We will start by going straight to the end of Meghan’s latest podcast, because it’s usually for the best. This week’s is called “Good Wife/Bad Wife, Good Mom/Bad Mom” and we’re promised “a raw and enlightening chat” and raw and enlightening is exactly what I’m up for, so over to you, Meg. I’m ready.
“Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field,” she says in her sign-off. “I’ll meet you there.”
“But is it plowed?” I whisper to my laptop. “Do I need wellies?”
I sometimes wonder if Meghan’s sentences would make more sense if I put the words in a different order.
This episode features her dear friend Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, who is the wife of the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and, inevitably, a humanitarian and activist, and what if I never become a humanitarian or an activist? What if I waste my life trying to earn a living and have a nice time with people I love? Grégoire Trudeau is also, Meghan says, “someone who has become so emblematic of the strength that comes from embracing humanity” and I worry that perhaps I’m not embracing humanity enough, or even at all.
Meghan says that her friend is “keeping that sense of self while holding up the mantle of what comes with being a parent and a spouse”, which I think means “living”. We learn that Grégoire Trudeau used to send Meghan “little meditations” during her pregnancy, and my friends confirm that when they were pregnant, little meditations would have been just the ticket and almost as useful as the lavender-scented candles that featured heavily on the birth plan for their first child and not at all on the birth plan for their second.
“I absolutely adore you,” Meghan says to Grégoire Trudeau, which is an excellent way to begin a raw and enlightening interview and I will remember it if I ever have to interview George Clooney.
I sometimes wonder if Meghan’s sentences would make more sense if I put the words in a different order.
“We often define freedom as a way to be free from the world, but it’s really a way to be free in the world,” Grégoire Trudeau says, ending decades of suspense. We learn that Meghan has been hanging out with her girlfriends by the pool, which boasts an inflatable pizza slice, and that the one without pepperoni was a few dollars cheaper than one with pepperoni and, who knows, maybe the Sloppy Giuseppe would have broken the bank, and maybe I could cope with this stream-of-consciousness gibberish if I meditated more. Then Meghan says the words we’ve all been longing to hear: she’s read a book.
It never ends well when Meghan reads a book. I’ve listened to nine of these podcasts and not once has she given a shoutout to Jilly Cooper. This week’s book is called A Radical Awakening and she reads us a poem about a woman who discards her old ways and “shreds her list of shoulds and obligations”. She finds that “artifice and guile leave her nauseated” and the “parental tentacles of tradition no longer define her truth”, and if that doesn’t make you yearn for Rupert Campbell Black playing naked tennis with someone else’s wife, nothing will.
The rest of the podcast is the usual trot through everything that is wrong with everyone else. “Don’t destroy your essence for this illusion of perfectionism,” says one of the guests, I forget who, does it matter? “The best woman you can be is the authentic one who is deeply connected to her own knowing,” says another. We talk about pendulums, which Meghan rejects, and “the limiting version of the mold that society has carved out for us”, a mold so limiting it doesn’t even allow for a woman to be born in California, find fame as an actress, marry an English prince, hobnob with the late Queen then go on Oprah to speak her truth.
Pamela Adlon is a writer, actor, director who says she uses the surname Jupiter because someone told her “you need a pirate name” and that is a direct quote and I am not making this shit up. At 13 minutes in, Meghan starts squeaking. I worry that the mold may be too tight, but in fact it’s because she’s worrying what it means “to be a person in the world in the most nuanced and real way”, which again, I think, means “living”. Meghan confesses that, like Adlon, she once studied to get British citizenship, but found the citizenship questions very hard so she’d ask Harry, because he’s bound to know where Stonehenge is and who’s the head of state.
She takes a call from her mum, Doria, although her dad might have made for more interesting listening. “Do you have a smiley face on?” Doria asks, and Meghan confirms that she does, and that she’s hanging in there, like a brave little soldier. Before you know it, or 43 minutes precisely to those of us who are counting, we’re on to the patriarchy “and what on earth more can I even say to that?” says Meghan, before saying more. Finally, the random word generator spews out more authentic truth and self-knowledge, but with no final shoutout for parental tentacles, which is surely an oversight. She’s back again next week, she promises. Yay.
Hilary Rose is a longtime columnist for The Times of London and the author of the weekly column How to Get Dressed
