Mary-Louise Parker: “I Just Love Directness”

MLP: Because I think in our culture, acting’s become such a muddy idea. There’s reality TV. Are those people actors? I always felt like it was a profession that deep down many people thought they could do if they felt like it, and people are so judgmental when they watch it, because they don’t really know what goes into it. I think a lot of people feel like if you can talk, you can act.
BNR: Which couldn’t be further from the truth.
MLP: Exactly. It’s easier to pull that off onscreen. Onstage, not so much. I’m not someone who just rolls on up like Meryl Streep or whatever. I feel like I have to be careful, because I can be shut down very quickly and very completely. I’m constantly feeling like I have to protect myself and my character.
I am a secretive person, I think, by nature, but I’ve always been so excited about writing in general. So we could sit here today and we could never talk about my book and I would be excited. Acting? No. I don’t want to talk to you about it. Not you — generally. I don’t want to talk about my feelings about it. I don’t want to talk about how I got there. Because it might shut me down. If I were somebody who was just like an automaton that’d come into work tomorrow morning . . . but I feel like it involves a lot of dissecting and hiding and self-hypnosis.
That sounds completely pretentious, but I don’t know, it involves hyper-preparing and being in a completely blank state, which are completely at odds, right?
BNR: Right.
MLP: Which I love and can make me feel like I’m flying. But interference does not help me usually, and there have been those directors who lifted me up; they made me fly. But there are not many. The ones that do, literally if they asked me to do a scene in a garbage can I will. They’ll tell you that. They want me to do 200 takes, I’ll do 300. But the ones that have shut me down on the first day, don’t try to talk to me after that.
BNR: Your epistolary memoir is addressed to both real and hypothetical men, including a cabdriver you had a bad encounter with during a very vulnerable point in your life and the man who will fall in love with your daughter someday. But it’s bookended early on, and in the last chapters, by letters to or about your father. How did your relationship with your father help shape this book?
MLP:  There just would be no book otherwise. There would be no love of books.
BNR: How did he instill that in you?
MLP: I remember standing in the driveway in Tennessee and asking him what the word ominous meant. I remember his body language. I remember how he froze and thought about it. I remember how something sparked in him to be able to tell me what the word meant. He kind of acted it out, and he waited until I understood. I mean, he should’ve been a writer.
BNR: Did he write at all?
MLP: No, he wrote kind of a book for the family. You know, that told little stories and things. But my mother so heavily edited everything, because my mother is really, really ladylike and very private. She made him cut everything he wrote. We used to send poems back-and-forth to each other in the mail. But I think he didn’t want to write anything that would pull at a scab or anything. My parents are so respectful. They were never like, “You shouldn’t date this person” or “Why haven’t you called us?” They always had an unbelievable sense of boundaries like I’ve never seen in any other parents. I will never achieve that.
[caption id="attachment_67344" align="alignright" width="213"] Mary-Louise Parker (Photo Credit: Tina Turbow)[/caption]
And I have a house in the country that I kind of named for him. On the wall of the kitchen I stenciled a line from this Philip Levine poem because that was the last poem that he had in his wallet when he died, because he would put poems in his pocket. It’s a Philip Levine poem called “Ask for Nothing,” so I stenciled the last line of that. And I stenciled on my porch, which was not easy — it’s the wrong kind of wood, it took me so long and like twenty-five cups of coffee, I’d say — the last line of the Stanley Kunitz poem that reminds me of him.
BNR: What’s that?
MLP: “The Long Boat.” The last line is — I didn’t stencil all of it, but the last part of that poem goes “As if it didn’t matter / which way was home; / As if he didn’t know / he loved the earth so much / he wanted to stay forever.” And I have “As if it didn’t matter which way was home” on my porch.
BNR: Talking about the form you chose for Dear Mr. You — did you find that writing in the form of letters was freeing?
