EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: Welcome to the show everyone. We’re very glad to have you with us on Dropping In. We’re going to talk about Obsession In the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic: What We Need or Are Addicted to. We have with us today the author of a beautiful new book called This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession. Obsession being a key word. Cameron Dezen Hammon will be with us to talk and about the times that we live in that they’re producing a test of our patience, our courage, our ability to question truth and even authority sometimes. Some of us are coping day to day as best we can and then at other times we’re wondering what this all means.

Our need to be vigilant is stoked every day by the news. I, for one have taken off my Apple watch just for my sanity because the news updates keep me constantly jumpy. We need to be vigilant yes but we cannot be careful enough. It’s really important to be humble in the face of what we’re being told by science and the medical community but can we manage to be healthy if we’re consumed with anxiety for being obsessed over what’s going on. Rituals and bringing our bodies into activity and some semblance of wholeness and connecting with ourselves are really needed more than ever now.

We have to bring ourselves to a point of balance so that we can understand whether we chalk this experience with Covid up to a randomness in the universe or whether we think that it’s actually something that’s here to teach us something, a great teacher that we can if we take some time look at and try to understand ourselves better. Obsession and how to put it down is the core of this book This Is My Body by Cameron Dezen Hammon. It’s a book that’s ostensibly about one woman’s tested faith and her marriage that is pitted against an intense attraction to someone other than her husband. The man she calls him.

A husband who is real versus what lies over the edge in our imagination. These things often collide and it’s part of what we’re doing right now just coping with information, fears beliefs and thought trains that get going out of control. We learn from Cameron what all these people signify to her what the role of her faith was and how we can by reading and listening to her helped manage our own thoughts in an overwhelming time. Welcome to the show Cameron. It’s so great to have you with us.

Cameron: Thank you.

Diane: I’m going to give you a little bit of a bio on Cameron Dezen Hammon. She is a writer and musician living in Houston. Her essays, poems and stories have appeared in Guernica, the Rumpus, Ecotone, the Houston Chronicle, the Butter, Nylon, the Literary Review, Brevity’s non-fiction blog, Columbia’s poetry review and elsewhere. You get the picture. She appears in the best publications in the literary world. Her writing has been anthologized in The Kiss: Intimacies From Writers, very appropriate to this book from W.W. Norton and of My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After from the Establishment. She is honored as notable in the Best American Essays of 2017. Her writing also appears in Catapult, Ecotone, in the Literary Review, the Houston Chronicle and Nylon among other places. She earned her MFA from the Seattle Pacific University. Cameron is host of the Ish podcast. Conversations from the liminal spaces in life and co-founder of the Houston-based literary reading series The Slant.

Her first book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession is now available on www.camerondezenhammon.com or at your local indie bookseller who delivers hopefully still or ships. Of course Barnes Noble and amazon.com. Welcome Cameron. We’re so delighted that you’re here.

Cameron: It’s great to be with you.

Diane: I just want to congratulate you. First of all it’s a slim book. It’s an elegant book but it packs a lot of punch and it’s been a great experience for me to read it. I just want to commend you first off you’ve got this romantic attraction going. It’s in the midst of your work with a mega church and as a musician singing with your husband who plays guitar. This obsession develops from a writer’s conference that you attend. We all know the evils of writers’ conferences but it truly it’s a place where people come together and think together and it does become a hotbed for ideas and crossover. Sometimes those messages, they go a little astray.

I just want to say that first off the fact that you recognized your obsession with this man as an obsession and didn’t just take it as I’m in love. It’s all consuming. It’s my reality. At a certain point there’s a tipping point where you recognize this as a love addiction, as an obsession. You head off to sex and love addicts, a group therapy. Out of this chaos and this therapy sessions you start to get a handle on this as an obsession. You start kind of calling a spade a spade. I just want to congratulate you on that. For those of us that are often lost inside our obsessions and can’t recognize them as such. Well done that you did that. I know that was a long process maybe from the beginning to where you realize that.

