Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jaquira Diaz Ordinary Girls 20240713

Her partner please give a warm savanna welcome to jacquira diaz. Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here and its wonderful to see all of you book lovers here. And thank you savanna for your southern hospitality. I also want to thank the savanna book festival and everyone who made this event possible lets give it up to the indie booksellers in the room. I love you all. Thank you for all that you do for loving books and championing writers. Because of you im here. Thank you. I want to open with a just the just a little piece that opens the book it functions like we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop. Going towards the boards letting the world spin. The wind in our hair. We were the loud moms and the troublemakers. We were at the party girls. Hitting the clubs in height top jordans. We where the wild girls who loved music and dancing. Girls who were black and brown and poor and queer girls who love each other. I had been those girls on a greyhound bus. Homeless and on the run. A girl sleeping on the stand. On a bus stop bench. A hoodlum girl still throwing talented boys and girls in their older sister. And even the cops. Suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school. They throw a chair at the math teachers son. Kicked out of pre algebra. A girl who got slammed onto a police car by two cups in front of the whole school after a brawl with six other girls. And i had been other girls. Girls standing before a judge girl on a dock appeared the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bay like it is the end of the world. Girl on a rooftop. Girl on an edge. Plummeting through the air. And years later a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. This is the opening of my book. I will talk about the inspiration and why i wrote it. It took about 12 years to write and it is without a doubt the lifes work. Its about the girl of adolescence. And miami beach. About surviving depression and survival. About our parents and how their actions shape us. About losing the people we love about how we are not defined by the worst thing we have ever done. It is about my relationship with my mother. Growing up i was a juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the streets. At 11 i attempted suicide for the first time than a few months after that i ran away from home for the first time and then i started getting arrested. I dropped out of high school kept running away kept getting arrested. Kept fighting in the streets. Kept trying to die. I was also in the middle of a sexual awakening and would finally come out as gay. I cannot talk about that not to anyone not in the early 90s not in my neighborhood. It was marked by homophobia entrance phobia. And certainly not for my mother. I spent much of my childhood pretending to be someone else especially when it seemed like the whole world was trying to erase us. I spent a lot of that time hiding in books and looking for myself in stories and after i became a writer i decided that i would write about people like me. Girls and women who are black and brown and poor. And on mother. Women like my mother a white puerto rican woman who did not know how to raise or protect her black children. They would spend the entire life spending it with Mental Illness. My mother was and is accommodated woman. She was loving and abusive. She held me one minute and then it kicked my and then held me again. She was and is flawed and vulnerable. My mother was and is deeply homophobic. When i first started writing ordinary girls. My mother was a ghost. I wrote around her. Avoiding the truth. The truth was painful. The truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. A black puerto rican woman who carried meet my whole life carries me still. Who taught me to pray and cook and chain smoke and taught me to keep house and taught me everything i know about forgiveness. I wrote about it. A miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3yearold son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up. And spent most of her life on death row. I wrote about my mothers mother my grandmothers mercy. She hated the fact she had have his children that her grandchildren were black. She would later die by suicide. And i wrote about them. The mythical woman the legend who took her children from their bed that night. In carried them to a nearby river. Held them underwater until they drowned. And then drowned herself. And now her ghost haunts bodies of water. I read about all these other mothers any mothers except my own until a friend who read the manuscript ask after reading about five chapters where is your mother. I have to sit down with the book and take a hard honest look at the pages. Examine my life and all of the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. The truth is my mother broke me in the truth is i was afraid to look to admit to see how much she had broken me. How hard it had been to find my way back to myself how easily i could be broken again. But i finally decided to ask the question and more than that to ask the question for myself. To answer it, where is my mother. To write about her to examine the relationship in a way that was honest that acknowledged all of the ways that she was real the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years i have to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions. To say that the writing of this book drains me. It would be a understatement. I gained weight, i lost weight. My hair started falling out. Ive have the worst insomnia ive have in my life. And then my grandmother died by suicide. I often needed time away from the book to take care of myself. And to make sense of what i was doing to interrogate different parts of the book it was quite the opposite. Writing this book is the hardest thing i have ever done. What kept me going. I wanted to write about people who rarely have a home in the