Amanda Palmer is well know for her work as a musician, but she’s also known for her 2013 TED talk, which garnered a lot of attention about using the internet to find and nurture an audience. It’s possible to know all this, like her work, and still be unprepared for her book "The Art of Asking." The book builds on the ideas she introduced in her TED talk, but it’s more than that. It’s her autobiography, it’s her meditation on cultivating an audience as a artist, it’s a book about what it means to be an artist and the many challenges we set up for ourselves, an intimate look at her marriage, and it’s a philosophical look at the nature of asking, what it means, how it changes us and what it makes possible. As I told her when we started talking, she was trying to make me cry at one point in the book, and she knew just what I meant.
ALEX DUEBEN: I know The Art of Asking came about because of your TED Talk and I was curious what you wanted the book to be.
AMANDA PALMER: To give you a cheeky answer–but a really honest one–I wanted the book to be what it ended up being. I aimed for the book you read and I think I nailed everything I wanted to put in it. I don’t think it’s a perfect book, but I knew what I wanted to thread together. I knew the ingredients that I would have put into my TED talk if I had another half hour to talk. With twelve fucking minutes on a stage, you’re not going to be able to get into, oh by the way, all of these things made sense when my friend got cancer and taking money from my husband and let’s touch on my abortion! [laughs] That wasn’t going to happen in my twelve minute talk. Nor was drawing a very obvious line between stripping and street performing and getting paid dollar by dollar and learning these giant lessons of humanity. There was just so much I could do in twelve minutes–but the connections were all really obvious to me. When I got a book deal, I knew the main ingredients that were going to get added on top of the TED topics. And all of the ingredients that I think went into my ability to trust my fans, which didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual process.
AD: You wanted it to be autobiography, philosophy–all of these different things.
AP: Yes and I learned the lesson while writing the book because we cut and when I say we, I basically had two editors. My official editor and one of my good friends who I called my book doula. And I had a third editor in my husband who read every word of my first draft and helped me line edit because he’s a pretty good writer. He has a really, really good eye for story and how to pare things down to keep the story moving along. I cut 70,000 words from the book. Most of the stuff that I cut was about how to use the internet. Maybe that’s another book someday but as I was facing a 600 page book, we were all looking at each other going, well, something’s going to have to go. It was really a gift because I sliced out everything about how to do crowd funding, how to use twitter, how to actually be a human being on the internet, because while it was on topic, it was just too much. I set that all aside and said, this is just going to be a story about asking. It’s not going to be a “how to” manual. It’s not going to be an internet book. It’s going to be a book about my personal journey and the journeys of the people around me dealing with our inabilities to ask.
AD: I mentioned before, when I was reading this, I felt like you were trying to make cry, because that was how I felt once you started to really explore this idea of asking and being open and what that means and thinking about it in terms of my own life.
AP: Yeah, it’s hard shit.
AD: You get into this, that asking is at the heart of what it means to be an artist, but it is simultaneously, the thing we’re most insecure about.
AP: A book like this is fascinating in the mirror that it holds up to culture–especially if you’re having a discussion about art or a discussion about crowd funding or a discussion about how much money time and energy in society should go towards art or artists. As I say in the book, one of the hardest things about being choosing to live as an artist is you just have this unscalable wall of fear and guilt around the choice to do it because you live in fear of not being valuable. You don’t know if you’re really of value in a society that’s talking out of both sides of its mouth. Everyone loves music and loves art, but seems to forget that in order to have music and art you need musicians and artists.
AD: It’s interesting because your publisher is at war with Amazon and the inability to pre-order books is screwing with how they work and plan print runs. That’s part of their established business practice, but if someone goes on kickstarter and says, hey, we’ve got this album or book, could you pre-order and pay up front, that’s begging and crass.
