Title:
You’re Not Going to Read Again

Subtitle:
Author and professor Molly Gaudry on concussion, sensory processing challenges, and rewriting her life through storytelling

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.

Let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia. And today, we’re gonna talk about storytelling. There are some stories that don’t follow an exact straight line. And ones that also can shape memory, identity, and maybe have a little bit of effort and disruption, here or there.

Today’s guest is someone who reimagines what storytelling can be. Molly Gaudry is the founder of Lit Pub and the author of We Take Me Apart a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award. Congratulations. Very nice. She is on the short list for the PEN Osterweil. Her latest book, Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, is deeply personal and it is shaped through a lot of her experiences with having concussion. Interesting. This is the first time on the show that we’re talking about concussion. Very interesting. She’s got advanced degrees in fiction, poetry, and she teaches at Stony Brook University and the Yale Writer’s Workshop. Very impressive. I’m so excited to hear your story.

Welcome to the show, Molly. It’s so nice to meet you.

Molly Gaudry: Thanks, Alycia. It’s really my pleasure to be here.

Alycia Anderson: Awesome. So we’ve only had a couple professional writers on the show, thus far, so I’m really excited about hearing your journey. And I would love to start with your life, maybe before books, before academia. Tell us about you. Where did you grow up? When did storytelling first become something that not only you enjoyed, but became something you needed in your life?

Molly Gaudry: So I was born in Korea, and then adopted and growing up in Ohio northeast Ohio, by the time I was three years old I’m not entirely sure that this is completely accurate, but I believe there was morning preschool and afternoon preschool.

And I think that my parents put me in both because of the language barrier. They wanted more time socializing, more time speaking English. By the time I got to kindergarten, I was reading and writing stories. There was a kindergarten teacher And an aide in the room. I don’t know why, but my desk was separate from everybody. I was working on workbooks, and other kids weren’t. So I don’t really know. I’d have to talk to my dad to see if he knows more about that. But when you asked this question, that’s immediately what I thought about, was sitting separately from everybody else in kindergarten. I think it might have something to do with the fact that I had extra preschool. I feel like there’s something related there. But yeah, I had these little story book I was reading and writing stories. That’s what I remember from kindergarten.

Alycia Anderson: Do you think that was like language barrier coming into Ohio and starting to learn English, from overseas? Maybe that is where it all began.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. I mean, it’d be interesting to think about what is. I’ve honestly never really thought about this. My dad tells a story that when I learned how to say dad in English, maybe daddy. At first, I was calling him “apa,” like Korean for dad.

Then it was “apa daddy.” That’s what I would call him, “apa daddy,” and then I drop the “apa.” Then just moved over to daddy. He tells that story, “apa daddy,” I’m your “apa daddy.” I don’t know. I think maybe my coming to myself and understanding who I am, existentially. Little kids, they look in the mirror, like that kind of thing.

I just wonder if some part of my sense of myself is in some way related to coming to language in that way at that time. I don’t know. It’s interesting to think about.

Alycia Anderson: That is interesting. I’m just guessing, but it feels almost like your way of storytelling back then, when you were trying to navigate probably new friends, new school, new language, new life, new parents, new environment, all the things. You’ve maybe found that to be a way for you to tell your story through drawing and writing, and communicating that way.

That is interesting. If that is the case, it seems that this is embedded in you from way back when.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: As you started to go through school, when did your love for writing really begin?

Molly Gaudry: I can remember making little booklets, like construction paper covers, foot and a half, telling stories, writing stories. I remember I wasn’t the best math student in grade school.

I wasn’t the best history student, but a lot of my teachers, along the way, would let me do extra credit to save my grade. I remember I wrote a story that took place in ancient Greece, which was a history extra credit. I wrote a story about some sort of science thing that was for science class.

I think I was very much supportedalong the way. It’s funny because, before this conversation, if somebody had asked me, “Who’s had the biggest influence over your writing life?” I probably would’ve said my creative writing professors from college.

