282 Alison Larkin
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/282
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Alison Larkin is here today and we are so honored to have her with us. It's likely a lot of you already know Alison, but for those of you who are new to her, she is a standup comedian, voice artist, audio book narrator, actress, producer, screenwriter, and bestselling author of The English American.
Today we get to hear her story which includes reunions with both birth parents, seeking out a therapist after meeting Nancy Verrier and how she finally came to truly fall in love in her fifties, only to have her fiance die suddenly during the [00:01:00] pandemic. Alison recounts this in her brand new one woman show called Grief, A Comedy, which is embarking on a world tour this summer.
Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.
Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Alison Larkin. Hello Alison.
Alison Larkin: Hello.
Haley Radke: What an honor to speak with you. I know you've been serving adoptees for many years, but to folks who might be new to you, do you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?
Alison Larkin: I'd be delighted. I came to [00:02:00] America when I was in my mid twenties in 1991 to find my birth mother about whom I knew absolutely nothing. I was adopted by the tidiest family in England and I had a very English upbringing. And the reason that I went to find my birth mother was because every time I was on a date with a guy, I'd find myself on constant alert waiting for the object of my affections to leave me. I'd be sitting in a restaurant and I'd go, he's going to go off with the waitress if I go to the loo. And I never let on, of course, because I was embarrassed about having such feelings. And I was, my love life was run along this philosophy. The key to dealing with a fear of abandonment is to date people you don't like. So if they do leave you, it doesn't matter.[00:03:00]
I began to wonder if maybe if I found my birth mother and I found out that it wasn't so much that she didn't want to keep me, but that she simply couldn't, maybe that would free me up to live and love like other people. I would watch my non adopted friends fall in love and be at peace. When I was in love or, really attracted to someone, along with it came this absolute terror that I didn't understand.
I was completely unconscious that it had anything, to do with early childhood abandonment at that time. I didn't know. And I, but I had a hunch it might have something to do with having been adopted. So I idealized my birth mother. She, as far as I was concerned, could float. She wore a white dress. She was angelic. And I had found when I was 15 [00:04:00] some non identifying information about my birth parents. And I remember it said about, her 5 foot 2, 110 pounds, American. And then I remember it, about him, it said something like, I don't know, 5'11", varsity football team, and then of the birth mother, it said relinquished baby because didn't want to ruin father's political career.
So of course, I knew immediately that I was a Kennedy. So with those kinds of expectations, and to be honest, a pretty naive, I had led a we'd lived in East Africa and West Africa. My dad worked for the World Bank and we lived in third world countries and we traveled a lot and I had traveled a lot.
I'd lived I'd traveled to Hong Kong and India and China on my own as a young woman. So I was [00:05:00] thinking, okay, I'm just going to go and meet my birth mother and it'll be like a regular trip. So I remember finding her with great difficulty. At the time, the only book that had any information about how to find a birth parent, I kept the adoption agency in Washington would not allow me to have contact with my birth mother, even though she had come into that agency and said she wanted to have contact with me.
It was very cruel. And I had this moment where I'm in London, and I go into a bookshop and my hand reaches up and I swear to God, I pulled down the only book at that time that had the name of the person who could help me in it, and it was Lost and Found by Betty Jean Lifton and I opened it. And there was a man called Tony Vilarity from the [00:06:00] International Soundex Reunion
who legally was able to put my birth mother and me in touch if our dates matched and the info matched. And I managed to persuade the adoption agency to ask my birth mother to contact him. And long story short, finally managed to find contact. And she invited me to come and visit her at her home in Bald Mountain, Tennessee, where she was living at the time.
And I met her and it was as any adopted person who has been through reunion will know, it was overwhelming. It was a complete shock and frightening. And I had expected that the two of us would walk towards each other in slow motion, like they did in the movies. And that our souls and our hearts would join, [00:07:00] instead
I was suddenly inundated with an enormous amount of information about her, which of course I wanted to know, but it was also about me because I had this very English identity. And then suddenly there was this woman who was telling me all about my creative genes and the writing and the artists.
And I was going, Oh my God, this is why I'm so creative. And some of the stuff she was telling me was really scary. About problems in the family. There was one relation who was suicidal, so he threw himself off a cliff, but failed. So he now has no arms and legs and sits in a wheelchair. And so there were things like this that was given to me as passing information.
But of course, I was absolutely riveted by her and what she was saying. [00:08:00] So I met her for three weeks, which I think was a mistake. I think it was, had there been any adoption counselors at the time, anyone I could have talked to, they would have said, hey, maybe don't go stay in her house for three weeks on the other side of the Atlantic.
Maybe just meet for coffee.
Haley Radke: Slow down.
Alison Larkin: Although whether I would have listened, I don't know, because I was in this, I felt like I jumped off a cliff and I had to do this thing and I didn't know why. And then I met my birth father with whom I had a real connection. I, my birth mother, and I found, I don't know why, but I was overwhelmed and I went numb.
When I met my birth father, he listened. My birth mother talked a great deal and I think found it difficult to listen at that [00:09:00] time in her life and I think when I met my birth father, it was a great relief because we were very much alike. We had the same favorite foods. We had the, you know the story.
Any adoptee who's been in reunion knows the story, same, all that stuff. And the connection was actually with him. And then he said, why don't you come to America? Because I was an actress and a playwright at that time. And he said, I think you do really well in America and being an adventuring type, which I am.
