Cheryl Strayed Once Fished Shit Out Of Oprah’s Toilet And Put It In Her Handbag (And Other Great Stories From Interrobang)
"I actually reached in, with my bare hands, into Oprah Winfrey's toilet, and I grabbed a massive wad of crap out, and I wound it in a lot of toilet paper, and I stuck it in my purse."
If you’ve attended any of the myriad “ideas” festivals that sprinkle the Australian cultural calendar, you’ll be well-acquainted with the tyranny of Designated Audience Question Time.
Usually comprising the final 15 minutes of a panel, conversation or talk, the audience is invited to ask a question of those on stage — “And please make sure it’s a question,” pleas the more experienced facilitator. But among those who know how to heed instruction, there is always at least one monologist who clasps desperately at the mic and devotes the remaining minutes to telling us — at length, in detail and without pause — about whatever agenda they brought with them: their politics; their problem with yours (“as a male feminist”); their nonsensical complaint about an unrelated article that they likely didn’t read; or, worst of all, Their Forthcoming Novel. If they do end on a question, it’s usually an irritating one: “I came in late, so sorry if you covered this, but how should we solve global poverty?”
Over the last weekend, Melbourne’s writing hub the Wheeler Centre launched a fairly risky experiment: what if, instead of avoiding the audience questions, you actively embraced them? For the first half of October, the Interrobang Festival compiled, they say, over a thousand crowd-sourced questions, ranging from the pedantic (‘What’s the difference between muffins and cupcakes?’) to the philosophical (‘What is it to be wild?’; ‘Why be good?’). The public then voted on the ones they liked the best, and the festival brought a “brains trust” to venues through Melbourne CBD to answer them across two days, and 25 events.
As with any event like this, the triumph was in the curation: the trust included respected journalists and essayists like Mark Colvin, Meghan Daum, Geraldine Brooks, Jane Caro and Cheryl Strayed; scientists and science communicators Upulie Divisekera, Dr Alan Duffy and Maggie Ryan Sandford; comedians and humorists Nakkiah Lui, Benjamin Law, Rob Delaney and Sammy J; and experts from a variety of fields, like former Greek Minister for Finance and rockstar economist Yanis Varoufakis, philosopher and writer Raimond Gaita, chef and presenter Adam Liaw, and blogger and tech activist Cory Doctorow.
The opening extravaganza, ‘Questions On Notice’, was framed like a quiz show, as the Wheeler Centre’s director Michael Williams picked random questions out of a barrel and fired them at teams of terrified panelists — a fun way to introduce a difficult concept. Most of the sessions took place the next day, varying between solo presentations, panels and one-on-ones; some followed the format of a more regular ideas event, while others very much didn’t.
Here are some highlights.
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Rob Delaney On Spooning, And What Depression Is To Him
In the first session of the festival on Friday night, Benjamin Law hosted a Q&A with UK-based, American-born comedian Rob Delaney, the co-star and co-creator of my favourite show this year, Catastrophe. Delaney is also an author, Twitter hero and, as Law described him, “America’s national DILF, and the reason half of your chairs are damp right now.”
Law stuck to the festival’s spirit while chatting to Rob Delaney, firing crowd-sourced questions seemingly at random at his guest; while some other sessions didn’t diverge too much from the format you’d expect at an ideas festival, the controlled chaos of this one led the conversation into unexpected, delightful and occasionally heartfelt territory, as the pair discussed personal brands, climate change, straight white man privilege, Twitter, love, sex, and Catastrophe.
In one particular highlight, Delaney was asked what to do with the lower arm when cuddling a partner: “Well, ‘Why are you on my side of the bed’ is the first issue,” Delaney answered. “My wife and I will cuddle for a minute and then we’ll be like, ‘Well wasn’t that nice? See you tomorrow after a full sleep cycle!'” (For that sweet minute, he’s the big spoon: “Obviously. Otherwise I’m like a hairy hermit crab and she’s my beautiful little shell.”)
But the session itself was named after a more nuanced question: ‘Are cockroaches attracted to human tears?’ Law chose to interpret it a broader sort of sense: “Does misery beget misery?” For Delaney, that certainly seems to be the case.
Thirteen years ago, Delaney — then an alcoholic — was in a car accident that prompted him to get sober (his character on Catastrophe, Rob Norris, is also sober). Almost immediately, he realised he had another problem to deal with: severe depression.
