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Premium: Sean Szeps - Not Like Other Dads · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
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  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
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  So you wrote a book? Yes, that's good. You were punished for it.
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  That was a long writing process. I got to tell you, whozers, for people who don't know how
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  what it's like to write a book, what would your advice be about what it's like to write a book?
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  Don't do it. Don't you run?
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  Be willing to get into therapy. That's what I would say. Yeah, well, especially if you're going to
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  write about your life, right? Maybe any type of writing process, like a therapy session for you,
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  like one big, long personal, self-indulgent, exhausting, boring.
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  I reckon if I'm being quite serious about it, it's probably 10 years of therapy to write a
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  memoir. I appreciate the use of the word Reckham. Welcome to Australia. I can do the philosophy for
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  you. Why did you write it? Where did it come from? So during the two lockdowns, when things
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  opened up, I was at a bookstore in Balmain and I went up to the woman at the front and I go,
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  do you have any gay books? And she's like, excuse me, thinking of being offensive. I'm like,
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  oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. She slips you like a gay porn magazine from under the counter. Do I?
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  And she was, I was like, LGBTQ, I bless. She's like, let me look it up for you. We have call
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  me by your name with Timothy's shadow man. And I was like, I've already read that twice.
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  And she was like, no, we don't. We don't have anything. But I can order some for you,
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  which ones would you suggest? And I was a deer in headlights. I was like, I don't know. I was
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  hoping there would just be a section and then I could feel good about myself for grabbing a book
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  about my community. So I went home, googled it, started to do some research. I'm just a big fan of
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  memoirs. Like I actually like them. I like reading them. And so I just looked it up, hoping I could
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  find some gay family that's Australian or American. Couldn't find one. Lots of book, like fiction
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  novels have been written about us. But there wasn't a parenting memoir.
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  That happened probably six months before I was approached by HarperCollins. And they said,
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  no one's written a queer memoir like this. It's either going to be you and Josh,
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  or one of the two other queer media families that exist. Is this something that you could do?
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  And I think the fact that I knew it didn't exist and then was approached was like, well,
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  obviously there's a need for this. And I want to be a writer. So I wasn't she was the publisher
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  of fan of your Instagram. So she knew that you were good with a little quip. She had listened to
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  our podcast interview. Oh, Mia Friedman on Mama Mia out loud. No filter. No filter. That's the one.
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  So she listened to that. I have seven million podcasts, the media empire. She listened to that,
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  loved it, googled my name, and then read every article I'd ever read because I had been writing
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  for years by that point. Yep. And she said, this is a writer. He has a full book in him. I'm sure of
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  it. And then she emailed me. And then the process of actually putting that book together was
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  them saying, all right, go and write a memoir. You going, okay, I'm going to write a memoir
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  and heading over to them and them going, uh, yeah. So we didn't mean that kind of memoir.
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  Oh, it's true. It's true. Isn't it? So basically what they did was, hey, you got to write
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  an outline. What are the stories in what order? How many do you have? Is there enough here, right?
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  And so I think I wrote out over the course of a month, 35 stories that I thought I had in me
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  about my life and about parenting. And then they approved probably 25. And then I just wrote them.
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  Right. I followed the guideline that I had gotten approved after they read it. They did come back
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  tailed between legs. Like, so listen, we love it. But this isn't actually what we imagined. It
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  would be even though it was the outline. We need you to scrap the first 10 chapters, which were
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  mostly about being a tortured gay kid in New Hampshire. Yes. And they wanted funny, what, whimsical,
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  like more sort of, here's what it's like to be a gay down into in the 2020s. Why, why?
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  I think the exact phrase was, you know, a little bit more like queer. I was like, stop.
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  Right. Yeah. They wanted it to be as they put it. And in retrospect, they were right.
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  The world has just gone through two years of total shit. Right. People don't want to read
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  misery. They're talking about the queer eye remake. No, no, the pandemic.
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  Right. Yeah. Okay. And so they wanted, and also you have a very strong persona on Instagram,
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  which is not exactly upbeat, snappy, queer eye, queer eye, basically, absolutely. And then you
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  hand in this like this morbid, tortured, self-loathing, like memoir, the little bullied gay kid.
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  And they're like, no, more sunshine. Exactly. So you got more sunshine. And now it's a big hit.
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  It is, I hope. We're in the early phase. They're far so good. Still hitting, hitting big numbers.
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  I'm seeing it on all the charts. What feedback are you getting from it?
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  I would say 90% of the feedback is from women. Almost all of them are saying something on the lines
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  of, I'm really surprised how similar your experience is to mine. Something on the lines of,
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  I saw myself in this story and this. In what respect? What kind? What's the through line?
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  I would say probably isolation, feeling that there's a parenting script that doesn't make sense for
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  them, struggling, but not wanting to admit their struggling out of fear of being judged as being
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  a shitty parent, struggling with the early days and figuring yourself out after leaving a job,
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  working with your partner. I mean, there really are so many overlaps in our experience,
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  and heterosexual couples. People just look at us and think, oh, their experience must be so different.
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  And I think for most women who pick up the book, they're flipping through the pages and going,
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  oh, shit, they're really not. Generally really doesn't have that much to do. After the birth
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  process and the breastfeeding, all the experiences of being sleep deprived and trying to figure it out
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  and wanting to do a good job and losing it, losing night sleep is not just for women. And they're
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  figuring that out as learning it, as they're reading it. Yeah. I don't think most people
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  think that our experience must be very different. I think most people who've spoken to me about
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  the early days of parenthood are like, it sucks, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. You don't have to have
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  boobs for it to suck. I am shocked by how many people say it, that clearly it is a large insight.
