Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with David Crow author of The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story. It is a memoir about your childhood - a survival biography in a lot of different ways. So, if you would just like to tell us a little bit about the basis for this book.
David: I didn't tell anyone my story until I was in my early 50s 'cause I was so ashamed and felt like I couldn't tell anybody. If childhood is a city you can never leave, if it was hard enough for you, it'll break you. And I found that the people that are supposed to love me, I couldn't trust... Betrayed that love to be very hurtful to me and my siblings. Found out that at a certain point when your childhood's bad enough, you don't like yourself, but you don't know it. You don't trust anybody because you can't trust the adults that are supposed to love you and take care of you. And that when you grow from this very broken model, learning to love, learning to trust, learning to be a good person can be very, very difficult. There are many cycles that people don't break and the worst ones come from horrific childhoods. In my early 50s, I realized that I was extremely troubled by my childhood. I never thought like a victim, still don't. I never wanted to keep score, get even, some people write books for that reason, or glorify myself as I certainly made a kagillion mistakes. But what I wanted to do when I finally realized that I could overcome this, that I could see myself in a different way, that I could forgive those who hurt me so much, I began to forgive myself. I began to have a much gentler view of myself... Became more trusting, more open, and my life changed. My children, my wife, my colleagues, my friends. I basically wrote the book for a single reason. To tell people you can overcome things that you think you cannot possibly overcome. Even if they bothered you for decades, which this did. When you are able to overcome it, when you are able to forgive it and move past it, there's a whole new world that will open up for you.
I didn't find any of the self-help books I read helpful. Not that they weren't somewhat helpful. I went to therapy, I found that was only somewhat helpful. What I had to do was go back and confront the worst memories of my life and understand who I was then. That I could do very little about it. That I had decided to feel ashamed, guilty, and I think for a lot of us, that you don't deserve any better. And that you can't get any better out of life than was given you. And of course, all of those thoughts are fatal. Letters that upset me are from people that are older who never learned to love, never learned to trust, and their self-image was created in their childhood, as mine was. They never broke free of it. And what they have suffered is a life sentence. I'm here to tell everybody, you don't have to have a life sentence because the first part of your life didn't go right. You can be the captain of your own ship, but you have to see yourself as someone different than the person that these very broken people told you that you were.
Mindy: I want to touch on something that you talked about there, because even though I had a wonderful childhood, we all have things that we've suffered through and...
David: Oh, absolutely. I didn't go through the worst and plenty of people who've gone through a lot more than me, but no one gets through life scot free, I don't think.
Mindy: No, I don't think so either. I myself have tried self-help books before. My therapist told me one of the reasons why I don't find them useful is because, quite frankly, most of them are not well written. And it's very difficult for me as a writer to look to something for guidance or help or any type of support, if I can't get past the writing. I think it's a weird little wrinkle in my life where self-help books have never actually been that helpful to me because I'm looking at the quality of the writing and I can't... There could be some great stuff in there, perhaps, but I can't get past it.
David: I feel that too. A lot of the self-help books will say things like, write your childhood-self a letter saying, I love you and you're wonderful. For me, that wouldn't work. What I had to do, and I kind of compare it to a ball of yarn that's got a million knots... You can't just cut them. You have to unwind them. And the unwinding is understanding why you feel so bad about yourself. Why you have a hard time forgiving people who did things to you that they never apologized for, probably don't even think they did. My dad never thought he did anything wrong. Even when he killed people, they had it coming, right? You have to go through something that's almost alchemic. You have to see yourself then. You have to see yourself as you wanna be, and then you have to kind of forge your path on how you get from where you were to where you wanna be. But you have to think it through, and you have to see what those memories, those messages, did to you. So for me to just sit down, I love you, David, you are a wonderful little boy. There was no loving the little boy, David, when all this happened to me. It just didn't connect. They tell you you can be anything you wanna be. Well, I doubt I could be a center on a National Basketball Association team. I'm a foot short, not quick, but I can be all that I can be. So I think there's a lot of things going on. And Mindy, I see your communication skills, I think, taking the self-help part to a new level. Make people feel what you're trying to say, but then make them take ownership of the pieces that they need to do to get where they need to go.