I decided to give it a try. So I started by thinking, I'd always thought I might want to do a one person show and I saw an ad for standup comedy in New York. And I thought, oh, I'll try that. So I stood up. I didn't know anybody in New York. I had no support whatsoever. I didn't tell my parents in England or my friends how [00:10:00] completely traumatized I was by the reunion because I didn't want to upset anybody because that's what we do is adopted people.
In my experience, we protect everybody else's feelings and we really ignore our own. So I was standing up in the club saying, hello. My name is Alison Larkin and I come from Bald Mountain, Tennessee. And of course people were cracking up and then people would say, oh my God, that's stuff you're doing about being adopted and finding your birth mother.
That is so funny. And then they found out it was true. And then I thought, if I'm going to express, they'd say, what was it like meeting your real parents? And the way the casualness with which they referred to my real parents, as my birth parents irritated me. And I thought, how can I express why someone from a very happy adoptive family might need to find the truth about the people she came from without sounding like a lunatic?
[00:11:00] So I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll write a one woman show and I'll combine stand up comedy and theater. And I will play a comedic version of myself, my English mother, who I had sound exactly like the Queen of England to differentiate her accent from my own, and my American birth mother who was her diametrical opposite in every single way.
And I started to talk about what was really happening through jokes. So I would say things like, I think everyone should be adopted because that way you can meet your birth parents when you're old enough to cope with them. And I'd say things like, of course, the adoption agency, things the lottery, you never know who you're going to get as parents.
I got lucky. Then again, if I'd been adopted by Mia Farrow today, I could be married to Woody Allen. So I was talking about it through humor [00:12:00] and the show, no one had done that at that time. We're talking like the mid 90s and no one had done a one woman show before. And I did. And I then realized, that I married a man that, who was very quiet.
My birth mother wasn't quiet and I needed somewhere quiet. And I met this man and he was quiet and he was very good at cleaning the kitchen. So I married him. I was not in love with him. I didn't love him in the way that I now know one can love, but I thought he was safe. And as an adopted person, and again, I think it was to do with my adoption, I think I chose him because I could trust him.
I knew he wouldn't go off with a younger woman because I was a younger woman. And I didn't have those passionate [00:13:00] feelings for him. So the anxiety wasn't there. So the fear of loss wasn't there. So I did marry him. And then we went to LA and suddenly I was going to have my own sitcom on television with Jim Henson Productions and ABC and then CBS studios.
And I worked with Gail Parent who created Mary Hartman, and who was also the head writer on the Tracey Ullman show. And we had, I had two, I was developed in Los Angeles to star in my own show and was doing stand up comedy on the side and then I had these two children and that changed everything because for the first time in my life, I was connected to another human being and when I was pregnant, I mean as an adoptee
I, my mother never was pregnant, the one who raised me, so I didn't know anything about it. [00:14:00] So I would go to complete strangers in LA, where I lived at the time, and ask them, what was it like when you were pregnant? And they would tell me because I had this nice English accent. And that was when I had not had any counseling or any support.
And at that time Nancy Verrier was giving a talk in Santa Monica, and I thought, oh, that sounds interesting. I'll go and listen. And she said something to me that changed my life. She equated, the primal wound theory, the part that I heard was that we adopted people are separated from the mother who gave us birth.
We're cozy and safe in the womb and then suddenly we're taken away and we're supposedly happy to be adopted by completely other people. But it was the first time any concept [00:15:00] of there being a loss at the heart of me ever came into my conscious mind. It was there unconsciously, but not consciously. And I asked her if she could help me
as a therapist, and she said she lived in San Francisco, but there was a woman called Dr. Marlou Russell, who lived in Santa Monica, and that she was an adopted person who had also had children. And so for the first eight years since my reunion, for the first time in my life, I had a trained adoptee counselor who was able to understand me.
And I almost, at that time, wasn't going to do the one woman show in a big way. I'd already done it in a little way, but there was a lot of interest in it. And I thought, oh no. I can't hurt everybody's feelings. I can't say things I can't speak up. And she said, why not? You have the right to your own story.
[00:16:00] And I thought, you know what I do, and maybe I can help other adopted people if I do this. So I, so the show then really took off and then I left Los Angeles. I was going to have my own TV show, actually a talk show. But I had these kids and I thought, I don't want to raise them in LA. The celebrity culture seemed to me very artificial and if we're, we adopted people who've gone through a reunion, it's all about finding out who we really are.
It's all about the truth, right? So I can't, how can you possibly live in, live any other way other than authentically once you've been through reunion. You're not going to, are you? You've been through hell to find out who you are and who you came from. So I said, oh to hell with Hollywood and moved with my then husband and two children to New Jersey, where he had some family.[00:17:00]
Then, yeah, I didn't want to be in the clubs. I didn't want to perform at night. I wanted to be with my kids while they still wanted to spend time with me. And I was fascinated by the fact that here were two genetic relatives of mine, who I actually wanted to be with. My, my birth mother scared me. My birth father, was my birth father with all sorts of complications.
But these two came from my body. And I then felt I knew how to parent them. Having been adopted by the English, I was never hugged. I was kept at the end of the corridor in a crib obviously, because that's what the English do. But I held these children. They slept with me. I nursed them.
And as I did, I think a part of me healed. And so to any adopted person listening, who is afraid of having [00:18:00] children, I would say, have children. Don't be afraid. I was scared. But when I did I learned what love was. So I quit performing. And I went to in New Jersey, I thought I was getting a little pissed off by the fact that in every commercial novel, adopted people are portrayed as eternally damaged victims at best, or serial killers.
