Ep #19: Shame, sex, and saying the unsayable - with author Marianne Power

Podcast

Sep 2

In the Season 2 finale, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with my dear friend Marianne Power, author of the international bestseller Help Me! and her latest book Love Me!. It was such a joy to dive deep into her incredible journey from journalist to bestselling author. Marianne shared the story behind both her books - from her year-long experiment living by self-help books that became Help Me!, to her courageous exploration of sexuality, relationships, and what it means to live happily as a single woman in Love Me!.

What struck me most about our conversation was Marianne's raw honesty about the cost of creating vulnerable art. She didn't shy away from discussing how terrifying it was to write about her most intimate experiences, from her sexual insecurities to her journey through tantra retreats. We talked about the difficulty of accepting praise, the inherited shame around sexuality, and how her Irish Catholic background shaped her relationship with both pleasure and success. Her courage in tackling the subjects that society tells us not to discuss - and doing so with such humour and humanity - is truly remarkable.

This conversation was a beautiful reminder of why I love doing this podcast - getting to witness the magic that happens when artists are brave enough to tell their truth, and how that courage ripples out to help others feel less alone in their own struggles.

Listen to the episode here (click the arrow at the bottom right to play), or find it wherever you get your podcasts:

Find out more about Marianne:

Marianne Power is a journalist and the author of the global bestseller Help Me!. Published in twenty-five languages, Marianne’s wry, funny, down-to-earth and moving journey around the world of self-help captured the world’s imagination. Love Me! is her second book and explores the different ways to have a life full of love and sex as a single woman in her forties, via tantra retreats and gazing at her pussy in the mirror. Cosmo says it's a must read book on sex, Guardian a 'gold star beach read' and her mother is getting used to it all.

Find Marianne on Substack
Find Marianne on Instagram
And of course, read her books! Help Me! and Love Me!

Introduction
Hello and welcome to Zuzu's Haus of Cats Presents... I'm your host, artist Eli Trier, although you can call me Zuzu. And on this podcast, I talk to my fellow artists about the magic of the creative process. We'll talk about what they make and in particular, how they make it. Their rituals and workflows, inspirations and disenchantments, ebbs and flows. We'll even take a peek behind the scenes of their businesses to see how they're using their creativity there too, and how they balance the needs of their business with the needs of their art.
If you're interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look at what makes artists tick and enjoy conversations about art, creativity, neurodivergence and business, then you're in the right place.
Hi everyone and welcome to the final episode of season two of Zuzu's Haus of Cats Presents... I can't believe this season is over. It's been absolutely incredible. I love doing this podcast, I love that I get to meet all sorts of interesting people and also talk to some of my oldest friends as well. Our final episode is one of those.
I have known this woman for more than a decade and she has just achieved the most incredible things with her writing. I am so honoured to know her and I can't wait to introduce you all to the incredible Marianne Power.
Meet Marianne Power
Marianne is a journalist and the author of the global bestseller Help Me!, published in 25 languages. Marianne's wry, funny, down-to-earth and moving journey around the world of self-help captured the world's imagination. Love Me! is her second book and explores the different ways to have a life full of love and sex as a single woman in her 40s via tantra retreats and gazing at her pussy in the mirror. Cosmo says it's a must-read book on sex. The Guardian calls it a gold-star beach read, and her mother is getting used to all of it. Marianne is an absolute tonic. I can't wait to share this conversation with you.
The Journey from Self-Help to Self-Love
Eli: I'm so happy to have someone I have known for over a decade now, the amazing Marianne Power, author of some of my favourite books. Funny, clever, brilliant. I'm so happy to have you in the studio.
Marianne: I still get teary if I hear anyone saying that. I'm such a sucker for praise.
Eli: Your latest book, Love Me!, was such a powerful read. As a woman of a certain age, it got me right in the guts. But first, for people who don't know you, do you want to give us a little bit of who you are and what you do and where you've come from?
Marianne: I'm Marianne Power and I live in London, Irish family, but born and brought up in England. I was a journalist for most of my career, writing for papers and magazines. Then in 2014, which is when I think we were in touch, I started a blog about my experiment to try and improve my life by self-help books. I was reading a different self-help book each month and doing absolutely everything it told me to do.
I was mad, now I look back on it, but it was just my idea. I thought, if I do one book a month by the end of the year, I'll be this perfect person. I really thought that I would eradicate all my flaws and just sort my shit out and life would be great.
That blog ended up being a much bigger undertaking than I understood because I didn't really realise that I was sort of dismantling myself. It was such a full-on process. But then it made for a really good book. So I went away and wrote it into a book called Help Me!, which came out in 2018 and that went all around the world and did really well.
Eli: It's been translated into 25 different languages?
Marianne: Languages, and I think it's in 29 countries because five of those countries are English language. It was extraordinary. It was like a proper hit and it was my first book and it was everything I wanted it to be because it's funny. I have this combination that I think maybe lots of artistic people have of total self-doubt and yet utter delusions of grandeur at the same time.
When I had the idea for Help Me! as a blog, I was in France on a train and it just came and I just knew that's an idea. It turned out to be really messy and difficult to actually follow through on that idea and properly do it, but I always knew that's a really good idea.
When I wrote the book and it got turned down by lots of publishers and it was a whole long thing in itself, I was just like, well, this is ridiculous. It's really good. So when it kind of got picked up around the world, it went from being a book that no one wanted to a book that everyone wanted. Someone asked me once, are you surprised by how it's gone? And my answer was no.
