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Love now and all. You can follow me, I'll tell you I love now.
Love is stronger than anything else.
I feel a love, love.
And I love you more than anything else.
What is love? There's too much love.
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Every week, we bring you stories about love, lust, loss, All the messiness of human relationships.
This week, I'm talking to actor Carrie Coon.
Carrie Coon has kind of been everywhere lately.
She's in the new season of The White Lotus, which I'm very excited about.
She's on the Gilded Age.
But I've been wanting to talk to her about a movie she's in called His Three Daughters.
It's about three sisters who've all reunited to take care of their dad, who's on his deathbed.
And Carrie Coon's character is really worth talking about.
Her name is Katie, and she sees herself as kind of a martyr, taking care of everything and everyone.
She talks in these fiery, frustrated monologues.
The trick is, I guess the thing I'm saying, is that I hope we can make this easy on him.
Just not make a thing out of anything.
If we disagree, we talk it out without getting heated or yelling or anything that's going to upset him.
We handle it like adults, like the age we are.
I really don't see what there is to disagree about anyway.
Katie is constantly on a tirade.
On the phone, angrily trying to get a DNR signed by a doctor.
Every time a home hospice worker stops by, she's grilling him on the plan.
And she relentlessly criticizes her stepsister, played by Natasha Lyonne, who she thinks is selfish and immature.
Here's the thing. I get it that you don't want to go into his room.
Sure, I was there till 4 a .m.
and Christina's basically been in there since.
The hope would be appreciated.
But look, everyone deals with death their own way and I'm not going to tell you what to do.
That's between you and him and however you think should run your life.
Kuhn's character has such a rigid idea of who her sister is that she can't be bothered to find out what she actually thinks or feels.
And it's driving a bigger and bigger wedge between them.
This whole movie feels so true to real -life sibling and family relationships.
It explores the ways we regress around our families and how our ideas about each other can limit our relationships.
So today, Keri Kuhn joins me to talk about the stories families tell themselves and how those stories can make it harder to get to know and love each other.
She reads a modern love essay by a woman who had to escape her mother's ideas of her in order to find herself.
Keri Kuhn, welcome to Modern Love.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Carrie, I was so drawn in by your film, His Three Daughters, and not just because I am one of three daughters, although that made it very personally relevant.
The sisters in this film are in a very sad and painful situation.
Their father is dying and they've come together to care for him in his final days.
But they also treat each other in ways that can be so hard to watch.
Their relationships are incredibly fraught.
And you can sense that they're entrenched in years of being in these roles in their family, years of putting each other in boxes.
I will also say that it really seems like all three of the sisters feel deeply misunderstood by the others.
Would you say that's true?
Yes, because they still see each other as they saw each other, you know, 20 years before.
And you can debate how much growth has happened in the interim, but they're not the same.
And their story of what happened is different.
In any family, you know, I have four siblings.
Our perspectives on any event in our family, you will get five different interpretations of what was happening.
And, you know, sometimes they match up a little bit, but sometimes they're wildly.
Is there a specific thing coming to mind where it's like, I do not remember dad doing that?
Like, is there one that you guys debate to this day?
Oh, there are lots of little details.
Like, I remember my dad disappearing for long periods of time, and he was hiding from us.
Oh. And not knowing where he was.
I think he had a secret space by our pond where he would hide.
Oh, you mean quite literally hiding.
Okay. Yeah, no, I mean actually hiding.
My mom worked nights, so she had a good excuse.
She just slept all day, so she hid very openly.
Dad had to sort of steal his minutes away.
But, you know, so there's like family lore about how often that happened or where he was.
And he was a great dad, actually.
He took a lot of responsibility.
But, you know, my sister, we joke, she has this trope about like, remember family game night?
And we're all like, literally, there was no, ever, there was never a family game night.
And you maintain there was no family game night?
No, definitely not.
Okay. I mean, you're connecting this experience of the film to your own family.