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  Like what? Come in and say, I was surprised at how much I related to. I think they buy the book
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  thinking. I'm a good person. Look at me, we're getting gay parenting more because I am an ally.
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  And then they flip through the pages and they come to a chapter about postnatal depression or come
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  to a chapter about us drugging our kids on a plane with Ben and her or whatever. And they go, I've
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  made the same mistakes. I've struggled the same amount. I felt similarly to Sean and the fact that
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  he's articulating it in a way that I can relate to and understand and feel nostalgic towards
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  is a ah-ha for them. And so clearly, either it's because men aren't talking enough about it
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  and they have a stereotype that men must not experience the same thing or they've never spoken to a
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  gay person. Do you think it's easy? Well, I mean, and also not a lot of gay people necessarily are
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  having families, I mean more, but the stereotype still generally holds as a rule that most
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  gay guys are not in married relationships with little children. Totally. So you break in the mold.
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  I'm breaking the mold. I was going to say we're breaking the mold. Look at you right here. Yeah,
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  but I'm not part of the community, which is that other word that you used when you were saying that
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  that you there were no books that were from our community and you wanted to look at books that
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  were from our community. What does that mean to you? I think of the community as a group of people
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  with a shared experience. And so when I think about parenting books, when I think about parenting
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  memoirs as the large category, there is obviously, you know, usually a section in a bookstore about
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  parenting. You pick them up and you read them and you and I read them and they're either written to
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  women specifically or they're not specifically written for women, but you can tell that they are
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  they know who's picking up the books or it's a book that specifically says, hey, dad,
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  the first early days and paragraph after paragraph chapter after chapter, there's a constant
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  reference to a man and a woman and a man and a woman. And so for me, looking for some type of
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  book that represents anyone who's not in a heterosexual relationship, the people who have those
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  stories to tell are usually same sex couples. And so I think of that as like the larger queer
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  community writing books about that experience. And do you think it was easier or harder for us
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  not being of opposite sexes than it is for people who are of opposite sex to raise kids in those early
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  dark days because you were saying like men will either just sort of check out and avoid the question
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  and some fathers have the luxury of just doing that and of just not being present and not being
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  the one who changes the nappies or the diapers or whatever, you know, not engaging and using the
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  excuse of the woman's biology as a reason as a rational for why she should be the primary carer.
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  You know, and sometimes there are reasons for that like giving milk and sometimes there are no
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  reason no good reasons for that like just a cultural norm around doing housework versus being the
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  breadwinner. In our case, we don't have an automatic assumption about those things. Is that a benefit
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  or a curse? Oh, it's an absolute benefit. Let's table the obvious hurdles we had to jump over. So
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  do you mean set aside the obvious hurdles? Because do you know that table means the opposite thing in
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  America and England? Oh, in one admit to table something means to put it on the table and talk
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  about it now. And in another admit to table something means to put it on the table and not
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  deal with it. Wow. I guess I'm doing both right now. Okay. Let's table. Let's put it onto it.
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  Let's put it under the table. Under the table. The fact that we couldn't just have sex to have
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  children, we tried. I mean, we were really putting in the effort and it didn't work. So we had to
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  pay for it a lot of money. I think you calculated something in the range of $250,000 Australian
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  dollars. Yeah. Which translates to what in America? I know. Yes. Yeah. Not more. It's not more
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  impressive. It sounds like you're expecting me to be like, that's 400,000. No, it's only 100 and
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  something. I thought you're going to do a quick mask. 184. 150. And then there's I guess the hurdle
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  of societal pressure or judgment about us doing it at all, which you get from everyone. They don't
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  not just straight people like, you know, other queer people being like, you're doing what? Well,
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  especially gay people. I mean, straight people are fine with it, I think. Mostly, you know,
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  the only people who ever give a shit about it are the guys who are like, you betraying the team,
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  you've sold out. It's a direct attack on their choices. And a little bit of the internalized
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  homophobia comes bubbling up to the top of their mouth. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
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  I will judge or they say things like, why would you ever do Saragasy when so many children need
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  to be adopted? The judgment comes in. Right. Well, yes. And straight people say that as well.
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  Yeah. So if you put those two things aside, because we couldn't just follow a broken script and
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  because one of us wasn't literally on a bed drugged up. Well, I was, but that was recreational.
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  I think we had it easier. We both did the exact same amount of bottle feeds. We both did the exact
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  same amount of nappy feeds, underwear, changes, clothing, you know, everything and the exact same
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  amount of MDMA. It was cool. It was fabulous. And because we did the same amount of everything,
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  I think there was much more of a mutual respect and a feeling that we were on the same path together,
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  like intrepid voyage or stepping step by step by step. When I talk to my straight friends about
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  this, it is not like that. It is mother feeling like I have to do everything, breastfeeding got a
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  figure this out. Father feeling like he's not very useful. Kind of feels like he's like a delivery
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  nurse. I'm just going to hand you the child every time the child wakes up and drop it off.
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  How many dads have we spoken to who felt like they didn't even connect with their children for the
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  first three, six, nine months? Yeah. And women feeling like they are the second they give birth,
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  their body is fully recovering and they feed this child on this exact schedule. Don't fuck it up.
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  And we just didn't have that. And so I think when I talk to my straight friends about our first
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  maybe three months, I think. Yeah, we had a really lucky.