YouSaid · the spoken record

Olivia Gatwood

lines on the record: 36
first: 2024-08-12
most recent: 2024-08-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're choosing a portion of it, and so it has to end somewhere. And I think ending in ambiguity gives the reader a lot of agency. I also think ambiguity is a cornerstone of AI. AI is its most unsettling when we can't decipher it, when we don't know if that's what we're interacting with. So yeah, those are the two things I hope people take away.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's I guess two things. The first is that I hope that we can begin to embrace the idea that there is not always a villain and a hero that so much of our behavior as people is rooted in shame and that the ways that we try to understand or fight off that shame can often look pretty ugly and that only when we begin to understand where that shame comes from what the source of that shame is do we start to free ourselves so I hope that that's something readers can take from these characters I also hope that readers can embrace ambiguity I think that ambiguity is a crucial part of storytelling because when we tell stories we're never almost never telling the entire story”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So I am slated to write the screenplay for the adaptation. I am very excited about that. I've dabbled in screenwriting before. I think I imagined this book cinematically while writing it. So I'm excited to see how that translates. I think that there will be a lot that's maintained and also I'm excited to see what changes. So I'll be working on that. And then I'm working on my second novel, which happened way sooner than I thought it would. I thought at the end of this, I was like, I'm not going to write a novel for so long. That was so much work. And then, you know, this idea came to me and I was like, this is a book. So I'm focusing on those two things.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's this long standing preoccupation with control over women's bodies and these laws to me, that's all they are. They have absolutely nothing to do with safety or freedom. They have nothing to do with children. I don't even really think they have anything to do with religion. I think they have everything to do with a fear that women will gain autonomy and begin to make choices.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, it's really, I think that part of the historical fascination with men inventing women is rooted in men's entitlement over women's bodies. I think that there is this real distinct sense of ownership. And I think that these laws that are being put in place or threatening to be put in place, they really have nothing to do with women's safety. If they did, they literally wouldn't exist. I mean, the statistics, the science is all there to show us that women are significantly less safe when laws are put in place that police their bodies. So I think ultimately what it's rooted in is a desire for control. There's a lot of feelings of threat when women get to make choices about our futures, about our right to reject motherhood. I think that”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not being able to read social cues, not having a robust social life, feeling out of touch with people who maybe you're supposed to feel connected to are seen as cold and icy and rude. And that's entirely because she's seen as beautiful and therefore we think we are entitled to her. We think that while you have this thing that so many people don't have and so you need to give me something, you need to give me your time. You need to give me your kindness. You need to give me your energy. And the only conclusion we have as to why she wouldn't do that is that she's rude. And so, you know, I think that I've held that perspective. I think I've experienced that perspective. I think all of us have been on both sides of that. And yeah, I think it's an important dynamic to illuminate.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, yeah. You know, one thing I heard from a reader, and I didn't intend this when writing the book, but I thought this was a really valuable perspective. She was talking about how this character Lena reads to her as autistic. And I was thinking about, and I've seen this a little bit online about how women who are seen as conventionally beautiful by some Western standard aren't given the”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to look like you because of course I do. And what that does is it removes this woman's personhood. It puts her entire identity in our own internal processing and leaves nothing for her to define for herself. So I want to write a character that's navigating that because I think that's something I've navigated a lot through my life with other women. And I think it is one of the things that prevents us from actually being able to make friends with women as people is I think beauty and desirability really gets in the way of that a lot of the time.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“which is to feel kind of resentful and defensive around extraordinarily beautiful women. It's this oscillation between jealousy, hatred, and desire that I think so many of us feel, especially as young people, I wanted to show that oscillation. I wanted to show how beautiful women are also often reduced to, and I'm saying beautiful women as though there's this subset of people. I suppose what I'm talking about is women who feel as though they were invented by men, women who you interact with and you feel like, whoa, this is like you someone a man wrote you. And how there's this, it's this war within yourself of like, I hate you and because I feel like I'm supposed to, I feel like you're going to take something from me. I desire you because you seem to exist in the context of desirability.