And I thought, there's no commercial fiction here with an adopted heroine as opposed to an adopted victim at the center. So I thought, oh, wait a second. I could write a book while my children are sleeping. And then I get to hang out with them when they wake up and I won't have to go to the clubs. So I wrote this book.
It took me a year called The English American. And at first I was telling the [00:19:00] story from three points of view, as I had in the show, from the point of view of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and myself. But my very clever agent at that time said, why? This is your story, Alison. This is the adoptee's story.
Tell it in the I voice. So I thought I better make it fiction because that way I'm free. So I wrote this novel and it was about my alter ego Pippa Dunn who finds her birth mother in the United States in the book. I decided to give her a non adopted sister, which I didn't have in real life, because I thought it would be really interesting to compare another child of the same parents who are actually genetically related to them.
And it was a fascinating exercise. And I wrote this novel because I wanted to have short chapters. I wanted it to have a what the hell's going to happen next quality. I wanted to put in great love [00:20:00] stories. So there were two men, the guy who is the soulmate. And then the guy who's like the, the nice guy, there was, there were two men, there were two sets of parents, there were two countries.
And within, so I was writing, I think to bring myself together the nature and the nurture. And this miracle happened, and there was a bidding war for it, and Simon & Schuster published it, and I got a massive advance, which at the time, I'd never get again. Wish I could, because nobody, publishing's just gone to hell since then, but that was great.
And it was very exciting and I did a lot of benefits for adoption organizations at the time and I was always very interested in helping adopted people specifically. I was very interested in kids in foster care and I remember actually doing a benefit in California [00:21:00] and I was invited out there by a very nice foster family.
And there was another family there and they were going, oh, there's, those are our foster kids. And of course, everybody's medicated. They're all medicated. I said, Why is that? And they said adopted people all have ADHD. And I looked at them and I go, oh, my God. And they had no understanding of what these children had been through.
The and I find myself getting really cross. I'm just like, and I was doing a show that night. And I had this song at the end. And then I, it just came out of my mouth and I just said, there was like a line of, I don't know, maybe 20 foster care kids and adopted people in the back of the room. And then it was all the sort of parents at the front.
And I said, look, I said, I've been thinking about what it's like, to be moved from home to home. And it really does occur to me that it should be the parents who should be taking the medication. And these kids stood up [00:22:00] and we're all like going, yes, because, and I think this is, this gives purpose to my life.
I can, if I can give voice to what it's like. I'm just giving voice to my experience, but if I can continue to be honest, then I can help. Then there's some then I can, there's some use to all of this because it was very painful, a lot of it. And as a comedian, I see every, I do see humor in just about everything.
So flip forward. I then got a, I just became, I'm in New Jersey, and my husband, now my "wasbund", I found out that he had lost all my money. And he, I had trusted him not to go off with another woman, but, never make the mistake of thinking that just because a man knows how to do laundry and clean a kitchen, it also means he knows how to handle the family finances.
Now, he was not a bad man, but he was really bad at math. [00:23:00] And he had lied to me. He had not told me what was going on. And I realized that all the money I'd made from the book, from Hollywood, had gone. And there I am with a seven year old and a nine year old. And I, actually, funnily enough, I reached out to the adoption community.
Nobody, maybe they'll remember. So I was on Facebook. I wrote to the Facebook people, does anybody have any ideas about somewhere that I might like to live that has creative people and that is around nature? And I got all these suggestions because I'd been doing adoption conferences as a keynote speaker.
So I knew a lot of adoptees and people kept suggesting two places, Charlottesville in Virginia, and then the Berkshires in Massachusetts kept coming up. So I went to Charlottesville and, I always, I don't know how you are, but as adopted people, we have a really strongly developed [00:24:00] intuition.
Pippa, in my novel, The English American, talks about her knower, as in K N O W E R. And I've always said to people who've said, do you think I should do this? I said, trust yourself, trust your instincts. You may not be able to trust your mother or your father or your husband, but you can trust yourself.
So my instinct said not here, maybe the Berkshires. So everybody kept saying, oh, you don't want to go up to the Berkshires in New England in February. So I went up in February in a storm and I got out of my car and I knew this was where I was going to raise the kids. I left my husband, I had to, and we had, now I'm going to tell you this because we'd been sleeping separately for ten years because he wasn't that interested in that side of life.
It was a very lonely marriage. And so here I am in the Berkshires, I move up here, and I'm going, what the [00:25:00] hell am I going to do? Especially about money. And then Tantor Audio called me up and they said, is this Alison Lurkin, the writer comedian? And I said it used to be. And she said, Oh this is Tantor Audio.
And if you can promise us 15 audio books a year, we will set you up with your own home recording studio so you can earn a living in the middle of the countryside where there is no other work except writing, which you don't seem to be doing much of. Can you do an Australian accent? No problem, mate. How about Scottish?
Oh, absolutely. I could narrate sweet pink Scottish romances with titles like Mad, Bad, and Dangerous in Plaid. Can you do a Brooklyn Male? Why certainly, and I would swear at this point, but I'm assuming that might offend some people in a Brooklyn accent. And so they set me up with a home studio and suddenly I was able to earn a [00:26:00] living and be with my children.
Because the good thing about when I'm writing a book, I can't think about anything else. But when you're reading other people's books, you can shut the door on the studio at three o'clock and then listen to your children's tales of woe or joy, depending on what it is that day. So I did that and then I decided.