MLP: I loved it so much that I have to actively think of how not to write another book. And it’s hard not to because I love addressing — I just love directness, period. It feels so intimate; it feels so immediate and honest. And there’s just so much freedom you get.
BNR: Before you wrote this book, were you in the habit of handwriting letters?
MLP: Oh yeah. I write letters now. I do.
BNR: To close friends and family?
MLP: I was telling somebody who wanted to get into writing letters — I could tell it was not going to happen — I just was telling her what you should do is you should really, really invest too much money in really great stationery. Then you feel like you have to use it and really love it and find the font and the envelope that you want. I have black envelopes. I had a special pen for them. People love to get letters. No one gets letters anymore.
BNR: What I find so fascinating is how you managed to write about people you were or are close to and people you barely knew with the same level of detail and emotional insight. And I’m thinking particularly of the letter “Dear Big Feet,” where you talk about a very ill stranger you noticed in the hospital as you waited for your father to recover from brain surgery. That was twenty years ago.
MLP: It’s really powerful, his mother sitting there on that couch. I’ll never forget that in my whole life. Not moving. Just the way she sat there, it’s indelible, those kinds of things. I can never forget them. Never. And coming in the next day, that one day, and being like, “Where’s the boy?” And them being like, “They took his body.” I just can’t forget that. That’s the kind of thing I think about: What happened? How does she keep going? You know, I can’t process it.  I do have a freakish memory for those kinds of things. And then, you know, you’ll say, “What month is it?” or “Who’s the vice president?” and you’re not going to get much here. But those kinds of things? I remember what you were wearing. I remember how you stood, like the guy in the health food store. I remember how he leaned on the counter when we talked. I always wrote and have so many of those books of memories and journals and things like that. So I have direct quotes that sparked other memories.
BNR: That’s a wonderful resource to have. In that essay, “Dear Big Feet,” you say, “Where your story intersects mine is at my refusal to accept things too sad for me to process; my reimagining endings that haunt me.” So how do you inhabit stories as a writer in a way that you can’t as an actress?
MLP: Well, I think with writing you have to have some sort of sense of distance, right? You have to have a sense of a bigger picture. And you have to have a sense of a bigger picture as an actor as well. But while you’re actually doing it, you can’t. You do, but it’s almost like I feel like you have two sets of eyes as an actor. I’m thinking onstage. TV and film is a different animal. But onstage, I feel like you have to have another pair of eyes that aren’t sunglasses on that are just there when you need them and you’re driving off the side of the road now. Because you have to tell the story; you have to fulfill the play; you have to be aware of the other actors on the stage. At the same time the goal to me is to be as un-selfconscious as possible and to be as present as possible and not watching myself.
I read this thing that Suzanne Farrell wrote — I’m paraphrasing — something like “You can’t be a spectator and a performer as well,” which I think is so perfectly said. You can’t tell them what to look at. And as a writer you kind of have to tell them what to look at. And also there’s so much about acting, especially onstage, that’s about being willing to be surprised by yourself and by other people. So many things were surprising to me as I read them.  And it’s nice to get to come up with it yourself.
BNR: So which letters were the most challenging to write?
MLP: “Dear Doctor.” I think because the experience was very, very fresh and I wasn’t certain of how I wanted to tell it, and the beginning drafts that I wrote were very flip, and they were a little winky. I’m really embarrassed by them now. And then I actually went in a whole other direction and it got really creepy. A couple days before I got sick I had this bizarre . . . not hallucination but a bizarre image, where I saw this man being eaten by bears. And I’d written it down to remember it to write about later. It was interesting that I wrote about watching a man die in front of me, and I was so sick, and I was two days from almost dying.
I thought that was interesting. So one bunch of drafts went in that direction, and then I finally found a way to pull it together into what it is — I would like another crack at it.
Also, “Dear Cerberus,” just because it was so ambitious. I actually got confused at one point. I was like, “Wait a second, it’s a dog with three heads. Does that mean the dog has three heads? Is it all one dog or are there three heads or the dogs . . . wait. Is it like three different dogs each with separate heads?”
