PicoBlog

At the outset of starting this site, I had a rather ambitious idea to write a series of posts under the heading, “Books that changed my life.”

That sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it?

But it’s true. Words can re-frame your sense of being. The right book at the right time can set you on a completely different — and better — course in life.

I can think of no author and no book more worthy of starting the series than Drew Magary, whose “The Night The Lights Went Out” (A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage) holds a special place for me.

It’s a great book and a gripping retelling of how someone I consider a friend nearly died.

It also served as foreshadowing in my life. In the book, which came out in late 2021, Magary openly talks about the role therapy played in his recovery.

In several places in the book, he urges people to follow his lead. “Why hadn’t I gone sooner?” he writes after seeing the positive effects of seeing a therapist. “Why, why, why, why, why?”

It’s a question I would ask myself about a year later as I began my journey with a therapist as I started to untangle what had gone sideways in my life.

I didn’t listen to Drew soon enough, but I remembered what he wrote as I prepared for my first meeting with my therapist. It’s not hyperbole to say Drew’s words — and therapy — have changed my life for the better.

It was my pleasure, then, to talk this week with Drew about his book, about therapy, and what it had meant to me. We also talked about the writing process in general. And of course we had to talk a little about the Vikings, a subject that has dominated the past 15-plus years of our conversations.

If you would like to listen to the entire conversation (which is naturally full of Drew swearing, in case that sort of thing offends you), I’ve embedded the audio below. After that are some of what I consider the highlights of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, for those of you who prefer to read.

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Rand: This whole book is about how you almost died. The comeback from that is just amazing. So, for anybody who hasn't read it before — and they should — what was the process of even writing a book like that?

Magary: It was December of 2018. I was at a party. I was still at Deadspin and we had an award show. We had an after party at a karaoke bar and I got there early. I had a few beers and had a slice of pizza. I walked out to the bathroom. I was in the hallway alone and I collapsed on my way in there. It was a brain hemorrhage, and I fractured my skull. No one knows if the hemorrhage came first or the fracture came first. No one knows why I collapsed. … I ended up having emergency brain surgery at 6 a.m. that morning and that saved my life, but I was in a medically induced coma for two weeks. … It was a bit self-indulgent to do all this research into myself. But this is a part of my my life that I have no memory of and the memories that I do have are incorrect.

Rand: So much of your recovery was physical. You had to restore your hearing, you had to relearn how to do things. You had to kind of piece together your story but also how to operate again in the world.

Magary: I mean, I had to learn to walk again. I had physical and occupational therapy in the hospital. They tell you 20 words and you have to tell them, you know, which 20 you remember right after they say it or you have to count from 100 backwards and you have to arrange items on a shelf. You have to fill out a day planner. The very basics of life. They have to make sure you can do them or if you can't quite do them, they have to have you practice until you are, you know, back on your feet, literally.

Rand: So you, you did all this work, but one of the final pieces of the puzzle for you, it seems, is in a chapter of the book called “Therapy.” The whole book is excellent. But where I get to the point where, hey, this is a book that changed my life is the chapter on therapy because you advocate: go to therapy. Listen, everybody, go to therapy. If you can, you will get help, you will become a better person.

And in my own journey, I think I was very much of the same mind as you. Therapy is something that's nice for someone else. It's like public transportation, right? It's a great idea for someone else. You don't look down upon it. You don't think it's a bad idea. I knew plenty of other people in my life who had been to therapy. But then I hit a low point in my life about 18 months ago, had a gambling problem, had all sorts of stuff that I needed to clean up in my life. All of a sudden I start going. I feel a lot better. I was like, wow, how come I haven't been doing this for much longer? Before I started going, I remembered this part of your book and I read it again. It seems so simple. “Go to therapy” was important to me. How did you get to that point where you realized, hey, I could use some mental help, too?

Magary: Well, I came out of the injury and I had damaged my frontal lobe and if you know your anatomy, you know that the frontal lobe is the part of the brain that controls emotions. If you damage that, then your emotional control is compromised in certain ways. I had a short fuse. I would yell. I never punched anybody or anything like that, but I was a crank and I was not pleasant to be around, particularly at the dinner table. If you ever been around angry people, they sort of cast a pall. They sort of poison the room. I would do that.

And so my wife and I both agreed, oh, I needed to do something about it. The easiest thing was to take a pill. I was supposed to do it in conjunction with therapy. But if you've ever tried to get therapy, you know that the simple act of getting an appointment is not terribly easy. I live in the D.C. area, which is very large, but also doctors are just locked up forever everywhere. … And so I said, well, look, I'll just take the pills and see if that works — when I was told by a doctor it was pills and therapy. But I was like, “the pills will do it.” And the pills didn't do the job.

It ended with me exploding one day in the car. My wife was like, no, I can't live with you like this, you’ve got to do something. I was just like, OK, I'll find any old therapist and there was one who happened to be a mile away from me. She had an opening. This is a family therapist. She wasn't necessarily specifically trained for someone who had what I had, but a lot of people haven't had what I had. There aren’t a lot of 47-year-old, half-Deaf, unable to smell, stoke survivors, you know, who are also professional writers and stuff.