People, I still had a name and some of the big publishers, I was working for Macmillan and HarperCollins and Audible. And somebody said, look, they're using your name to sell audiobooks. Why don't you use your name to sell audiobooks? I said what do you mean? They said why don't you set up your own audiobook company and call it Alison Larkin Presents.
So I thought that's rather American, but why not? So I started with the one book that I knew I could do really well, which was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. And I produced it. I figured out how to do it. And to my utter astonishment, it [00:27:00] sold. It sold really well. And I said, oh, I'll do another Jane Austen.
Then I did all the Jane Austen's. Then I did Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Peter Pan. Then I did Alice in Wonderland. Then I started, I just kept going. And people seem to love these books. And then I thought I'm going to make them different. And what I would do is at the end of an audio book, I'd have a conversation about, a lot of the themes that like, we're all still talking about love and Jane Austen was talking about love and we're all still falling in love with the bad guy.
And why as women are we falling in love with Wickham? And anyway, those that interested me. So then flip forward 10 years, my kids are in college. And I begin to realize that I'm really lonely in my recording studio, because it's just me, the microphone, and basically a padded cell, as you will verify.
Haley Radke: Yeah, we're in the same cell. [00:28:00]
Alison Larkin: So I started to, I hung out at the coffee shop, and I went down to the coffee shop, and there was this couple there, and they were really happily married. And I heard that one day that he had died. And I managed to pluck up the courage to say to the woman, I've avoided love my entire life because I didn't want to suffer the way you are now.
Was it really worth it? And she looked at me and she said, Oh yes. Was your choice to avoid love really worth it? And I said, I don't know. And then I realized I'm 52. If I don't do something about it myself, I will never know what it's like to know true love. So a friend of mine got me online dating, which [00:29:00] of course was hilarious, and I put, I write about that in my show, the new show, and then I'm getting a newspaper at the Red Lion Inn, which is down the road from where I live, because I like to do the Sunday Times crossword, and the last paper's taken, and the woman points over my shoulder and there's this man, and he is smiling at me sheepishly, and he's holding up the Sunday Times magazine, which has the crossword in it.
And he's offering it to me because he's heard that I wanted that the last, he's taken the last paper. And I say no, I just I only do it for the crossword because on Sundays it's so much easier than Saturdays and he says, yes, it is. That's true. And I noticed he has the most incredible brown eyes and we start talking and he was from India, from South India, Vizag, near Hyderabad.
And like me, he had come to [00:30:00] America 30 years before. And he came when he was 22 to do a PhD in chemical engineering from India, and I came from England to find my birth mother. And we both got stuck here, and we were away from our own, where we'd grown up, the people we knew when we grew up.
We connected on many levels and we fell in love. And I fell in love for the first time in my entire life. For me, what that means is there was peace. There was connection. There was trust. There was somebody who really got me and who I really understood. And I remember one day saying to him, we can't be in love.
And he said, why not? And I said, because there's no friction. We don't have to negotiate. And he said, I know, isn't it great? So [00:31:00] we just loved being together. So all that stuff that I'd experienced in my, when I was much younger, was gone. The lack of connection that I had with my husband wasn't relevant.
And I was so happy. And he was too. And we were together for a year and a half and we had just decided to get married. And a week later, very strangely, I was on a call, my very first call to a group of adopted people. It was, Marcie Keithley's group and it was a group of adoptees and birth parents and they'd asked me on and I thought, sure, I'm going to talk about being in love.
And I think Bhima even called during that. It was a sort of live Zoom thing. And I stayed at home one night longer to do that talk and [00:32:00] to encourage my fellow adopted people not to be afraid of love because guess what? I'd finally found it in my fifties. I'd found it and it existed and what a waste of life, but anyway, there I was.
And then the next day I went to Bhima's house. And we had a perfect day. We went, spent that night looking at the stars, actually. And the next day he said he wasn't feeling very well. Now this was in July 2020. He had a heart issue when he was 49, he was now 54. And the doctor said, if you get COVID, you cannot get COVID.
So he wasn't feeling very well the next morning. And so we thought we better go down and have a COVID test. So we go down to the hospital where they were doing the COVID tests, but it was a side room at the hospital. And I'm waiting outside and I'm calling my "wasbund" and the kids [00:33:00] and saying, look, I'm going to have to quarantine because there's a chance that Bhima has COVID and making arrangements.
And they wouldn't let me in because of course, because it was COVID. But I said, just, he's had a triple bypass, just stay with him. And then about 20 minutes later, this security guard comes over and says that they left him alone in a room and that he fell on the floor in cardiac arrest.
And that they were putting him in an induced coma and flying him to Albany Hospital. And five days later, this beautiful, brilliant, 54 year old man was pronounced dead. And there was a funeral on Zoom and somehow I managed to drive home. [00:34:00] Now, I have this theory that if you've experienced loss very early on in life, it has, there's a perk to it.
Because when you experience sudden loss, again, it's almost there's a muscle that's familiar. It's oh yes, I remember this. And I survived it last time and I know I can survive it again. So I, of course, nobody came to the house because it was the pandemic. I was numb, which is exactly what happened when I met my birth mother.
It was as if, I don't know, it's a physical thing, it the body protects you from the pain somehow. And on the surface of things, I was functioning very, but I was like numb. And I would, I would. Of course I would scream in the car [00:35:00] when the numbness thawed, which is a very good stress reliever.