Another cause for celebration is that you wrote this book. It’s shimmering. It’s edgy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s stripped bare. It’s all the things we love and it gives you another platform. I felt that this was something in the kind of claustrophobia of the early part of the book where all of your eggs are in one basket. Your work, your husband, your child, your whole life is wrapped up in in the mega church. You don’t really have a platform outside the church. If one thing tips or collapses like your music or the doubt that you might experience in your faith then your whole world collides and collapses. I think it’s really a wonderful thing that you’ve come out of that. You’ve gone from constraint to this liberating I think authored authorship of your own voice. Has it been liberating to expand your identity this way?

Cameron: Yes, it absolutely has. Thank you for saying that and for recognizing that. It was exactly as you described. It was sort of a world built with various sort of failsafes that I had not recognized I had been putting into place that if one part of my world failed the whole thing would collapse. A strange thing for one to do but I did that and absolutely, I mean living this and writing it has opened up another world to me for which I’m very grateful. Yes, absolutely.

Diane: But I wonder how strange it really is because we all get caught up in the world view that we have. Look at how we thought of ourselves three months ago. It couldn’t end. We were on the roller coaster. We were having the ride of our life. There was money going around. People felt secure. There was no sense that there could be anything else. Sometimes I think this invisible web, it really is invisible. We don’t know how interconnected it all is that when one piece comes out like our health everything else tumbles. I think the fact that you did take a step out of your microcosm and also you described in the book how that came about.

You had a health scare actually of your own that led you to the point of baptism in an evangelical church. I think that was probably a certain sense of belonging for you then, a certain sense of rescue for you then, maybe a purge but you’re ultimately a creative person. You’re an author, a songwriter, a musician and then you were inside this church that was very conservative. You were navigating very conventional roles mother, wife, members, anti-feminist, mostly misogynist church. I just feel like how did all of that feel? Was there a dissonance going on at this time? How was it?

Cameron: I mean how did we get here right like that’s just sort of the ultimate question. As far as the dissonance I mean I think about myself then and wonder the same. I mean though I wrote the book and I lived it. It even still now kind of mystifies me that I did sort of jump headlong into a community that did not affirm me but to be fair and I think that I write about this somewhat in the book. It was sort of a slow process. There were many years and many churches.

The first church that I was a part of in Brooklyn, in New York I was baptized on Coney Island by a group of very unusual Christians who came to Brooklyn from England who were very egalitarian. They were very pro-environment, pro art. I mean they were totally unusual to what I sort of met in various stages later. It wasn’t like I jumped in first stop hyper conservative Southern Baptist Church. That’s not at all what happened. It was a kind of a slow burn.

It was when I got to Texas, I moved from Brooklyn to Texas sort of shortly after my baptism. After 911, I got engaged because I believed that my boyfriend and I like if we were going to have a sexual relationship we needed to get married. We were definitely in love but my changing beliefs about sex and sexuality had a big part in making that decision and because he was the man like I decided I would move to Texas and we would start over there. It was like I sort of tried on the belief like piece by piece. Over time like eventually I found my way into communities that were yes, conservative and yes, non-affirming. There was dissonance and it took a tremendous amount of discipline to quiet the voices in my head that protested.

I write a little bit about like secretly sending money to Planned Parenthood while attending and working for conservative churches. Like I was still trying to rectify and understand the various parts of myself but it was in secret for sure.

Diane: Right but you had those communications going out and that’s kind of cool. I also when I was reading that first group that you were with it really did sound attractive. It’s a time of life when we’re all questioning. We’re all trying to kind of philosophy going for ourselves and it’s also a time I think when we’re young that there’s a much more I don’t know what. Like an external locus of control where we need this belonging in order to feel ourselves. I agree. It was incremental and also the early steps that you took in Brooklyn I could totally understand doing that. I could relate to it. I felt like we were all on this existential quest at that time reading writers and poets who would allow us to think deeply about things.