Alycia Anderson: But it’s interesting now to think about how much support there was along the way. Just learning to read, and practicing those reading and writing skills. As a teacher now, I’m like, “Extra credit’s just more work for them.” It was just really cool. But yeah, there was so much support along the way. You mentioned some of your professors being some of your mentors. I love that, actually. I feel like a lot of us have a coming of age. At university at some point, where there’s a professor, there’s somebody in our lives that see something in us that maybe we’re not ready to see yet or we don’t acknowledge. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Molly Gaudry: In the spring of ’26, I was at the annual writing conference, and it was in Baltimore this year. It’s my first time back in over 12 years, I think. I went as a representative of my department at Stony Brook.

I bumped into my two professors from undergrad, Michael Griffith and Brock Clark. They were both at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergraduate. I got to see them both and just tell them that if it hadn’t been for them and their faith and belief in me that I could do this.

I was so grateful. I told ’em I’m just so grateful. And it was great to get to see them both together and tell them that. At that moment, one of my students walked up to me and was just like, “I just wanted to say hi.” And then I was able to tell those two professors.

I was like, “This is one of my former students, Amy, and her book is coming out next year.” It felt like three generations. There’s a slightly longer story, but the story is that I was not a great undergraduate in a lot of my other classes. But they saw something in me in the creative writing classes that they were teaching. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but one day they said, “Come meet us.” I showed up and they said, “We’ve done something for you. The English department has agreed to let you into the Master’s program. ‘Cause all students were fully funded, they were like, “For the first time, the department is not going to fully fund a master’s student. We will cover 80% of the tuition. You’re gonna have to come up with the other 20%. And we don’t really trust you in the classroom yet, so you’re gonna have to work in the writing center to get your stipend. If you go to all of your tutoring shifts and you get all A’s the first year of the Master’s program, then in the second year you’ll get the same package as everybody else.” The reason that they did that, the way they explained it to me is that my grades were so bad. I think I had a 2.0 and I was on academic probation. “So you’re never gonna get into graduate school. There’s gonna come a time where maybe if you want to pursue this path and you wanna go get an MFA or something, you have to let us do this for you because you will then have proof that you can do graduate level work.”

It was so great to get to see them. I haven’t seen them in such a long time. A couple weeks ago, I was standing with them as a professor at another school.

Alycia Anderson: That’s incredible. What a coming-of-age story and just an advocacy story of leadership in front of you, ahead of you, teaching you, guiding you to get to where you are, to have this full circle moment. That’s really incredible. I can imagine you’re paving that forward for many of your other students now.

It sounds like with that young girl, that came into that circle at the same time.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. And in fact, for a while, I had run this website and small press lit pub. I think we started in 2011, and I got here at Stony Brook in 2020. So I think in 2022, I decided to pass the torch to three Stony Brook students that had graduated at that point. One was a fiction writer, one’s a nonfiction writer, one’s a poet, and they now run the site as a literary magazine. And each one is the editor of their respective genre. Amy was the nonfiction writer. Yeah, just feel like my sort of pet project, and I put a lot of time and effort. It feels like it’s in good hands.

Alycia Anderson: That’s amazing.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah, with these three.

Alycia Anderson: Okay. Can we talk a little bit about some of your books and your writing? I know that your latest book, I believe, is Fit Into Me, and it feels like a powerful anchor for this entire conversation. The book explores identity, memory and what it means to live in a body that doesn’t always feel predictable or even whole.

Can you talk a little bit about this, your journey with it? Just the whole story.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. I just brought up the writing conference. It’s AWP, the Association for Writers and Writing Programs annual conference every year. It’s in a different city every year. I guess in 2011, I hit my head. I was getting my MFA and I hit my head. I was endurance training in preparation to try out for a roller derby team in Washington, DC.

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

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Molly Gaudry: I wanted to try out for the DC roller girls.

Alycia Anderson: That’s incredible.

Molly Gaudry: I was endurance training. I was outdoors and I hit a rock or something, and just right into the ground. I got a concussion. I didn’t really think anything of it. It was bad. I was banged up. It was on the weekend, so I waited, ’cause I wasn’t gonna pay for emergency room fees or anything. But I waited and I went to the student health center on Monday. Mostly, they just helped me clean everything out. They were digging gravel out of my legs, just really cleaning everything.

