The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

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For most of human history, musicians and artists have been part of the village, accessing one another freely. They’ve been healers, listeners, mind-openers—in touch with the community, not untouchable stars on screens and behind barricades. I grew up believing that the distance of “real” stardom was glamorous. But in truth, feeling love from a distance is just lonely. Maybe even worse than no love at all, because it feels so unnatural.

The Internet has shaken things up in this regard and brought us, in some ways, full circle: we’re back around the fireside, albeit sometimes using our smartphones. The sorts of connections I make with people on Twitter and on my blog are real, honest, and loving. I’m able to reach safely into people’s heads and hearts, allow them to reach back into mine, and—most importantly—give them a place to reach into each other.

This morning, as I was getting ready to sit down and write this book, I popped onto Twitter and:

and

This all happened in fifteen minutes, the time it took me to order and drink my morning espresso and eat a croissant in the corner café. It’s not my job. It’s my life. It’s me.

I have over one million Twitter followers. As I ate my croissant, I chatted in real-time 140-character chunks, and a few hundred people posted responses to the things I’d just shared. I scanned all their messages and publicly discussed a few issues—personal, emotional, and political—with a few friends and strangers. I probably twittered about twenty times. I walked back to my apartment. By the time I got there, a few hundred more tweets had flowed in. I looked them over before I settled down to write, and was pleased to see a wave of thankful messages from the people whose artwork and photos I’d shared, a few 140-character pom-pom waves wishing me luck with the upcoming writing day, and a variety of other conversations and connections bobbing along in the wake of my fifteen-minute Twitter flurry.

This is a normal morning.

I asked my blog readers a question.

WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU’D ASKED FOR?

There were thousands of responses, and the overwhelming majority were variations on this:

I wish I’d asked for help.

One girl wrote:

I was born legally blind to a rural family that didn’t know how to deal with disability, but wasn’t going to give up on me either. I was raised with the best of intentions, but ultimately I grew up as a mixture between a cherished porcelain doll for display and a feral dog let to run wild. I’m twenty-four and I’ve spent all of my late adolescence and early adulthood reteaching myself simple day-to-day life skills (using an oven, cleaning a toilet)… I wish I’d asked for independence.

She wishes she’d asked people to help her by not helping.

It’s the same thing, isn’t it?

I was comparing notes with my older sister Alyson one night, over wine, right around the time I was also struggling with a marriage-and-money freak-attack. She’s a scientist, and I’ve never totally been able to grasp what she does. Stuff with genetics, gene sequencing, finding cures for rare forms of cancer, and other simple things like that. She experiments on fish in her work, and I usually lose the plot a few seconds after she starts explaining what she does. I can’t stop worrying about the fish.

She and her new husband, like me and Neil, had been keeping their finances more or less separate since getting together. But also, like me and Neil, some things had merged; she’d ditched her apartment and moved into his flat. She had her upstanding position at the university, he had his freelancing tech job, and life was good—but she was about to come up for tenure. She wasn’t confident she was going to get it, and her husband had offered to support her so she could take time off to look for a new job, go back to school, or even spend a few months communing with nature and finding herself. She couldn’t stand the thought of it, the shame of it. She hadn’t taken more than a few days’ vacation in twenty years.

All my friends think I’m crazy, she said.

All MY friends think I’M crazy! I said.

What the fuck happened to us? I asked. Why are we so weird?

I don’t know, she said. Our self-sufficient, breadwinning mother? Our New England upbringing? Hangover from the witch-burning Puritans? Society as a whole?

I blame society, I said.

Well, we’re not alone, Alyson said. I have a couple of friends with this same problem. They make a ton of money, but not as much as their husbands, and they can’t stand feeling inadequate. I don’t think we’re crazy.

I thought about the men in my life, the ones who’d let me into their heads and hearts. Most of them didn’t have a hard time in certain departments of asking, but when it came to their emotional needs, it was a mess. They could ask for a raise, but they couldn’t ask for a hug.

I thought about Anthony. He was a professional therapist, listening to people, asking them about their deepest fears and problems all week long, and even he would clam up when things got rough. He likes being in control, he loves having answers, he loves fixing and helping people. But he has a really hard time letting people help him. Sometimes, when he gets depressed, he shuts down and doesn’t like to talk. When that happens, I figure it’s time for me to step up, ask him questions, help him through, talk about the problems. But he clams up and doesn’t like talking to anyone about his own problems. He calls it Going Into The Box.

