In Pleasant Company: Reflections on the End of Dolls of Our Lives
Saying Goodbye to Dolls of Our Lives: Lessons, Memories, and Community
I have always thought of myself as someone who deeply loves learning and is very curious but is also somewhat of a “character,” to use a word loved by my grandmother. What I mean is, I liked school, but I was/am also easily bored and probably up to something on the side.
When I started my Ph.D. program, I knew I wanted to learn how to do historical research at the highest level and to learn from experts in American history how to interpret and write about the rabbit holes I wanted to pursue. Sometimes those rabbit holes were questions, like, “How did people imagine their reading as a kind of medicine in the early twentieth century?” or subjects like “petty disputes involving John Adams in early America” or “gossip columnists of the early twentieth century.” I knew I cared a lot about all kinds of things. What I was less sure of was the professional direction these interests would take me.
When I met Allison in graduate school, it felt like I’d found a kindred spirit or fellow private investigator working for an agency I’ll call “No One Else Remotely Cares About This, Inc..” We bonded over the Olson twins, deep dives on Eleanor Roosevelt, and of course, American Girl. I’d been teased early in my program when new students talked about their influences in terms of pursuing history. Everyone had very smart answers. I said “Molly McIntire.” It was the truth! I’d follow that sociopath in saddle shoes anywhere, including to my local library so I could learn more about “victory gardens” and the holocaust, incidentally a thing that did not concern Molly too much. I’d even followed her to a Ph.D. program in an era when higher ed (and the humanities) were both under attack and in freefall. What an influencer Molly has been in my life!
I always sort of felt out of place in graduate school. In part, that was because pop culture was and is an important part of my life and fires up my imagination just as much as any archive or monograph (which I still love to read). I can’t pretend to be a person “who doesn’t own a television” which was a thing I’d sometimes hear people say. Allison and I both felt comfortable referencing historical figures, historians whose books we liked, and the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy. There’s been a lot of writing about who gets the privilege of an extended girlhood (*cough*, Taylor Swift), and I think that’s valuable to consider. There were some people in this moment of our lives who confused our height with our age and thought we were still girls who got up to “hijinks.” Yes, we once presented our friend with a custom American Girl-style book for her birthday and would make time for movies and dinners out in addition to studying, but to paraphrase the Olson twins, “we’ll do our work | solve any crime, before dinner time.”
I did not have a lot of guidance in graduate school, so when I decided to start a podcast, no one stopped me (this is perhaps the only thing I have in common with Joe Rogan). I was studying how people imagined books as medicine and had recently completed training as a DJ at our local campus station (I have a lot of interests). I was never a huge public radio listener growing up (I usually listen to music), but I’d recently become aware of podcasts as a thing I could listen to when I couldn’t sleep. Something that was immediately apparent (and off-putting) was that most podcasts I could find were hosted by or about men. Needless to say, I was curious about the form but didn’t see myself in it. One person whose work inspired me then (as now) was Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show (2015) in which she tracked down answers to seemingly trivial but vital questions like “Did Britney Spears read the copy of my book she was photographed carrying?” (answer: unclear).
I was inspired by Starlee’s vibe on tape (she seemed like a person I’d be friends with) and her ability to talk about important life things through seemingly innocuous pop culture topics. That would leave a mark on me and inspire our approach to our show.
Still in school at this point and trying to find sources for a history of books as medicine, I realized there weren’t many places I could go to find records of how people thought about the things they read prior to Goodreads or Amazon reviews (themselves a wild archive of human expression). I started doing interviews with people I knew about the books that had meant the most to them, and found that I really loved the experience of asking questions and listening to people share stories. I recorded these interviews with my friend Taylor who knows a lot more about audio than I do, and released it as a podcast called Chapters.
Before this show, I’d studied mostly nineteenth-century history and all of my subjects were dead. Imagine my surprise when I delighted in being able to ask follow-up questions to sources, instead of wishing they’d dished up a little more intel in their long-forgotten diaries. I got to interview someone who’d been spared in a school shooting by a book in their backpack that stopped a bullet, a friend who talked about their reading and the role it played in their journey to coming out, and more. I also started a program where high school students interviewed each other, and learned how to record and edit audio. Importantly, I started to feel more like myself doing this work than any paper I’d written that went on to die a lonely death on a professor’s hard drive.
At this same time, Allison was finishing her Ph.D. and starting with the park service. We’d kicked around doing a project together on American Girl for years but wanted to finish school first. We also weren’t sure what form it should take. Having created Chapters, and knowing we wanted to reread the American Girl books and discuss them together, audio seemed like a good match. We decided to make a podcast together and presented this idea at a local history conference to test the waters. I mean, would anyone listen? We had exactly 4 people show up to our talk (one was our friend). One woman complained about how expensive the dolls were (true), and that seemed to be her assessment of our project entirely. Nevertheless, to paraphrase a now-retired man, she (we) persisted.