Mindy: I myself hit a brick wall pretty hard. I can find them trite. I also agree with the "you can do anything you want." I have always said, "No, I can't be a ballerina." My physical body is not made for that. No, I can't do anything that I want. So, I always find it to be useful to be practical. Function over form is always pretty major in my life, and I need things to serve a purpose.
David: Lori Gottlieb wrote a letter, You Should Talk to Someone, which is the best book that I've ever read. But there's room for this for you, Mindy, and others of us to fill in some of these spaces. People go from, "I'll never be a National Basketball Association Center" to "I can't do anything." No you can do a ton. Everybody has a capacity to be far more than they are, but they're gonna have to work real hard. You're gonna hit brick walls, as you said. Tell me you haven't hit a brick wall and I'll tell you you haven't had much growth.
Mindy: If it's not hard, it's not worth doing. But I grew up in the Midwest on a farm, and I wanna talk a little bit about your childhood. You grew up on a Navajo Indian reservation. When it comes to your book and your childhood, can you talk a little bit about the Native American angle on this and how that is such a huge part of your story?
David: So my dad, who said he was Indian, Dad took us to an Indian reservation for two reasons. I'm born after he got out of San Quentin. My mother was pregnant with my sister when he went in. He did something, could have gotten him the death penalty - certainly could have gotten him 20, 30 years in prison, but he needed to go to a place to accomplish two goals. One, he had to be able to go to a place where he could lie about being a violent felon, because every employer will ask you, "Have you been a violent felon?" That's a real negative. I think no one wants to hire a violent felon. And the second thing is, he wasn't afraid of his accomplice, one-on-one, but he was afraid his accomplice would ambush him. By going to the Navajo Indian reservation in the 50s - think pre-internet, pre-everything - I mean, I was five before we saw our first television. You could basically hide from the world, and he did.
And Dad was able to work in a good job. First at El Paso Natural Gas Company, and then later at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It allowed him, basically, to lie about his past and be able to function. And my first memory, where the book really begins, where he takes me out into the frozen tundra on the reservation and says, "We have to get rid of your mother because if you grow up with her, you'll be crazy just like her." And the book starts there, and it just goes through an incredible series of events that almost read like a novel. Why did things just keep happening? Worse and worse, and somehow dad survives all of it. Somehow we all four kids and my mother survived it, but they didn't survive it very well. My siblings have paid a tremendous price. I think in some ways they had it a lot worse than I did. Partly 'cause I understood Dad, so to a certain extent, I could head off things that he was gonna do, but if he got really, really angry, which he did all the time, there was nothing to stop him.
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Mindy: I think too, when you're talking about a memoir like this that is so deeply emotional, and you're writing about your family and, of course, your parents but also your siblings. What made you say, "I think I need to write about this," or "this should be a book." Was it a therapeutic move on your part? Or was it something that could go out into the world and help other people?
David: All of the above. I honestly thought I would never be able to overcome what I had gone through. Meaning that I would just never feel better about myself. I would always have guilt and shame and feelings of not deserving good things happening to me. I was able to have a good professional career, reasonably good relationship with my children and siblings, but they were never what they needed to be, right? 'Cause I didn't trust. I wasn't open. I basically hadn't overcome my childhood. Outwardly, yes. I could do all the things you're supposed to do, for the most part. I could compartmentalize, but inside, I was a real mess. By the time I hit my early 50s, I thought, "Well, this is never gonna change," right? I'm gonna die not particularly happy with who I am... What I've done. I really, really concentrated... Went through a divorce and had a second marriage, which has been very successful, but during that time, I went through a deep reflection. I got to change the equation. So I had been constantly going back to my childhood haunts on the reservation and in Gallup, New Mexico, but I always went back to this one house where the worst of the worst happened.