When we ask for anything, we’re almost always asking for help in some form: help with money, permission, acceptance, advancement, help with our hearts.

Brené Brown has found through her research that women tend to feel shame around the idea of being “never enough”: at home, at work, in bed. Never pretty enough, never smart enough, never thin enough, never good enough. Men tend to feel shame around the fear of being “perceived as weak,” or more academically: fear of being called a pussy.

Both sexes get trapped in the same box, for different reasons.

If I ask for help, I am not enough.

If I ask for help, I am weak.

It’s no wonder so many of us just don’t bother to ask.

It’s too painful.

Sometimes it was like Neil was from an alien planet, where people never asked for or shared anything emotional without deeply apologizing first. He assured me that he was simply British. And that we Americans, with all of our loud oversharing and need for random hugs and free admissions to people we’ve just met of deep, traumatic childhood wounds looks just as alien to them.

When he started to trust me, he told me that he’d believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t actually fall in love. That they were all faking it.

But that’s impossible. You’re a professional writer, I said, and you’ve seen a thousand films and read a thousand books and memoirs and know real people authentically in love. What about John and Judith? Peter and Clare? Did you think they’re just lying? And you’ve written whole books, stories, scenes where people are deeply in love. I mean… I just don’t believe you. How could you write about love if you didn’t believe it existed?

That’s the whole point, darling, he said. Writers make things up.

While I was working on the first draft of this book (which I did over a few thousand coffees in various cafés in Melbourne), I shared a coffee with Samantha Buckingham, an Australian indie guitarist/singer-songwriter, during which I picked her brain about her process and her relationship with her own fanbase.

Sam is typical of a lot of indie musicians eking out a living. She’s not on a label, she crowdfunds and releases music directly to the Internet, she plays house parties in her fans’ living rooms. We were comparing notes about the pros and cons of Patreon.com, a new subscription service Sam was using, which allows fans to automatically deposit money into a musician’s account every time the musician releases a song, kind of like a book-of-the-month club for artists putting out content, so they can rely on a somewhat predictable income instead of praying that their Kickstarter will get funded every time they have something to release. (At the time of this writing, she’s got forty-four patrons—including nineteen $1 backers and one backer at $50—and is paid about $200 every time she releases a song. Patrons can choose how much they pay per song, and they can cap their monthly bill so she doesn’t all of a sudden dump one thousand songs on people and run off to Mexico. Although running off to Mexico when you’re Australian seems weird, so I’m thinking she would more, like, run off to Papua New Guinea.)

Sam was, in fact, about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend, and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs to Patreon while she was “on vacation.” She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a mai tai was going to make her look like an asshole.

What does it matter where you are or whether you’re drinking a coffee, a mai tai, or a bottle of water? I asked. Aren’t they paying for your songs so you can… live? Doesn’t living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a mai tai—not just sitting in a room and writing songs without ever leaving the house?

I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct-support website through which her fans pay her monthly, at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wish list of musical gear and costumes, like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn’t mind charging her backers during what she calls her “staring-at-the-wall time,” which she thinks is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. Her fans don’t complain; they trust her process.

These are new forms of patronage, and it’s messy; the artists, and the patrons, are making up the rules as they go along. But whether these artists are using crowdfunding (“front me some money so that I can Make A Thing!”), subscription services (“pay me some money every month so I can Make Things!”), or pay-per-piece-of-content pledge services (“pay me some money every time I Make A Thing!”), the fundamental building block of all these relationships boils down to the same, simple thing: trust.

If you’re asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn’t matter what your choices are as long as you’re delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, mai tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for cars, or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side and making your patrons happy, the money you need to live—and “need to live” is hard to define—is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art.

Like me, Sam, and thousands of new-school online artists, Kim is in daily communication with her fans. Her ongoing arrangement with her two hundred supporters functions because she shares her songwriting process, along with her bad days and heartaches. They trust her decisions. When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress she just bought, nobody scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It’s not like her fans’ money is an “allowance,” with nosy and critical strings attached. It’s a gift, in the form of money, in exchange for her gift, in the form of music.

The relative values are messy, but if we accept the messiness, we’re all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don’t care that the money I’ve fronted him isn’t going towards two turntables or a microphone. Just as long as the art gets made, I get the album, and Beck doesn’t die in the process.