It isn’t really hard to understand how you got into it. I do think there’s a very subtle but strong shift in the book from this beginning where you’re really looking, you’re a performer. You look to the audience also for affirmation once you get to Houston. You’ve married this love. It’s very touching the back and forth of your love affair with your husband. I think but then you arrive at this place where and like many of us have been there. Oh my God, I’m a wife. What’s expected of me? Oh what’s expected of me as a performer, this person in this role?

Those demands start to become, they get louder. You were sending off this money that I think that’s very touching. It tells me there was this inner person still, an inner beating heart that comes through very well in the book This Is My Body. I just think the transformation is incredible. Let me just go on here. You are then taking part in a church that’s an evangelical church correct? Part of that equation is conversion. Part of the sort of triumph of being a church member is to convince others to be part of your faith. You go to is it Prague or where do you go?

Cameron: Budapest.

Diane: You’re in Budapest. You meet this man who’s in a park where you and your husband and others are performing. The concerts are to draw people into the faith that you are experiencing, your Christian faith. Here’s this guy. He’s kind of nomadic and he’s drawn into your orbit just kind of as a friend, a helper. You help him by providing a place for him to stay for a month. Then you start to realize you need to kind of report back home that this person you did what you were supposed to do. You tried to convert him. This was part of a mission. That’s understandable too because after all it was your job.

There’s so much power that there’s such a sense of interpersonal power. You need to dominate the thoughts of someone else to bring them over to your sphere. You weren’t successful thank goodness. I’m sorry. He walked away essentially. Did that start to ring bells in your mind about wait a second what am I doing or how your mission was unfolding in your life?

Cameron: Yes, absolutely. That’s why I included it in the book. I think that my experience in Budapest and that chapter that goes through our time there was really a turning point for me in that I was kind of brought face to face with the parts of the mission that just didn’t sit well with me. The parts of the mission that didn’t sit well with me were just this idea that we had to or were there to convert people, to get them to essentially pray a prayer, say some magical words and thus be indoctrinated into the kingdom of God.

I mean we knew and we felt like this can’t be real but yet it was how we marked success. That was a huge turning point. I mean my relationship, our relationship to that young man like was defined by the way that we had to see him sort of as a project and not just as a friend or a fellow traveler. We’re still in touch. I mean that our relationship wasn’t broken but there were years where we weren’t at all in touch. As I write about I think that I sent him a couple of notes like are you still going to church? Are you still a Christian? He didn’t respond and which spoke volumes.

Diane: The live and let live part of it. We’re going to have to stop, pause for a commercial break here but when we come back we’re going to talk about this idea of like well what could you take out of the faith that was meaningful, what did happen to Cameron after returning from Budapest and what happens to all of us when we’re faced with an incredible obsession with another human being. You won’t want to miss it. Come back and we’ll be back in just a minute.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Cameron Dezen Hammon, the author of a beautiful new book This Is My Body. It is a memoir. It’s a story about love and obsession but it’s wrapped inside a story about faith. I really think the dimensions of this book, it’s slim volume. It’s beautifully written and it says it speaks volumes in a very, very concise way. The author Cameron Dezen Hammon is also a songwriter. Cameron, do you think that even writing songs, the concise sort of condensed way songs unfold has it informed your writing of the book because you do it so succinctly?

Cameron: Thank you. That’s a very kind thing to say. I hope so. I definitely am an artist who rotates, sort of rotates the crops so I don’t typically work on songs. I’m working on longer prose pieces but I mean I definitely I the first thing I ever wrote in my life were poems. Poems and songs obviously had so much in common. I mean I hope that they’re connected. I also think that the concise nature of the book I have to credit my brilliant editor who is just so wonderful and so helpful with this book Beth Staples at Lookout Books. She had a big hand in the concision for sure.

