Welcome to Limboland.
A podcast about
East vs. West vs. Me
I lived the escapist fantasy: I ran away to Bali and lived there. It didn’t work out. I came back to America. And now I wonder if that was a mistake. The deficits there that existed before have become more appealing. Maybe because of my father’s death, I appreciate what living in the developing world offered and see it through his eyes. He embraced his life there. I felt cut off and now I understand; being cut off is the point. When I’m here, I wish I was there. When I’m there, I wish I here. So basically, the problem is me. The sense of dislocation is ever-present; I’m never at home. Bali is also a haven for the wellness community. ‘It is what it is’ is the mantra. I’ll be challenging the platitudes within that community and try to get to a more nuanced certainty. In the West – we are focused on what’s ahead. In the East – it’s existing in the present. Neither work. The West is about searching for more, the East is about needing less…as a circumspect person, it’s created a constant state of cognitive dissonance.
When I fled to Bali at 45, it was to be closer to my ageing father who has lived in Southeast Asia my whole life. I’m an only child. Growing up, I would split my time between New York City and Thailand. In 2013, I met Mario, an Italian ex pat living in Bali who was more of a local than most Balinese. He had two six-year-old twin daughters and we became a family. I got stuck in the place I went to get unstuck. A decade later, my father is gone and my relationship with Mario has ended.
I will be mining from this deeply personal quest – a deeper understanding of the criteria that has guided choices I’ve made (feeling safe!), what it means to function as a child in an adult body and how the specific the calculus of my life was seemingly about place, but it wasn’t really about that at all. It turns out, a tolerance for sustaining limbo is the legacy of trauma.
Listeners will relate to how relationships can draw you away from where you live; how feeling unsettled is not necessarily about geographical location; how trauma from childhood can leave you with a sense of having to keep trying to find something other than where you are. I’m on a quest to connect the dots. To quell the feeling that something is always missing. Can one really ever feel like they’re in their life? Their real life is about to start. And as you get older – you realize you have less time ahead than you have behind. It becomes magnified that you have to enjoy life right now. What does that even mean? How does that happen? And where? I’ll talk to deep thinkers, ex pats, monks and shrinks about the tools the Eastern and Western philosophies give you and if and how they work. I want answers.
Let’s find out together.
Ariel Leve is an author, award-winning journalist and columnist, TV writer (Better Things) and screenwriter. For more than a decade, she was a senior writer on contract with the Sunday Times Magazine in London and wrote the popular columns Cassandra (The Sunday Times), The Fussy Eater (Observer) and Half Empty (Guardian). Ariel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Marie Claire, The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, Granta, and other publications. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir An Abbreviated Life which has been optioned for film by Pamela Adlon (BetterThings). Ariel is co-writing the screenplay with Adlon, who plans to direct as her first feature. Ariel is the author of two other books: a collection of her columns, It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me; and co-author, with Robin Morgan, of 1963: The Year of the Revolution. She has been profiled in New York magazine and The Guardian and widely interviewed on radio, including NPR, Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, the BBC, and Radio One. Ariel’s TED talk on gaslighting has been viewed nearly 2 million times, prompting letters from viewers around the world expressing appreciation for her candor and the desire to learn what happened next in her life.
"Mesmerizing... A portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry."
—The New York Times
"An Abbreviated Life is an explosive new memoir from acclaimed journalist Ariel Leve, chronicles Leve's dismal childhood under the primary care of her riveting, glamorous, intellectual, and ultimately incredibly destructive mother . . . In the company of captivating memoirists Mary Kerr and Alexandra Fuller."
—Elle
"A powerful and frequently devastating account of a childhood without boundaries and dominated by loneliness, chaos and fear. Leve's recollections can be brutal but are made digestible by the elegant sparseness of her prose."
—The Guardian
"Sometimes, a child is born to a parent who can't be a parent, and, like a seedling in the shade, has to grow toward a distant sun. Ariel Leve's spare and powerful memoir will remind us that family isn't everything."
— Gloria Steinem
"The staccato style of this searing memoir enhances the harshness and emotional power of what is a frightening story by a brave author, who resolutely describes herself as 'a long-distance runner through the canyon of childhood' - a modest understatement. This is the story of an endangered childhood, tyrannized by an out-of-control and fear-inspiring mother. This book is an unstinting portrayal of psychological abuse, both insightful and precisely told."
— John Irving
"Out of a childhood that seems just about impossible to have survived, Ariel Leve has written a haunting, indelible story that becomes its own form of redemption. This is an act of bravery that strikes me not only as a literary achievement, but a human one."
— Dani Shapiro
"Leve writes in beautiful staccato sentences and weaves her own story together masterfully."
—Evening Standard (London)
"You must read this distressing and inspiring book."
—Miami Herald
"Unflinching in detail."
—Vogue
"Leve's prose is soulful, cryptic, musing."
—New York Observer
"An Abbreviated Life adds a harrowing chapter to the great human tragi-comedy called "We Don't Get To Choose Our Parents." Ariel Leve's extremely readable memoir is, at its heart, a story about surviving childhood -- a trick we must all perform. As such, even in its raw extremes, her story is a universal one."
— Richard Ford