That’s what they were emphasizing is do not let this get infected. Half my body was like road rash. They were just like, “Do not let this get infected. People get concussions all the time. Don’t worry about it, just don’t fall again anytime soon. But the most important thing is that you do not let all of this get infected.”

So that’s what I left thinking, “Don’t get this infected. That’s the most important thing here.” And everything was fine. Then I was at that conference. Back in those days, I’m gonna say the attendee numbers are anywhere from 10 to 15,000 people. I was in the book fair working a table, and you’re just surrounded by tables. It’s a convention center.

I understand now. I didn’t know it at the time, but I understand now the amount of visual processing that I was doing in that environment as opposed to at home. I was processing all of these moving bodies, and people far away, and then talking to people right in front of the table and showing them books.

Looking far, looking near, and then tracking all of these movements. It just overwhelmed my visual system. Everything just turned into double vision and I couldn’t fix it. So I was just seeing like this for months. It took a really long time before I found a doctor who was able to diagnose and then send me in the right direction. I didn’t know this at the time, but vision and eyesight are different. I kept going to eye doctors and they kept telling me, “Your eyesight’s fine.” And nobody could figure out what was causing the double vision. They sent me to some sort of psychiatrist for something related to neuro-ophthalmology psychiatry or something. I did eight hours worth of testing that day with that guy. Ultimately, he was just like, “You’re not gonna read again. You have to figure out a different path for your life.

Eventually, finally, I found my way to a doctor who was like, “I think you should just go see a vision therapist. You’ve seen everybody else. What can it hurt at this point?” And so I went to a vision therapist. I got a referral. I went to a vision therapist and this guy. This was in Ohio.

At that point, I left school and was at home. He was just like, “This is easy. I know how to help you. Come back and let’s talk.” A pretty lengthy consultation, but he identified everything I was going through. He was able to put words to things that I was feeling and had experienced, but couldn’t articulate as problems.

For instance, I thought the double vision was my primary issues. One of the things that he said was like, “Are you not wearing perfume anymore? Are you not using cleaning supply? What’s going on with your household?” And I was like, “Yeah, no scents anymore.” And he was like, “Yeah. Your brain is processing vision. It’s processing all of the senses.” And he was like, “All of this is very much related.” I had not put that together with my double vision.

Alycia Anderson: Oh wow.

Molly Gaudry: I had developed a thing about not liking seams in socks, not liking tags in clothes, all of this kind of stuff.

He said, “Oh, yeah.All of that, very textbook. Just an overwhelmed sensory system, and let’s get you into therapy.” He was able to give me a referral so that I could go back to school and start working with a vision therapist in Virginia. I still go, off and on. I did vision therapy in Virginia when I shifted over to my PhD program. I did vision therapy in Utah, and now here on Long Island. I dip in and out when I need it.

Alycia Anderson: And this is all in relation to the concussion?

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. Yeah. So basically, nothing got fixed. I still have sensory processing disorder, but I got to be a guinea pig at the University of Utah. The life skills clinic, they did a exploratory study since so many of my symptoms were like their primary client base. Primarily, their clients were children, who had sensory issues. Those were congenital.

One of the difficulties, for them as researchers, is that if sensory issues are congenital, then children are not able to articulate if something’s better or getting closer to normal. And then on top of that, parents are bad indicators of a successful week of treatment or not.

That week, the therapist had sent the child home like, “When you’re overstimulated, try doing this.” Maybe it worked really well, but if the parent had a really bad week and was stressed out all the time, that they would come back to the therapist and say, “It didn’t work We didn’t have any kind of progress this week.” So, those two layers of faulty information, kids not being able to say what felt like a hundred percent, what felt better, and then parents’ interpretations getting in the way. Because this had happened to me and I knew that I wanted to get back to reading speed that I had been at before comprehension. All kinds of things that I wanted to be able to get back to doing. They launched this exploratory study, and there’s a whole team of researchers that tried lots of different strategies and techniques for how to manage myself in different situations. In my case, I can control the double vision now. I still have it. When I relax my eyes, it doubles, but I can control that. I just gained muscle strength. Vision therapy, it’s like going to the gym. You stop working out, you gotta get back into vision therapy again.