We launched in 2019, and genuinely believed our friends would listen and that was about it. The show felt like one of many “hijinks” we’d created together, whether it was a fake American Girl book for a friend, or now a seemingly real podcast that we couldn’t fathom strangers listening to. Recording it was fun, and if the extent of its life was the joy I’d felt making it, I would have been alright with that. There was a method to our madness, to start talking pop culture and lure people into History talk as our equals (if you can have an opinion on Britney Spears, you can definitely follow and have a take on the politics of the American Revolution). We use the language of pop culture and history interchangeably, so it made sense that our show did too. We also wanted to produce something we hoped to see more of in the world, a podcast that took seriously the things of childhood and their influences and interpreted our continued interest in them as something other than childish.
Allison and I have never lived in the same states, so the show was initially designed to keep us in touch after we no longer had the connecting point of our shared graduate program. Unbeknownst to us, we created something that would not only keep us connected but connect us with a ton of other people.
I was genuinely shocked (and still am) at the reach of the show. I used to host a weekly viewing of The Bachelor at my apartment, and one week I had my friends over when one of them noted that an influencer named Carly had shared our show on Instagram. Full disclosure, I was new to Carly and didn’t understand she had a lot of followers which helped spread the reach of our show. We have never spent money on ads, and it makes me feel good knowing that our show spread mainly by friends telling friends they’d found something fun they wanted to share. That remains one of the coolest aspects of our show. We started getting emails from strangers who’d found and loved the show and seen themselves in it. People asked us to create a Patreon and Discord and we weren’t even 100% sure what those words meant. A few months into the show, a stranger came up to me at a work event and told me she had a parasocial relationship with me. I had to google what that meant because I’d never heard that phrase before. We learned a lot and fast.
I started working at a college doing a postdoc when I finished my Ph.D. in 2018. One day, I was packing for a trip to one of the school’s satellite campuses when I noticed Margaret Lyons was tweeting a link to old American Girl books on the Internet Archive. I shared her tweet as we’d had listeners asking us where they could find the Kirsten books, for example. She dm’d me and said she was looking for them because she was writing about our show in The New York Times. I was home alone at the time and this dm hit me like a jump scare. I screamed like a man on Maury who’d just been told he was the father. What was I scared of? Hard to say! Myself? People I thought were cool in high school knowing I made a doll podcast? Truly no idea! You have to forgive my lack of chill about any kind of recognition because to this point, my historical offerings to the world had garnered *checks notes* very little interest! My advisor in grad school, a very polite and kind person, had so little investment in what I was presenting at my defense that he introduced me by saying “Now, here is Mary to talk about . . . books.” He sounded like a book club member introducing a book he’d never read. Not the kind of deep-level investment you’d hope for at the end of several years of study. All to say, I couldn’t get arrested in my grad program. No one really seemed invested in what I was doing so long as I could cover the classes I’d been assigned to TA. To realize the show reached The New York Times and other major outlets was mind-blowing and very humbling. A book editor reached out to see if we wanted to write a book, which was always a dream of mine, to write books in the style of people whose work I found equal parts smart, funny, and accessible. It all felt surreal. (Shout out to our agent Lauren and our book editor Kat and her new daughter Romy).
What was startling was that we’d found such an audience simply by being ourselves. The version of me that appears on the show is exactly how I present IRL in part because I’m not capable of Mr. Ripley-level duplicity. When we’ve done interviews, we’re often asked about the incredible reach the show has had and its impact on listeners and I am so grateful for that. At the end of the show, I want to reflect on what it’s meant to me and for me.
I have realized in the past few weeks that the show is the first place I felt entirely comfortable showing up as me in public. When I taught in grad school, I felt comfortable making pop culture references and jokes while teaching. I love connecting with a class and creating a community that exists in a room that can’t be recreated again. It’s one of my favorite things about teaching, reaching a conclusion in a class discussion that none of us could have devised on our own. That’s a thing I also love about great podcast interviews or discussions, when two people have a realization together that they couldn't have apart, and we, the listeners, hear it happen in real-time. Those are my favorite moments on our show, apart from the many things that made me laugh. I struggled to bring this full version of myself - the part that likes to laugh and also cares deeply about history and all kinds of things - to my professional life as a historian and writer. The show gave me that space to be playful but also critical, and I am so grateful for that. It led to a major revelation for me that the things I want to do professionally have to include both fun and curiosity. It also made me realize that they likely won’t happen in a classroom, as that has never really been the platform where I feel most like myself.
I have grown so much and learned so much about myself in the process of making this show. I remember sitting back from my Ikea kitchen table where I completed my draft of what became Chapter 2 in our book and feeling really proud of myself as a writer for the first time. I’d written a dissertation, articles, and other things in school and at jobs, but those formats all limited my capacity to write in my voice. I grew up reading Sarah Vowell's books and loving the ways she blended being smart, funny, and conversational in her trips through American history. I always wanted to do my own version of that, and the show not only gave me that opportunity but taught me how to do it.
There is no rule book or class you can take to learn how to sound like yourself on the page or on a podcast. The answer (for me anyway) was to simply keep showing up as myself and to try to be as true to how I speak and think in all spaces. What I have learned about myself in that attempt is that, despite any attempts to sound purely serious, I always default to my own voice which is often funny, curious, and frankly, gay.
