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Nerve.com
What's your favorite story that you've done for Nerve?
Interviewing Billy Idol, of course. I asked him to marry me, and he said, "Okay." He said, "Well, what do you look like?" and did I have any money?
I remember the publicist breaking in, and telling you to get back on topic, and you were like, "That is the topic."
Not only did she break in on us, but she hung up on me. When the love-train gets rolling, it takes more than a warning from a publicist to stop the train.
What was the assignment you really hated doing?
The thing I did about my mom and dad was unpleasant.
The feedback on that was amazing. People really relate to it.
I think Generation X in general was in a difficult position. It's not that we were so much molested but we were "parentified," I think that's the term. We were generally the latchkey kids who were treated as a confidante, especially of sexual matters, because of the sexual revolution and there were so many single parents, and you were supposed to tell the truth to your children about everything -- which was not a good idea in retrospect. So it was sort of like we were all kind of semi-molested, and yet it was never real molestation. Just like when people are not actually physically abused, but it was just weird, like a weird punishment. That's almost worse than if someone hits you, because then you know, "Oh, someone hit me," and then you can get past it. But sexual closeness that we've had, especially with our mothers, had a tremendous, weird, weird effect on our boundaries and our ideas about sexuality. And I haven't really heard anyone exploring this, and I think this essay was touching, so to speak, on it. I wish somebody would write a big thing on it for Time magazine, but you can count on Nerve to have the germ of the big idea.
I feel like part of the memoir and blog phenomenons is that we have this idea that talking fixes everything.
We don't even question it. It's just right to spew. And also, children are not your equals or friends. You know, it's funny. My dad introduced me to punk; he wanted me to be more rebellious. When I was fifteen, he made me watch a documentary on the Sex Pistols, and he said, "Well, why aren't you doing something like that?" And so I did, but it's kind of like, how could I have my own rebellion when I was serving my father? And I never had a chance to even find out if I would have my own rebellion. Of course I could rebel against rebellion by becoming ultra-conservative, and I did try that — and that's why "The Lisa Diaries" ended, because of my brief flirtation with ultra-conservativism. Then I wrote an essay on Nerve on why I wasn't having sex anymore.
You've been in trouble over your writing for Nerve. What's the latest with that?
The trouble is, my former subject has decided to take everything that I've ever written for Nerve and show it to the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and has tried to take custody away from me, and show it to judges and lawyers and investigators and psychological evaluators. And you know what's ended up happening is, all of them say, "I don't care; as long as you don't do it in front of your kids, that's fine with me."
And I think that's the whole problem with Generation X, is that our parents did do it in front of us, because they were trying to include us and be our best friends. So I can do anything I want as long as I'm not my kid's best friend. And it's been really good for me to have all of these investigations, in a way, because I used to have two lives — my life with Nerve and my other artistic endeavors or whatever — and I took my kids to school and I tried to be the perfect PTA person. I tried to have a secret life. And Nerve exposed all that. The mailman knew me from Nerve; he was a subscriber. Because Nerve got really huge. I had no idea. When I signed up with Nerve, I thought it was going to be fifty people in Arkansas who were going to gratefully subscribe every month. It turned out, a taxi driver recognized me from Nerve. My neighbor recognized me. My landlord read about my orgy in his house! My child's pediatrician read "The Lisa Diaries" in book form because he saw it in the bookstore. And he loved it.
So it was really good, because I had been scrambling all the time, because I actually didn't want the Nerve people to know that I was secretly a PTA mother, and I didn't want the school people to know that I was actually a whore. When everybody found out, it turned out everybody still liked me. So Nerve really freed up my energy, because it took so much energy — I was trying to hide everything from everybody. Now I'm much more social, because I don't have to worry.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Nerve consulting editor and Babble editor-in-chief Ada
Calhoun has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor and theater critic at New York magazine, and her softball team's MVP.
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