [00:49:00] PhD.
Sure. Yeah. It's okay. So we've got, Melanie Kimball.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay. Thanks Melanie. Thanks Molly, for digging up Melanie's words.
Molly Gaudry: Yeah, it's but I think that's right. Your experience with that quote is my experience with these quotes and why they're here. They say what I can't say they, some something makes sense. Something clicks something is, helpful in some way and so it made its way into the book. So my recommendation actually is another book. It's Tracy O'Neill's, Woman of Interest, a Memoir, and I read it, only fairly recently, but I really loved it. I was, like I said before I've resist certain books about adoption and I'm not entirely sure why, but what I do know is that Tracy's book, like Jeanette Winterson's Tracy's [00:50:00] book, presents not as this beginning, middle end experience of adoption. For better or worse, right? But hers presents as a detective novel. She is searching for biological mother and hires an investigator even, or says, says she does. Because I was able to read it for the genre play, for the hybridity, for the experiment, and the way that, my conception of any memoir how this plays with that, I was easily able to turn the pages. I was easily able to read her adoption story and not only that, but like my story her, she's also got lots of different narratives of what had been told to her. So yeah, I was able, I was really just able to read this book and I, again, I wish I could articulate [00:51:00] why or where this resistance comes from.
But yeah, Jeanette Winterson and Tracy O'Neill are authors that I was able to read and have done a lot of good work for me in terms of making progress on this journey.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I read Tracy's book before it came out. I got a advance reader's copy and I was like, this is so different. I love when there's new which is, it's probably so up your alley. It's so up your alley. I totally get that. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that recommendation to us. What a delight to get to meet you, Molly. It's such a pleasure to talk with you. And where can folks connect with you online and find Fit Into Me?
Molly Gaudry: Haley, it's been a real pleasure to be here. I really appreciate, your time and attention and most of all your care.
So the book is available for purchase on the Rose Metal Press website. It should be available on all the [00:52:00] usual book buying places as well. But I would encourage folks to, to buy direct from the publishers themselves. And then more information and contact page is available on my website, mollygaudry.com.
Haley Radke: Perfect. We will link to both of those places in the show notes for folks. Thanks so much, Molly.
Molly Gaudry: Okay, great. Thanks Haley.
Haley Radke: I love it when people can be really honest about what they don't know and what they haven't processed yet and choose not to share yet. I think that's really healthy and I don't know if we always model it super well. I feel like I'm pretty open book and I've done a lot of work around most of the things that I share and [00:53:00] I know people process things at such different timelines. When I was talking with Molly, I was thinking it must be so difficult to write something, five years ago, 10 years ago before it sees the light of day, see the public. I'm often working on these shows a couple months ahead and I'll have a great interview like this one and be like, oh my gosh, I wanna release it right away.
And it's only like a few months to wait. And so I'm curious about that. Like you take this time to process and write and that takes a really long time that it's finally ready to see the world and there's still a long time to wait. I don't know. I don't know if I could do that. It's probably good for us.
It's probably good for us to wait anyway. I hope that you check out Molly's work. It's very different and I love [00:54:00] it. It's so unique and it really it takes you to places that you may not have explored before, and maybe that if you're creative, it can give you some permissions to, push the reader away sometimes or pull you in closer but for these topics instead of these. It's just very, it's very cool. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. I am working on my brand new project called On Adoption. I would love for you to check it out. We are fundraising through Adoptees for Family Preservation and I, every dollar is accounted for and is being used wisely to make just a very high quality show that I think will help to change folks' minds about the impact [00:55:00] adoption really has, and to really reveal a lot of what's happening in the adoption industry today. So I'd love for you to join. You can check out links in the show notes to support that project. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.