“I had wanted to get sober for years, and had tried for varying lengths of time, and then … in a blackout, I drove into a building,” he told us. “Nobody else was involved in the accident, but I realised that my drinking could kill people, you know? And I didn’t want to kill anybody. At the time, I didn’t care if I lived or died — which on its own is sad, but I’m sure some people can relate to that. But when I realised other people could die I said, ‘no, time to knock this off’.
“When I removed drugs and alcohol from the equation, it was like fight or flight, you know, while I was having all this surgery post-accident. And then my brain was like, ‘Haaaang on there, pal. Where’s my medicine?’ My brain just completely stopped working, and I went into a very severe depression and came very close to suicide.”
After quoting from writer Andrew Solomon’s TED Talk (“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality”), Law asked Delaney how he would describe his depression. “I try not to use any flowery language, and just talk about the physical symptoms,” Delaney answered, flatly. “For me, this is what depression was: I wouldn’t sleep at night, which is horrible, and then in the morning, as soon as the toothbrush touched my tongue, I would throw up. I had diarrhea all the time, I was losing weight, I didn’t masturbate forever — which I mean come on, that’s bizarre; you have to masturbate at that age or you’re going to kill somebody. But I didn’t masturbate and I didn’t want to kill anybody, except myself; I would regularly imagine graphically killing myself. And just oppressive doom — I mean physical, thrumming pain. I was in pain all the time. If I looked down I would constantly catch myself with my fists clenched around my thumb like a baby … That’s what depression was to me.”
It was only after he found a successful medication regime that Delaney says he began producing work that mattered. “I don’t like to take medication, but I stopped a few years in and then I had a second episode of depression as bad — or worse — than the first one. So: I completely agree that medication these days is totally over-prescribed; I completely agree that pharmaceutical companies would looooove everyone to take them; but I experientially know, in my bones, that I’m one of the folks who should.”
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Cheryl Strayed Once Put Shit In Her Handbag At Oprah’s House
Another program highlight featured a conversation between essayist, Wild author and Dear Sugar advice-giver Cheryl Strayed, and author and columnist Meghan Daum. Daum had been (lightheartedly) critical of the festival’s concept — “I call it the festival of unanswerable questions” — so chose her own way through the discussion: by reading lines from Strayed’s new book (a collection of quotes from her Dear Sugar column and podcast), and structuring discussion points around them.
Surprising nobody, Strayed was a shining golden beacon of majestic wisdom, and the audience ate up every word. The pair discussed the pressures of writing in the internet age, and the “currency of envy” that exists on social media. “I would have struggled fiercely with jealousy if I started writing now,” Strayed conceded; later, Daum admitted to pieces she’d never have written if she’d known they’d end up online.
But Daum saved the best question for last: “You have all these famous friends now — Reece Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Oprah Winfrey. Which of them do you like best; and why should we not hate you?”
From here, Strayed launched into the story of the year.
“Terrible things have –” she begun, before a pause. “My daughter clogged Oprah’s toilet by having a little episode. She has also vomited in Reece Witherspoon’s bathroom. We’re waiting to see what happens at Laura Dern’s house, with my daughter.”
But it was the Oprah fiasco that demanded details.
“‘You must behave very properly at Oprah Winfrey’s house,’ I said. And we were there five minutes and we were having a flood. At Oprah’s house. This is a true story.”
And how did Oprah react?
“We made Oprah… not aware of the situation,” Strayed answered. “Because I went in there with my bare hands and — Let’s just say that I gathered a lot of things and put them in my very large bag. Let’s just say I put shit in my purse. My daughter’s shit.
“This is why it’s a good idea not to have children. I actually reached in, with my bare hands, into Oprah Winfrey’s toilet, and I grabbed a massive wad of crap out, and I wound it in a lot of toilet paper, and I stuck it in my purse. Because we had just arrived at Oprah’s house! I was mortified.”
“My poor daughter,” Strayed continued, admitting she had never told this story publicly before — or even to Oprah (“I guess enough time has passed now.”). “But that’s the other thing that’s so amazing. they don’t — we had to say to them, ‘Okay, Oprah’s this wildly famous person’. And they’re like, ‘She’s this nice lady we know’.
“For Christmas last year I gave my kids iPods … They downloaded like every emoji that exists, and they would text me every emoji. And my son found that there was this Oprah emoji, and so he texted Oprah her emoji and said, ‘Oprah, I found this emoji, isn’t this cool?’ — and within 30 seconds she texted him back and said, ‘Carver, that is my favourite emoji!'”
“How old is your son?” asked Daum.
“Eleven.”
“And he has Oprah’s mobile number. Wow.”