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, my first kind of question when I was writing this book, and this isn't a spoiler, but I think it does reveal some of what the conversation is in the book, is what would it be like as a human woman to interact with an AI woman, with a fembot? What would that feel like? What would I notice about her that a man wouldn't notice? What would I find insufferable? What would I find desirable? How does my understanding of the perfect woman differ from a man's understanding? Of course, as I started writing the book, that conversation became much more complicated. I think what I wanted to showcase was how beauty, especially for a queer woman, is a really complicated space to interact with because you're interacting with your own desires, but you're also experiencing, you're replaying the conditioning that you know.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that that happens really naturally when you're writing. If you go into a story and you're like, these are the themes I want to talk about, I think it can feel kind of forced and it can feel really overwhelming. But I think if you are able to kind of zoom out and see how they're all interacting with each other in the same community, like that's why I think focusing on a city is a great place to start from a story because it is this melting pot. Everything is happening at once. So then you're not separating them in your brain as these three separate themes. Instead, you're thinking, this is all happening in this one space. I'm going to tell a story in that space. And I think naturally those themes come through. At least that's how I feel as a writer. I think focusing on Santa Cruz in particular was a really helpful tool for talking about gentrification, talking about gender, talking about beauty. And it just, I think naturally those themes.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that the rate at which tech people were moving in and also just the exorbitant amount of wealth, like tech in particular, you know, a starting salary is often in the six figures. And so if we consider that the jump is so high that then the home prices are jumping at that rate as well, and it doesn't make any room for gradual growth. It doesn't make any room for real like integration in any way. It makes like a deeply segregated environment, both literally in kind of the lines of neighborhoods and also in the way we interact with one another. There's this kind of them versus us, which I think is really harmful to community engagement.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know, gentrification is at least in the US, is just such an enormous issue. I think it moves at a pace that people can't keep up with. So what happens is, you know, we seek the socioeconomic status of communities change so quickly. And the people who work in the community can no longer afford to live there. We see public school closures is a huge, huge part of gentrification that I think is just a major loss to a community. Schools becoming private institutions, schools becoming a place that you have to afford. You have to afford to go to. You have to afford an education as a young person. I think that if our communities can't hold the people who work within our communities and uplift them, then we have a real problem on our hands. And so with Santa Cruz specifically,”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I've had to get used to is that I'll be explaining something that they already know about because they, you know, they were, they read about it. They are on Reddit. They're on Twitter. They're on Instagram. Like they know what a pick-me girl is. They know what the conversation around it is. And that doesn't mean that they can't benefit from education, but it does mean that you have to approach education from a different place when you're talking to young people who have heard so much of what you're saying.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, with regards to the themes of this book, like they're dealing with technology in a way that I can't fathom, you know, their fluency with technology is so profound and they don't under they don't know about life without technology, which I feel like I was born in 1992. I have a very clear memories of life before like I remember when we got a desktop computer I remember learning what like how to type on a computer very clearly. So I think that that is something I will never actually be able to access in my understanding is what that's like to grow up with screens. And I don't necessarily think it's bad. I don't necessarily think it's good. I just think it's extremely different. So, you know, a lot of young people who I work with.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was no critique around it growing up. Also, like, yeah, to be clear, also being around those girls can be really frustrating. Like, it can be so annoying. And it's not a coincidence that most often they're really young. Like they're just acting out the thing that they have understood to be the most desirable identity.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That and is able to put on this kind of mask that makes men want her. She prioritizes men's desires at every turn. There's a lot of flirting going on. There's a lot of like, oh, other idea, the reason it's called pick me is because I think it exists in a space of other girls do this thing. I don't do that thing. Pick me. Like other girls get jealous, but I've never, I don't get jealous. Other girls are dramatic. I'm not dramatic. There's this way that you're setting yourself apart. And I think, you know, so many of us are capable of doing that.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the pygmy girl, I mean, I've seen it defined a lot of ways. The way I define it is it's a girl whose identity, at least on the outside, exists sort of as a means to seek approval from men. So one example of the pick me girl, if you've read Gone Girl or you've seen Gone Girl, there's a monologue in that movie slash book called The Cool Girl Monologue where she talks about the cool girl being this sight of like paradox. So the cool girl is a girl who, you know, she only eats hot dogs, but she never gains weight. Like she loves beer, but somehow she's like also really feminine. She is this virgin horror paradox. It's like she is extremely appealing sexually, but somehow hasn't lost her value in the eyes of men. And I think that the pick me girl is a girl who sees”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“worthy of love. And so I think I want to challenge that judgment instead of approaching it with judgment, encouraging people to approach it with a real sense of understanding, because I think there's such a vulnerable truth beneath those behaviors.