My mom went homeless there. My dad tried to kill her there. My mom was sitting in an empty house. My dad just took us all out of school. We just struck off. Cut off electricity. Took the food, no water, nothing. And left this mentally ill woman who had less than a ninth grade education and just dumped her like a hurt dog. About a week after my dad did this, he had cut her brake lining, so he thought she should be dead. But she didn't die and she was still in that house. And he made me go back to find out if she was physically there. And when I did, she was sitting in a fetal position on a cold floor, a dirty mattress, and I stared at her and I saw the look of complete hopelessness. The eyes are vacant. And I didn't know what complete hopelessness was till that minute. She saw me, jumped up and said, "You're my only boy. You're my oldest boy. You've gotta take care of me. You and I have to go out in the world 'cause I can't survive without you." My father came up behind us. Hit her real hard. Knocked her to the ground. Grabbed me. Took me to the car, and then he hit me with his elbow in the head. I was sitting in the passenger's seat and I didn't feel it. My head hit the window, but between the window and his elbow, I felt nothing. And I realized at that point, that was where in my life that I broke. That my spirit broke. That I would never like myself again. Would never trust myself again. Would never love myself again, and I would never let anybody get close to me because the pain was too great. When I went back to that house, I re-lived that moment and plenty of others. There was a very nice man that lived there, and when I walked into his living room and I looked in the living room, all of these memories came back like in three dimension. I started crying and he talked to me till two in the morning. And I walked to the door and thanked him, and he said, "Look, you can't change your childhood, but you can get past this," and for some reason, it was the exact right message at exactly the right time.
Went back to the hotel, and the next morning after I woke up... I kept journals all my life and saved them, but I started writing again, furiously. And I picked up the phone and called my dad, which I never do. The least helpful person, you'd ever call. And I said, "Did you ever feel bad about what you did to us?" And he started cursing me out using every filthy word you can. Calling me a coward, not much of a man, a guy who would never amount to anything. And he said, and by the way, you haven't... Don't revise history to make yourself feel better. I didn't do anything wrong. I was done with him. I could forgive him. I could let it go. He could never change. There's things you can change, things you can't. Couldn't change him. You're not gonna get that. You're gonna have to give yourself something that the people who did it to you won't. So I call my mom. Again, something I rarely did then. And I said, "Did it ever occur to you the incredible pressure you put on me to leave with you and be the head of the household at 10?" And she said, "Well, you deserve it. You left me. You abandon me. You're my oldest boy. You never help me. You're not here, right where I am now. You have a lot to account for. I'm sorry, you feel bad, you should." And when I put the phone down I realized, "My God. I'm trying to be as mean as my dad, and beyond belief, savior for my mom, and then defining myself for my failure to do both things. And I gradually, from that moment on, I started seeing myself differently. I started being more forgiving to myself. Realized over about a period of a year, I need to write this down. Something had happened inside of me that changed my life. And it was something I'd wanted all my life, and already accomplished the catharsis. This was an after the fact. And I felt very committed to writing it, to let other people know, "Hey, you can do things. You can get past things that you're absolutely convinced are impossible. It's not gonna be easy. You're gonna have to work incredibly hard." If you read my book, I made so many mistakes. I did so many dumb things. Did so much wrong, but I just never quit. And when this moment happened in that house with this man, I had put in a ton of work. Maybe it hadn't accomplished its goal but it was working in my sub-conscience. Once I was able to be honest and say, "This happened. I did this. And I'm sorry about it, but I don't have to be defined by it," and from that time on life has gotten quite a bit better for me.
Mindy: So the book then was something that came out of the experience of already having changed.
