Mary Louise Kelly is speaking at the Wheeler Opera House on Monday as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, a war correspondent, a reporter, and a mother.
In her new book “It. Goes. So. Fast.”, Kelly walks readers through her eldest son’s senior year of high school, and how she chose to be in the bleachers for his final season playing varsity soccer, despite numerous conflicts at work.
Kelly spoke with Halle Zander on Sunday at the Aspen Institute’s podcast studio.
Halle Zander: You're here at the Aspen Ideas Fest to talk about your book, “It. Goes. So. Fast.” First of all, there’s periods after each of those words. So is that, I assume, for emphasis?
Mary Louise Kelly: It is for emphasis. That was my editor/publisher's idea. You know, in broadcast and radio, you can hear the emphasis in my voice. You can hear me say “it … goes … so … fast.” But in print, I couldn't figure out, how do you make it that emphatic? And the solution that we came up with was period after every word and capitalize each letter so that you get, like, I really want you to pay attention to every word because it really goes … so … fast.
Zander: And on that note, you've been writing in a journalistic sense for a long time, for radio, for print. How did it feel to go to autobiographical, longform?
Kelly: Terrifying, is the one word answer. I was at a crossroads where I had been for the 19 years that I have been a mom trying to figure out how to be a good mom and be a good journalist at the same time. And some days that came together beautifully and the vast majority of others it did not and involved making hard choices. And I had kind of hit a wall of realizing I kept missing the thing that was most important to my sons. I have two teenage boys. They love soccer. Their soccer games are weekday afternoons. They almost always start at 4 p.m., which you will know better than most (Zander anchors “All Things Considered” for Aspen Public Radio) is the exact same time that “All Things Considered” goes on air, and so I kept missing the games, and I kept thinking next year I'm going to figure this out. And when my son was going into his senior year of high school, it dawned on me. I'm out of “next years.” I don't have any more do overs and if I'm going to make a different choice, I need to make it now. And I really wrestled with that and what it would look like for me and my family and my work, and so I started writing about it and it became an exercise in writing a year of my choices in real time. My hope in putting it out there in the world, I know not everybody, in fact, almost no one, has wrestled with that exact choice. But I think the idea of needing to be in two places at once, a feeling like trying to be true to your work that gives you purpose and meaning and do it to your best potential in the way that you want to do it, that brings you into direct conflict with the other things that give your life purpose and meaning, which is the people you love and showing up for them. And so I hope that through my story, I could help people feel a little bit of solidarity that, you know, we have all been there. There's no easy answer to any of this.
Zander: In this book, you get pretty vulnerable. I mean, you talk about the passing of your father. You talk about your separation from your husband, and obviously this conundrum of choosing between work and family. What do you think was the hardest thing for you to pull back the curtain on?
Kelly: Well, I will tell you, the moment that I really, really tried to get through in reading the audiobook, and just couldn't do it, and it was writing about my dad. I'm used to being behind a microphone all day, but I’m not used to talking about myself for hours on end. And it was also the first time that I had been able to see anybody’s face reacting to what I had written. I had a director. I had a studio engineer, and I could see their faces and their reactions. And some of the later chapters about my father when he was very sick and losing him, and the book is about me and my boys and what you pass down through the generations, but obviously, in reflecting on that, I'm reflecting on what my parents gave me and what lessons I've taken from them and thinking as an adult in ways that hadn't ever occurred to me as a kid to think about. Gosh, they were making all these choices too. They were also wrestling with how to be in two places at once and how to be a great parent, which they are and have been, and then trying to read some of the one chapter in particular about my dad. I did it, and my voice broke and I couldn't get through it, and I had to stand up and lap the building, sit back down, try it again — still couldn't make it through. Finally, on the third take, I got through it, but I'm told that they actually kept one of the earlier ones, and I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it. But I think they kept the one where you hear me really, really struggling because I figured there was no point in writing a book if it wasn't really, really what I felt. And so it's all in there.
Zander: The book is all about your struggle to choose between this work that you love that is a part of who you are, that you've known you've wanted to do your whole life, and these people who are your number one priority. But you talked in previous interviews about taking it kind of decision by decision, step by step. So when you approach that decision of, “I want to do this interview, but the boys have a game.” How do you grapple with that nowadays?
Kelly: Well, I mean, the honest answer is if I'm really having to choose between my work and my children, that's easy. My children come first every time, and I promised myself that when I became a mom, and I would like to think I have been mostly, not 100%, not perfectly successful, but mostly successful at that. They're definitely big stories and work assignments and interviews that I had to let go because they conflicted with a promise I'd made to my family. I can't actually think of a decision that went in the opposite direction where there was some huge thing where I knew my kids were counting on me to be there and I didn't show up. But part of the revelation of writing the book was that that's a really easy rule to follow on the big decisions. Like, you know when your kids' birthdays are going to be. You know if they're headed to the hospital, you're going to show up no matter what you have going on at work that day. You're on your way. Big decisions feel quite black and white. What occurred to me in writing this was, it's all those 4 p.m. soccer games. None of them feel so critical in the moment because there's always going to be another one. That's like the gray area, though, and it's all those little decisions that accumulate and add up to a life, and the decisions you've made about your priorities. This is still hard to talk about because — it's really hard, the gray area of all those little decisions. And they're not critical in the moment until you get down to there aren't hundreds, there aren't dozens, there’s just a few. Am I going to show up or not? In my line of work, there will always be another big interview. There will always be another natural disaster to cover. There will always be another election. There will always be another war, sadly, there will not always be another child in my house who needs me. Is there somebody else who can go cover this story? Yes. Is there somebody else who can be a mom to my children? No.
