Spoiler Alert's Michael Ausiello On Caregiving, Ceding Control, and RuPaul's Drag Race
Plus: Upcoming events, an expert AMA, and Gayle King's surprising announcement
Hi everyone,
In 2020, there were more than 53 million family caregivers in the United States alone. That number increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, when loved ones were taken out of long-term care, adult day centers closed, and the paid caregiving workforce decreased due reasons including burnout, bad pay, and fear of contagion. Currently, around one in every five Americans is a caregiver. Family caregivers are partners, children, siblings, parents, grandparents, and beyond. The care they give can be short or very long term. And at least 3 million are younger than 25. We generally do a poor job of supporting them, and while caregiving can provide its poignant moments, its burdens range from identity struggles to loneliness to an impact on lifetime earning potential.
So I thought it was a good time to shine a light on this theme in the newsletter. Our feature interview is with Michael Ausiello. He’s the founder of TVLine and author of the hilarious and deeply moving memoir Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, which details the long arc of his relationship and challenging final year with his husband, Kit Cowan, who died in 2015 from a rare form of neuroendocrine cancer at 43. It was recently adapted as a film starring The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons, Fleabag’s Ben Aldridge and Sally Field (as in…Sally Field) and nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. You can currently catch it on demand. We talked about a whole lot, including the challenges of caregiving.
Before we get into all that:
📚 On December 31, Gayle King shared her two favorite books of the year. One was Michelle Obama’s Becoming. The other was The Modern Loss Handbook. And yes, I, too, cannot believe that is a sentence I just wrote. Said Gayle: "Death is a certainty in life…yet we often stumble through the grieving process without the tools to help or the words to express how we really feel. Insert The Modern Loss Handbook by Rebecca Soffer. Soffer joined us at CBS Mornings and I found her to be poignant, funny, and able to provide exercises that help you maneuver the rough. I’ve recommended this book to several people and they all told me it was very helpful. If I were going through something, this is the book I want to read.”
🥂 My first book was published four years ago this week, cowritten with Gabi Birkner. Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome. was named a best book on loss for a younger generation by The Strategist and is a marvelous companion to the latest one.
🎤 Join me at one of the my upcoming events next month:
🗽 New York City on February 5: Keynote at Sutton Place Synagogue
🦀 Rockville, MD on February 8: An evening at Temple Beth Ami
💙 In December’s newsletter featuring From Scratch’s Tembi Locke, I thanked the Harnisch Foundation for providing heaps of copies of The Modern Loss Handbook to my friends at The Dinner Party. The problem? I expressed that gratitude while jet-lagged at the Frankfurt airport and dumbly misspelled the name of an organization with which I have worked closely for many years. (If that doesn’t make the case for copy editors, I don’t know what will.) And so, thank you to Ruth Ann Harnisch, Jenny Raymond, and everyone else at the HARNISCH Foundation. I encourage you all to look at the incredible investments they have made in social change work for two decades and counting.
🖥️ This month’s paid subscriber content is at the bottom of the newsletter. Subscribers can register for our popular yoga for grief support Zoom session with occupational therapist Sandy Ayre and join a special AMA with Rebecca Hobbs-Lawrence, who runs several caregiver support groups at Dougy Center and will be offering her expertise to those in the throes of it or on the other side and in need of support. Paid members allow us to spend lots of time working on Modern Loss’ online content — both here and on our website — and provide it all free of charge. We are a very small entity, and I’m actually using the royal “we” here because mostly it’s just me. Thank you in advance for supporting this mission!
Drop a comment after the interview about your own experience with caregiving, or with any thoughts at all. And if you have any burning desires to see someone in particular featured in this space, share them here.
— Rebecca Soffer
Michael Ausiello Does Really Care, Do U?
REBECCA SOFFER I loved that you didn’t sugarcoat your relationship in your book. You write about alcohol addiction, drug use, infidelity, a sexual desert landscape, and turning your attention to work more than your personal life. This stuff has always been somewhat taboo to talk about when someone in the relationship has died, because the other person can’t speak for themselves. But you portrayed a real life. How did you decide which of these hard truths to include?
MICHAEL AUSIELLO Kit was always in the back of my mind. The litmus test was: Am I revealing our humanity? If I was, even through a flawed lens, it felt like fair game. I needed to tell the story about two real people who were in a complicated relationship. Softening Kit's rough edges wouldn’t pay tribute to him. Showing his complexities – and as a result, the amazing person he was – would.
SOFFER He was so amazing that you fully dedicated yourself to his caregiving when he got sick. The Modern Loss community is full of people who cared for their person throughout long-term or fast and furious illness. But when we talk about the shit that goes down with people going through hard things, we don't automatically think oh, they might be receiving care from a family member or friend who's giving a lot of themselves, let’s check in on them.
I needed to tell the story about two real people who were in a complicated relationship. Softening Kit's rough edges wouldn’t pay tribute to him.