literary landscape. I wanted to y up write about growing up poor in miami. About all of the ways that they were invisible and hyper visible and i wanted to write about my Community Without losing sight of what mattered most. We people i were that they existed. That they lived and loved, even if the rest of the world didnt see them. When i started writing this book i thought not just about how to write my story, how my story was and is connected to a larger world and what my place in that world might be. Im here because ive found that place. Thanks to a group of friends who saved me. I was struggling as a girl, as a woman and later as a t writer, struggling with how to write about Sexual Violence in a way that was honest and still artful and in a way that was just about my experience that spoke to something larger about girls. About how complicated family lives in fights and loves and i wanted to write it without pity or glory oranger. But also, more so than any of my girls, im someone whos hadaccess to education , to a program in creative writing, to fellowships and writing conferences. Its taken a lot of hard work, but doesnt erase the fact that ive had access to all of this and most of the girls in my community. The world isnt kind to black and brown girls. And the world isnt kind to black and brown women. Especially when they come from workingclasscommunities or from poverty. These ordinary girls taught me that its possible to makeour own families , to make our own tway. They helped me believe in love and friendship and hope but more than anything, after they had girls of their own, it was there girls who taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. They helped me perceive the girl i had been. They helped me remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was, that my story was unique m. Atall girls, no matter their circumstance are vulnerable. This is something we share, something that transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class. Somewhere there is a teenage girl whose mother suffers fromMental Illness and addiction just trying to get through the day. Trying to come to terms with their sexuality. Id like to imagine maybe seeing herself in this book would make her life just a little bit easier. Some of the other things that i talk about in the book r , are also things that were very important to me, things that made me a writer. My father loved books. Be was a poet, we stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father. He took me to the funeral of one of of puerto rican protest poet and when i saw everybody gathered in celebrating his life, people who had read his books, i ththought that poets were important and that they can change the world. And i thought i want that. I also wanted this book to Say Something about access and who gets access to this world. In publishing, who gets to be up here and talk about books and it was important to me because coming from where i came from, i always felt like i didnt have enough. So it was important to talk about that and also about puerto rican history, about puerto ricos history of colonialism and its relationship to the United States and i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir that somethingthat wasnt a history book. And how my stories connected to that story area being puerto rican i think most of us who come from puerto rico feel a connection to the island even after we left it. Even if weve never been there which is the truth. Theres a saying that a a lot of Puerto Ricans know. A phrase which comes from a poem by i forgot his name but it comes from a phone and it means that i would be puerto rican even if i wasborn on the moon. So i wanted to reach people who would never read about Puerto Ricans or people who wouldnt pickup a history book for people who do not have access to that history. Or whatever reason and make some of that history accessible to the general readers or reader who picks up a memoir about girlhood and so i tried to talk about the parts of puerto rican history and colonialism that shaped me as a woman and as a human being and as a writer. And a lot of this influence the kind of writer i became and i was always thinking of who i was writing for and in so many ways i felt like this book, even though i intended it to be as open and honest and i intended to be vulnerable, i wanted it to be in conversation with a specific group of people. Earls for like i was, certainly Puerto Ricans, black Puerto Ricans, girls who grow up in poverty and presumed to understand i was just writing about them. But i was writing for them. Something that i mentioned in the book is how i was a kid who loved to read. And i didnt have money for books so i went to the library and asked librarians give me books. And i Read Everything they put inmy hand and everything they put in my hands were books. That were written about like people and for white people and i thought to be a writer you needed to be white. And so i wanted them to understand and to see themselves in a book and to understand thatwasnt real. That we exist. That this is possible. There were other parts of this book that kind of shape in the butt at the time i thought about how i was writing howthey would make sense to the story. One of them was the baby lollipops murder that i talk about which happened in 1990. There was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach and at the time, they didnt really know where this toddler came from, just that they had found his body and he had been tortured. So i saw this story on the news and it took over the 24 hournews cycle and at the time , i was 11. I was a kid but because it was on the news and on every newspaper and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it, we all kind of obsessedabout this. And i already imagined myself a writer and so i took note and i thought about this a lot. And for weeks, i thought about this until they discovered, they found the babys mother and the story came out on the news that they had