Diane: Well it’s something that I feel as though somehow it’s also a natural inclination stepping from poetry because and it’s great we all need editors but sometimes it ends up feeling chopped. This doesn’t have that. It’s a really an elegant flow. One of the things we were talking about before the break was this idea of the obsession, religious obsession and evangelical need to convert people this kind of lovely man that you met in Prague or sorry Budapest.

I feel like here we are in the midst of a pandemic and we’re all searching again for something. Some of us always were but it brings light a need for some kind of peace. In my church of my origin it was what’s called the peace which path is all understanding. It’s some kind of a connection to the divine. We are looking now. We’re realizing that that our connection to one another is so powerful. Now that it’s been interrupted we see it in its absence we’re connecting in different ways. Maybe our community is just a much more beautiful and potent thing than we ever imagined.

I wondered for you and what you’ve taken away from your years with the church, as you mentioned there was not just one church but with for example the mega church that you were singing with. There had to be threads from that have come through with you. Looking at this time is it here to teach us something? What are your thoughts on that?

Cameron: I mean I think I certainly I hope that every season brings with it some kind of teacher. I think if there was a teacher from the season I spent in a mega church or in sort of performative religion or performative Christianity that the teacher would be to point out the difference between sort of a quiet faith or an abiding spiritual practice and the performance of faith. Performance doesn’t serve us during a pandemic.

I have a friend who posted something the other day about like what this pandemic is doing to sort of reveal the church. Like is it a place that provides services and classes and events that we go to once a week or is it a place or a people that just quietly abide in each other and in their belief about a God of their own understanding. Like the rubber really meets the road in moments like these for the church. I can say that now that our ability to perform on Sunday mornings in a corporate space has been suspended. What does faith look like when it’s practiced quietly alone? I mean even in Christianity that’s we’re supposed to be focused on that going to our closet alone in silence and then in secret and praying.

What our individual practice looks and feels like it’s so much more important now because it’s all we have. I definitely took away from that season the understanding of the difference between the two, the public and the private.

Diane: Well I think that that’s a very beautiful thing, the quiet abiding of faith versus the performance because honestly two things that you said really resonate. One is clearly we’re at the intersection of power and faith because for example here and really it’s almost a subject that feels very dark at times because here in Florida there is a mega church. The pastor was just arrested because as recently as last Sunday was having physical in-person, 500 person get-togethers, encouraging laying hands on one another. This refuting okay of science and what we knew to actually help us as human beings get through this pandemic.

There’s a real clash there that I kind of always want to leave alone because I just, what can you do. It’s something that our governor in in Florida has there’s been a lot of back and forth permitting not permitting. Anyway it sounds as though believe it or not some of these things are going to go on. I much prefer and relate to what you’re speaking of the very quiet, abiding, whatever that looks like whether it looks like going out in nature and studying the stars or sitting alone or sitting just you know in contemplation.

The other thing that really struck me about what you said is this season because the one thing that I’ve hung on to is this sort of the Ecclesiastes. To everything there is a season and a time and a practice. That chapter from the bible which I confess I rarely tap into. It just has resonated mostly because The Birds’ song of 1965. It’s a time to be born.

Cameron: It’s a great song.

Diane: Yes, it’s a great song. A time to die, a time to plant, a time to kill. I’ve got it in front of me so that I won’t go on forever but it’s a time to heal time, a time to break down, a time to weep, a time to mourn, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. It just touches us. It does gives me goosebumps. This ability to contextualize the time that we’re in and maybe its purpose I think it’s really significant and the way in which everyone. Victor Frankl said suffering only continues to be suffering when you don’t find meaning in it. Right now we are suffering. We’re suffering in a very real way but I think the hope is that as you say people start to go inward, start to listen to themselves again.

I just really appreciate delivering a book that actually gave us a context for that as well. You talk about in the book, the title of the book is This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession. Don’t worry we will get to the romantic obsession. There’s a very intense attraction that you had but starting with physicality. You talk about speaking in tongues in the book and somehow I went right to singing because there is something vibrational about this. There is a physical manifestation of communicating and faith.