I highly recommend it to everybody who is listening. If you are really having a tough time, scream in the car. However, if the cop pulls you over and says, what's going on, ma'am, then just point to the radio and say, I was just listening to Lady Gaga. That's my recommendation, but that's a joke.
Anyway, so I got after a few weeks after he died. I started, I just got this sense that he was saying to me, Alison, get in the best physical shape of your life. So I started to go out into the mountains around where I live, and I started to work out with a group of people who were doing that during the pandemic.
And I ate very carefully. I knew that if I had sugar, I'd crash. I knew that if I put really good things into my body, it would help. And as I worked out my body grew [00:36:00] stronger and I one day realized that the numbness had gone but instead of the pain that I had been expecting which of course I had felt in snippets there was this extra energy and a kind of deep peace and a sense that he was right there
and that's when I got this other theory about again I don't know if it's an adoptee thing and I'd really love to know from your listeners what they think. If they've experienced this, and God, I hope they haven't, that perhaps because as adopted people, we are separate from our birth families, right?
But we're not, we're connected because those of us who have been through reunion know that actually we're connected to our birth families. We've always been connected to them. Even though they've been physically away, there has [00:37:00] always been a connection. And when we actually meet in person, that connection becomes visible and tangible.
And I'd sometimes wonder whether the fact that I have a great sense of Bhima still, almost four years since he died now, is something to do with the fact that I was trained from a very tiny baby that to connect with what you can't actually necessarily see it doesn't mean it's not there. I don't know.
And I don't know. It's a sense. It's not like literally, but there's a sense. And I have this. It's song at the end of my show. Oh yeah, just to finish the story. Yeah, I had known Archbishop Desmond Tutu because Archbishop Desmond Tutu had seen The English American, my first one woman show, and had read my novel and he loved them and he I was in touch with him at that time and I said, look, I don't understand Why am I not completely destroyed?
Why am I not toast here? Why am I able to function? And not only [00:38:00] why am I able to function, why do I want to live more fully and love more fully than ever before? And he didn't answer my question, but he did say, Alison, you have to tell this story because the world needs hope and it will bring hope to people who have suffered loss.
And then I thought, I don't really want to write another book. It's so hard to write a book. And he said, so tell jokes, sing songs, whatever, but tell it. And you can't say no to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. So I'm in my house on my own. I'd given up writing. I'd given up performing. But I remembered that when I was processing my very painful reunion with my birth parents, I wrote a show in a book.
So I started writing another show. And then a producer said, we're going to put it on. And then I wrote a book which starts six weeks after Bhima died, when he shows up at my kitchen [00:39:00] table determined to help me find love again. And then suddenly the book that I do the show and then suddenly the Soho theatre in London, they want it, and then I'm on the BBC, on BBC Radio 4 doing The Woman's Hour interview, talking as I have been with you, honestly, because I don't care what people think.
I really don't and suddenly, there's all these people and these people who've lost people are coming to the show. And then, suddenly, it's being produced and the show is going to the Edinburgh Festival starting June 30th. And then, it's going there all month to the assembly rooms. Then, it's going back to London.
Then, it's going on a theatre, a 30 theatre UK tour. Then, Australia, New Zealand, Mumbai, and then the United States. And the book that I have just finished, we are making available only for people who have just seen the show, because I want them to read it first. And I don't care. I'm breaking the rules. I love to break the rules, don't you?
And so [00:40:00] that's people can get it at the shows. And so that in a nutshell. Is the answer to your question. And that's not a nutshell.
Haley Radke: Oh my god. I've researched you, I've read both your books, I've watched multiple interviews.
Alison Larkin: Oh, you have?
Haley Radke: Yes, I have. Absolutely. I get prepared.
Alison Larkin: Oh.
Haley Radke: So I was ready, but you took us on a journey, so I'm thankful. You're such a great storyteller, of course, because of your expertise in that area. I watched that, ironically, it's called The Happy Hour interview that you did right before Bhima died.
Alison Larkin: Oh, you did?
Haley Radke: I did. I watched it before I read your second book and you were like glowing with joy when you were talking about your relationship with him. And so to know just a few [00:41:00] short days later, you would lose him is just.
Alison Larkin: Two days later, literally, under 48 hours later.
Haley Radke: That's just unreal.
Alison Larkin: But here's the thing, here's the thing. If I, with my background, can go through that, and not only be okay, but be fully alive, and I know I will love again, then we all can. I believe in the end, my daughter said, and again, I wonder if this relates to adoptees as well, but my daughter said I think I know what happened. And I said, why should I be doing a course on the neuroscience of love? And she said, I think when Bhima died, the love didn't. All that joy that you saw in that interview, all the joy that I felt [00:42:00] was still there.
And what it's, the love has gone into this new show in this book. And it is time for me, I have basically for the last four years seen very few people apart from my dachshund, Charlie. And it is time for me now to go out into the world and reconnect with people again. So that what I want to do is to go back to that adoptee group and say, it's okay.
The most, the thing that I was most afraid of, the reason I avoided love all those years was because if this sort of thing happened, I would never survive it. Not only have I survived it, I've been transformed by it. And that love, whether you're alive or not, it's there. That's what I believe. And so does that make sense to you?
Haley Radke: I think so. I think, so one of the things I really appreciate about The [00:43:00] English American is it brought to light, was it was published in 08, is that right?
Alison Larkin: Yeah.