found his mother and her partner and they had hit his body and fled and part of the narrative at the time was part of what was important to the narrative at the time, outhe news made itsound like this woman and her partner , these two lesbians killed this baby and ran away they very much made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. And the people who talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and School Security and librarians ut always talk about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia and so i kept thinking about the story and thinking about it and then 20 years later, i wrote an essay of being this little girl when this story broke. And the essay was published in a magazine called the son and a woman who had been at the time working as an antiDeath Penalty activists who visited prisoners on death isrow read and emailed me and she said i know this woman that you wrote about. Ive been visiting her in prison. Shes been on death row since 1992 so i wrote back to her and asked her if she could put us in touch, if we can start a correspondence and she did and eventually i wrote to anna cardona and i told her id written about her or written a story about discovering her story on the news and she wrote back, she wrote me letters and her first letter was, she was kind of livid. She was upset that i had written about her and she said you didnt know me. You didnt know my son. What gives you the rightto even write about me . So i wrote back and i wrote back and told her my story and told her who i was and why i had written about it and how i wrote about discovering her story on the news and sort of following along with it and i was a child at the time. And i told her that i had, i would like to hear her story. Not what the newspaper said or what was on the news or what people said but the truth and i include this in the book because i think its important for readers to see i think a writer when writing a memoir to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violences. And when i asked her to tell me her story, she wrote back and said this is not a story, this is my life. And she put me in my place. And i deserved it. And at that moment i really started thinking about why i was writing and why i was writing it this way. And i went back to the beginning of the book and i started interrogating myself and interrogating why i was telling the story and if i had a right to tell the story considering that i wasnt really a resident of the bar yet anymore and i hadaccess to all the things , that i eswas in graduate school and the people i was writing about it and have access to any ofthat. But she really got me to think about seeing other women and writing about and thinking about the fact that im writing about real people. Theres another one that i mentioned in the book whose name i ondidnt even know who died bysuicide. And i also thought about her a lot and i included her in the book because i thought about her in thesame way. At the time, i was someone who was suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety and Suicidal Ideation andthinking about taking my life. Thinking of this woman as a story, as a legend. And i also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers that these are just stories. That these are real people. And that she was a real woman in 2017 Ana Maria Cardona got a new trial and i was corresponding with her for several years. I wasnt writing here all the time but i would send an occasional letter and she would write back or she would write 2 or 3 letters and i would write back and one of the things that she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her, then she didnt want me to write about her except they became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative. And she wanted me to go to her retrial and i did. So she was being chargedfor murder again but this time , the Death Penalty was off the table. And as i sat in the trial after having all this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else waspartially responsible , reanother woman had confessed, i realized that she was lying. She got caught lying on the stand by the prosecutors threeseparate times. And i included a little bit ofthat to. Cause i really wanted the readers to think about this idea of her that i had constructed in my head and how that sort of apart because i wasnt really thinking of her as a woman. I had been thinking of this as a story that i was following as a journalist. And so there are these other moments in the book where i thought t were important to call myself out. I thought about writing about puerto rico and one of the things that ive done over the years has been to visit puerto rico and to go back almost every summer, spend time with family. I still have most of my family there and drive around and so i drove to san juan one afternoon and if any of you have been to puerto rico this building in san juan called the Puerto Rico Tourism Company which used to be a present. It used to be a prison where Puerto Ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow, the building was purchased and now its a puerto rican Tourism Company and its a place where you can get trolley mats and theres a gallery and agrand piano and alpeople take selfies. The building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and take photos and when i went back to visit this building, after having written most of this book, almost all of it, and i was thinking i knew the history of this place and i went intending to see what it had been, a prison where people were tortured and where people lost their lives and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists, a woman asked me, she asked me to take a photo of her with her two children and i took her phone and i took a picture of them and then i asked her to do the same, to take a picture of me in front of this jail cell and its a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing. Its a moment that now filled me with shame