And then the sensory stuff. If I go overstimulated, get a little nausea, that kind of thing, I learned a lot of different techniques, and it’s usually just trial and error. They have to upset you in the clinic. I remember there was a room with a tire swing, and there were three therapists in the corners of the room. And they just took turns swinging me to each other, and then spinning it and swinging me.

You get dizzy, and unhappy, and the sensory, and all this stuff. You just get real worked up and agitated, and everything starts to break down. At that point, they take you off the swing and they try things. Try a lot of different things. “Is this helping? Is this helping?” You figure out what works and what doesn’t. Now I have strategies for an environment maybe where, if my friends wanted to go out somewhere, and it’s a amusement park or a dance club. Things are just moving and swirling.

I have some strategies now for how to get through that, but it doesn’t mean that I’m fixed or better. I still get worked up, but now I know how to bring it down and stay in that space for small amount of time. And then, I also know that I can just be like, “This isn’t for me. I’m gonna leave now.”

Alycia Anderson: That’s a pretty big shift in your life. When your body and your mind doesn’t feel like your typical self anymore that you’re used to, how does that challenge your sense of identity, how you move forward, those types of things? That’s a pretty incredible story.

Molly Gaudry: Yeah. I think that was the hardest. I think that was actually harder than any of the physical. Especially once I got into vision therapy, once I got into that life skills clinic and started undergoing experimental treatments and learned how to manage. It was the emotional sense of, “Who am I? I can’t read at the speed that I used to be able to. I can’t concentrate for as long. I don’t like to go out in public spaces. I just say no a lot more. I sleep a lot more.” I think coming to accept all of those different ways of being in the world, that’s what took the longest. That was probably the hardest part of all of this for me. But I do have to say that once I understood this is not gonna get fixed, you can live a life.

Once I understood that and really internalized that, I feel like I’m happier than I was before. I really do. I’ve set boundaries now. I know when to say no. I know when to chill out. I know when to rest. I actually think that I’m healthier now than I was. Even if I can’t read for long stretches of time, I think I’m healthier.

Alycia Anderson: So you get the concussion. Was it not treated correctly or is this common?

Molly Gaudry: It was never treated. The accident was in the fall, September, I think, and then the conference was in February. Visually, that was the first real big thing that was like, “You have a problem. You have to seek help and treatment.” But it was months and months. I think there are things that are common. My living environment and my time in school when I hit my head, that fall heading into winter, was not very stressful. I was not really getting overwhelmed.

It wasn’t until I went to this conference, it was just all of these bodies, and people, and lights, and smells, and movements. That’s when everything kind of. Even after that, it took a long time before I was able to find a doctor who said, “I think you should go to vision therapy.” I have heard from people since then. In one very specific case, somebody had a concussion, knew she had a concussion, and started experiencing things she remembered that I had been posting on social media about back in those days. And she was like, “Okay, so now I understand more about what that was like.”

Alycia Anderson: I guess the reason I bring it up is because so many of the experiences were the same physical experiences: nausea, visual disturbance, a short temper. That was one that we talked about. Because in a heightened state of anxiety, just faster to react and snap. But I don’t think treatments are the same for everybody. In my case, vision therapy helped me because the primary thing was vision and learning to control the muscles that allow me to keep my two eyes working together. And you said that post-concussion, you feel more settled, happy. I forget the words that you said exactly. Before your concussion, and the version that you were versus the version that you are now, what would you say to them?

Molly Gaudry: Before, it was just nonstop. It was just always working. I was always working. As always, I would say yes to everything. I feel like I even gave panel talks, as a panelist for how to do this thing, how to be a writer. I feel like I used to also say to other people, “You just have to hustle. You have to say yes when opportunities come your way.”

Alycia Anderson: I think I was even preaching this work mentality. It’s an odd thing right now for me to say, “I don’t know if that’s so healthy.” I have a full-time teaching position, so that puts me in an interesting position to be able to say, “It’s okay to say no sometimes.” I understand in this time of academic precarity, it feels like there is no other choice but to hustle and to say yes to everything, so that you’re doing more than the next person. But I wouldn’t say that’s healthy, mentally or physically. I agree. We are in such a hustle culture. I think that’s a great takeaway and a great lesson. Sometimes it takes these traumatic experiences in our lives to step away for a moment and go, “Okay, how do I not only need to shift, but what’s the lesson here that I can take forward? That’s really powerful.

