The Legacy Years Podcast: Kristin Newman
The author of "What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding" on Hollywood, memoir writing, egg donation, and embracing "full catastrophe living"
The first episode of the Legacy Years podcast is now live! My guest this week is the hilarious screenwriter and producer Kristin Newman.
Kristin has many impressive IMDb credits to her name, including Only Murders In The Building, How I Met Your Mother, and That 70s Show, but I first discovered her via her travel memoir, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding. The book (which Kristin is currently turning into a scripted TV series) chronicles her adventures as a 30-something professional woman, traveling the world and enjoying vacation romances with hot foreign men while all her friends are getting married and having babies.
Besides the fact that it’s a really fun read, I appreciated What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding for its honest portrayal of what it takes to follow your own path as it diverges from the conventional one. As a reader, I had no doubt Kristin was living exactly as she wanted to live, and it’s hard not to feel envious as she happily bounces from one international trip and one steamy romance to another. But there are also moments, like attending the wedding of a close friend/travel partner, when Kristin grapples with ambivalence and loss. Even when we make choices deliberately, it’s hard not to wonder about our alternate lives and what we might be missing out on.
The plot twist is that Kristin did get married in the end. She even bred! After six failed rounds of IVF, Kristin and her husband decided to use a donor egg, and she’s generous enough to share the logistical and emotional aspects of that experience in this episode.
This conversation is honest, vulnerable, and funny. I hope you love it.
P.S. You can also listen to it on Spotify
As a taster, here are a few quotes from Kristin that have stuck with me:
On the importance of continuing to pitch your ideas, even when you get shot down…
I had a friend tell me once when I was early in my career – remember that professional baseball players bat 300. That means, two and a half out of every three hits, they strike out. And that's the best players in the world. So if you're not the best in the world, you're probably swinging and missing 5,6,7,8 times before you hit one. He told me that as a way of saying keep pitching. For better or worse, I think that’s my strongest suit in a writers’ room; I talk a lot and I keep pitching. Eventually, I get enough in that I think I add some value.
On accepting that you and your work are not for everyone…
I always said that What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is a little bit of a one or five-star book. And I think that I might be maybe a one or a five-star person. Because that's what happens in book reviews for memoirs – first you get the book reviewed, and then you get your personality reviewed. I'm a strong cheese. You're either into blue cheese or you’re not. You'll either feel like my friend when you read it or you'll say this woman is trash. And you know what, that's great, too.
On her compulsion to live a story-worthy life…
I was talking to somebody recently who said, “I think that somehow the way you do everything becomes story-worthy.” Maybe that's why I waited so long to have a baby because the drama of having a baby in your 40s is high. The story ends up being a big one. I tend to bring drama and story with me in my life.
On her strangely shameful desire for a conventional life…
I was so proudly not the woman in my 30s trying to get married. On dates, I wore it as a badge. “I'm looking for great guys with commitment problems,” was the little thing that I chirped (which works great by the way). I was so proud of that, as though to want love and lifelong companionship is a really shameful thing.
On the challenges of writing about motherhood (and the genius of Jessie Klein’s book I’ll Show Myself Out)…
Can you imagine ever judging a man for writing a daddy story or a daddy blog? Do you know what that would be called? It would be called For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway gets to do it and not be judged. It's my own internalized misogyny that's made me feel like being a mother and being a wife is giving up, and something you do when you're done with your journey.
On the injustice of female fertility and her successful egg freezing that didn’t successfully produce a baby…
I suddenly went on an insane “I need to make a baby” kick that involved years of IVF and heartbreak, so many dollars, so much science, and so much deep heartbreaking depression. And still, to this day, I could not tell you what piece of that had to do with proving that I could have it all. All those people who told me at 35, “If you don't do it now you're not going to be able to do it.” I was like, fuck all y'all. I can do it when I want to do it. Women should get to have babies when they want, the way that men do. It's not fair. And science and freezing eggs will fix that. But that's not what happened. I needed all kinds of help to have a baby.
On using a donor egg to conceive her daughter…
“I talked to our egg donor about struggling sometimes with that feeling of, Who is this baby inside of me? I'm just kind of housing an adopted baby, is how I felt at first when my daughter was a few months into my tummy. And she said, “If it helps you, I don't think of her as my child at all. If anything, I think of her as a sister. We have the same DNA but she's not my child.” And the idea of her as a sister to my daughter provided me a lot of peace and helped me wrap my brain around it.
On the impossibility of making perfect life choices...
I’ve had many friends who were contemplating divorce, and my most pragmatic friend Natalia will talk to them about the trade they are making. You're trading this set of miseries that you have when you're married, to be divorced, but you're gonna get a new set of miseries. Every life has both, right? There's this great mindfulness book called Full Catastrophe Living and it’s about accepting all that life is. Every version of everything has so much catastrophe, no matter what you do. You're gonna get so much catastrophe, you're gonna get so much joy – you're gonna get both, on any road.
S1 E1 Related links and references:
Kristin’s book “What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding”
The Retrievals podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times
HBO Girls episode “One Man's Trash”
Jessie Klein’s book “I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife & Motherhood”
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Deborah Copaken Kogan’s book Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War
The Legacy Years podcast is edited by Seren Hughes, an audio producer (and very talented recording artist) who works on music, podcasts, and film. Seren lives in the UK and works from her studio with the help of her little dog Leeloo. You can find more of her work here.