And I do wonder if what we're seeing between the sisters and his three daughters kind of inevitably happens to some degree in all families.
Like, we can be very certain we know our family members very well that we don't put the effort into figuring out if we're missing something sort of fundamental about who they are in this moment.
Does that resonate with you?
Absolutely, because what I've come to understand, not only in making this movie and reflecting back on my own life, but because I'm now a mom.
I have a six -year -old and a three -year -old.
I work so hard not to project onto my children.
It's something I consciously am aware of.
What do you mean by that, projecting?
I mean that I try not to presume who they are or what they're going to be or what they're thinking.
I put so much energy into it.
I do not do that at all for my siblings.
And so what I've come to – like I'm trying to be such a good mom and I follow parenting experts and I'm trying not to make the same mistakes.
And that is one fundamental thing that I'm incapable of doing.
You know, it's our inability to be willing to see, again, the person who's in front of us rather than a set of ideas we have about that person.
I wonder like growing up, do you remember ever feeling like someone close to you had the wrong idea about you?
I mean, here's what's—I didn't have any idea about me.
And some of the things that resonate in this essay have to do with, in a family when we're fulfilling a role, and when we are trying to be safe and loved, we start to define what love is through how we try to get it.
and so for me what I started to understand for whatever reason conscious unconscious that that there was something about utility that if I could make myself useful to the people around me then they would have to love me I have to be providing some you know use to these people it's utilitarian and so for me
as a woman I was an observer of human behavior and I was trying to keep myself again safe and useful in these spaces we become shape -shifters right we start to turn ourselves into whatever the thing the person in front of us needs, and we become very good at it.
I know a lot of women are going to recognize that behavior.
And what happens, of course, inevitably is that you're so hyper -compartmentalized, there's absolutely no way that you are in touch with what you actually need.
And so you become this amalgam of everyone else's needs and feelings, and you're metabolizing that all the time, and you get so far from the thing that you want.
And of course, when you're spending all your relationships guessing at that, but no one's doing it for you, because actually you're constitutionally incapable of expressing your needs because you don't believe anyone's actually going to fulfill them for you, then all that does, it turns into a resentment,
a simmering resentment that, again, you are fundamentally incapable of communicating.
And then it just explodes and falls apart.
Or you hope it does, because that's the only way you know how to get out of anything.
You know, you're talking about how it's the stories we tell ourselves about the love we deserve, how we express love that are so formative.
The author of the Modern Love essay you chose to read grew up being told a story by her mom, being told that she was cold and unloving.
And for a long time, the author internalizes that and believes her mom must be right about who she is.
Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to this essay or anything you want to say to sort of set it up before we hear you read?
Mm -hmm. What resonated with me was an idea that I had about myself for a lot of years about how I was damaged and that I was actually incapable of loving in the way that society expected me to.
And now I understand that what I actually believe is that I didn't have any self -worth.
I was fundamentally unworthy of love.
But actually what was going on is that I was just completely disassociated and compartmentalized.
And you cannot love and believe yourself worthy of love from a place that's not more integrated than that.
Because there's no self there, you know, to kind of...
Anchor you. Anchor you.
Yes, there's nothing there.
And I think, you know, I've sort of, I get more Buddhist as I age.
I'm like, there is nothing there, but this is different than that.
You know, there's a distinction to be made about, you know, perception.
But really what was happening is that I so didn't believe that, A, my needs were worthy of being met.
In fact, I couldn't even tell you what they were.
I hadn't really—that still small voice inside of me did not exist, and I couldn't tell you what I needed.
I was just an amalgam of other people's needs.
After the break, Carrie reads the modern love essay, A Family Label Ungarbled, by Harriet Brown.
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All right, Carrie, whenever you're ready, take it away.
Okay. A Family Label Ungarbled by Harriet Brown.
When I was pregnant for the first time, my biggest fear was not whether I would love the baby, but whether I could, whether I was capable of loving another human being at all.