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Questions And Words Are People Too
The sessions worked best when the questions were specific. Cory Doctorow and Alan Brough’s session — ‘What is the best way to destroy the internet before it destroys us?’ — was as entertaining as it was deeply alarming, and Delaney dealt with wit and good humour with some of the sillier questions of the festival, like ‘Why can’t we decimalise time?’ and ‘If a mansplainer is manspreading at the same time, is he a ‘manspleader’, or a ‘mansprainer’?’
Other sessions were harder to parse. Featuring Geraldine Brooks, Meghan Daum, Nakkiah Lui and Sally Warhaft, and hosted by Jane Caro, ‘Why be good?’ took a while to warm up beyond Feminism 101 (“What is feminism?” “Can men be feminists?” “Why is feminism a bad word?”).
Meanwhile, ‘When is Australia racist?’ — with Abdul Abdullah, Benjamin Law, Nakkiah Lui, Greg Phillips and GQ Thailand‘s editor Voranai Vanijaka — was a fascinating and occasionally combative discussion, but some asked if leaving white people off the panel only underlined how invisible they are from these conversations.
In the closing session, ten of the speakers were asked to talk for eight minutes on the topic, ‘Are words more important than actions?’ The answers were all tinged with personal stories: Strayed talked about the time her children used her own words against her, and won; Lui told a new version of her story ‘I Am Protected‘, about a childhood smoking ceremony that left her under the care of protective spirits, which affected her approach to life and love; Mary Norris, the “Comma Queen” who has spent three decades as copy editor at the New Yorker, admitted, “My life has been completely squandered on words,” but drew parallels between the session’s provocation and the question of the chicken and the egg: “Actions give birth to words,” she said, “and words inspire actions.”
But commentator and broadcaster Sally Warhaft’s response was the hardest to argue with: she talked of the most difficult period of her life when, eight weeks after a friend of hers demonstrated expansive generosity by carrying her two twins to birth, the Indonesian government demonstrated a disregard for human life and justice, executing her close friend Myuram Sukumaran and fellow Australian Andrew Chan. Of course actions are more important, she said: words alone would never have killed them.
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Rob Delaney Is An Excellent Dad (But Definitely Won’t Have Sex With You)
Earlier this year, Meghan Daum released the book Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids. It was largely thanks to her presence at Interrobang that that particular topic kept rearing its head, but Benjamin Law chose to flip it with Rob Delaney: “A question my partner and I often get is, ‘Why aren’t you having children?’ … But I think the other interesting question is ‘Why DO you have children?’, because it seems like a much bigger decision.”
“I like kids,” answered Delaney, who has three boys under the age of five. “That’s one reason. I enjoy being around children. With each kid we’ve had, it has selfishly made me become more focused as a person.”
In fact, he met his wife when they were both volunteering at a camp for children with disabilities, in Massachusetts. “It’s so fun to be with a kid and see them see something for the first time and remember what that was like.
“They just have these beautiful minds, and stomachs that you can make noises on. You know you can pick a baby up by an ankle? You don’t have to hold it like they do — if you made the baby, pick it up by its ankle; be like ‘Fuck you! I’m gonna hold you by your ankle!'”
By this point in his charm offensive, one audience question was entirely unsurprising: “I wonder if you have discussed with your wife the prospect of an open relationship, and if you would consider me?”
He chose to answer it seriously.
“I grew up in a Catholic family. My dad grew up in a Catholic orphanage, and my mum grew up going to Catholic schools, so therefore I feel very guilty about sex. Even when I masturbate or have sex with my wife, I still finish and am like, ‘Oh God, what have I done.’
“So we’re in a monogomous relationship and I don’t have sex with people who aren’t her. Is that the right thing to do? I really don’t know. I think Churchill said something like, ‘Democracy’s the worst kind of government except for all the other kinds’. And for me that’s sort of how it is. Sure, we could try to engineer an open relationship, but that would be a hassle.”
“I’m personally incredibly conservative,” he continued. “I’m socially liberal — like, I 100% believe that people should be riding unicorns around shirtless with their buttholes out, like, ‘Here’s my butthole, I’m on a unicorn’, fucking whatever — but me, I’m in a corner like, ‘That’s good for them, but here I am reading my newspaper’. Not even a fucking iPad, a fucking physical newspaper.
“So I’m afraid of you that you feel free enough to even ask that. I mean, for Christ’s sake.”
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For more from the Wheeler Centre and Interrobang, head here.
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Flights and accommodation paid for by the Wheeler Centre.
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Feature image by Connor Tomas O’Brien.