Also, CAMP CRUEL, excerpt from Margaret’s book, I’m The One That I Want.

September, 2001
 

We were not friends, Margaret and I, just showbiz acquaintances. People who passed each other in The Improv, for many years, silently nodding hello. I didn’t know her, but I had to call and tell her how much I loved her book. She thanked me and agreed to an interview. I wanted to know how she arrived where she is, coming from where she did. It took a while to arrange a date that worked. She had a book tour and a two-week meditational stay in Tibet to get through. Well, okay then, we would wait. We did. Here it is. Buy her book. It is innately empowering, honest and raw. And if you ever get the chance to sit down and talk with her, do it. I did. —Rosie
 

RO:   I loved your book. 

Margaret Cho: Thanks, Rosie. 

RO:   With a childhood like yours, I found it interesting that you resisted therapy as long as you did. 

MC:  Yeah, I know. I think that what prevented me from getting treatment was coming from the Korean culture, which is so anti-therapy, anti-sharing all those painful secrets. You just don’t do that. You don’t talk about your life and those issues with other people, especially people who aren’t in your family, who aren’t Korean. But I’ve been in therapy for a couple of years, and it’s been so helpful—just to be able to talk about my life and share it with people and not have all these secrets. 

RO:   What made you finally decide to go to therapy? 

MC:  Well, I was in a relationship, and I wanted to kill him all the time. 

RO:   Yeah, that’s bad.

MC:  I really hated him so much for no good reason. He would come to hug me, and I would just want to slug him in the face. It was this immediate reaction—like, “Why do I have all this anger in me?” And it scared me that here is somebody who is trying to love me, and I was not letting him in in any way. That is the main area of difficulty in my life— love relationships. I really have a hard time letting people get close to me. So I think it is just this rage that comes up, and I am not able to let people in. 

RO:   And do you think that is because you grew up in a family where love was not overtly evident? 

MC:  Well, I didn’t have a good example of a loving relationship. My parents were very unhappy in their marriage at that time. Now they are really happy with each other, but they’ve been through some difficult years. Not having an example of really affectionate unions led to this idea that it just didn’t matter, that it wouldn’t be part of my life. And since my parents were not physically affectionate, it was kind of like growing up in a very barren desert. And I was just re-creating my life outside of that, in adulthood, the same way.

RO:   Did your boyfriend encourage you to get help, to get counseling?

MC:  No. I think he was just afraid of me. 

RO:   I imagine your anger is intense.... 

MC:  [laughing] He thought I was going to kill him. But I sought therapy because I thought, “This really is not okay, this is not normal.” And it wasn’t the right relationship anyway. I wasn’t going to salvage the relationship—I was going to find out why I had repeated this pattern of not connecting with anybody for so many years. So that led me to therapy, which really helped me enormously. 

RO:   “You speak candidly in the book about your struggles with drugs and alcohol. 

MC:  Yeah, well, it was a way to self-medicate. I was just so miserable and afraid all the time. 

RO:   Afraid of what?

MC:  I think when you are in show business or when you care a lot about your career, you can get all tied up in it. I did. A lot. I was constantly in a state of panic about different TV shows I was on, or different things I was trying to do with my career. I would take it personally. I was hurt all the time—if I didn’t get a part or wasn’t funny enough. I needed something to calm me down. I needed a sedative because I was so terrified about everything. Everything! I put so much of my self-esteem on my career accomplishments. I was only as good as my show. 

RO:   So your sitcom going off the air threw you into a funk? 

MC:  Right. That was all that I cared about. That’s where I got my self-esteem. My love of myself was completely conditional. If I could be a certain weight, if I could be attractive enough—I would grant myself self-love. 

RO:   Then you achieve it, and you think you will feel better, but you don’t.

MC:  No, you don’t, because those aren’t the things that make you feel good about yourself. You think they are, but it is really just another way to delay your own happiness. Because you get “it”—a sitcom, say—and you realize that’s not enough. You are still unhappy. 

RO:   Were you a sad kid? 

MC:  Yes. I never really fit in with other kids. I never really found a sense of peace or safety anyway. My parents worked a lot, so they weren’t there for me—as well as being shut off culturally. They were not demonstrative, and they worked all the time, so I felt very lonely. 

RO:   You write a lot about your mother. You describe her as depressed. 

MC:  Yes. I think that she had it. She always had weird behavioral things, like I think she had an eating disorder, which she passed on to me. She had problems with my father, and that would manifest itself in her blaming her weight. Like she would go up and down on crash diets. When I was about ten we would always go after school and work out for an hour or two—me, my mom and my brother—then we would go to binge at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut. And we would have this almost delirious time together because we were so starved, and then we would eat this crazy food that was totally forbidden, and then we would go home and have dinner with my father like nothing had ever happened. 

RO:   So it was a sneaky
underworld with you and your mom. 

MC:  It made eating very criminal and very exhilarating at the same time, and it was a way to connect with her and not with my father. It was a way to go behind his back. It taught me that having this desire to eat was something wrong that had to be hidden. That was something that I was brought up with, and I think that was her way of coping with depression. 

RO:   I take it she hasn’t been to therapy? 

MC:  You know, it’s funny, because I’ve brought my parents into therapy and they really don’t know how to react to it. They think it is the weirdest thing that we are sitting in this office with this white lady and we are telling her all our secrets. And they are really into it. 

RO:   How did you convince them to go? 

MC:  I just asked, and they knew that we had been living in this agreement that “everything is okay” for far too long. They had not achieved any closeness with me as an adult. They knew that I was depressed, and they wanted to help me, so they were very willing to go into therapy. 

RO:   So therapy has been helpful to you? You seem so calm, so happy.

MC:  Yes. I think it’s everything—the culmination of being in therapy, having the luxury of being able to be in therapy and also to have the luxury to write about my experience. So all of it together works toward a healthier life for me. And I am really grateful for the way I get to live my life. It all has a part. 

RO:   Do you feel pressure on yourself to be a role model for young girls?

MC:  Absolutely. Part of the reason I wanted to write the book was it was almost like writing a letter to my 14-year-old self to say, “You are going to be
okay.” I wanted my book to be something a young girl could hang on to. I think people need an example of somebody who went through it, and somebody who is willing to be honest about all the hideous things that happen. 

RO:   Were friends or family mad about the details in the book?

MC:  Oh, yes. People are way more pissed off about the things I wrote about in the book than anything I’ve ever said onstage. 

RO:   And why do you think that is?

MC:  There is a kind of finality that comes with the written page. There is a woman I talk about who is my best friend, and she and I had abortions together. I wanted to tell the story because it was a very rich and painful experience. She had not told her mother about it. So the book comes out, and she is faced with having to talk to her parents about this. Fortunately her parents were understanding. And it was not irresponsible of me, but something I had to remember—that when I talk about my truth, I am not only implicating myself, but the lives of many other people. 

RO:   Did that worry you?

MC:  No. “You have to write your truth. I think the truth is more important than other people’s feelings. I don’t know what I would feel like if someone wrote about me in that way. But I feel very clear and open about my life as it is. And I like to use it as a teaching tool. I feel like now I’ve gotten to the point where I am able to be a teacher. I want to be able to use that.

RO:   You are a very, very good writer. I think this book will help a lot of people. 

MC:   I hope so. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from people, and it’s a very different reaction than I’ve gotten from my stand-up. People really feel that reading it has been a very transformative experience for them. That they are really changing from it and feeling really great from it. There is a lot more at stake. People feel more moved by this than anything I’ve ever done. It’s really satisfying.

CAMP CRUEL – excerpted from Margaret’s book, I’m The One That I Want