The Genesis of Love Me!
Marianne: Love Me! was the follow-up. In Help Me!, I spent this year living by self-help books and at some point a friend sort of joked that if this doesn't end with you meeting a man, it won't have worked. But it was one of those jokes that was kind of not a joke, and it really played on my mind because I'm someone who's been single most of my life. I just have never coupled up or got the love thing or the relationship thing in the way that most people seem to.
There was a sort of love interest in Help Me! - the Greek. It was amazing to me how many people around the world, journalists around the world would ask me about the Greek. We're so obsessed with that love story. It's so in our cultural DNA. Like my friend said, that's what a happy ending is. Really, it doesn't matter if you've found peace and whatever, no, but you have to find the person, your one.
Love Me! starts when I go to see the Greek and it's a disaster. I come home and it's just this quite public failure because I had literally alerted the media about the fact that I was going to Athens to see the Greek. The journalist from French Elle was asking me what's happening. I said, well, actually I'm going to see him. He was such a lovely man, but there was all this kind of pressure put on him. He was just a bloke I went up to in a coffee shop.
So Love Me! starts with I come back from this trip and it's bombed and everyone's heartbroken for me. But at one point a friend's like, you don't seem heartbroken. I was like, I'm not, I'm embarrassed. I'm not heartbroken. He was just a nice guy.
So then it starts with this question of like, why am I so ambivalent about relationships and about this thing that a lot of people build their lives around? What movies build their stories around? Love songs? Like, what is it? Why am I missing this gene? And is it possible to live a good life as a single woman or am I deluding myself? Is there something going on underneath that I'm going to look back and think, oh, you were just protecting yourself and would I regret it? And in that, of course, then is the question of like, if I don't have children, would I regret that?
Can you be happy as a single woman? Can you be happy as a single woman who doesn't have children? And then the final part of it really is - I was always really ambivalent about being in a couple, but I always knew I wanted great sex and I hadn't had great sex because I'm Irish Catholic school girl background. I would have been in that era where I was quite scared of sex. It was always like, don't get pregnant, don't get raped. There was so much inbuilt stuff. I would have been having like drunken encounters, but sex felt like this world that I had not properly explored and I really wanted to.
The Vulnerability of Writing About Sex
Eli: What I think is astonishing is that you have the courage and the vulnerability to put it all out there for other people to benefit from. Your books are incredibly vulnerable, which makes them incredibly connective. I was in floods of tears reading Love Me!. I found it such a powerful book, but I know that must be incredibly difficult to have out in the world as a representation of you. And as you're going through the process of this sort of self-excavation, as an artist myself, I know that can be really rough. So what do you do to take care of yourself throughout that whole process?
Marianne: I didn't do a very good job of it. I was writing that book having signed the contract at the beginning of March 2020 and then lockdown happened. So I was writing this book about love and sex and my sexual shame and my deepest insecurities while living alone in a pandemic. That ultimately ends up feeding into the end of the book because pandemic really put a lot of things to the test. Like, well, you've chosen a single life, but actually living alone in a pandemic was brutal. I hated it.
I think it made it a richer book for it, but I didn't look after myself well. I was in a state of stress anyway, because the pandemic really affected me. Some people seem to really cope with it quite well and I didn't. It really rattled me. I was terrified of what I was writing. I was absolutely terrified of writing about sex, writing about my deepest insecurities, my feeling that I was a weirdo, that this part of life had never gone the normal way.
I'd felt such shame around it. I felt like a freak and a weirdo. These are all the feelings I was writing about in the book. So it was a full-on experience and there were quite a few times when I stopped writing it and I was like, I actually can't do this because I was waking up really often at three in the morning thinking, you cannot write about your genitals.
There's a chapter about a book called Pussy: A Reclamation, which is an incredible book. It's such an important book, but it asks me to look at the mirror at my pussy and ask me, what do I call my genitals? Like this was stuff I had never done in my whole life. And I could not believe that I was now writing about it and potentially putting it into the world where my auntie Anne was going to read it. My colleagues at newspapers were going to read it. It was a full-on thing.
It wasn't even just my shame I was carrying. I think it's so inherited. It's generations and generations where women have not been allowed to be sexual or to be seen to be sexual or to talk about sexuality, especially with my Irish Catholic background. It was such a full-on thing to do. I stopped it several times, but then I spent the advance.
But then there was always this bit of me like, this is so crazy that I am having nightmares about writing about a part of my body. It is so crazy that I feel so much shame about this beautiful natural act that has been so messed up by society. In saying that we can't talk about this quite fundamental part of life, whether we're having sex or not having sex, wanting it or not wanting it, it's really quite a big part of life. We're given all these messages about it. We're seeing images everywhere and yet we're not allowed to have actual honest conversations about it.
The Learning from Tantra
Marianne: Because I've been lucky enough to go to these tantra retreats, and I've gone there not intending to write about them. I wrote about the very first one for a magazine article, but the rest of them, I hadn't intended to write about them. But the learning in them was so amazing. The experience I had, and just what we were learning and experiencing was so amazing. And as a writer, and especially as sort of journalistic writing, I always want to share what it is I've learned and done because so many people will never have the opportunity to be in rooms like that.