The title of the book is This Is My Body which comes from the Eucharist and the body of Christ. It’s something oh and I also want to say we’re focusing on a very maybe a narrow wedge of Christianity. The whole Ecclesiastes part that we talked about with the seasons and the purposes. That comes from the oldest portion of the Hebrew Bible between the Song of Solomon and Lamentations. It has been translated into many cultures Greek and was originally written around well before Christ 450 to 200.

It’s the oldest part of canonical wisdom. I just want to get that in there so that we realize we’re talking about a very open envelope here but back to this physicality and way of physically manifesting faith. Then on into attraction but for you, you enjoy this physicality. There’s part of it that you revert to even through ritual even now you say.

Cameron: I think the title of the book actually came originally came from a short flash essay that I wrote about experiencing a miscarriage and the way that the experience of Eucharist or taking communion in church, in a church that was very, very pro-reproduction and very sort of focused on women having babies how that kind of changed the way I saw the Eucharist and also my body.

I think a funny thing I’ve learned about myself in the process of writing this book and talking about it is that to call it This Is My Body and to focus on the body or at least presumably focus on the body is sort of a guard rail that I put up for myself because I’m far more naturally in my head like I’m definitely a cerebral thinking, feeling person and not as well a person who understands the power of the body and the importance of living into it and being present.

It’s like a bit of This Is My Body is about reminding myself to return to my body. Protestant Christianity sort of notoriously is in the head, is sort of known as being very intellectual, very thought based. Some other versions of Christianity, I mean even Catholicism is far more grounded in the body. Orthodoxy is more grounded in the body in terms of the, even the belief of the Eucharist, the transfiguration and believing the actual physical presence of Christ in the bread which is not widely accepted among Protestants.

In the last several weeks I kind of say all the time that I’m really terrible at prayer. I’m really terrible at the physical ritual of faith and religious practice because I’m so in my head but in the last couple of weeks, in the season of this pandemic I have found myself creating a ritual, a prayer ritual every evening, kind of getting more serious about meditation completely driven by necessity because I need to put my mind and body focused on one thing for as long as I can to sort of escape like the cycle of the news and the cycle of the anxiety.

It’s been really interesting for me like in the last couple of weeks I feel that that practice is grounding me and it’s giving me some relief and some connection God as I understand God. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Diane: No, you did. My questions are so nebulous that there’s no way you can answer them anyway. We’re all just floating and flowing but I relate to what you’re saying because I think that there’s a way in which when we’re under so much stress that unless we get outside ourselves into something ritualistic whether it’s lighting candles in the evening or having just moments together with our thoughts. First of all we will diminish our own health, our own ability to keep our immune systems alive and well. We’ll become more susceptible. We have to in these times keep ourselves holistically healthy. I think the fact that staying present physically.

I just want to toss it out there. I mean I understand this idea of being very cerebral because in the end God is a concept. It’s a concept. It’s one that we feel. We can certainly say we feel spirit but there’s no proof. Some religions had to make a Christ figure and some religions had to make other imagery but in the end it’s spirit and it’s something that’s moving through us and it isn’t identifiable physically. Absolutely, it lends itself to this.

Believe it or not I have to take another break but is not a bad thing but we’re going to take a look then at your obsession and this unavailable man and where this obsession took you. I love this poem that you include Diving Into the Wreck by Adrian Rich. It’s easy to forget what I came for the wreck and not the story of the wreck. The thing itself and not the not the myth. I think refuting the myth and getting to the wreck it takes such courage, bravery. When we come back talk about how you dismantled the myth of another man. Don’t go away. We’ll be back with Cameron Dezen Hammon.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here speaking with Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of the book This Is My Body. It’s a memoir of romantic and religious obsession. Maybe at this point those are the more sensationalistic aspects. We’ve really gotten to a point where we’re talking about a quietude and accessing a more personal, intimate space for reflection in this time.