because it was like i was trying to forget and i was complicit in this erasure. I thought i needed to include it in the book, to call myself out and to talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence and who is complicit . Something that also is in the book, a lot of people have said that miami is kind of like another character. Pli dont think its true but miami is upsetting for a setting for part of the book and its atmosphere and its Historical Marker and cultural marker. And i tried to capture what was for me the real miami, not the miami that i saw over and over on tv and movies and music videos. I tried to write about this miami that was kind of invisible in everything i consumed either on tv, music videos or books which was this workingclass miami beach that was just four blocks away from ocean drive. Where people live in poverty and people had racks in their apartments and people sometimes didnt have electricity because the power got cut off and this was very real when i was growing up in miami where we would have this building that was kind of falling apart that was crumbling and a block away we had a building that had been bought and renovated and was beautiful and people with a lot of money lived there who drove mercedes and bmws and we all lived in the same neighborhood and it felt like this strange liminal state to e live in a place that didnt want me there with people who didnt really want to see you. And to be ysolely pushed out and i wanted to kind of have the miami beach of this time be very present in the book. Because i wanted it to Say Something about how faith can be beautiful andugly , how a place can be glamorous and brutal at the same time. To Say Something about the duality of the immigrant and migrant experience , how people are more than what you see on the surface, most of the people that lived in my community y were latinos and haitians and immigrants and migrants and most of them had educations and had professions back home and then came to miami and drove taxis. I had to go back to school and brought their families o and lived in poverty. I ieremember my father had friends who were taxi drivers who have been doctors and engineers but had to come and start from scratch because they had to learn the language and were struggling in other ways to what i wanted that present in the book becausethat was the reality we lived in. Something else thats in the book before i talk about how i became a writer is Mental Illness. My mother suffered from continuous, continue to suffer from Mental Illness and it was very clear when we were kids that something was wrong, but my mother went undiagnosed until we moved to miami beach frompuerto rico. And years later it became clear to me that she had been undiagnosed for years and that also because we were poor, we didnt have adequate medical care and she didnt really haveadequate healthcare. And it was clear that it would have been different if we hadhad money , that she might have been diagnosed if we had had resources, that her life might havebeen different. I also talk a little bit about my maternal grandmothers Mental Illness and her Suicidal Ideation. She eventually did die by suicide in 2011 which is something that is present in the book it was also something that was present during my whole life growing up because my grandmother talked about this though often. She threatenedoften. She was also suffering from Mental Illness and depression and took a lot of medication and when i was a kid, i also was suffering from depression and ptsd ffand anxiety and was undiagnosed for years but i thought that this seemed like an easy way out at the time. I dont know how else to describe it butit seemed much easier than living. I became a writer is also something that i touch on in the book. When i was 16 i dropped out of high school and then i got my ged and i started taking classes in a community college. And for a brief trend that i enlisted in the military and for a briefperiod , i was in the navy and then this was also in the middle of dont ask, dont tell so the military became a place when i first got there, it was a place filled me with hope, ironically even though it was right in the middle of dont ask dont tell because it was the first time peopleexpected me to succeed. I felt like i could start fresh in a place where no one knew me and reinvent myself and i can work hard and have a future. It was the first time i thought i could have afuture , that a real life was possible and then the navy game unbearable because i was bullied for being gay. I had a relationship with a woman while i was there and someone found out and it spread. The rumors spread and eventually dont ask dont tell became my nickname and i left the military and its not something that i talk about extensively in the book. Its just one chapter but i do mention it be cause it became sort of like a bridge, a way for me to think of a life worth living and after leaving the military i went back to college and i took classes again and then i did very well. I went to grad school and i decided i would be a writer, that even if i had to work other jobs that i would be a writer. That hope was possible if no one published my books iwould write. And then after graduate school i got this fellowship to the Wisconsin Institute for creative writing because i applied for fellowships and scholarships and everything. Every single opportunity. If i could afford it, i would apply for it so i applied for this fellowship and one day i got a phone call and they told me i got it so i moved to wisconsin. It was called, and there was a lot of cheese but it was great. I have a dairy allergy. It was also difficult. But then i started teaching and slowly, things started falling into place. It was a lot of hard work tand teaching and years when i just worked odd jobs and kept trying to write this book. And would take a break and stepped away from it and then went back to it when i could and then abandoned it and started trying to write