I had good reason to think I wasn't.
In her book, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins, Elizabeth Stone describes how the stories families tell assign roles to each person and how those roles can become self -fulfilling prophecies.
In my family, I was the one incapable of love.
I don't know that anyone ever used such a phrase, but that's the message I got as a young girl.
My mother used to bring out a black -and -white snapshot of my younger sister and me side -by -side when we were maybe two and five.
She would point to the scowl on my face, comment on how my shoulders leaned away from my sisters and say, You were always like that.
Maybe all parents say things like this to their children, meaning to describe rather than to harm.
But I came to believe it.
I grew up thinking of myself as ungracious, selfish, and cold, emotionally withholding not just to the younger sister who adored me, but to my mother as well.
I believed there was something wrong with me.
I was missing some crucial element that other people had.
I felt like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, except no ticking clock could take the place of the heart I seemed to lack.
It wasn't just words that convinced me.
It was the way I felt or didn't feel.
Our house was full of drama, slammed doors, raised voices.
I spent as much time as I could in my room Trying to block out the world with a book But I knew that at some point After the shouting had subsided That my bedroom door would bang open And my mother would launch herself onto the bed Weeping She would wrap her arms around my neck Tell me she loved me
And ask me to show her that I loved her, too Each time My eyes stayed dry My back rigid I felt in those moments A terrible, unspeakable coldness I was a stone in a frozen river, wedged into the bottom, buried deep in stillness and ice.
What kind of monster doesn't love her mother?
I did feel something for my grandparents, but I wasn't sure what to call it.
My feelings for them were quiet and private.
I felt a small, steady flame inside me when I was near them, but I didn't think of it as love.
Love was big and loud and messy Love rocked on the floor, head in hands, eyes running with mascara and angst Love slammed doors and stalked out into the night Too wrought up to button its coat or brush its hair Love was not something you chose or wanted Love rode you hard and tore you up Love broke
you By the time I left my parents' house at 16, my inability to love was part of my repertory, like my green eyes and curly hair.
I was flip about it, telling guys who were interested, you don't want to get involved with me, I'll only break your heart.
And I did. My early relationships with men were more like car wrecks than mating rituals, tending toward longing, despair, and anguish.
Once, I broke into a boyfriend's apartment and stole back every gift I'd ever given him.
I cheated on one boyfriend with another, and then again on the new one with the first.
Many times I cried myself to sleep and woke up with mascara smeared across my cheeks.
That, I thought, was love.
It made you miserable and stained your pillowcase.
I treated men badly and let them treat me badly.
Why did it matter? I was the damaged one, the one incapable of love.
I deserved what I got, and anyone stupid enough to get near me deserved what he got.
By the time my husband came along in my late 20s, my cavalier attitude had morphed into wistfulness.
You seem like a nice guy, I said one evening soon after we met.
Too nice. I'll wind up hurting you.
We should just be friends.
I am a nice guy, he replied.
And what makes you think I want anything more than friendship?
Just as long as we're clear, I said, and kept on saying it even after we started dating.
But our relationship was different.
It was quiet, utterly devoid of torment.
We took long walks around the city and around his mother's rural upstate enclave.
We went to movies and shared Indian food.
We rarely fought. I liked who I was with him.
But it's not love, I told him.
I'm too selfish to really love anyone else.
He looked me in the eye.
I know who you are, and I know you are a good and loving person.
I married him, in part, because I hoped he was right.
I hoped he saw something in me I couldn't see or feel, because I couldn't reconcile his sense of me with my lifelong view of myself.
This man had his own vision of me, what he wanted me to be, but I knew what was at my core.
And while I knew that I felt something deep for him, I couldn't give it a name even to myself.
Four years later, as I walked the halls of St.
Vincent's Hospital waiting for the Pitocin to take effect, I felt terror right through my bones.
Sometime within the next 24 hours, I would give birth, and then I would finally know the truth about myself.