David: Well, yes. What had happened in that house in the conversation with both parents was the final catalyst, and then no one really knew. When I wrote the book, the first thing that surprised me is all my college friends and clients that have known me for a very long time said, "we always knew something was wrong. Why couldn't you tell anybody? Why didn't you say something?" And the answer is, and anybody who's been through anything remotely like I have, you can't tell people. I mean, you're a young person. You're in college in your early 20s, and people say, "Oh, how's your family?" "Oh, my dad kills people. He beat my mother to what he thought was her death. How was your life?" I didn't want people feeling sorry for me. I certainly didn't want people judging me. I just thought I'm different than everybody else in the world. They're good people. I'm bad people. You're not bad people because you went through bad things, and you're not bad people because you did some dumb and bad things while you went through that. The end goal is to get better, stronger, play it forward, go back and fix as much as you can, but before you want the world to change, change yourself. And once I really understood that and made those changes, life got much better. It didn't get perfect. It's not perfect now, and it won't be. But my God, it's very, very good. I still wake up with the occasional nightmare and stuff like that, but by and large, I don't feel like the guy that went through the book anymore. That guy's gone.
Mindy: The real reward isn't being able to feel that way, but the book itself has done so well. You've won many, many awards - the Next Generation Indie Award for best memoir... An International Book Award for best true crime. You've done very well, and looking at your reviews on Amazon, you have over 11,000 reviews. And your overall rating is four and a half stars. So there has to be just an incredible feeling, not only of course, the personal reward of having turned your entire self-concept around but also just to be able then to find this outlet and have the outlet itself be so incredibly successful.
David: Well, I've been very fortunate. It crossed over 200,000 in sales printed in Russian and Lithuanian. I wanna thank my publisher who helped me figure this out, my publicist, who's very smart. But the other piece is getting out of the way of the story and letting the story tell itself. I wanted people to see what happened and imagine themselves in that spot, asking themselves, what would I have done? But more and less, what I wanted them to understand was the journey and how I had gotten through the journey and how it had got me to a place that I never dreamt possible in the beginning. So, I think the reason the story did well is the story, not me. Just... I knew there was a lot that I went through. I thought there was something to say, and I thought I knew how to say it. And I got incredibly fortunate and people felt like it was a message they could relate to. My final say on that is, I think one thing that really helped it was the honesty. You know, I had advice - to leave some of the really dark part out - what he did, and you went through. I said, we can write a novel deciding I'm superman. We can write an honest memoir showing you that I'm anything but Superman. And that the reader who reads this will see themselves as not being Superman either, and imagining how they might work through some of these things. And realizing that an ordinary person can work through extraordinary things if they never give up.
Mindy: And that's a great message for writers too, because there's a lot of rejection and a lot of pain and a lot of your own self-worth wrapped up in your work when you're a writer.
David: And you're gonna get rejected. I got rejected a lot. You're also gonna get bad reviews. You're a horrible person. You belong in prison. You're gonna get all that. So here's what I tell people. Welcome to the world. The world's just full of people who are just ready to jump on you, tell you you're no good, laugh at you when you trip all that. That's fine. You just have to let that be a part of life. But what you have to do to overcome it is you can't throw a rock at every barking dog and get where you wanna go. Every rejection, whether you're writing a book, or you're applying for a job, or you're trying to get past what I got past, is a chance to do it differently and try again. The real essence of my message is you can try 100 times, 1,000 times and think, "I'm giving up," but there could be one little tweak, one little epiphany, a different effort, a different person, a different situation, and all at once, you've crawled through the bottleneck you never thought you'd get through. The people who don't make it - quit. And I will say, doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
Mindy: That's certainly the truth.
David: And be clear, you can find a thousand doubters on the block you live in. There are very positive people in this world who want the best for you, but you'll find a surprising number of people who are also glad to see you not make it. And that's too bad 'cause I wanna hang out with the people who wanna see me succeed. And then my friendship, my children, my family, my friends - I want them all to succeed, and I hope every one of them does better than I did. You find the right kind of positive people and they don't quit. They're gonna go far. Even if you don't think they will. You just watch. They'll get there.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let people know where they can find the book and where they can find you online.
David: You're wonderful, Mindy, and thank you. So the book can be purchased on Amazon, easiest, just The Pale-Faced Lie. David Crow, crow like the bird. But you can get everything including how to get the book in other ways and all my blogs and stuff about me on David Crow author dot com.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.