it as a novel because it didntfeel possible to admit all these things to people. And then i decided to actually go through it it and write this book because i thought it was important that i told the truth and writing it as fiction even if i didnt change a word felt like lying. Id like to possibly open the room to some questions and conversation. Maybe something lighter. But before i do that, i also wanted to review a very short, short section because this i think iswhats at the core of the book. The book is also about girlhood and about navigating a certain kind of girlhood in puerto rico and in miami beach and i was talking about not just myself navigating this girl myself but about these other girls who were my lifeline. And so im going to review one paragraph which really is atthe core of what this book is. We wore short shorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys. The earrings and no matter what, everybody had opinions about how we dress, call us, boys and hood rats or fast girls. Our shorts were too short. Our jeans too tight, too baggy. Our voices to loud. Everybody wanted to control what we wore, what we did, we get with. We were not the girls they wanted us to be. We were not allowed to talk like this, you want like this. We were not supposed to feel the kind of desire youfeel 13 , 14. What kind of girl, they love to say. What kind of girl, even as they took what we gave, took. Hat we tried to hold onto our voices, our bodies. We were trying to live in the world was doing it says to kill us. Thank you. [applause] thank you, i appreciate it. Thank you for powering through that. In real life im very funny. I promise. If youd like to ask a question, we ask just so that everyone can hear you theres a mic in the middle. Step up to the mic if youcan. Yes, go ahead. Iq, what an important story to share with all of us. So i have a life or a heady question. Your choice. My question would be what other writers are the ones that have inspired you . So many writers and authors have inspired you. I remember reading as morale the santiagos when iwas a teenager. I think it was 19 and i thought this was the first time that i read a book in english about Puerto Ricans who were like me, like normal People Living their everyday lives and i thought we exist and before then, like i said, most of the books that librarians put in my hands were whitney by white people for whitepeople, mostly written by white men who worked around anymore. But also some work. I read ae. Lot of stephen king. I also read Toni Morrison and i thought my god, this is incredible. You scan do this . And i thought, ill never be able to do this. I still think that. You should Read Everything Toni Morrison has written. Everyone should. From writers writing today to inspire me today, i love catalinas latest novel cancel rock, i love angie cruise, dominicana and i also read a lot of poets. I love tony cook kellys bestiary. And natalie diaz and my brother was an aztec. I could go on forever but i wont. And you had another question . Did you or did someone else have a question . I have to call you out, im a resident of northern wisconsin , lifelong resident. Its not cold in madison. It was cold for me. Just kidding. Tell me about dance, the dances you and yourgirls did , was it catharsis, was it anger, tell us about that. So dancing and music in a lot of ways for me, i studied music when i was a kid but dancing i think was more about performance and performing for me specifically, performing a kind of strength. It was very often, very often in miami when i started going through puberty i felt the unwanted attention from men and i developed very early and i felt like i was getting all this attention that i gwasnt interested in so i started dressing and was close. I wore baggy jeans and polo shirts and basketball jerseys and i trust head to toe like a boy and i didnt want to be looked at and i think dancing was very much like that. Pretending to be someone else, tending to be stronger, tending to be happy but it was also for me and my girls dancing is like what we did because we needed something to do. We went to Bayside Marketplace where you can pay three dollars to get on a boat that had a dance floor and music kind of got us through a lot. Like, we needed to dance. Especially during thattime. We needed music and so now when i look back at everything we live through, it felt like dancing was not just performance but dancing was resistance and survival. Thank you. Other questions . Will you please talk a little bit about your editing process . How much of the book was edited and how did you get with an editor and that agents and publisher . My first stop even before the book wasfinished , i started submitting parts of the book that agents that i found online without really knowing anything abouthow publishing works. Thatwas a mistake. Dont do that. Theres plenty of information out thats free on the internet. Find out if youre interested in getting an agents what books, what kind of books you are interested in writing and what are the books out there on the market that are like yours for the books that you want to write and who are the agents represent the writers you love or writers who are writing about something similar and do research on. Theres plenty of information, there are interviews and articles and profiles and their a wealth of information out there about t this but i went and i submitted articles to an agents who was at a very big house and have a lot of very big name authors. And she read one chapter and she loved it ptand she offered me representation and me right away. And i thought i may, i hit the lottery, i got Estate Agents this big house and my books are going to be a big sellerand i didnt hear from her a very long time. He was at a big agency and had very big plans and i was a very little, little fish. He didnt have time for me. So i kept writing and then i nwent to this writers conference and there was this one he writers conference and there was an