There’s a scene in the movie which feels like the real nut of the advocacy part of it. You’re at the hospital check-in desk and calmly and repeatedly ask a staffer to get Kit a bed because he can’t sit up. After being told four different ways that they’re all occupied, you have no choice but to turn up the advocacy from a gentle 1 to a forceful 11 until a bed miraculously becomes available. Caregiving requires a lot from the mind, body, soul, bank account (especially in the United States). How did you handle that?
AUSIELLO I had a full-time job that not only paid our medical bills for insurance but also allowed me to focus on Kit. My boss was like do what you need to do, don't worry about work. Not everybody has that situation. I can't imagine how you are a caregiver and maintain a full-time job at the same time. If you don't have support from your employer, it's impossible do to it alone. But I was very lucky that, especially toward the end, I could give Kit one hundred percent of my time. Because it required one hundred percent of my time.
SOFFER What advice do you have for caregivers?
AUSIELLO Take care of yourself. I wish I’d taken that advice more seriously. In order to be the best caregiver you can be, you need to be compassionate with yourself and your limitations. You need to get out for a break, have a night out with a friend, go to dinner for your own sanity. Kit always encouraged me to step out of the cancer bubble. It was hard to leave his side, but it always made me a better caregiver when I did.
In order to be the best caregiver you can be, you need to be compassionate with yourself and your limitations.
SOFFER If you could wish for any abilities of hospital and hospice staff, what would it be?
AUSIELLO To have a specific liaison who deals with the caregiver. One of the problems I encountered was that shifts come and go and I'd always have to spend 15 minutes just getting the new person up to speed on Kit’s situation. It was frustrating, wasting all that time. There was a lot of educating and reminding people, no, you don't understand, he has an enormous rectal tumor that’s inhibiting his ability to move.
Once we needed to rush him to the hospital, but we lived on the third floor of a brownstone. I repeatedly told [the staff on the phone] that he couldn’t walk down the stairs, or even sit. He had to lay flat. Sure enough, they still brought a chair stretcher.
SOFFER There is so much nuance to your experience. It must have been somewhat terrifying to sell the rights to your story and cede control to a creative team that was going to boil all of these feelings and experiences down into a 100-minute film.
AUSIELLO That was the biggest challenge for me. I didn't completely relinquish control because when I made the deal with Jim Parsons, it was like, I am going to be very hands-on, I'm not signing away the rights and saying, ‘do what you want with it.’ I was involved every step of the way. That said, there are other creative people at the table. When I wrote the book, I had the final say about everything. With the movie, the director, Michael Showalter, had the final say. That was a little terrifying. Thankfully, he’s an incredible director and collaborator.
SOFFER It’s like you specifically needed the person who directed both The Big Sick and Wet Hot American Summer.
AUSIELLO That's why he was our first choice. He gets the sensibility of this story and also does a brilliant job of balancing the comedy and the drama of life.
SOFFER What did you do when you met Sally Field for the first time? You work with celebrities all the time. But in this case, she was playing your mother-in-law.
AUSIELLO Obviously, she's a fucking legend. I kept my distance on the first day and waited for the right time to introduce myself, because obviously she was interacting with a lot of other people. Eventually, I found my moment and it was wonderful. I let her know that I'm there for her as a resource if she needs anything. She couldn't have been lovelier.
SOFFER I think that’s what we all needed to hear about Sally Field. There's a scene in which you pretend Kit is a TV character being killed off because he’s leaving the show. You're a TV guy. Have you done that with painful experiences as a coping mechanism, taking yourself to another plane to process it?
AUSIELLO Absolutely. Television has always been an escape for me from back when I was a child and would obsess over Dallas and Falcon Crest. These were alternate universes I would slip off to. And not just by watching them, but in my imagination. I related to the aspects of the movie where there was that blurring of real life and fiction, because I think we all do that. When you go through trauma, you search for escape and a way to soothe yourself.
SOFFER Speaking of television, shortly before the pandemic you performed a story in a Modern Loss show in New York City. It was a six-word memoir format for which you told the backstory. Your six words were “RuPaul's Drag Race is My Kryptonite” and you talked about how that had been your and Kit’s favorite show, and how you didn’t know if you’d ever be able to watch it again, either alone or with someone new. Where are you at with this in 2023?
AUSIELLO I mean, I'm sure I can. I continue to choose not to. It was just so special between the two of us. I think part of it is protecting myself, but also preserving that memory. It feels sort of sacred.
SOFFER What might Kit's reaction have been to the film?
AUSIELLO I think he’s say thank you for casting Ben Aldridge as me because he's super-hot.
SOFFER Yeah, on that we can agree. Ben Aldridge is objectively super-hot.
AUSIELLO Beyond that, I couldn't even begin to tell you. I hope he’d happy but when it came to matters of art, Kit was very particular. I imagine he would've had strong opinions, good and maybe bad, about the book and the movie, but wouldn't even venture to guess what those would be.
SOFFER By nature of saying that you don’t dare mess with what he might say, it feels like you’re keeping him present. It’s kind of an example of how the relationship does live on.
AUSIELLO That’s a really nice thing to think about.
📚 Purchase Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies by Michael Ausiello here 📚
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