Growing up gay in a Catholic family is not a recipe for inherent comfort as an “out and proud” queer person. Though my family loves my wife, Anna (a person literally impossible not to love), I have struggled to feel like I could be openly gay in my family, even now many years after coming out. It’s hard to describe a culture so influenced by something like Catholicism where the kindest treatment gay people or any queer topics receives is silence (and outright condemnation otherwise). It leads to a culture of silence around queerness, even by very well-meaning people who are accepting. Though I have loving parents, having so much in my past tell me being gay was shameful or wrong and not a lot of positive reinforcement to the contrary made me walk through life like I had a pebble in my shoe: I could move forward, but it was hard to take steps with confidence. Harder still that I was navigating this in secret as I thought it was something to be ashamed of and had to bury deep within myself. A major gift of my adulthood, and a major benefit of the show, was giving me a space where I could talk about being gay with joy and zero shame. Talking about which American Girl reads as queer with listeners and people we met at our book events has been so amazing for me. It’s so fun, and frankly so healing, to argue with strangers about why Molly is more of a queer icon than Samantha (although as we’ve learned they literally have the same face). Do the stakes of these debates matter? Not in the least. In fact, I fully expect these debates will only register importance when I recreate them as part of a future audition for Ten Days in the Mad-house. (If you can’t handle a Nellie Bly reference, this newsletter may not be for you).
I had no clue how much I needed to talk about the things in pop culture that I now understand nurtured my queerness as a child. When I was growing up, I would secretly watch musicals like Camp (how did I think I was straight?), tape episodes of South of Nowhere on the family DVR and erase them before anyone knew I’d watched, and I always had a fascination with people who were inherently themselves without apology like Dolly Parton, Mariah Carey, and Lady Gaga (again, how did I think I was straight?!?!) I never talked about these interests with anyone because I thought it might make me seem, well, . . . gay. Even though I came out years before the show aired, I clearly never connected all the queer pop culture dots that helped me come into myself, which included American Girl. A major gift of the show for which I will always be thankful is that it allowed me to be myself without apology, and to learn to love that person.
The timeline of the show lined up with some important life milestones for me. I got married on D-Day during the pandemic (was this an inadvertent Molly tribute?) and I was so touched that so many listeners were interested in this part of my life and happy for me. I had listeners who offered to plan my wedding, listeners who wrote to me asking to see wedding photos, and many queer listeners who told me that hearing me talk about the joy I have in my life with Anna inspired them to come out or to hope to find similar happiness for themselves. When we did a book event at the Boston Public Library, a man had me sign his book and told me he liked how open I was about being queer. His friends later posted a video of our interaction with the phrase “knowing gay nod” as I nodded along to him talking with me. I want to be a “knowing gay nod” for literally anyone reading this. It is totally cool to be queer, and entry requirements are surprisingly easy.
Perhaps the greatest gift of the show to me is the gift of community. I know how saccharine this can read, and I don’t care (I’m a Leo and we do big feelings). It’s been both strange, surreal, and fun to develop and maintain a community of listeners around the show. I never saw us in this role because I originally thought I’d be able to fit our entire listener community in my apartment to watch The Bachelor. Imagine our surprise that we now have a very active discord community with meetup groups around the country, and many more listeners who communicate with us and each other in our comments on Instagram. On our last episode, we shared a letter from a couple who got engaged after meeting via one of these meetup groups. I still can’t believe this! I’m so happy for them!
So many listeners shared that the show helped them navigate the pandemic, a time when we all felt particularly isolated. It’s easy to feel that way now when we may have moved away from friends or family or face other barriers to intimacy with people IRL. I know that’s certainly led to me feeling like I “know” my favorite authors or people I see online who feel like they could be friends. As someone for whom religion is no longer a source of community and who has finished school (thank god), having the show as a source of fun people to talk with and get to know has been so meaningful for me. Hosting PowerPoint parties, chatting on Discord, and doing pen pal exchanges have led to new friendships and connections I cherish.
My wish for the show and the listeners for whom it mattered is that it will continue to be a source of fun and joy when you’re on your commute, can’t sleep, or need a fun convo to listen to as you take a walk or shower. I like to think of new listeners finding it and using it to jumpstart conversations with new friends starting with the loaded question “Which doll was your favorite?” For the listeners who have been with us all along, I’m so grateful that we have this community that will continue.
I am excited to continue to share my life and interests here on Landline and in future podcasts and books. I’m also looking forward to some book events in the next few months where I hope I can meet more listeners and readers, and say the words I know to be true, “Thank you for being a friend.”
Call Me! (or not!)
I’d love to hear from you! Drop your thoughts in the comments to share with the Landline community, or reply to this email to contact me. You can also find me on Instagram, or email me. I don’t have a dedicated phone line yet (just like in my youth), but maybe someday I’ll achieve Claudia status and get a Landline.
Absolutely loved reading this. Dolls Of Our Lives was such a gift to us all! How else would I ever have unearthed and healed my Samantha trauma!
I love seeing the journey again through your words. And realizing that the podcast was just as much about discovery as it was rediscovery.