agent there Michelle Brower and i had signed up for a sellers reading and so i read this book and she heard me read and she emailed me. She got my email from the conference and emailed me and said would you submit some work to us and because i had this very powerful agents i didnt send her anything and then she wrote me a year later to say i saw that you published this other essay, if you have work will you send me some more and i still didnt send her anything and by then i had already parted ways with my agents and then the third year, third year in a row around the same time he wrote me again and she asked if i would send her something though i just thought what have i been waiting for . This patient has read my work, read other pieces and actually gets my vision and likes my writing. So i sent her work and i sent her i think about 100 pages that would be, that would eventually make it in this book and she asked if we can have a conversation. We had a conversation for about an hour. We talked about this book and what else i wanted to do in the future about possibly how i envisioned my career and then she offered me representation, but the book wasnt ready to be sent to editors or to be published so she gave me extensive notes and said go back and keep writing again. Write the book so i went back with her notes and i wrote and i wrote and years, i think three years oflater the book was ready. The whole process of writing the book took about 12 years and when she thought the book was ready and polished enough she sent it to several editors eand we got, i want to say a couple of offers right away and before the book went into auction we got a preemptive offer from algonquin books and i had a conversation with algonquin, with my agent and i really liked what she had to say about how she wanted to preserve my voice and not turn it into some commercial book. She wanted me to tell her what i wanted to do and only get there and thatswhat i wanted. I all my other conversations with editors at big houses had been, we can make this the next educated and i was like i havent read educated but im pretty sure this is not that. And every conversation id had with editors was more about what they wanted me to do and kathy was more like, i will work to help you get this to become the book you want to be so we went with kathy at algonquin and i felt lucky to have had her as an editor u. When i look back at what this book looked like before,i cant even believe you kept reading. I cant believe this is a book and i feel the process is very much a collaboration but im lucky to have had her as an editor. As your mother read the book and if so as that changed your relationship and if she hasnt , just the mere existence of the book, has that alteredher in any way . My mother is not a reader. She doesnt read. But i talked with her extensively about the book and shes a lot more, shes a writer, he knows what the book is about. Shes more interested in will there be a movie and wasgoing to play her . You all are laughing but im serious. And my mom, i wrote a book. But so if you read the book you know that i was estranged from mymother for about seven years. I completely remove myself from her life and her familys life for my own Mental Health and then when my grandmother died, i felt like finally i can reach out to my mother and start some sort of relationship again. That took years though. My mother is clean now, is in an assisted living facility and we are able to have conversations now and she calls me every day and sometimes three or four days a day just to say i saw this thing on tv but its difficult because my mother is an addict and even though shes clean, shes also still suffering from Mental Illness and often i dont know what to expect so seeing her, when i go visit her and seeing her required me to do this kind of work that is harmful. Like i have to be harmful to my Mental Health, i have to be willing to forgive her every single time i walk in there, every single time i pick up that phone. I have to be open to forgiveness every single conversation, every single visit. Otherwise, i will be able to have a relationship with her and i will be able to live with myself. Its difficult but we do have a relationship. I just got engaged last year and my mom took a really long time to accept first that im gay, then that im engaged to a person who is not a man and also things having to dowith gender. My partner is nonbinary, transnational and and my mother for her, all of this seems like you much. But i love her and almost every time i visit her i have to say i love you and you love meand youre going to have to love me this way. And its been working. Thank you so much. [applause] on our Author Interview program after words, netflix director of inclusion Michelle King offered her thoughts on the barriers to succeeding that women face in the workplace. Some of the discussion. If were opting willing to do something were not opting men who do we need to think about it and it comes to sort of lean in, that book was written in a time and place where people rarely wanted solutions to people like the idea that they alone can overcome and inequality that i have no hand in creating even though logic ordinance, the problem to me is how do you say to people you can do everything just right. You can get the qualifications, have the experience and get the performance ratings and still not succeed because success discriminates because workplaces work design for difference read their designed to support this ideal to advance and people that most quickly fit that ideal standard are more likely to advance so the more you differ from it the more challenges you face and thats somethingthat we talk about. That organizations are inherently set up for this ideal prototype to succeed and that create a lot of challenges for anybody who might differ from the nonbinary ideal so the aim is to think about all the solutions that we have, is there something we are asking men to do . Secondly do any of tse