Cameron, we just talked about Adrian Rich’s poem and this kind of confronting of an experience and dismantling myths. What happens when you become obsessed with someone, another person who’s enormously attractive? You also just mentioned that you kind of discounted the power of your physical body but in the end it’s enormously powerful. You have the ability through your music to sway a congregation, to see them. You write that you see them surrender some parts of themselves to get in touch with whatever they believe in.

It is enormous the power that we have and your attraction to this person who you could only ever hope to have a sliver of their life. Okay, this is another man outside of your marriage. The other man whether it’s us as the other woman or the other man as that he’s inaccessible. He is unavailable. The obsession forms around that. It’s the unavailability, the desirability of that. You go into it extensively. I wondered sorry if this if this does get personal but you write about it in the book. You had a dad who dipped in and out of being accessible. I had an abandoning father. I do think that these set up these dynamics for obsession. I wonder if you’ll agree. I wonder if you agree with that.

Cameron: A 100%. I mean I think it’s set up not only my sort of proclivity to become obsessed with unavailable men in a romantic sense but also with an unavailable God which is kind of what I hope is the kind of the central conceit of the book is this idea that the way that myth shapes romantic love is very similar to how it shapes religious love or religious adoration or belief. When I was working on this book because the thing that unlocked it for me creatively was coming to this awareness that sort of communicating with someone that you don’t ever see via text message or even just in your thoughts is a lot like prayer. You’re sort of sending these ideas and these thoughts off into the abyss towards something that you have wholly imagined.

As far as romantic love, romantic obsession when the person is unavailable and absent it allows the imagination to fill in the blanks. In that case an idealized person is created of course because there’s nothing in reality to contradict that idealized image that I’ve created in my head. I mean I definitely think it’s part when we talk about abandoning fathers or father issues or daddy issues or whatever. It’s kind of like we know that. I mean it’s sort of talked about a lot that an absent father can create these patterns but I think it’s even bigger in our culture. I think it kind of even goes beyond just those of us who had fathers that were unavailable. I think that we are trained to want what we cannot have because it also is the engine of capitalism. I think it’s everywhere.

Diane: I mean I love the idea. I mean I’m glad that you went ahead and drew the line to mythology of religion because I think it creates a certain kind of religion. It’s a mythic. First of all it’s very powerful. It has power over us. It is um guaranteeing things that are questionable such as everlasting life and it’s very seductive. Again back to where you’re talking about a more granular kind of faith. It’s the opposite. It’s a very atypical like a huge omniscient kind of religious imagery and mythology. That’s scary sometimes. I also think that you beautifully correlated it to consumerism and the need, the ever-present need to have more different other. The thing that’s just over the edge. New York, it was always women were never able to that I knew were never able to settle down with anyone because what if they met somebody around the corner who was better.

It’s a way of never being able to settle in with something that even feels very right because what else is out there. I think with your concept of this person who you’re communicating with. That’s key to me because I think once you start communicating with the object of your obsession you’ve created a level of mystique that’s much deeper than if you’re just keep imagining what’s that person doing, what’s that person thinking.

I also want to come back to the idea that love and this this kind of adoration and I shouldn’t really call it love, this obsessive adoration is a lens through which we see ourselves and ourselves become this kind of goddess. We mythologize ourselves in those relationships and those dynamics. We are a goddess. We have the power to seduce and what’s more we have eternity because needless to say this love will last forever. Both of these are shattering myths. Myths that could splinter and should splinter. It’s the most fragile kind of belief system imaginable that you do a great job of puncturing in the book but that didn’t come easy for you. You did the hard work.

Cameron: I did a lot of work.

Diane: You did a lot of work. How did you go about it?

Cameron: At the beginning of this saga when these feelings and this communication, this relationship well the relationship started like I had the specter of my parents’ marriage sort of in my mind’s eye. I distrusted the enormity of what I was feeling. I could see sort of the path that it would take me on. I did not want my kid to go through what I went through as a child and my parents’ marriage split up and how ugly that was. One thing that I do is I reach out and I reached out to a therapist and I looked for helpers and I looked for help.