Just the telling of it was complicated and I wanted it to be very like a fairytale, like a heightened story in which I’m completely innocent and these people are the big, bad wolf. To circumvent it seeming like I want you to feel sorry for me, because I thought it would be funnier, too.
And I thought you’d see how in some ways I was complicit, because nobody’s that dumb. I mean I was that dumb, but in the end you see that is an aspect of me. That’s a chip of my personality that is that tireless and that gullible and that stupid.
And just in the end, so that I was able to say I could be the evil witch in someone else’s story. You know, I wanted it to be like that. I didn’t want it to be like I need you to feel sorry for me, because in the end all the letters are meant to be about gratitude. So I wanted to write a book that was positive. There’s really one mean sentence in the book, and I just couldn’t take it out because I loved it as a sentence.
BNR: Which one? I’m trying to remember.
MLP: It’s in “Cerberus.” I probably shouldn’t say.
BNR: In a letter addressed to your teacher you say, “It’s so transparent, how willing we are to dismiss the intelligence of someone who rejects us, as though that renders them incapable of sound judgment.” It’s true that we’re all going to judge people who don’t immediately accept us or who push us to be better even. Have you had a lot of relationships like that throughout your career? Do you feel like you’re better at handling criticism now?
MLP: Well, I’m quite used to it. And certain kinds of criticism I just try to steer away from — for instance, I would not Google myself.
BNR: Smart.
MLP: Why would you? I’m going to see something that would make me feel bad. It doesn’t matter if I see twenty things that are nice. So why would I?
BNR: Yeah. Because it’s easy to fixate on that one thing.
MLP: And, you know, that letter was meant to show that there have been times in my life that people have said the hard stuff to me and they stung. They’re really useful sometimes. When they’re right, you know that someone’s right. That was really informative for me, that whole experience, because I’d come from being this girl that felt so massively unlikable and like a big wallflower, and I came to this drama school and suddenly it was like everyone liked me and I was so flamboyant and so eccentric and nobody minded my eccentricity. I wasn’t trying to snub them. And somebody was like, “No, you’re too weird.” And I was like, “Yeah, but now it’s supposed to be OK!”
And I had to see that OK, this is the way that he’s seeing me and he’s a teacher. This is a school. I have something to fulfill. I could sit here and just be bitter, or . . . it became a project, and it was really validating, and it was so generous of him to let me in. He didn’t have to. He saw that I was trying, that I was making a fresh attempt in the spirit of what I ultimately thought he wanted. And he appreciated that. That’s really informative when you’re young.
BNR: In “Dear Doctor,” the harrowing chapter about your near-death experience, you say, “Not even all our stars are moving, that was light years ago; it’s only us here, dying as slowly as we can.” It’s a beautiful and melancholic thought, and it’s a sentiment that’s repeated in other letters, like in “Dear Rafiki Yangu.” You say: “I forget that we are all made from ether and instinct. We’re all missing parts and orbit the same moon.” What is it about space as metaphor that you’re drawn to?
MLP: I’m so obsessed with that. When I first started writing, I was like, “I’m going to relate every story to a planet and I’m going to call it Cold Black Dwarf.” And my agent was like, “Right. No?” But I find space incredibly poetic as I say in “NASA.” It just explains things to me. Everything is a metaphor. Binary stars clinging to each other, and they’re burning as they go down. You know, things that are too far away to see that aren’t even actually there anymore but we keep looking for them or we see their light and we’re convinced that their light is proof that they’re there. All of it to me is a metaphor, and I could just sit there with it forever.
And I talk about that in “NASA,” too. Like the tidally locked stars: one star only gets to see the light of the star, and the other star is constantly revolving around and showing all sides of themselves like their dark side, and the other one is just like, “This is all you get.” And then there are some that they only ever see the light of each other. They never go back.