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I know that might be taboo to say, but certainly with boys there can be a dynamic that feels relaxed and depressurized. Of course, as you get older, you might start to realize that conflict can look different, that there might actually be a lot of conflict with men and boys. It's just navigated differently. Maybe friendships with women actually demand more conversation, which I think is a really important skill to eventually harness, but it makes sense to me why a young person would veer away from that. And so I think that criticism around the pick-me girl does leave women who maybe don't have friendships with women, with other women, feeling like they're doing something wrong, like there's something about them that is unevolved. I think that there are a lot of friendships with women are like relationships. And so when you can't access that, you feel like you're not.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, you know, I grew up and I was friends with mostly boys for a lot of my life. And some of that was because of my own desire, like want to be desirable. Like I think some of that, there's this idea of the pick-me girl. I think some of I was certainly channeling a lot of that as a teenager, wanting boys to love and accept me. I think there's also a lot of criticism towards the Pick Me girl when actually there's a much more vulnerable truth beneath that, which is that you're taught as a girl that power is access through men and boys, so it is only natural that that is where you go when you're looking for power as a teenager, when you're looking to find access to the world, but also, you know, I also think that there's something to relationships with boys that feels really freeing. You know, there's not as much emotional investment. There isn't as much, there's often not as much”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Showcase that dynamic and explore it further for myself, friendships between women have always been really important to me. I do think that they're the key to like self understanding as a woman. I think they're also really hard. I think they're really hard to access. I think they're a lot of work. And so I wanted to showcase that work between women of different generations, women of different backgrounds like Lena and Mitti. I just, yeah, I kind of wanted to see all of these dynamics play out and show the beauty of them, but also show the difficulty of them.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when I was in my early 20s, when I was touring a lot in a group called Speak Like a Girl with my friend Megan Falley, we lived with her mom on Long Island and Megan ended up moving across the country to be with her partner and I stayed Everything really matters which is beautiful, but like, you know, you get a text message from someone you're dating and everyone picks it apart and they're like, he said, hey, instead of hi, like, that's crazy, you know, but with this older woman, she was very like, oh, none of this matters. Like none of this is going to matter. Her perspective of life was so much bigger. And so I learned so much from that. And I really wanted to”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“at least in part motivated by politics, which for me, you know, so much of my writing is motivated by gender politics, understanding gender politics, it can be easy to revert into this place of wanting to convince people that your voice matters and that your experience matters. And I did that for so long and I found it to be really kind of exhausting and draining. And it was so much more rewarding to write what I understood about the world confidently and realize that so many other people also felt that way and harness that kind of community rather than a community of debate and conflict. So yeah, I think generally I still try to stay in that place at least while I'm writing. I think it's a healthier place to write from.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do think that that's kind of a driving force. I think that there, maybe with fiction, I think at my understanding of my own audience has expanded a little bit. When I wrote this story, I definitely wanted, you know, men in tech to read it and feel not just put off by it or not just defensive, but feel curious and invested. you know, matters to me, I think, if we want to teach people about our experiences of the world, we have to approach that in a way that feels open and educational. And so I think with this book, I did have a sense of a larger audience, in part also because I was just writing a more diverse cast of characters rather than just myself. But I also think that When you're writing”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changing language to feel like it expressed the kind of gravity of what I was trying to express and not sacrificing that sort of poeticism in fiction.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or pushed forward really by action in large part. And so getting a character from a room to a room, you know, getting your characters to eat, to use the bathroom. And that doesn't mean that you have to include all of those details, but you do need to create a person and a life. And I found that to be the hardest thing because as a poet, I care so much about language and I care so much about beauty and some things you just have to write because you have to write them. Like this character has to get up from their seat and they have to move. And that doesn't always sound beautiful. But I didn't want to sacrifice metaphor. I didn't want to sacrifice texture and sensuality in my language, so I worked very hard. It was just a matter of going back and back and back and always kind of looking at what I can be doing in a more, I think, in a way that evokes the senses.