But then it was just a simple act of talking out your problems to someone else and having them ask you questions. They ask you the questions so you can get the to the answers yourself. And that was invaluable.

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Rand: It sounds so simple, but there's a certain stigma about it, especially with men in society still. I think that’s starting to change a little bit. But why do you think we are so reluctant? I mean, you had a specific reason to go. But I would imagine even before any of this happened, even before anything really bad happened to me, like I could have benefited from this. A lot of people could benefit from it.

Magary: I grew up in the 80s and the 90s when, I mean, it wasn't as unenlightened as say, the 1950s or whatever. But if you were vulnerable and you admitted to being vulnerable, and you went and sought help, it was a sign of weakness. So I obviously could have used it but I was like you. I was like, yeah, I don't really need it and then you get it and it’s like well this is actually quite helpful.

Rand: I feel like one of the breakthroughs I had in therapy was talking through a family vacation we had almost exactly a year ago. We went to California, we went to the Palm Springs area. Then we were going go to Los Angeles for the last day and I had it in my head that we had to get to a beach in L.A. before sunset. I wanted to see the sunset over the ocean in Los Angeles.

And we went to the zoo in Palm Springs that morning before we left for L.A. and it was like kind of slowing our day down. And I was like getting antsy. I was like, we’ve gotta get to L.A. We’ve gotta get there for the sunset. I'm driving like a maniac. There's traffic. We stopped for lunch at like the fastest place possible. I'm rushing us back into the car. Everybody's got to go pee. I'm like, no, we gotta get to the beach and we finally pull over, we go pee. We get to the beach like five minutes before the sunset and I feel vindicated and my wife's like, what was that? You made the whole car ride there miserable because you had something stuck in your head. Everybody agreed the sunset was magnificent, but it didn't have to be this.

Talking about it later in therapy, it was like, yeah, I have a problem when plans go off-kilter. I have a big problem with that. And that's something I've had to work on. If I think something is supposed to happen and then something is preventing it from happening, I lose it. … I was like, oh, yeah, I was being a complete idiot that day.

Magary: I have that exact problem. I don't think you're the only dad to have Clark Griswold disease. I'm also sort of a dreamer by nature. So you know, you get a vision in your head and that's what you want it to be and then it's not, and then you're pissed and, you know, it's trying to assert control over something that you naturally do not have control over. And you know, I'm much better about that now. But I was not for, let's say, 40 or 45 years.

Rand: I want to transition to talk about writing a little bit. I feel like it was after you wrote The Postmortal, which is another excellent book of yours, and I think I texted you and I said this was great. I loved it. What other books are you working on? What, what else do you want to write? And you talked about how writing a novel is a pain, how you don't want to do it again. And then of course you did.

And before I started doing this website, I read this interesting book by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese author. It was basically about his process as a writer, his process as a novelist. It was kind of a memoir, and he's just had a fascinating life.

I have a hard time writing long. I feel like I should be able to write long — that if I'm going to do a project outside of what I do in my day to day life, the journalism that I do, which tends to be shorter, that I should be able to write a novel, a book. I wrote one a long time ago. It wasn't very good. Never got published. It's just kind of sitting there. But besides that, I've picked up and started half a dozen other attempts that never go anywhere. So, how do you do it? How do you write long and short at the same time?

Magary: Well, I mean, writing blogs is just easy. You're talking with your fingers, right? You're just like, OK, well, you know, Stephen A. Smith said something ludicrous. Here's how I feel about that.

With novels, you know, I wrote The Postmortal. I had written my first book. It was called Men With Balls. It was a dumb, you know, a stocking stuffer book. I got to write my first book, I got an advance, all that stuff. I had been blogging at Kissing Suzy Kolber for a while when I got that book deal. And I was like, OK if I treat the book like a blog and I just write an entry every day, after X number of days, hey, there's a book — which is correct on a certain level. If it’s a disposable book like that first one, that's fine.

A novel is different because it has to flow through. But when I wrote The Postmortal, I sort of cheated. It was told through not just the narrator, but also through link dumps and whole articles written by other people. There were television transcripts, stuff like that. So that allowed me to write something piecemeal and then make it whole.

And then I wrote the first just straight narrative book. I wrote The Hike, went all the way through. And so it was just sort of a learning process. But I'm surprised that I sent you that text. I really love writing these novels. I love living in that headspace and just being somewhere else for a while. It's almost like a trance.

Rand: Do you feel like you write in your head a lot? I do that a lot so by the time I go to write it, it just kind of happens.

Magary: Yeah. I mean, the sort of mystical blank page, it's a lame cliche because it suggests that you can't fill that page — that you haven't already worked to fill that page in your head before you got in there. I have a notebook. It's always by my side. If I have a thought, I write down the thought. If something happens, I write down the thing that happens, you know, and as I write it down, it starts percolating in my brain. It was Walter Mosley who said, “I write every morning, I spend all afternoon percolating.” That's what I do.

Rand: I haven't talked sports at all yet on this site but we’ve got to talk Vikings for like one second. What do you, what do you want to happen at quarterback for the Vikings?

Magary: OK. As much as I respect Kirk Cousins, particularly after the past 12 months, he needs to go. There's zero doubt about that. Great guy. Very, very good solid quarterback. There's no doubt about that. But they have to let him walk.

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