BNR: You mentioned you’re working on another book right now. What other kinds of books do you want to write?
MLP: I don’t really know, because it’s hard to stop writing this one.
BNR: Could you see yourself writing one to women? This is all addressed to men.
MLP: The one that keeps kicking around in my brain just naturally sort of is about women. But I didn’t do that. Now I have to write about women. It just sort of actually happened, but I’m not sure that’ll be the next thing that I write because I’m still in the phase where I’m not on a roll with anything. I want to know a little bit more about where I’m going before I sit down and start, because I think I know where I’m going but I’m not 100 percent sure.
BNR: It’s always weird to talk about it also before you kind of know.
MLP: Yeah. But it was funny because when I first got this book deal, I was almost too embarrassed to tell anyone. Embarrassed is maybe the wrong word. But I did encounter a couple of ill-disguised smirks when I did say something to someone. I just didn’t really tell many people after a while except to people who know me and know that I write. I didn’t talk about it so much.
BNR: Did that help you with the writing process?
MLP: No, it’s natural for me to hold back things like that anyway.
BNR: People often assume just because a person is known for one art form that they can’t try another.
MLP: Yeah. And it always felt like part of me. It’s not like one day I thought, I wonder what writing feels like? I’ve been writing for Esquire for a decade or whatever. Yeah, longer than that. And it’s not that I’ve written tons, but a fair amount and for a few other magazines and have written for myself my whole life. So it’s not like I just thought, I’m going to pick up a flute today.
BNR: If you could adapt any book to film or stage, what would it be, and why?
MLP: It wouldn’t occur to me. I mean, with plays I’m always looking for a new play. I’m always looking for it to fall on my desk and be excited by it, and the last play I got to do [Heisenberg] was one of the best plays I’ve ever read. So that’s exciting for me, to open a play. I might be doing it again in November. I’m hoping to. It’s one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever had, like beautiful. The writer, he’s some kind of genius. But I don’t really think of books in terms of Oh, this would be . . . I guess sometimes I do but I haven’t recently so much.
Although I did have a thought, because somebody said, “Did you ever think your book would be a movie?” And it’s not a movie at all, but I thought “Cerberus,” like I thought of Guillermo del Toro, like he could do that in Spanish. I thought that would be amazing. That’s the only one that occurred to me that I could see cinematically and I could see him doing it.
BNR: That would be incredible.
MLP: Yeah. In Spanish, too, with Demián Bichir in it as one of the dogs. But the rest of them it never really occurred to me.
BNR: What are you currently working on, or what’s coming up for you for acting?
MLP: Well I just finished that play, and we’re thinking that it’s going to go again. And then I’m trying to find the right TV show to get hooked into again because I like that schedule. I like working in television more than movies. Movies are a bit slow for me. I mean, I’m grateful whenever I get a movie obviously and I feel grateful for all — I feel like I have to state that I’m grateful, because everyone’s always like, “Do you feel like women don’t have enough opportunities?” I’m like, “I don’t really feel qualified to speak on that because I feel like I’ve been really lucky and I’m happy with what I’ve had, thank you.” Yeah.
BNR: What kind of TV show would you like to be in?
MLP: Well, I liked the last one I did, Weeds, because it was extreme and it had a pretty wide range between comedy and darkness. I like that.
BNR: It’s a fantastic show. Do you have any writing rituals that you like to follow?
MLP: Yeah, I turn on the Disney Channel super loud, and I tell my children to crawl all over me, and I encourage the dog to jump on my computer and hit the keys so that everything that I’m reading is unintelligible. And then sometimes someone will spill a smoothie or some Ovaltine.
BNR: [Laughs] Those sound like the most ideal writing conditions.
MLP: I’m shooting for something a little bit calmer next time, but that seemed to be the way. There were a few nights where as soon as they went to sleep I’d just go down and sit and just write and four hours would go by. But much of the book was like that, the other chaos. I’m not sure I recommend it. It was sweet in its way.