A lot of the tantra work isn't what we have this idea of being an orgy. A lot of it is about learning how to say yes and no, learning about how to ask for what you want and saying, I don't like that. It's learning how to have difficult conversations. It's learning how to slow down enough to even feel things. Many people have sexual trauma and some of us don't, but we're still quite shut down. So it takes a really long time for people, myself included, to even feel safe enough to enjoy touch.
I knew that I wanted to tell a story for every woman who's been single for years and feels like a weirdo or someone who feels like they didn't get the hang of sex. I think there's way more of us out there. We don't talk about it. It's not cool. I wanted that to be in the world.
I remember there was another book by Lucy Anne Holmes called Don't Hold My Head Down, and she goes off and writes about her body and her search for great sex. She wrote about her insecurities with such honesty. I think I read that book four times because I was just like, oh, thank you. It was the first time I realised I wasn't weird. There were other people like this. And so I wanted to be part of that.
The Cost of Vulnerability
Eli: It really is. You go through this entire process and you have the courage and the vulnerability to put it all out there for other people to benefit from. You don't shy away from that stuff. As an artist myself, I know that that can be really rough.
Marianne: The book did happen in the end, but it ended up taking me four years instead of a year. It was written in a pandemic in between getting long COVID because I think the stress of all of it really hit my immune system. I was deep in debt because books don't pay massively, even if you can do it on an efficient schedule, but on four years, if I was to figure out what I get paid per hour, it would be...
It cost me a lot writing that book, on lots of levels. It really cost me a lot. It came out in hardback last summer, and it's just coming out in paperback now in the middle of July. It's taken me this long to feel really proud of it. When you say things about how powerful it was, it just means the world to me because it was difficult.
Sometimes I've had these moments - when it came out last summer, it got a lot of press, which is great because I'm a former journalist and I'm so lucky that way in that I know people at papers. The Daily Mail ran extracts of it. The first version, someone else had done it and they were great, they let me rewrite it, but someone else had done this bonkbuster montage of all the sexy bits, or not even sexy bits, without any of the learning. There are sexy bits, but there's actually just - that's probably 20% of it, most of it is learning and inquiry and crying and conversations with my friends.
I was so upset to see the version of my book in that way. When the piece ran, they blurbed it on the front page. So on the front page of the Daily Mail, I walk past the newsagents and there's my picture. And there's some sort of headline like, I got over my insecurities by going to sex school or something like that. It's just - when it's actually happening, it felt pretty horrific because I'm actually still the Irish Catholic Convent School girl. I'm not this radical, unapologetic person yet. I wish I was and maybe I'll get there, but I'm actually not there yet.
Your work has such courage in it. And in real life, I'm not always like that. In real life, I'm sometimes like, what the hell have I done? This is awful. This is like an actual nightmare. Your sexual insecurities on the front page of the Daily Mail. How on earth did you let this happen?
A lot of that press coverage, I never really shared with anyone, but now that the paperback is coming out, I was sorting out the press coverage last week and I was just like, well, fucking hell, love, you really did that. And I felt so proud of myself. At the time, it was just a lot. That's really normal. I imagine anytime anyone puts something into the world, even when on paper, it's going really well, and you're really grateful. It's so overwhelming when it's happening.
Family Response
Eli: What's the response been from them? Are they proud of you?
Marianne: They have been amazing. Honestly, I was dreading that because I thought I'd bring mortal shame on my family and I would be excommunicated or whatever the family word is for that. And again, that was real ancestral stuff because Irish Catholic really has quite heavy shame around sex and sin.
I joke at the start of the book that I'm a convent school, I'm a 40-year-old convent school girl and not the fun naughty kind, the everything is a sin kind. And they have been amazing. Honestly surprised the hell out of me. Letters and messages from my aunties who just love it.
My mum was amazing too. I was also worried because it's such an unusual thing that even normal friends my age who aren't Irish Catholic get weird if I mention Tantra. For my poor mum to be having to read this book, and I didn't want her to read it, but my sister had secretly given her an early copy and told her, if you hate it, don't say it to her, but if you like it, I think it will be a huge relief if she knows. It was on my mind so much.
I was sitting outside a cafe on the street one sunny afternoon and mum walked past and she just sat down and she said, I've read your book by the way. And I was like, oh. She said, well, I was shocked. And I was like, oh God, mum.
And this will make me cry again. She said, I didn't know you were doing all that. Because every time I went off to a tantra retreat, I was told I was going to a meditation course. She said, I don't know anyone else brave enough, not only to do what you've done, but to write about it. And she said, I never talked to you girls about sex because no one ever talked to me about it except to make us scared. You don't get pregnant. And she said, this book isn't about fear. It's about pleasure. And it's very important.
And then she left and then I started crying. That was massive. To get the support from my aunties has been brilliant.
Reader Response
Eli: What about the response from readers, people who don't know you?
Marianne: It's amazing. I think for some people it's too much. Friends that have read it who've been honest and said they found it really triggering because our sexuality is so - a lot of it is me looking back on my teenage years and my feelings, and that's really uncomfortable stuff. So I think for some people it's been too much.
It's confronting. It's a confronting thing because it's such an endemic problem. But I have also heard - it's interesting that I go in on the negative because I have had tens and tens and tens of messages from people saying extraordinary things about how they have never felt so seen and understood and less alone.
One woman who's a married woman said, I made love with my husband last night because of your book, after years of having sex, we finally made love. And we've been married like 30 years or something. Because of the chapter on slow sex, which is just this real slowing down and you're not doing that kind of box-ticking performative or just get it done type or the habits that we've got into.