AP: People are really weird. I look at critics even now even in the last few days because I launched a conversation about patreon and literally seeing comments on facebook like, Amanda Palmer has a book deal and a rich husband, why would you support her? I really am mystified at the people who are off message and mixing the simple black and white issue of artists at all levels don’t work by magic. Something has to give, something has to function. What about Madonna? Are you complaining that you have to pay 13.99 for her album on itunes? I mean isn’t Madonna all set? Doesn’t she have enough money? Why are you supporting her? It’s pretty weird. People really have a hard time with artists asking directly. To me that’s what it comes down to. These people feel a huge emotional distance between Madonna saying hey help me out and buy my album directly and driving to Walmart and going to the M section with all the middle men in between.
AD: The tech industry is big on this idea of a sharing economy, which is something different from this notion of asking and sharing that you’re talking about.
AP: I think that those subjects live on the same planet. The planet that they live on is maybe there’s another way than just crass commercialism and crass capitalism and this really hard strict way of doing things. Maybe there’s an alternative where we trust each other and we share our resources and we support each other. Yeah, it’s a little bit messy but it’s an economy that runs more on trust and less on mistrust. I think that if they have anything in common it is that. It is important because that’s taking us back to, I will trade you this pound of cheese for this chicken. [laughs] We’re just in this together. I need your cheese, you need my chicken and that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around.
AD: You use this example at the beginning of the book where if a woman asks group of women for a tampon, very rarely does anyone say, I have one but I won’t give it to you.
AP: Yeah it’s pretty rare. [laughs] The universal language of tampons.
AD: You also talk about how being married and building a relationship is this process of asking and negotiating and understanding.
AP: Yeah I mean there’s definitely a micro-macro in everybody’s lives when it comes to our friends, our intimate connections, our ability to have a small sharing economy of two. [laughs] One of my favorite yoga teachers said, and I don’t know who the quote is by, but how you do anything is how you everything. You can’t espouse this philosophy and believe this shit only in one area of your life. You can’t decide to trust people and believe in people and believe in a sharing economy from 9 to 5 and not do it when you get home and vice versa. It just doesn’t work.
AD: There was this very telling moment in the book after you had to have an abortion where you said that your husband should know how to handle this.
AP: A classic Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer moment!
AD: That moment encapsulated so much of your relationship–and every relationship, ever, really–that all this other work you’d been doing, dealing with all this other stuff, it didn’t help you in this relationship.
AP: It did not. [laughs] This one of my biggest prayers about the book and how people read it: I hope people see how totally lost and ineffective this narrator is at following her own manifesto. [laughs] To me, that really had to be the core of the book, which is, as I was standing there on the TED stage speaking my beautiful truth, I was having a fuck of a time following my own directions. Just the ability to admit that and write about it and say, guys, I have nothing figured out, at least we’re all down in the shit together–that was the book I wanted to write. Someone asked the other day if this was a self-help book and I said, it’s actually more of self-hate book with a little self-help message if you’re clever enough to figure it out. [laughs] I’m totally fucked up, I’m totally flawed and I don’t know what else to do except share, try, philosophize and try to figure out why it is we can intellectually know these things, but somehow still not get to the finish line. To this day. I still am trying to figure out my marriage. I’m still trying to figure out how to accept help. I’m still trying to figure out if I really deserve to write this book. I don’t know. You tell me. That’s your job.
AD: I know that right now you’re working on The Bed Show at Bard College. Are you interested in doing more theater projects?
AP: Well, I’ve never left theater–although you’d have to be paying pretty close attention to my career because theater doesn’t live on the internet. I’ve done four or five big theatrical productions in the last ten years. I’ve written shows in workshop. I did a run of Cabaret a few years ago. I love the theater. This project is unlike any other that I’ve done. It’s an original musical. I’m using a handful of old Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer songs but I’m writing ten-eleven new ones. They’re great and these kids are insane and we’re writing things from scratch and putting things on their feet and trying to tie together a story. It’s a really manic process because we’re trying to do this in just a couple of months, but it’s fun as hell and it’s really emotional. This group of kids and me and the director have become a fast family which is what I love so much about theater projects. I’m loving it. I wish we had a little more time, but I’m loving the process.
AD: I know you have to run, but I have to ask–because you mentioned in the book more than once–how does your husband pronounce wastepaperbasket?
AP: Wastepaperbahhhhsket. [laughs] It’s so cute.