Haley Radke: First, for the first time. It was, it brought to light the challenges of reunion where, we can get really romanticize reunion and you stay very connected with your adoptive parents.
It re reunion challenges help you have conversations with your adoptive parents, and I think one of the things you've been able to really articulate well to us in all of your work is that it's not, it's normal to want to know where you came from and you can do that and keep connected with your adoptive parents when you're talking about things with them.
Honestly, they're open about it. They didn't seem to feel threatened by it, right? So you have this very good balance there, and you are still supported there. And I think a lot of [00:44:00] adoptees can be critical of that.
Alison Larkin: I have to be honest with you. That was a novel.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Alison Larkin: So in The English American, I wrote what I would have liked to have happened.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Alison Larkin: Because when you're writing a novel, you can create whatever you want. The reality is that I didn't really talk about it with my adoptive parents.
Haley Radke: Oh, do you wish you had?
Alison Larkin: I talked about it enough, but then when I wrote the book, I had told them. So I told them through the art what happened and how I felt about them, but they wouldn't, they were English. So the English don't really communicate. I, so in real life, I relate to people who felt they couldn't talk to their adoptive parents. And yeah, I just created a story I would have loved to have happened, but it wasn't all factually true, just to to be.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that, because I do, yeah, yes, fictionalized the experience.
Alison Larkin: Yeah, it's just, I wouldn't want to think. That [00:45:00] was, yeah, that's why I'm right. That's why I wrote the second book. I wanted to create something.
Haley Radke: OK, so so putting that together, I think a lot of us have struggled with relationships. I personally, I got married very young, and I met my husband in our first year of university together, and this year will be our 20th wedding anniversary.
And I lucked out big time. He is amazing. And yeah. study and stable and all those things that I am not necessarily always. And so when I, and I watch my friends struggle with that and talk about these, like how hard it is to connect or, find the person. I love that you were sharing all of those learnings you've had through the decades like, because we don't talk about that enough.
And I think it's, you're opening a conversation with [00:46:00] adoptees who maybe haven't figured out, oh, it's from that. Oh because we can feel broken. We can feel like, as you said earlier, like the normal story, fictional story of adoptees, it's serial killer, or it's like we're these broken, traumatized people.
Alison Larkin: Which actually I find quite irritating as well. And I've actually taken Nancy Verrier on a little bit on some of her writing. I've challenged her in person, and I'm sure she would respect my mentioning it here. I do not believe that anybody is doomed. I believe that we all have the capacity to choose how we spend each day.
And the thing about adopted people is that we didn't have a choice right at the very beginning. But you know what? We do now. [00:47:00] And as adults, retraining that part of us that thinks, oh, I don't have a right not having confidence or to say, actually you do, each day you get to choose how you will spend it.
Don't waste a minute, cause tonight might end it. Don't waste your time. Those are the last lines of my show, Grief A Comedy. Don't waste your time. Because however we came into the world, we can't control what happened to us when we were very young. But you know what? We can control not what happens to us, but how we respond to it.
And that was what Desmond Tutu said to me when I first met him many years ago. And it was the phrase that kept coming into my head when Bhima died. I can't control what happens to me. [00:48:00] But I can control how I respond to it and the adopted people, I know every single one of them is a hero because I know what they're dealing with, whether it's conscious or subconscious.
If you have been abandoned for whatever reason, it causes it's tough. It makes, it can make things hard and we can choose to live fully anyway. And I defy anybody, anybody to say you cannot, you are going to be eternally damaged because I just do not believe that is true.
Haley Radke: When you went to therapy with an adopted person, was it because you were afraid you wouldn't be able to connect with your children or be the best mom to them or what was the thing that was like, I got a [00:49:00] deal because some people are just too afraid to go there.
Alison Larkin: Such an interesting question because, I'm trying to remember why I think I knew that I wasn't even thinking consciously of having children at that point actually. It was before I had kids.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Alison Larkin: I knew I was in a relationship that was disconnected. I knew that, I'm not an unattractive human being, but I was always afraid people would leave me.
And I knew that there was, it was such a sort of light bulb moment when I connected the dots in Nancy, thanks to Nancy Verrier, when I connected the dots and realized, wait a second that's a physical reaction. So the closest you can be to another human being is either being in their womb and growing in there, which we all do, [00:50:00] or having sex with a person later on in life.
That is two bodies together. Intimate. And I, for me anyway, put it together and go, oh, now I know why if I am physically very intimate with somebody, it triggers a fear that has no place here. It's to do with something that happened a very long time ago. And I wanted to go into therapy because I needed some help navigating a way to live without that fear.
Constantly in my life. And do you know what? Now, I am free now. I'm free of it. With Bhima, it was thanks to him partly too. But by the end of our relationship I wasn't afraid anymore. Because whenever, he somehow knew if he was talking to a really good looking woman, for example, at a, [00:51:00] jazz club or something.
I'd be going I'm about to leave. That's it. I'm going to dump him. It's gone. I'm just heading for the door. And he'd come up to me and he'd whisper, Alison, I want only you. And it all went. And now, because I know how quickly life can go. I will not waste a minute of whatever time I've got left on old insecurities that have got absolutely nothing to do with my life now. I am not going to let what happened to me then affect me now because my life is too precious. I want love in it. I want connection in it. And a friend of mine, this may be helpful for your listeners. It certainly was helpful for me.
