I want to take a moment and say thank you for all the messages of comfort and support that so many of y’all have shared with me since Marlowe passed. I haven’t ever felt this kind of grief, for this long, in my life. When I am feeling the most sad, when I’m sobbing until I can’t breathe, I feel closest to her, so all I can do is go through it, honor it, and embrace her memory.
There’s a dog on Instagram called Wesley the Chicken Nugget. I adore him, and I love it when his person shares photos and video of him being a dog, so I completely understand how we can love animals we’ve never met. I know that lots of you loved Marlowe, and that comforts me every day.
So thank you, from Anne and me, for choosing to be kind.
I had to take a couple weeks off from recording stories for It’s Storytime (I’ve come to believe that four or five weeks of bereavement leave isn’t unreasonable) but we’re back to work and there’s a new story this week that I wanted everyone to know about.
It’s called To Carry You Inside You, by Tia Tashiro. Here’s my intro:
I grew up in the entertainment industry, not by choice, so I had a front row seat to the abuse and exploitation of child actors like myself. I grew up absolutely terrified of upsetting anyone on the set, robotically doing whatever I was told, so I could just get through it and have one of the precious and rare hours of my childhood where I got to just be a kid, before I was ripped out of childhood and thrust back into a place I never wanted to be.
Today, we are going to visit a future where child actors are still exploited, still used up and discarded, facing an adult life without purpose, that they were never prepared for, because nobody cared what happened to them past an arbitrary age.
We will meet a young woman who is doing her best to assemble the pieces of a stolen childhood into a fulfilling adult life. It isn’t what she wanted, or would have chosen for herself, but she’s doing her best, which is all any of us can do.
This is one of those examples of speculative fiction that I point to when I talk about the power of storytelling that lands on different people for different reasons. This story isn’t about me, but holy shit is it about me. In fact, when I reached out to Tia and asked for permission to do the narration, I mentioned that she captured the experience of being a child actor so perfectly and honestly, she must have some firsthand experience … imagine my surprise when she told me that she didn’t, that she used her imagination to create those moments.
Holy shit. That’s incredible. Please let me know what you think, if you listen.
Anyway, I’m doing my best to promote the show and just let people know it exists, but I keep getting crushed by the algorithm. On Threads, the posts before and after I talked about the podcast have thousands of views and hundreds of interactions, but my post about this episode has like 20 interactions and has only been seen by about 2000 of the 5000000 accounts that follow me. That seems … odd. And honestly, it’s kind demoralizing that one of the few direct ways I have to tell people this exists seems to work against supporting that. I’ve tried letting Bluesky know, and the 13 people who tend to notice me there are excited about it, I’m sure, but it just doesn’t seem to get traction there at all. If anyone reading this has experience bringing something to an audience who will probably love it, but just don’t know about it, I’d be grateful to hear anything you have to say about it.
Last thing, that is explicitly in service of promotion: If you listen to the podcast, you can help me out by rating and reviewing it wherever you are subscribed. The show’s audience is growing slowly but steadily, and I know it isn’t because of me; it’s because listeners are recommending it. That means so much to me. Thank you.
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It’s interesting that none of what happens to us as children is ever by choice. Be it becoming a child actor on set instead of doing kid stuff, or taking that vacation to the lake and getting to drive the boat while mom and dad fished off the back of the boat with a rod in one hand and a beer in the other. Even the kid stuff, looking back at it now, was not by choice; we just run around on a sort of autopilot, without enough brain power to make good conscious decisions about our actions.
I don’t know what made me think about this after so many years of reading your posts. I guess this thought makes me feel like your childhood was worse that I thought before, now knowing that your parents opted to make those bad choices for you, not as opposed to making no choices at all, but as opposed to making great choices. The default behavior of a parent should be to make good choices, and making no choices is bad enough; making poor choices is two steps from what should be normal.
I guess I’m saying that plain old neglect might have been better, and that’s sad.
I loved driving the boat when my parents wanted to go for a ride and pretend to fish. I’m sorry you may not have had that sort of moment. And I’m sorry about Marlowe; I too have a pup who is a member of the family, and losing family sucks.
A couple of years ago, we lost our black lab, named Killer. She was the first dog that I had ever called my own, and my (future) husband and I had chosen her, along with my 5 year old, when we first moved in together, in 2010. She was 14, old and gray, and per King of the Hill, full of green dust. She was ready to go before we were ready to let her go, and I know we waited too long, but we said goodbye in September of 2024.
Soon after, my husband found a reel of a black lab named Olive, and the reel was named Olive Chomps. Not only does Olive look just like my sweet Killer, she also likes to walk around and clack her biters together and chomp-a chomp-a at the air. Oh, she makes my heart sing and she makes my heart cry.
When I am especially missing Killer, I like to pull up a reel of Olive, and watch a couple few. Then I snuggle my 3 year old pit Violet – Violet Beauregarde when she’s naughty- and tell her a story about her sister Killer who she never met, but who would have been her best friend, too.
Love to you and Anne, Wil.
I’m so so sorry about Marlowe. I sent condolences on threads but I realize of course it was lost in the washing machine of comments like a lone sock.
I’m a terrible no good friend that I didn’t acknowledge Marlowe when I was sending you emails about other things.
She was the best girl and there will never be another girl quite like her.
I’m so sorry about Marlowe – we love our fur children to distraction and mourn them the same way. Hugs. The new story was amazing – listened last night – love your pod – you do Levar proud
Wil, have read The Golden Globe by John Varley? Great scifi, and also (at least to a degree) relevant to your experience as a kid in show business.
I miss Marlow Mondays. Best wishes to you and Anne.
I will always write something compassionate in your time of need. And if it doesn’t get through your site’s algorithm, I’ll leave my words on Bluesky.
Equally upsetting to your girl’s passing was the pain you were suffering. You’ve already been through so much and though our beloved furry and otherwise children inevitably leave us, it really seemed so unfair. So many of us love you; I love you and not just because we’re in that club no one wants to be a member of. It’s because you’re such a stellar human despite it all.
I have shared this on Spoutible, in case anyone sees it there.