So you have this new book. Tell us about it. How do we buy it? What are we gonna learn from it?

Molly Gaudry: I don’t know if there’s anything to learn from it. I’m gonna point people directly to the publisher’s websites, Rose Metal Press.If any of their other books on the catalog look compelling, then “Add to Cart.” I would recommend for this audience, Naomi Cohn’s, Braille Encyclopedia. Maybe both of ours.

My book is part nonfiction, part fiction. And the nonfiction is really about this time of my life and making peace. I don’t even wanna say that, but coming to terms with a new body. I’m very uncomfortable being emotional or vulnerable to expose these raw, more wounded sides of me. Part of the project of the fiction is like, “Is there a way that I can transpose some of this into fiction, where there can be more vulnerability?” ‘Cause you can externalize that onto a character. So she’s not going through brain injury stuff, she’s just going through men. Just some of those states of confusion, states of emptiness, states of anger, and helplessness, and frustration. All of that, she can experience in ways that I don’t think happens in the nonfiction when I’m talking about these experiences. I don’t think that there’s anything to learn from the book.

The nonfiction, it’snot one of those stories that resolves and says, “I’m healthier now.” It is more like, “This happened and here we are.” It doesn’t really resolve. It resists the idea that there’s a lesson to be learned, or a positive takeaway. I think that’s maybe the thing the book insists upon a kind of ambiguity. Here’s a story of what happened, and there’s a beginning and a middle and an end in this book, but it’s not over. It didn’t end. I’m still living that.

But, I will say that there are lots of quotations, like over a hundred quotations. There’s a lot of other books that I reference in this one. On a lighter side of the book, I would say just a love of reading. And for me, how I just fought to get some of that back in my life. I think there’s a takeaway of what reading and writing means to me and how hard it was to face the idea of letting it go, and then what it was like to fight for it.

Alycia Anderson: I love that. And I feel like a lot of us that go through, really, any type of disability or life altering phase, there are things that we feel like we’re gonna lose completely and you have to literally adapt and find paths back to it. Maybe even find ways to be better at it than you were before.

I think that is a really powerful path. I think it’s really interesting how you said when you’re writing this book, you wrote it in two different ways, fiction and nonfiction. And I feel like also in the disabled path, even just being different, a lot of times it’s too hard to be vulnerable in stamping your name on it and finding creative ways to tell your story through something that isn’t you, but is, must be really freeing.

I think that’s almost a therapeutic thought, even if you’re not a writer. How do you let your story be free to live into other universes that you might not be able to show up full on all the time, but you’re still releasing some of those things and exposing them?

At least in my case, there’s so much therapy that happens when you start to share little pieces of the hard stuff. So I think that’s a really interesting way to go about doing that. Really beautiful. That message right there is such a major takeaway for our community and for your readers that are gonna read your book and be able to look at it through the lens of both fiction and nonfiction. That’s so creative and unique. It feels like a method of freeing yourself a little bit. Absolutely amazing.

Molly Gaudry: Thanks.

Alycia Anderson: We’ll go to the website. We’re gonna leave all of your information in the show notes to click, buy. Thank you for the other recommendations for the books. Follow you, support you, all the things. You have an absolutely incredible, unique, beautiful story, and I think the way that you share it is really lovely and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share it today. Really nice.

Molly Gaudry: In turn, I think what you’re doing with this podcast and everything. It was such a pleasure to get to listen to episodes.

Alycia Anderson: Aw.

Molly Gaudry: I think it’s so cool, the community that you’re helping to provide the space for. Yeah, glad to be here.

Alycia Anderson: We’re trying. You just added a really unique, beautiful layer to the story of this podcast, so I’m grateful for your presence, sharing space today, growing our friendship, and just learning more. Thank you so much for your time.

Everybody listening to the show, go click, buy, purchase, shop. Don’t just put in the cart, but actually buy. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

Molly Gaudry: Thank you. Thanks, Alycia.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. And this has been Pushing Forward with Alycia, and that is how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next week.