I had a friend who, as he was dying, I was asking him I think it's in the book you just read. I said, if you could give three pieces of advice to the people you leave behind [00:52:00] you, what would they be? And he said, that's easy. One, love is the only thing that matters. Two, remember, most people are doing the best they can with who they are, which doesn't excuse abuse or bad behavior, but it helps you understand it.
And three, connect, because it is only in connection that love can find expression, which brings me to your podcast and the work that you are choosing to do, because this is a lot of work. I know how much work it is to put together a podcast. And you are choosing to connect with all the adopted people who are listening.
And that is really important work. And bravo to you.
Haley Radke: Thank you. How about we'll wrap with one question and then we'll do our recommended resources. I love how you have balanced being an advocate for [00:53:00] adopted people, but being in out there in the mainstream and I know that your show Grief A Comedy will be touching many people who've lost loved ones and maybe not have a connection to adoption at all.
So I appreciate that you bring adoption into that conversation. How have you done that, bridged that cause some of us are like only in adoptee land.
Alison Larkin: I know. Actually I got a bit overwhelmed after The English American came out and I would get lots of letters from people telling me their stories and I wanted to help them all and I couldn't.
I couldn't, I wasn't, I wasn't a therapist for a start. So I ended up on my website, which is alisonlarkin.com with one L in Alison, putting a list of resources so that if people needed help, they could go there. I was in the end, I needed to raise my [00:54:00] children. So I focused on my children and I let the work do it for me.
So the book was out there, The English American was out there and this new book is absolutely talking about the challenges of being adopted and the fact, and just to throw this in at the end that I, the first thing my birth mother said to me was, did you know you had a twin? You did, only he died in the womb. And, uh, so there was twin loss as well.
But I put that in honestly, because I felt it was important. It's part of my story and I'm hoping so for me the way I do it is through the work. So you hear you are you're doing it through your work, you're doing the podcast and you're in and I've I'm just telling the story and letting it unfold as it will and that's I just that's how I'm doing it and, yeah, I'm not really very involved in adoptee or adoption groups anymore. Although I'd really like to be, I just don't really know how. So maybe they'll find me again, I don't know. But yeah, so I hope that sort of answers your [00:55:00] question.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I really love loved, truly, reading Grief, A Comedy, and the book!
Alison Larkin: Did you really like it? Because you might be the second reader, or third.
Haley Radke: No way!
Alison Larkin: Yeah, seriously, it hasn't even come out yet. It's coming out in two weeks, and the only place people can get it is after a show. Yeah, I'm just so thrilled.
Haley Radke: I know. We're going to talk about, I'm going to, I'm going to briefly talk about it, no spoilers, and tell people they can't get it. No, you're going to go see Alison when she is performing. I've seen clips of you perform. I've never had the honor of being in person, but I'll tell you, I did stand up comedy one time. I took a class and I did a set. I know. The bravery it takes to get out there and to do, I don't know what it takes to do a whole hour show or however long your show is.
Yikes. [00:56:00] Overwhelming. Anyway,
Alison Larkin: that's fun. .
Haley Radke: I'll at the very end, I'll tell you the joke I opened with, and you can tell me if you think it's funny or not.
Alison Larkin: Yes.
Haley Radke: Stay tuned. No I loved it. I loved it because it was memoir from you. And so I knew this is your real story. And I knew English American was fictionalized. But it felt also biographical, as I'm reading it, right?
Alison Larkin: Yeah The English American was extremely autobiographical.
Haley Radke: Yes, which is why I felt.
Alison Larkin: With the new book, it's did Bhima literally show up at my kitchen table? Therein lies a big question.
Haley Radke: But as a comedian, Alison, as a comedian, and having read English American first, which I know is fictionalized.
Alison Larkin: Yeah.
Haley Radke: I started reading Grief A Comedy and you lead with the story about connecting with Desmond Tutu. And I'm like
Alison Larkin: [00:57:00] Desmond Tutu? Yeah. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Is this pretend? Is this made up? Like that.
Alison Larkin: That was true. Word for word true. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Which I know now. And I knew after reading it, but I was like, no, I truly loved it.
I think a lot of readers will really connect with you. And I love how you show Bhima leading you. I don't want to say anything for spoilers. So it's beautiful.
Alison Larkin: He does go on dates with me. He's determined that I'm going to date again. And I'm just saying, absolutely not. I'm going to sit in the house and think of you and that's going to be what I do.
And he makes me go online and he accompanies me on a few extremely funny dates, which is all we'll say at the moment.
Haley Radke: Yes, I know. I think folks are going to love it. And I'm a little annoyed that you're only going to sell it to people after the show, but you're like to be the rule breaker.
Alison Larkin: I know, it is going to be released much more widely. And of course, there'll be an audio book [00:58:00] at some point. But at the moment, literally, literally, I just finished writing it a week ago. It's literally got the very first. But people can I tell people can go to alisonlarkin.com and then all the details of how to get the book where the shows are, where the tour is, you can reach me all that stuff is on the website. Now I think they put it up.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Okay, wonderful. We will link to that. What do you want to recommend to us?
Alison Larkin: I want to recommend two things. I want to recommend that if you're not sure, and you're in hell. Reach out. Reach out to another adopted person. Find an adoptee support group. Reach out.
And trust yourself. Because here's a couple of lines from the final song of my show, Grief A Comedy. I'll give you the lines. I can walk. I can breathe. I can [00:59:00] speak and see and hear and I can bend my knees. I've got two legs. I find things funny and if I keep my living simple, I've got enough money.
I can read any book. I can eat feta cheese. There are people I love who are living. I can spend time with these. It's not the life I thought I'd live, but I'm good at changing plans. I've got a lot to be thankful for and a likely long lifespan. And when I'm missing my true love, if I get very still and close my eyes and take a breath, I can bring him near at will.
I can walk, I can breathe. I can shut out all distractions and take the time to grieve. And if grieving is the price we pay for the deep love that we feel, [01:00:00] then grief is just part of the deal. So I would say to adoptees listening who may be grieving, and to anybody listening who isn't adopted too, is that I just think grief is part of the deal, it's the other side of love.
And yes, it hurts, but the pain will pass. And it's accepting the fact that yes, it's going to be painful, but it will pass. That is the secret that then you go, oh, wait a second. You mean pain is just part of everyday life? So is joy. And so I would say, focus on the joy, turn your head towards the light and accept the fact there's going to be pain, but in order to be fully alive, that's part of the deal. And that's what I would say.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much. If folks are [01:01:00] listening right when this is released, you have a couple shows in June they can go to if they're in Massachusetts area. And yeah.
Alison Larkin: Yeah, that June 6th through 9th, the Barrington Stage. Yeah, if you go to my website, it's all in there. June 6th through 9th. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Alison. Just an honor to get to speak with you. I'm going to tell you my joke. It's okay. If you don't laugh.
Alison Larkin: Please. Yes.
Haley Radke: I said, I was like, I'm Haley Radke. I'm adopted. The best part about being adopted is never having to think about your parents having sex. She's clapping.
There we go.
Alison Larkin: I love it. Funny. Big love..
Haley Radke: Okay, friends, I loved hearing Alison tell her story. [01:02:00] I was captivated. I teared up in multiple places. I don't know. She just has this incredible energy and I think it probably came across to you. And this is how she is in all the conversations I've seen her participate in, this incredible willingness to be vulnerable, which that's my vibe, I love people who are willing to really go there and share their authentic self with us. And so I think that if you're able to go see Grief, A Comedy, and when it's released to the general public Grief, A Comedy, the book, I think you'll really feel connected with her. And I love this levity she brings to the serious topics. It's just really. It takes a very skilled person to do that.
I try to do that and I know [01:03:00] I fail often when I'm trying to do that. So I really look up to the way Alison talks about that. I didn't talk too much about The English American. We mentioned it was published in 2008 and she reads the audio book. And so to refresh my memory of it, I listened to the audio book to prepare for today.
And it's so good. She does all the voices in which she, showed us today as well. Her accent game is. 10 out of 10. And so it's, I'm going to say it leans towards like beach read vibes, which is so different than most of the adoptee authored work that we feature on the show. Like often we're reading memoir or like these serious academic texts together.
And so I'm, in hindsight, like I didn't read this in 2008. It's I don't, I'm not sure [01:04:00] when I first came across it. I know a listener recommended it to me even last year. And I was like, oh yeah, I remember that book. So this book is, it's very different. And knowing that it was a bestseller, sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a second, knowing it was a bestseller and that, thousands and thousands of people read it.
I was listening with those sort of eyes, ears. Because she really shares in The English American, a lot of the insecurities we have as adopted people, like she's oh fear of rejection and, this and that, like all these like quirky little things that most adoptees I would say have as character traits.
And so that was really amazing. And then the other piece I liked, and I don't know that I expressed this fully to her in our recording, but was she really shows like reunion, like this [01:05:00] excitement, the honeymoon phase. And then it's oh, what if the people you're reuniting with aren't quite well and haven't quite dealt with their stuff.
And I, I don't know if you can hear my dog snoring in the background, but anyway, Spencer's having a nap, sorry for the snoring. She's it really normalizes that view of what reunion really looks like, but also. It's like a beach read. And don't want to call it chiclet exactly, but it's more that lighthearted paced book.
And she's said before she likes to write short chapters because that's what she likes to read. And that kind of thing. I've heard her say that in other interviews. So anyway, if you haven't read it, I think it's a great one to check out and just see what kind of work adoptees have been doing through the years, she mentioned Betty Jean Lifton's book hitting it, touching it at a bookstore just like randomly. And 2008 is a long time ago already. So to know what [01:06:00] folks have been doing before us now I think is important. So I hope you'll check it out. I hope you'll go support her. And when she said world tour, like she's not kidding.
Grief, A Comedy has got so many dates. If you're listening, when this episode drops, it's 2024. She's got a couple spots in June in Massachusetts, and then it's whoa, the list is long. So if you're an international listener, make sure you go check because I think you will be inspired and laugh and cry if you go and see this, I am envious of those of you who get to go in person. Okay, blah, blah, blah. That was enough. I just, I really, I'm so thankful, I feel so thankful for people who have paved a way, and I believe Alison is one of those people for me, people who have paved a way to talk about adoptee rights in the broader community and [01:07:00] I, in researching her like I, I listened to all kinds of interviews and she mentioned she had a happy adoptive family and good childhood and all those things.
She always brings it back to but adoptees are misunderstood and birth certificate rights and she is an advocate for us, believe me I feel really thankful for the work she's done. And I'm really excited to see what comes of her new work. Now that she is back and touring the world and God, don't you want to hear her comedy?
I want to see a standup set too, by the way. Okay. I'm so glad. Sorry. I just, I had a great time with her. I'm sure you can tell. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Let's end it. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.