But that doesn’t mean observers are going to stop criticizing artists and their process anytime soon. No less than Henry David Thoreau has been called a poseur.

Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.[6]

The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn’t jibe with most people’s picture of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk hero. In the book An Underground Education, Richard Zacks declares: Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years, but he condensed the book down to a single year, the four seasons, to make the book flow better, to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect his emotional experience.

I told this story to Sam over our coffees.

Poor Thoreau, said Sam, shaking her head. The donuts are totally the mai tai.

Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.

It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think when they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else’s donut.

Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can’t see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love. Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick. It’s difficult.

So, a plea.

To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it’s appearing:

Please, take the donuts.

To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band:

Take the donuts.

To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please…

Everybody.

Please.

Just take the fucking donuts.

You can never give people what they want, Anthony said.

What do you mean?

We were lying by the side of Walden Pond in Concord, two towns over from Lexington, where we’d created a ritual of ambling around the circumference of the water, then lazing under the trees with a picnic for a nice long grok.

People always want something from you, he said. Your time. Your love. Your money. For you to agree with them and their politics, their point of view. And you can’t ever give them what they want. But you—

That’s a dreary worldview.

Let me finish, clown. You can’t ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that’s a lot, and enough to give.

As Sam and I sat in the café, pondering the donut and mai tai dilemmas of all artists, we were joined by Xanthea, who had first introduced us to each other. Xanthea and I had met a few months before, bonding at a wonderful Kickstarter house party she’d organized in her parents’ backyard in Perth.

Xanthea was twenty-two, worked at a bookstore, didn’t want to finish college, organized indie rock shows in laundromats, wrote songs on various instruments, and was a living statue on the side, clad all in white, wearing an old-fashioned sundress, handing out flowers. I’d gone to see her a few days before, where she was performing on Flinders Street, and watched from a distance as she was ignored, loved, ignored, loved again. When I finally dropped some money in her hat, we shared a conspiratorial gaze—the secret statue society. I was proud of her. At the house party, we had shared tales of living-statue hardships, and she’d told me about being harassed by perv-y drunks, and about the time a girl poked her hard in the ribs with a flute. She toughed it out. My kind of girl.

She sat down next to Sam and ordered a coffee, and we explained Thoreau and the donut kerfuffle. Xanthea said she could totally relate. She was just starting to play small gigs and didn’t know how to handle the business side.

I’m getting offered all these gigs in Perth, they’re offering me actual MONEY to play my stupid songs, not a LOT, but I don’t feel like I should take any money… not yet. I think I’m not ready. And it’s even less fair because I’m not, like, a BAND yet. I’m just a person.

I got what Xanthea was saying about the Band Thing. Taking money on behalf of a group, a band, a company—any entity larger than yourself—feels very different from taking money on behalf of YOU.

When I took the step from playing my few-and-far-between solo shows to playing in The Dresden Dolls with Brian, I felt a huge difference between asking people to listen to ME and MY songs and help ME ME ME, versus helping our BAND. It felt very different to hand someone tapes whose front cover proclaimed AMANDA PALMER as opposed to saying: I’m in a band, here’s our CD.

One felt selfish, the other felt legitimate.

Right before I met Brian, I’d started putting “Amanda Palmer and the Void” on my gig flyers. I figured nobody could argue with that on technical grounds. I had a backup band of approximately no people. (I’m not the only one who’s done it. See: Marina and the Diamonds, Tracy and the Plastics.)

I discovered more recently that this experience has been studied, and not surprisingly, it’s a particularly female problem.

In 2010, Emily Amanatullah, a graduate student in management, did a research simulation in which men and women had to negotiate starting salaries in different scenarios.

When the women negotiated for themselves, they asked for an average of $7,000 less than the men did. But when they negotiated on behalf of a friend, they asked for just as much money as the men did. Amanatullah found that women were concerned about “managing their reputation,” worried that pushing for more money would “damage their image.” And other research shows it’s a justified fear, that both male and female managers are less likely to want to work with women who negotiate during a job interview.

On the other hand, when they had to negotiate on behalf of someone else, they presented far higher counteroffers. The upshot? Women were in fact excellent negotiators. They didn’t feel comfortable using their negotiating skills for themselves, but they felt fine asking on behalf of others.