Another person my age and single said, you've completely changed how I feel about being single. There's been some absolutely gorgeous feedback. Mum says I need to print off every message I've got and really reread it and let it soak in because I think I don't. Messages arrive and I'm just startled and grateful by the feedback. And then it's almost like I kind of shut them down again. I think I actually really need some time to properly let in what I've done and the impact of it, the positive impact of it.
I did this event to celebrate the paperback at the Vagina Museum in London a couple of nights ago. There was a woman there that I'd never met before. She has read it twice and has signed up to Tantra because of it. There are a lot of people signing up to Jan Day's Tantra, which is amazing. Another woman there who has signed up to Jan's work because of it. And she's like, you've changed my life. I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for your book.
The Difficulty of Accepting Praise
Eli: I love the idea of printing them out. So you've got like a tangible pile…
Marianne: I think so and to almost kind of go back and reread the way that I so closely read the books I study for what I write and learn about. The books about sexuality and being a woman, I had to reread those a lot of times because at first I couldn't take them in.
Pussy was so confronting and she's talking about fever and empowerment and how it's important to own your genitals and your pleasure. And it was like, oh my God, who is this woman? This is insane. But then I also knew, yes. It's this mixture of like, this is mad, I hate it. And for weeks, I couldn't even open Pussy. It was like hidden under the bed. I felt really ashamed of even owning a book with that title. And then in the end, I think I probably read it four or five times to just really let it sink in.
Eli: I'm wondering what the connection is between that sort of unwillingness to accept pleasure and own pleasure and the praise thing as well. Like it feels like those are very much connected.
Marianne: Totally, you're totally right. And that was what I realised after this Vagina Museum event that was a huge hit that sold out. It was me and my Tantra teacher and another writer called Monique Roffey who's amazing. This event sold out in two days, which is really unusual, apparently in London for events at the moment. We sold out our online capacity. So we had 165 people at this talk either virtually or real-time. Most people in that room had read Love Me! and were there because they read Love Me!.
And yet when I was on stage being asked questions about my experience with tantra, I noticed there's this bit of me that automatically goes into the self-deprecation that goes into what a mess I was and how scary it was. And it doesn't properly own how much my life has changed from it. The upshot is that I've ended up having the sex I've always dreamt of. And I have a life of friends and lovers and my neighbours. Truly it's the life that I didn't know was possible, but I deep down yearned for, I have it. And it's so interesting, there's a bit of me that still doesn't quite talk about that enough.
Regina Thomashauer who writes Pussy, she also does this exercise called bragging. She said that women have been conditioned to bond over our woes because in patriarchy women are often set against each other and we want to show I'm not competition, I'm not trying to outshine you. And so we bond over all our shit bits or our imagined shit bits. It's so limiting as a way of life. And it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think I really have been victim to that. I have got so used to saying the jokes about myself, about saying how shit I am, that I'm getting quite bored of it because it doesn't do justice to me, but it also doesn't help other women.
What would help other women a lot more in that room is a woman like me, 47, saying, I have an amazing sex life. I had so many hangups and I now have this beautiful life. That's more helpful. And that's not to pretend that everything is perfect because of course it isn't. But yes, I set out for this and it really happened to me and it can happen for you too if that's something you want.
The Courage Behind the Work
Eli: Exactly. You really, you go through this entire process and you have the courage and the vulnerability to put it all out there for other people to benefit from. And I think that it's remarkable because you don't shy away from that stuff. Your books are incredibly vulnerable, which makes them incredibly connective.
Marianne: What I would really love now is to kind of move my eyesight onto the absolute courage it took to do it. Maybe on one level, it's stupid. And on another level is heroic what I did to pick the thing I am most scared of, most embarrassed about, the thing that society is so fucked up about. So it's not just me. It's not like everyone read it and was like, oh, no big deal. Everyone was like, oh my God, you really went there. I really did that.
I never got a thrill out of being honest about my most personal, embarrassing, shameful bits. There's not a kind of exhibitionist in me, but there was always this thing of like, if you're going to write it, write it because it's such a disservice to people if you skip out the realness, which is the absolute shame.
At one point at a tantra retreat, I start crying and I admit my biggest embarrassment, which is I don't know what to do with a penis. I didn't want to put that line in because I still - but I'm now actually, funny. I've done so much exposure therapy. I've used that sentence on so many interviews and it's like penis Tourette's. It's so funny, now I say it and it means nothing to me. When I was writing it, I was like, you cannot have that in the book. But I said, but you have to, because you are not the only person that's going to feel that. And you can't miss out these things that are actually the real truth.
Sometimes when I read the audio for Love Me!, and I read the audio for Help Me!, and sometimes when I'm reading it out loud, I'm like, fucking hell. God, you really wrote that, didn't you?
Eli: I think that's what's wonderful about both of your books is that as a reader, you can tell that this has cost you. Like this isn't just you churning out some, oh yeah, I did some self-help books and I went to a tantra retreat. It really, it's an excavation of the self. It properly is. And that's a gruelling process to even go through personally and it's a gruelling process to then translate into written word into what you hope is also a captivating enough story.
Marianne: It's gruelling and that's what artists do I think. The ones that - that's what they do. And I would never have particularly related to the word artist, I would have thought it was grandiose or something. I always beat myself up by how obsessed I get by whatever I'm working on. And then a friend who is an artist, she's like, but you're an artist, that's literally the job description because there's always a bit of me, you're doing it wrong, you're making such a big deal of this, you should just be bashing it out and I can never bash anything out. I seem to have to torture myself every step of the way and maybe that's just - maybe I'll lose some of that as I get older and I'll find ways to be lighter with it, but for now that does seem to be, I really drag myself over the coals.
Eli: And that's where I think good art comes from. I really do. It has to come from a place of truth. And sometimes it's really torturous to get to the truth. Sometimes it's light and easy to get to the truth. But it all has to come from a place of truth. If it's not true, it's not good art.
Marianne: Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way, she said great art can come from great joy and she doesn't really buy into the tortured artist myth. So a bit of me was like, have I unconsciously bought into the tortured artist myth? And I interviewed her during the process of writing Love Me!, because she had a new book out and the Irish Independent asked me to interview her. And of course I was delighted to, but I spent the whole call crying. I got on Zoom with Julia Cameron and I cried for an hour. Honestly, and I couldn't write the piece afterwards, I was so embarrassed about myself.
I was so in it. And I was like, this is so hard. Is the fact that it's hard a sign that it's wrong, I shouldn't be doing this? Because I was reading a lot into the fact that it was so hard was a sign that I shouldn't be doing it was the world's way of telling me not to do it. And that if it was right, it should be easy. And because part of her does say that, she does say it can be easy.
She said, they're demons, they're demons. And I said, so I don't have to believe them. She said no. But I would like it to be easier going forward. It's a pain in the ass for me to go through this. And it's a pain in the ass for everyone around me to have to see me wiggling and crying.
At this vagina museum event, lots of friends were there and Matilda who works in the coffee shop across the road came. Matilda saw me every single day of book mode. She has seen me in so many states of tears. But the rewards are really huge. I have to remember that. I moan about the money, but it's such an honour to be published and to have strangers take the time, not only to read your words, but then to take the time to get in touch. That's really meaningful.
Mum says that too, she's like, you're impacting the world in ways that very few people do. And again, sounds grandiose, but my mum isn't grandiose. So when she says stuff like that, I kind of think, well, that must be true.
The Magic of Connection
Eli: Absolutely it is. I don't think - not only the impact that you have, I mean, not only have you fixed a big part of your own shit, which is enormously courageous in and of itself. Most people don't do that. Most people aren't self-aware enough to do that sort of thing. And then not only that, you have shared it with the world in such a way that you're helping a whole bunch of other people fix their shit. And that feeling that you had when you read Don't Hold My Head Down, you're giving that to a whole bunch of other people.
Marianne: Which is, that was really my intention, because when I read that book and I got in touch with Lucy afterwards, just to say, just thank you. That honesty, she did not need to be as honest as she was. And she really said all the things. And it was such a relief to just go, oh, thank God.
Eli: That's such magic.
Marianne: It is, isn't it? Because this is part of what in Tantra workshops, so much of it is about saying the things that you are so embarrassed about and then hearing other people say their things. And when you hear other people say their stuff, it doesn't matter what they're saying. It never feels shameful to listen to it. You're like, oh, that totally makes sense that you feel that.
A lot of my shame was around my lack of experience and lack of sexual experience and lack of relationships. And for other people, they have a lot of shame around the opposite story of putting themselves into a lot of situations that they look back on and just go, my God, I was giving myself away all the time. So we all have our different wounds in this area. And I guess there are some people that really don't, and they've gone through life and the combination of circumstances and their nature has meant that this has been something that's been a good part of their life and a healthy part of their life. But for a lot of us, it isn't.
I think I'm now stepping into having worked through some of my shame and shock about what I've done, stepping into the bit of like, pride and almost like semi elder woman type role of - if there's anything that I can share that will help a young woman feel less clueless than I did, then that's totally of use and valuable and it doesn't really matter too much. The older I get, the less I care so much about how I come off. It doesn't really matter that much at this stage. I have the people who love me and that's it.
Whereas in the early stages of writing Love Me!, a friend sort of warned me against doing it. And she said, if you write about this, then men aren't going to want to date you. But it was a valid concern because I think there will be a lot of people that would read this and not want to go near me with a barge pole, but it's really okay because I was not meant for them anyway.
There was a younger part of me when I was in my thirties that probably did want to be more acceptable to the norm. A lot of Love Me! is about why aren't I normal? And that's the great gift of aging though isn't it that you're just like, fuck it. And now I feel quite sad for some of the young normal people that are getting it all right because I just see how much effort is going into it and I wish that they could have a bit more fun. I wish that when I was younger I could have just relaxed a bit more.
Balancing Presence and Documentation
Eli: I'm curious, because a lot of what you write about Tantra is about being in the moment and being in your body and being truly present with what's happening. How do you reconcile that with the fact that you're writing about these experiences? Is it difficult to balance that kind of, I must remember this for the book?
Marianne: That's such a good question. As a journalist, I would go to situations knowing I'm going to write about it. And so you're never fully immersed because there's always that slight note taker part of you. But I didn't sign up to Tantra to write about it. I really didn't. So the very first one I did, I wrote a magazine article. But at the start, Jan, the teacher gave me really good advice and she said, if I were you, I would be here as a human. And if at the end of it, you find there's something you want to write, you can write it. But I think it would be a shame if you go through this and don't really immerse yourself because immersing yourself is quite different from the note taker mode.
So when I signed up to the ongoing tantra, that was not with a mode to write about it. There must've been a bit of me that thought, oh, you might write about this. But I actually was also so secretive about what I was doing, I wasn't telling most people that I was doing tantra. I wasn't going in there with the absolute knowledge I was going to write about this. There will have been a bit of me that as a writer kind of thought I might, but then I wasn't taking notes.
They were such vivid experiences that when I came home, part of the processing was writing pages and pages and pages in my journal about what had happened, what I'd said, what I'd realised. And again, that's what she encourages as really part of understanding and processing what's happened. But they were never written up into proper notes.
When I got to the end and realised I really do want to write about this and I asked Jan, is that okay? Because it's a confidential environment. When we sign up to it, you really sign up not to talk about it or talk about who's in it, just so that we could all feel safe to just explore. And so she was really good. And she was like, I would love you to. I think it would be wonderful. And because she'd read Help Me!. So I think she got a good enough measure of what kind of person I am. And she asked to read anything I wrote and to kind of check that it was okay. So we went through all of that.
But so when I then sat down to write, it was going through old journals, but also it was just so vivid. Those moments are so unusual. I think I'll be remembering a lot of the tantra stuff on my deathbed. So it didn't need a lot to jog my memory. It was such a rich, vivid time that once I started writing, it was really in my head.
And what I would do is, because I do this all the time anyway, is just write down little funny things that people had said. And a lot of the funny things didn't end up going in. But I just write down, because it's just these moments you just go, oh my God. Like I was at a tantra retreat once and some bloke was really angry. This didn't go into the book, but he's like, I'm fantasising about becoming a Nazi. And I was like, is he for real? Is he not for real? I couldn't tell if he was joking, but it was just the idea of being at a tantra retreat and someone talking about joining the Nazi party.
I ran another time having a conversation with someone at a tantra retreat going, how would you know if there was a psychopath at a tantra retreat? And we were having a full-on conversation about how would you know? It's funny conversations because it's like, you're in a really unusual, intense world that you're in for a week all thrown in together. So I wasn't in note taking mode or reporter mode at all when I was doing that. And there's so much of it that never got put into the book. And luckily afterwards, it all came back very vividly.
The Power of Humour
Eli: It's funny that you mentioned the humour because one of the things that you're so brilliant at is taking all of this deep emotional, heavy stuff and then adding humour to it and making it so much more accessible. And I think it stops it being like trauma porn. Like we're not reading these books thinking, oh my God, this poor woman. We're reading them going, oh my God, yeah, me too.
Marianne: So one of the running themes in Tantra is that I don't like mushrooms. And every time I'm having a good day at tantra retreat where I kind of think, oh my God, I'm nailing this. I'm really getting somewhere. There'll be mushrooms for dinner. And then I start going downhill again.
I think that's always part of my writing. I think it's a really Irish thing to kind of see the absurd and the funny in everything. It's a sign that I'm getting depressed when I can't see the funny side of things. So when I'm really down, I don't find anything funny. And I'm obviously in quite a good place at the moment because I'm starting to really find things funny. And I love overhearing conversations with just someone at the supermarket and just like, people say the funniest things. So I get a thrill out of those little moments between people.
Eli: The stuff that people say to each other sometimes when they think they're not being listened to is just glorious.
Creative Process and Rituals
Eli: This is a podcast, ostensibly, about the creative process, although we do nearly always go off into far more interesting territory. But do you have any kind of ritual around how you work, how you produce a book? Obviously you're doing a lot of the excavating part and the experiencing part and researching and things. Do you write as you're doing that or do you do all of that first and then synthesise it in one go?
Marianne: I tend to do all the research and book reading and note taking goes on separately. And then I spend an inordinate amount on paper and printing and print off all my notes and actually put them in like paper folders so that for Love Me! there would have probably been about 30 plus different paper folders on different themes. Notes on The Ethical Slut, notes on Pussy, notes on Sex at Dawn, notes on Attached. Because the way I write there's quite a lot of learning involved and then there's the real life notes of what had happened at various things so there'll be like folders called real life 2018, real life 2019. And it's where I write down little snippets of conversations.
Like when I tell my sister that I'm reading Pussy and she'll always say something funny. Those moments get written down on my phone and then they get put onto a Word document and printed off and then I will just go through all of that and then start highlighting the bits that I think are good and then it becomes a Scrivener doc and then I really get into...
I'm up at six-ish. I do my best in the morning. So I will kind of do six till 12 if I can. If I can, but I'll take breaks and stuff. But that's my - and sometimes it absolutely didn't work like that at all. My tendency is to go a bit too hard with it, I think, because I don't know, I just - I'm not suited to writing books because they're such long projects and I'm someone who just wants to get things done. The journalism pace actually suits me much better. And so I don't find it relaxing necessarily just living in a book and knowing I might have another year or two in this. And in my case, it was four. I'm always trying to get it done.
That morning routine is good for me. And then I kept getting COVID and then I started getting long COVID. And so there were months when I wasn't doing it. But now that I think I'm starting to kind of wake up again, money is on my mind. So it could be that money is the next topic that I get into. So I'm starting now to write little WhatsApp or little notes on my phone when the topic of money is coming up and I'm starting to collate a list of money books that I want to read. And so it kind of starts gradually and then I'll start reading the books and start taking notes.
Eli: Are you working just on the book or are you doing journalism stuff as well?
Marianne: When I was writing the book, I wasn't really doing journalism. I wish I could combine the two, but I don't seem to be able to. When I'm in book mode, I'm in book mode. The journalism is a different kind of writing because book mode is such a deep dive and journalism, it's just a very different mode. It's like with books I'm going under and then with journalism, you're sort of trying to survey from the top. And I don't seem to be someone who balances different things very easily. I seem to just be all or nothing.
And then it's such a relief afterwards when it's done to switch into journalism. And I think it's a miracle to be able to just write 900 words. I love it. I'm back in journalism at the moment and writing and editing a couple of days for a newspaper, the iNewspaper in London. They've been gorgeous. And it's been a lovely palate cleanser. And now I'm slightly itching to get back into the depths again. But also nervous of it because then, money is the next thing I need to figure out.
The Next Book: Pay Me!
Marianne: I'm in debt, I'm terrible with money. It's the, and I kind of, it's like the trilogy, I suppose, Help Me!, Love Me!, Pay Me! is the idea for the next book.
Eli: I have literal chills.
Marianne: But it's not just a book idea, but it's also mostly driven by this real need to sort this out. This part of my life. I can't keep ending up in this mess. I'm 47 and still just about paying rent and I work really hard and it's such a shame that I have not put myself in a more secure position. So I want to figure out what's going on with that and how much of it is emotional, how much of it is just the world we're living in now. Like journalism rates are very low compared to what they used to be, cost of living is very high. So there's also practical realities. And then I suppose questioning, like what is money? Because when I have it, I never treat it with respect. It's always like, I give it away, I throw it away.
And then what is money in the future? If AI is going to come in and do so many jobs, how are we going to earn money? I think we're going to look back at this time of capitalism where we gave away most of our waking hours to a company. I think we're going to look back on this and think this was a terrible place to live. And no wonder we were sick and depressed. And so, yeah, get into that sort of bigger stuff as well as my own personal failings and struggles.
Money is emotional as well. My sisters are really different with money to me. They're so just really smart with it and generous and kind and everything, but just so respectful of their money. Whereas when I've had it, I have not been, it's been like drinks are on me and easy come, easy go. And I ended up in a really bad situation and then cause stress to myself, but also people who Love Me! kind of going, oh God, she's there again.
Eli: I remember when we did the Naked Money community project back in 2016. And you wrote a beautiful piece about being in debt and how ashamed you felt of it. And it was really powerful.
Marianne: Was it? I have no memory of that. What was Naked Money? Remind me.
Eli: Naked Money was a community project that I did. It was 2016 where I got I think it was like 20, 30 people to write about their relationship with money, specifically creative people and artists. And everybody wrote something fabulous. Some people broke down their income. Some people talked about the shame of being successful and it being really easy. Some people wrote about just scraping by as an artist and how that impacted their self-worth. And you did this incredible piece on being thousands of pounds in debt and-
Marianne: Oh my God, I have no memory of doing that. And my debt is way bigger now having, even though I've had an international bestseller and all that kind of stuff and years later I'm in an even bigger hole.
Eli: I'll dig it out and send it to you.
Marianne: You do such good projects, Eli. And you've had Amie McNee on the podcast? She did a brilliant breakdown as well of the money from a book. And I admire her transparency so much of like, this is what it actually is.
Eli: I think that's so valuable because I think especially with something like books, we still have this very almost archaic view that like, you've written a bestselling book, therefore you're living in a big mansion in the countryside and sending a butler for the paper. And the same way I would feel the same with anyone who's releasing any kind of music or someone who's been on the telly. Well, they've been on the telly.
Marianne: Yeah, I do it too. And for some people, that might be their reality that they got paid really well, and they've been really smart with it. And for a lot of people, it won't be. But you get these - because there's this status attached to a lot of these public kind of public jobs, the public artist jobs, you kind of get status, but it doesn't necessarily translate into money, although with Help Me! it did and I just didn't manage it well. I just got excited and thought it would last forever and it didn't.
And then it took me four years to write the next book which I think is also something that's normal. And then this is like someone who plans better because I've never been a planner, it's all very much like just live in the moment, a planner knows okay love but you're not going to get your next check for however long and so, yeah it's really...
Eli: You need to write it. You need to write that. And then you can have the sex life you've always dreamed of and the money life you've always dreamed of and you'll be fine.
Marianne: And because I'm staying with my mum at the moment, I was upset about money the other day and she was so kind. She was like, well, Marianne, you are all about exploring the alternative life. That's what you're doing. And she said, especially in the UK, we're obsessed with home ownership, and I've never owned that. She's like, but if you did that, maybe you'd have been drowning in stress right now, trying to keep that mortgage. And she said, and lots of countries are not obsessed with that.
Because I have this part of me that's like, I'm 47, I don't own a house, I don't have a pension, blah blah. She was like, so be it. You have had a life that's really, really rich in people and experiences and adventure. And now that I'm getting older, I also am appreciating the value of financial security in a way that I didn't ever before. When your energy starts going, when health problems start popping up. It's really scary when I'm the only one paying my rent and I wasn't earning any money. It's really stressful.
Eli: No, you need to write about it. That's the only solution.
Final Advice for Creative People
Eli: Marianne, this has been an absolute treat. You are always such a joy to speak to. We could just chat for hours. I have one last question that I ask everybody who comes on the podcast, which is if somebody is out there thinking that they would like to turn their sort of creative spark into their full-time gig, what would you want them to know? What advice would you give them?
Marianne: It's funny that even though I've always taken quite big leaps when I couldn't really afford to do it and have made it my full time, I feel I would not advise other people to do it. I think it puts an awful lot of pressure on you.
I found that when creativity becomes your full-time job and you really need to earn money from it, it puts a lot of weight on it. So I think if there was a way, even just doing mornings in a coffee shop or just having some bit of base level income and connection with the world for a while. Like you can leave the job that's killing you and that you hate, but I think if there's some way to kind of keep some tethered to the outside world and have a bit of income, it might put a bit less pressure on you because I know people who have hated the law and they've left the law and they sit down, they're going to write their book now and it's hell. They're sitting in their home for a year going insane, which is basically what I do.
So it's not, fortunately for me somehow or other, the combination of circumstances and my temperament means I get something at the end of it, but it's not an enjoyable process. So for me, life now is about how to make things lighter and more fun. I think creativity ideally is play and it's like curiosity and of course there's the workman element to it is really part of it too. But as much as possible, if people can keep it light and I suppose also because I'm in debt, I'm very aware at the moment of financial realities. I'd have told everyone to quit their job, follow your dream. Right now I'm not so much in that place. Right now I'm like, oh, look after yourself. Have a safety net, have something.
And if you're in a situation where there is money in the bank and you've really protected yourself that way, then go for it. Because there's some people that have been wanting to do it for years and they've got all the savings, but they can't quite really make the leap. So in that case, go for it. But I think don't cause yourself undue stress thinking that more time will yield more results because I think sometimes...
Stephen King writes about this in his book on writing that for most of his early books, he had a day job and I can't remember what the day job was, but he said he was always fighting against that day job, trying to get time to get back to writing. And he said it was like the grit in the oyster that made the pearl. Whereas sometimes when you've got that full day, full week, full month, full year to do nothing but write or nothing but paint, it's quite paralysing. And you suddenly want to clean the bathroom whereas when you're coming home from a job and you just want to scribble down some of the funny idea that's in your head.
I say all this having constantly quit things to do things full time and it worked out in some ways. But that's my true feeling in that moment of like just look after yourself as well financially if you can.
Eli: I think that's really sound advice and not just to have the financial safety net, but also to allow for the circumstances where you can play. Because you can't make good art if you're worried about whether the rent's going to get paid.
Marianne: That's the situation I've been in, it makes things very heavy and strange because, yeah, ideally you want to be doing things just to see, like, oh, what will happen if I wrote this or what would happen if I tried that colour. But when there's a clock ticking and rent to be paid, it's very hard to be lighthearted, isn't it?
If you're in a situation where you've got family you can stay with or a partner that can help and all that stuff, that is so gorgeous. But as a single woman, I'm just aware of having some sort of cushioning. But I moved back in with mum when I wrote Help Me! and I've moved back in with her for patches of Love Me!. So I've done that. I've been so grateful to have a mum I can go back home to and not pay rent. So I'm all for doing that kind of thing. If you've got a way that you can be fed and watered and take the time out to have a go then absolutely go for it.
Just find a way to do it in a way that's fun and doesn't - look after yourself. It goes around to your very first question of like, how do you look after yourself in the process? That matters a lot, I think, to look after ourselves and make things as nice as we can. And ideally, I suppose the more we do that, then the longer this creative life can be, because I've got a kind of real cycle of boom, bust and burnout and pushing myself. And I'd really love to unlearn that cycle because I want this to be something I'm doing when I'm 90.
Eli: Take care of yourself. That's wonderful. I love that advice.
Where to Find Marianne
Eli: Marianne, where can people find you if they want to come and investigate and sign up for all your stuff and read your books?
Marianne: As my late Irish dad said, you're all over the Google. Google Marianne Power. I think I'm Marianne Power writer on Instagram and I have a Substack. So I think if you Google Marianne Power Substack that will come up. It's been very erratic service, but I'm always intending to be less erratic. So thanks, just anyone who's interested, thank you for being interested. And Eli, thanks for just such a gorgeous conversation. It's really been a tonic.
Eli: Enormous pleasure. And I will put links to things in the show notes as well. So if you're listening to this, you can come over to the website and find everything there. And Marianne, what a joy. Thank you so much for coming on.
Marianne: Ditto, ditto, ditto.
Closing
Eli: Oh my gosh, what a gorgeous conversation to wrap up the season finale. Thank you so much, Marianne, for being such an excellent guest. I had such a lovely time. And in fact, to all my guests, thank you so much for making this season just such an incredible experience. I'm so grateful to each and every one of you for giving me your time and hanging out with me in my studio and talking about all things creative process, but also everything else as well. We've gone to some really interesting places this season.
If you have missed any of our episodes and you want to find out more about Marianne then make sure you head over to zuzushausofcats.com that's house spelled H-A-U-S forward slash podcast. You'll find Marianne's episode there with all her show notes and also all of the episodes from this season and also from season one as well so you can catch up on anything that you might have missed.
Thank you all so much for listening. I'm really looking forward already to doing this again next year. The podcast will be back in 2026, but if you want to stay in touch in the meantime, then do come over to zuzushausofcats.com forward slash keep in touch and sign up for my email newsletter. I send a weekly newsletter which celebrates creativity, difference, otherness. It's been described as just a safe place to be who you are and I would really love to welcome you into that little community.
So that's zuzushausofcats.com/keep-in-touch and hopefully I will see you there. But otherwise we'll be back with the podcast in 2026. Take care of yourselves. Bye bye.