I went to therapy. My therapist told me to go to SLAA sex and love addicts anonymous which I have complicated feelings about now like but at the time I mean I guess I’ve always had complicated feelings about it but it definitely was what I needed. It allowed me to be in a community of people that were also looking at love with both eyes open and understanding that our family of origin can set us up to put romantic love in a place of power that it should not be to believe that a romantic partner will complete you and will sort of make all of your dreams come true. The people in SLAA at least the people I knew were looking wide-eyed at that and seeing that for what it is which is a myth. I decided that I would not let myself be consumed by these feelings because I didn’t want to destroy my life and my family.

Diane: Great that you also understood consequences and of course that is just really the enormity of that. You write in your book about making another person I’m going to quote here “a lover into a god when so much of a person is colonized, overtaken like this. The object of affection can become a kind of deity. Once the man and I start talking again. We’re always talking.” I would say it’s not so much a conversation as it is a kind of blood flow. It’s a communication that is robbing you. It’s giving you what you think of as nourishment but it’s also robbing you of some essential way of getting at the wreck because now you’re involved totally with the myth. It’s really intensive.

I had to because and I appreciate your admitting and really the whole book is so candid and just wonderfully written but I appreciate your admitting the complex feelings that you had about going to sex and love addiction groups. I then had to turn to a book that I had on my shelf The War of Gods in Addiction by David Schoen. He is a writer that talks about the archetypes that have always tempted us with the fantasy and possibility that we might become gods. That somehow it’s like the vampire of lore. It’s erotic and it promises eternal life even though it’s the living dead. It feels like to me it’s almost like heroin or drugs. It negates all the anxieties that we have and our social inadequacies and we feel powerful. We feel powerful in these obsessions.

Really it is something that’s robbing us of all power because the power that you display in the book by writing, completely finding your voice to confront issues of inequality in the church and really acknowledging a lot of things that of course to get along you went along. We understand that but once you gained your voice there was so much more power than there ever was in this obsession with this man.

Cameron: Yes, of course.

Diane: I realized the other thing you admit to is that you were going to you were just about to substitute one compulsion for another because the man says to you, if you were mine. You say is this what I need to belong to someone else, to be claimed, plucked out of one existence and delivered into another. I mean this is great that you had these moments of revelation. I again congratulate you. I would say in addition to the consequences once you penetrate that matrix of fidelity or of trust you don’t have it anymore. It’s the ruins that you’re dealing with after that. I just appreciate so much that you came back to yourself.

With the time that we have left and it’s just a couple of minutes you get to this point where you’re in a coffee shop with your friend Kate towards the end of the story. You’re talking about what faith could possibly mean at this point. You say I think of higher power and my mind snap shut, that’s your quote. Your friend Kate says it’s Johnny Cash. It’s cold creams. It’s things that were vibrational for her that resonate and give us inspiration and are transportive. Would you say that that’s also the takeaways of this beautiful book?

Cameron: That was such a big moment for me because Kate is a veteran in recovery. She was trying to explain to me what higher power is. She was simply saying for me, she said my first higher power was the sound of Johnny Cash’s voice and the smell of my grandmother’s cold cream. Back to the body. These are tangible, experiential things that give us a sense of peace of being loved, of being safe. I’m trying to go back to that now. I think that’s good guidance for any spiritual practice is what are the things that transport you to a place of peace and comfort. This is a time to really lean into those things.

Diane: Totally and safety. We’re going to end here with that note. It’s been wonderful being with you. The book is This Is My Body. Let’s be mindful everyone what we do with our bodies and stay safe. It’s Cameron Dezen Hammon. You can find her at www.camerondezenhammon. Thank you so much Cameron.

Cameron: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for dropping in. Please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.