And the other thing, said Xanthea, sighing. I have friends who’ve played like a gajillion more open mics than me, who are taking it more seriously and gigging every single weekend. I mean, I get what you’re saying. But it doesn’t feel fair.

What do you mean it’s not fair? I said. They’re offering you the money because they like you… and your music, right?

I just mean… like, there’s an ORDER of things—a progression, she said miserably, looking guiltily at me, and then at Sam. And I’m not at that place where I feel like I’m allowed, you know, to get paid.

We both just looked at her and said, in unison:

Xanthea. TAKE THE DONUTS.

In the early days, The Fraud Police seemed to keep pace with my career. Despite write-ups in bigger magazines, airplay on radio and TV, and playing larger venues, the growing fame and all the outside eyes just made me feel more insecure, like I was pulling a bigger one over on everybody. On a bad day, the success did the opposite of reassuring me. Instead, it compounded my fears of not being real.

The volume of those voices in my head blaring you’re a total phony weren’t diminished by compliments from other artists, or by congratulations from my mentors, or even when my parents stopped asking me what I was really doing with my life (due, I feel sure, to the first time I had a show listed in the New Yorker, a press outlet that they actually KNEW).

What at last began to quiet the voices and dismiss the deep-rooted psyche-bashing work of The Fraud Police was simply this: after hundreds of signings, after talking to thousands of fans, I started to believe that what I did was just as useful as what they did.

They spoke to me directly. In the signing line. Over Twitter. A lawyer loved listening to my music on her long commute to work. An ecologist said my first album got him through final exams. A young doctor had a psychotic break during med school, and said that listening to my song “Half Jack” over and over again in the hospital had helped get him through. A professor had met his wife years before at a Dresden Dolls concert, and now she was in a coma following a car crash; he sent me a necklace of hers as a keepsake.

These were “real” people with “real” jobs, making society work. And there were a lot of them.

I would take in all these stories, and one by one, ten, a hundred, a thousand stories later… I had to believe it. I would hold these people in my arms and I would feel the whole synchronicity of life and death and music envelop us.

And one day I turned around and it had just happened without my realizing it.

I believed I was real.

I had just finished a gig in Perth and was driving to a fan’s house, to crash with the Australian crew, when Neil called me from New York.

He said, My dad just died.

What?

He died. My dad just died. He was in a business meeting, something happened with his heart, and he fell over, and he’s dead.

Oh my god, Neil.

What could I do? I was about as physically far away from him as I could possibly be. We had only been dating for about three months, but it was long enough to have started falling in love.

Do you want me to come to you right now? I’ll get the first flight out, I offered. I’ll just get on a plane and come be with you.

No, darling. He sounded like a zombie. Stay there. Finish your tour. Go to Tasmania.

No. I’ll come. Really. I want to.

No, don’t. I’m asking you not to. Stay there. Go make the people in Tasmania happy.

I felt so incredibly helpless. He was in New York City, literally about to start a signing for his new children’s book. It was midnight in Australia and eleven in the morning there.

I talked to him for a while longer, then hung up, feeling useless.

I was given our host’s master bedroom that night—I was feeling disoriented, and I slept with the phone clutched in my hand. Neil had as deep a connection to his fanbase as I did. I could just imagine him there, those first people coming up with their books in hand, and I imagined him losing himself in their stories, their faces, their details.

I imagined him signing every book very deliberately, focusing on the task at hand, thinking every once in a while, as the ink touched the page and he got lost in a millisecond of space: My dad is dead. I called him the minute I woke the next morning, but I got his voicemail.

I called Cat, Neil’s old friend, who was helping him out with the signing.

How is he? I asked. How was the signing? Is he okay?

You’re not going to believe this… but he’s still at it.

He’d been signing for seven hours straight, for 1,500 people.

I didn’t know what to do. Write him a long, heartfelt email? Send flowers? Both seemed ridiculous.

So I called my assistant at the time—wonderful, helpful Beth, who was also in New York—told her about Neil’s dad, and gave her instructions. She raced around the city to accomplish several tasks, and stepped up just as Neil was dedicating the very last book to the very last person, after eight solid hours of signing.

She placed a tomato, a schedule, and a banana on the table in front of him.

From Amanda, she told him.

Cat, who was standing off to the side, texted me:

You did it. I don’t know HOW you did it.

But he just actually smiled for the first time.