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it was very, very hard. Like, it was just really hard to write a novel. Obviously, that's probably not new knowledge to people, but I do feel like this I want to say that because I think that sometimes these things can come across as like you just sort of imagined it. And then it was there. And it's actually such an incredible amount of work coming from poetry where I'm very simply just dealing with less words. Poetry, I wouldn't say is easier, but certainly when you're working on a poem or you're editing a poem, just the amount of information you're dealing with is much smaller. So I had to get very organized. I had to really get to know this story intricately in order to be able to edit it because I needed to jump around. Writing a novel is very logistical as opposed to poetry, which is motivated by more of an emotional truth. A novel motivated.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so much of our thinking is facilitated by AI, so the story just became much more grounded in reality. And I think because of that, I started asking more existential questions about what it means to be a human being during this time. And in that way, I think the narrative maybe moved away from explicitly sci-fi and moved more into kind of a humanist realist narrative with elements of sci-fi maybe.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I started writing it in 2019, which was a very different time. And it really was much more explicitly, I think, sci-fi when I started writing it, simply because the conversation around AI wasn't as advanced. So I was making a lot of stuff up. I was, I think projecting more of like an obvious fictional sci-fi narrative onto this world. But as time passed, it's not even just that it became more believable that these things could happen, but that genuinely we just all started interacting with AI very comfortably in our daily lives. Like it just wasn't, it's just not simply not as, you know, foreign or sensational anymore. It's part of our everyday life. And so, you know, we get recipes using AI. We get directions using AI.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yah, no totally. It's very the conversation around AI is extremely gendered. I'm not the first person to come to that conclusion, but it is certainly what I think piqued my fascination around it. You know, stories about men's creations, women as men's creations go back to Grecian myths, you know. The first story about a woman robot was in the silent film era in the 20s, a movie called Metropolis. And in these stories, everything from Metropolis to, you know, ex-Machina, which came out, you know, 10 years ago, there's this narrative of a man creates a woman that is kind of the object of perfection and of his imagination. And then that woman either begins to have her. Sort of following those same tropes but centering women, there's very few men in this story intentionally so.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“were the locals and they resented the influx of tech people who were coming from San Francisco and there was the same change happening but with different groups and I became really interested in that change specifically how it affects the way we interact with each other how it changes the way we interact with our neighbors and I've always at the same time been a big fan of stories about fembots. I just love I've always felt like this deep kinship towards women robots in these movies who feel that they're or whose identities really were created by men and who then have to seek out their own kind of liberation and sentience. And I wanted to write a story that embodied all of those themes.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is like a product of Santa Cruz. It's also very much my mom specifically. Like I wouldn't say everyone at Santa Cruz rides a donkey to school. That's very much a quality of my mother. But then at some point in her childhood, the university moved in, the University of Santa Cruz University of California at Santa Cruz. And suddenly there was this change in the social world and the economic world of academics and a lot of locals really resented that change. It brought kind of a new sort of wealth. It brought an elitism, I think, to the town that wasn't there. And people who grew up there from their really resented way that this city that had such humble roots was suddenly becoming a place for the elite. And then when I lived there, so much, you know, in 2019, there was a different kind of war happening.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, which is where my mom grew up. I grew up hearing about Santa Cruz. I didn't really grow up going there, but my mom talked a lot about it. She had kind of escaped from it herself as a young person. And she had always talked about how the city was always at war with itself when she was growing up it was kind of a small agricultural sleepy beachside town. It was very country. My mom rode a donkey to school. And then suddenly there was a”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also maybe a bit locked in? And then a young couple moves in next door, a tech entrepreneur and his girlfriend, and Mitty becomes kind of fascinated by this woman who seems to be effortlessly perfect, and at that point we move back and forth in between the perspectives of Middie and then Lena, the girl in this couple. And we begin to learn about Lena as a human being, as a person who is having questions about her own existence and her own identity and her own lack of liberation.”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so whoever you are, honey is about a group of women on the coast in Santa Cruz, California. We specifically follow Mitty, who is a woman in her 20s who lives with an elderly woman named Bethel, their platonic roommates. They've been living together for 10 years. sort of circumstances around Middie's arrival in Santa Cruz 10 years ago remains a bit of a mystery throughout the book of course eventually that is revealed but for the first large portion of the book we don't really know but together they live in this kind of really staunch Luddite nostalgic experience they really resent the influx of tech people who have moved into Santa Cruz they yearn for a world that is analog they're very nostalgic people and so their existence is equal parts kind of charming and beautiful”
2024-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · The Poetry of Modern Storytelling, with Olivia Gatwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT