00:05:28.640It's a super, super rare vascular disorder. And it really kind of it shows itself differently for everybody who's got it. But there are certain kind of abnormalities that that are typical. And for me, one of the things that almost everybody who has it has is like a port wine stain. So we've all seen those. Mine is gigantic. It's all over my stomach and my right thigh and my back.
00:05:57.020but it's also kind of what they there's this thing called the hemangioma here's where things
00:06:02.120get really confusing too is that there's all this debate as to what kind of nomenclature is correct
00:06:08.340and what isn't and what's outdated and i was born in 1976 so it's like things have probably changed
00:06:14.620since then i use the word hemangioma because that's what i was always told it was called
00:06:18.820which is basically like this mass of flesh on my back and my right leg. I don't, not my arm,
00:06:27.340not my right arm. So like my right leg is much bigger than my left. My back is, you know,
00:06:33.040the way I describe it in the book is not at all back. Like it is just kind of like this
00:06:36.380mess of flesh. And so depending on how I dress or how I angle myself or how I am exposed to you,
00:06:44.700meaning like if this were, I mean, listen, we worked together for years and you're telling me
00:06:49.040you never noticed it. Imagine like, you know, the people that I meet, if this were the first
00:06:53.260time that we were meeting and it were online on a video screen, you would have no idea unless I
00:06:58.960told you. Um, except some people, you know, there are people who are kind of observant
00:07:04.260in ways. Sometimes I think it's the people who are the most empathic. Sometimes I think it's
00:07:09.860of people who are the least empathic um there are people who notice just like little idiosyncrasies
00:07:16.520like the fact that i don't quite sit up straight or the fact that it looks like i'm wearing a really
00:07:22.140thick sweatshirt and why would i be wearing such a thick sweatshirt when it's 80 degrees outside so
00:07:28.080so yeah so i hear that from people uh that they have not noticed it but i you know i also hear
00:07:34.480the opposite so yeah yeah no I didn't I didn't notice it I mean for for a couple of years I got
00:07:40.300to say uh but I mean I think that's also probably because we started working together when like I
00:07:46.200said when I was in my late 20s and I was just so focused on me all the time right right yeah
00:07:52.140that is the biggest lesson I think for all of us is that like as self-conscious as we ever are
00:07:58.140remember that nobody is as focused on you as they are on themselves literally no one no one
00:08:04.140exactly so you're diagnosed with this how early on did you know about this and how early on were
00:08:10.440you aware that your body was was different from other bodies as far as I know it and understand
00:08:16.920it it was something that my parents found out about when I was born so they didn't know before
00:08:23.560but once I was born it was obvious that there was something that was different about my body
00:08:29.660And they got the diagnosis pretty quickly, which is not always the case for people that
00:08:34.240have click well, Trinani, because it's because it does present so differently for people.
00:08:39.160There are lots of doctors that haven't heard of it.
00:08:43.260And so they kind of go in circles trying to get a diagnosis.
00:09:14.420So when did you start becoming obsessed with fashion as a way, and maybe I'm getting this wrong, but as a way to, like, also cover your body but then self-soothe your confidence?
00:09:25.800So I feel like the fashion was doing something for you, both physically and mentally.
00:09:41.860I happen to be lucky enough to have a mom who is obsessed with fashion and shopping and she's got a great eye.
00:09:50.620And so my being well dressed was always really important to her.
00:09:54.760And so it became really important to me. And I just, you know, she got a lot of joy from clothing. And so I started to get a lot of joy from clothing. And it wasn't until I want to say really probably puberty where, you know, everybody's bodies are changing and, you know, the young women around you and me too are kind of starting to have feelings in our body that maybe we haven't had before.
00:10:22.720And all of a sudden it got a little bit more complex because I went from being this kid who wasn't really self-conscious about wearing anything to being like, well, right, but I'm like clearly not a bikini girl.
00:10:36.520And I will say that's not just because I have a weird body, but that's because I grew up in an era, as did you, where it was like certain girls wear bikinis and certain girls don't.
00:10:47.520And I thank God that we are no longer in that era.0.98
00:10:51.340And the fact that, you know, people of all shapes and sizes wear whatever the fuck they
00:10:55.720want now is to be the biggest miracle.0.51
00:11:17.520It was just like layer on top of layer of like, yeah, I can still find joy in fashion, but I have to abide by certain rules. And those rules were really haphazard and constantly shifting. And so, you know, like I wore shorts throughout high school. I was on the volleyball team. I mean, we were practically in our underwear, right?
00:11:39.520Like I did that because the other option would be not playing volleyball, which wasn't an option for me.
00:11:47.960Well, I was going to say wear a bikini at the beach, but that's not true because I did.
00:11:51.820I went through a small I went to a phase.
00:11:53.500It was it was a lot of like trial and error and a lot of like phobia and counterphobia and like pushing boundaries for me.
00:12:02.560So fashion has always been a way for me to kind of test my own limits.
00:12:06.480But I but I think at the end of the day, I love clothing so much that I almost always come out on the side of like, yeah, I'm just going to wear whatever this was.
00:12:35.700I love my life. Um, and yeah, it took, why did it take me so long to get here? I hate that for me.
00:12:42.680I think it, I hear, listen, I think it took me as long to get there in a really genuine, complete,
00:12:50.680whole organic way, because even though I was doing all those things,
00:12:57.200I wasn't doing it with, without self-consciousness. I, I was, you know, I was wearing really teeny
00:13:04.200tiny dresses but i was also looking for fights everywhere i went you know i wouldn't i would
00:13:10.000take the subway to work and like a tiny dress and watch for people to look at me funny and like you
00:13:18.300know it'd be the best day ever if i caught somebody staring at me funny so that i could start a fight
00:13:23.380with them like nothing gave me more of a thrill like that's not great um probably i am now right
00:13:30.100Yeah. No, where I am now is a true like this is this is something you can only understand if you're a woman and you hit 40 or you're not a man and you hit 40. There is something that happens when you hit 40 where you are just out of fucks in the realest way ever.
00:13:48.900it's like it's real no amount of saying that you were out of them before it's just like0.88
00:13:56.220i'm i think you're giving yourself a hard time for it taking so long but i think it took that
00:14:01.280long for me to to be complete yeah no i see that i see that we're going to take a quick break and
00:14:07.240when we get back i want you to explain the book's wonderful title all look so hot in a coffin
00:14:12.180okay we are back i love the title of your book i think the first time i read parts of this book
00:14:25.320it was before it had this title yeah yes it's a while ago tell me how you came up with this one
00:14:32.740and what does it mean so the the title the title of the book for a really long time just the
00:14:38.280police holder title was such a pretty face. And, um, but the title of my prologue, the preface of
00:14:47.420the book was I'll look so hot in the coffin. And what that meant for me was a couple of things,
00:14:52.520which is like this sort of self-deceiting idea that so many of us have, which is that if we
00:14:58.700could just get to X, if we could just get to whatever weight, if we could just get to, um,
00:15:06.500having our nose look like this if we could just get to like whatever fill in the blank thing it is
00:15:12.140we would finally be happy and of course we know that that's not true it's like a void it's it's
00:15:17.520you know once you get something you want something else and um for me it was like
00:15:24.380constant dieting and constant focus on my body was like I was in a way killing myself
00:15:32.780I was killing my psyche. I was killing my emotional health. I was just like beaten down
00:15:39.080and sad and tired. But it's like, okay, but when I'm dead, I'll be so hot because I'll be so thin
00:15:47.260and like, yay. And then it was kind of the realization of like, wait a minute,
00:15:51.720why is that my goal? Like you get, we get this brief moment on earth and it's like,
00:15:57.480is that really how I want to spend it? And that's very easy to say. But I decided to kind of try to
00:16:03.620actually live my life that way. And then the other part of it was this, this is so morbid,
00:16:10.020but I had this dress that I love, this Isabel Marant, white eyelet cotton dress that I just,
00:16:16.460it was my favorite dress ever. And I, you know, I'm a yo-yo dieter as a lot of women are, and
00:16:22.920And the dress started not to fit. And I would do that thing where, you know, you put it on to kind
00:16:29.220of like it's a masochistic exercise where you're like, how tight is it? I remember my mom doing it
00:16:34.220when I was little. She used to, she had this pair of pants that she used to put on all the time to1.00
00:16:39.080kind of gauge, you know, how much weight she'd gained and how close she was to fitting in the
00:16:42.960pants again. And I got to a point where I could get the dress on my body, but it was really more
00:16:48.900like a sausage casing than a dress and I had this idea that like I'm telling you morbid um
00:16:56.840I was like well if they can get the dress on me when I die I will start to decompose
00:17:04.200and at some point the dress will fit again and I'll look so hot in the coffin in my Isabel
00:17:11.620Morant dress and I really love I really love the morbidity of that actually it was so I mean it
00:17:18.340was a joke but also not but also not a joke not a joke because i think every woman listening can
00:17:23.400relate i mean and what a what a way to live your life right to plan for a day that you're not even
00:17:29.620going to technically be at and so that title that god bless my editorial team at dial press
00:17:39.040they pulled that out from my preface pretty late in the game and they were like we think this should
00:17:45.820be the title of the book and I I was really really ambivalent about it because on one hand I loved it
00:17:52.520but I was also afraid that it would turn certain people off and then I I started to realize that
00:18:00.160the people I was afraid of turning off are probably not my readers anyway um you know
00:18:05.600because I love it you know like who didn't love Jeanette McCurdy's title I'm glad my mom died
00:18:10.200everyone everyone loved that everyone loved that title and I feel like publishing has been trying
00:18:14.320to recreate that title and for some reason it just stuck you never know what's gonna stick or
00:18:19.740what's gonna never go excited you really never know and I really for a very long time thought
00:18:24.180such a pretty face was the greatest title ever and it is so funny because every woman that I know
00:18:32.580understands what that title means they're like like if I if I say to you like if you had to like
00:18:38.960explain what such a pretty face means like what does that mean to you it means that you know she
00:18:44.800has a really pretty face but the rest of her is exactly right every single woman has heard that
00:18:52.300i i was talking to a guy recently about that having been the title at one point he was like
00:19:00.380oh what is that a reference to and i was like and i there was a group of us and there were other
00:19:04.860women and they were like are you serious and he was like yeah is it like from like a song is it
00:19:11.120and we were like oh my god yeah how nice it must be to live your life how nice it must be i couldn't
00:19:19.000i was like oh my god the the it wasn't it was true privilege it was true privilege it was just
00:19:25.580like this has literally never been said to him and every single woman i know has had that but in the
00:19:30.660we abandoned that anyway i'm so happy we did i'm so happy that they pressed me to go with
00:19:37.200i'll look so hot in a coffin because it really i think that's the vibe and the voice of the book
00:19:41.380um but yeah is he crazy i could i was like flabbergasted i would like i can't believe
00:19:47.980i'm explaining this to you i know i know but i'm but i'm also not surprised at all no of course
00:19:53.520Truly non-surprised. We grew up in this diet-obsessed culture in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. And then we worked so closely together at celebrity magazines, figuring out what covers were going to work and what were going to stick.
00:20:11.380And the ones that always flew off the shelves were the ones about weight loss.
00:20:17.420I mean, not every single time, you know, a miraculous diet to lose 15 pounds by bikini season.
00:20:26.980How do you think that that impacted you as you were also dealing with all of your body stuff?
00:20:32.180I do think that I was able to separate my work life from my psyche, but I also think that it would be really naive to think that I was able to do it as completely as I thought.
00:20:47.740I mean, I think working where we worked in the industry we were in is kind of the same.0.88
00:20:55.800It's just sort of like an extreme version, like the Turbo Max version of what it's like to just be a woman in the world.
00:21:04.900Like we're all inundated with that message, specifically that the smaller you get, the more value you have.
00:21:11.600And so for us, I mean, like I have memories of sitting around and kind of like we would make like, you know, make fun of the cover sometimes like in a in a very lighthearted way.
00:21:25.060Like we didn't all the all the people. It's like the way it's like the way people work for like bad men now. Right. It's like really, really easy to be like, you should resign from Tesla because you shouldn't be working for Elon Musk or you shouldn't work for whatever company.
00:21:42.660If you are really kind of way lower down the ladder and you're just like a worker bee, which is what I think that we were, you're kind of just creating the stories that you know are going to sell.
00:22:01.160And and, you know, this is like the conversation we were having off mic before we started recording about like being in publishing now is all about conversions.
00:22:11.260And in some ways it always has been. And so, you know, there's there's a consumer desire for stories about weight loss or, you know, like the magazines wouldn't make them if they didn't sell.
00:22:26.500And so it's kind of this self-perpetuating thing that is horrible and misogynistic and just gross, but also completely, you know, I don't see it ending.
00:22:41.700And now, especially in the era of weight loss drugs, which I am on, I have a lot of mixed feelings about it.
00:22:48.320The biggest thing I can say about it is that I just like wish that I didn't want to be on it, but I do.
00:23:49.140But I do wish, I do wish that the long game that like the, the, the end results were that we didn't place value on the size of people's bodies.
00:24:05.160And that's not going to happen in my lifetime for me.
00:26:00.960Yeah. And then interestingly, I haven't talked about this before, but when I got off of it, suddenly I had.
00:26:07.420insane tolerance it's like something something in my brain got like erased
00:26:13.980such that i had no it so it was like really i really had to watch myself to be like whoa like
00:26:22.920oh my goodness like maybe more than you should be drinking um and it was a very clear difference
00:26:29.000because like yeah when i was on the stuff i couldn't drink at all and then i got off and
00:26:33.460suddenly it was just like shit was going down like water wow okay I haven't I I mean so when
00:26:42.040you get the colonoscopy you have to be off it for a certain amount of time originally they told me a0.98
00:26:47.700week but then my doctor had me off it for like two and a half weeks before and that was a really
00:26:52.740really anxious time for me because I was just convinced that in those two and a half weeks I
00:26:56.300was going to undo all the work that I've done over the last two years um when I was talking to a
00:27:02.120friend of mine who recently told me that she's taking one and she we were saying she was like
00:27:08.240the most unexpected thing about it is um this this friend of mine who recently told me that
00:27:14.560she's taking it was like I didn't expect to not want to drink at all and it was the first time
00:27:20.860I'd ever put the two things together because it's like when you're our age so I'm 48 when you're in
00:27:26.560our age group there are so many variables that you don't know I'm like I don't know what's0.97
00:27:30.580perimenopause I don't know what's we go be I don't know what I'm just like 48 and fucking exhausted
00:27:37.240and so once my friend told me this and also like you get older you're it's like you know your your
00:27:42.660tolerance definitely drops like working in New York in media in our 20s and 30s is like being
00:27:49.340a professional alcoholic you're just like i know right so much and you know there were nights i'd
00:27:56.920be out with friends like if i could go through three bottles of wine with one friend oh yeah
00:28:01.720totally of course that was just like a wednesday and now i have trouble getting down one glass of
00:28:08.180wine it just makes me feel kind of ill so that's how i was oh that no that's definitely how i was
00:28:14.500on the semiglutide um i couldn't even i couldn't get through one glass of wine i didn't want a
00:28:19.700glass of wine and now that i've been off it for three months i mean it really is going down like
00:28:23.740water such that i'm like wow okay yeah check yourself girlfriend i mean um but it but whatever
00:28:30.920but it almost felt like like i said as if something had been erased in my brain like as
00:28:35.520if some limit had been erased in my brain or something yeah who knows what these drugs are
00:28:40.320doing to us well that's the thing that is that's the craziest part and that's like where i come
00:28:44.160back to like the whole i'll look so hot in a coffin thing like that it could literally be
00:28:48.200killing us where we have all killing us we don't know we actually have no idea not have lined up
00:28:53.740faster to take this drug that we know nothing about the doctors are ecstatic they are just
00:29:01.160like yuck take it you're great we get i get all this positivity i got it from yesterday from the
00:29:06.420anesthesiologist. And I'm like, you guys have literally no idea what we're injecting.
00:29:10.260We have no idea what's going to happen. And, you know, maybe we're all going to look so hot in a
00:29:15.600coffin. Whatever. Exactly. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. All right. Let's take one more quick break. And
00:29:23.480when we get back, we are going to talk about how you hope that this book contributes to
00:29:28.620the ongoing conversation about, you know, representation for people in bodies that
00:29:33.660don't look the way that we think bodies are going to look. Yeah. Okay, we are back. What
00:29:46.340has the feedback been for this book so far? I mean, are you getting a lot of people reading it
00:29:50.400who are in bodies that may not present the way that the media has told us that a body will
00:29:56.220present that they're like, thank you. Thank you for fucking writing this. Yeah, but it's a little0.99
00:30:01.540bit more sort of like like yes I am hearing from people who have disorders that are as rare and
00:30:07.820weird as mine but I'm also hearing from people who have things that are more kind of mainstream
00:30:14.580like they have depression or they have alopecia or they have they have something they have something
00:30:20.960that has told them that they are not quote-unquote normal whatever that is and like to me that's
00:30:26.720everybody right but or it's almost everybody and it and that includes people who you know to an
00:30:32.340outsider might look like they have the perfect whatever they have and so I'm hearing a lot of
00:30:39.340like I feel seen and that to me is just the absolute best compliment I could ever get because
00:30:47.580all I want all I want is like it's it's like if you had told me if you had told me when we were
00:30:53.360growing up that gender would be like that this generation of kids would be as as wise about
00:31:00.260gender as they are um and that it's not a binary i would have been like what it was just a concept
00:31:07.740that was completely completely foreign to us right but then once people kind of teach you
00:31:13.140differently and for these for the for the younger generations they're growing up without those
00:31:17.800limitations placed on them it's just obvious it's so obvious that it's not a binary and there's
00:31:22.780there's no benefit to thinking of it that way growing up for us you had to look a certain way
00:31:28.660and that way was thin and curves in only the right places and I always think about how it was like
00:31:35.740bad enough that I grew up with the supermodels and then the weights replaced the supermodels
00:31:41.420and I was like great now I have to be even thinner like that's never gonna happen oh I mean it was so
00:31:45.920unfair right like we had like the Cindy Crawford's and the Naomi Campbell's and they were so thin but
00:31:52.220But then it was like Kate Moss comes on. Yeah. And you're like, no, get even it. Get even thinner.
00:31:56.840It was like both were impossible. Both were never going to happen. But like it somehow got even worse.
00:32:03.840And so my hope is that just to like crack open that door a little bit more and think let's the same way we've stopped making assumptions about people's gender, the same way we stopped making assumptions about people's sexuality or anything else about them.
00:32:19.840let's just look at people and not assume that their back is flat or that their legs are the
00:32:26.620same size or that, you know, they're not depressed or that don't assume anything about them. And
00:32:32.580that's a huge ask. And that takes a lot of work. But I really just wish we were more open and
00:32:39.480flexible with what we accepted as quote unquote normal. We've been talking a lot in this episode
00:32:49.160about women and women reacting to your body what's it been like to date well hard really hard
00:32:57.340because I spent a lot of my life not realizing that what I was trying to do was prove to myself
00:33:08.380and prove to men I was out with that I was good enough for them and I and it meant that instead of
00:33:14.060And asking myself whether I liked a lot of the guys that I was going out with, I was instead focused on making sure they liked me and making sure that I was attractive to them and that I didn't turn them off or gross them out or that they didn't find out my secret or if they did find out my secret that they were okay with it.
00:33:34.200And so I think that's why dieting became such like the perfect frenemy, because it was one way that I could control my body a little bit.
00:33:45.380Dating has been easier as I've started being more open about my body and again, gotten to that actual place of self-acceptance as opposed to that faux self-acceptance that I tried for so many years.
00:34:00.700So it has gotten easier. But I really I haven't dated in a little while. And I'm really at this point, I feel like I'm public enough that anybody I meet is going to know. And it's just that all it does for me is take a little bit of the edge off.
00:34:18.940It doesn't mean that I'm going to mesh with a person or we're going to have great chemistry or we're going to be a fit, but it at least means that that's one thing that I've always thought about myself as like a deal breaker, which many, many, many men have assured me is not in any way a deal breaker.
00:34:35.240um it's just like kind of out there and and so dating when I was younger was incredibly hard
00:34:43.740it was really just like a game I was playing with myself to prove like yep yep this guy's hot and
00:34:49.420he liked you and that guy's hot and he liked you so like you must be normal you must be okay looking
00:34:54.140you must be lovable um it was really it was exhausting for a very long time yeah yeah I mean
00:35:01.140I think that dating was exhausting no matter what kind of body you were in, especially in New York
00:35:07.920City for a long time. I never thought that I was enough or like the right body or like that people
00:35:14.380wanted to be naked with me. And yeah, this actually puts it really well that she's like, no man has
00:35:19.900ever asked me to put my clothes back on. Exactly. Exactly. But it's so not about that. It's about
00:35:26.840like have you found a guy that you want to take your clothes off with and is worthy of seeing you
00:35:33.600naked like that's like you know like I would love to go back and and have younger me who was dating
00:35:38.360so much just ask different questions and prioritize different things like it's not about any of that
00:35:44.500it's about like our joy and our pleasure and our comforts and so I hope you know I I think like
00:35:53.120if i start to date again which i don't know might be nice i'm i go back and forth um yeah i think
00:36:00.160it'll be interesting to see because i'm in such a different headspace than i was yeah yeah well
00:36:04.500you have to come back on after you start doing it because i want to know i want to know how
00:36:07.420everything changes i would love to done easy peasy tell everyone where they can find more of your
00:36:12.900writing and your wonderful book so well thank you so much um my book is really anywhere you can buy
00:36:19.980book i tend to go bookshop.org but any place that they sell books they sell my book for the most
00:36:26.420part um and carlosasenko.com is my website i'm on instagram if you want to give me a follow
00:36:32.980i'm just you know i'm in all the places that people are you're in all you're in all the all
00:36:39.480the places you know i've like i've started telling people to stop apologizing for buying it on amazon0.97
00:36:43.680i get it we all fucking hate them okay bezos sucks but i also know that people like convenience and0.92
00:36:49.280like no one ever has to apologize for me because sometimes people never send me no yeah they'll0.98
00:36:53.360send me their book receipt and be like put it on amazon sorry i'm like i don't care thank you for
00:36:57.160buying my book and i appreciate you and we all support indie bookstores in different ways and
00:37:01.520sometimes we just want something fast okay and that's the deal with the devil that we've made
00:37:05.160whatever life is hard yes okay you do you do the things that you can do and otherwise you try to
00:37:11.520make your life as easy as possible as easy and frictionless as possible thank you so much for
00:37:17.340being here. I loved having you. This was wonderful. I loved being here.