Zander: You have reported from a bunch of war zones. How do you prepare to go into a place that's so dangerous?
Kelly: You know, yes, I have been to a lot of these places. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've filed from some hairy situations. I also, largely because of being a mom, I have made a decision that I have never been based in those places. The only time that I've been to Afghanistan, I have been traveling with the defense secretary as part of his press pool. You're going to dicey places, but that's an entirely different scenario when you're inside the security bubble than when you're embedded with troops and not leaving and headed back to Andrews Air Force Base any time soon, or when you are based there permanently as a bureau chief. So I have nothing but admiration for my colleagues who have done far more of that kind of reporting than I have. You know, it's the most basic thing in our industry, but any journalist worth their salt will tell you no story is worth dying for. I always, before taking on a risky assignment, think it through, do all the security planning, do all the security considerations. NPR's great about the hostile environment training they give, great about thinking through which colleagues to put in that type of situation with you. What's the exit strategy? And I've never taken an assignment where I couldn't, hand over heart, say, “Yes, things happen.” Yes, I could get hit by a car when I walk out of this interview in Aspen today. You never know, but I've never taken on an assignment where I wasn't fairly confident that if things went even remotely to plan, I would come home.
Zander: Did you have to prepare your family before going on those trips? And what did that look like?
Kelly: Yeah, and that conversation has really changed with my children as they've gotten older. Before I went to Ukraine recently, my older son wanted to know, “What's the exit strategy? What's that look like? How do you get in? How do you get out?” And those conversations get harder as they get older because the honest answer is, I don't know. I don't know because in the war zone, you don't have control over any number of factors and you can't say exactly when you're going to be in and out, and what that's going to look like. What you can say is, “I'm not going to be an idiot. I'm going to, you know, make the best risk calculations I can. I am going to take responsibility for the team that's coming in with me. ”We all need to come out safely, take responsibility for the people we've gone in to interview who aren't going to be coming out, who don't have a U.S. passport and get to leave. Some of the, actually, most dicey situations I've been in are not war zones where you're getting shot at but countries that do not enjoy freedom of the press, where you're being monitored. And it's the risk of being detained that's actually more than the threat to your physical safety in a mortar fire, that type thing, reporting from places like Iran or North Korea or Russia. And those conversations get harder and have gotten more interesting as the kids have gotten older. And my attitude has always been, if they're old enough to ask, they deserve a good answer. And I lay out for them, “This is how we're thinking about it. This is the planning. This is the itinerary. Whatever questions you got, lay them on me.” But I would be a different kind of mom if I didn't get on that plane. This is what I do, and I love it.
Zander: For new parents who are in the workforce, who are about to embark on parenthood. From what you've learned from writing this book, is there any golden nugget of advice that you might share with them as they start this journey?
Kelly: I think just the solidarity of knowing there is no golden nugget of advice. There's not a single one of us who's figured this out or found the easy path. It's a cliché, but the whole “you can have it all, but not all at the same time,” there's a lot of truth in it. I have found that. And I have, at different points in my children's development, when they really needed me, chosen to opt out of the workforce and be at home because they needed me, and there was nobody else who could do what I could do for them and with them. And I haven't, in hindsight, regretted it. There were moments in the thick of it where I thought, “have I thrown away my career? And I'm scared.” There have been moments on the other side where I have been all-in on the road, away from my children for weeks, reporting around the clock on some huge story, and looking back, I don't regret those either. Although there are moments when you're in the thick of it where you think, “What the heck am I doing on the other side of the world? I don't even know where my kids are right now. What kind of mom am I?” So I think the thing I would say to my younger self is just give yourself a little bit of grace. Give yourself a little bit of kindness. I've learned if I judge myself by the standards that I would apply to you, to any of my colleagues, to any of my friends, I can look at all of you and think, “God you're doing great. You're killing it. You go!” It's so much easier to beat yourself up, but frankly, probably, you're doing all right. Your kids are doing all right. There's time over the scope of, you know, it's going to take you 18, 21 years or more to raise a kid. I'm told by people with kids in their twenties, thirties, forties that it doesn't — it really doesn't end. They keep coming home and needing you. It's the long game, and there's time to get it right, and have some fun along the way.
Aspen Public Radio will be broadcasting “It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs” on Sunday, July 2, at 7:00 p.m. MT, on 91.5FM/88.9FM or streaming live at aspenpublicradio.org.
