AMANDA PALMER
Dresden Doll, activist, and all-round kick-ass person Amanda Palmer had a brief chat with Ruth Seavers on the power of music to inspire people, her recent book, and learning to stand on her own two feet, ahead of a mini-tour which includes a stop-off in Camarthen.
Your work is very political. Not everyone is creatively-inclined but everyone can be politically active. Do you think art affects more change than traditional activism? Which holds the most power?
I think that’s like asking which has more power: making a birthday card for your kid or donating to the local food bank? They’re both critical, and we do an endless dance between the micro and macro. I’m endlessly fascinated with how music has a deeper power; not just to get people out to vote but a power to make people reflect, stop, think, know themselves, question themselves, face their own broken experiences and feelings. A giant stadium singing a “You Must Go Vote” song: how does that stack up against Elliott Smith singing his way into your heart and explaining heartache and addiction in a way that nobody else can, thus making you feel less alone, giving you a connection to humanity, maybe making it more likely that you’ll be a little more empathetic in your day-to-day life? They’re both important, but one does something superficial, and the other is magic.
You are obviously well-versed in writing music. When it came to writing your book, The Art of Asking, how did the process differ?
I wrote the bulk of the text during a five-week trip to Melbourne, Australia. I just sat my ass down in a cafe and wrote 5,000 words a day, and then ate and drank wine. I had no kid [back then], and I told my husband to forget about me. I then spent the next year travelling around and editing the book in different places with my dear friend Jamy, who acted as my editor. That part was the torture. I just had such a hard time wrapping my head around something so giant for such a long period of time. It gave me a new level of respect for all writers of large books. It’s a mental marathon.
You’re at the beginning of your forties, how do you feel about age? Many people are acutely aware about the passing of time, wanting to hold on to it.
I only have my own experience, which is that I feel stronger and more powerful with every passing year. Especially just having had a miscarriage with the #MeToo parade marching past my door while I bled out and realised, with horror, that men have been demanding that I bend to their narratives, medical systems, and feelings about myself, my body, my age for far too long. Even I, Amanda Palmer, feminist and unshaven icon of I-Give-No-Fucks, am waking up from some kind of nightmare, as I realise how poorly we have done as feminists, how we have continued to keep the conversation firmly printed in the storybook of the old white men, and my God, how we have just been living in a deluded universe.
It’s distressing and especially looking down at my little two-year-old, I’m like, ‘holy fuck, how do I get us out of here?’ And my age is part of that. On the one hand, I hate that it brings me authority, because it doesn’t always feel earned – it just feels random because I have these lines on my face. On the other hand, I actually do have a deeper and wider perspective than I used to, and I like sharing it. But I try to be keenly aware that I only know what I know, and the older I get, the more I realise I have no authority over anything but my own experience. Which is kind of liberating.
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Becoming a mother – what’s the most significant change you’ve found that you didn’t expect?
Everybody kept telling me “It’s going to change your life, you’re going to experience love for the first time! Your brain is going to explode with love!” and I have to say, the cliche just didn’t come true. It’s definitely an amazing kind of love, but it isn’t the explosive, life-changing, hit-by-a-bus love that people claimed it to be. I had way more explosive feelings for my boyfriend when I was nineteen. Maybe it’s timing, maybe it’s hormones, maybe it’s Maybelline. But this love is a quiet, soft, easy love. It’s probably because I had a child at 41. If I had been 19, I can imagine that my feelings for the baby would have slaughtered my feelings for the boyfriend. But who knows?
Did you always want children?
No. Sometimes I did, but sometimes I didn’t. Then I hit my thirties and I really, really struggled with the decision. And now, especially with the referendum coming up in Ireland [on abortion], I feel like being particularly open about this. I had an abortion at 17, which wasn’t a hard decision – I was in high school and it would’ve been a horror show. But then I had two abortions within my marriage; one for medical reasons (I’d taken a foetus-deforming antibiotic without knowing I was pregnant) and one because I simply couldn’t bring myself to want a child in the current situation I was in, full stop. It was such a painful and yet empowering experience, because I truly had to stand alone and go through this hellfire of indecision totally, totally alone, with subtle shame and judgment coming from every outside angle.
And yet, I persisted. I told myself I would be the final arbiter. In the end: I was just not ready to do it, I wasn’t there yet, I wasn’t ready to take the dive. I had to listen to my inner wisdom, even though people around me – my husband, certain friends – were encouraging me to take the plunge. I chalk up my ability to have that abortion to all the work I’ve done to stand in my own skin, to not allow others to make my decisions for me. And this is the truth that I see so many women waking up to right now: to not let those outside voices rule our narratives, whether those voices are coming from our husbands, our parents, our religions or our countries.
Funnily enough, I think it may have been my ability to make that decision – alone, with no cultural support or support from my little social world, with nobody throwing me a “congratulations on getting through your empowered abortion!” – that I was then able to handle having a natural childbirth a few years later, and a miscarriage with no medical intervention – even though it was prescribed – a few years after that. I was like: ‘I’ve had it with doing it somebody else’s way. I am the master of my own decisions, my own destiny, my own womb, my own time, my own body’. It’s such a difficult place to get to, and I had to walk through a burning fire to get there, but I feel like I’ve arrived, and I feel like it’s time for me to tell these stories, so that other women know the path is waiting for them, if they want to walk it.
Amanda Palmer. Lyric Theatre, Camarthen, Thu May 10. Tickets: £20. Info: amandapalmer.net